2026-10-19 15:38:26"Form up! Form up!" Austin screamed, his voice jumping an octave as all the color drained from his face. "T-Tank, get in front! Raise your shield!"
The young warrior holding the wooden buckler was shaking so violently he dropped his short sword into the dirt. "My skill isn't ready! The interface says [Buff Loading: 80%]! I can't activate [Iron Shell] yet!"
"Just hold them!" Austin raised his bronze wand. His eyes dilated as the system’s yellow targeting circle projected itself onto the center of the lead Stalker’s chest. "Die, you filthy bug! [Flame Bolt]!"
A bright ball of orange fire burst from the tip of the wand with a sharp whoosh.
It flew fast, bright, and loud. But Austin stood straight up, his heels locked, completely ignoring the thirty-mile-per-hour crosswind blowing off the canyon walls.
The wind caught the magic projectile twenty feet out. The flame curved violently to the left, sailing harmlessly past the lead beast’s shoulder, and exploded against an empty granite boulder with a harmless shower of sparks.
The Stalkers did not even flinch. Their three white eyes locked onto Austin’s screaming face.
Their back legs coiled like heavy steel leaf springs.
Austin stared down at his wand in blind panic. He jabbed it forward again. "Fire! Cast it again! [Flame Bolt]!"
A loud, hollow chime rang directly inside the recruits' heads, accompanied by a bright, flashing red prompt that hovered in the air:
[Skill On Cooldown: 12 Seconds]
[Mana Remaining: 45/60]"Twelve seconds?!" Austin screamed, his voice cracking into absolute hysteria. He slapped the side of his own head, trying to make the prompt go away. "Why is it twelve seconds?! It was eight seconds in the training room! Reset! System, reset cooldown! Clear cache!"
"It doesn't reset because you're screaming, you fool," Logan muttered under his breath.
The Stalkers leaped.
They did not run; they bounded across the gravel like monstrous crickets, clearing thirty feet with a single push of their clawed limbs. The lead beast was in the air, its jaw splitting open into four separate mandible flaps lined with yellow, needle-sharp teeth, aiming straight for Austin’s throat.
The recruit with the shield turned and ran, yanking the connecting chain sideways. Mia fell to her knees, covering her head, crying for her mother. The entire unit collapsed into a tangle of screaming limbs, rusted iron, and absolute paralysis.
They were waiting for an ability icon to light up. They were waiting for a permission slip from the sky to save their lives.
Logan did not wait.
While the recruits were screaming at their screens, Logan’s fingers had already moved down the inner seam of his right boot. He slipped out a small, flat triangular wedge of hardened spring steel—a simple tool he had spent three months filing by hand in his cellar workshop.
He slipped the wedge into the small gap between the hinge of his wrist-cuff and the retaining pin. With a sharp, practiced twist of his wrist, utilizing pure mechanical leverage, he popped the rusted spring.
The iron cuff fell open. Logan was free of the chain.
The lead Stalker was six feet in the air, directly above Austin. The second beast was circling to the left to gut the fallen girl. The third, the largest of the pack, with jagged bone ridges along its jaw, was charging Logan with its mandibles spread wide.
Logan reached down to his belt. He did not possess an enchanted blade. He carried two chipped, five-inch field skinning knives forged from common scrap iron, their wooden handles tightly wrapped in greasy cord to ensure a non-slip grip.
He did not look for a red health bar. He did not wait for a target-lock. He looked at the machine of flesh and bone leaping toward him.
“Weight: one hundred and forty kilograms,” Logan’s mind calculated without a single drop of panic. “Speed: forty-five feet per second. Landing trajectory: locked. Once in the air, a beast cannot change its momentum.”
Logan did not retreat. He dropped his chest, leaned forward at a sharp angle, and stepped straight under the arc of the alpha beast's leap.
The monster’s shadow swallowed him. The stench of its rotting breath washed over his hair.
Logan did not slash wildly. Slashing against rubbery hide was a waste of energy.
As the beast sailed over his head, Logan thrust his right blade upward at a seventy-degree angle, locking his elbow straight so the beast’s own incredible forward velocity drove the steel deep into its flesh.
The blade entered the soft, unarmored white groove directly behind the front left leg joint—the exact channel where the femoral artery and primary motor nerve cluster crossed the rib cage.
The sharp iron severed the artery like a taut bowstring being cut. A fountain of hot, black blood drenched Logan’s canvas sleeve.
The alpha beast crashed into the gravel behind him with an agonizing, strangled screech, its rear legs instantly paralyzed as the motor signals from its spine were severed.
Logan did not watch it slide. He was already spinning on his heel.
The second beast had pinned the recruit with the wooden buckler, its four-part jaw opening wide to crush the young man’s skull. The recruit was waving his fists uselessly against the monster's armored shoulders, screaming at his system to deploy a shield.
Logan closed the distance in two silent strides. He did not shout a battle cry. Sound was wasted breath.
He leaped onto the beast’s back, driving his left knee directly into the small of its spine to pin its hips to the ground. His right hand reached around, grabbed the monster’s upper jaw flap, and pulled its skull backward with violent force, exposing the pale, rubbery junction between the skull and the first neck vertebra.
Logan reversed his grip on his left dagger and drove the thick iron point straight down into that two-inch gap.
The blade pierced the brain stem.
The beast did not even twitch. Its four mandibles went limp instantly. Its three white eyes rolled back into its skull, and the glowing red [Level 4] title above its head simply dissolved into thin air.
One second. Two movements. Two dead predators.
Austin was still scrambling on his back like an overturned turtle, holding his bronze wand with two trembling hands. The third Stalker was inches from his face, its front claws digging into his leather breastplate, ready to tear his chest open.
"Cooldown! Cooldown! Cast! Cast!" Austin shrieked, tears and snot covering his cheeks as he jammed the wand against the monster's nose.
The beast raised its claws to decapitate him.
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
Chapter 11
"If you mix that swamp-pig fat directly with the silver-leaf thyme, the acid in the plant will curdle the animal grease," Logan said calmly. "It will feel cold on the skin for ten minutes. Then the trapped moisture will rot the dead flesh underneath. Within twenty-four hours, the patient will have black gangrene in the marrow."Sophia froze. Her jaw dropped slightly. "How... how do you know that?" she asked, her voice dropping into stunned disbelief. "My system recipe says [Combine Cleansing Herb with Animal Lipid for Level 1 Burn Dressing]. It doesn't say anything about curdling acid!""The system gives you a title and an icon," Logan replied, his eyes steady on hers. "It doesn't understand the chemistry of spoiled fat. If you want that salve to heal without rotting the bone, grind two spoonfuls of dry river chalk into the grease first. The alkaline chalk neutralizes the plant acid. It keeps the fat clean while the thyme draws out the heat."Sophia stood in the dim light, her breath
Chapter 10
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
Chapter 9
From his belt, Logan drew a six-inch iron bodkin, a thick, unsharpened spike of cold iron used for punching holes in heavy leather harness straps.Logan placed the blunt point of the iron spike directly into the small, soft depression between Christian’s collarbone and the top of his shoulder blade, the exact anatomical gateway where the brachial nerve plexus emerged from the spine to control the arm and channel the body’s internal spiritual energy.Logan drove his right heel downward, using his entire body weight to slam the iron bodkin three inches deep into the nerve cluster.Christian did not scream. The sound that came out of his throat was a flat, wet rattle.A violent, visible spasm rippled through Christian’s body. The blue-white fire on his fists instantly sputtered and died like blown-out candles. The orange glow in his eyes flickered, turned pale, and went completely dark.The second archer, seeing his commander dismantled in less than four seconds by a boy who hadn't cast
Chapter 8
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
Chapter 7
CRACK.The sound was not thunder. It was the violent tear of superheated air.A bolt of compressed crimson plasma blasted past Logan’s left temple, missing his ear by less than two inches. It struck the trunk of a weeping-needle pine behind him. There was no fire, no smoke, only a blinding flash of white-hot heat that instantly turned the thick wooden bark into bubbling, translucent green glass.The heat was so intense it singed the hairs on the side of Logan’s head.Logan did not freeze. He did not gasp. He threw his body sideways, rolling over the sharp black shale of the ravine, and pressed his back flat against the cold surface of an overhanging granite shelf.Above him, the wind howled through the narrow mountain gap.A heavy thump shook the loose pebbles on the ledge fifteen paces away. A man dropped from the sky, landing upright with the arrogant ease of a seasoned hunter. The impact of his iron-shod boots cracked the rock, but his knees barely bent; an invisible cushion of man
Chapter 6
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
You may also like
My Rich Squandering System
NOVEMBRE24.5K viewsRise Of The Powerful Husband
Dark Crafter27.7K viewsEthereal Adventure System
Dark Crafter44.2K viewsSystem Super Daily Login
Khusayni90.3K viewsThe Weakest Man With the Strongest Heart
Flavina87 viewsThe City That Resets Every Midnight
orion189 viewsThe Doctor's Beast Tamer System: Apocalyptic Survival
aisakurachan84658 viewsAscend or Vanish
Aria Winters174 views