When Josh finally got close enough to see the main village, it was already morning. It had taken him a while to get out of the tunnels, and they had dumped him farther to the east than he would have liked. At least he didn't have to spend the night with a splitting manaburn headache.

The second his eyes landed on the village, he knew it was a lost cause.

The village was in ruins. Every wall he could see had massive holes rent into it, and smoke rose from burned buildings. Packs of monsters roamed the paths and broken roads. There were a suspicious number of young new trees, the sure sign that monsters had died and the Jungle had claimed their corpses as fertilizer for saplings. In some places, the small trees were as thick as a wall of spears.

The fact that the monsters were wandering aimlessly was almost worse evidence than the burning buildings. If there were any humans left, and especially the citystone, the monsters would be swarming thick as flies.

A roar shook the world, and several broken buildings collapsed from the sheer force of it. Josh flinched as he saw a great head, the skull alone the size of an eighteen-wheeler truck, rise above the trees and buildings. It looked like a wild boar... if the boar was the size of a small warehouse. Its tusks were so twisted and gnarled that they looked more like the rusty hinge of a broken lock than anything, its teeth were sharp like knives, and even its flat nose snorted with the force of a jet engine.

Josh managed to use his Identify skill on it before it fell back below sight.

Porcine Dracobeast. Level ?? Monster. Again, not actually a dragon, just a step or two in the same direction. Think of a dracobeast as to a dragon as a monkey is to a human. Not that it actually matters, because this thing would absolutely annihilate you if it so much as glared at you too harshly. Weaknesses: Lacks wings. And fire breath, but most dracobeasts don't have breath weapons. That's not a rule or anything, it's more that true dragons are the oddity for having breath weapons than the other way around. Anseran Dracobeasts have an ice breath attack. You know, gray geese? Brantan Dracobeasts don't, though. That's kind of weird.

Josh had to pause to parse that message for a moment. That was even stranger than usual for the System. He wondered if it was in a mood. He didn't actually know if that was possible. Regardless, the important thing here was that a monster—a boar, apparently—had managed to eat enough of the citystone to evolve all the way to dragon-stage.

That was both a good thing and a bad thing. On the plus side, it meant that there wouldn't have been much of the citystone for any other monsters to eat. Instead of a horde of moderately powerful monsters, they just had one massively powerful monster to deal with.

On the negative side, Josh couldn't fight a dracobeast. Not with the simple stone ax he had made, not with the entire town behind him. He might not have been able to manage it ever in his entire life, and certainly not now.

He was letting himself get distracted. Letting himself ignore all the other implications of the horde and the broken citystone.

If the village was dead, that meant all its defenders had died with it.

Josh took a deep breath, hefted his ax again, and continued towards the village.

He checked their plot of land first. It was actually mostly intact, which wasn't a surprise. There hadn't been anyone there, so the horde wouldn't have been interested in it. Though they had broken through the palisade and crushed two of the shacks, the stone part of the wall remained intact. That was something.

There was a Primate Scavenger in the ruins. It looked like a mutated chimpanzee, but it was hard to tell. He had once seen a gorilla shrink with its evolution into a more stealth-focused track. This one had four arms and some crude wooden weapons, but it died to an [Empty Chop] from his ax. He breathed in the mist of its power, and received a message.

CONGRATULATIONS! You are now a level 32 Stonecrafter! You have 1 free attribute point and 1 class attribute point to allocate. Your class attributes are Perception and Sensitivity.

NEW SPELL LEARNED: Stonesense Aura. Sense all materials within range that you can use for Craft: Stone for as long as this spell is active. Cost: 5 mana (reserved). Depth of sense is influenced by Power, different materials you can sense are influenced by Flexibility, total number of materials you can sense is influenced by Capacity, and range of sense is influenced by Sensitivity.

Well that would have been useful before now. They had wasted a load of time digging down looking for bedrock. He doubted that this would have prevented the fall of the village, but maybe, if he had used it properly, he could have done something.

He went to activate the ability, only to receive a System error. He blinked, looked again, then groaned. The aura cost five mana, and he only had five mana. Auras weren't like normal spells. They required you to put aside a certain amount of mana in reserve, and as long as you had the aura active, the mana was out of reach. His Sensitivity score wouldn't reduce the cost, but it would increase the range and effectiveness of the aura. You couldn't reserve enough mana to drop you down to zero, which meant that it was basically useless to him right now.

He looked down at his talisman. He could crush it and gain a brief boost, which would put him at 6 Capacity for a time. Then he would be able to use the aura, at least to see what it was like. Would that be a good idea, or would it be too dangerous right now?

Before he had much of a chance to think about it, two more monsters wandered through the trees. Josh decided that made the decision for him. He hefted his ax and scanned the enemies. The first was a shambling mobile plant in the vague shape of a boar. It had thorns for tusks, a thick weave of branches for a body, and more branches coming off its back with red fruits that glowed slightly.

Lycopersicum Walker. Level 24 Monster. Yep, this is a walking tomato plant. Normally the farmers would have killed it before it even finished ripping itself out of the ground, but what are you gonna do? Watch out for the fruits. Actually, never mind. It would be funny to see you die from an exploding tomato.

Walking plants were never a threat, except for walking trees. If it was alone, he wouldn't be worried even if it was level 50. Walkers were always predictable, and he had fought enough of them that he was pretty sure he could kill it in his sleep.

The other one was more problematic.

Crotalinae Rattle-Breaker. Level 24 Monster. So, as you've probably guessed, this thing used to be an ordinary rattlesnake. It was actually pretty nice, as far as rattlesnakes go, which isn't much. Normally, rattlesnakes go the stealth and ambush path of evolutions. This guy, however, got dragged into a horde attacking a citystone that some idiots upgraded without thinking through the consequences. It was in a very blunt, straightforward mood when it managed to eat a shard of citystone. Bumped it all the way from level 9 to level 24 in one go, and it went all-in on straight offense. The only good news for you is that it's not waiting to jump out of the shadows at you.

It looked like an ordinary rattlesnake... except it was thicker than his thigh, longer than a shipping crate, and looked as if it could swallow him whole. It hissed and rattled its tail. It sounded like rocks being shaken around inside a tin can the size of a truck.

Josh stared at the snake and the tomato plant for a long moment... before turning around and walking away. He was not in the mood for a difficult fight. Not when the monsters were giving him the option to avoid it.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He kept his attention on the monsters as he circled around. His ridiculous Perception and Sensitivity worked well for him here. His mundane senses were heightened so that he could see and hear the monsters from farther than should be possible, sorting through the noise and confusion that was normal in the Jungle to focus on what he needed. His magical senses, dim as they were, also let him feel once the monsters had decided to give up on him.

He was eight levels above them. Not a huge amount, but when combined with the fact that they were clearly glutted on power that they still needed to process, they were fine with not fighting him. He tried not to think about the fact that they had received that power from the people they had killed in the village.

It took Josh a bit to skirt around all the monsters and find his way into the central circle of walls. The dragon was the biggest obstacle. He created a few bloodstones, downed a recovery potion to recover his lost blood, and then threw a rock at the sleeping beast. Once it was awake, it smelled the bloodstones on him, and he led it outside the village. It followed him at a slow pace; his body and his bloodstones were a nice snack for it, but not enough to really rile it up. In fact, he doubted it was actually completely awake at this point.

Once he was a good mile outside the village, he buried the bloodstones inside the hollow of a tree and circled around, giving the Porcine Dracobeast a wide berth. It glanced in his direction, but it didn't see him, so it decided to go after the stationary meal. Josh was free to escape, and all the other monsters had cleared out of the way.

This wasn't the first time he had dealt with monsters too powerful for him. With rare exceptions, all monsters were dumb animals. Learning their patterns wasn't hard. He ran back to the village and slipped inside the shattered gate.

He stopped at the entrance. He stared at the broken remains of the village, feeling as if he was the biggest failure in the world.

He had thought leading the dragon off would give him a chance to get some closure. A chance to see something important in the village. Some sign that there had been survivors who escaped. A collapsed escape tunnel, an obvious last stand, maybe even a written message.

There was nothing left.

There were a few scattered logs, splintered and broken from the palisade. He saw some square stones that might have been the remnants of buildings. The Old World structures were gone entirely, crushed into dust and ground into the dirt.

The citystone was, of course, completely gone. Not a single red shard remained. There was nothing in the entire world that monsters desired more than a citystone, because there was nothing in the entire world that gave them more power. There were several places where large amounts of dirt had been scooped up wholesale. Josh thought those were probably where the dragon had taken big bites out of the ground to get up every little piece and grain it might have missed.

Most of the bodies were gone as well. Not all of them. A dead human didn't give a monster any power—at least, not after they had been dead for more than a few minutes. If a monster happened upon a human corpse soon enough, they would devour it in an attempt to consume the last of its leaking power. Flesh, blood, and bones, they'd eat it all.

Josh had never gotten an exact count of how many people lived in the village. He thought it was a few hundred, at most. There were only a hundred or so corpses here, at their last stand.

They had held their ground, and it had all been for nothing in the end. They had died, and empowered the monsters who killed them. Even if the Dragon Slayers came out to deal with the dracobeast, there was still a plague of elite monsters where no one would expect them. Now this place was going to be impassable for months, if not years.

Josh rubbed his forehead, acutely aware of his missing fingers. Were the Dragon Slayers active this early in the year? He doubted that they could fight even a weak, wingless dragon right now. Surely this wasn't the first time that they had lost a village and gained a dragon before they were ready, though. They had to have some plan.

He stopped walking when he found the mayor.

Mayor Vashti looked strong and intimidating, even in death. She lay on the ground on her back, her face firm but not pained. She still held both of her swords, even though one of her arms had been torn from her body entirely. Her chest had been ripped open, and the blood surrounded her as if it was some mad parody of a halo.

He knelt down next to her, pushing aside his bile and nausea. He had seen worse, smelled worse. As long as he focused on her face, he could pretend nothing else existed. Despite how impossibly pale she looked and cold she felt, she could have been sleeping.

He retrieved her second sword and placed it at her side. He carefully closed her eyes, then bowed his head.

“May the First Immortal guide you to endless victories,” he said, quoting a prayer he had heard but never believed. He had little interest in venerating the Eight, but these people did. “May Saint Obadiah the Rogue use you as a knife to the hearts of the guilty.”

Josh had met Obadiah exactly twice. He was the one who had encouraged seeing the Eight Heroes as something beyond human, beyond people. Obadiah had meant to make themselves an ideal to strive for, not as gods. He hated the idea of prayers directed at him.

But Obadiah wasn't here, and Josh was in no mood to care.

If he was here, none of this would have happened. The First Immortal wasn't specced for horde combat, but that didn't matter. He still could have killed half the horde by himself. His “weak” abilities were higher-ranked than everyone else's best. Even if he didn't have a decent spell or technique to wrangle all the monsters, even if he arrived late and had to face the dragon, he would be able to do that. Killing large, slow single targets was exactly what his class was made for.

Josh could do neither. He had failed to save the town, and he would fail to avenge it. Everything he had worked for these past few weeks was gone.

He continued forward, looking for more evidence of what he knew was true. He had to see, and he did. He found Samson, the mayor's bodyguard, not far away from her. He was wearing thick metal armor that he had made himself, but the spear in his hand was something more mundane than the enchanted Pyrolance that he was famous for. Josh didn't know where it had gone. He was too numb to care.

He spoke another prayer, this one to Felicia, the Knight. Samson had been a Knight before he switched classes, so it was even more appropriate.

Would these two have survived if they hadn't used his [Crafter] bloodstone? They were both skilled and on good advancement paths. Mayor Vashti likely would have been an Improved-tier [Attacker], and Samson would have been an Improved-tier [Defender]. How much more could they have done for the town, for themselves, if he hadn't thrown a wrench into the works?

There were more bodies, mostly ones that he didn't know. He spotted Manny, the podborn innkeeper. He was curled around the broken body of one of his waitresses. He saw the mayor's driver, sliced in half and buried in rubble. Josh had never learned his name.

He found Lydia and Judith surrounded by a ring of monster corpses ten bodies deep. There were crude traps scattered everywhere, bear traps and tripwires and more esoteric things. They had been in a small building, Josh thought, though the walls had been knocked down. Runes were carved into every available surface, including the dirt, and the air still smelled of burned sugar and ozone.

Lydia had been advancing quickly as an Enchanter, and Judith had taken to being a Trapmaker with a will. It did not surprise him that they had held their own for so long. As far as he could tell, they only fell due to overwhelming ranged assault. Their bodies were pinned by spikes and spines, shot from beasts and walking plants that couldn't get close enough without being slaughtered.

“May the Eighth Immortal know your names,” he whispered. This one wasn't a prayer. Not quite. Not a prayer to the Heroes, at least. “May the Healer remember you. May she return and heal all those you tried to save.”

Judith had a daughter, though Josh had never met her. Had she escaped? Mayor Vashti would never have let the children stay behind to be slaughtered, and he hadn't seen any of them among the corpses yet.

There was a roar that shook the trees. Too close. The dragon was coming back.

He wanted to stay longer, to see if he could find his friends. He needed to see his friends. He needed to know, or this was going to haunt him for the rest of his life.

But he couldn't afford to face a monster of that sort. Not today. Maybe not this year. Someday, though, he would come back. If the Dragon Slayers didn't get to it first, he would kill this thing himself.

He did not stay for one second longer than he had to. He ran, dreaming of vengeance to distract himself from his pain.

He did not notice the message that Mayor Vashti had carved into a wall with her swords. The wall had fallen to the ground, face down, and he had no time to go looking for secrets in these ruins.

He did not realize that his friends were still alive, having taken the village children south to safety.