The road to Windham carved through landscape that seemed designed by something with a grudge against beauty. Rolling hills of grey grass, forests of twisted trees that looked like they were trying to claw their way out of the earth, and fields where farmers bent double against soil that clearly hated them. Everything was just slightly wrong, as though the world itself had been traumatized and never quite healed.
I walked without stopping, without tiring, covering in hours what would take a normal human a full day. My body required no rest, no food, no water. Perfection meant self sufficiency. I was a closed system, perpetual motion made flesh.
The sun climbed and fell, painting the sky in shades that reminded me too much of infection. By the time night descended fully, I had covered perhaps sixty kilometers. At this pace, I would reach Windham by midday tomorrow.
I could hear them before I saw them. Voices, laughter, the crackling of a fire. A camp, perhaps thirty meters off the road, hidden in a copse of trees. The wind carried their scent to me. Unwashed bodies, leather, steel, and something else. Blood. Fresh blood.
Mercenaries again, most likely. Or bandits. The distinction seemed meaningless in this world. I considered simply passing by. I had no particular need to interact with more insects. But curiosity pulled at me, that same impulse that had led me to speak with Elsa rather than simply extracting her memories.
I wanted to understand this world, and understanding required observation.
I approached the camp with no attempt at stealth. Why would I? They were no threat to me. The undergrowth crunched beneath my feet, and I saw figures by the fire turn, hands moving to weapons.
There were eight of them. Seven men and one woman, all dressed in the patchwork armor of career killers. Their camp was crude but functional, bedrolls arranged around a central fire, weapons within easy reach. And there, tied to a tree at the edge of the firelight, a boy. Perhaps fourteen years old, his face swollen and bloody, his clothes torn.
In a world where cruelty was currency and mercy was bankruptcy, scenes such as this played out a thousand times each night. The strong preyed upon the weak not out of necessity but out of boredom, out of the simple animal pleasure of dominating something helpless. It was the purest expression of a truth this world had carved into its own bones: existence was pain, and the only question was whether you inflicted it or received it.
The largest of the mercenaries stood, a massive man with a scarred face and arms like tree trunks. He held a sword that looked more like a slab of sharpened iron than a proper blade.
"Well, well," he said, his voice surprisingly cultured despite his appearance. "What do we have here? You lost, friend? This is a dangerous road to be walking alone at night."
"Is it?" I replied mildly. "I hadn't noticed."
The woman laughed, a harsh sound like metal scraping stone. She was lean and weathered, with eyes that held the particular emptiness of someone who had seen too much and felt too little. "Look at him, Ragnar. Dressed like some kind of foreign nobility, walking around like he owns the world. Think he's got coin on him?"
"I think he's got something," Ragnar said, taking a step closer. "The question is whether he's smart enough to hand it over or stupid enough to make us take it."
I looked past them to the boy tied to the tree. He was watching me with desperate eyes, hope and terror warring in his expression. He thought, perhaps, that I might be his salvation. How tragically wrong.
"The boy," I said. "What's his crime?"
"Crime?" Ragnar laughed. "No crime. Just bad luck. His village couldn't pay the toll when we came through. Someone had to pay, so we took him. Figured we'd ransom him back, or sell him to a work gang, or..." He shrugged. "Well, we'll figure something out."
"I see," I said. "And what if I were to purchase him from you?"
That got their attention. The mercenaries exchanged glances, calculating. Ragnar's grip on his sword loosened slightly, greed overriding caution.
"You want to buy him?" Ragnar said. "Well now, that's interesting. What's a pretty thing like you want with a beaten up farm boy?"
"My reasons are my own. Name your price."
"Five silver," Ragnar said immediately. "And that's a bargain."
I didn't have five silver. I didn't have any currency at all. But that wasn't really the point of this exercise. I wanted to see how far their greed would take them, how long it would take them to realize what I was.
"I don't have silver," I said.
The mood in the camp shifted immediately. Hands tightened on weapons. The woman stood, drawing a pair of wicked looking knives.
"Then why," Ragnar said slowly, "are you wasting our time?"
"I suppose I was curious," I replied. "About the mechanics of your cruelty. Whether you torture the boy out of genuine sadism or simple profit motive. It's an interesting distinction."
"He's fucking mad," one of the other mercenaries muttered.
"Mad or stupid," Ragnar agreed. "Either way, I think we just found our entertainment for the evening. Boys, why don't we show our guest what happens to people who waste our time?"
They moved with practiced coordination, spreading out to surround me. Seven directions of attack, no escape routes left open. It was actually competent tactics, the kind that came from years of ambushing travelers.
I didn't move. Simply stood there, waiting.
The first attack came from behind, a spear thrust aimed at my spine. I heard the mercenary's breathing change, the shift of weight, the whisper of the spear cutting through air. I turned my head slightly and caught the spear shaft in one hand.
The mercenary's eyes widened. He tried to pull the spear back. It didn't move. Might as well have been embedded in stone.
I yanked, hard. The mercenary flew forward, losing his grip on the weapon. Before he could recover, I reversed the spear and drove it through his chest. The point emerged from his back in a spray of blood and shattered spine. I released the shaft and let him fall, the spear still transfixing him like a butterfly pinned to a board.
"Now then," I said pleasantly. "Who's next?"
Chaos.
They came at me from all sides, abandoning tactics for desperate violence. Ragnar's massive sword descended toward my skull. The woman's knives flashed toward my throat and kidneys. Another mercenary swung a mace at my legs. They were committed now, all in, knowing that hesitation meant death.
I manifested my bone blades, the organic weapons erupting from my forearms with barely a thought. The feeling was exquisite, like stretching muscles that had been cramped. The blades caught firelight, gleaming wetly.
Ragnar's sword met my blade with a shower of sparks. For a moment, we were locked together, strength against strength. I could see the confusion in his eyes as he realized I wasn't being driven back, wasn't even straining. Then I pushed, and he flew backward like a child's toy, crashing into two of his companions.
The woman was faster, more skilled. Her knives found the gaps in my defense, or where gaps should have been. One blade scraped across my ribs, the other aimed for my eye. I caught her wrist mid strike and squeezed. Bones shattered like glass. She screamed, high and agonized, and I released her to collapse in a heap.
The mace wielder had better luck, or perhaps worse luck depending on perspective. His weapon connected solidly with my shin, a blow that should have shattered the bone. Instead, the mace head crumpled like tin foil. The shock of impact traveled up his arms, dislocating both shoulders. He fell back, whimpering.
Three seconds. Four combatants neutralized.
The remaining mercenaries had seen enough. They broke, running for the darkness of the forest. I considered letting them go. But no, this was a teaching moment. This world needed to understand what had arrived in it.
I extended my blade arm and manifested the projectile technique I'd experimented with before. Three compressed spheres of hardened keratin and bone, refined from my earlier crude attempt. I launched them in rapid succession.
The first caught a fleeing mercenary in the back of the head, exploding with enough force to separate his skull from his spine. The second took another in the legs, shredding muscle and bone, dropping him screaming into the undergrowth. The third missed, impacting a tree trunk and embedding itself three inches deep.
Inefficient. I'd need to work on accuracy.
I turned my attention back to Ragnar. He was struggling to his feet, still clutching that ridiculous slab of a sword. Blood ran from a cut on his forehead where he'd struck something in his fall. But his eyes, those were what interested me. No fear yet. Just fury. Pride wounded, ego demanding violence.
"What the fuck are you?" he snarled.
"I'm beginning to think that's this world's favorite question," I replied. "What am I? What am I? As though naming something gives you power over it." I began walking toward him slowly, my blade arms dripping with the blood of his companions. "I am what kills you. Isn't that definition enough?"
He charged with a roar, swinging that massive sword in a horizontal arc designed to bisect me at the waist. The technique was crude but backed by genuine strength. Against a normal opponent, it might have been effective.
I didn't dodge. I stepped into the swing, inside his guard, and drove my blade arm up through his stomach. The organic weapon pierced intestines, diaphragm, lung, and emerged from his shoulder in a welter of gore.
Ragnar's roar became a wet gurgle. His sword fell from nerveless fingers. I lifted him off the ground, suspended on my blade like meat on a hook, and watched as his eyes slowly dimmed.
"You asked what I am," I said to his dying face. "I am the apex. The culmination. Everything your species has tried and failed to become. I am perfect, and you are insects. Remember that, in whatever hell awaits you."
I withdrew my blade and let him collapse. His body twitched twice, then went still.
Silence descended on the camp, broken only by the crackling of the fire and the labored breathing of the woman with the shattered wrist. She was curled on her side, cradling her ruined arm, staring at me with eyes that had finally found fear.
"Please," she whispered. "Please, I have children. Two daughters. They need me."
"You have children," I repeated, looking down at her. "And yet you spend your time torturing farm boys and robbing travelers. Fascinating priorities."
"I had no choice," she gasped. "In this world, you take or you're taken from. You kill or you're killed. That's the only law that matters."
"An interesting philosophy," I mused. "Tell me, do your daughters know what you do? What their mother has become?"
"They... they think I'm a merchant guard. That I protect caravans."
"Ah. So you're a liar as well as a murderer. How maternal." I knelt beside her, studying her face. She was perhaps thirty years old, weathered by violence and hard living. There was nothing remarkable about her, nothing that distinguished her from ten thousand other predators who prowled this cursed world.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"I'm considering it," I replied honestly. "You've given me information about this world's moral framework. The strong prey on the weak, mercy is weakness, survival justifies any act. It's a coherent system, I suppose. Brutish and inefficient, but coherent."
"Then let me go," she said desperately. "I've learned my lesson. I'll go back to my daughters, give up this life."
"Will you?" I asked. "Or will you simply be more careful about choosing your victims? More cautious about who you attack?" I reached out and placed my hand on her forehead, the same gesture I'd used with the dying merchant. "Let's find out, shall we?"
"No, wait, please don't—"
The neural filaments emerged, sinking into her skull. Her scream cut off as I established the connection, my consciousness sliding into hers like a knife between ribs.
Her memories flooded into me. Two daughters, yes, that much was true. But she hadn't seen them in four years. Had abandoned them with her sister when their father died, choosing this life over motherhood. I saw the raids, the murders, the casual cruelties she'd inflicted for coin and entertainment. I saw her laugh as villages burned, as families were torn apart, as men and women died begging for mercy she had no intention of granting.
No children waiting for her return. Just convenient lies spoken by a cornered predator.
I withdrew the filaments. Her eyes refocused, wild and terrified.
"You lied," I said simply.
"I'm sorry," she sobbed. "I'm so sorry, I just wanted to live, please—"
I crushed her skull between my hands. The sound was wet and final. Her body went limp, joining the others scattered around the camp.
And so another lesson was written in blood upon the pages of an already blood soaked world. The strong, who had always preyed upon the weak without consequence, learned that strength was relative. That there were hierarchies they could not imagine, powers they could not comprehend. But lessons written in the dead could only be read by the living, and of the eight mercenaries who had made camp in these woods, only one remained.
I turned my attention to the boy still tied to the tree. He was staring at me with absolute horror, his body shaking so violently I could hear his teeth chattering. Tears and snot ran down his beaten face.
"Please," he whispered, the word barely audible. "Please don't kill me."
I walked toward him slowly, watching his reactions. Pure fear. No calculation, no attempt to manipulate or bargain. Just a terrified child confronted with something he couldn't understand.
I stopped in front of him, studying the ropes that bound him. Crude work, but effective enough against human strength. I extended a blade and cut through them with a single motion. The boy collapsed forward, his legs too weak to support him.
"Run," I said.
He looked up at me, uncomprehending.
"Run," I repeated. "Back to your village. Tell them what you saw here. Tell them what I am, what I did. Let them know that something new walks their world."
"You're... you're letting me go?"
"I have no use for you," I replied. "And unlike the animals I just killed, I don't torture for entertainment. Now run, before I reconsider."
He ran. Stumbling, falling, picking himself up and running again. Within seconds he'd vanished into the darkness, the sound of his panicked flight fading into the distance.
I stood alone in the camp of corpses, surrounded by the wreckage of my passage. The fire crackled cheerfully, indifferent to the slaughter that surrounded it.
Why had I let the boy live? I examined the question clinically, curious about my own motivations. Was it mercy? No. I felt nothing for him, no sympathy or compassion. Was it strategy? Perhaps. A witness to spread word of what I was capable of, to sow fear before me.
Or was it simply whim? The arbitrary decision of a god who could kill or spare based on nothing more than idle curiosity?
I didn't know. And the uncertainty bothered me more than I cared to admit.
I left the camp behind, returning to the road. The mercenaries' supplies held nothing of interest. Primitive weapons, crude armor, a few coins that meant nothing to me. I took the coins anyway. Currency might prove useful for navigating human society.
The night was still young, and I had distance to cover. Behind me, the fire in the mercenary camp would burn itself out, leaving only ashes and bones. The forest would reclaim the bodies, insects and scavengers breaking them down into their component parts. Nature's recycling program, efficient in its way.
By dawn, I crested a hill and saw Windham in the distance.
It was a fortress city, just as Elsa had described. High stone walls, guard towers at regular intervals, banners flying from the battlements. Even from kilometers away, I could see the strategic positioning. It sat astride the river, controlling the crossing, with open ground on all sides that would make siege warfare a nightmare.
Impressive, by primitive standards.
The road widened as I approached, becoming more trafficked. I could see other travelers now. Merchants with their wagons, farmers bringing produce to market, a few soldiers on patrol. They gave me strange looks as I passed, my exotic appearance and bloodstained clothing marking me as something foreign.
No one challenged me though. Perhaps they assumed I was some kind of mercenary myself, returning from a successful hunt. Or perhaps they simply knew better than to question armed strangers on dangerous roads.
The gates of Windham loomed ahead, massive wooden constructs reinforced with iron. Guards stood at attention, checking travelers, collecting tolls. I could see the calculation happening in their eyes as I approached. Threat assessment, risk analysis. Their hands stayed on their weapons, but they didn't draw.
"Halt," one of them called out as I reached the gate. He was older, a sergeant perhaps, with the weathered look of a career soldier. "State your name and business."
"Kars," I said simply. "I'm traveling through. I need supplies."
"Supplies," the sergeant repeated, looking me up and down. His eyes lingered on the blood that stained my clothing, on the strange design of my outfit. "You a mercenary?"
"Something like that."
"Right. Toll is two coppers. And we don't want any trouble in the city. You start something, the count's guard will end it. Understood?"
I reached into the pouch I'd taken from the mercenary camp and produced two copper coins, handing them over. The sergeant examined them, then nodded.
"Keep your weapons sheathed and your hands to yourself," he said. "Welcome to Windham."
I passed through the gates into the city beyond.
The smell hit me first. Unwashed humanity packed into close quarters, sewage running in open gutters, smoke from countless fires mixing with the scent of cooking food and tanning leather. It was overwhelming, a sensory assault that would have driven a lesser being to their knees.
I breathed through my mouth and continued walking.
The streets were narrow and crowded, buildings looming on either side like the walls of a canyon. People moved in currents and eddies, merchants hawking their wares, children darting between legs, beggars pleading for coin. It was chaos, barely organized, held together by nothing more than routine and necessity.
This was civilization as the damned understood it. A concentration of suffering, thousands of individual miseries packed together for mutual protection against the greater miseries that prowled beyond the walls. They called it society. They called it progress. But it was simply fear given architecture, desperation given form.
I wandered the streets, observing. Taverns and brothels, smithies and shops, a market square where goods exchanged hands and gossip flowed like wine. Everywhere I looked, I saw the same patterns. The strong exploiting the weak, the clever preying on the desperate, survival as the only virtue that mattered.
A girl, no more than twelve, propositioned me from a doorway. A merchant tried to sell me a sword that would probably break on its first swing. A thief's hand darted toward my pouch and withdrew quickly when I turned my gaze on him.
This was humanity's triumph. This fetid warren of stone and shit and suffering. This was what they built when left to their own devices.
Pathetic.
I found an inn eventually, a three story structure called The Broken Sword. The name seemed appropriately ominous. Inside, the common room was thick with smoke and noise. Soldiers, merchants, and assorted lowlifes drank and shouted and occasionally fought. The perfect environment to observe without standing out.
I approached the bar where a fat man with a stained apron was serving drinks.
"Room for the night," I said.
He looked me over suspiciously. "Three coppers. In advance. Food's extra."
I placed the coins on the bar. He swept them away and jerked his thumb toward a staircase. "Third door on the left. Cause any trouble, you're out. Damage anything, you pay for it."
"Understood."
The room was small and filthy, a straw mattress on a wooden frame, a chamber pot in the corner, a window that looked out over an alley. It would have been intolerable for a human who cared about comfort. For me, it was merely a base of operations.
I stood at the window, watching the city go about its evening routines. Torches and lanterns pushed back the darkness. Sounds of revelry and violence drifted up from the streets below. Somewhere, a woman was screaming. Somewhere else, someone was laughing. The sounds mixed together into a symphony of human misery.
And somewhere out there, hidden in the shadows of this cursed world, were beings who called themselves gods. The God Hand. Five entities who transformed humans through sacrifice, who existed beyond the mortal realm.
I wanted to meet them. Wanted to see if they truly possessed power or if they were simply more insects with delusions of grandeur.
But first, I needed to understand this world better. Its power structures, its hidden places, its weaknesses. Information was a weapon, and I intended to arm myself thoroughly before seeking out whatever passed for divinity here.
A commotion in the street below caught my attention. Soldiers, a dozen of them, moving with purpose. They were searching for something, checking faces, questioning people. One of them held a sketch, showing it to passersby.
I couldn't see the details from this distance, but I could guess what it depicted. A boy had run from a massacre site, babbling about a purple haired demon who killed eight mercenaries without breaking a sweat. And now the authorities were looking for that demon.
Faster than I'd anticipated. But not unexpected.
I stepped back from the window, considering my options. I could leave the city now, slip away before they narrowed their search. Or I could stay, see how they responded to my presence, what resources they could bring to bear.
The second option was more interesting. And besides, I was curious what this Count Julius would do when confronted with something his soldiers couldn't kill.
Only one way to find out.
I lay down on the straw mattress, not because I needed sleep but because the position allowed me to think without distraction. My perfect mind worked through scenarios, possibilities, strategies. This world was a puzzle, and I had only just begun to see its shape.
Tomorrow would bring challenges. Perhaps even genuine interest.
I smiled in the darkness, anticipation stirring for the first time since my awakening.
And in the spaces between moments, in the realm where the God Hand observed all that transpired in their domain, five beings turned their attention toward Windham. Toward the inn. Toward the room where something impossible rested.
They did not speak, for they existed beyond such crude communication. But understanding passed between them nonetheless. A question without words. An answer without sound.
The Perfect Being had arrived in their world. And soon, very soon, they would meet.
The question was whether the encounter would be a collision or a conversation.
Time, as always in this cursed realm, would provide the answer in blood.