The need to catch up with his wayward blot of ooze itched at the back of Nic's mind as he sat patiently in the ghost-town, watching the wisps live their lives. They were growing fearful as the sun set beyond the horizon. He didn't even need to see them to sense that, it was obvious from the way the wisps moved.

Such dim sparks. He wasn't going to find any great warriors here. Likely the strongest had already been picked off by this beast.

But Sofia and he could find uses for normal people.

Time passed at a crawl as Nic sat under an old tree, not far from the stone face of the Tutelary Spirit. Her weeping stone eyes filled a small pool from which the villagers drank, while a large garden provided most of their food. Someone here had a Shard for growing plants that Nic noted as valuable...

But on the whole he found the place sad. Weeks gone, and this was the best they could do? He knew they were scared- but he couldn’t help but feel they’d given up on living.

As he was watching the lonely wisps move about their campfires, there was a faint stirring in the air. He almost missed the presence that flickered above him, because he was relying on his Eight-Eyed Mantle to guide him. The skill completely failed to sense the intruder. Instead, raw intuition made his neck prickle up in a moment of warning.

He was on his feet in a second. Then a jolt of vertigo slammed through his frame, nearly sending him toppling over, and the sky went dark.

The air itself turned muddy and tinted, as if he was suddenly at the bottom of a deep well. There was a violent shift in the natural energies flowing through the world, as if they were curdling like sour milk. His entire skin shivered as foreign power seeped into him with every breath.

It was familiar.

It was demonic.

The buildings and trees beyond had gone shadowy. It was like they were only half-real. Like he had fallen out of phase with reality and into somewhere sideways of it.

Nic saw the people around him now. They were scared, watching the tops of the walls with weapons in hand. They uneasily glanced towards Nic, who was stretching his arms overhead and rotating his neck, pulling at each muscle until the slimy bones beneath bent and stretched with him. Warming up.

This beast had tried to swallow him. Now he'd choke it from within.

People huddled around a campfire, and Nic walked forward, plunging his blade into the flame. As he drew it back out the hilt extended into an edge of billowing red fire, its core a blazing length of solid ember that glowed like the setting sun. People flinched back from the sheer heat it radiated, and Nic saw a child watching him, eyes full of awe.

He grinned.

Then the screaming started. Nic turned as fast as he could, rushing towards the source. By the time he arrived the damage was already done. One person was dead, lying broken against the ground, while an older man with a spear and clanking loose armor plates chained to his body stumbled away from the fight.

A huge wolf had jumped straight over the walls. It was a hunched mass of black fur, its mouth dripping with blood and something else. Something that glowed an eerie, oozing blue-white color. That luminous saliva fell in splattering torrents as it advanced on the corpse.

"Recall."

Nightdoor Demon-Spider Larvae. F-Class // Demonic Demi-Sapient. Born from the injection of a spiritual parasite into a living host, this body of flesh serves an incubator for a ravenous brood.

The description threw him for a second, as he realized he was looking at more than a wolf. But at the same time the beast had sensed him. It sniffed the air, and its mouth began to split open vertically. With a horrific crunching of cartilage and a wet, fleshy wrenching sound, it split open along its chest and belly exposing jagged spars of bone that were both ribcage and jaws...

Nic braced, and the beast lunged for him. Clearly his demonic blood was drawing its attention.

Good.

For a moment Nic stood straight in the wolf’s path, staring it down.

Then at the last second he twisted aside and brought his blade up from below in a double-handed chop, flame searing through the night. It hacked straight through the beast’s head.

The body took three more steps on momentum, then came to a halt, shuddering. Tendrils of long blue material that glowed a slick wet hue in the midnight extended out of the bleeding stump. Each tentacle ended in a backwards-bending harpoon point of bone, like a hunting tooth.

Nic didn’t give it time to orient itself. He ran, leaping up and using his sticky aura to dash along the edge of the wall and come crashing down, sword cutting a blazing trail over the sky as he dropped for the beast’s back. If the head didn’t do the trick, severing the spine might.

It whipped about faster than he’d been expecting, and all three tentacles shot into his flesh. The harpoon-points punctured his lung, his shoulder, his arm in three places, moving with a speed the ungainly host body simply didn’t possess.

Speed an F-Class shouldn’t be able to possess at all.

With a flick of its limbs, the beast threw him against the wall. Nic groaned, head knocking the wooden barrier as he lifted his sword- pointing it like a spear at the creature. His arms were weak, huge portions of muscle needing to regrow before he could fight at full strength.

His danger sense screamed.

Nic reacted blindly, rolling aside as the second wolf dropped from above. He came up in a guard position, sword a blazing bar interposing between him and any attack from the first wolf.

They moved in unison, trying to corner him, to circle around and defeat him. Nic slowly moved back as the ache in his arm receded and new flesh covered the wound.

Something shifted in the edge of his vision. “Stay back!” Nic called out, a moment too late.

One of the humans had drawn an arrow and now that arrow flicked through the air, punching into the wolf’s neck uselessly.

The beast turned. Its snarl ripped through the air, foul glowing slime dripping from its teeth as it took off, hindlegs kicking it into a blur that rushed down on the human interloper. Nic gave a snarl of frustration as he too took off running, trying to intercept before-

The first wolf, headless, instantly shifted to block him. Its three tendrils snapped out, aiming for his legs.

Nic stomped down and flew into the air as Mire-Caller lifted a segment of the soft, wet mud underneath into a platform. The harpoon-tendrils punched into the muck and were instantly grabbed, the mud grasping them with tiny limbs of its own and pulling them down.

Nic didn’t have time for a finishing blow. He landed on its back and leapt off, into the second wolf’s path, his blade making a blazing circle that forced the beast to halt.

Another arrow whistled past his shoulder and struck it dead in the eye.

It was a good shot, actually.

It was just totally useless.

“Stay! Back!”

Nic’s sword had recovered from the circling blow poised at his shoulder, and now it lanced forward, becoming a beam of crimson that ripped through the wolf’s skull and severed the top of its head, leaving the lower jaw flopping uselessly in place. He drew the blade back with a downwards motion, ripping away the foreleg as well and crippling its movement before darting back-

Barely in time to evade the tendrils of the first wolf, which had freed itself and tried to strike at him from behind. Nic tore one in two with a quick parry, but the wolf was relentless, and the long slimy limbs twisted in midair to chase him down.

He lifted his left arm and took the blow across the Wintertusk Bracer. One of the tendrils managed to slip past the guard, tearing a gash down to the bone of his shoulder, but with a grunt, Nic drew on the bracer’s powers.

From a tiny axolotl folk to a true beast. He swelled in size, muscles bulging, frost dripping from his skin. Tusks emerged from his mouth and the pink shade of his flesh transformed to a dark crimson, the marks of Aleph emerging like fire along his shoulders and arms.

The wolf had made a very big mistake.

Nic plunged forward, taking the tendrils head on. They darted and punched at his torso, but between the thick scales of his armor and his toughened flesh, they couldn’t get any hold on him. He burned blood through the Internal Sacrifice Cauldron Technique, erupting with strength.

One hand left the hilt of his greatsword and caught a harpoon-tendril darting for his throat. He hauled the beast up onto its hindlegs, lifting it like a slab of meat on the hook, and with a single downwards chop he split the beast in two- cleaving between the jaws of the vast mouth on its belly.

A high pitched scream emerged from within, and something soft, blue, and luminous tried to break free of the corpse.

Nic’s foot crashed down and crushed it.

He turned to deal with the second wolf, but it was already over. A dozen arrows bristled from its back. Each of them was growing, the wooden shafts expanding into miniature saplings that twisted their green shoots upwards and speared down with their roots, impaling the flesh, binding it to the earth. The wolf was rooted in places by a net of crawling plant life.

Not so useless after all.

Nic stomped it until the larvae emerged and grasped the squirming thing.

There was a burn of energy in his core, something foreign struggling to avoid being absorbed. Demons fed off each other and as small as the larvae were, their bodies were rich with Essence to claim.

Drawing a flask from his belt Nic shoved the fist-sized worm inside, plugging it shut.

Then he turned to the archer.

Despite having seen Nic fight for them, the people who’d gathered around the edges of the fight flinched back at the gaze of his bestial transformed state. His eyes contained a brilliant fire, runes glowing in each pupil, cutting glowing runes in the air as he turned.

The archer was a young man. Nearly a teenager, really. He had floppy, curly black hair, and a wiry physique that was full of ropey muscle padding suntanned skin. Nic tried to place him. Nobody he’d met but…

There was something familiar.

Nic felt a sudden, violent lurch of hunger. Bloodlust rose, and his ‘presence’ unfurled from him like a wave. The people flinched, and some of them gripped their weapons, clearly convinced he was about to attack.

It had finally clicked. They were demon-tainted.

The larvae’s progenitor hadn’t just dragged them into this spiritual realm to hunt them. It was poisoning them, filling them with Demonic Essence.

Nic frowned and released the Wintertusk Bracer’s magic. He shrank back down into a more approachable size, and the beastly instinct to feed cleared from his mind as the coating of frost boiled off his skin.

Inkspur leapt onto his shoulder.

“BEHOLD!”

“No beholding.”

“BEWARE-”

“Worse.”

“BE AWARE.”

“I’ll take it.”

“You see before you the LORD OF WINTERHOME. He has slain the BEASTS that plagued you, and offers you the chance to-”

“I know him!” From the back of the crowd, a small voice shouted, and a child with red hair pushed forward. She was painfully thin and didn’t fit in what looked to be the clothes she was wearing when the world was taken over by the System.

“That is VERY GOOD, small SPAWN OF THE MUD, but I was talking-”

“He saved me from the bugs!” She continued, cutting off Inkspur off again. The little wyvern grunted and puffed out a ring of poison smoke in dissatisfaction, sulking.

Nic kneeled down. “Hey, I think I remember you. I’m glad you’re doing well.”

Inkspur grudgingly translated.

The old man he’d seen fighting before limped forward, a bandage wrapped around his waist where the wolf had clawed him between his armored plates. The suit of armor was truly rough, stitched together from street signs and other garbage, but it showed some initiative. The man was wiry, with a rough crop of stubble on his chin and the residue of what must have been impressive muscle when he was young.

A pair of inscribed metal tabs hung around his neck. Nic remembered the same kind of necklace on the military man he’d met before, and instantly marked the old-timer as a veteran.

“Hey, uh, are you human? Like, did you end up turned that way somehow?”

“More or less.” Nic said, not volunteering that he was technically an Invader from another world.

“Hmm. Any chance I could get in on that? This old body…” He sighed. “Well, it’s got a little mileage left I guess, but I’m not much use these days. Sure as fuck, I’d rather be bouncing about on frog-legs like you.”

Nic paused. It was a perfectly reasonable request, really. Just not one he could complete. The blood trees did come to mind, but they were far too precious…

“If you get enough credits from killing monsters, there are pills that will make you young again.” He offered.

But before the old man could answer, a harsh, scratchy voice cut in.

“They’re not dead.”

Nic looked up.

It was the young archer who was speaking, combing a hand through his hair nervously. “We’re still here, see? So there’s got to be- we can’t just be stuck here forever, right?” His leg was twitching, a high-paced shudder of near-frantic energy. It was a mood that was spreading through the crowd.

“No.” Nic said. “There’s one more, and then I think you’ll be free.” Inkspur translated that into a long diatribe about how he was going to free them from tyranny by slaying a leviathan foe.

“Good. Well, yeah. I’m coming along then.” The archer said, looking Nic dead in the eyes.