Sweat beaded on my brow as the late afternoon heat took hold.

I tried not to let the strange encounter play on my mind as I made my way back to the gate. A small part of me worried about what Sumatra would say when he saw me returning without her. No doubt he’d panic about losing his position or something. Ironic that losing both a handler and client was perfectly acceptable and even preferable to losing just the client. With no witnesses to report the facts to the authorities, almost anything could be written up as death by misadventure within the Bloodmoon zone.

A sudden flash of lightning stirred me out of my thoughts, followed by an immediate boom of thunder. I at first thought it was another rain shower approaching but the sky above was still clear as day.

The thunder came again and this time I saw the lightning itself. Not a vertical flash but horizontal, up on a small hillside perhaps less than a quarter mile away. Squinting, I saw figures in red and orange robes dancing back and forth using martial techniques and qinggong.

It was the Fire Bird Sect members that were a part of Mu Lin’s group. The lightning flashed yet again and this time I saw it emanating from the old man who had joined their group as well.

I figured they must have stumbled upon something. I was about to pay it no mind and start off for the gate again when a new sound caught my ear in between the cracks of thunder. A sudden high-pitched scream.

Mu Lin.

* * *

My legs pumped like pistons, driving me up the hill side. I wasn’t a cultivator, but I’d completed most of the Body Tempering Techniques they forced upon us in school. That made me what was perhaps an Olympic-class athlete back in the old world. I prayed that would be enough to get me there in time. In the few minutes that it took me to reach the hill, I’d heard Mu Lin cry out at least twice more, but after that there had been only silence.

My worst fears began to take hold as the silence continued, but I rejected them immediately. No, she’d be alright, I told myself, but I couldn’t deny the facts either. Mu Lin was here with not just one but four high-tier cultivators. For her to have screamed like that, they had to have run into something so powerful that even the four of them combined couldn’t handle it.

The list of things capable of that was quite short in my mind. A corpse demon, or a reaper beast perhaps? Nothing that should be this close to the barrier. But whatever it was, it was already far too powerful for me to even make a difference. Yet still I pressed on. I had to help my friend. I crested the rise where I saw them fighting earlier and my mind did a double take when I saw the huge swath of blood spilled all over the ground.

My fears grew stronger.

“Mu Lin!” I called out for her.

No answer.

I followed the blood. Someone had been crawling on their stomach, the trail leading to a tree with faint and shallow breathing coming from behind it. Please don’t be you, Mu Lin. I rounded the trunk and was somewhat relieved to see it was the old monk gasping and wheezing on the opposite side. But my relief was short lived when I saw that his insides had been torn out. I wanted to retch immediately from the stench of his bowels. He could barely register that I was even there.

“Old man…” I stooped down to him. “What did this to you?”

I feared to think what his answer would be, but his eyes were already glazed and growing fixed. “They… they took it…”

“Took what? Who?”

“My core…”

What the hell…?

I looked at his stomach again. It indeed wasn’t a gore or bite wound, but the clean cut of a blade. His innards too looked like something had been pulled out from inside of them. I thought back when I saw the sect members fighting on the hillside. Were they actually fighting each other?

“Did the Fire Bird Sect members do this to you?”

I’d heard of such things before. Murderers who would rob Core Realm cultivators of the solidified lump of Qi they had spent decades or even centuries cultivating. They could fetch high prices on the black markets, but the punishment for such a crime was steep. It could bring down the wrath of entire sects or the empire itself. Were the Fire Birds really that stupid?

I waited for a response, but the old man kept going on about his core as he continued to bleed out and die. I didn’t have time for this.

“Hey!” I shouted to get his attention again. “Where’s the girl? Where’s Mu Lin?”

He merely kept babbling.

Screw this… I didn’t wait for him to respond any further. I needed to find her.

I drew on my skills of the wild to piece together what had taken place. It was a chaotic scuffle that had ensued, but through the chaos I began to make sense of the conflict. The three members of the Fire Bird Sect must have surrounded the old man, gotten behind him perhaps. Even out-numbered though, it was surprising that they were actually able to defeat him if he was as powerful as Mu Lin had said.

That increased my concern for Mu Lin. She was a cultivator, but she was more a scholar than a fighter. I left the dying old man and followed the trail, looking for any trace of her. Eventually I found something: the faintest sliver of her thick, dark hair. I tracked it further, where she looked to have broken into a run and I did the same.

I descended the leeward side of the hill and eventually heard voices.

“Do it, just make sure she can’t run again. The little bitch is quick.”

My heart thundered with panic at the sound of that. I dashed into the small copse of trees where the voice had come from, just as a muffled cry filled the air. I finally saw Mu Lin about a hundred feet away, surrounded by the three Fire Bird Sect members, their orange robes now stained with a deeper shade of red. One of them, who was bald, held Mu Lin from behind, his hand cupped over her mouth. Her glasses were missing and tears streamed from her eyes. Just in front of her, another man with a thick beard was busy driving a sword deep into her thigh.

“Not too much!” the last man, who was white haired, and much older than the other two said as he began removing his robes. “I don’t want her bleeding all over me.”

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My mind snapped, realizing what he was about to do. “Get away from her!”

I charged forward, no weapon in hand but I didn’t care. I was going to tear them apart with my teeth if I had to. The cultivator holding Mu Lin glanced up, but merely grinned as I bore down on him.

“Look! The other one showed up! Guess it’s a two for one special, just like Sumatra said.”

He began laughing at his own joke and the slight distraction was enough for Mu Lin to sink her teeth into the flesh of his palm.

“Ah! You filthy bitch!”

He let loose his hand and Mu Lin yelled.

“Chun, just run! They’ll kill y–!”

The cultivator coldcocked her hard across the temple and her body hit the ground like a sack of rice.

“Mu Lin!”

She wasn’t moving.

An uncontrollable rage filled me as I watched her lying there either unconscious or dead. I fixed my sights on all three of the cultivators as I ran towards them and suddenly nothing else mattered to me besides their deaths.

The sect member with the beard lunged at me with his blade from thirty feet away, moving so quickly that he was behind me before I knew what happened. I didn’t even feel the pain until a moment later when a huge gash opened up in my side. I belched blood as my body lost all strength and I collapsed to my knees. Jeering laughs came next, as if I’d just become the latest source for the trio’s entertainment.

“You’re as stupid as your name, you dumb bastard,” the man who cut me said while standing over me. “You really think you can do anything to stop this? The best you can do is watch your lady friend enjoy the last moments of her life, right before we take yours.”

I heaved and wheezed, shaking with rage as the pain in my side zapped all strength from my body. But as my blood began to pool on the thick grass, a new strength began to take hold. I thought back to the giant woman and her offer and wished I could have that power right now. As a cultivator, I would slay these scum no matter how powerful they were.

No, forget that. I would slay them now!

A primal grunt escaped my lips as I forced myself onto my feet and then drove my head deep into the bearded man’s stomach. It was like headbutting a wall and I saw stars, but the move must have surprised him too, because it was enough to make him lose his balance for a second. I felt another surge of energy within me as a desperate thirst for violence and vengeance took hold. I lashed out with my fists and hands, clawing at his throat, and managed to tear off a piece of his beard.

“Gah!” he cried. He then volleyed a kick into my stomach, and the world spun as he sent me tumbling backwards and onto the ground.

As I lay there heaving on my back, a smile crept onto my lips. I raised the clump of hair in my hand as if in victory. “See? You’re not so tough. I’ll tear you all apart. Even if it’s piece by piece.”

Somehow saying that made it feel like it was true and a renewed strength returned to me.

“Beat the hell out of him!” the cultivator said, rubbing the hole in his beard. “Don’t make his death quick!”

All three came at me at once and my world became a shitstorm of blood, gore, and pain. It was all I could do to merely cover my face with my arms. I cried out as the blows fell, but something inside me made me laugh instead of wail, which only goaded them on further. It was a beating far worse than any I’d received at the schoolyard or in the square. Each blow felt as if delivered by a hammer. My ribs snapped, my arm broke. The world began to tunnel into blackness.

I refused to let it fade…. not until… somehow… I killed them all…

Then abruptly the pummeling stopped.

After a few seconds I cautiously pried open my eyes to see why. When I did, I saw all three cultivators had now turned their backs to me to face the giant woman standing behind them.

She’d returned, but as for how she got here this fast I didn’t know and didn’t really care. There probably wasn’t much she could do against the three of them anyway. But maybe, between the two of us, we could kill at least one of these sick bastards before we both died. That’d be enough for me. One final, well overdue act of retribution against the cultivators before my sad joke of a life finally came to an end.

The thought made me smile.

It was a nice thought.

A shame I couldn’t move anymore.

The older cultivator snorted as my vision began to darken further.

“Looks like it’s going to a be a three for one special today, boys,” he said. “Too bad you’re as worthless as these damn Terrans, you big bitch. I wonder how much you even paid that idiot Sumatra to let you come out here and die.”

“Hey, we should get it back from him,” the bearded man said. “She’s got no core to sell. He should owe us for doing this.”

The murderous scum. Even their sensible ideas sickened me.

“She looks strong though.” The bald man dropped into a martial stance, the air around him stirring, undulating his robes with Qi. “Let’s see how long she lasts.”

He leapt into the air with a claw-like weapon in his hand, spinning like a top.

“[Fire Eagle meets the Mountain]!” he cried.

The giant woman didn’t even try to move as he raked the claw hard across her face, the Qi-infused technique sending blood flying. Then in a blur, her hand snatched him right out of the sky, gripping him by the neck.

“[My Turn],” she said, before burying her forehead deep into the man’s face with a sickening wet crack. The back of his bald head exploded from the force of the hit, sending its contents spraying into the air.

Holy shit…!

A deathly silence took hold as the woman dropped the cultivator’s body unceremoniously to the ground. “Well…I hope that lasted as long as he thought it would.”

A palpable sense of horror and dread descended as the remaining two cultivators backed away, their eyes widening in fear. I stared at the giant woman wide-eyed myself, but not with fear. My heart swelled with an unbelievable sense of awe and disbelief instead. The man she just killed had been at least a high-tier Foundation Realm cultivator. To do what she just did, everything she said had to be true.

Everything…

An immense pressure thickened the air as she drew the massive sword from her back. A sensation of hate and rage filled me like never before. But it wasn’t coming from within me. It was coming from her. Her eyes blazed with a light of their own as she let out a feral cry.

She rushed forward, her massive body moving with a speed that seemed impossible. She leapt and spun in the air with her greatsword in tow. The two cultivators barely managed to leap to the side with qinggong as she brought the blade crashing down where they’d stood just seconds before. The sword sundered a tree in two, throwing dirt and debris high into the air. She roared, taking huge swipes of the air, leaving a trail of destruction behind her as she chased after the cultivators.

“Hold nothing back!” the older one cried. “She must have a beast core!”

The two cultivators began using martial techniques of their own, slinging flames from their palms while desperately trying to keep their distance from the woman. One summoned a spinning wheel of fire that hit her dead in the chest. She hollered with irritation, but little more. Nothing they did seemed to slow her down. In fact, the opposite seemed true. The more they attacked her, the more vicious and incensed she became.

“It’s no beast core!” the older cultivator screamed, his voice high pitched with panic now. “She’s a Berserker!”

As he said the name everything clicked. Her ferocity and rage. Her brute strength and raw power. I felt every ounce of the primal energy coursing through her as the battle played out—the power resonating within me, seeming to almost fill my own veins.

The Fire Bird members kept their distance, peppering the giant woman with Qi techniques from afar. Although they didn’t seem to be harming her, she wasn’t able to catch them either, it seemed. Finally, the woman stopped and lifted her sword towards the sky.

“[Furnace of the Frenzied Flame]…”

As she spoke the words, the entire sky darkened and became streaked with veins of yellow fire. I thought that perhaps I was hallucinating from blood loss at first, but then the cultivators reacted to it too, glancing about in abject terror.

“A pocket reality!” one of them cried. “She possesses an inner world!”

I wasn’t sure what that meant, but when I looked to the woman again, she appeared to have transformed. She looked even bigger than before. The tattoos on her body had turned into some kind of ethereal armor, metallic bracers and pauldrons floating just above her skin, which had now turned a deep shade of red and on either side of her head, a set of bull’s horns had emerged.

Releasing a savage howl, she drove straight into the cultivators with superhuman speed, fear locking them in place. It was all they could do to scream and lash out wildly with techniques and weapons. The woman took a sword strike deep to her chest and a swath of flames right to the face, but she pressed on unfazed. Then with a single cleave of her massive sword, she cut them in two at the waist, killing them instantly.

The woman stood there breathing heavily as she stood over the severed bodies, her eyes wild as if still craving more. In that moment, as I beheld the fearsome being of raw anger and rage, I knew what it was that I needed to become.

If I wanted to fight against the cultivators, to avenge my family, to protect my friends, then I would need that same strength. As the darkness finally took me, I made a vow. If somehow fate allowed, I would become what she is.

I would become a cultivator…I would become a Berserker.