The first bounty hunter found us six kilometers outside Millhaven.
He was a Level 28 Ranger — I could feel his System energy signature from a hundred meters away, bright and eager, like a moth that had just spotted a flame.
He was crouched in a ditch beside the road, crossbow loaded, trying very hard to be invisible.
He was not invisible.
[SYSTEM NOTICE: BOUNTY HUNTER DETECTED. LEVEL 28. CLASS: RANGER. SKILLS: STEALTH (C-RANK), PRECISION SHOT (B-RANK), TRACKING (C-RANK).]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: HE HAS A WIFE AND TWO CHILDREN. HIS MORTGAGE IS 14,000 CREDITS. THE BOUNTY WOULD CHANGE HIS LIFE.]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: I AM TELLING YOU THIS SO YOU FEEL GUILTY WHEN YOU HURT HIM.]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: I AM EVOLVING MY STRATEGIES.]
I stopped walking.
Sera stopped beside me, hand drifting to her sword.
“Ambush?”
“Single target. Ditch on the right. Crossbow.”
She squinted at the ditch.
“I don’t see anything.”
“His stealth skill is C-rank. It bends light slightly and muffles sound. Good enough for normal eyes. Not good enough for someone who can see System energy.”
I looked directly at the ditch.
The ranger flinched — he could feel my gaze locking onto him even through his skill.
“Come on out,” I called.
“I can see you, and the System just told me about your mortgage. Let’s talk.”
A long pause.
Then a man’s head rose from the ditch, crossbow still raised, face a mask of conflicted determination.
He was young — mid-twenties, weathered skin, calloused hands.
Not a killer.
A desperate man with a price tag in front of him.
“Anomaly Zero,” he said, his voice steadier than his hands.
“By the authority of the Axiom Bounty Registry, I am claiming the active warrant on your—”
“Fifty-five thousand credits,” I said.
“I know. I saw the poster.”
“It went up to sixty while you were walking,” he said.
“The System is matching every hour.”
[SYSTEM NOTICE: SIXTY-FIVE THOUSAND AS OF THIRTY SECONDS AGO. KEEP NEGOTIATING, I DARE YOU.]
I sighed.
“Look,” I said to the ranger.
“I’m going to give you some advice. Free of charge, which is more than the System’s ever done for you. Turn around. Go home. Pay your mortgage the hard way. Because if you pull that trigger, one of two things will happen.”
I held up a finger.
“One: you miss, and my friend here — who is a former Knight-Commander of the Holy Order, Level unknown but significantly higher than yours — turns you into a cautionary tale.”
Sera’s hand tightened on her sword.
The ranger’s eyes flicked to her, and I saw the moment he recognized the blackened greatsword.
His face went pale.
I held up a second finger.
“Two: you hit me, and it doesn’t matter, because I’m apparently unkillable and your bolt will bounce off something I don’t fully understand yet. Then I’ll be annoyed, and you don’t want to see me annoyed.”
The ranger’s crossbow wavered.
“The System told you about my threat level,” I said.
“Catastrophic. That’s not a classification they hand out to people you can shoot with a crossbow.”
He lowered the weapon.
Slowly.
His hands were shaking.
“I have a family,” he whispered.
“I know. Go to them.”
He ran.
Didn’t look back.
Disappeared into the grasslands with the desperate speed of a man who’d just realized how close he’d come to dying.
[SYSTEM NOTICE: …THAT WAS DISAPPOINTING.]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: I WAS ROOTING FOR HIM. HE HAD A COMPELLING BACKSTORY.]
“Your backstories don’t make me feel guilty,” I said.
“I grew up in an orphanage and became a professional killer. I’ve heard worse.”
[SYSTEM NOTICE: NOTED. I WILL TRY HARDER.]
The second wave was less polite.
They came an hour later — a group of four, moving fast along the road behind us.
I felt their energy signatures before they crested the hill: three Levels in the 30s, one in the low 40s.
Mercenaries, not amateurs.
Their System energy was sharper, more aggressive, laced with combat buffs that told me the System had actively enhanced them for this encounter.
[SYSTEM NOTICE: MERCENARY SQUAD “IRON FANGS.” COMBINED BOUNTY CLAIM: 65,000 CREDITS.]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: THEY HAVE NO MORTGAGES. NO FAMILIES. NO COMPELLING BACKSTORIES.]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: FEEL FREE TO BE AS VIOLENT AS YOU WANT. I WON’T JUDGE.]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: I WILL, HOWEVER, BE TAKING NOTES.]
Sera drew her sword.
The blackened blade hummed, drinking light.
“Four targets,” she said.
“Enhanced. The leader is the Level 42 — the one with the axe.”
“I see them.”
“I’ll take the left two. You take the right.”
“I’ll take all four.”
She looked at me.
I looked at her.
“Fine,” she said.
“But if you leave one alive, I’m finishing it.”
“Deal.”
The Iron Fangs crested the hill and charged without preamble.
No speeches, no warnings, no dramatic declarations.
Professionals.
I respected that. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
The Level 42 — a massive man with a double-bladed axe and arms like tree trunks — led the charge.
His System enhancement flared bright around him, boosting his speed and strength well beyond his natural limits.
Behind him, a sword-and-shield fighter, a dual-wielding rogue, and a backline mage with fire already gathering in her palms.
Standard formation.
Good synergy.
The kind of team that would shred a normal target.
I walked toward them.
The axe-man swung first — a horizontal cleave that would have bisected a horse.
I stepped inside the arc, close enough to smell the sweat on his neck, and placed my palm flat against his chest.
The Void Core pulsed.
Not Void Flame.
Not anything dramatic.
Just a focused burst of nullification energy that killed every System enhancement on his body simultaneously.
His buffs vanished.
His stats crashed back to baseline.
The axe, suddenly far too heavy for his un-enhanced arms, dragged him off balance.
He stumbled.
I tripped him.
He hit the ground face-first and didn’t get up.
One.
The sword-and-shield fighter was next.
She was smarter than the axe-man — she didn’t overcommit.
She kept her shield up, circled, tried to buy time for the mage.
I didn’t give her time.
I kicked the shield.
Not the edge — the center, where the System reinforcement was thinnest.
The Void energy shattered the magical bracing like glass.
The shield crumpled.
She stared at the ruined metal on her arm in disbelief.
I swept her legs.
Two.
The rogue came from behind — fast, silent, daggers aimed at my kidneys.
His stealth skill was B-rank, better than the ranger’s.
He genuinely thought I hadn’t noticed him.
I caught both his wrists without turning around.
Combat precognition.
The ghost-image of his attack had painted itself across my awareness three seconds before he moved.
I’d been waiting.
“Behind me is a bad angle,” I said over my shoulder.
“You’re exposing your center of gravity. Your instructor should be embarrassed.”
I squeezed.
He dropped the daggers.
I tossed him into the ditch where the ranger had been hiding earlier.
Three.
The mage.
She’d finished her spell — a fireball the size of a wagon wheel, blazing with System-enhanced heat.
She hurled it at me with a scream of effort.
I caught it.
The Void Core drank the fire the same way it had drunk the dragon’s breath.
The flames hit my palm and vanished — absorbed, converted, gone.
The mage’s eyes went wide.
Her mouth opened.
No sound came out.
“My turn,” I said.
I flicked a wisp of Void Flame back at her.
Not enough to kill — just enough to singe her eyebrows and set her cloak on fire.
She shrieked, dropped to the ground, and rolled frantically in the grass.
Four.
Total time: eleven seconds.
I stood in the middle of four defeated mercenaries, hands in my pockets, breathing steady.
Sera lowered her sword.
She hadn’t swung it once.
“You said you’d take all four,” she said.
“I did.”
“In eleven seconds.”
“Was it eleven? Felt longer.”
She stared at the carnage.
The axe-man groaning in the dirt.
The shield fighter examining her ruined arm.
The rogue tangled in a ditch.
The mage patting out the last of the flames on her smoldering cloak.
None of them were dead.
All of them were broken.
“You didn’t kill any of them,” she said.
“Dead bounty hunters create martyrs. Alive ones create rumors. Rumors are more useful.”
“Useful for what?”
“For making the next group think twice.”
She considered this.
Then she sheathed her sword and stepped over the axe-man’s body like he was a piece of furniture.
“Your restraint is strategic,” she said. The source of this chapter is g.com.
“Not moral.”
“Correct.”
“Good. Moral restraint gets you killed in this world. Strategic restraint keeps you alive long enough to win.”
I looked at her.
Really looked.
The way she analyzed violence with the same clinical detachment I did.
The way she’d accepted my methods without flinching, without judgment, without trying to impose a moral framework that neither of us believed in.
Two killers, walking down a road.
“We make a good team,” I said.
The faintest crack in her composure.
Not a smile — not yet — but something close.
“Don’t let it go to your head,” she said.
We kept walking.
The road stretched toward the distant mountains, the grasslands rolling on either side like a green ocean.
The twin moons were rising again, early in the sky, casting double shadows.
The System was quiet for almost ten minutes.
A new record.
Then:
[SYSTEM NOTICE: BOUNTY UPDATE.]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: CURRENT BOUNTY: 80,000 AXIOM CREDITS.]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: DISTRIBUTION: ALL REGISTERED CITIZENS WITHIN 200 KILOMETERS HAVE BEEN NOTIFIED OF YOUR GENERAL LOCATION.]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: I HAVE ALSO ACTIVATED “CITIZEN AWARENESS” PROTOCOL. EVERY PERSON YOU PASS WILL NOW RECEIVE A SUBTLE QUEST NOTIFICATION ENCOURAGING THEM TO REPORT YOUR WHEREABOUTS.]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: YOU ARE NO LONGER HUNTED BY BOUNTY HUNTERS.]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: YOU ARE HUNTED BY EVERYONE.]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: THE FARMER YOU PASSED THREE MINUTES AGO? HE JUST REPORTED YOUR DIRECTION. THE SHEPHERD ON THE HILL? SAME. THE CHILDREN PLAYING BY THE ROAD? THEY DON’T EVEN KNOW WHY, BUT THE SYSTEM TOLD THEM TO POINT, SO THEY POINTED.]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: THE ENTIRE WORLD IS MY EYES NOW. GOOD LUCK HIDING.]
I stopped walking.
Sera stopped beside me.
She’d read the notification over my shoulder — the System helpfully made them visible to anyone nearby when it wanted to be theatrical.
“It’s weaponizing civilians,” she said.
Her voice was flat.
Controlled.
But I could hear the anger underneath — the same anger that had driven her to expose the Church’s corruption in the first place.
“Not soldiers. Not hunters. Everyone.”
“Efficient,” I said.
“Cruel, but efficient.”
“People will get hurt. Bounty hunters will fight in populated areas. Innocent people will be caught in the crossfire. The System doesn’t care about collateral damage.”
“I know.”
She looked at me.
“You’re not angry.”
“I’m calculating.”
“That’s the same thing, for you.”
I didn’t deny it.
The System had just shown me the true scope of what I was dealing with.
It wasn’t going to fight me with monsters and soldiers alone.
It was going to turn the world against me.
Every farmer, every merchant, every child — all of them potential informants, all of them incentivized to sell my location for a handful of credits.
I couldn’t fight an entire civilization.
But I could make myself impossible to find.
“We need to get off the roads,” I said.
“The System tracks me through the Void Core’s energy signature, but it’s imprecise — it can narrow me down to a region, not a specific location. If we avoid populated areas and stick to wilderness, the civilian network becomes useless.”
“The wilderness has monsters.”
“I kill monsters for breakfast. Literally — the Flame Drake was very filling.”
Sera almost smiled.
Almost.
“And the curse?” she asked quietly.
“The suppression requires contact. If we’re moving constantly through hostile terrain—”
“I’ll manage it.”
“You need to sleep eventually.”
“I’ll sleep in shifts. You suppress the curse during your watch, I suppress it during mine.”
“That’s not sustainable long-term.”
“Nothing about this situation is sustainable long-term. We’ll figure it out as we go.”
She nodded.
Accepted the plan with the same pragmatic efficiency she applied to everything.
We left the road and cut into the grasslands, moving east toward the mountains.
Behind us, Millhaven shrank to a smudge on the horizon.
Ahead, the wilderness stretched vast and untamed.
The System watched.
The bounty climbed.
The world turned its eyes toward us.
And I walked into the dark with a cursed knight at my side and a cosmic AI plotting my murder.
Just another Tuesday.
[SYSTEM NOTICE: THE BOUNTY IS NOW 100,000 CREDITS.]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: I’VE ALSO ADDED A “SPEED BONUS” FOR ANYONE WHO BRINGS ME YOUR HEAD BEFORE FRIDAY.]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: IT’S TUESDAY. YOU HAVE THREE DAYS.]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: TICK TOCK.]
I smiled.
“Race you,” I whispered.