Metal blades clashed against one another as a barrage of spells were set off all around the battlefield. Given that the battlefield was a grassy plain with no environmental features to get in the way, and that forces on both sides of the conflict were even in number, the battle was a pure display of skill. Whoever was better would win. There was no terrain advantage. No defenses to hide behind. No overwhelming force.

There was only strength.

“Ignore the rest!” the commander, a human player on one side of the field, shouted. “They’ll break if you take him down!”

Of course, such a task was far easier said than done for the group who all wore matching armor and uniforms.

“Bring honor to the Augus Empire by putting these savages down like the feral animals they are!” another of the human players shouted.

But for all their bravado, they were being pushed back.

From the opposing side, a player whose avatar looked like a minotaur charged straight into the humans’ shield wall and gored two players on his horns before swinging around dual greatswords as if they were one-handed weapons. Every swing severed limbs and bodies with ease.

Those trying to slay the bestial minotaur managed to impale him with several swords and spears, but not even that was enough to defeat him. That only caused his eyes to glow red with rage.

Green energy then surrounded the minotaur’s body, healing his wounds as he cut down two more of his opponents. As for where that energy came from, it came from a human girl from the minotaur’s side who more or less looked like a punk version of a nun wearing an outfit only a few steps away from being pure bikini armor. The way she dressed was a stark contrast to how the more “serious” players on the other side dressed. They actually looked like a uniformed force trying to look roleplay-friendly. Those on the minotaur’s side, however, looked anything but as they wore a wide variety of costumes all disregarding any sort of consistency or lore-friendliness.

“You owe me for that!” the girl who healed the minotaur shouted.

“I don’t owe you for you doing your job!” the minotaur shouted back as he cleaved the head off of another player.

“When I’m healing the equivalent of a tank who purposely puts himself in every single AoE there is without ever using any sort of defensive CDs, I do!”

“You don’t need defense skills when you have enough offense to kill them before they kill you!”

“And who keeps you alive so that you can kill them before they kill you?!”

The minotaur let out a laugh just as loud and obvious as the rest of him as his fur grew even more soaked with the blood of both himself and his enemies.

They weren’t the only two bantering on their side, either. Most of the players were. While those fighting under the banner of the Augus Empire acted like proper soldiers, those on the other side acted like griefers and shit talkers who just wanted to have fun and kill everybody.

One of the Augus Empire soldiers had both his legs cut off with a single sweep from one of the minotaur’s greatswords, dropping him to the ground as he rapidly bled out. Despite that, he had enough energy to look up at the minotaur and ask, “Who—who are you with?! The End Bringers?!”

The minotaur looked down at him with a look of disgust before crushing his head under his hoof. “As if I’d play with those children,” he said before looking for the next enemy to kill.

At that point, more than half of the defending force was dead. The Augus Empire’s numbers were dwindling and the caravan they were escorting would soon be ripe for plundering.

That was when one of the defending players shouted, “There he is! Their leader!”

While it was easy to mistake the minotaur as the leader of the attacking force considering that he was the largest and seemingly the most brutal of them, that wasn’t true.

The true leader was a man wielding an oversized axe in one hand and a spiked mace in the other. Unlike the minotaur who was covered in dense fur, the leader was only a little shorter but with even more muscle and covered in green skin. And rather than have two horns sticking out from the sides of his head, he had two tusks that pointed up from behind his lower lip. That aside, he wore little clothing other than the monstrous skulls on his shoulders, bones around his arms, and pants with greaves.

One of the heaviest armored members of the Augus Empire charged at the leader, positioning his shield between him and the leader.

All it took was a swing from the spiked mace to pierce and bend the shield to open a path for his axe to swing through, tearing through the player’s armor with easy and almost cutting his torso clean in half.

“Come on, Bone!” the minotaur shouted. “At least try to look like you’re having some fun! We’ve got good prey here!”

“Know nothing about good prey,” Bone, the leader of the assailants, replied before withdrawing his axe from the man’s torso. “Boring fight after boring fight. Need real challenge.”

“You’re impossible to please, you know that?”

“Leave him be,” the healer from before said. “Bone wouldn’t be Bone if he wasn’t grumpy.”

The minotaur shrugged and went back to work.

Meanwhile, Bone looked around for who the leader of the group was. That was when he saw one player in particular sitting atop a horse at the back of the caravan’s forces wearing armor more elaborate than the rest of the players.

Surely, the leader would be the most powerful, right?

Bone forced his way through the defenders as if they were nothing, not even paying attention to their attacks. His healers kept him healed while the rest of his group dealt with those trying to take him down.

Unfortunately, before Bone could even reach the leader, he turned around with his horse and tried to run away.

Unfortunately, before the leader could get away, Bone lifted one leg and slammed his foot down into the ground in the direction of the fleeing leader, creating a shockwave and upturning the earth beneath his foot in a cone in front of him that knocked the horse into the air. Upon landing, the horse found itself stunned and its rider couldn’t move, either.

“Only cowards run,” Bone said, approaching with his weapons drawn. “Created this skill to deal with cowards like you.”

The stun only lasted for a few more seconds, but the horse took off running as soon as it could.

But it wasn’t fast enough.

Bone threw his axe and aimed to make it so that the horse would never be able to run again, and that was exactly what his throw accomplished. The horse dropped to the ground with its rider falling off to the side.

By the time the rider was able to get back up on his feet, he saw the orc towering over him with a disappointed expression on his face.

“Just—just take the goods and leave me alone! I won’t report you!” the leader shouted. “You can have whatever you want! You can take the whole damn caravan! Just—just let me live! I just got this armor!”

Bone sighed and cracked his neck before swinging his mace into the side of the man’s head as hard as he could, instantly killing him. “Disappointment after disappointment. Nobody in this game puts up good fight.”

Nobody else in the caravan was able to put up a good fight, either. While it might have been evenly matched in terms of numbers and terrain, there was one side with overwhelming skill and it was incredibly obvious which side that was as Bone’s group stood tall without a single loss over the corpses of the Augus Empire players.

“Bone! Bone!” another voice shouted, this time coming from a short boy wearing baggy robes that looked several sizes too large for him. “We don’t need any of this stuff, right?! Let’s make a fire! Come on! Bone! Fire! Please! Can I?! I wanna! Can I? Please? Fire? Yes? Yeeeessss? Now? Okay, starting a fire!”

Bone never even got a chance to reply before the excited boy lifted up his staff and summoned forth a wave of burning flames to crash over the caravan. Now that the fight was over and he didn’t have to worry about ruining anybody’s fun, he could burn everything left standing to the ground.

The boy could not have looked happier to see the fire raging before him. If anything, he looked too excited about it as he drooled and rubbed his staff as if it was something else hard and long. “Ah… there’s nothing more beautiful than fire. The way the smoke twists and dances in the air, the crackling of flames, the intense heat that covers your entire body… ah… fire really is the best. Wait! Bone! We’re missing something! We need meat! We should cook some meat over it! We’re going to let the fire go to waste! Somebody, hurry up and kill something to get some meat! I don’t care what it is, we have to cook something!”

“What about the bodies?” the minotaur joked.

The fire-addicted boy cringed and shook his head. “I’m a pyromaniac, not a cannibal! Go kill like, a deer or something! Actually, wait. You’re a minotaur. That means you’re a cow. That means you’re made of beef. That means… we could turn you into a giant steak.”

The minotaur took a step back from the drooling boy. “Wha-what happened to not being a cannibal?!”

“Heh, heh, heh… come here, Reggy. I promise that it’ll be quick.” The boy approached while making grabby hands at the minotaur.

Reggy, the minotaur, ended up turning around to run away from the maniacal boy as Bone sighed while watching them.

It was impossible for Bone not to make comparisons to the sight. While seeing them have fun together was nice… it also brought on some bittersweet feelings. It made him feel happy to have brought together new friends, but it also made him feel remorse for those he lost.

The healer girl with the revealing nun outfit then walked up to Bone and poked his arm. “Something wrong?” she asked.

“Is nothing,” Bone answered. “Well, bored of bad fights. Need stronger enemies.”

“Well, we probably won’t get better fights unless we seriously declare war on somebody or attack a major city. But as strong as we are… I don’t think we could win if we did that. Not without recruiting more to join us. Or maybe… I heard that there’s a pretty strong group of players to the east in the last town. They even took down one of the world serpents. Sounds like they have a pretty small group, too, so it won’t be like attacking a major faction city.”

“How far east?”

“At the edge of the continent, so, it would—”

“No. Too far.”

The healer sighed. “You don’t want to travel even if it means you’ll finally have a good fight?”

“Would rather fight boring fights than travel and not fight at all.”

“What if we try and set a course to move to the east while fighting? Find out all the different towns we could raid while working our way over there. That way we can fight while we’re traveling. I mean, it wouldn’t be too different from what we’ve been doing. We’d just be heading east instead of north. What do you say, big guy?”

Bone thought about it for a few moments before answering, “Maybe. We know strong enemies are north. East is only a rumor.”

“I guess that’s true.”

“But after we burn down the empire, can head east if there are no better options.”

“Well, I won’t say no to that. I’d love to fuck up all those prudes and roleplayers.”

Bone placed a hand atop her head to shake her around a little, causing her to blush and smack at his hand before he stopped. “Good heals.”

“It’s thanks to always healing you and that other brute. You two never bother avoiding damage, so your bodies are as durable as literal tanks at this point. A-also… how uh… you said you and your wife got in a fight, right? How’s—how’s that going?”

“We made up. Fight all the time, but always make up. Somehow.”

The healer looked away and sighed quietly enough for him not to hear her. “Damn it,” she whispered under her breath.

Bone looked at her and asked, “What?”

“Nothing! It’s nothing. I’m going to go see if anybody else needs healing.” With that, she ran off, leaving Bone alone with the corpse of the leader and his horse.

Bone tilted his head before shrugging and forgetting about her strange behavior. He then looked at the sky and thought about the two people who frequently visited his mind.

He wondered how Fenrir and Oleander were.

If only things could have worked out differently. They could still be like the old days where they all had fun together killing everybody and ruining people’s days.

But whether he had them to do it with or not, he was determined to continue playing how he loved to play, and that was by picking the biggest fights possible.

And since the Augus Empire was the biggest faction in the world in Fantasy Tales Online, he had every intention of burning it down until not a single member of it remained standing.

The rest of his group would catch up later. He had no interest in hanging around resting or enjoying the fire, so he took a step north to continue onward toward the Augus Empire’s capital.