Logan adjusted his collar. "I am leaving. Take your hand off your sword, Brandon. You are blocking the ramp."The crowd gasped. Several initiates laughed nervously."Did this blank just give an order to Young Master Cox?" someone whispered from the back."He must be insane. S-Rank Berserker... one backhand from Brandon could turn a normal human skull into mush."Brandon’s smile did not fade, but his eyes turned cold and sharp. "You think you can walk away from me with your head up? A waste without an interface should know how to greet his betters. On your knees, Carter.""No," Logan said.Brandon took a half-step forward. The crimson letters above his head flared with blinding, furious intensity.[Skill Activated: Warlord’s Dominion (Rank 1)]The air inside a twenty-foot circle suddenly turned as heavy as wet sand. A red, translucent shockwave rippled out from Brandon’s boots. The pressure fell like an iron weight dropped from the ceiling.Two civilian scribes sitting at the registry

The heavy iron gate of the southern portcullis screeched upward with a groan of rusted chains, and two heavy boots slammed into Logan’s back.He stumbled forward, his boots skidding across sharp, black shale. The iron bars slammed down behind him with a teeth-rattling boom that shook the dust from the canyon walls."Die well, trash!" a guard sneered from the safety of the battlements above. "Let the beasts chew your bones! Saves the city the cost of your burial!"Logan caught his balance, kept his head low, and did not look back.The air in Demon’s Maw Valley was thick, warm, and foul. It tasted of rotten eggs and burned fat. Long plumes of pale yellow sulfur rose from deep cracks in the ground, drifting across the narrow gorge like sickly ghosts. All around him, the black stone walls rose hundreds of feet into the gray sky, so steep and jagged they looked like the broken teeth of a buried giant.On the ground, scattered among the loose pebbles, were bits of shredded armor, snapped wo

Logan did not run. He planted his back foot, aligned his shoulders, and hurled his right dagger through the air.The heavy, unmagical piece of scrap iron spun twice, whistling softly through the sulfurous wind, and buried itself four inches deep directly into the center of the beast’s third eye.The eye popped with a wet sound.The Stalker roared in agony, rearing back on its hind legs, clawing frantically at the iron sticking out of its brain.Logan was already there.He slid beneath the thrashing beast on the loose gravel, caught the wooden handle of his embedded dagger with both hands, and ripped it downward with the full weight of his falling body.The blade carved through bone, palate, and tongue, splitting the monster’s lower jaw in half.The beast collapsed sideways onto the white stones, shuddering twice before going completely stiff.Silence returned to the gorge.The only sounds were the whistling sulfur wind and the ragged, terrified gasps of the four surviving recruits.Au

Logan did not finish the third step. He threw his heels hard into the gravel, locking his shins, and dropped his weight straight down into a dead crouch, completely arresting his forward motion within the space of two inches.Two explosive fireballs and two heavy arrows whistled through the exact empty air where his chest would have been had he completed the stride.The projectiles slammed into the canyon wall forty yards behind him, exploding with a deafening roar that sent a cloud of black sulfur smoke rolling over the floor of the gorge.Christian blinked, his glowing orange interface flickering with an amber question mark. "What? The lock slipped?"Logan didn't give him time to re-calibrate.Before the system could process that the target had stopped, Logan exploded out of his crouch, not forward, but at a sharp thirty-degree angle to the left, taking three erratic, broken-rhythm hops like an injured crow, then throwing himself into a low, sideways slide.Christian furiously thrus

The waterfall roared like a falling mountain, curtaining the mouth of the narrow cave in a sheet of white foam and cold mist.Logan stumbled through the curtain, his boots catching on a slippery, moss-covered ridge of stone. He hit the damp ground on his right shoulder, rolling once to absorb the fall before his breath caught in his throat.A wave of blinding fire surged through his left arm.The burned skin from his wrist to his elbow was gray, cracked, and weeping clear fluid. The cold river water that had soaked his jacket only made the scorched flesh throb with a deep, sickening pulse. His ribs ached from the shockwave of Christian’s firebolts, and the sulfur dust coated the back of his tongue like bitter ash.He pushed himself up onto one knee.The sharp, metallic sound of a cocked trigger cut cleanly through the roar of the waterfall.A cold iron bolt hovered two inches from the bridge of Logan’s nose.The crossbow was made of blackened ash-wood, reinforced with bronze wire. The