I turned my back on the little campfire.
Away from the living, and into the blackness of the tunnels.
The silver line of the System’s waypoint pulsed in my vision, a steady, demanding heartbeat pulling north.
Back toward the ruins.
Back toward the monsters.
My old gar brain finally rebooted, but the logic was cold and sharp this ti.
Kill stuff.
Get stronger.
Get the cure.
This wasn’t so impossible, emotional drama anymore.
It was a grind.
A high-stakes gear check.
Vex was just a world boss, and his little lieutenants were the trash mobs I needed to farm to level up.
The quest to save her had just beco my main scenario.
And it started right now.
I walked through the maze of tunnels for what felt like hours, my new [Unbreakable Will] skill just pushing the exhaustion away.
I didn’t need rest.
I needed EXP.
The waypoint led to a part of the undercity that opened up into the ruins of so old royal library.
Dust and busted-up stone were everywhere.
The air slled like burnt paper and death.
And then I saw it.
A massive, stone-skinned giant, one of the dumber, brutish models, was just smashing what was left of the place.
Its single green eye glowed with a stupid, mindless hunger.
It was a trash mob.
Perfect.
Ti to test out the new software.
It turned as I stepped out of the tunnel, its dumb eye locking onto .
It let out a low rumble and raised a fist the size of a small house, ready to swat the bug that just showed up.
My new System was already feeding the deets.
I didn’t need a strategy.
The pact I made had given sothing way better.
Tools.
I raised my hand, not to cast so prissy Mana Bolt, but just to point.
A new skill, one I hadn’t even consciously registered from my pact, flared to life.
It wasn’t so sappy soul remnant from Yael.
It was a cold, logical tool from the Slayer program.
[Swap] (Rank 1): Instantly exchange positions with any visible target. Cooldown: 10 minutes.
The world twisted.
For a split second, I was looking down at my own little body from a hundred feet up, then the swap was done.
I was standing where the Titan had been, and it was standing where I had been.
Right under its own house-sized fist that was still coming down with unstoppable montum.
There was a wet, grinding crunch as stone smashed into stone.
The Titan roared in stupid surprise as its own fist shattered its shoulder and clavicle, its whole arm twisting at so grotesque angle.
It staggered back, crippled and confused by the sudden server lag.
I didn’t give it ti to process the glitch.
My body was already moving.
Another new skill, a pure function of the Slayer protocol, activated.
[Phase Step] (Rank 1): A 15-ter, instant teleport.
Reality tore like cheap paper.
The world dissolved into a black-and-white static scream, then snapped back together.
I was on its uninjured shoulder, right next to the back of its thick, stony neck.
The System’s target marker glowed red on its weak point.
My mana bar, which had been uselessly empty before, was now boiling.
The pact had refilled it.
[MANA: 150/150]
I jamd my hand against the side of its head.
I didn’t cast a spell.
I just opened the floodgates.
Raw, ugly power, fueled by the cold fire of my guilt, poured out of my hand.
It wasn’t a bolt.
It was a drill.
A drill of pure, focused energy that bored right into the Titan’s skull.
It shrieked, a sound that cracked the stones around us.
Then it went silent and toppled sideways with a ground-shaking thud that sent a cloud of century-old dust into the air.
A chi, cold and clinical, went off in my head.
I stood on the dead giant’s face, my hand still sizzling with static.
I had a bank of twenty attribute points saved from the Ogre and the Scrabblers, gathering dust.
The old Quinn would have hoarded them for a bigger Intelligence boost.
The Slayer needed to be unbreakable.
I spent half of my reserves without a second thought, dumping ten points directly into Constitution.
I needed to be able to take a hit.
That was all that mattered.
The System chid again.
Good.
More durability.
I moved on to the next one.
This one was wading through the river that ran through the capital, scooping up debris like it was sad about it.
It seed less aggressive.
I tried to get so info out of it, my old habits dying hard.
"Where is Vex?"
The thing’s voice was a low grinding sound, like rocks rubbing together.
"The... Master... is... everywhere... and... nowhere..."
Useless.
You couldn’t interrogate the NPCs.
You could only delete them.
[Phase Step].
A blur of motion.
Another torrent of raw power.
Another dead giant.
One after another, I moved through the ruins.
I wasn’t a mage anymore.
I was a virus, a bug in their system, my only purpose to farm every asset Vex had on this server until I was strong enough for the final boss.
And then I saw it.
The red-haired Giant.
The one that had looked in the eye.
The one that had broken her.
It stood in the middle of the ruined main plaza, observing the destruction not with mindless hunger, but with a smart, evil kind of calm.
This was a boss, not a mob.
It sensed .
Its single green eye swiveled to lock right on .
It didn’t roar.
It didn’t charge.
It recognized the "error" had learned a new trick.
It rembered .
It moved, faster than any of the others, its hand slicing through the air like a guillotine aid at my head.
My System flashed a warning.
.
I didn’t dodge.
I smiled.
A cold, thin, ugly thing that was not my own.
[Swap].
The world twisted.
The red-haired Titan was now standing where I had been.
Its own hand, moving with unstoppable force, slamd into its own face like a teor.
CRACK!
The sound was beautiful.
It staggered back, its faceplate of living stone fractured, green light bleeding from the cracks like corrupted data.
It let out a sound of pure shock and pain.
It was hurt.
It was vulnerable.
I didn’t give it a chance to recover.
The ten-minute cooldown on [Swap] was irrelevant.
The System’s core logic flashed in my mind.
The more I fought, the faster my tools ca back.
My little mob-killing spree had slashed the tir.
It was already halfway recharged.
[Phase Step].
I was behind it.
I unloaded a full blast of power into the back of its skull.
It roared in fury and spun around, swatting away like a fly.
My body slamd into a ruined wall.
Pain flared, a sharp, electric shock.
.
Then, my [Pain Eater] flaw kicked in.
The damage didn’t slow down.
It fed .
A surge of adrenaline and raw power flooded my system.
The world sharpened, ti seed to slow for a precious few seconds.
I was on my feet before the dust even cleared, a blur of motion, circling it, peppering it with blasts of energy.
Annoying, stinging hits.
I was the kiter now.
It was her role, and now it was mine by necessity.
It was a grim, painful tribute.
It couldn’t keep up.
For every hit it landed on , I used my speed and teleports to land three more, fueled by the pain of its own attacks.
Its stone body began to crack and crumble under the relentless assault.
Finally, with one last, desperate roar, it lunged.
[Swap] was ready again.
I swapped us.
It crashed, full-force, into the side of a collapsing tower, which then toppled over and buried it under a thousand tons of rock and broken dreams.
Silence.
A flood of notifications buried my vision.
But there was one more, a new one, pulsing with a darker light.
I looked at the mountain of rubble where the red-haired Titan was buried.
An army of misfits?
No.
Gandalf’s little test was a footnote in a forgotten story.
I would build my own damn army.
An army of one, and its shadow.
I walked to the pile of rubble, reached out my hand, and activated the skill.
"Bind," I whispered.
The air went cold.
Inky black shadows, darker than night, bled from the cracks in the rubble.
They swirled and coiled, rising up and pulling together into a familiar, titanic shape.
It was a perfect, silent copy of the red-haired Titan, made of pure, solid darkness.
It knelt before , its head bowed.
And then, its single, massive eye opened.
It did not glow with a sickly green light.
It did not glow with the athyst I so desperately longed for.
It glowed with a cold, empty, silver light.
A mirror of the cold, empty purpose that now lived in .
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