Uhhh. I may have made a mistake. I mentioned the idea of building a kind of hero for for people to rally behind. Really I was just trying to get my hands on a few juicy sigils. I didn’t expect the leaders of Denver to agree. Turns out that Washington D.C. is thinking of doing something similar due to some overpowered European. I didn’t even know that Denver had managed to get in contact with them.

  Regardless, I was asked to build a hero like the Hero of Berlin, whoever that is. At first I assumed that meant simply making a the most powerful soldier I can. No. I am needing to make them a public hero. So I guess that mean comic books, a catchy theme song, and a team of attractive sidekicks.

  Day 114, Owen Landers

  Mandy took a hesitant step forward. She was still standing atop the bus, so the movement didn’t really gain her any ground, but it was enough to give her the confidence to speak. She said something in Hindi that Silas didn’t understand, punctuating it with a small waving motion.

  Silas smiled faintly. He wasn’t sure how universal certain gestures were, but despite being Mongolian and having lived much of her life in India, Mandy’s body language was the same as any nervous American college student trying to calm a tense situation.

  He did his best to make himself look friendly. That was difficult, considering the blood dripping from his gauntlets, sliding down the blade and pooling beneath his boots. As bad as he looked, Bella was worse. She was splattered head to toe in gore, courtesy of using her prosthetic arm and war club to splatter the monsters and she was smiling. Not a relieved smile. A pleased one. The kind that made her look like a psychopath.

  A sudden, unwanted thought struck Silas. Maybe she is a psychopath. Then another followed just as quickly. Maybe I am too. Enjoying violence wasn’t the only trait associated with psychopaths and maybe not even a common one, but he had enjoyed that fight.

  No. That wasn’t quite right. He had enjoyed doing something meaningful with his strength. Protecting people. Using his skills for something that mattered. Wasn’t that supposed to be the reward of a warrior? It was what had drawn his father to the police force, after all. Silas had joined the army mostly for college assistance, but standing here now, he could feel it, that same sense of purpose. Maybe he’d inherited more from his father than he’d realized.

  He glanced at Bella, wondering if she had a similar reason behind her mindset and actions. Whatever the case, she was his friend. He cared about her. If she had trauma or mental scars he’d be there for her when the time came.

  The Indian soldiers lowered their weapons slightly. The tension didn’t vanish, but it eased. Their voices sounded less angry now. More hopeful.

  Mandy turned back to Silas. “They’re with the Indian Defense Force. They are a resource-gathering teams. Their job is to collect fuel.” She hesitated, “The fuel depot they needed had a monster sitting on it. They, uh, they blew it up.”

  Silas frowned. “Why not just kill the monster and take the fuel? Unless it was a kaiju, that shouldn’t be hard with this many people. Especially if they had a rocket launcher.” Another concern crept in. “And if they shot it with a rocket, was it purified?”

  Before Mandy could respond, a high-pitched screech tore through the air, raw, furious, and very close. Silas swore under his breath. These people might technically be part of the Indian Defense Force, but they weren’t soldiers. Or at the very least not experienced ones.

  Thankfully, the sound was still distant. A half mile, at least. That gave them a little time.

  “Mandy,” Silas said quickly, “ask them why they aren’t getting in that truck and running for their lives.”

  She relayed the question and got an answer just as fast. Her expression tightened.

  “They’re out of fuel,” she said. “Even if they wanted to leave, they can’t. But they do have a rocket launcher and several spare rounds. They thought they could handle anything big.”

  Silas grimaced. That plan only worked until a swarm shows up. It wasn’t worth saying, they already discovered it the hard way.

  He nodded once. “Alright. I’ll deal with it.”

  He turned to open a portal and a hand clamped down on his shoulder. Bella glared at him through her helmet. “Don’t you dare.”

  Silas paused.

  “I let you go fight wyvern earlier because you were the only one with armor,” she continued. “That excuse doesn’t hold anymore. We’re all armed. We’re all protected. I have a relic. Hell, even Aron and Mandy have relics, yeah, they can’t use them without spirit, but still, ” She gestured sharply. “We fight together.”

  Silas hesitated. Her reasoning was solid. Annoyingly so, “…Fine,” he said. “I’ll open a spy portal. We’ll start firing before it reaches us.”

  He glanced toward the soldiers. “You get on the rocket launcher. Actually, Bella?”

  She grinned. “Yeah?”

  “Can you tear it off the truck? We’ll need to be able to point it the other way,” Silas ordered.

  Bella looked at the launcher, then back at him. Her grin widened. “I’ve never used one before.”

  The Indian soldiers flinched as Bella strolled toward them. Several guns snapped back up, tracking her movement. Bella ignored them completely. Silas watched tensely. He wasn’t entirely sure his bone armor could stop a bullet, not without a proper relic infusion.

  While Bella worked, he opened a spy portal and looked down at the source of the roar. The creature was wrong.

  It wasn’t like any monster he’d seen before, but it still carried that same cartoony, uncanny-valley quality common to the others. Less Dr. Seuss this time more like something from an cartoon mashed together with an anthropomorphic video game animal.

  It was bipedal, with black-and-red spikes hair running from the crown of its head down its spine, continuing into a tail that almost resembled a horse’s. If it had stuck with the animal theme, it might’ve worked.

  Instead, of showing an anthropomorphic lion or hedgehog face, it wore metal. Thick, ugly plates bolted to its face, arms, legs, and chest. Not forged armor, attached armor. Like someone had tried to turn a living creature into a tank without caring about aerodynamics or mobility. Just raw protection.

  In one hand, it wielded a massive club, a femur reinforced with a jagged metal blade. Crude, brutal and disturbingly real. It lacking the strange, otherworldly aura its owner possessed. It stood at least three and a half stories tall. Bigger than most things he’d fought. Comparable to the beholder and almost as large as the giant centi-snake in terms of sheer mass.

  “What would a rocket launcher even do to that?” he muttered.

  The creature roared again. Its back was unarmored. Maybe the hair hid it. Or maybe its masters needed a way to punish it if it disobeyed. Then it started running.

  Despite the half-ton of metal bolted to its body, it moved terrifyingly fast, sixty, maybe seventy miles an hour in a dead sprint. Straight at them.

  “Thirty seconds,” Silas breathed. He turned sharply. “Bella! do you have that launcher? We need it now!”

  She ripped it free from the truck, tearing bolts loose with brute force. She staggered, nearly falling, but caught herself and hefted the weapon.

  Her eyes flicked to the portal. “…What the hell is that thing?”

  “I don’t know,” Silas said. “But we’re shooting it in the back.”

  He closed the portal and opened another one, this time just inches behind the charging creature. Bella fumbled with the launcher. Silas wasn’t much better as neither of them had used one before. Thankfully, one of the Indian soldiers rushed in, shouting instructions in a language neither of them understood.

  It didn’t matter. Their goals were aligned and both wanted to blow the abomination apart. They loaded the rocket and aimed.

  The creature was closing fast. The soldier shouted something unintelligible and covered his ears. Silas followed suite, failing to react when launcher bucked violently. Because it was no longer mounted.

  Bella barely had time to react as the recoil yanked the weapon backward. She clamped a palm down holding the weapon steady, but the damage was already done. The rocket veered off course. Instead of tearing into the creature’s spine, it slammed into its shoulder.

  Silas looked up. It was close enough now that he could see the impact clearly. A bloom of fire and a rolling boom that knocked the monster over. For a moment Silas thought it was dead, however, he couldn’t be that lucky.

  The beast released a rumbling growl as it slowly climbed back to its feet. The struck arm hung loosely by its side, but aside from a bit of blackened metal, it was unharmed. It had even managed to keep ahold of the primitive axe.

  Uncertainty filled Silas as he watched the massive abomination approaching. He turned to the Indian soldier and yelled, “Get another one of those rockets ready. We’ll see what we can do to slow it down.”

  Portaling away would be safer but Silas was sick of running from monsters. This thing was huge, and the fight would be brutal, but the risk might be worth it. If anything carried a strength-enhancing sigil for Bella’s armor, it would be a creature like this. There was also something to be said about fighting back against the invaders.

  Unfortunately, there was one glaring problem. He didn’t really have a weapon capable of killing it.

  He could try to open portals and slice at it, but this wasn’t a wyvern. It wasn’t going to thrash around blindly or turn its own body into a weapon. It had an axe and it likely knew how to use it. Still, he wasn’t alone this time. Bella was here, and she was strong enough to deal real damage. Samantha had her own methods of attack, and Aron and Mandy could serve as distractions.

  It would be hard. It would be dangerous. However, it was far from impossible.

  “I should really make a spear,” Silas muttered.

  Bella glanced over and nodded. “Yeah. Something long and pointy would work better in these circumstances.”

  As the creature advanced, it moved slightly off-balance, unable to swing its injured arm in time with its stride. Standing on the bridge put them roughly at its clavicle level, whether that was a good thing remained to be seen. Silas frowned, watching carefully, trying to piece together how something that large should move.

  When he’d fought the armored abominations before, his Control stat had helped massively, letting him pinpoint gaps, exploit weaknesses, and act with precision. If Control was that valuable, what about the others?

  Vitality was obvious it helped with endurance, stamina. However, what could Memory, Wisdom, and Focus do? His gaze flicked down to the sword he held in his gauntleted fist. If experience was simply living through events, could better memory allow him to gain more from each event? Could wisdom help him apply those lessons more broadly?

  Memory, Wisdom, and Focus didn’t just store past events, they should accelerate understanding. They helped him recognize patterns, extract lessons faster, and apply them more efficiently. That would help him after fighting this abomination.

  He needed something he could do now? The creature was closing in. There wasn’t time to experiment or fumble through new techniques. Silas grit his teeth. The enemy was on his doorstep. Fine, he thought. If logic and science won’t give me an answer, I’ll steal one from somewhere else.

  He’d watched plenty of movies, superhero films, martial arts flicks, even the cheesy ones. They always exaggerated some physical ability until it bordered on the supernatural, perfect memory, hyper-focus, predicting bullet paths before they were fired. Why couldn’t he do something similar?

  With Focus and Memory, why couldn’t he memorize how mass moved, how momentum carried weight through space, and use that knowledge to predict motion in a split second? Super powers or not, everything still obeyed physics. Unless some sigil deliberately broke those rules, movement followed patterns.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  A slow grin crossed Silas’s face as the idea formed. What if martial arts were taken to their extreme? Master Tucker used to say you could tell what someone was about to do by how they tensed their muscles. Silas wasn’t skilled enough to read people like that, but this wasn’t a person. This was a massive creature swinging an enormous axe.

  If he watched closely enough for things like foot placement, shoulder rotation, and weight transfer, why couldn’t he predict its attacks?

  “Why not?” Silas muttered, tightening his grip on his sword. Once again, movies came to the rescue.

  Bella shot him an odd look, but there was no time to explain. Instead of climbing onto the bridge or tearing something loose to throw at them, the monster did something far worse. It lowered its injured shoulder and charged. Water exploded upward as it surged forward, slamming into the bridge like a living wrecking ball.

  Silas staggered back, staring in disbelief. If he had known the creature going to do that, he would’ve just sliced it apart with a well positioned portal. Maybe he’d been giving the monster far too much credit.

  The bridge clearly hadn’t been designed to take a multi-ton creature impacting it at highway speed. Stone cracked, support beams sheared loose, and the structure began to fail at the point of impact.

  Silas reacted instantly. Their vehicle was not far from the breach, with Samantha and the twins still inside. Dashing backwards to a more stable section of the bridge, not far from ground level, Silas opened a portal over his head.

  The other end snapped open beneath the armored bus, forcing him to quickly get out of the way. The bus dropped cleanly through, vanishing to safety. No way in hell he was letting Samantha and the twins die in front of an abomination.

  The Indian soldiers weren’t so lucky. They tried to flee, but their sigil levels weren’t high enough to escape the impact zone. Several were thrown violently across the bridge. Only those on the far side of their truck avoided serious injury.

  The creature roared. It raised its intact arm and brought its axe down onto what remained of the arched bridge. The blade punched straight through stone. Silas sucked in a breath. The raw strength on display was ridiculous. The bridge had already been destabilized, sure, but collapsing it like that was still obscene.

  What remained were two ends of a broken arch, separated by a wide gap. The monster stood in the water between them like a some kind of beastial titan.

  The arches were nearly shoulder height to the creature. It was almost as if the abomination had created a road straight to its face. Silas sprinted up the fractured stone and leapt, aiming for the monster’s shoulder.

  Its slitted eyes snapped up to him, glaring at Silas through the visor. For a brief moment, everything slowed. He could see it. A twitch in the left shoulder preparing to act as a counterbalance. The foot shifting to take excess weight. The torso twisting. The axe coming around.

  Silas didn’t try to take the hit. Unlike most people, he could maneuver in midair.

  A portal opened sideways across the creature’s swing. Silas passed through just as the crude axe impacted the aperture and was severed cleanly at the portal’s edge. The blade spun away into the city, sliced smoother than any scalpel could ever manage.

  Silas emerged from the second portal and landed on the creature’s opposite shoulder. The monster flinched, roaring in surprise. It snapped its jaws at him, but its own metal helmet blocked the bite. Silas grabbed the bars protecting its eyes, clinging tightly.

  The head alone was nearly his height, which was slightly terrifying. For a heartbeat, their gazes locked, vaguely reptilian eyes surrounded by black and red fur staring into Silas’s own. The helmet and eye slits were covered by thick metal bars, more like a prison grille than armor.

  No way was he going to break through that. Fortunately the ears and the neck were exposed. Using the bars for leverage, Silas drove his sword into the side of the creature’s neck. He grunted as the blade only punched in a few inches.

  What is this thing made of? He shoved harder. It was like trying to stab into a bag of packed dirt. The creature responded by swinging its massive wooden club like an oversized flyswatter. Silas barely had time to register the motion before something impossibly heavy slammed into his side.

  Then he was flying. Something cracked on impact a sharp, brittle sound. Silas was able keep a clear head, using the time he was flying he quickly ran a mental inventory midair. Thankfully there were no broken bones. His armor, however, had cracked under the blow. It hadn’t been designed to stop a giant’s club. At least the weapon had lost its blade. That would’ve been worse.

  He hit the underside of the bridge, bounced, then rolled down the curve of the arch like a tumbling stone before losing momentum and crashing to the ground below. It hurt, but he was alive and surprisingly intact.

  “Silas!” Bella shouted from above, pointing at the creature. “Get me up there!”

  She was still on top of the bridge. He was beneath it. There wasn’t much he could do from here. Silas opened a portal, his last one for this fight, placing the exit directly above the creature’s head.

  Bella didn’t hesitate, jumping from the jagged end of the bridge into the aperture. It was nearly a twenty-five-foot drop. She built up tremendous speed on the way down.

  The creature was focused entirely on Silas. He’d stabbed it. He’d survived its blow. The rocket had hurt it more, sure, but the thing didn’t understand what a rocket was. There was even a good chance it thought that Silas was responsible for its first death.

  That distraction gave Bella everything she needed. She landed hard on the creature’s head. Unlike Silas, she had no trouble driving her dagger home. While the blade was still embedded when she followed through, her prosthetic hand clamping onto the back of monsters head as she twisted the blade into its throat.

  At the same time, the temperature around her palm spiked. India wasn’t a cold place, multiplying the ambient heat eightfold was more than enough ignite the black and red fur. Flames spread across its spiked scalp as it roared in agony.

  The monster reacted like any animal on fire. It thrashed like, well, like its hair was on fire. Bella was strong, much stronger than Silas, but not stronger than something this size. She lost her grip as the creature flailed wildly, trying to extinguish the flames.

  Then it realized something important. It was standing in a shallow river. The creature dove in letting water rush over burning fur, steam exploding upward in thick white plumes. Bella was flung clear, twisting midair and landing on her feet with a splash. She skidded backward a few steps, then charged straight back in.

  The creature was still rising when she reached it, but it was still disoriented. Giving Bella the opportunity latched onto the faceplate and began heating it. The metal didn’t get hot enough to glow, but it did rapidly surpass the standard temperature of conventional ovens.

  The creature screamed louder as its helmet turned into a branding iron. Thrust its face back into the water and ground its faceplate along the riverbed.

  Silas snarled, he felt useless. He was supposed to be strong, but he lacked weapons that could actually kill this thing. All the precognition in the world meant nothing if he couldn’t take advantage of it.

  He looked around desperately for anything he could do to help. Then the realization hit. He was thinking like a fighter but he wasn’t one. Nothing on his interface said fighter. It said sculptor. His talent wasn’t violence. It was shaping.

  Without hesitating, Silas reached up, grabbed the shoulder plate of his armor, and tore it free. The bone plate softened instantly under his fingers. He strode toward the abomination. Bella could kill it but if it grabbed her, he wasn’t sure how long she’d last.

  So he did the only thing he could. He kneaded the bone into putty and stuffed it into the gaps between the creature’s armor plates.

  He didn’t have enough to immobilize every joint but enough to matter. While the creature was distracted by a melting face, he packed bone into the shoulder joint, locking it in place. Then one of its knees. The attack was painless, and the monster didn’t notice.

  It was too busy smashing its burning face into the water, dragging itself through stone and mud, trying to dislodge Bella. Eventually, it did hurling her into the wall. Still, it didn’t notice the joints.

  It rose to one knee, reaching up to grab its faceplate. Then with a shriek of primal agony, the monster tore the bolted helmet from its face. The fur around its hands ignited from the temperature but that was nothing compared to what was now exposed.

  Bone cracked as the bolts holding the helmet to the monster’s skull cracked. Flesh was pealed away by jagged metal and blood ran down its face. Silas’s initial assumption of an anthropomorphic face was wrong. Large reptilian eyes sat over a feline face locked in a Cheshire smile.

  Silas took a half step back at the visage. No, he couldn’t back down now. With the eyes exposed, maybe he could actually do something. He had dropped the mantis blade in the river, but he still had his knife.

  Drawing the blade he took a step forward. He was stopped by the sound of a bell. Something very fast and very hard smashed into the metal shoulder guard of the monster, deforming the metal. Silas glanced up to see Samantha leaning over the edge of the bridge.

  The creature was knocked to its hands and knees by Samantha’s shot. For a brief moment, her unexpected assistance and the fact that it had actually worked, lifted Silas’s spirits. That moment didn’t last.

  The creature’s blood-smeared face twisted into a snarl. Its head snapped upward, eyes locking onto the girl leaning over the shattered edge of the bridge. Samantha was exposed and the creature was tall enough to reach her.

  It lunged to its feet. Silas broke into a sprint. He couldn’t let it grab her. Samantha might have a good armor sigil, but it wouldn’t save her from getting crushed in this particular monster’s iron grip. That was when his earlier preparation took effect.

  The bone he’d wedged into the gaps of the creature’s armor finally did its job. Bone, under the right directional forces, was freakishly strong. If the beast had thought to flex its body in just the right way, it might have shattered the obstruction, but it didn’t. The creature met resistance where it expected none.

  Its knee wouldn’t straighten. Its arm wouldn’t flex properly. Those weren’t directions most bodies were particularly strong in, at least, not from anything Silas remembered seeing at the gym. The creature stumbled. Its massive body crashed backward into the water, movements failing it as its own mass worked against itself.

  Bella screamed, “Leave my daughter alone!” and brought her bone club down onto the creature’s neck.

  The blow was thunderous, one that would have been instantly lethal if the weapon had been strong enough to withstand her power. Even with the Hearth Conserver sigil she possessed, Bella couldn’t fortify bone enough for that impact. The club shattered in an explosion of fragments from the weapon and blood as the creature’s skin ruptured.

  Still, the creature backhanded Bella aside, sending her skipping across the water. Silas didn’t waste the opening. Dagger drawn, he slid in. The creature’s head was near the water, relatively speaking. Even on its hands and knees, it was still tall enough that he had to stab upward. It was already trying to climb back to its feet.

  Silas slashed. The monster clearly wasn’t used to having its face unarmored. Nothing protected its eyes. Silas carved a line from one eye, across the feline snout, and through the other.

  They burst. Viscous jelly spilled down over him. It was disgusting, but he didn’t care. The creature was blind. Hope started building in his heart. They could do this.

  It reared back instinctively, only to be stopped once more by the bone blocks Silas had jammed into its armor. Then the final part of the plan went off.

  Calling it a “plan” might have been generous, but with the last member of the group finally in position, the Indian soldier raised the rocket launcher and fired from the opposite side of the broken bridge. The world became fire and light.

  Silas barely had time to cover his eyes before the blast threw him backward. He rolled hard, slamming into the bridge struts connected to the shoreline. Bella was shoved off her feet again, splashing into the water, though she didn’t go as far, her greater mass spared her some of the force.

  Silas was back on his feet instantly, expecting the worst. The beast still standing. Maybe it had been sturdy enough to shake off the explosion. He was both wrong and right.

  The rocket had punched through the creature’s exposed back where no armor had been present. A massive chunk of flesh was gone, but its skeletal structure remained intact. Its intact spine still transmitted signals, even though it was now visible.

  The creature howled in agony and tried to rise. However, now that its back muscles were torn to ribbons movement came painfully and with great effort. No one intended to let it finish.

  Bella charged, slamming both hands onto the creature’s chest plate. The water around it began to bubble as heat built beneath her palms. Silas moved in from the side.

  With the outer muscle layers burned away, his dagger could reach the deeper places that mattered. The ribs were enormous, thicker than his thighs, but the gaps between them were wide enough to fit his arm through. Silas had gutted enough deer and elk to know what organs were exposed now.

  Just beyond a thin membrane, the lungs sat. It didn’t take much to collapse a lung. Those were his targets, even a beast like this needed to breathe.

  He leapt onto the monster’s back, grabbing the gap between thigh and hip plates and hauling himself upward. Burned hair tore away in his hands as he climbed. Where flesh remained, he drove the knuckle blades of his gauntlets into it, using them like anchors.

  The creature thrashed weakly, but the lack of reaction to the pain from the rocket wound, and Bella’s relentless grip told Silas what he needed to know. It was spent, yes it wanted to live, but shock, blood loss, and pain were draining it of its ability to fight.

  And why wouldn’t it be? It had taken two rockets. Lost its eyes. Had its face burned away. Been shot with armor piercing sigil abilities. Oh, and it had only recently revived after being at the epicenter of a gas explosion. This thing was an absolute unit, but nothing could keep going forever.

  Silas intended to end it. He climbed higher, using ribs like ladder rungs, until he found a large enough gap. Then he drove his dagger in deep. Once. Twice. Then again and again. He worked along the ribs like a sewing machine, stabbing into the lungs again and again until the creature’s roars degraded into wet gurgles.

  While Silas worked from the back, Bella worked from the front. The steel chest plate glowed with heat. The air smelled like burned flesh, barbecue, almost. The realization made Silas’s stomach churn. He shook his head, he forced away the intrusive influence of Flesh Lord.

  After what felt like an eternity, though it was probably only five minutes, the creature finally collapsed. It wasn’t quite dead. With its lungs collapsed and body burned beyond function, it simply couldn’t move.

  Silas twisted his dagger free and extended it hilt-first toward Bella, “Would you be willing to finish it?” he asked quietly. “I think anything more than this is starting to feel… inhumane.”

  Bella stared at him. “What are you talking about? It attacked us. We won.”

  Silas shrugged. “I know. It’s just… even if it’s an evil abomination, letting it die slowly like this doesn’t feel right.”

  Bella shrugged. “That’s fine. But I don’t need your knife.”

  She walked over and picked up the creature’s fallen helmet. Now that Silas saw it clearly, it was less a helmet and more a reinforced faceplate, like a welding mask. As Bella stepped behind the creature’s head, the metal began to heat. She positioned herself where the skull met the spine, raised the mask overhead, and brought it down with everything she had.

  Even with her prodigious strength and thermal cultivator accelerating the strike, it took three blows to sever the spine completely. When it was done, she placed a hand on the corpse and purified it.

  The black smog from the purification took a few seconds to clear. Silas looked at the sigil, not entirely sure what he expected. Maybe that a creature like this would be more awesome than it actually was. It glowed purple no brighter than others, but depicted a lion roaring at the sun. Silas got an impression of pride from it, though he couldn’t be sure if that was real or just projection.

  Bella frowned at her interface, “These words sound familiar. This thing was called Servitor Tyrannus Leo.”

  Silas wasn’t a Latin expert, but he was pretty sure that meant Servant of the Tyrant Lion.

  “So,” he asked, “who does it say you purified the taint of?”

  Bella pressed her lips together, rereading the text, “It says… I purified the taint of the Demiurge.” She looked up, “Whatever that means.”