The fire had burned down to embers by the time three travelers wandered into the edge of their camp, hands raised in the easy, open gesture of people who wanted to be seen as harmless before anyone had reason to think otherwise.
“Didn’t mean to startle you,” the scarred one said, offering a small, disarming smiles as.
“Saw your fire from the road.
Mind if we share it a while?
It’s a cold stretch of ground out here after dark.”
Hoju studied them for a moment, nothing in his instincts flagging any immediate danger, and gestured toward the space on the other side of the fire.
The weeks since leaving Teria had taught him plenty about genuine travelers, tired merchants and wandering hunters who valued shared warmth and a little company over the isolation of an empty stretch of forest.
“Sit,” he said.
“We’ve got extra to share if you’re hungry.”
Fresha offered them a portion of the rabbit they’d cooked earlier without hesitation, the same easy warmth she’d carried since childhood, one of the few things the road had never managed to wear out of her.
The scarred man introduced himself as Ashgrove, gesturing to the two younger men beside him, twin brothers by the look of them, sharp featured and near identical, who gave their names as Doss and Renn.
The conversation moved easily at first, trade route gossip, complaints about the season’s unpredictable weather, the kind of idle small talk that filled space between strangers without demanding much of either side.
Hoju found himself relaxing into it despite everything he’d already learned to be careful of, some quiet, tired part of him grateful for company that didn’t require him to watch every shadow at once.
It was Fresha who noticed first, a small thing, easy to miss.
She reached for the waterskin at her hip and Renn’s eyes tracked the motion a beat too closely, a beat too calculating for a man simply enjoying a fireside conversation.
Hoju caught it too, a half second later, and something in his chest went cold and alert all at once.
He kept his own expression easy, kept the conversation moving, while his Mind’s Eye quietly widened its attention across all three of them properly for the first time since they’d sat down.
What he found there, buried beneath the friendly small talk, made his stomach drop.
A faint, deliberate stiffness in Ashgrove’s shoulders that didn’t match the loose posture of a genuine traveler.
The twins’ breathing, too controlled, too even, the rhythm of people holding themselves ready rather than people actually at rest.
“Long way from any real town out here,” Ashgrove said, still smiling, still easy.
“Just the two of you, this whole stretch of road?”
“Just the two of us,” Hoju said, matching his tone exactly while his free hand drifted, unhurried, toward the hilt of his sword resting beside him in the grass.
“Family looks out for each other, doesn’t it.”
Something shifted in Ashgrove’s expression at that, small, almost imperceptible, the look of a man realizing his target had already caught on.
“It certainly does,” Ashgrove said, and the pleasant mask dropped entirely.
The blade came free of its hidden sheath faster than Hoju’s eyes could fully track, and only hard won instinct got his own sword up in time, catching Ashgrove’s opening strike inches from his throat.
“Careful,” Ashgrove said, disappointment coloring his voice rather than surprise.
“Contract’s the same either way,” Doss said, stepping back and letting fire gather along both hands, Renn mirroring him a step away with a matching pulse of cold.
Fresha scrambled back from the fire, hand going for the small utility knife she still carried, and Hoju put himself firmly between her and all three attackers.
“Someone’s paying you to kill me,” Hoju said.
“Someone’s paying us to make sure a certain problem never reaches the capital in one piece,” Ashgrove said, and the fight began properly.
Doss struck first, a wide arc of fire tearing across the camp toward him, Renn’s ice following a half second later, angled to cut off the exact retreat path the flame would have driven him toward.
**Twin Crescent.** A technique built entirely around the assumption that dodging one brother meant walking directly into the other.
Hoju read it a heartbeat too late to dodge clean and threw himself sideways instead, catching the edge of the ice lance along his forearm rather than his ribs, the cold biting deep enough to numb the whole limb.
Ashgrove closed the distance the moment the twins’ attack landed, blade flashing in a precise, economical strike aimed at the gap the ice had just opened in Hoju’s guard.
**Silent Edge.**
Hoju caught it on instinct, the numbness in his arm forcing him to compensate with pure reflex, and felt the blade’s edge drag a shallow line across his palm even through a clean parry, an oily residue left behind on the wound that told him everything he needed to know about what coated Ashgrove’s steel.
He didn’t have time to process the danger of that properly.
The twins were already resetting, Doss’s flame building into something larger, more sustained, while Renn layered a second volley of ice lances behind it.
Hoju’s eyes flicked toward Fresha, still tucked behind the low rocks at the camp’s edge, and understood in that instant that a straight retreat would leave her exposed to whatever came next.
He needed to be two places at once, and some desperate, focused part of him, honed by everything Gogohut had left him with, reached for exactly that.
He willed himself toward the gap between the twins’ positions with everything he had, a single sharp burst of intention rather than movement, and the world blinked.
**Condition met.
Skill created: Instant Move.**
He reappeared inside the twins’ formation before either of them had time to register he’d vanished from his original position at all, Hurricane Slash already coiled and ready.
The strike caught Doss across the chest before the fire mage could raise a defense, the trailing gust behind the blade opening a wound deep enough to end the fight in the same motion.
**Hurricane Slash used in live combat.
Proficiency 3 → 4.**
No panel offered him anything for the kill itself.
He had learned that lesson long ago, turning it over more than once since leaving Teria.
Monsters yielded experience.
People, whatever they’d chosen to become, did not.
Whatever strength he carried away from a fight like this one would have to come from the skill itself, sharpened only by the simple, brutal fact of having used it and survived. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
Renn’s scream of rage carried more grief than tactics behind it, ice erupting wildly from every direction at once, and Hoju barely had time to pivot before the assault closed around him.
He caught the first lance on his blade.
He caught the second the same way.
The third came from an angle his own body couldn’t physically cover in time, and instead of dodging, some instinct born from watching Gogohut’s memory replay in his mind told him to simply meet it, to stop trying to escape the force and instead redirect it.
He turned his blade at the exact angle the strike demanded, and the ice lance shattered against it, its own momentum thrown back along the same line it had come from, catching Renn across the shoulder hard enough to send him staggering.
**Condition met.
Skill created: Heavenly Parry.**
Hoju closed the distance immediately, Air Blade tearing across the gap between them before Renn could recover his footing, and the twin battlemage fell beside his brother without ever raising another spell.
**Air Blade used in live combat.
Proficiency 3 → 4.**
**Heavenly Parry used in live combat.
Proficiency 0 → 1.**
Ashgrove had not moved through any of it, watching from a careful distance with an expression that had shifted from confidence into something far more calculating.
“Two of my best,” he said quietly.
“In under a minute.”
“Leave,” Hoju said, breathing hard, the numbness from Renn’s earlier strike still crawling slowly up his arm despite Quick Heal’s best efforts against it.
“Or you’re next.”
Ashgrove’s answer was another strike, faster than the first, aimed low at Hoju’s exposed leg rather than anywhere he’d defended before, and this time the oily blade found real purchase, a shallow cut along his calf that burned immediately, far hotter than any wound should have.
Ashgrove disengaged the instant the blade connected, retreating rather than pressing an advantage, and Hoju understood, watching him go, exactly why.
The poison hit him a few seconds later, a deep, spreading heat that turned his legs sluggish and his vision swimming at the edges, Quick Heal working frantically against a toxin it had never been designed to counter.
He tried to give chase anyway, stumbling two steps before his own legs betrayed him entirely, and Ashgrove disappeared into the treeline at a dead run, badly wounded pride the only thing he escaped with intact.
Hoju sank to one knee, the poison spreading faster than his healing could keep pace with, and felt Fresha’s hands catch him under the arms before he fully collapsed.
“Hoju,” she said, voice tight with fear.
“Hoju, stay with me.”
“Ring,” he managed, barely coherent.
“Now.”
She didn’t hesitate, closing her hand over his where the band sat on his finger, and the domain folded around them both an instant before his vision finally gave out entirely.