A boss battle, the fight concluding.

Henry, casting away on top of the chandelier, stopped suddenly, his Skeleton Archers following in tow. On the ground below, where the mammoth-sized boar lay prostrate in submission, the magical saws and flying spears halted their butchering. The beast-king's royal hide, slick with blood and sweat, was marked by unhealing wounds, the monster's health-pool having finally reached zero.

King Torc gave a resigned sigh, welcoming the coup de grace.

Henry shook his head. "Nope. As I stated earlier, my sole priority is getting out of here. Open a wormhole out, and I'm happy to let you live. I don't want your over-sized level 2 porkchops. Waste of inventory space."

King Torc didn't believe the offer. "Mercy? How can ye reconcile this with yer ruthless assault? Save King Torc yer psychological abuse. Finish it."

Henry groaned. "Again with the pig-headed honour nonsense. Fights are supposed to be ruthless. It's not a game." Well, he paused on second thought, technically, this was a videogame. "But, anyway, I'm not interested in any more of this. If you comply, you get to live."

By 'more of this', he referred to whatever convoluted quest he'd inadvertently embarked upon. Given how trivial this fight had been, this encounter was probably only the first part of an extended chain of battles, each escalating in difficulty until the final epic confrontation against 'The Great Black One' whom this boar had alluded to.

Henry, after putting more thought into the matter than he reasonably should have, had decided to reject any further involvement in this nefarious plot. Once upon a time, he'd duelled and slain such monsters. Today, however, he was only here to complete the tutorial. He would not kill this oversized pig and progress to the next challenge; this side-adventure ended right here, placed on indefinite hiatus in the quest-logs of a player who only used Saana to read imported novels.

"And, hey, if you live, you won't even be alone anymore!" Henry gestured towards the regular-sized Horny Boar that'd triggered his arrival in this place, the smaller creature huddling in a corner with the donkey. "It might be a dude, but I'm sure you two can figure something out. Have the next craftsman sew a wolf-fur dress."

King Torc, ignoring the crass joke, relented. "Very well, then. King Torc concedes. Ye have my grunt as a king."

"First, bring out the goods," Henry ordered - since he had won, there was no harm in checking out the loot.

The beast-king picked itself up, trotted over to its wolf-skull throne, and gave it a tap with a side-horn. The blow caused the throne to crumble, exposing a sparkling trove hidden inside, a treasure mound of goods collected by abducted adventurers over the centuries: armour, weapons, gems, crafting tools, unique bags, and other expensive curios. There were literal tons of gear.

Henry, taking in the size of the harvest, confirmed that this boar was indeed a 500-man monster.

As a precaution, he had his Skeleton Archers collect the loot. They jumped down from the chandeliers and formed a train, selecting the best-looking pieces and bringing them to him for inspection by climbing up a rope he threw down. Most of the pieces were worthless to him, as one might expect from a Level 2 boss.

King Torc watched his collection being rummaged through with sadness. "This is also yer prize."

The beast-king began to cough as if to dislodge a wolf-thigh from its throat. Its hacking brought up a glob of yellow mucous sludge, inside of which stewed a dark object, an apple made of shadows.

Henry gave the 'prize' one glance. "Nope. You can take that one back."

"Ye must accept!" King Torc insisted. "The prophecy—’

"Nope," Henry remained firm. "I’m not falling for such obvious bait."

You didn't have to be religious to recognise the stupidity in accepting weird, forbidden fruit from a talking animal. Whatever this shady apple represented, he wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.

In the end, he chose a few crafting-related items, a Legendary rapier, and four ancient books - not a terrible prize.

The looting done, he ordered the boar to open a wormhole back to Suchi. The beast-king squealed in a way that, oddly, seemed to contain no magical power. Nevertheless, at one part of the throne room, the fabric of reality was torn, revealing a rift through which one could see a bird's eye view of Suchi and The Horny Boar Fields.

"One last thing," said Henry. "Use your stun ability."

King Torc snorted petulantly, having indeed been considering freezing him in the last moment.

The beast-king squealed, and the room froze.

A moment later, Henry finally left his perch on the chandelier, jumping down.

King Torc, watching him descend, felt his over-sized heart shift between one emotion and another, and its over-sized brain swirled with fragmented images of the fields of home and the juicy worms and the pretty girl boars. Suddenly, he thought about this human's earlier commentary against honour.

Perhaps he'd been right; perhaps honour wasn't worth anything.

King Torc roared. "The prophecy will not be broken. Only one leaves alive!"

Unable to give up, the beast-king launching off, charged at the landing human.

Henry sighed.

Why couldn't anyone ever just accept defeat? Why did they insist on throwing away their lives?

His Skeleton Archers started shooting at the boar’s legs to debilitate it, but, despite the beast's trotters being the size of tree-trunks, the archers missed, the eyeless sockets in their skull not helping with their aim. The spears and magical saws also gave pursuit; however, King Torc had accelerated beyond their reach, his charge ability too fast.

Henry, with the beast-king between himself and the wormhole, ran straight at the monster. With one hand, he touched a Spelltome on his chest; Henry, having crafted this one himself, had dumped all its Tier-5 item's stats into physical stats, making his body functionally impervious to the Level 2 monster's pitiful attacks - this fight had never been close. With his other hand, he clasped the gladius bought from the bald trainer, gripping the humble weapon as he had before while practising against the regular boars and stabbing them in their hearts.

He'd exercised enough patience, enough mercy for today. If this beast longed for death, then he would grant it.

"This is more like it!" King Torc respected the calm resolve with which the tiny human sprinted at him. "Give me yer best!"

The beast-king committed even harder to his charge, the internal tremors of his six-ton bulk ripping open the clotted wounds of his hide and causing them to fountain forth his dying blood.

So the two charged headlong at each other, the mammoth-sized monster and the scrawny 17-year-old bringing to bear against their enemy the full craft and weight of their bodies.

But as they were about to collide, Henry gave a sigh, expelling the frustration clouding his thoughts.

He refused. Wu-Wei.

At the last moment, he switched his Spelltome-hand to a different book, and dropped his sword, reaching for a constellation. "RING!"

A door of flames from a opened up and swallowed him up.

King Torc, having seen this spell before, was not unprepared.

Cancelling his charge, the beast-king used an ability he'd not yet had the chance to show due to the human staying at a distance. King Torc opened his mouth as if to bite the forming pillar of flames, and in the back of his throat condensed a secret weapon, a tiny black dot.

Alas, the beast-king's timing had been milliseconds off. He'd lost too much blood, his vision blurring and his mind descending into a delirious haze.

Biting too late, he snagged only the tail of the flames. While the tail vanished, the rest of the burning pillar climbed over his head and across his back, the heat singeing the hairs of his hide.

Henry, emerging from the flames above the boar, arced in the opposite direction of its charging bulk. He landed a few metres to its rear. There, he caught an spear that'd been lagging behind in pursuit and, assisting the weapon, snapped around to javelin it.

The spear, its aim true, struck the boar in a hind leg. The point pierced through the meat and part-way into the hard material of the floor, pinning the beast in place.

King Torc, unable to move, unable to turn around, cried out in despair. "Stop, human, come back! Free me! Free me! FREE ME!"

"Even if it's hard, try living for one more day," Henry replied. "You never know, dude. There's always some light in the future, each tomorrow beginning with a fresh dawn."

He was sincere, genuinely hoping the beast would survive for another day. Or at least another hour - just long enough for him to finish the rest of this annoying tutorial.

Jogging for the wormhole, Henry jumped into it head-first, leaving this odd episode to rot in his forgotten wake.

As the wormhole sucked him in, he had the random feeling that he’d forgotten something.

Immediately after the human's departure, without any sign of entering the throne room, a creature was standing beside King Torc.

Its features were impossible to make out. Although shaped like a tall, thin man, its body was composed of ink-black shadows, no light managing to close in near enough to its skin to reveal anything more.

Its black head was directed at the portal where The Tyrant had disappeared. Whatever feeling or thoughts it might've had, assuming it had any, were hidden, the creature having no visible eyes or mouth.

Turning to the boar, the creature extended one of its hands to give a pat, and from its head sounded a click, small, barely noticeable.

"You tried your best, Old King," it said.

King Torc gave the creature a complex look. "Ye must have known I’d lose. Why did ye leave me hope?"

"I didn’t know," answered the creature.

"Yer kind knows all."

"I didn’t know."

An open, child-like sorrow snuck into the beast-king's voice. "In the next Cycle, what will I be?"

"You wouldn’t like the answer."

"So ye did know."

The creature shook its head helplessly. "Farewell, Old King."

"In the next Cycle."

"In the next."

The shadow creature clicked again, but this time it was not to communicate.

Beside it, King Torc's eyes dimmed, their lust for life fading.

The spear then removed itself from the boar's leg, and the giant body floated a few metres upwards. The weapon came around to the front of the boar, before stabbing into its chest cleanly, piercing a heart that had already stopped beating.

The corpse of the boar king floated towards the wormhole.

As its snout made contact, the entire beast was sucked in.

To an outside observer, the boar would have vanished straight after the click, the sequence of actions having occurred in a hundredth of a second.

In the next instant, the shadow creature was beside the small boar hiding behind the rubble of the broken throne.

The creature spent a few moments grunting and snorting.

When the boar returned a grunt of agreement, the creature clicked again, and the apple of shadows that Henry had rejected shot over.

With a cautionary sniff, the boar ate the object, before, suddenly, charging over to a nearby wolf corpse with a famished haste.

In another instant, the shadow creature was by the donkey, which was too terrified to move.

The creature stuck its hand into its own stomach, and, for the first time, its actions, which had been effortless so far, became strained. Digging deep inside itself, it released click after frustrated click. Eventually, it pulled out another apple of shadows, identical to the one it’d fed the boar. This, it shoved into the donkey's mouth and down its throat.

The shadow creature clicked once again, a new wormhole opened up, and the donkey was gone.

And then the creature was gone.

Left alone in the throne room, the solitary boar ran from dead wolf to dead wolf, picking up one after another with its mouth and swallowing them whole like a pelican. On close inspection, one could see its legs growing thicker, its hair longer. In a circle around its head, small bumps of a crown were sprouting, each trying to break through the skin.