Ryu needed strength, but the Qi he had stored was barely enough for a single level. With his full cultivation... He might be a match for the World Bosses. They were bosses meant for Master Classers, after all, but that meant letting down the barriers once more. That meant embracing the madness. Who would die this time?

He fingered the words engraved into his bow. The images of Bonny's team played out in front of him. Another body in the forest.

Ryu Ishida had never forgotten the depravity man could sink to. He lived with it everyday.

---

Horace triggered a Skill, his [Thought Spike] laying one of the snakes down. Aja’s spear took it through the skull. The tan-skinned woman looked up at him, her braided hair pulled tight behind her head. She gave him a fierce smile. Under normal circumstances, he would smile back, but the woman was covered in the viscera of giant snakes. It was more than a little disturbing.

A burst of flames rattled the chamber above him. “Hey Burner, relax a little man,” Horace said, using his [Telepathic Communication] Skill.

“Can do,” Burner responded.

He leaned back in his chair with a satisfied sigh. This was the life. No real fighting. No guts, blood, or dirt. Just relaxing. Here, he played general. He provided support for his teammates, coordinated their movements, and watched their back. From a distance. Horace looked around the chamber once more. He grimaced. No sign of Bonny. In all fairness, she was a thief. It wasn’t exactly uncommon for her to disappear from sight. It was just that her mental presence had disappeared too. She only did that when-

A snake flopped over the back of his chair, its fangs inches away from his neck. He flinched. He was dead, so dead. A familiar giggle made him crack open an eye with an annoyed glare.

“Afraid of a little snake, brother?” Bonny said, pointing the snake corpse at him like a mock spear.

“You’re filthy,” he said flatly. If he showed his annoyance, she would only smile wider.

“And you’re clean.” She did not seem to enjoy the dirt that marred her suit, however.

“Don’t you have snakes to kill?”

The redhead scratched her nose, smearing a smudge of dirt across her freckles. Horace clenched his teeth. Dirt.

“Oh, right. I should probably get to that,” she said, turning around to walk away. He let himself start to relax. She stopped. He tensed. “Actually, nevermind. It seems I wasn’t needed.”

Aja slinked to his side, laying a key on the arm on his chair. Burner grunted behind him, and the familiar cigarette smell filled the air once more. Bonny laughed.

---

The hour ticked by with agonizing slowness. Each moment of silence marked another trip to the hells of his idle thoughts. After Bonny’s group cleared their dungeon, another group’s journey was shown. Then they died. And another appeared. Then another. Some passed. Most didn’t. He watched until he couldn’t anymore. Until the images haunted the space behind his closed eyes. Why did he watch? He didn’t know. Part morbid curiosity, part some strange sense of honor. He was likely one of the few people, if not the only one, to witness these adventurers’ deaths. Some part of him felt that deserved to be remembered, their sacrifice honored. He just wished he wasn’t the one who had to do it..

At some point, he drifted off into a restless sleep. Strange visions troubled him, the specters of his dreams as frightening as any monster. Maybe even moreso. He couldn’t run from a dream. Or kill it. He could only bear witness to the twisted horrors of his unconscious mind.

He woke a sweaty mess. A screen took up his vision, calling him to awareness like the ringing of a bell.

Warning

Your party will be transported in 4 minutes, 58 seconds.

He let out a weary sigh, the type only disappointed mothers and men who have seen far, far too much can muster.

---

The flow of air ruffled his hair like the greeting of a favorite uncle. Ryu found himself in the middle of a rocky flat, his surroundings bare save for two large mountains in the distance. Other Climbers started appearing around him in groups both large and small.

“Where’s the boss?” a fighter shouted. Ryu frowned. He was wondering the same…

The two mountains in the distance moved. Any response to the man’s question was lost in the rumble that ensued.

Ryu looked at his bow skeptically. What use would one of his arrows be against these titans? What trap was big enough to catch a foot that was bigger than most homes? He looked around him, doing a quick estimate. Maybe a little over half of the original hundred Climbers remained. Of those, all would be dangerous professionals, yet many would die, nonetheless. If not all, himself included. With the World Bosses approaching, Ryu casted one last glance. There. A flesh of red hair. Bonny. He almost moved towards her. He wanted to. He couldn’t. If things went bad and he had to let his Skill slip, she had to be as far away as possible. If something happened to her… he couldn’t forgive himself. He pulled his hood up.

A woman stepped in front of the group of Climbers. Behind her, the mountains still moved, and she stood proudly, a spear wrapped in orange cloth held over her shoulder. The braids of her dark hair hung wildly around her face.

“Quiet!” she barked. “We need a plan. Unless you all want to die, that is.”

“You know, I reckon I’d like to live,” a man in the group of Climbers said, taking a long pull from his cigarette. “Suppose you got an idea about that?”

She ignored the man, who Ryu recognized as another part of Horace’s dungeon team. “I say we split this group up into teams. One team needs to distract one of the Bosses and lure it away, while the other focuses on killing the second. Challenging both would be stupid. Question is, who is going where?”

A woman stepped up, her dark tights covered in an armory’s supply of knives and darts. Ryu started to shake his head. “I’ll be part of the distraction team,” said Bonny.

After that, the others fell into groups with ease. Nobody who made it this far was stupid. Prideful maybe, but not stupid. With the Bosses just minutes away, ego was put aside. Ryu managed to find himself in Bonny’s group.

As they prepared, a force brushed against his mental awareness. “I’m assuming the hood means you don’t want my sister to recognize you?” a voice said into his mind.

Ryu sighed. Of course. “Something like that.”

“Mmmm… And it would be by total coincidence that you ended up in her group, yes?” Horace said.

“Do you have a point or…?”

“No,” the man said, somehow conveying a sigh through mental contact. “Just… Just keep her safe, okay? And be careful out there, man.”

“You too,” Ryu said. Horace was a good man. Too good. Ryu wasn’t sure why the man tolerated him, but he was glad for it all the same. By this point, he could feel and hear the approaching bosses, their steps rattling his teeth in an unpleasant way. His Skill stayed active.

[Predator Senses] allowed him to make out the bosses features, and well, they were ugly bastards to put it nicely. One was broad, its dark scales covering a muscle-bound frame. The other was spindly, and it moved in a jerky rush, as if it could fall at any moment. They were closing on the group at a troubling pace. Both were humanoid giants with the same draconic visages. Scaled Giants, he supposed.

He inhaled a lungful of fresh air. People would die today. He looked to his left. Then his right. Professionals or not, the men and women at his sides would very likely breathe their last here. He did his best to memorize their faces, to crystallize that inexplicable expression of determination on their faces. He needed some of that himself. He breathed out a shaky breath. The world went red.

Pain. He opened his eyes with confusion. Move. He had to move. He rolled, rising to his feet in a crouch. His bow, a soulbound weapon, reappeared in his hands, and he looked around. Where he had stood was a crater. To his right, a boulder sat on the ground. The men and women, his comrades, were like paste on the ground. He moved without a glance back. Death bothered him. It always had, and it always would. But he couldn’t stop. He’d done his best to honor them. That was all he could do. The rest of his team still needed help. Bonny needed his help.

He covered ground with reckless abandon. Through the rocky terrain, he could see the two giants being engaged, the stocky one being led away from the other. He headed that way.

The thing about flats was that they were… flat. Annoyingly so, in fact. For a chase, this was problematic. For a chase with a giant, it was deadly. When Ryu caught up to the “distraction” team, several of its members had already perished under the feet of the giant. It was for this reason that he decided to take a more direct approach.

Another body in the forest, he thought recklessly. His jump brought him to the giant’s thigh, and his hatchets kept him there. Then they took him up. And up. To the titan, he was an insect. The thing probably didn’t even notice him. Or it wouldn’t have if he had not been ramming his hatchets in the gaps of his scales, at least. A hand that made horses look tiny came down like god’s judgement. Ryu braced himself against a scale and jumped, hatchets in hand. The air shook below him as the giant’s hand met its abdomen, and he seemed to hang in the air for a long moment. Then he was falling.

He hit the back of the giant’s hand with a hard thump. He felt the hand below him flex. Felt it start to turn. Felt it rise in the air, far above any height he’d ever been. He slammed one hatchet into the meat of the thing’s hand, hoping to gain purchase. It stuck. He tried to do the same with the other, but the hand finished its turn. He found himself suspended in air, the blade of his hatchet the only thing keeping from a drop to certain death. A curse slipped out of his grinning lips. He knew this was stupid. Insane, even. But of all the events in his life, this one stood out as the most absurd, and for those brief, weightless moments, he imagined he was someone else somewhere else. Then the scream reached him.

The sound a broken human was capable of was nothing short of hellish. Ryu had heard it many times. Had caused it even more. When this one reached him, it stabbed past his mind and went straight to his heart. That could be Bonny. He was up here grinning, and down below, the others were dying. Pathetic. The judgement ripped away his joy and false dreams, stripping the delusions from his miserable existence. Right. He wasn’t a good person. He did not deserve to be happy. To atone, he would have to make sacrifices. And this battlefield was his altar to make them upon. He prepared himself for another jump.

---

Horace shuddered. Another dead body, and for what? If this was progress, he wanted no part of it. He wasn’t a stranger to fights- far from it. But this was no fight. It was slaughter. The spindly giant made a move above, and another Climber was taken, clutched in long, delicate fingers. He tried to close his eyes. Tried not to hear the nasty crunch of breaking bones or the inhuman screech of pain that came after. Tried not to look at that grin, the all too human smile on the face of black scales that towered above. It mocked them.

Burner’s fire crashed against the giant. To no effect. Aja’s spear thundered into its ankle. To no effect. It looked like little more than a toothpick. Another Climber was stepped on. Horace couldn’t even find her body after. It was over. They were dead. All dead. Blood splattered on his face. He was going to-

“Psychic, do your Skills have any effect on the thing?” The voice broke through his panic, and he breathed out. Calm. Right. He looked at Aja. The tan woman was furious, the graceful lines of her face twisted into a snarl.

“I-I don’t think so,” he offered weakly.

“Do you think, or do you know?”

He watched another man die. Something in him stopped quivering. So much blood. So many dead. And he was crying? No, his sister needed him. Ryu needed him. Aja… She needed him now, too.

“Hold for a moment,” he said. He triggered a Skill, [Neural Processing]. Time seemed to freeze, and his observations about the giant slammed together, the speed of his thoughts increasing his headache.

He used another Skill, [Synesthesia]. The giant stumbled. Just for a moment, maybe a few seconds of disorientation. But then, that was all he needed, his improved mind working at double the pace of normal. For that brief time, the scaled giant’s senses would have gone berserk. The thing would have heard colors, smelled screams, and seen the smell of blood. Then it was over, and the giant’s killing intentions returned. Only this time, it was focused on Horace.

“Yeah, I suppose they work.”

---

Ryu’s jump launched him onto the side of the stocky giant’s neck. His hatchets fused together with a clang, forming into his favored axe. He moved one hand up the handle, letting one foot slide behind the other. Inhale. [Cripple] covered the axehead in a sanguine red. Exhale. He twisted, his hand sliding down the handle of the axe. He was a lumberjack, the neck in front of him his tree. The scale in front of him split under the blow, and the axe found flesh. Then a shadow fell over him.

He leapt out of the hand’s way, skidding down the giant’s shoulder. His axe, however, was less fortunate. The last thing he saw before he fell was his weapon being turned into matchsticks, and then there was only air. For a moment- a very brief moment, mind you- Ryu considered his end. And what an end it would have been, at that. He’d lived a hard life, mostly due to his own fault, but in that hardship was a variety of experiences. It was enough to be content with. Almost. If only he could have-

The end he wished for never came. Instead, a weight impacted him in the air, and all of a sudden, he was twisting through the air, a red-haired woman held in his arms. Or maybe he was in hers. It was difficult to tell. Bonny leaned into his ear, cheek pressed against his own. She was close, close enough for him to see the enchanting green of her emerald eyes. He opened his mouth.

“I love you” Bonny said, the air whipping her hair around in a crazy dance. He felt her weight shift and turn them around. She was making it so her back would hit the ground first. She was trying to save him. The moment shattered, and reality hit him like a brick to the head. They were about to die. She was about to die. Unless…

[Shadow of One’s Self] seemed to deactivate with a will of its own, and his power returned. Bonny’s eyes widened. His breath began to quicken. They hit the ground.

“You’re welcome for saving you,” Bonny said, lying on top of him. She smiled. They were on the ground once more, his back seemingly one large mass of pain.

He pushed Bonny off of him, sitting up with a hiss of pain. “You need to go,” he said, teeth clenched.

“Why?” she asked, a wounded look on her face.

“I can’t… I’m not good,” he said pathetically. Not that there was much he did that wasn’t pathetic.

She put a hand on his face, forcing him to meet her eyes. “Bad men can still do good things,” she said.

---

“Do you think this is actually going to work?” Burner asked, looking skeptically at the giant marching down on them.

Horace thought for a moment. “Probably not.”

“Nice knowing you, then,” the bearded man said, lighting a cigarette. Why the man wanted to smoke at a time like this, Horace did not know, but it was not the time to question it either.

“You boys done chatting?” Aja said. She stood beside them, spear hefted back behind her head. Right. They had a job to do.

“Suppose so.” Burner tapped the tip of her spear, and it started to glow red like a cherry.

Closer, Horace thought. Closer… Now! He activated [Synesthesia] once more, and the giant stumbled mid-stride. Aja’s spear shot through the air, a fiery afterimage close behind it.

For the first time, the giant let out a screech of its own. The sound, while distasteful, was the sweetest music to Horace’s ears. He felt hope. Well, a little hope.

“What are the odds of that working again?” Aja asked, drawing a new spear from her inventory. This one was longer, its haft inscribed with depictions of lions.

“Slim to none, I’m afraid,” Horace said, sagging into his chair. His mental energy was drained, and a splitting headache pounded at his temples. Gods but he was filthy. He wanted nothing more than to take a long, hot shower and scrub every-

“Get down!” Burner yelled, his right hand burning with bright fire. Then he saw the rock. With remarkable depth perception for a newly-made cyclops, the giant had launched a boulder, and it was now on a crash course for their spot on the flat, empty plateau.

See, that just wouldn’t do. Boulders were dirty, dusty things. Not to mention, this one had recently touched the hands of a dirty, filthy giant. It would not be touching him. He let his [Hover] drop. His chair fell, hitting the ground with a loud thump. Then the boulder seemed to hit a platform, and it bounced over them, with a loud thud.

Horace smiled, blood dribbling from his nose. He was close to unconsciousness, the mental strain of his Skills overwhelming his brain. Once more, [Telekinetic Ward] proved its use. On the surface, it created a sort of invisible shield, but if one were to create the shield in the sky at a tilted angle, an incoming projectile could be deflected. Or something like that, as Ryu would say. Honestly, it was a bit hard to feel clever when your mind was too exhausted to come up with the meaning of the words.

“We’re going to die.” The words left his lips before he could understand them.

He looked at Aja vacantly, the woman still shouting at his face. Then he looked past her. A gigantic man thing was running towards them! He pointed. Aja slapped her forehead. This was the problem with mage type Skills. They were far more powerful than other Skills, but their cost was higher, too. On top of that, their cost came in the form of mental exhaustion, not physical stamina. When a warrior type used too many Skills, he moved slower and with less power. When a mage type used too many Skills, their very thoughts came slower and with less acuity.

Horace started to panic. His mind screamed of danger. Aja had pried him from his chair, and he was now bouncing over her shoulder, staring back at the approaching giant. It was coming for them! It was going to eat him. He imagined sliding around in that stinking, gross mouth, and his stomach turned. He started flailing. He wanted to move, to flee.

Aja shook him and then shook her head. She turned to others. “Attack the giant! We need to rally now. Burner take Horace away.”

A man stumbled to his side and tugged on his arm. He didn’t move. He couldn’t walk. Been in a chair his whole life. No, that wasn’t right. He could…

“Fine,” the man said, and he ripped Horace from his chair and threw him over one shoulder.

Horace’s head bounced as they moved. He watched the large shape approach. Smaller figures ran at it. Lights flared. The giant roared. The ground shook. Men burst and popped like balloons. He felt there was something strange about that.

More tiny figures gathered. One stood out to him. A woman. The woman. She had talked to him earlier. Her spear flew into the air. Dozens of glowing objects followed. The giant stumbled.

Horace clapped. Or he tried to. A hitch in the man’s stride sent them both crashing to the rocky ground, and he bounced away once, twice, and a third time, his eyes never leaving the fight. The small figures swarmed the kneeling giant. Like ants. They climbed and stabbed and cheered. Then the giant moved.

It thrashed about and turned small figures into paste. It roared. More died. Screams reached him. The woman stood tall. Horace tried to yell. Tried to tell her to move. Tears filled his eyes. The man who had carried him stood by his side, cursing and pulling his arm. Horace was limp.

A hand the size of the house crashed into the ground the woman stood on, and she disappeared from his view. The small figures on the ground seemed fewer than ever. When the giant looked up once more, Horace had to crane his neck to see. It looked at him. They were dead. Then something caught his eye.

A blur smashed into the giant’s head.

---

Ryu stared down at his hands, the screams of the dying forming a hellish opera around him. A bad man can still do good things. He doubted that. Bonny had left, going to help the others. Save them, as she had him. He’d decided then that he loved her. As much as a creature like him could love, that is. Something in him still wanted to be good, needed it, even, and she brought it out of him. Even when he believed he had none left.

The killer in him stirred, that dreaded piece of ruthless ambition preserved by his Skill. It was a childish thing formed in the mind of a prideful, broken boy, and it was all the stronger for that. No, he decided, a bad man couldn’t do good things. What good was achieved by ill means? The world just didn’t work that way. However, a bad man could kill things, and in this case, that would have to be enough.

He stood. He couldn’t bear the screams and the guilt any longer. He would quiet them. His eyes seemed to refocus, the giant clear in his vision. He moved.

Ryu had always preferred cultivation over his Class. It was simple, and more importantly, it came from him. It was his body that was altered, his strength that was increased, and his perception that was developed. Skills seemed… less so. They were external. He activated them, and things beyond his knowledge happened. With cultivation, he could do the acting on his own. And so he did.

The mad rage of violence descended on Ryu like a starving predator. It overtook his will, grabbing the wheel of the ship and pushing his own hands away. He surrendered. Many say to fight calm, to not let emotions cloud one’s vision. Like many things people say, such a thing was often impractical. How could he separate his emotions from his actions? He had skin in the game. It was his life on the line, and it was he who felt the brutal tear of skin beneath his power, felt the spray of blood, and felt both will and body break beneath him. Separate one’s emotions from that? He couldn’t. Ryu embraced rage like a lost friend, and rage embraced him back.

His feet carried him to the giant, each step pounding on the rock below. In his right arm, he held a long, one-edged blade. It had a bit of a curve, its hilt rapped in a cloth of vivid red. With its appearance came memories. Memories of a young boy rehashing the ancient art of violence. Of betrayal. Memories of a boy with little self control. And now here he was, a shell of even that. Ryu laughed, and violence laughed back.

His mad rush continued. He passed dying women, weeping men, and vacant, lost souls. He passed sanity and regret, sparing them nary a glance. He passed all things, focused only on the towering black monster. Then he found it. His sword met tough, black scale in a contest of hardness. He won. The scale split underneath his strength, and he pulled the sword behind him, dragging the four feet of steel through muscle and ligament. Then he stopped. The giant was staring at him now, finally taking notice of the challenger below. Their eyes met. Ryu stared, and death stared back.

He leapt. His feet met black scale. He leapt again. Then again. His hops carried him up the giant’s body like some insane bug, his sword his stinger. And sting he did. Up and up, he went, carving the body beneath him with an artistry only his addled mind could appreciate. Then air. A final leap brought him above the giant’s head.

The giant looked up at him, its hand not far behind. Ryu looked back down, He threw his sword up, a bow of familiar pale wood materializing in his hands. With it came a memory.

SoulBound Item - Marshal’s Promise

Enchantment: FullDraw. When activated, the draw of the bow increases to amplify the user’s strength, multiplying the force with which an arrow is released.

He seemed to hover in the air, the earth below so tired of his misdeeds that it wanted to be rid of him. His eyes met the giant’s for a second time, disregarding the hand that came to snatch the life from his body. His hand drew an arrow, one that seemed to be formed of pure steel. It was the one he had won from the dungeon, heavier than an item of its size had any right to be. Its nock met string; he drew the bow back, its draw straining even his cultivated strength. Aim. Breathe. Loose.. Ryu fell, and his arrow carved through the air between it and the giant’s skull. Its size increased, turning from arrow to tower. [Multishot] activated. One arrow became four, each covered with the red glow of [Cripple].

For a moment, time seemed to slow, as if even the governing forces of this world wanted to watch a master at work. Then blood. So much blood. He landed in the remains of the giant’s skull, bathing in it like some demented god of war. He felt happy. Then gravity took hold. The giant’s body fell, and Ryu fell with it, a smile writ large across his face.

The corpse hit the ground, and Ryu bounced out from it. He stood with a lazy stretch, looking around him. It seemed he was not done with it. Across the plateau, another titan yet lived. And that was simply unacceptable. Here, Ryu ruled supreme. He started to run once more, ignoring the survivors who looked at him with awe.

---

Death had fallen, only to be replaced by hell. The giant thing was dying. The blur had leapt into the vacant socket of its missing right eye, and Horace’s mind sense felt the mental signature of a soul so steeped in blood that it overshadowed the monster it slew. His dim mind struggled to piece together what he was sensing. It felt so… familiar and yet completely foreign at the same time. He could only picture a man on a mountain of bones, a mind torn apart by guilt, violence, and rage.

A man burst from the skull of the giant. His dark hair hung around his face, knotted with blood and viscera. In one hand, he held a long, curving sword. In the other was a glowing red Qi crystal. Before anyone could react, he slammed it into his chest.

---

Power coursed through his body. Qi. His reward from the System for slaying the World Bosses. He funneled the Qi into his Class, and a small sigh of ecstasy slipped past his lips. This was what it was to stand on top of the world. At that moment, none could stand before him. Then the world went dark, replaced by an empty, cubical room of bleached white. Across from him stood a man.

The man was his mirror, he realized. Soon after, he revised his opinion once more. If this was a mirror, it was a poor one, indeed. Instead of his hair, this version of him had locks of pure, shifting darkness. Gone were his eyes of gray. In their place were sockets of empty black, interrupted only by slits of silver. The impostor’s face was leaner, as if the skin had been pulled tight over the bones of his face. His skin was that of a porcelain doll’s. Worst of all was the smile. It wasn’t inhuman, nor was it grotesque or monstrous. It was… perfect. Straight white teeth showed in the pleasant smile of his false twin.

They stood opposite, so similar and so different at once. Ryu’s filthy gear remained, but his twin was naked, showing a gaunt, malnourished body. Even its arms were different, long and spindly. They looked at each other for a long moment, and then the thing spoke.

“I’ve known you for so long that I forgot you wouldn’t know me. I apologize. As you may have noticed, I am you. Sort of. Think of me as… a brother, if you will,” it said in a raspy, hoarse voice. Ryu wondered for a moment how such an ugly thing could hide behind such a pleasant smile.

“For some reason, I find that hard to believe.”

His “brother” shook his head, his smile not flinching. “Forgive me. You know me. You do. You just don’t recognize me. After all, I have been with you every moment for ten years. I’m the other side of you, the side you hid behind the wall of your Skill. The side you let out to play when things got rough. No longer. Now, I live. And I will soon take control, Ryu. I promise you that. With me at the helm, I will show you what true greatness is.”

Ryu was not amused. “So you’re Ryu number two, is that it? Pathetic. It’s true. You are a dark thing, but I will forget you. Move past you. Take the helm? You can’t control me,” he said, anger leaking into his voice.

The demon that wore his face laughed. “No, I am not ‘Ryu number two.’ I am more than that. Better, even. I am Ender. Make no mistake, brother. I will take over. It is not if. It is when. Play your games. Do what you please. But when things get rough, you will come to me. As you always have. We are intertwined, you and I. Like two halves of the same coin. Could you forget your left hand? So go. Enjoy your new power, but know it will soon be mine. If you don’t believe me, just wait,” it said.

Ryu looked around the pale room with a thoughtful look. He wanted to be angry, to be hateful, but it was impossible. His hate stood before him, clothed in the skin of a man. A screen appeared, blocking the creature in front of him.

Master Class- Shinigami

There are those in this world who have lived for far too long. In the myths of the Old World, Shinigami were semi-benevolent spirits needed to guide souls after death, but here, a new type of god is needed, one who will send those pitiful souls to the afterlife.

Ender spoke once more. “You see, brother. We will be gods.”

---

Horace frowned, the notification in front of him almost unreadable in his exhausted state.

World Event

The Sixth Ring has been opened. With it comes a new challenge. Humanity has dallied for too long. Your ascension must continue, for a competitor has appeared. Your race to the top starts now.

End of Book One