“He’s unguarded!” Ein shouts, “I’ll take care of the cloak!”

Clark leaps into the action for Kell’s hill, his knives ready to finish what he started. As the din of gunfire and the smashing of bones overtakes the air, Clark rounds the corner and takes in a glimpse of the unarmed, unshrouded Kell.

Covered in its static blood containing what looks to be a dense white ink filled with black squiggling letters, the slightly short Kell dives forward with his fists raised high to strike.

“En garde!” Kell shouts valiantly as he punches at Clark with precise, slow jabs, carrying all the weight of your common man.

Clark, of course, is a few steps past this.

Faster than Kell can react, Clark cuts forward with his knife, slashing upward at Kell’s outstretched arm. Even though Clark’s missing a primary hand, his left hand is more than enough to depart Kell from his own. The analyst’s voice pierces Clark’s ears as he shouts in pain. Clark laughs at how easy all of this is, just as he feels a sharp pain in his side.

He leaps back and looks to his ribs. There’s a piece of paper wrapped into the shape of a spike, shoved cleanly into his ribcage. “Wh-” Clark coughs up as [bleed 3], [burning 3] [poison 3], [paralysis 3], and [mute 3] annotations pop over his head. “How the hell?”

Kell scoffs as he tears out another piece of paper to write on. After just a second of Clark attempting to regain himself as his entire body turns against him. Kell wraps the new wound in the written page as if it were a sort of bandage. Sure enough, the black-white blood static from his arm staunches out.

Clark needs to figure this out. By some dark magic fuckery Kell’s able to attribute aspects of items or weapons to paper— just like a high value target to keep his aces hidden.

The blood-covered Kell wastes no time in pushing his notepad against his leg as he writes with his only hand. Clark’s not pleased to find that Kell write in English, particularly the words “causes slash 5” on the paper.

Clark remembers watching the beta footage where a warrior used a [slash 5] attributed attack against a mage; the lad was literally cut in half, ushering up a full gasp of awe from the conference room.

“Spend some time with your family, you stupid child,” Kell says with a grim tone as he raises the piece of paper up like razor blade.

Clark can’t talk, he can’t move, and every inch of his body is in unbearable pain. As his hp ticks down at five percent a second, Kell weighs down just in time for a solid bolt of magnetically-accelerated lead to smash in through his head. The four-eyed mask is torn from the outside in, and through the other side, the openings gushing out that static blood.

Frozen from [paralysis 3,] Clark can only watch as Kell wavers at his feet a moment, and then falls over. Kell, in his cheap suit and with his myriad wounds, begins to crinkle up like old papyrus, the wind steadily deconstructing his body and scattering it out upon the crimson planes.

After a few seconds Clark hears a scream from Ein amidst the crashing of the surrounding bones and gunfire. Ein saved him, but Clark cannot save Ein, it seems. In the next moment, Clark struggles to turn his head just enough to see Ein being pierced through by the dark entity Night-Winter, its cloak-like amalgam sharpened to a spear point as it impales

Ein again and again.

“I-integrate!” Ein shouts with a gurgling, heavily-injured tone. At that moment, Ein disappears, in a way not unlike a sci-fi teleportation effect. He just flashed out of reality.

All that’s left is Clark… and Night-Winter.

The black cloak turned monstrosity begins crawling toward Clark with furious, stabbing steps into the ground, each move forward shattering the pile of bones covering the ground.

Clark checks his status effects. It reads that [paralysis 3] has only five more seconds. Clark uses everything in his will to reach for one of his daggers, but what could it possibly do against such a fearsome creature.

Night-Winter pulsates as it takes a warm, reverberating breath. “He is deeply misguided, but he is my user,” it says in the deepest, most estranged voice Clark has heard with his own ears. “He will reintegrate back to his mark in only minutes from now…” the cloak pauses for dramatic effect. Clark looks down to Kell’s body… and he spots his written-out weapon note: the one with [slash 5] on it.

“But you,” Night-Winter continues. “You’re going to choose not to log in again. There’s nothing fun about what I’m about to do to you. We don’t need any more interlopers interfering with the goal.” Night-Winter raises its fabric tentacles with metallic weight, readying to begin the torment.

In the only free second he’s given after [paralysis 3] runs out, Clark snaps up the piece of paper from Kell’s body and slashes across the reaching out Night-Winter.

While game dynamics of Dragon Scythe Online usually don’t work on these untargetable types, somehow the translation of Kell’s paper makes it applicable.

Night Winter’s reaching tentacles are cut off and sent into the breeze, the piece of paper cutting through them as if it were a sheet of enchanted adamantium. Night-Winter doesn’t rear back, but forward, sparing only a semi second for

Clark to leap out of the way. There’s no fighting this thing.

Just before Night-Winter leaps forward again, Clark rolls into Kell’s body, snatches his pen and paper, and runs around.

Ensuring he holds his distance, Clark also goes around to where Ein “integrated” and picks up his dropped rifle before he makes his escape. As he has a metric ton of DEX, evading Night-Winter is easy once he exits striking range. He opens his mini-map and spots an icon that tooltips as “realm gate”. “Must be a teleportation hub,” he thinks as he spares one last glance at the place of the battle, now nearly a third of a kilometer away.

Night-Winter is blowing along the breeze in an attempt to catch up, but its not enough to reach him.

Clark runs on to the nearest village, a disheveled, dilapidated shanty town with only NPCs. No player has gotten far enough to reach this place yet, and none will for at least another fifty hours. Clark peeks over the horizon one more time to spot Night-Winter, now but a speck downrange, and he turns to use the realm gate. As he expected, it’s a teleportation hub that leads to any previously-visited city. Without so much as a thought he crosses into Eizerith.

After all, as the very first Midnighter, he needs to set the bar high. He’s going to find Hero and finish the job.