Before I knew it, a week passed, and I was suddenly fighting on par with Philip. When two weeks had passed, I was regularly beating him in our bouts.

“It’s no surprise,” he’d said when I’d brought it up. “With your monstrous strength and stamina, I daresay it’s a miracle I lasted this long! Just goes to show that even the greatest strength is of little use without proper technique. I’ve no doubt you’ll go on to become quite the monster, at this rate.”

Philip was right about my technique. Until then, my stances and strikes had all been informed by Hollywood. I’d always given action movies a grain of salt, but I’d never in my wildest dreams guessed just how horrifically inaccurate they truly were. Knowing what I now knew, the very thought of those scenes where the protagonist whirls and backflips for no good reason made my head spin.

From dusk to dawn, my days were so busy that I often wondered where the time went. Humans were shockingly good at finding normalcy in chaos—at making the incredible feel like just another part of the everyday mundane, and I was wired the same as everyone else.

Between the mornings training with Philip, afternoons training with Rogar, and nights spent meditating, there was not a single moment of the day when I didn’t grow. The nights were the only times Aerion and I really got to spend together. She’d become incredibly occupied with Guild contracts that almost always involved providing relief to some beleaguered part of the city, and was racking up quite the reputation as the silver-haired super-elf.

At some point, Philip and I had agreed that while training alone might make me a stronger warrior, ignoring a city full of people when we could be out saving lives felt a little callous. Nowadays, we worked in what lessons we could in the field, in our brief moments of downtime between saving lives and helping the authorities maintain order.

“Detour,” Aerion said from behind me, pointing down a side street.

Philip and I wordlessly acknowledged, and we moved away, avoiding the thronged mass of people that clogged the thoroughfare.

“It gets worse by the day,” Philip commented.

“And will likely only continue, until the Cataclysm Dungeon arrives,” Aerion replied darkly.

While I had been growing stronger, the meteors constantly pelting the city and surrounding area had as well. The problem had gotten so bad that people were leaving the city in droves, clogging the exits and causing all sorts of mayhem.

Neither the gates nor the roads were designed to handle such traffic, and the City Guard were woefully understaffed to handle such large-scale events, so Aerion’s contracts had increasingly involved supervising this exodus to ensure no tragedies occurred.

And tragedies had occurred. Just the other day, a man was trampled to death by a horse-drawn carriage. The horses had panicked when a meteor had buzzed the city overhead. The driver lost control, and the poor family standing in front of them had paid the price.

At least the guy managed to push his family out of the way at the last moment.

That was hardly the only story. I’d watched people burn to death in a building that had taken a meteor & burst into flame. I’d disarmed fistfights that would’ve turned ugly, and I’d saved children from opportunist thugs looking to take them hostage.

Then there were the mundane problems no one ever thought about when considering thousands of people standing in a line for days. Things like food, water, and sewage. So much of what we did was to support those people, keeping them alive and fed, if not clean and comfortable. The ordeal looked like a nightmare to me. I couldn’t imagine how bad it must’ve been for the elderly and the children.

It was times like these that I realized just how blessed of a time I had previously lived in. A crisis like this would’ve been considered a horrible humanitarian disaster on Earth, and the whole world would’ve responded with aid and support.

Here? It was just another catastrophe. One in a long line of brutal and tragic things that happened. People died and people suffered. That was a fact of life in this world, and one that everyone lived with.

That also made them tough, both mentally and physically. The kids in the line rarely complained. The elderly stood on sore feet and aching bones for hour after hour, and slept on the dirt without issue. People helped each other, and endured far more than they had any right to.

All in all, despite the apocalyptic nature of things, despite the horror and the death, I was at least proud of the good I’d done. For once in my life, my existence had profoundly impacted someone else’s. More than any reward, it was the look of gratitude and utter joy in the eyes of those I’d helped that made my chest warm. It wasn’t just me, either. The Boonworthy and the Blessed throughout the city had banded together, aiding when and where they could, free of charge.

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It wasn’t bad, helping others like this. It wasn’t bad at all. I felt a sense of purpose I never had, back in my world. Most people there generally only looked out for themselves.

“Alright, same drill as always, folks,” the local City Guard leader was saying as we joined up with the larger task force—about fifty, composed of Hunters and Guard alike. “Let’s make sure nobody gets run over or stabbed. These are good people, for the most part. Just that good people sometimes do bad things when they’re scared and tired. And believe me, these people are both. Be gentle, but keep the peace.”

We broke up and assumed our assigned stations along the miles-long convoy. Aerion was a few hundred feet from me, while Philip was across from my position on the other side of the crowd. With how chaotic these lines were getting, Baron Sinclair had decided that there ought to be Guard or Hunter presence at all hours of the day.

He’d also organized relief in the form of food, water, and shelter for those who were stuck in line. The controversy of the blasphemy against Eskil had been mostly resolved, and it looked like Sinclair would come out unscathed, for the most part.

The perpetrators had already been publicly executed, and a ceremony in Eskil’s honor had been scheduled. Dominion was expected to show up in person to pardon Sinclair and the Blacksmith Guildmaster, but until then, Sinclair couldn’t really breathe easily.

Even so, he’d made the best of a bad situation. He really knew his stuff. If I ever returned to Earth, I’d have to have a word with all those fantasy writers who made all nobility out to be incompetent villains.

I swept my gaze over the crowd. Things seemed orderly as they slowly shuffled along. Nearly everyone looked dirty, tired, and anxious. Some had stood in this line for days, and they were nowhere near the gate.

Hours passed with little action. That was the mind-numbing truth about guard duty. About 99% of it was boredom, with the other 1% being a life-or-death struggle.

It happened, as it so often did, when the boredom had set in. My mind was off thinking of the Cataclysm Dungeon, focused on the distant horizon.

Which was why I was the first to notice.

Something tingled at the edge of my consciousness—a dull voice, nearly silent at first.

But as the seconds passed and the object in the sky grew larger, so too did the voice.

Snapping back from my daydream, I focused on the approaching meteor. There had been many like it. Many close calls.

But also several catastrophic bombshells. Too many to safely ignore.

“Philip!” I called over the ground, pointing to the sky. He, and several other sets of eyes, looked up.

Philip took all of a second to find the object, spin, and yell at the top of his lungs. “We have incoming! Everybody get down! Lie down and grab a hold of something!”

The crowd, who’d seen or had been involved in several of those close calls, didn’t need to be told twice. Everyone who was able flattened themselves upon the stone.

Just in time for the flaming ball to smash into a three-story building.

The superheated explosion knocked the air out of my lungs and pressed me against the cold stone. When I recovered, coughing and sputtering from the smoke, I struggled to make sense of what my eyes were telling me. There was no hole in the side of the building. There wasn’t much of a building in the first place.

The upper floors were just… gone. Vaporized. Or blown to smithereens.

The street was chaos. People screamed, though even as the fires spread, they refused to move. Such was their desperation to hold their position in line.

That desperation led to the dozen bodies I saw strewn all around the street, and who knew how many more lay buried in the rubble?

“Greg! Help me with this!” Philip shouted. I rushed to his aid to find him and Aerion struggling to lift a piece of the stone building that had collapsed. “We can hear voices from the other side. I fear several are trapped.”

I cursed and got to work, lending my strength to the effort. All around us, guards rallied at Philip’s cries, and soon we had a half-dozen men, one elf, and even a giant helping.

Slowly, agonizingly, the boulder began to budge. Philip bellowed a rallying cry, empowering us to redouble our efforts.

The stone lifted, higher and higher… And that was when I heard a scream from behind.

Still hefting the boulder, I turned to find a man clutching his abdomen, and another across from him with a bloody dagger. The man with the weapon was already searching the mortally injured man, even before his body had hit the ground.

“Philip!” I yelled.

“Go!” came the response. “We’ll handle this.”

I charged at the murderer, and before I knew it, Light of the Fearless was in my hands, its twin abilities active.

Gasps of shock and recognition rang out. Awed shouts of ‘Silver’s bodyguard!’ and the ‘It’s Light of the Fearless!’ rang out. Rogar’s marketing campaign had done wonders. The sword was like a celebrity now, and by extension, so was I. Unfortunately, as if it wasn’t confusing enough that the sword shared the same name as its ability, Light of the Fearless seemed to be what everyone was calling me by, now, too.

I’d thought of hiding the ability, but Rogar had pleaded with me to show off both abilities. He’d said it would be invaluable for his business, which did make sense. Single-ability swords were rare. Ones with two were downright exotic, so I’d agreed.

I figured having a bit of credibility didn’t hurt—in fact, making a name for myself as a mercenary would actually help hide my true identity. Nothing quite like layers of deception, after all.

I only hoped I could live up to the lofty title.