I am so proud of my dad. It feels weird to think ‘Yeah thats my dad. He could beat up your dad,’ again. The countryside was pretty quiet, like the apocalypse never happened. Sure there were the random monster den, but it felt like a safari trip. A pack of werewolves arrived. Dad and the gold adventurers wipe them out.

  A bone covered wyvern showed up. The thing shrugged off shots from a .50 cal. Sure the armor cracked and it drew blood, but little more. Dad cut its head off. Three of our people got sigil levels in that fight and one was the healer. More importantly, we now know what ten capacity means. My father is the first person in Greenriver to get a personal sigil, something called Greater Martial Artist. I am now glad I started cataloguing titles as a precaution, they will be important from now on.

  Day 90, Owen Landers

  Silas slumped as the pain started receding. He was sure he had taken worse wounds before, but burns hurt in a different way than anything else. His face had been partially melted off, both hands had suffered third degree burns, his knees and inner thighs had suffered a similar fate from straddling one of the dragonkin while beating it with a rock.

  Those were just the burns. He was pretty sure an arm was dislocated, his kneecap was fractured, and his back had made some ominous cracking noises when he had stood up. Was that all? Two fingers popped as they snapped back into place, Ah he had forgotten about those. The burn covered up the pain from the broken fingers.

  Once his face no longer looked like it had been drawn by a horror artist, Silas grinned at Sammantha, “Thank God for eldritch tentacle monsters, am I right?”

  Sammantha rolled her eyes, “I don’t think those words were ever meant to be in a sentence together,” Then she smiled, “I am glad that none of your injuries are permanent.’’

  Her eyes flicked to her mother’s missing hand when she said that. Silas wanted to assure her that her mother’s injuries weren’t permanent. There had to be sigils out there for healing, they just needed to get back to earth and find them. However, he did not know that for certain, in fact, there was circumstantial evidence that pointed to the contrary.

  He settled for something more neutral, “I am too. Though it does mean that I don’t get cool scars.”

  Samantha snorted, “Yeah, you get weird patches in your beard.”

  “Hey, my beard is nice,” Silas brought a hand to his face. He felt the charred fingertips of his gauntlet on his cheek. Oh yeah, he had just had half his face burnt off, “You might have a point.”

  “Finally!” Came the excited cry from across the rock formation or was it a small mesa at this size?

  Both Silas and Samantha looked at Bella quizzically. She looked quite good for someone who had just fought a dragonkin. Her breast plate had a spiderweb crack running through it with a fist mark in the center and her shield arm was scorched black. Maybe she shouldn’t get her arm back, Silas was getting worried that burning it off was becoming a habit.

  “Should I do it here?” Bella asked. She had an excited, crazed look in her eyes.

  Silas wasn’t sure if she was serious or not, but given that they were literally half a mile from a nest full of monsters that wanted nothing more than to eat them, he said the only logical thing, “No, you’ll be incapacitated. We need to at least get back to a safe house.”

  “Oh right,” Bella said, “Let's go then.”

  She was bouncing from one foot to the other like an excited child. Well, he could see where Samantha got her excited ticks from. Leaving was definitely a possibility, but he was worried about the people who may or may not be trapped in the nest. There was no way to know how long anyone had been captive and another hour would be unlikely to change their circumstances.

  Alternatively, his father had drilled into him how delicate human life was. As a police chief, the man had seen a lot, from drunk drivers, farming accidents, drug overdoses, and good old fashioned violence, he knew how easy it was to kill someone. Silas looked down at his hand, none of those things were a problem for him, he was no longer easy to kill. Anything that could kill him couldn’t catch him.

  Maybe it was arrogant, but he had power. What was the point if he didn’t use it? He pushed down the thought that he would be recruiting more bodies to power up for the fight with the nest. That was a bad motive, even if it was still the main one.

  “We need to split up,” Silas said, “You and Samantha go back to the safe house. Get your personal sigil while I take a look at the camp.”

  “You can’t, it's too dangerous,” Bella shook her head.

  Silas raised an eyebrow, “How so?”

  “What if you get seen?”

  “I will use a portal to escape.”

  “What if you’re fighting?” Bella changed her question.

  “I can still use a portal.”

  “And if your portal is on cooldown?” She asked, exasperated.

  “I will not go in without it ready to activate,” Silas said. Just because he wanted to scout didn’t mean he had a death wish.

  He could see the conflict behind Bella’s eyes. She wanted her hand back, but she also didn’t want to leave him on his own. Silas understood her thoughts, but it would actually be easier to do this without them.

  “Bella, I don’t intend to enter the camp. Remember, I can just open a portal and drag them through. The fewer people I need to shuttle through, the faster it will go. On the off chance there are only materials, I can simply create a portal beneath them and let gravity do my work,” Silas explained.

  She still looked uncertain, “Are you sure?”

  Silas knew her questions came from a place of concern, however, this conversation was wasting precious time, “Yes, the stronger you are the better chance any survivors I find will have. Remember, they will still have level one sigils.”

  He could see the moment she acquiesced. Bella nodded and Silas opened a portal back to the safe house. She stepped up to it, and with one last glance, stepped through. He waited a few moments before shutting the portal. It required both of his limited spirit to reach the safe house, so he would wait another minute for his resources to come off cooldown.

  He chuckled at the slight irritation he felt at being made to wait on literal portal travel. Talk about first world problems. He sat on a rock and fidgeted. Waiting wasn’t something he had done much of since arriving, he was only waiting a minute, but he still itched to pull the dragonkin apart and use their bones to fix his gear. Maybe his Flesh Lord sigil was not the only sigil affecting his desires. So long as he didn’t start feeling that about people he didn’t really care.

  “In and out,” Silas muttered his way through his plan, “Snatch as many people as I can and run.”

  Simple and straightforward, as all the best plans were. The last seconds ticked down and as soon as that last second passed he started moving. He followed the path of the dragonkin that Bella had killed. The formations were close enough to jump across. He might only have a two in body, but his Flesh Lord forced him to utilize hysterical strength at all times. It wasn’t the same punch that the werewolf sigil packed, but it was more than enough to clear some narrow ravines.

  It didn’t take long for him to find some that he had to portal across. A part of him wanted to simply portal to the rim of the camp, but the paranoid part of him was unwilling to advance with only half of his escape plan. He was nearly to the rim when he noticed one thing that had been off for quite some time. The small army of scouts and guards on the formations were gone.

  They had killed three in one small area, but that did not justify all of their absences. Silas contemplated turning around right then and there, however, he knew that he could escape any trap that was laid. One good thing about this landscape was that he could move incredibly fast across the top of the formations. Where most creatures had to climb down and use the ravines to move with any speed, he could cut straight through.

  He still double checked his armor. Getting cheap shotted was still an easy way to kill him. Thankfully, it was burned not broken, aside from his pauldrons. He had used them to deflect a few club strikes each, and they had done their job well. His second and third layers of armor were still in working order. The biker looking light armor wouldn’t stop anything determined, but it should still keep him functional against abrasions and glancing blows.

  It took him nearly half an hour of moving across the formations to reach his destination. Not all of that was travel time, he would stop and scout the ravines from above. Seeing a few dragonkin marching below made him feel a bit more at ease, even if they were of the acolyte variety.

  The smoke got thicker as he approached. It was too thick to see what was going on from straight overhead and he hoped that he would not be forced to climb into the ravines to get his eyes on the camp. He heard it before he saw it. The sound of guttural barks. Silas knew that just because the dragonkin were happy, it didn’t mean that there were any people there. However, images of desperate people filled his mind, speeding his steps along.

  He reached the final formation and dropped to his stomach. No need to silhouette himself against the sky. Crawling forward, he tentatively poked his head over the edge, hoping nothing bit it off. He immediately jerked it back when he saw dozens of spiked legs and white carapace just below him.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  It took his brain a moment to identify the shape. A centi snake was clinging to the wall, its body still and thankfully not looking at him. A discrepancy in the view made him take a second peek. The last centi snake he had seen was big and green with hairy insect legs. It reminded Silas of a titana boa he had seen in a museum.

  This one had a white carapace. Silas took a second look. His eyebrows raised when he saw that it was indeed a centi snake, or at least what was left of one. It was a skeleton, propped up like a trophy atop the peak of a building of some kind.

  Several other structures were visible in the smoke, each topped with a skeleton of some kind. A third was under construction and the method of acquiring building materials was unsettling. Silas watched as one of the monsters with flexible arms and colorful fur was gutted. The organs and blood were dumped into a trough filled with dirt, mixed into a sludge, then baked into bricks.

  He shuddered as he watched the body get tossed into a small pile of other corpses. Was each building literally built with the blood of their victims? Silas chose to ignore the construction crew, he had better things to do. Instead, he looked for the source of the fire. Thankfully, anything that glowed was easy to find in the gloom created by the flames.

  The fire was set up right beside the blackened portal, and it was releasing an entire cloud formation. There was quite a bit on fire, an eighteen wheeler with the oval tube that signified it was carrying gasoline. Below the vehicle were tires, melted folding tables, PVC pipes, and other plastic products. They were all melting into a gooey mess that smelled caustic.

  “Good thing I didn’t bring Bella and Samantha,” Silas thought, “That smoke would probably mess up their lungs.”

  Two dragonkin, likely the ones responsible for tending the flame, were finding this out the hard way. One threw a bundle of PVC onto the fire before retreating and retching. It ran over to the brick mixing pit and vomited in it. The construction crew aired patiently, then mixed the vomit into more building materials.

  “Gross. If any creature needed to be wiped out on principle, these ones would be it,” Silas muttered.

  Thankfully, he didn’t see any humans. Silas was about to leave the dragonkin to their suffering when the black portal crackled to life. A dragonkin stepped through pulling a shopping cart behind it. The creature was bleeding from what appeared to be bullet wounds.

  Toys filled the cart, dolls, baby supplies, and action figures. The only thing they had in common was that they were composed of plastic. Silas wrinkled his nose, trying to block out the caustic smell as the toys were thrown into the flames. He was curious why they were burning cheap products, but it wasn’t particularly important at the moment.

  The portal flashed again, this time the dragonkin was holding a mucous rope that Silas suspected to be a repurposed intestine now. Its body was covered in crackling fire with fully formed wings folded behind it. This was definitely a more advanced specimen than the two he had killed prior. He was contemplating how to handle this one when it jerked on the rope.

  Another flash and a young man stumbled through. Silas’s breath caught, so there were prisoners. He hoped they were prisoners and not food or building supplies. The man cried out as he was jerked forward. He wasn’t alone, the rope tying his wrists trailed into the portal.

  A young girl, likely his sister followed him through. Unfortunately, it did not stop at them. Four more people were pulled through, whimpering and covered in horrible burns. Silas could move six people, but convincing them to step through a portal might be difficult. Especially, since they all looked Asian. Did they even speak English?

  Silas didn’t care. He could worry about getting them through the portal when he got to that point. That was looking more unlikely by the moment. More dragonkin trooped through the portal carrying more rubber and plastic supplies. They forced the captured people to haul the supplies off to the fire. They wheezed and coughed as the smoke invaded their lungs and coated their skin and clothes.

  Seriously, what was going on? Were the dragonkin addicted to plastic fumes like teenagers sometimes were with paint fumes? He ducked back down when a familiar dragonkin stepped through the portal. All of them looked identical, barring whatever scars they possessed except one. It was an entire head taller than those around it with vibrant purple scales crackling with purple flames. The fire wings folded behind it appeared nearly solid with how tightly the flames were bound.

  It scanned the ridge line, looking for something. Had it been notified of his presence? Three lesser fighters had just been killed, but it had been on earth how could it get that information? Silas contemplated leaving, if he was being conservative with his estimations, the boss dragonkin had twice the stats that the lesser variants did. He didn’t know how that would affect its fire powers, but it made the monster far too much for him to handle alone.

  When it was done with its inspection, the boss dragonkin turned its attention to its minions. It barked orders in their guttural language. Silas was once again confused. Where were all the dragonkin? Maybe a kaiju had come along and eaten half of them. The thought brought a smile to Silas’s face.

  A smile that fell when the boss dragonkin marched over to the pile of construction corpses. It pulled a body out, this one was a German Raptor. Then it drew a circle of fire around the body and knelt before it. Unsettled, Silas watched the monster do what could only be called prayer, though not the kind typically done in church.

  Many pagan faiths demanded bloodletting, as a show of devotion. The boss dragonkin ran a claw down each of its forearms as it chanted. Blood collected in its palms, pooling to the edge of its fingers. Silas flinched back when the bestial chanting was overtaken by a scream. It spread its wings and arched its back, trembling as something inflicted immense agony upon it.

  Silas contemplated opening a portal to strike while it was weakened. He started the process when something appeared. Silas felt something oppressive appear, like a weight anchoring his emotions and making him feel small. Growling, Silas tried to push off the feeling that he was now prey.

  It took a moment for him to locate the source. Across from the boss dragonkin something had appeared. Composed of swirling smoke, a being had manifested. It had the vague shape of a dragonkin, though it clearly had a spear and a bow slung across its back. The being was like a black hole, desiring to consume everything. It was not an unthinking creature, the confidence that everything would eventually be found and overcome radiated off it.

  Silas was unsure how he knew this, but he felt it deep inside. In the same way, this thing made him feel small and stupid. He clenched his teeth. He hadn’t felt like this since he panicked over getting stranded.

  My emotions serve me! He yelled within the confines of his mind.

  It leaned over the boss dragonkin and dipped one finger into the puddle of blood. The leader of the dragonkin trembled, Silas couldn’t tell if it was reverence or fear. Possibly both. Dark energy drifted into the blood, reminding Silas of the smoke that came off corpses when they were purified.

  It turned out to be closer to the truth than he liked. The blood crystallized into a beating heart made of dark red blood. Bowing once more, the boss dragonkin shoved the heart into the German raptor. Black smoke covered the corpse for a moment before being sucked back in.

  The body twitched. Scales, red scaled grew to cover the damaged areas and the telltale signs of horns appeared at the sides of the undead monster's head. His mind went back to when they had gotten the Greater Sturdy Gatherer sigil for Bella. She had claimed that something had been eating the bear from the inside out, like some kind of parasite. Silas now suspected that he was looking at the dragonkin’s reproductive cycle.

  Infest a body, grow to take it over, and finally convert its mass to their own. Silas let out a relieved sigh. He was willing to kill monster families to get home, but it was still nice to know that he was only killing parasites. There also seemed to be a flaw in the cycle. If Silas killed the smokey being, he could effectively kill every dragonkin here.

  As soon as he had the thought, the smoky dragonkin’s eyes snapped up to meet Silas’s. He scrambled back from the edge. What the hell was that? Unfortunately, the answer was not comforting.

  Objective: Nimrod, master of Schemes and the Hunt, has declared a holy quest. Any servant of his who kills you will be rewarded with his favor. The hunt is all, pursue the prey for yourself and take your reward through cunning and strength. Escape back to earth before this can be accomplished. Reward: 1 or more Titles and Technique: Defier of Nimrod’s hunt /Penalty: Death

  Silas started to retreat. What about the people? He couldn’t leave them to become parasite hosts. There was also no way he could fight a god, or master, it really didn’t matter what Commune Inc. called it. He took one look back into the clearing below. The smoke creature he now assumed to be Nimrod’s ghost was nowhere to be seen.

  More importantly, the dragonkin were jumping around like caffeinated toddlers. They were excited, but not rushing toward him. So, their god did not inform them that Silas was just above them. He reopened the objective and reread it. It only referred to him, Bella and Samantha were absent from the objective. There was one part that did not read with the sterile efficiency he expected from his interface.

  The hunt is all, pursue the prey for yourself and take your reward through cunning and strength. That read more like a motto or favorite quote. So that was likely how Nimrod worked. Everything was prey, but he would not take the pursuit of that prey from his followers.

  Silas snorted at that. If Nimrod wasn’t going to get involved, then this changed little. It was basically a free title and whatever a technique was. True, he could always find a different portal, but those had been opening less and less as time went on. He assumed that had more to do with Earth’s dwindling population. Regardless, it concentrated the monsters in the area more greatly than normal and made egress far more difficult. A stationary, permanent portal was actually the easier goal.

  He thanked Nimrod for the free spirit. Then he paused, no, he wouldn’t thank the master of clever murder for anything. He would kill its followers. Then one day, he would kill it too.

  The dragonkin scattered rushing out in groups of three or four, likely looking for Silas. He smirked, the stupid god had even cleared out most of the monsters. Bureaucratic oversight always messed up an operation, it was nice to see it working in his favor for once.

  Not all the dragonkin left, the boss picked up the baby dragonkin raptor hybrid and staggered into the brick home with the centi snake atop it. So it couldn’t mass produce new dragonkin. They had been killing two or three a day for the last forty days, that was about half of what he had originally seen. Accounting for new additions and power from enhanced sigil levels, Silas estimated they had another two or three months of hit and run combat before they got home.

  “Abby, I’m coming. It might be over a sea of blood, but I’m coming,” Silas muttered.

  He grimaced, some of the dragonkin had picked up actual weapons. A few machetes, hand axes, and wood cutting tools, like the kind that could be purchased from any game and fish store. The wood cutting tools in particular would be a problem. His armor would stop the lighter weapons.

  Several dragonkin stayed behind, mainly the construction workers and two guards. They kept the humans working, and the fact they weren’t allowed to go hunt made them more ruthless. One of them went so far as to grab a young woman and start eating her arm. She screamed and writhed, but the monster did not let her go.

  Silas wanted to wait, hoping the boss dragonkin needed sleep. He could kill the two slave drivers and likely the construction crew, but not the boss on top of all that. When the dragonkin jerked his head, tearing the arm off, Silas had had enough. It cauterized the wound before shoving the crying girl back towards the pile of plastic. Her brother rushed to help her when she fell, only to get clubbed by his sister’s severed arm.

  Silas didn’t really think after that. He wanted blood.

  He jumped off the edge, opening a portal below him with the other opening facing the rock back up on the formation top. The result was a portable aerial platform. He wanted to crash into the dragonkin and kill one in a single blow. He leaped off the first platform and opened a second one after a thirty foot fall, only the second portal didn’t open.

  Silas fell the remaining forty feet to the ground. His eyes widened, a sigil had never failed him before. Thankfully his control was greater than a normal persons, allowing him to turn his angled fall into a clumsy roll. His sword dug a divot into the dirt, stopping him from completing the maneuver and leaving him on his back.

  From the ground, he tried to open another portal, this time for escape. Nothing. No not nothing. He got the feeling that it required vastly more spirit than he currently possessed to accomplish the feat. The other portal was already disrupting space somehow, that was likely the issue and one he should have expected.

  Excited growls accompanied the sound of pounding feet. In a strange turn of events, the girl’s screaming and crackling fire actually covered up the noise of engagement. Rolling to his feet he spun and drew his blade in a maneuver similar to how he killed his first lesser fighter. To his surprise, these weren’t fighters. Whatever stats they got, body was much less important.

  His blade beheaded the first acolyte, causing the second to skid to wide eyed stop. Silas looked from what it had in its grip to its shoulder. The monster dropped the girl’s arm and took a step back.

  Silas snarled at it, “Yeah, you know what I’m thinking, you God damned monster!”

  It glanced back towards the humans and Silas could almost see the word ‘hostage’ cross its mind. It turned and Silas pushed off, the stamina granted by his high vitality wasn’t able to be properly used by his comparatively low body, but it did grant him extended periods of explosive action.

  He slammed into the dragonkin’s back, point driving between shoulder and arm bone. The monster staggered, then lurched to a stop as Silas reversed. Hook like spikes tore through tendon and muscle as Silas placed a foot on the acolyte’s spine and tore his weapon out. He really needed to get more mantis blades, he would have the people to use them.

  A pitiful whine came from the foul creature. Silas knew better than to let a dragonkin play with its blood. He had been burned too many times. With his foot still on the creature’s back, he stabbed it in the back of the neck, shutting the damned thing up. For a moment he considered retrieving the arm, maybe they had a sigil that could reattach it. One glance told him that no one would be able to fix it what was left.

  “Come with me,” Silas yelled.

  He quickly checked on the construction dragonkin. They averted their eyes when they noticed he was looking. All of them were disfigured, their horns and claws cut off. So, they weren’t above torturing their own either. Silas pushed down the sympathy that tried to bubble up. They were still parasites. One of them finally worked up the courage to move. Not toward the humans, but towards the boss’s home.

  “Time’s up, if you’re coming follow. If not, have fun,” Silas took off.

  The sound of pattering feet followed him. Looking back he saw all six people following him, the girl was receiving a piggy back ride from her brother. Silas made a mental note to get him the pack guardian sigil.

  A roar came from the building. The construction worker was launched out on a wave of fire that collapsed the building. Bone shattered and brick were crushed as the boss dragonkin made its exit. Silas smirked as he made eye contact with the monster, they had just exited the distortion.

  “I win and there’s nothing you can do about it,” Silas said as the portal opened to a formation top a mile away.

  He paused when the dragonkin returned the smirk. It dragged a claw across its neck in the universal sign of ‘I gonna kill you.’ Silas didn’t stick around to find out what it meant, he had places to be and people to save. Thankfully the firework show prevented the prisoners from questioning the portal, anywhere was better than here.