Helios made it exactly halfway across the fields toward Aldrenhal’s outer wall before the alarm bells started.
They weren’t ordinary bells.
He felt them as much as heard them, a low, resonant pulse that seemed to come from the tree itself, rolling out toward every corner of the capital at once.
Around him, players and elves alike froze mid-step, heads turning toward the source, conversations dying mid-sentence as the pulse rolled past a second time, louder.
[Threat detected: eastern perimeter.]
[Classification: Evo.]
Helios had never heard that word before.
Neither, judging by the confused muttering spreading through the crowd, had anyone else.
A few nearby players who’d been wandering the fields since general launch turned toward the sound of the bells with the same lost expression Helios himself had been wearing an hour ago, clearly hoping someone nearby would explain what was happening before they had to find out the hard way.
A couple of them started drifting toward the wall out of pure curiosity, entirely unaware of what curiosity was about to cost them.
“Evo,” he repeated, testing the shape of it.
“What’s an Evo?”
Kaelen was already moving, cutting through the crowd toward the wall with the kind of purposeful stride that made people step out of his way without being asked.
Helios broke into a run to catch up, ignoring the way his own legs, still barely adjusted to having a physical presence at all, protested the sudden effort.
“No idea,” Kaelen called back over his shoulder.
“But the Council’s threat classification system doesn’t throw around new words for nothing.”
They reached the eastern wall in time to see it.
The thing crashed out of the tree line at a dead sprint, low and hunched, built more like a wolf than anything upright, except its proportions were wrong in a way that made Helios’s stomach twist just looking at it.
Too many joints in the legs.
A hide the color of old bruises, matted and cracked like drying mud.
Where its eyes should have been, there was only a faint, sourceless red glow.
It didn’t move like an animal chasing prey.
It moved like something running toward a specific, calculated goal, ignoring the scattered players in its path entirely in favor of a straight line toward the wall itself. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
[Detected: Evo — Ravager, Juvenile]
[Threat Assessment: Moderate]
[Estimated Level: 8]
Level 8.
Helios did the math without wanting to.
He was Level 2.
This thing was four times that, and moderate wasn’t the word he’d have chosen looking at the size of its claws.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, a small, unhelpful voice pointed out that “moderate” was probably calibrated against a properly leveled Founder, not a kingdom-builder who’d barely scraped past his own starting classification.
“Archers,” Kaelen barked, and a line of Dark Elves along the wall responded instantly, nocking arrows Helios hadn’t noticed them holding a second ago.
“Hold until it clears the tree line fully. I don’t want stragglers using the cover.”
The Ravager didn’t wait for a clean shot.
It hit the open field at a speed that made the earlier sprint look casual, closing the distance to the wall in a handful of seconds, and the archers loosed anyway, a ragged volley that mostly found air.
One arrow connected.
The Ravager barely flinched.
“Moderate threat, my ass,” someone muttered further down the wall.
Kaelen vaulted the wall himself before Helios could stop him, landing hard in the field with a blade already drawn, one that hadn’t been visible on him a moment ago.
Helios’s stomach dropped.
“Kaelen!”
“Somebody has to buy the archers a second volley!”
The Ravager rounded on him instantly, drawn to the closer, more obvious target, and the fight that followed happened faster than Helios’s brain could fully track.
Kaelen ducked under the first swipe of claws, close enough that Helios heard the air split where they passed.
He rolled sideways, came up already swinging, and scored a line across the Ravager’s flank that drew a shriek instead of blood, dark ichor hissing where it hit open air. This story is hosted at novelping dot com.
[Damage dealt: minor.]
[Ravager: enraged.]
Enraged was, apparently, worse.
The Ravager’s next lunge came faster than the first, low and vicious, aimed not at Kaelen’s exposed side but at his legs, trying to put him on the ground where the fight would end quickly.
Kaelen barely got his blade up in time to turn a full claw strike into a glancing one, the impact still hard enough to send him skidding backward across the grass, boots tearing furrows into the dirt.
“Second volley, now!” Seraphina’s voice cut across the field, sharp with an authority Helios hadn’t heard from her yet, and this time the archers found their mark, three arrows landing together in the same shoulder joint Kaelen’s blade had already opened.
The Ravager staggered, one leg buckling under its own weight, but didn’t go down.
It let out a sound that wasn’t quite a roar and wasn’t quite a shriek, something in between, and turned its full attention back toward Kaelen with an intensity that made Helios’s chest tighten.
Helios didn’t remember deciding to move.
He was over the wall before the thought fully formed, sprinting toward Kaelen with absolutely no plan beyond not letting his general die because of him.
“Helios, get back—”
“Not a chance.”
The Ravager turned toward the new noise, and for one suspended second its red, glowing gaze fixed directly on Helios, sizing him up the way a predator sized up the smallest, slowest animal in a herd.
[Warning: incoming threat exceeds recommended combat threshold for current classification.]
“Yeah,” Helios said, out loud, to a warning that had picked possibly the worst moment to state the obvious.
“I got that.”
Behind the Ravager, Kaelen was already pushing himself upright, shouting something Helios couldn’t make out over the sudden roaring in his own ears.
Whatever it was, it didn’t matter.
The Ravager had already decided which of them was worth its attention now, and it wasn’t Kaelen.
The Ravager lunged.