Three more of the black-clad soldiers went down in the span of two or three minutes.Both sides were fighting with total disregard for their own safety, but Ferris's numbers were starting to tell.At this rate, every last one of them would be dead inside ten minutes. Fifteen was already looking generous.Then a booming, energetic shout cut through the chaos."A bunch of reckless punks think they can lay hands on the Crimson Talon Syndicate and just walk away? Apocalypse or not, you're about to learn otherwise!"An older man with a full head of white hair appeared out of nowhere, standing directly between two of the attackers before either could react.Two punches later, both men were on the ground, badly broken."Cal!""Mr. Cai, what are you doing back here? Weren't Xander and the others supposed to have you clear of the encirclement by now?"Cal's sudden appearance threw the enemy's rhythm off completely, buying the surviving black-clad soldiers a few precious seconds to regroup."Th

Lazy had shrunk back down to his usual harmless self and dozed off in Damon's arms, worn out from his own transformation. Damon carried him quietly along the road home, mind drifting back through fragments of memory from his first life.Ever since the apocalypse hit, beasts and zombies had always evolved faster than humans could keep pace with.In the early days, scattered human factions had managed to hold their own, hunting beasts and zombies actively, harvesting crystal cores, staying ahead of the curve.But that window hadn't lasted. Higher-tier monsters started emerging in greater numbers, and everything got harder fast.Tree spirits turned into genuine threats instead of easy targets. Even zombies, historically the bottom of the food chain, became a real problem to deal with.The reason was simple, in hindsight: once higher-tier beings started asserting control over the lower-tier hordes, those hordes stopped rushing blindly into human territory. They started acting with actual

"What's going on in here?"Recognizing the room full of brothers, Grace pulled back the power of her tattoo and crossed to Lance's side, confusion written across her face."Sister-in-law!"Lance answered with a pained grimace. "The Prince called us in special, said he needed help pushing his cultivation forward.""...By having all of you gang up and hit him? That's helping him cultivate?"Something skeptical flickered across Grace's face.Lance's grimace deepened at her expression.They'd followed Damon's instructions to the letter, groups of ten rotating through, each wave cranking up their output by twenty-five percent over the last. By this point, every man in the room was pushing half his real ceiling.And it hadn't mattered. They couldn't even crack his defenses, let alone leave a mark. Injuring him wasn't a possibility, it was a fantasy.They'd known Damon was strong. None of them had guessed it was this strong.Worse, their boss wasn't even fully focused on the fight. He was si

"That so?"The soft laugh had barely faded before Damon's eyes narrowed.BOOM!!A wave of power exploded outward, heavy, absolute, and strangely calm at the same time.Tier 2. Saint Jerome, the Suffering Pilgrim, activated.The instant Damon unleashed his aura, the two to three hundred men flanking him followed suit, their own auras flaring in near-perfect unison.On paper, they were badly outnumbered, eight hundred against three hundred wasn't close.But every single one of Damon's men carried a forbidden tattoo.And that wasn't even the real advantage. The real advantage was this: every last one of them had already pushed into the late stage of Tier 1.Not most. All of them.That single fact alone flipped the momentum of the fight before a single blow landed."They're all late-Tier-1, uniformly? And a chunk of them are already brushing up against Tier 2?"The confidence radiating off Graves's eight hundred men a minute earlier evaporated on the spot.They'd walked in expecting a sho

Something wasn't adding up.Something was seriously off.Damon's brow stayed furrowed.Ever since his rebirth, nearly everything had tracked closely enough with his first life that he could plan around it.But this, this deep, deliberate involvement from a man who should barely register as a factor this early on, had knocked the timeline off course in ways he couldn't fully account for.That, combined with the complete personality shift he was seeing...A thought hit him, sudden and sharp.If I got a second chance at this life, why couldn't Augustus Whitlock have gotten one too?If Whitlock had been reborn, that would explain almost everything.Because in Damon's first life, Whitlock had died months before Damon did.Not framed. Not murdered. Not torn apart by beasts or myth-tier monsters.He'd simply gotten sick and died. A man sitting on real power, on the verge of everything he'd worked toward, cut down by something as mundane as illness right as it all came together.If that same