While the adventure-rejecting hero travelled on, the millions occupying the steppe were readying themselves for that approaching monster.

  The camp-lights were cranked up almost bright as day, making it easier to spot any vulnerabilities in its gigantic hide or carapace or skin – the details of the monster were yet to be established. Nested within fortifications improvised from upturned wagons, they sharpened spears, they fit their armour, they charged their spells, they shook the hands of comrades and wished each other glory. Speeches through the various camps called each man and child at their post to that ageless task of bravery. This was the hour of noble deeds, of bloody sacrifice, of welcomed pain, of discovering through hardships overcome the hero whose heart beats in every chest and, perhaps, the hero to succeed the one particular hero playing flunky.

  One of the camps—highlighted for no obvious reason—consisted of what appeared to be five hundred ancient Egyptian cultists, perhaps sincere or perhaps a community of historical reenactors. Robes worn over their armour were dyed with a yin-yang palette of black and white. The black corresponded to Nephythys, goddess of death, while the light was for her healer twin Isis, who had by 2050 managed fortunately to reclaim her name from a now-obscure group of failed nation-builders. In another Kemetic motif, several man-catchers distributed amongst the group had been custom-designed as shepherd crooks, like that wielded by Osiris.

  Most of the cultists were down on one knee, heads bowed, having been listening to prayers recited in alternation by two priests positioned to their north and south. Their leader strolled tall-ish through their ranks, giving a motivational speech against the looming monster. He had a short but muscular build, like the severed trunk of a sequoia, and the gaze with which he scanned his brothers simmered with that manic quality that teeters unsettlingly between rage and laughter.

  “The Serpent of Uncreation,” said their leader, repeating a line chanted by their priests, perhaps describing the monster in religious allegory. “The Incarnation of The Cosmic Traitor - great stuff, yeah, that’s powerful, powerful stuff. Boys, y’all know me – Mad M’s too stupid to comprehend the lore. But what I do know is that this is not the time for intimidating ourselves into being pussies. As The Cosmic Some-shit approaches, y’all need to get fucking hyped! HUY! HUY!”

  The kneeling men echoed his chant, a chesty, explosive grunt like someone hacking up a glob of phlegm into the face of a downed nemesis.

  “Boys, we’ve planned the strat, we’ve drilled the strat, and now? We’ve just got to execute the strat.”

  Several cultists were still logging on, beaming from the sky into Saana or stepping out of caravans where their bodies had been stored inert. One of these newcomers interrupted the leader, asking why they’d been summoned randomly and what was causing the noises of battle in the distance. Had the enemy arrived? What was the strat?

  “The strat?!” The short leader fumed. “The strat is your late-ass shutting the fuck up. Get your gear on, bro. Take a blessing from the priest, and continue to shut the fuck up. Don’t EVER interrupt my hype speech, you stupid bitch. All relevant information is in the group chat.”

  Each of these commands were punctuated by an emphatic thrust of a falchion wielded by the short leader. This weapon was notable, seeming—by its quality and magical aura—to be one of Saana’s rare artefacts. Its ancient craftsman had forged it by compressing three different sheets of metal whose layers were visible along the spine, each of a different colour and aura. A cyan layer was crusted in frost, an umber radiated a friendly invitation to those nearby, and a white seemed to retract from any who might reach for it with the skittish leaping of a deer.

  The leader, regaining his dramatic bearing, swung his falchion at a general northerly direction. “The top boys are telling Mad M to sit y’all tight. ‘Keep y’all’s wits,’” he parodied a homophobic whine. “‘Don’t set y’all’s expectations too impossibly high.’ What do y’all think about that? Does that sound like the behavioural conduct of The CC Boys? Any of y’all keen on lowering y’all’s expectations?”

  A few cultists glanced up with hesitation, wondering if they should answer yes.

  He thrust his falchion at these buffoons menacingly. “NOT today, boys, we’re going fast, we’re going hard, we’re going crazy on Mister Doesn’t Know Who The Fuck He’s Just Stepped Into The STREET With.” His non-sword hand shot up and started flicking through what appeared to be spell gestures, although this resulted in a curious lack of magic. “Cairo Cryptz, Black River born, Fists Up For The Sisters, Never Stooping to No Mother Fucking Misters, huy, mother fucking huy, we run this shit! HUY! HUY! Shout it with me, bitches: HUY! HUY!”

  Those kneeling around him repeated the chant again, louder, more fierce, more manly. The leader, infected back by the escalating hype, began to strut with the exuberance of a preacher taken by the holy spirit. He thumped each man he passed with a heavy shoulder slap. Several lost their balance.

  “HUY! HUY! Boys, I feel an omen that we’re chosen by The Sisters! We bout to strip this villain of his precious fucking riches!”

  There was a sudden clangour half a kilometre away, a commotion of battle cries, grunts, and gnashing metal. All the eyes of the camp and the others neighbouring them flicked towards it, right in time to spot a geyser of blood shooting through the sky over the head of the crowd and splashing a pole-fixed lantern.

  A thick, luminescent fog soon rose from a mass of souls slain together.

  The monster could not yet be seen. It may have been one of the steppe’s shorter creatures or it could have possessed a rare invisibility magic – a novel challenge for any wannabe heroes.

  “HUY! HUY! HUY!” cried the leader, undaunted. “‘This long night’, boys – sing that shit with me!”

  The cultists roused themselves with a slightly deranged, borderline necrophiliac rap verse that went: ‘This long night I’m making love to death, seducing sweet Nephthys with my enemy’s head! After we neck him, we gon send him on a plate to her bed. She’ll scream, “Oh, daddy, it’s so sexy how you raped till he bled!”’

  The themes were a little problematic and, maybe, heroically disqualifying.

  The leader continued throughout to fix his sight on the nearing devastation, the blood geysers and fogs of souls leapfrogging gradually towards them with each step of the hidden enemy, the volume of battle increasing, the neighbouring groups huddling behind their defences, breaking into charges.

  As he held his posture, the manic aspect of his gaze deepened, like one spotting a lover on a crowded street or a rival across the prison yard. This at least had the soul of heroism, never broken, always eager, somewhat insane.

  His falchion—purely ornamental—vanished and was replaced by an ordinary sword and shield, humble as that stone picked up by David for Goliath.

  He beat these together in a greeting for the beast. “HUY! HUY! All your treasures, all your hoardings, we gon take with a smile, stack ‘em up beside your corpse in a grand victory pile!” His head tossed back with the frenzy of a howling jackal. “HUY! HUY! FUCKING HUUUUUUUU—”

  The last chant was cut short when a dark rod flashed from behind him and through him.

  His face sagged, and the manic eyes turned dull as if he’d suddenly died – which he, in fact, had.

  This guy, maybe not the replacement hero, had already perished.

  Blood oozed in a sagittal line from brow to chin. This line gaped a few centimetres, and the left and right halves of the man, no longer intact, might’ve continued to peel away from each other had the attack not somehow bypassed his clothes and armour, which held his pieces together like a burger tightly bound in its wrapper. His hands, twitching, slackened, the sword and shield spilling from their grip. His legs sank. As the rest of the body went down with them, as several followers glanced up at the abrupt cessation of their leader’s chant, his murderer standing right behind him was revealed.

  His murderer was, however—most peculiarly—not a recognisable monster of the steppe, nor any monster, but a solitary human, one painted in a kind of blackface of blood and human fat, which had also drenched his clothing and the toes of his open-topped teleportation slippers.

  It was, of all humans, the most humanist of humans: none other than the ex-hero, making a pleasant but ambiguous cameo.

  On the plus side, it seemed that he’d had a change of moral conscience and decided to take a detour from his luxury retirement travels to join the gathering in their defence against the invading monster. On the minus side, his efforts seemed inaccurate, the ex-hero perhaps drunk, as he’d accidentally slain the wrong target.

  He—perhaps not wanting to add to his infractions by creating litter—discreetly swiped the leader’s falchion as it popped out from the spatial bracelet, and then he gave the group a word of apologetic encouragement for the battle ahead.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “Enough with the prayers,” he said motivationally, “you roleplaying scum. Give me the better worship of your steel!”

  Alas, perhaps due to the small mishap of bisecting their leader, perhaps due to him failing to provide a sufficiently heart-moving apology—or, from a certain cynical interpretation, any apology—those gathered turned a teeny-weeny-meany-bit hostile.

  Daggers sang from sheathes, and spears and man-catchers were heaved up from the dirt. The cultists close enough to grab his body tried, and their figures disappeared as dozens of others teleported in at once, his position smothered in limbs and the requested steel like a magnet dropped into a bowl of nails. This cluster began to grunt as points eviscerated flesh.

  But none of this noise came from the ex-hero.

  In a corner of the camp, several hundred horses and camels had been chewing straw in a corral of caravans laced by rope. He reappeared inside this. His floating weapons fanned out from him like the feathers of a peacock, their tips, blades, and heads aglow with condensing motes of energy.

  Dozens of animals shrieked at once as the weapons ran through them, each of his ten tools clipping multiple. Worldpiercer shot its extending point through six lined in a row. Worldcleaver split two neighbours spine to teat. The light beam of the yogini’s bow carved through nine, blew a hole in a caravan, and killed some men rising from their knees on the other side. The arcing, slow-moving crescent from the two-hander bisected one horse horizontally, then two, then five, and as each animal thumped against the ground, their top sections split off to spill out guts and clumps of partially digested feed.

  Why shred a bunch of horses and camels? The heroic value of this was hard to ascertain, but it may have been due to the nature of the monster. Considering its invisibility, it may have had a unique ability to infest seemingly innocent creatures or adopt their appearance like a skinwalker. It’s possible that the same reasoning underlay his killing of the group’s leader, the act not in fact accidental but an intentional attempt to slay a monster hidden in the squat man’s flesh. This was a potentially true interpretation.

  Before some of his first attacks against the horses and camels had finished their trajectory, the weapons had already retracted back onto his person, and the ex-hero was teleporting about the corral with his stat-stealing swords, their darker-than-black blades eviscerating one panicking animal after another and funnelling their siphoned lifeforce into his muscles.

  As the herd fled from him, their owners flooded in. The robe-wearing cultists competed to leap into the corral, the fastest giving high-test shouts as they teleported on him in isolation and, meeting his swords, were swatted dead like flies, their body parts mingling with the piling gumbo of hooves and viscera.

  The ex-hero, not focused on the humans, continued to rampage through the herd in search of his monster. In quarter-minute bursts, whenever his weapons had recharged, he teleported to the densest cluster and exploded them. These successive attacks slew far more due to the animals filing for the same few exits from the enclosure.

  Their owners watching them expire gave indignant cries, and they poured in with an increasing speed and madness, joining their horses in death as they ignored both the attempts of their commanders to organise them and the higher rationale that their attacks were misdirected against an ex-hero just trying to save them from their invisible monster adversary.

  Onto the rooves of the caravans climbed the ranged troops. The first volleys of arrows snapped, almost all failing to hit their target as he strobed about like a whack-a-mole game calibrated for the reflexes of a mantis shrimp. A few lucky shots hit, but these pinged uselessly off the ex-hero’s spellshield jacked up by the stats siphoned through his swords. Inside the surrounding vehicles, taking cover under windows, mages raced to collect more devastating magic, most prioritising lightning-types without travel time.

  Then, just as all of the cultists were finishing their setup around him, he teleported out of the corral and reappeared by a makeshift bunker of wood. He pressed a cone of magic fire into its wall, blasting open a hole through which a return gust ejected the ash of several vaporised cultists. Some grunts followed as he dipped inside for a quick spot of chopping.

  One breath later, on the camp’s other side, a whole platoon that’d run loyally against the tide to the summons of a lieutenant exploded, his floating weapons shredding them from the centre of their gathering.

  In the next breath, the ex-hero was back in the corral, butchering the animals alongside their owners spinning in confused, infuriated circles.

  The monster, it seemed, was impressively mobile.

  The ex-hero in his hunt continued to teleport about this way, killing mounts and groups of cultists. As he flashed spot to spot, the mob were tugged in multiple directions like water jostling in a bucket, allies accidentally knocking over allies. The first spells to initiate resulted in a tragic wave of friendly fire, as the casters missed his vanishing figure and struck those clustered behind. One mage whose lightning arced off his shield gave a cry of minor triumph, only to keel over the next instant when he—reapparing beside them—cut them throat to navel, the ex-hero perhaps suspecting from their accuracy that the monster had hijacked their body.

  Somewhere in this chaos, he’d also managed to replenish any spent teleportation charges, and two cultists—perhaps finally realising his intention—switched teams to attack their allies. The ex-hero rewarded these for their clarity of enemy identification by upgrading them to super-strength skeleton soldiers capable of hacking multiple men at once. When one of these skeletons was subsequently weighed down in teleporting bodies, they were released soon after by the ex-hero—never one to abandon a friend—zipping by and smiting their captors. One of those smitten in turn, convinced into a change of heart by that demonstration of loyalty, transformed into a skeleton themselves and joined the monster hunt.

  He then randomly skipped four hundred metres away from the cultists, to an area thus far spared from the battle. There, a tight formation of guards held in reserve had been surrounding a man in a royal crown with a blood-red officer’s coat and white breeches.

  This figure had been standing on a chariot, wielding a javelin in one hand and binoculars in the other, with which he’d been studying the action, probably searching for the monster. What he didn’t know, however, was that the monster had infected him, maybe. In his focus, he also didn’t notice the ex-hero’s appearance right behind him until they both were falling along with the chariot and its double team of shrieking horses.

  The earth beneath yawned like the mouth of a hungry giant as it inhaled them. And maybe this was actually the monster, the thing not invisible but underground, although such a fact was hard to reconcile with the previous massacre, unless one hypothesised there being two monsters, one hiding in people/animals’ flesh, one underground maybe, both coincidentally invisible maybe.

  Regardless, a wave of dirt taller than two adults rippled out from the hole swallowing the ex-hero and the guy in the chariot, the movements concealing them and bowling aside the guards too slow to react.

  A few moments later, while those knocked over were still righting themselves, the earth began to shift once more, before thrusting out a red-dirt pillar.

  A hail of arrows immediately rained on this pillar, the impact chipping away the outer shell of earth and exposing the figure from before. He’d been stripped nude of his armour, left only with his red coat and his crown, and he was propped upright by his own javelin. The weapon had been shoved through him vertically, up his arsehole and out of his ruptured Adam’s apple – a bit of Attila-esque cruelty from the monster.

  The corpse spasmed on its skewer as the rain of missiles pelted it, each shot blowing out chunks of bone-meat like a gulf club thwacking out divots of turf. Within seconds, the corpse had lost any human or animal resemblance.

  Some paces away, a group of soldiers exploded as the ex-hero—still not successful in locating the monster and/or escaping it from underground—reemerged from a different hole and darted through the next quick round of investigative decimations.

  A smug telepathic message resonated in the heads of everyone nearby.

  ‘Toodle-dookie-do, Duke Exeter just got it, too, snookered up the poo by who-knows who-knows who. For the rest you loonie goons with booties yet abused, the window of impunity is closing soonie soon. No more boo-boos, no more hurties, for those who blurt this simple tune: "Arigato for the mercy, Cripple-kun!"'

  Whoever might have sent this bizarre taunt, by the end of it, the ex-hero was already gone, skipping to yet another site in his perpetual chase of their elusive monster foe.

  The aftermath was a nauseating patchwork of mangled corpses, injured soldiers flagging medics, and squads—configured in a frozen tableau behind their wagons or in the middle of cancelled sprints—hyperventilating as they continued to scan for danger. Some began to shake, the excitement of their nerves having nowhere to discharge after the attack’s abrupt cessation.

  With all under an order of silence, the air hummed with the irregular chanting of mages refreshing their spells in cycles and the solitary barking of an untrained dog.

  A bow snapped – loosened by one trembling archer.

  As they tried to apologise, a crossfire of magic bolts and arrows tore them apart, several people misreading it as a renewal of the assault.

  Only after this second commotion passed did the mood settle and the orders of silence were lifted. The players at once began to swear while they collected the gear of the fallen.

  “Fuck…”

  “Lads, that’s insane.”

  “What a psycho…”

  “I didn’t even see him," commented one, the invisible monster perhaps masculine. "D’you, Vij? D'you see The Tyrant at any point?”

  “Nah, matey - too fast.”

  “Gosh, the Count ate it, too.”

  “Where?”

  “Dangling here.”

  “That’s not him.”

  “Same shoes.”

  “Shiiiit…that’s rough…”

  “Fucking barbarian…”

  “Over there - that's the front of his face, slapped against the wall.”

  “Shiiiit….reckon that’s intentional?”

  “Can’t be.”

  “Might be. Like The Duke. Sick cunt's making murder art.”

  One teen, shucking a chest-plate off of his friend’s legless torso, found it too stuck due to his shaking hands. It occurred to him that he might have to step on the head to create a firmer grounding to tug against.

  At this unpleasant thought, he released the torso and gave a shout of surrender to the heavens. “Arigato for the mercy, Cripple-kun!”

  A person next to him, infuriated, shoved him over. The teen offered no resistance, only nervous laughter, as the point of a sabre was thrust mortally up under his jaw. Others sprinted over to join the attacker in mutilating the corpse, the group tearing it apart like a pack of dogs mauling a housecat.

  Bystanders watched and nodded with a half-sincere, half-embarrassed enthusiasm. They likely recognised through this sobering incident their own mistargeting of their best friend the ex-hero instead of the monster.

  Why were these nutjobs dismembering their own? Why hadn’t they halted their attacks against the ex-hero after his sincere apology? Why was he so inaccurate at slaying the monster?

  In this soup of chaos and confusion, there was, luckily, a profoundly clueless player set to appear who might be followed for a moment as they found clarity from some of those gathered.

  Back at the first camp of Egyptian cultists, from inside one caravan, there came a shriek of terror. A woman stumbled out covered in bits of gore, slapping strings of eyeball and lung off of herself and spitting out globs of blood.