Bornean was a man of certainties.

Money makes worlds go ‘round, both Arcane and Science Worlds it mattered little, of this Bornean was certain.

Shoot first ask, questions later, of this Bornean was certain.

All magic was helpless in the face of technology, of this Bornean was certain.

And that Cat-girl’s cunt was the best piece of beast-folk meat he’s ever fucked, of this Bornean was very certain.

The lanky Hyena-folk tittered to himself as he reveled in the pleasant sting from his palm when he had slapped that whore across the face and heard her squeak in pain.

Gods, the look on her face and the way she curled her tail between her cum splattered legs almost made him orgasm all over again.

“Hey Dust-Dog!”

The sound of that infernal wannabe noble High-Elf Asmodeus cut Bornean from his pleasant thoughts. The Hyena-folk turned his eyes to the mist choked heavens and suppressed an exasperated groan.

“Yeah Boss?” He asked over the panting and frantic slap of bare hips against flesh and the moans of ecstasy from the tangle of bodies gathered around the fire.

Asmodeus’s sharp arrowhead shaped face appeared from the throng of bodies. His tan face was pulled into a stressed frown. Bornean noticed with mild disinterest the anxious twitch in the High-Elf’s spear like ears.

Asmodeus’s lip curled in distain as he scowled down at the slimy little hyena-folk dressed in a baggy orange and gray jumpsuit several sizes too large for him.

“Quit stroking your meat and go relieve Denvel from guarding the dregs.” He drawled.

Bornean scowled back up at the towering High-Elf with an irritated snarl on his lips but when his eyes grazed over the Mage-pistol strapped on the elf’s hip he held his tongue.

“Sure Boss…” Bornean growled. “Whatever you say…”

Bornean zipped up his jumpsuit’s front and groaned to his feet, his short tapered ears prickled with Asmodeus’s gaze burning into the back of his neck as he scampered off into the mist.

“…Gods-damned fuckin’ Elf with his fuckin’ needle nose stuck up his fuckin’ ass…” A stream of mumbled curses spilled from the irritated Hyena-folk as he slouched and stomped towards the stream and the orc resting there against the tree.

“Oi, Den! Get your fat ass up. Boss says its my turn to watch the dregs.”

The orc didn’t move from his spot or make any indication that he heard Bornean call out. Bornean growled and drew his trusty shock baton from his belt and rounded on the tree until he was nearly nose to nose with the lazy orc. He laid into the apparently sleeping orc’s leg with the deactivated shock baton.

“Hey Den! I saaaid get up- Oh shit-!”

A cry of alarm slipped from his lips as the orc’s severed head tumbled from his shoulders into the drying blood coating his lap, his tusked mouth agape and his beady eyes wide in a soundless scream of terror.

“Shitshitshit!” Bornean turned to shout towards his companions. “H-urk!”

Steely fingers choked the words from his throat and dug around his neck like a vice.

It was then that Bornean came nose to nose with what he was certain was the face of Death himself.

It was the creature they had found at the crash site. A battered and broken skeleton with blackened skin stretched taut over jagged bone with one arm seared off just below the left elbow. In its hollow eyes burned twin infernos of blue Hell-fire and hanging from its shoulders was its filthy patchwork garb, shredded and burned.

This monster looked all the world like a corpse recently exhumed from the grave…I f it wasn’t for the fact that it was effortlessly holding a full-grown man aloft in one hand that is.

In blind panic Bornean flicked his shock baton to life and swung wildly at his assailant. The baton crackled and fizzled out as Enith’s magic saturated air fried the baton’s sensitive electronics into uselessness.

Not that it mattered much, even if the baton’s taser would have still worked. Not when the one armed monster was free of his drain manacles with death dancing in his eerie blue-gray gaze.

Bornean gurgled in dismay as his baton bounced uselessly against the bony arm that held him aloft. The baton tumbled from his hand and he squeezed the grinning monster’s sharp wrist with the desperation of a trapped animal and madly bucked back and forth with all his might to struggle free.

The monster chuckled darkly and is fingers sank deeper into the helpless hyena-folk’s reed-like neck. Seofon lifted his victim into the air with an unnerving ease as Bornean flailed and kicked in against his grip.

Bornean’s rubber boots harmlessly bounced and slid off the grinning creature’s arms, chest, and face, his eyes bugged out as his strangled brain screamed for air.

Bornean’s vision narrowed as black creeped closer from the edges of his sight. He was only vaguely aware of his stomach flipping and the pain blossoming from his shoulder when the Monster choke-slammed him into the dust, his body smacking into the ground with a dull thump.

What got his attention was the sweet, sweet taste of moist air rushing into his lungs. The beat-man gasped and gulped, momentarily forgetting the dark figure looming over him.

The foot crushing his knee jogged his memory however. A strangled whimper of pain slipped from his swollen throat and his eyes locked onto the pair of glowing sapphires burning from behind the curtain of filthy hair as the monster knelt over him, his hand clamping down around his left arm.

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Bornean struggled against the agony lancing up his ruined leg and he fought to push out a shout against his protesting vocal cords as the monster leaned closer until they were nose to nose. The monster’s voice was cold and hard as iron striking stone as he uttered a single word.

“Scream.”

Then he ripped the slaver’s left arm free of his body in a shower of blood, bone, and gore.

Bornean was a man of certainties.

He was certain he was about to die a very painful, bloody death.

--------------------

The fuck that had slapped the kind Cat-girl squealed like a stuck pig after I freed the offending limb from his twiggy body. The grimy jumpsuit the beast-folk hung off his body pulled apart easily and stained a dark crimson as he rolls around pitifully in a pool of his own blood.

I feel my cheeks stretch taut as a feral grin spreads across my bearded face.

His scream is music to my ears.

Something dark, dark and revolting curls in the pit of my stomach to churn with my savage glee until I feel sick.

It’s not guilt. Well, not guilt over harming scum like him. It’s more like disgust at how much pleasure his suffering was feeding me.

Just how much of my humanity did I leave in the Dark?

Oh well -I think as I casually toss the slaver’s sundered arm over my shoulder- a problem for later, when I have time to care.

The limb squelches wetly as it splatters to the dead gray forest floor.

Panicked shouts and the pound of scrambling bodies breaks the tense silence that followed my new one-armed friend’s squeal.

Caught them with their pants down, it seems.

Cries of fear from the river bank draw my attention. The chained Nameless dregs heard the slaver’s scream, but the mists seem to have prevented most of the low-leveled dregs from seeing what happened. There’s a good possibility that old man saw me though. Just at a glance I figure him to be around Level 75 or so.

I make out the dim outlines of the slavers blindly racing around their campfire for their discarded clothes and weapons.

In their confusion none of them noticed the naked Cat-girl fleeing from the chaos with her hands clasped tightly to her chest as a tiny key glitters from between her slender fingers.

Good girl.

“RRUUUEEEAAAAHHH!!”

An earsplitting screech echoed from the depths of the dead forest. A sound of agony and eternal regret, the likes of which the Dead are all too familiar.

When the last vestiges of that horrible cry die in the mists silence consumes the hollow. I can clearly hear the purposely shallow breaths of those around me. Even I begin to breath lightly, not out of fear of what horror made that God awful screech, but more to blend in.

Its rather unnecessary I suppose. None here are remotely close to my Level. However attention is a dangerous thing, especially when the forest your traversing has a violent disposition.

Shapes and horrors slip from the shadows and dance along the edges of the clearing. Animal-like cries and howls tear break the spell held over the slavers and the Nameless dregs. Like someone flipping a switch everyone threw themselves into a frenzy.

The Slavers snatch what they can and scatter like the wind, many straight into the jaws of whatever monstrosities await just outside the clearing. Their Perception not high enough to even see what was killing them.

Pathetic screams join the jubilant howls of the prowling monsters as they gorged on their slaver buffet.

A few of the slavers have to presence of mind to keep their cool however. That snooty High Elf with the Mage-Pistol among them. He seemed to have rallied a few of his hapless minions around him in a bid to form a buffer against the forest and his creatures.

Wait. He’s not running out of the clearing. He’s leading them to the river. To the Dregs chained by the river. Where the Cat-girl was frantically with the key to unlock the shackles binding her fellow Nameless.

I bunch my emaciated legs and launch myself into path of the High Elf and his cronies. My heart flutters in my chest as the thrill of the hunt slams into my bones and the indescribable power high sends my blood roaring through my blackened veins.

I laugh, exhilarated, in the power I weld, however weakened and restrained. Moral dilemmas and thoughts of my broken feral inhuman soul are stamped down and locked away.

Who cares about right and wrong when you can bend the world around your fingers?

-------------

“WHAT THE FUCK!”

A splatter of copper and crimson slaps across the High Elf’s knife sharp face. Salt and metal sting his tongue and adrenaline pours into his veins as the orc slaver running just in front of him folds over sideways.

The audible snapping of the unfortunate meat shield’s spine and the wet squelch of tearing flesh and gore was all the warning Asmodeus had before a bloodcurdling laugh of delight hissed and gurgled from the mists.

“What the shit is that?!” One of the slavers cried and pointed to the wretched shadow grinning from above mutilated orc’s dying corpse.

“The fuck does it matter? FUCKIN’ SHOOT IT!” Asmodeus screamed and as the creature chuckled and lunged.

Asmodeus felt his heart seize in his chest. He’s going to die. In a place like this?! All because he was surrounded by imbeciles?! No!

Hatred burned his fear and he forced himself into action. He snatched the closest cannon fodder- some worthless pig of a human crewman- and twisted his arm, forcing the squealing pig into the laughing monster’s path.

The pig’s squeals were instantly silenced as the laughing abomination clamped blackened, bony fingers around the man’s head and twisted it off.

Blood and fatty viscera gushed from the obese carcass. The creature flung the flabby head at one of the other slavers and splattering his deceased companion’s thick fluids across his body and winding the hapless slaver where the head smashed into his chest.

A squeak of terror slipped from Asmodeus’s pretty lips as his flabby meat shield smacked into the ground.

The High Elf drew his Mage-Pistol and blindly fired.

Angry yellow bolts of lightening zips through the mists. The chuckling monster seemed to melt into the fog.

Just when the wildly firing High Elf thought he had for certain struck the giggling monster the bolt of lightening would snap through the mists and the disturbed fog would roll away, revealing nothing but empty air and spine chilling laughter.

“whatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuckwhaTTHEFUCK!”

Panic and terror surged through the haughty High Elf. His blood was pounding so loud in his ears he barely noticed the screech of agony as another of the slavers was brought to his knees from behind and pulled apart by the snickering Devil.

The monster jerked his newest victim’s spine sharply to the left and pried the screaming man apart in an explosion of intestines and gore.

The bisected man’s arms clawed at his ruined stomach as his innards fell out. Being pulled apart was not a quick death.

The monster dropped the dying man and settled his gaze on the trembling High Elf Slaver weakly aiming his Mage-Pistol at his chest.

“Shoot,” The blackened skeletal figure snarled, his haunting blue-grey eyes flashed in the fog choked expanse. “Ic Dearr Uncer. (I Dare You.)”

Asmodeus had no idea what the monster said -he didn’t even know it could talk!- but whatever it said scared him on a level he hadn’t known existed.

He didn’t like that at all. The High Elf’s sharp lips twisted into a snarl of his own and he forced as much of his dwindling mana as he could down his arm and into his Mage-pistol.

If this idiot was going to stand around and wait for him to shoot, why keep him waiting?

With a howl Asmodeus pulled the trigger.

Angry yellow lightening erupted from the wore arcane weapon and struck the grinning monster square in the chest. Arcs of electricity rippled and tore across the half-naked creature’s blackened skin and a hiss of triumph slipped from Asmodeus’s lips-

-only to choke in horror as the skeletal monster chuckled and casually snapped his fingers.

An incredible thunderclap rocked the forest as Asmodeus’s lightening bolt was ripped from the monster’s body and slammed back into its caster’s body.

Asmodeus didn’t even have the opportunity to scream as half of his body and face flash-fried in an instant. The redirected spell’s impact launched the High Elf across the clearing and into a dead oak where he bounced and crumpled into a boneless heap on the forest floor.

Seofon shook his tingling arm and smirked down at the unmoving Slaver’s body. “Bitch.”

Before he could properly bask in his gruesome and bloody victory a terrified scream split the air.

Its coming from the river- The Nameless!

Without a second thought Seofon spun around and sprinted into the mists, praying that whatever was happening he wasn’t too late.