The sight of vacant glazed eyes greeted Ryu from the top of the deserted wall. Good soldiers were now dead ones, and he found their eyes did not beg for the revenge he sought to give them. So be it. If Ryu could not hold their grudges, he would hold one of his own on their behalf.

Clothed in only a spare set of standard plate armor, Ryu walked away from the wall. His heavy axe was slung over one shoulder, and as he opened the doors to the silent fort, his anger grew, stoked by pools of blood on the stone floor and the dead soldiers slumped in them. [Whisper Step] sapped his energy with frightening speed, but he had little care. The rational, cautious part of his mind was surrendered to Ender’s ministrations. He caught up with the group of assassins in moments.

They were three in number. Each had webbed fingers and less armor than the typical Bug, and he knew now what he had seen in the river prior to the raid. He had little time to wonder over their Evolutions, however. His axe split the first one in twain, repainting the stone walls around them yellow.

The other two did not even exchange a glance. One turned to face him, and the other sprinted away towards the command room. Here to kill Daisuke, then. The thought almost made him laugh. Too often the assassin and never the guard. It was nice to switch things up for once.

A serrated chitin blade punched through his plate armor, breaking him from his thoughts. He had just gotten back from the healers, too. It was a shame, really. Their work was soon to be wasted.

His axe ignored the short sword buried in his side, more interested in the hand that held it. His pain was given to Ender in return for fury, and his axe cleaved through chitin plating. One sword down, one more to go. It was good, then, that Ryu had so recently dueled a certain dual-wielding woman. While much faster than Emiko, this Bug seemed less skilled.

A grunt and a pull freed the serrated sword from his side, and his opponent found its weapon spearing back towards it. Taking his axe back into two hands, he launched himself after the sword with [Whisper Step]. He blocked a strike, roared some unintelligible curse, threw his weight into the light Bug, and slammed it into the wall, the haft of his axe trapping his opponent’s sword between its chest and his weight. A headbutt cracked the Bug’s face and scraped the skin from his forehead. Blinking from the blood pouring into his stinging eyes, Ryu failed to muster enough strength to resist the Bug’s push, and before he knew it, a gap had formed between the two. A gap large enough for a long, two-handed battleaxe.

Ryu was exhausted. His opponent was dead. Battle, he’d found, was less about who won and more about who lost the least.

He swiped more blood from his face with a curse, stumbling after the escaped assassin. The serrated edge of the sword had made a mess of his side, and he could feel his steps growing weaker from blood loss. His body was strong from cultivation, sure, but it was not strong enough to ignore the effects of two fights with opponents of similar strength to his own. Hells, cultivation was just an aid to keep the body and mind able under the strain of Skills, Techniques, and whatever came after. It would not save him from the effects of his wounds. The Bug’s death would have to come fast.

He made it to the command room about the time his vision had started to tunnel. The table in the center of the room was little more than shards scattered about the room, and Daisuke’s assistant was dead, her head near separated from his body. The graying soldier himself was bowing under a flurry of blows from the Bug’s two short, curving swords. Ryu almost failed to hear their crash of their strikes over the blood pounding in his temples.

He barrelled into the room with a throaty chuckle. Death laughed at everyone, and a man could only laugh back. The Bug disarmed Daisuke, its second blade raising to take the commander’s neck. Ryu’s spinning axe took it in the back.

The assassin stumbled. It was dying, but still, it continued after the trip. The distance Daisuke had managed to make between them in the Bug’s lapse was shortened, and without a weapon and no time to summon a new one from his storage, Ryu stumbled after the two fighters.

Sword, Ender grunted, drawing Ryu’s attention to the Daisuke’s dropped blade in the ruins of the command table. He picked up the blade, and the Bug was forced to shift its attention to him, leaving the wounded Daisuke to settle against the wall.

His axe slid from the Bug’s back, as green light swirled around its figure. Ryu’s breath came in a hurried staccato rhythm, and he tightened his grip on the sword. He was a fool. Perhaps Bonny would find a smarter man with him dead.

[Weakness Sense] drained most of his remaining stamina. His enemy crashed towards him, its leap enhanced by some Skill, and seeing the weakness in its form through his Skill, he used all of his remaining strength to lift his sword to the right position.

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He whispered a single word. “Cripple.” Crimson light exploded into the room, and his vision went dark.

Some time later, something hard prodded his metal armor, filling the air with a loud clang. “Wake up, you bloody fool. A man who has dirtied my command room so much should at least have the decency to open his damn eyes.”

Ryu grunted, cracking open a single gray eye to look at the pale Daisuke. The soldier had one of Ryu’s legs in his hands, and from the looks of things, he seemed to have pulled Ryu out into the halls of the fort. The thud of boots reached his enhanced hearing, but it was faint.

“Get up, son,” Daisuke said. “Can’t give a restoration pill to an unconscious man who refuses to open his mouth. Damn Master Class strength.”

Ryu tried to lift his arm, but the tired muscle refused to respond, twitching with the effort. He grunted again. “Can’t move.”

“That’s what happens when you overdraw, son. Gonna need some food between this and the healing, or your body is going to start cannibalizing muscle to feed itself,” the soldier lectured, seeming to find some comfort in the words. He tossed a red pill into Ryu’s mouth. “Now eat that and quit bleeding on my fuckin’ floor.”

Emiko and her soldiers found them like that. Ryu was too tired for shame, so he let a pair of soldiers lift him, mumbling a thanks before passing out once more. He found being a guard quite rewarding. After all, assassins did not get carried out of battles unless it was as a corpse.

He woke up some time later in the fort’s proper infirmary, the impromptu hospital in the mess hall too full for him to sleep in. After the assassins’ appearance, another wave of Bugs had arrived, and Emiko was forced to send her soldiers back to the wall under Kaito’s command, taking only a small force to see to the reported intrusion.

“... and then one of my men heard your fight with a Skill of his, and we hustled to see to see to the intruders,” she explained, sitting beside his bed in the infirmary. “I'm sorry we couldn’t make it there sooner.”

“Don’t apologize to me. Apologize to Daisuke. He’s your commander,” Ryu said, a weak smile on his lips. When was the last time he had family to fuss over him?

“If I could find him. The old man’s probably trying to rebuild his command table himself. Without it, he can’t activate any of the fort’s active enchantments.”

“Huh,” he said, a dark thought coming to him. “I wonder if the table was their actual target. Are your men still stationed at the walls?” Ryu asked.

Emiko nodded her head. “Yes.”

“Then get to them. Just in case. I imagine Daisuke was their main target, but if he wasn’t… Well, the fort is in a bad spot.”

“If I must,” she said with a smile. “Reinforcements are on their way, and a Crafter will be here even sooner to fix the table. I doubt we’re in danger, but better to be prepared, I guess.”

She left after grumbling a bit more, and Ryu relaxed into the white bed. He was fond of her and glad to have met her, but there was something to be said about being alone after a fight. Something about almost dying called for a special type of silence. It was called sleep.

Still committed to hiding your true strength? Ender growled at him.

Ryu sighed. No sleep for him, then. “If I reveal my true strength, then I’ll be killed by my own forces. There’s a short list of people that strong, and my name isn’t on it.”

The strong worry little for the opinions of the weak.

“They do when ‘the weak’ outnumber them by thousands and are supported by old monsters.” For all of Ryu’s strength, there was a reason why the ‘Big Seven’ were considered the Master Classes with the most potential and not strength. There were hundreds of Classers stronger than them, but they were mostly old enough or nearing the age that their Qi requirements for the next tier of power was too high to overcome. While cultivation could extend one’s lifespan into hundreds of years, it could not fix the fact that old age made it much harder to advance.

We will be stronger than them all, Ender said.

“Maybe.” He tuned the devil out, hoping to find sleep. Instead, the door to the infirmary swung open again.

“Ryu.” It was Emiko once more, and she sounded distraught.

“Yes?” he said, sitting up and looking at his sister.

She clutched the hilt of one of her swords so hard it shook. “We’ve been summoned back to the keep.”

There was only one man who could summon a member of House Ishida, and his name was Haru.

“Fuck’s sake,” Ryu snarled, stepping out of bed. The room around him spun. A man was going to die today, and it might just be himself.