The night air, cold and sharp as a blade, lashed at Michael's face as he ran. It was a sprint born of pure, undiluted terror, the kind of desperate flight his body hadn't attempted since university. Within minutes, the consequences of years of neglect—late nights, cheap cigarettes, and a diet of stress and instant noodles—made themselves brutally known. His lungs screamed, burning as if filled with shards of glass, each ragged gasp a torturous wheeze. The distance to the cave, a mere kilometer or so, stretched before him like an impossible marathon.
Should've quit the smokes, he thought with a pang of bitter regret, his legs churning on pure adrenaline. Should've done some bloody cardio.
The impetus for this frantic dash was simple: slow down, and next year today might be his death anniversary. Initially, upon slipping past the town wall, a flicker of arrogant hope had warmed him. The night was vast, the landscape featureless. How hard could it be to find one man in this darkness? Let them eat my dust, he'd thought, even allowing himself a moment to fantasize about the value of the little silver goddess in his satchel.
That fragile hope shattered when he glanced back and saw the bobbing glow of torches stream out of Cinder Town's gate. They didn't fan out to search; they moved with a grim, unerring purpose straight down his trail. Then, the sound that turned his blood to ice: the sharp, excited baying of hounds.
Dogs? They have dogs?The injustice of it was staggering. These people ate bugs and lived in scrap-heap houses, yet they could afford hunting dogs? What did they feed them? The sheer, tracking-focused efficiency of it was a nightmare. In the open darkness, a man on foot was no match for a nose to the ground.
His one consolation was the absence of engine noise. No trucks, no bikes. It was a footrace. He had a lead. Maybe, just maybe…
That 'maybe' died a quick death halfway to the cave. A glance over his shoulder revealed the torchlight had grown alarmingly close—less than three hundred meters. Shouts, crisp and clear in the still night air, reached him: "Halt! Stop or we'll shoot!"
A hysterical laugh almost burst from his lips. Yeah, right.They wanted the location of his fictional "high-tier Vault." They needed him alive and talking. Arrows were an empty threat.
His confidence evaporated a moment later when the torches drew near enough to illuminate not just men, but a dozen sleek, silent shapes gliding beside them. Bicycles. They had bicycles. Of course they did. Simple, efficient, no fuel required. Despair, cold and heavy, settled in his gut.
With a final, gasped curse, he veered off the relatively flat path, scrambling up the rocky slope of a nearby hill. It was a gamble—it sapped his dwindling strength and added distance—but they couldn't ride bikes up here. His muscles shrieked in protest, his vision blurring at the edges.
Just as he felt his heart might explode from his chest, he saw it—the large, distinctive boulder he remembered. The cave was just beyond it, fifty meters at most. Salvation was a short, agonizing sprint away. He just had to trigger the portal, figure it out, anything…
He stumbled around the boulder, hope a faint, guttering flame. And then it was snuffed out completely.
There, in front of the cave mouth, a cheerful campfire crackled. And sitting before it, a hulking silhouette that froze the very marrow in Michael's bones. It was gnawing on a bone the size of a human thigh.
An Ogre.
The creature was a grotesque mirror of the pixelated monsters from his old gaming days, but rendered in horrifying, smellable, three-dimensional reality. Its head was a bulbous, onion-shaped mass dominated by a single, malevolent eye in the center of its forehead. Its body was a mountain of pale, sagging fat, clad only in a crude skirt of dried grasses. Even sitting, it was over two meters tall. A club lay beside it—a gnarled tree trunk, thicker than Michael's thigh, its business end dark and stained with substances he didn't want to identify.
The Ogre noticed him at the same instant. The bone, stripped clean but riddled with deep tooth marks, was tossed aside with casual disregard. That single eye locked onto Michael, and in its depths, Michael saw not malice, but a simple, profound delight. The look a starving man gives a suddenly materialized banquet.
With a grunt that shook the ground, the Ogre snatched up its club and charged.
The speed was terrifying. Despite its immense bulk, its strides were long and powerful, covering meters with each earth-shaking step. The ground trembled under the onslaught. Michael stood, paralyzed, a mouse before a steamroller.
Twenty meters. Fifteen.
A sob caught in his throat. He was trapped between a monster that wanted to eat him and a mob that wanted to torture him. The choice, in the end, was instinctual and immediate. He spun on his heel and fled backthe way he had come, towards the torches and the shouts. A beating he might survive. Being an Ogre's midnight snack offered no such odds.
…
The battle erupted not around Michael, but pasthim, in a whirlwind of violence that left him gawking on the sidelines. A combatant with a fighting prowess of roughly five, he was utterly irrelevant. The moment the Ogre's charge met the advancing line of torchlight, the two forces collided with a fury that forgot all about him.
"Blast! A lone Ogre! Loose!" John the Minotaur's roar split the night. A shotgun blast boomed, a crude firework of sparks and pellets, followed by the thwip-thwipof arrows slicing the air.
The projectiles struck the Ogre's raised arm with meaty thuds. It bellowed in pain—a sound like rocks grinding together—but didn't slow. Its club, a blur of deadly momentum, swept horizontally with a sound like tearing canvas.
It connected first with a burly man who looked like he could have played professional basketball. There was a sickening crunch. The man flew through the air as if launched from a catapult, his torso bent at an impossible, spine-snapping angle. He was dead before he hit the dirt.
The club's arc continued, aimed directly at John. As it descended, something miraculous happened. A faint, shimmering white light enveloped the Minotaur's form. His muscles seemed to swell, his frame expanding. He braced, raising his shotgun to parry the blow.
CLANG!
The gun's barrel folded like a soda can. The weapon was torn from John's grip and sent spinning into the darkness. John himself was hurled backwards, his right arm hanging limp and useless at his side. But he was alive. He had, impossibly, blocked an Ogre's blow.
What followed was a scene ripped from a high-budget fantasy film. The remaining hunters swarmed the beast, a whirlwind of slashing blades, jabbing spears, and desperate arrows. Every second, new wounds opened on the Ogre's pale hide—bleeding gashes, embedded arrow shafts. Yet its vitality was monstrous. It seemed to absorb the damage, shaking off blows that would have felled a bull. Its retaliations, however, were devastatingly final. Each swing of the colossal club was a death sentence. A connecting hit meant broken bodies and snuffed-out lives. The night air filled with screams, battle cries, the wet impact of wood on flesh, and the Ogre's enraged bellows.
It was brutal, primal, and terrifyingly captivating. For a second, Michael was mesmerized.
Then sense returned, sharp and cold. While the titans clashed, the ant could escape. He didn't wait to see the outcome. While the Ogre was distracted, bellowing as it backhanded a man with enough force to shatter his ribcage, Michael turned and ran. Not away from the cave, but towards it, skirting the very edge of the chaotic melee.
He slipped into the welcome darkness of the cave's mouth, his heart hammering against his ribs. And there it was. In the center of the small chamber, pulsing gently like a captive star: the swirling, emerald vortex of the portal.
He didn't hesitate. He didn't look back. With the sounds of carnage echoing behind him, he took a final, gasping breath of the foul, bloody air and leaped into the shimmering green light.