"Time to farm," he said, and stepped to the left.
The claw came down where his torso had been. The displaced air hit him like a wall. He felt it ruffle his hair.
Close. Kind of.
His eyes sharpened. The familiar pressure settled behind them — not quite focus, not quite calm. Something further down than both.
[Will of Torga — Activated]⏱ 10 seconds
The world didn't slow. It simply became legible.
He could read the bear's weight distribution in the tension of its haunches. Could track the telegraph of its next swing in the rotation of its shoulder. Could see, with annoying clarity, exactly how something this size moved when it believed it was unstoppable.
He moved first.
His fist connected with the bear's left forelimb — not at the joint, not at the bone, but at the precise angle required to compromise both simultaneously. There was a sound like a green branch snapping, magnified a hundred times.
One.
The bear lurched. Lexel was already underneath it, driving an elbow into the right forelimb with the same surgical economy.
Two.
It tried to fall on him. He let it, stepping through the collapse, planting his foot and driving upward into the left hindquarter. The crack this time was deeper. Structural.
Three.
The bear screamed — not in rage now, but in something it hadn't felt in years. Lexel felt nothing about this. He stepped around the flailing hindleg and addressed the last one with a precise, downward stomp.
[Tiger Stomp]
The ground shook. A hairline fracture split the earth beneath his boot.
Four.
⏱ 3 seconds
The bear was down. All four limbs compromised, crimson hide heaving, breath coming in wet, ragged bursts. Still alive. That was intentional. The subjugation notice would need a living beast.
Lexel looked at his fingers.
Two AP was nothing. He extended his index finger, almost contemplatively, and let the heat gather at the tip — a compact, glowing point no larger than a marble, casting warm light across his knuckle.
He flicked it into the bear's exposed flank.
A small, controlled burst of fire bloomed and died. The monster flinched violently. The message was clear: I could have done this from the beginning.
[Will of Torga — Expired]
The Gore-Bear's level ceiling lifted.
What followed was immediate and absolute. Every remaining ounce of its monstrous strength crashed back into its body — and had nowhere to go. Four broken limbs. Gravity. The animal collapsed with a sound that shook leaves from branches twenty meters away, and did not rise.
Lexel stepped up onto its head. Settled his weight. Crossed his arms.
The forest went quiet.
The adventurers had stopped running. He wasn't sure when. They stood at varying distances — some at the tree line, some halfway up it — in a loose, unplanned arrangement that looked almost like a painting. Open mouths. Wide eyes. The team leader still had his sword raised, the blade trembling slightly with the effort of not being used.
Nobody said anything.
The bear breathed slowly beneath his feet.
Lexel waited, in case someone felt like applauding.
Nobody did.
Lexel crouched beside the fallen Gore-Bear and pressed his hand into the space where the heart should have been.
He rooted around for a moment. Then a moment more.
Nothing.
He straightened up, wiping his hand on the inside of the bear's fur where it was marginally less wet. No core. Four meters of apex predator, infinite aggro courtesy of his own bloodline, ten seconds of surgical precision — and not even a Monster Core to show for it.
He sighed through his nose.
"Hey." He turned toward the adventurers, who had not moved. "Can I borrow a sword?"
Seven pairs of eyes stared at him. The team leader's blade was still raised. Her arm had locked up somewhere around the third limb-break and hadn't received the signal to stand down.
Lexel looked at the sword. Looked at his hands. Remembered.
Right.
[Arsenal] — Passive
He didn't need a blade. Anything he wore doubled in output and severely depleted the durability; he might owe them money from breaking the sword.
"Never mind," he said.
He grabbed the bear by the head.
It was the size of a carriage wheel. He got his fingers into the fur behind the jaw, shifted his grip once, and began to rotate. Left. Right. Each movement came with a sound — dense, architectural, the kind of sound that registered in the chest before it reached the ears.
Snap. Snap.
The adventurers didn't breathe.
Left. Right. The neck gave incrementally, then completely, then Lexel stepped back with the head in both hands and the separation was clean enough that it almost looked considered.
He held it up briefly — not for drama, just to check the angle — then let it hang at his side by the fur.
"Excuse me," he said to the party, stepping past the team leader's still-raised sword. "Good effort on the formation, by the way."
Nobody responded. One of them sat down in the grass. Not on purpose, from what Lexel could tell.
He left them there and walked back toward the village.
---
The Talon Guild door swung open.
The old receptionist had her quill out. Two adventurers were nursing drinks at the corner table. A young man was reading the bounty board with his thumb hooked in his belt, the picture of casual.
The figure in the doorway was backlit and carrying something large and dark and dripping.
He walked to the desk at an unhurried pace, the floorboards registering each step. Then he lifted the Gore-Bear's head and set it on the receptionist's counter with the solid finality of a man paying a tab.
The young man at the board turned around. His thumb unhooked from his belt.
The adventurers at the corner table put their drinks down at the exact same moment.
The old lady looked at the head. Looked at the man. Looked at the head again. Her quill hovered above her ledger, trembling faintly.
"I—" She swallowed. "Impossible. You actually did it?"
"Want to smell my hand?" Lexel offered it across the counter, palm up, still damp.
"N-No—"
"Suit yourself."
She set the quill down. Picked it back up. Set it down again. Then, with the mechanical precision of someone operating entirely on procedural memory, she reached beneath the counter, produced a pouch, and placed it in front of him.
"H-Here you go. One thousand gold."
Lexel took it without counting. "Thanks."
He turned and walked back toward the door.
Nobody in the Talon Guild spoke. The two adventurers at the corner table hadn't touched their drinks since he'd walked in. The young man at the bounty board had taken a half-step backward without seeming to realize it.
The door swung shut behind him.
A long silence settled over the room. Then, slowly, one of the adventurers at the corner table reached for his drink, reconsidered, and put both hands flat on the table instead.
There was a word for what they had just seen.
Champion.
---
The inn door opened and Lexel walked in.
Anthierin looked up from her chair beside Flinn's bed. Her expression completed a full journey in under two seconds — relief, assessment, disgust.
"You smell like a slaughterhouse," she said.
"I was in one, technically." Lexel dropped the gold pouch on the table. "Bear. No core, unfortunately."
"That's not the point." She leaned back and crossed her arms. "You reek."
"You're a blacksmith." He pulled off one gauntlet, noted the state of it, set it aside. "You stand next to a forge all day. You've smelled worse than me on a Tuesday."
"I'm a blacksmith," she said, with the measured patience of someone who had made this distinction before and expected to make it again, "and a woman. Both things are true at the same time. I like being clean."
"Revolutionary."
"Wash yourself."
Lexel opened his mouth, closed it, and decided the argument had a ceiling. He began unbuckling the second gauntlet.
Then, from the bed —
A slow sound. Fabric shifting. The faint, deliberate rhythm of someone surfacing from somewhere deep.
Flinn's eyes opened.
They moved first to the ceiling, then to the unfamiliar beams of an unfamiliar inn, then sideways to Anthierin, who was already crossing the room.
"Flinn." She stopped at the bedside, voice dropping a register. Not soft, exactly. Something more precise than soft.
Lexel looked over from across the room. "Yo. Still alive, I see."
Flinn's mouth curved. The expression arrived slowly, like it was remembering how. "Yeah." A breath. "Famous thief, still famous after all."
Then the laugh came — short, involuntary — and immediately a sharp flinch crossed Flinn's face as the wound reminded them both of its terms and conditions.
"Don't," Anthierin said, in the tone of someone who had been watching that happen all afternoon and was tired of it.
Flinn exhaled carefully instead, and said nothing more on the subject.
Lexel rolled his shoulder and glanced down at the gauntlet still in his hand. The metal had warped along the knuckles, stress fractures running from the wrist guard to the finger joints like a map of everywhere it had been asked to do too much. [Arsenal] had pulled everything it could from the thing, and the thing had given accordingly.
"I should shower," Lexel said, mostly to himself.
Anthierin glanced at the gauntlet. Her eyes tracked the damage with the involuntary reflex of someone who had grown up measuring metal against its limits. She pressed her lips together.
"Leave that one," she said. "It's beyond repair."
Lexel turned it over once. The wrist guard crumbled slightly at the edge, flaking onto the floor.
"Yeah," he agreed, without particular grief. He set it down on the table and looked at her. "It's not like we're running out of options."
He gestured, loosely, in the direction of the 500,000 gold sitting in a sack by the window.
Anthierin stared at it. Then at him. Then back at the sack with the expression of someone who was still, three hours later, not entirely accustomed to its presence.
Lexel disappeared into the washroom.
The door clicked shut. The sound of water followed, distant and steady.
Anthierin stood in the middle of the room for a moment. Then she turned, walked back to the chair beside Flinn's bed, and sat.
The silence had a different quality now. Quieter. She looked at Flinn.
Flinn looked back.
"So," said Anthierin.
"What?" said Flinn.
Anthierin's expression didn't change. She had the face of someone asking about the weather — completely level, completely sincere, not a trace of mischief anywhere on it.
"That ass," she said, "is round for a reason, huh?"
The silence that followed was a different kind entirely.
"W — What?!"