SOWER: My Cultivation Creates Gods

3 | The Margins

The gate swallowed them whole.

One moment, Los Angeles. Sunshine. Food trucks. The distant hum of traffic.

The next, darkness.

Rome's eyes took a second to adjust. The interior of the gate spread out before them like a cave system someone had carved from nightmares. Stone walls. Uneven ground. Patches of bioluminescent moss that gave off just enough sickly green light to see by. The air tasted stale. Old. Like breathing in a tomb that hadn't been opened in centuries.

"Kobolds," Reyes said from the front. His spear was already in hand. "Not goblins. Watch your ankles. These little bastards like to go low."

*Kobolds. Great.*

Rome had fought kobolds twice before. Nasty little things. Looked like someone had crossbred a lizard with a gremlin and given it anger issues. They came up to about waist height on a grown man, but they were fast. Mean. And way smarter than goblins.

Goblins rushed you head-on like idiots. Kobolds set traps. Flanked. Went for the tendons.

The party moved forward in a loose formation. Tanks at the front. Damage dealers in the middle. Kiona and the other support at the back. Standard stuff. Rome drifted toward the edges, near the cave wall, where the shadows pooled deepest.

Some hunters liked being in the center of the action. Big weapons. Big swings. Big glory.

Rome preferred the margins. The angles nobody watched. The places where a guy with a knife and no shame could do the most damage.

*Stay low. Stay quiet. Let the heavy hitters draw attention.*

Twenty minutes in, they found the first pack.

"Contact!" Rodriguez's voice bounced off the stone walls. "Six of 'em! Maybe seven!"

The kobolds burst from a side tunnel like roaches when you turned on the kitchen light. Scaly bodies. Yellow eyes. Claws that clicked against stone. They shrieked in that high-pitched way that always made Rome's teeth hurt.

The tanks surged forward. Rodriguez's hammer came down on one kobold and turned it into paste. The woman with the spear skewered another through the chest. Reyes was a blur of motion at the front, his weapon flashing green with each kill.

Chaos. Beautiful chaos.

Rome moved.

Not toward the main fight. Around it. Along the wall. Into the shadows where the moss light didn't reach.

A kobold broke from the pack. It had spotted something the others missed. An angle. A gap in the formation. Its yellow eyes locked onto Kiona at the back of the group.

*Oh no you don't.*

Rome's hand closed around the hood of his jacket. One smooth motion. Over his head. Off his body. He closed the distance in three steps and whipped the fabric forward.

The hoodie caught the kobold square in the face.

It shrieked. Clawed at the cloth. Stumbled. Blinded.

Rome was already there.

His knife punched into its throat. The kobold gurgled. He ripped the blade free, spun it in his grip, and drove it down through the top of its skull.

Once. Twice. Three times.

The body dissolved. Turned to dust and scattered across the stone floor. Two small crystals clinked where it had stood.

*Two essence stones. Not bad.*

He scooped them up and pocketed them in one motion. Retrieved his hoodie. Shook off the monster dust.

*Dry cleaning's gonna be a bitch.*

"Nice one, Rome!" Someone shouted from the main fight. He didn't see who.

He raised two fingers in acknowledgment without looking.

The rest of the pack went down fast. Rodriguez crushed another two. The spear woman got one more. Patterson, the old bastard, somehow managed to bash one's head in with a rock he'd picked up off the ground.

"Clear!" Reyes called out. "Anyone hurt?"

A chorus of negatives.

"Good. Keep moving. Stay sharp."