Excusing himself, Silas rushed out of the doorway and searched for Vivienne. He was relieved to see she hadn’t made it far as he spotted her profile amidst the crowd in the plaza. The Beastmaster had black wavy hair with pink highlights, an aquiline nose, and tanned skin. She had a blocky, muscular physique. Beside her ambled Volkan, the Pyromancer, who was lanky with spiky dirty-blond hair and sporting a slack expression. By aura alone, he appeared the stronger of the two, but Silas knew this was inaccurate since Volkan barely made the leaderboards, whereas Vivienne had consistently been in the top 10 since the start.

Shoving through the crowd, he headed for them, but Vivienne noticed him before he reached them. He adopted a friendly smile and got within earshot distance. “Hey, I’m Silas. I was wondering if we could have a brief talk?”

While Vivienne regarded him with a gentle frown, Volkan looked through the leaderboards and openly gaped at him. “Huh, you killed an E-5 all by yourself. Wouldn’t expect it by the looks of you.”

Silas ignored the backhanded compliment and focused on the Beastmaster. “I’ll just get to the point. Do you happen to have the Eiffel Tower in Léonois?”

“What if we do?” she asked with a guarded expression.

“My sister’s missing, and a Seer told me she’s in a settlement with the Eiffel Tower. If you do, I’d be in your debt if you could let me come over and search for her,” Silas said.

“What’s her name?” Vivienne asked, losing some of her guardedness.

“Chloe Wycliffe.”

She looked to Volkan, who shook his head. “Listen, neither of us knows her, but I’ll have a look for her. If we find her, we’ll contact you. Where are you living right now?”

“Could I not just come and search with you guys?” Silas asked.

“We’re not keen on visitors right now, no matter how well-intentioned you may be,” Vivienne replied without missing a beat.

“Oh… I’m from Riverside. We should have an envoy stationed here after a day or two.” Her response had been disappointing for him to hear, but he was fairly confident now that Léonois was where Chloe was at. Although they had rebuffed his request to go there, he wasn’t too worried. If by chance he didn’t get news from them after a worryingly long time, he would simply request to use the teleporter from Léonois’s nearest settlement, and if not that, the next one. From there, he would just have to run over, but since his sister had been named as being in good health every time he checked, he didn’t feel overly stressed over the situation.

“Brilliant. We’ll have our response in about that time,” Vivienne said.

****

Following this, most of the visitors to Brightmoor left back to their own settlements, including the lot from Riverside. It was exactly two days later when they chose an envoy to Brightmoor that Silas got the news which had been waiting from Vivienne: Chloe was in Léonois, and he was allowed to come over. He was quick to take up the offer.

****

Krumtor’s breaths were ragged puffs of white in the chill as he trudged through the shin-deep snow. It was lightly hailing, but this was no bother to him since his mind was disconnected from his body, allowing it an unmatched sense of calm and clarity. Over the last few weeks, he had power-levelled all the way up to level 50, his most satisfying kill being Jeung Seoyeon, a top 10 human ranker. And now he was going to kill their number 1 in order to avenge Auden, his predecessive and successive Foltrus. Where Auden had failed as Foltrus, Krumtor vowed to show the Order’s might.

He was vaguely aware that Aldora and Coelus were following him, but since they were Karaes and Dimas, they were not allowed to interfere with his vengeance. Even if he were to fall, they were to let the duel proceed. Of course, fortunately they would never have to since Krumtor would not suffer a loss. He had only been dethroned as Foltrus in the past due to his dealings with the void, with Themir - the Fiend, at which time Auden had ascended to his position despite being weaker. Now that Krumtor had levelled up, he was back to being the strongest; each of the Avatars had their specialities, Dimas in subterfuge and assassinations, Karaes in all things arcane and logistics, and Foltrus in dominating every battlefield he graced with his presence.

Krumtor had hardened up with his most recent fights, now making him a hulking beast sculpted of bulging muscles. He wore brown boots and slacks with his upper body bare with frost and stone raining down on it, the yellow tribal tattoos glowing on his grey skin. He was hairless with large moon-like eyes, a nose which resembled a squished tomato, and lips which were puckered and pale. He only had a stump of a horn on his brow, but that was of no matter due to his void magic. Ideally, he would have inherited Auden’s manastone morning star (which had, in fact, been his before) but it had been ravaged beyond use by Dahlia. As such, he had instead been forged a new manastone weapon - a seven-foot greatsword as thick as his fist and sharper than even his teeth. Its blade was made of four segments stuck together, neon blue running between them.

Reaching the apex of the rocky hill, Krumtor gazed down and saw Dahlia by the foot of the plains. The heat from her body had cleared all the snow in a rough metre radius around her. It appeared she had been sleeping before rousing to his presence as she was stretching her broad limbs now. Her back was spiked with cruel barbs, and her arms were red and dotted with sickly green splotches, ending in long black claws. She was as tall as Krumtor, even with her slouch, and her body was scaled with scarlet plates. Her facial features were disjointed with one another, giving her a disconcerting countenance, although hardly worth mention when considering how ugly other monsters were. As Dimas had warned him, he could see she had no cuts or scratches on her, no doubt due to her obscene healing abilities.

“You smell familiar,” Dahlia called out, her voice deep and bestial unlike any human he had known, certainly no woman. “You remind me of this chewy bastard I had a month ago.” A flash of realisation crossed her deformed face. “He came looking to disturb my sleep as well. I guess you two are connected after all. Don’t tell me I kicked some hornets’ nest by having him?”

Krumtor snorted and slid down the slope, the snow rumbling and rolling ahead of him. It crashed down by the foot of the hill, and he stopped some strides away from her. As expected, she rushed him like a dumb beast with primal hunger in her eyes, her maw open, displaying sinister fangs and a dangling tongue. For some reason, human rankers always thought themselves invincible when facing him. Jeung Seoyeon had charged him too, no doubt intending to dodge his blow and strike him dead. Instead, he had used a void tendril to spear through her heart before she even managed a swing of her sword.

Out of the snow sprouted a dozen void tentacles, all shooting for her. These ones were not pointed but rather prehensile, latching around her arms and legs and pulling fast. When she tried to swing and grapple out, they dug into her flesh and yanked back, imprisoning her in a vulnerable pose with her limbs splayed out. She reared her ugly head to snap at the tendrils with her fangs - and it would have worked too - but Krumtor had already spawned his next wave of tentacles, this round sharper than blades. They speared through her, puncturing her scales and goring through her flesh. Murky blood spat out of her wounds onto the white sheets below.

All the same, Krumtor wasn’t naïve like Auden; he knew that beasts, especially one as powerful as this, would only become more dangerous as they approached their deaths. Another score of tentacles sprouted and fired, splattering blood. But Dahlia was thrashing now and biting, eating the very void, visibly healing. In fact, Krumtor noticed with some surprise that she was healing faster than his tentacles were damaging her. Well, he hadn’t expected the number 1 human to be killed off so easily, anyway.

Coal-black smoke billowing out of his mouth, Krumtor’s tattoos turned jet-black and writhed like a tangle of snakes, while his broken horn grew with the void, reaching a menacing length. He strode forward, warily watching her movements. Seeing as she was most deadly in a melee, he refused his hubris to advance before him; some enemies deserved contempt, but not Dahlia. As he neared, her struggles got more frantic until finally she ripped free of his void prison, scrambling away on all fours. Even still, more tentacles chased after her to snare her once more.

Without warning, she stopped some lengths away and bent her back to the sky, raising her head as if she was going to howl. But it never came. Instead, all her scales simultaneously fell off with a click, revealing her nude body below. However, this was only for a moment as moss-like fur burgeoned out. Her body grew leaner and smaller, a tail sprouting from her backside. Her face became lupine and cruel. As his void tentacles caught up, she dashed from the spot, appearing a blur to him as she bounded off the stony ground, causing explosions of snow with every step. She circled his tentacles and made for him even as his eyes struggled to keep pace with her speed.

Krumtor’s heart raced and his muscles tensed, surfacing countless veins on his skin and an ugly grin on his face. He lunged and swung his greatsword, which she sidestepped, but then his weapon split into its four segments, each piece shotgunning for her. She ducked three but the last one impaled her forearm and threw her back. She tried to chomp it and heal, but he predicted this and recalled it immediately. Even so, she leapt after it to snatch it out of the air when suddenly he teleported with it, swapping positions and appearing right before her with his fist swinging up to her chin in a furious uppercut. The satisfying crunch he expected never came. Instead, she spat a green acrid glob into his face, blinding him such that he didn’t even know how she managed to dodge his strike.

Wiping the burning saliva from his face, he was abruptly under attack as she ravaged him with her claws and fangs. It brought him one moment of fear before he realised she lacked the power to do any more than surface wounds. All the same, she was healing, so he decided to give her a taste of her own medicine. Forming voidwater in his mouth, he vomited it right onto her, and grinned manically while she screeched like a banshee and darted off. He watched as it scorched her fur and beyond, dribbling a trail of liquified flesh after her.

As before, she stopped not far off and bent her back again. But unlike before, he sensed something alarmingly dangerous from this transformation. Her body exploded in height, going from five-foot to more than double that in a single deafening moment as she released the most inhumane, tortured scream. Her body lost its profile as it began to bubble and run, barely maintaining its bipedal form as her flesh dripped off like red wax from a flesh candle. When she turned, Krumtor saw no face, only a circular hole which he assumed to be a giant mouth. She had no claws or fangs in this form, and yet he felt trepidation like nothing before.

****

“I don’t like this. We need to help K,” Karaes said, watching from the snowy hilltop.

“We can’t. It’s the rules,” Dimas replied flatly. “He has to do this by himself.”

“Fuck the rules. We can’t lose him. There’s no one else who can replace him as Foltrus,” she said sharply.

She didn’t get a reply as Dimas froze up, raising an open palm after a few heartbeats to pause her. “I’m sensing several lifeforms passing the thirty-mile tripwires. They’re either big or very numerous.”

“Random movement?” she asked.

“No, converging on our position.”

“All the more reason we need to help K. If this goes on any longer, they could catch us in a very bad position,” Karaes said.

Dimas glanced at her through his mask, then gave a curt nod. “Fine, but be prepared to make your portal. If it looks hopeless, we’ll run and return later.”