Aldric rose slowly from behind the boulder, wiping the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. The dull ache in his ribs had dulled to a whisper. His skin, though charred and bruised in places, had mostly reknit. A few deep gashes still throbbed, bones still grated when he twisted wrong, but he could move again. He could stand again.
The system had gutted his stats, stripped away his legacy, but it hadn't taken everything.
It couldn't touch the mana in his core—dense, compressed, forged over decades of bloodshed and mastery. And it could never take his knowledge. Every rune, every spell, every layering technique, every forbidden incantation they had once begged him not to teach the war-mages… all of it still burned inside his skull like coals.
He stretched his arms out slowly. Muscles cracked. Tendons realigned. One breath in. One breath out.
Now came the priorities.
Food. Shelter. Water.
The last was easiest. He knelt, carving a sharp arc into the dust with his finger. Three smaller runes branched from it, spiraling together into the simplest form of Aquenis-Vel.
The air around the rune shimmered. With a hiss, a thin stream of cold, clear water burst upward, twisting like a living thread before falling back down into his waiting hands. He drank deeply, gulping mouthful after mouthful until his stomach ached with it. The taste was pure—cleaner than anything in the cities.
He wiped his mouth, exhaled, and rose to his feet again. No need to hide now. No need to crawl or bleed or beg.
That was the Aldric of a few hours ago.
This Aldric stood. Watched.
Then the world trembled.
A sound tore through the still air from the south—deep, thunderous, ancient. It was not the shriek of an animal, nor the roar of a monster. It was older than both. Primal. Majestic. Terrifying. It rolled across the cracked hills and dead stones like a tidal wave, shaking the marrow in his bones. His knees buckled, not from pain, but from something worse.
Fear.
Real fear.
The kind he hadn't felt in years.
His body froze, locked by instinct. Even his mana stilled in his veins, retreating deeper into his core like it didn't want to be noticed. It took him nearly a minute just to move his head, slowly, inch by inch, forcing his muscles to obey.
And when he looked south—his breath caught.
Far, far beyond the hills, beyond even the cursed horizon of the Wasteland, a shape moved against the grey sky. No, not moved—loomed. A body, immense and terrible, silhouetted by fire and ash. From its maw, a volcano spewed forth—a stream of molten fury arcing into the sky and crashing down with a sound like gods screaming.
Aldric could see it from here.
See it.
The creature's size defied logic. Wings like black mountains spread wide across the heavens, flames erupting from its scales with every beat. It reared its head and roared again, fire scattering like shrapnel from its jaws.
"Dragon," he muttered, lips curling into a grin.
The fear still pulsed in his veins, but now… it was layered with something else.
Hunger.
If something like that could exist here—then this land was not a grave. It was a forge.
He squinted further, narrowing his eyes against the haze. The dragon reeled. A blast of light hit its flank, sending it crashing into a distant ridge. There was someone fighting it. Someone powerful enough to push it back.
Aldric's grin widened, stretching his bruised face into something twisted.
So he wasn't the only one out here with strength. This Wasteland wasn't just death and ruin—it was challenge. Even the dragons had predators here. And he would rise above all of them.
The thought made his blood sing.
Still, he wasn't foolish. Not yet. He wasn't ready to interfere. Today, that battle belonged to others. He would watch. Learn. Endure.
Then return.
He turned away from the distant battle, planting his hand into the dust. His voice dropped low, breath merging with sound.
Creation magic.
The most arrogant of all arcane disciplines.
Even the Empire's Grand Magisters avoided it—too volatile, too inefficient, too demanding. It required not just mana, but will, memory, intention. An invocation not of force, but of being.
And Aldric was never much good at it.
His voice trembled as he spoke the incantation—old, guttural syllables strung like barbed wire between breaths. Sweat poured down his temples as glowing lines spread from his hand into the ground, forming a complex pattern. His mana drained by the second, rushing into the spell like blood through a broken artery.
Five minutes passed.
By the end, he was on one knee, eyes sunken, breath ragged.
Then came the spark.
From the center of the runes, something rose. Glowing at first. Then metal.
A blade.
Crude by creation standards, but unmistakably his.
A long, single-edged greatsword—almost black in color, with a faint reddish hue near the edge, as if it had been freshly quenched in blood. Its spine was serrated along the final third, brutal and utilitarian, designed not to duel but to maim. The guard was asymmetric, jagged and sharp on one side like a cleaver, smooth and curved on the other for counterbalance. No embellishments. No jewel-encrusted pommel. Just a worn leather grip wrapped in blood-colored hide and a faint rune etched near the base: VKG-R1—his original forge mark, long outlawed.
The blade pulsed faintly in his hand, still warm from the magic that birthed it.
It wasn't perfect.
It wasn't his sword.
But it would do.
Aldric took the blade in both hands, testing its balance. It was heavier than he liked—dense, slightly off in the curvature—but it would serve. He sheathed it across his back, binding it with a thin strand of mana into place, then began to move again, slow but steady across the broken terrain.
The hills around him were dry and choked with dust, corpses of old trees scattered like twisted bones. The sun had long given up on this land, leaving only a low, lifeless light that bled through the thick grey sky. Shadows moved strangely here—sharp-edged and wrong, like the land itself remembered every death it had ever consumed.
Then he heard the footsteps.
Light. Rushed. Erratic.
He didn't stop walking.
A small figure darted into view, shrieking as it charged. Green skin stretched too tightly over bone, a crude dagger in its hand that looked more rust than metal. Its eyes gleamed yellow in its sunken skull, teeth bared in a snarl that dripped spit and hunger.
A goblin.
Tier 1 filth. Level 3, maybe 5 if it had eaten something that didn't crawl.
Aldric didn't look at it. His gaze swept the horizon behind it, left and right, checking the jagged rocks and empty hollows for movement.
Goblins never hunted alone. It was against their very nature. They swarmed. Always. Like ants in rotting skin. Weak individually, but in packs they overwhelmed villages, tore apart caravans, bled dry wandering adventurers who thought themselves safe in numbers.
But there was no pack here.
No echo of screeches. No shuffling claws. No movement in the dust except this one.
Still, Aldric waited.
The goblin shrieked again, lunging with a sudden burst of speed.
Aldric moved only his arm. A single motion. Quick. Brutal.
The blade whistled once through the dry air. Then silence.
The goblin's head separated from its shoulders mid-leap, spinning end over end before landing in the dirt with a dull, wet sound. Its body twitched as it hit the ground, fingers still grasping for a weapon it no longer held. Blood soaked into the cracked earth, thick and dark.
Aldric didn't even glance down.
He watched the cliffs. The shadows. The wind.
Still nothing.
He turned finally, looking at the corpse with a slight tilt of his head.
One goblin. Alone.
Impossible.
Even in these cursed lands, even where no beast could feed and no pack could thrive, goblins clung to each other like fleas on rotting dogs. Their instincts demanded it. Alone, they starved. Alone, they lost direction. Alone, they died in days.
Yet this one had been alone.
Aldric clicked his tongue and moved on.
Goblins weren't worth eating. He had never tried himself—he had standards—but some of his underlings once had, during the siege of Virelth. They'd said the meat was bitter, stringy, foul. Like licking the underside of a corpse left too long in the sun. One had vomited blood for three days.
Aldric didn't need that.
He stepped over the body without pausing, the blood barely warm against his boots, and kept walking.