It was common for archhumans to hide what they were capable of.
Having hidden cards to play in case of being targeted was an obvious reason, but not the only one. Far from it.
All around Starhold, there were countless towers full of rangers working tirelessly to keep the never-ending tides of monsters at bay.
From all around, the vast fields of tall, golden grass seemed to conjure monsters out of seemingly nothing, as if they were spawning into existence the way they did in dungeons. This wasn’t the case, of course, but there were so many passages scattered throughout Faralethal that it might as well have been.
Atop one of the towers, a short brunette cocked her crossbow, raising it to take another shot. The expensive contraption fired another bolt, flying over a vast distance to strike an invisible monster right in the eye. “Gotcha,” Anya said with a smirk as she put her weapon down.
Being a light user could really suck sometimes. Invisibility was one of the few things that made it worth it.
If only people like Anya didn’t exist.
Being a light-affinity arch herself, she relied heavily on her crossbow. It wasn’t always enough to finish the job, but that wasn’t her role on the frontlines, anyway. She was there to do one thing—spot invisible monsters and, if not take them out, at least reveal their position.
As far as anyone was concerned, her talent was True Sight, giving her the ability to see past invisibility and traps.
In truth, her talent was a bit more complicated than that.
To simplify, she could see past states of whatever she looked at. If she looked at a tree, she could see it as a sapling—if she focused harder, even a seed.
It had its shortcomings. To use it on something, she had to, even just subconsciously, perceive the target in question. Thankfully, the Eagle Eyes tempering technique made spotting Invisibility distortions rather easy. And as long as she perceived the distortions, she could see the past state of the target in question.
Namely, a state where it wasn’t invisible.
It was a far more valuable talent than just basic anti-stealth.
So why keep it hidden?
“Hey, Anya?” A male ranger called over to her.
“Huh?” She turned to face him on reflex, failing to cancel her talent in time. As soon as her eyes landed on the man’s body, her mind perceived an overlapping image of him in a past state.
Namely, one where he wasn’t wearing any clothes.
Eight out of ten, she rated, unflinching at the sight. She was already far too accustomed to this happening to show any kind of reaction. “Yeah, what’s up, Lance?”
“I was thinking of calling up a few old buddies for a dungeon dive.”
“Oh? Where?”
He grinned. “Shortish’s Purple Maze”
She whistled. “Damn. How’d you get a ticket to that?”
“Beat the fuck out of a drunk rich kid who thought he could take me in the arena. Worst part, the dumbass didn’t even make me bet anything in turn, he was that confident he’d wipe the floor with me.”
Anya laughed. “So… you need a scout, huh?”
“It’s Purple Maze, girl, I enjoy being alive.”
“That place is pretty scary, from what I heard. I’m pretty good but…”
“Thirty-five percent.”
“Time and place?”
He chortled. “I’ll be seeing your greedy ass at five this Friday, outside my megacomplex.”
“Done.”
They both turned back to shooting monsters down.
Some hid their powers because they wanted to keep their cards hidden.
As for Anya, well, she would prefer if everyone she knew wasn’t aware of the fact she could see them naked at will. And that was far from the only embarrassing thing she could see. For starters, most pairs of tits and scars in Starhold were fake.
Anya could appreciate a pair of boobies whether they just came like that or if they had been finely crafted by a professional… but seeing someone yap for half an hour about the dramatic story of how they earned a particularly nasty scar, only for her to check and see the scar’s past as totally unblemished skin that had skipped the whole getting injured part…?
Yeah.
It’d be best if people didn’t know she could do that.
Being a ranger in the towers around Starhold was a pretty sweet gig. Relatively safe, almost boring at times, and it counted towards war accomplishments. The money wasn’t the best, but the empire appreciated those who helped out in other ways, which made it well worth it.
There were numerous watchmen keeping track of how every fighter there was contributing to the defense, which was how both credit and money were distributed. It could feel quite unfair, but it was a system too complex to balance perfectly.
The watchmen had to take into account the contributions of everyone who helped take a monster down, then, the value of the monster corpse, if it could even be retrieved, and the actual threat the monster posed had it not been taken down.
And finally, something that was recently taking deep root in the spirit of Starhold—
The entertainment factor.
Anya eyed a drone, a thing of brilliant ethertech, flying around the field as it aimed the camera at anything interesting that was happening. It soon left, chasing greener pastures, as this part had barely anything fun to show.
She shook her head, sighing as she brought her attention back to the fields. She wasn’t sure how she felt about the culture Starhold was fostering. Nowadays, everything was being turned into entertainment. Well, perhaps the word propaganda would be more apt.
The empire really wanted more people to come to Starhold. To that end, Anya had heard that they were even subsidizing the cost of BCs being sold throughout the entire damn country, with unfathomable resources being poured into spreading the word of Starhold’s existence.
On the one hand, Anya understood the importance of Starhold. On the other hand, the content that was being broadcast was terribly gruesome. Children saw this stuff, for crying out loud, and then dreamed of coming to get themselves killed!
And speaking of getting oneself killed—
Anya’s eye twitched as she spotted a skinny young man who looked no older than 19 walking past the tower, hands casually placed in his pockets, wearing nothing more than a white T-shirt and grey sweatpants. There was a strange, coiling, black tattoo running up his arm, with what looked like golden petals—no, lips, all across it.
He had zero equipment, not a hint of a weapon, and his eyes were filled with a terrible, deep sadness. “Oh, god, not another one!” She groaned.
The empire had a completely hands-off approach when it came to what archhumans wanted to do to themselves. While Anya appreciated the freedom, it came at a cost.
“What’s this, a third one this week?” Lance commented, shaking his head as he raised his bow to fire another shot. “Fucking hell. I’m gonna go take a break, I don’t wanna watch this shit.” He put his bow away into his storage ring and walked towards the stairs that took down to the resting area.
Anya contemplated doing the same thing, but decided against it. As much as she hated to admit it, she was getting used to seeing stuff like this happen.
Starhold wasn’t great for mental health. And it was only getting worse by the day.
She wondered what could have driven this poor kid to make this choice. “Probably the arena…” That place was atrocious. Sure, the consequences didn’t stick after the fight, but living through your own death was right about the most unpleasant thing Anya could imagine. And worse, while the arena had time limits for different kinds of matches, as long as it didn’t involve anything sexual, there was no explicit rule against torturing your opponent.
It was sickening.
Unable to hold herself back, she shouted. “Hey kid! What the hell are you doing!?”
The man paused. There was something unnerving about the way he held himself. Slowly, he turned, looking directly at her. She tried to keep his gaze, but something about him freaked her out. She turned away.
He continued walking, heading straight for the danger zone where monsters were being slaughtered.
“What the hell is up with that guy…?” She wondered as she watched him. Something about him was different. Enough that she was starting to wonder whether she was wrong about why he was here.
Unable to hold her curiosity back, she took a glance at him. She wasn’t trying to see him naked or anything. She very likely would, but it wasn’t a given. The exact past state that would be shown was partly out of her power, and quite often, it could reveal a number of interesting things about the target.
She activated her talent.
A gasp escaped her lips and she found herself turning away, her heart speeding up. “What the fuck!?”
A brain. She saw a brain. One of the past states of that man’s body was that of just his central nervous system.
She had seen a number of surprising things through her talent. But never had she witnessed someone being reduced to just a fucking brain! She had seen people who had suffered horrible injuries, including a man who had somehow lived through being literally decapitated, but never had she seen something like this.
The fact that she saw just a brain without the rest of the body meant that… this wasn’t the man’s original body. At the very least, everything else had to be reconstructured from scratch. Most likely— “Some kind of body snatcher…?”
She gulped. Her curiosity won out, and she used her talent again. Her breath caught as, this time, she saw a bulky figure, a man with an incredible amount of muscle, a full beard, wearing some kind of black trenchcoat. “Holy shit… Holy shit, holy shit…!” She clasped her hand over her mouth.
He was a body snatcher!
It was then that the man stopped again. He turned around again, looking straight at her, eyes narrowed.
She dropped, hiding behind the cover. “Did he just sense me using my talent on him!?”
Her heart was pounding out of her chest at this point. Every muscle in her body was telling her that she should run away. That man was dangerous. Against her better judgement, she took another peak, and saw the man heading towards the monsters again.
She released a sigh of relief. Now that she was thinking clearly, she realized she was overreacting. Perhaps the man had gone through some kind of body transplant! Not that that was much better, frankly, given that it had to be someone’s body he had been transplanted to, but still… At any rate, even if he had somehow felt her using her talent on him, she highly doubted he knew what she had done.
Regardless, suddenly running away would only make her look suspicious. Thus, she went right back to work, hoping that the man would forget about her existence and do whatever it was he was here to do. Not that she was hoping he’d kill himself, or anything. Who knew?
Maybe all of this was just a big misunderstanding.
Moments later, he finally stepped into the fray.
She was trying her best to stop paying attention, but she was powerless to resist her curiosity. She watched him casually step up to an ape-like monster with massive claws. The thing growled at him, and swung its arm, aiming to cleave him in two. Anya felt her asscheeks clench as she anticipated the gory outcome, but that was not what happened.
The attack landed, slashing the man across his abdomen, but rather than a shower of blood and guts, it left a rather shallow wound.
And then, the man punched. He didn’t use an ability. He just punched a two-star monster about the size of a grizzly bear in the face. And it fell over, out cold. A moment later, its presence vanished.
Anya gaped. “What the hell just happened?”
Her eyes went down to the man’s previous wound. It was almost gone. “That’s some quick regeneration…”
If this was where it ended, she would have been shocked enough. But then, the man was jumped by a tiger-like creature, which proceeded to chew half his face off, and then spewed scorching flames all over his body. “Oh god!” She looked away, feeling queasy at the sight of the man’s face getting torn off. Even with all the violence she was exposed to constantly, that had been a gruesome way to go.
Yet, not quite as gruesome as what happened next.
The man, despite the fact that the entire surface of his body was charred black, shoved his arm down the creature’s throat, and then violently ripped its tongue out before proceeding to dig his hand through its eye for an improvised lobotomy.
Had this whole thing ended there, Anya would have been shocked enough. But it didn’t.
For hours, she watched the man commit a wholesale slaughter. His shouts were loud enough to overpower the sound of all out war around him, and yet, whatever anger possessed him seemed to never run out.
At some point, the drone had appeared again, and this time, it stuck around for the show.
Eventually, Anya reached the end of her shift and decided she’d seen enough. She clocked out, heading home.
When she came back tomorrow, the same tower was surrounded by far more people. Curious, she went back up to her station, only to spot something shocking. “He’s back again!?”
“Again?” Lance asked from beside her, scoffing, “He’s been there for a whole day already. Wonder when he’s gonna drop dead.”
For another shift, she watched the man fight. It was a thing of wonder. He most certainly could dodge the attacks coming his way, but chose to ignore anything that wasn’t immediately life-threatening. He also never used an ability, not once. He did use some raw manipulation to shape his blood into makeshift weapons, but that was the extent of it.
Yet another day came and went, and she returned to an even bigger crowd, the drone having stuck around throughout the whole thing,
“Hell yeah!” someone in the crowd cheered. “Get em’!”
Bets flew left and right, people wondering when he would die or stop fighting.
Anya swallowed her distaste as she climbed the tower again.
“Who is that guy, even?” a ranger asked Lance.
By this point, the bizarre man was covered in gore and wounds from head to toe, making him completely unrecognizable.
“Ah, shit.” Lance pinched his brow. “I saw him when he first came here, but I didn't pay enough attention to his face to remember it.” The man turned, noticing Anya enter. “Hey! You were here, right? Do you remember what he looks like?”
Anya weighed her options. In the end, she shrugged. “Nope! I was actively trying not to pay attention since I thought he was just going to kill himself. Then he got his face ripped off in the first two minutes, so… yeah.”
“Damn. That’s a shame. People have been wondering about his identity, and I heard some reporters are offering good money for information on who he is.”
“Huh… Good for them,” she said, ignoring them and moving to her station again.
Yet another shift came and went. People continued watching the man fight, brainstorming nicknames for him. They called him Pain, Mad Berserker, Ghoul, Wraith, and a number of other names that failed to take hold. In the end, somebody called him a “perpetual lobotomy machine” and that soon morphed into “Lobotomizer,” which somehow stuck.
The guy did love picking monster brains, after all.
Nobody seemed to believe he would walk away from here alive, and that included Anya. And yet, he kept fighting, his endurance seemingly neverending. He fought through the third day, then the fourth, then, the fifth.
As horrible as it was, it was also inspiring. There was something about the inexhaustible spirit of the warrior, of how he accepted every blow that wouldn’t outright kill him, and the sadness suffusing his every move.
No matter how confident she was he’d lose his life here, deep down, Anya still wanted the man to live.
And on the fifth day, something awful happened.
The rangers, which had been busy keeping major threats away, seemed to come to a deal. In an act that made Anya livid, they had collectively agreed to let a three-star stone golem through, just to see what would happen.
“Sick fucks!” she cursed, furious at the flippant attitude of the defenders.
Her crossbow couldn’t even leave a notable crack on the damned thing, so there was no point in trying to take it out on her own.
She somehow hoped the crowd would change their minds. She knew they wouldn’t. But it was horribly disappointing, nonetheless, to watch them stand by as the man faced the creature of stone.
The golem fired a shotgun blast of stone shrapnel, which peppered the man. Somehow, it failed to kill him. He stepped forth, and the golem swung a fist, which met the man’s bare chest with a deafening thud. He went flying back like a ragdoll.
There was no way he was going to live through that.
She watched the broken form of the man sit there, unmoving, not a single person stepping forth to try and save him. Well, it was hypocritical of her to speak, as she had done nothing, either.
Her thoughts were interrupted as someone shouted, “Holy fucking shit, he’s getting up!”
Indeed, the man who had just taken a three-star golem’s punch to the undefended chest, was currently in the process of getting up. He was a bit shaky on his legs, but it was already a bloody miracle his spine wasn’t mush. Rather than drop back down and die as every single person there expected him to, the man whispered something under his breath.
For five seconds, he stood there as the golem slowly approached. And then, he moved.
In a sudden, unbelievable turn of events, the man moved at immense speed, leaping before the monster. He lifted his hands, releasing a torrent of blood into the air, far too much to be contained by anything less than Sea of Blood.
The crowd watched in silence as the fountain of blood solidified into an object that had to weigh tons. And then, rather than get crushed under its weight, the man swung it down with a guttural, strangely high-pitched shout. The titanic chunk of blood smashed into the golem’s head with enough force to bury the monster up to its knees. It stopped moving.
And so did the man. He simply stood there after the swing, letting his hands fall to his sides as he looked up, and breathed out.
Anya had the same thought as everyone else watching.
That was the sight of a man dying on his feet.
And they were all wrong.
He suddenly nodded. “That felt good,” he said as he turned around. Spotting the crowd there, he made shooing motions at them. “The show’s over, folks. Get the hell out of my way.”
The mass of onlookers parted, letting him through. Shouts of excitement echoed through the crowd, the disbelief tangible. An entire damn parade followed the guy until he reached the elevators, where the sorting proceeded anonymously, separating him from the horde of followers, his identity unknown to everyone… except for Anya.
She turned back to face incoming monsters, raising her crossbow. “Nah,” she said. “There’s no way I’ll ever see him again.”