There was no god above the Fifth Ring, they said, and Ryu believed them. The Circle was a testament to that.

When one thought of ruined buildings, they pictured caved in roofs and crumpled walls, but that was a poor picture of the devastation in the Circle. Entire blocks were little more than gravel and a few shards of wood. Booms rattled the stone ground, glowing lights appeared in the sky above, and projectiles descended from the sky at random.

Worst of all was the dead. They lay in various states, missing various parts. There, a man missing a chest. Beside him a few scraps of carapace. Sometimes it was just chips of bone and a pool of blood.

The living they encountered were little better. Some slumped against walls that no longer existed, dead to the world save for the rhythmic rise and fall of their chests. Others called for missing family members or sprinted past towards the next fight.

That was the other thing with the Circle. There was no front line, only the Spire. It stuck up from the center of the district like a spindly finger. No armies marched here, only small groups and solo elites. They ran about, heading away from or towards the Spire. The Bugs were never far, either. Ryu had already killed two and searched for another still. He wanted one of the Sixty-Four.

“This is madness,” Inosuke said at his side, kneeling beside an unresponsive man. “Bloody madness.”

Emiko spun about at a distant boom, her swords raised. “Didn’t you hear fa… Lord Genji? The Seven highest scorers on the List are all here, and they’re not even the strongest.”

Ryu grunted. “The Spire.”

The dead spoke more than ever now, babbling and cursing and whispering. They begged for the death of the Bugs. For the death of Keira. For his own death. He needed a way to silence them. He needed to finish his Insight. A half-upgraded Technique was enough to drive a man mad, and Ryu needed little aid in that.

Fell caught his arm. “They,” he said, nodding his head back, “can’t go to the Spire. Hells, neither can I. The fighting is too thick.”

Ryu pulled his arm free. “You’re right.”

Emiko shook her head. “I can’t believe it’s gotten to this. They only sent their weakest after us,” she said, watching a woman fall from the sky a few blocks away and bounce along the ground.

Ryu laughed. “This? This is nothing. I…” He stopped himself, working his jaw. “Nevermind. Let’s go, I want to fight while we can because this will not last. Soon the majority of the Sixty-Four will arrive, and levels will be the last of our worries.”

He started walking once more, but his mind was away. Why were they waiting? Why hadn’t they taken the Spire? A stray thought occurred to him. Were they holding back on purpose? They wanted to take human forms, and corpses wouldn’t work. Still, Ryu had proved that Master Classers could fight off their control.

Gods, they had lured the strongest Master Classers to the Circle. Even his escape seemed too easy now. They had played Keira, Keira had played him, and Ryu? Ryu was playing himself, the damned fool that he was. Brought himself right into a trap.

Nothing to do for it, he supposed. Oh, he could leave, but dying seemed as good an option as any. His child, Bonny, Jinn, and the three with him now would be better off without him.

He bit the inside of his lip. Onward, and that was it. Self-pity was an awfully weak thing to indulge, no better than a drunkard at the bottle.

“Emiko, what level are you?” he called back.

“Seventy.”

“And you, Inosuke?”

“Sixty-eight.”

Ryu glanced back. “Seventy-five or a week, and you both leave. Whichever comes first. Fell, I won’t ask you to stay, but if you do, I’d like you at my side.” Dying alone seemed terribly lonely.

“Brother-in-arms,” the warrior said with a half-hearted smile.

Ryu turned back. Onward into war once more, and he was glad. He looked forward to feeling emotion once more.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

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Ryu caught the Bug’s blade on his own, stomped on its knee, and pushed it back towards Emiko. The Bug chittered, its antenna flicking between the two siblings. Emiko moved first, sliding forth with a step Skill. Her swords flickered once, twice, and a third time. The Bug’s moved with it, catching strikes with the dull ring of metal on carapace.

“It drops its sword before it lunges,” he called. Almost felt bad, leading a Bug to slaughter to like this. Then he remembered what they had done to him, and he wondered why he wasn’t hunting for himself. Aiding Emiko like this only lessened the Qi both of them got. He should just leave.

He bit his lip. He would not risk his sister’s life. Could not. No matter how rational it sounded. Gods, but the dead had grown persistent. They were always whispering now, a cacophony of voices that accompanied his every waking moment.

A cry from his sister snapped him back to the present, but instead of one of pain, it was a cry of triumph. Her longer blade was pushed into the Bug’s chest, yellow ichor bubbling from the wound. Ryu grunted and lifted Solitude.

His blade chopped into the monster’s neck, freezing its mandibles in place save for a few dying twitches. Emiko stumbled back. Ryu let the body fall.

“Why?” she asked. “I had it.”

He sighed. “This one was not even Evolved,” he said, naming the Bug equivalent of a Master Class. “You missed its heart.” It had two. “Of course, you pierced its digestive tract, and it might have died anyways. But you missed the return blow it was readying.”

“It was hard to read, alright?”

Ryu gritted his teeth. “You’re too much of a swordsman. It isn’t about reading its movements or biological signs. It’s a Bug, it barely has any. You’re too used to fighting them in groups on the wall.”

“You’re right,” she said. “What are you doing?”

Ryu paused, looking up from the Bug’s corpse. “Too much to explain.” He went back to cutting. Where was it? Did the host body absorb the parasite? He doubted it. If they abandoned their original forms completely, how did they hatch new offspring?

There. He pulled a tiny, worm-like creature from the base of the Bug’s brain stem. Solitude had almost nicked it, but he had pulled his blow enough to preserve it. He pulled a jar from his storage ring, tossed the body-snatcher in, and sealed it tight. Know thy enemy, he believed the saying was.

Emiko wiped her swords clean. “Do you want to go check on Fell and Inosuke?”

Ryu looked up. He had almost forgotten. “Aye,” he said, hopping to his feet.

When they caught up with the other two, the men had already dispatched their target, a Bug brushing upon its first Evolution. Inosuke had a cut over his right eye, but other than that, they both looked sound.

“Sixty-nine,” Inosuke said with a grin.

Over the next few days, Ryu led the other three into battles, using his aura to avoid the strongest Bugs. He would watch from a distance, observing, reading, and interfering when necessary. He would critique the member’s of his party after in clinical tones.

When they grew tired, they would retreat back over the river and into some of the abandoned homes in human territory. While the others slept, Ryu retreated into his Shard Realm, practicing with Soul Eater and visiting the graveyard for further Insight.

He was close, having already tasted a bit of Insight. Soul Eater disgusted him, but he could not upgrade it without understanding it. At least somewhat. He had no way of knowing if Soul Eater actually consumed a soul and robbed a person of the afterlife, after all. However, he believed that what Soul Eater consumed was the same thing that made up the graveyard: semi-sentient echoes of the people he had murdered based on his memories and theirs.

When he ‘burned’ a soul, he was actually consuming a piece of the dead’s Qi his Technique took. Instead of increasing his cultivation, however, the sudden burst of Qi multiplied his physical abilities for a brief moment.

He wanted to take that power and stockpile it, however. Instead of a brief burst of explosive strength, he would like a lesser effect over a greater period of time or a more condensed version of its previous effects. Which brought him to the mechanism for the Technique.

He was tired of the memories. Tired of feeling he was robbing the dead. The graveyard was large enough, and he felt his power should come from them. He’d done a tally. A little over a hundred graves lined the hill in neat rows. He wanted them to be the last, but it still seemed they would have to power the Technique.

His Insight lacked something, and chances were it would only become clear in a fight where his body acted on instinct alone. So he’d wait. It was all he could do, really.

He devoted the rest of his time to studying the body-snatching larvae he harvested from the Bug corpses. He poured chemical agents and other materials into their jars and watched what happened to their dead forms. It was a grim task, but a necessary one all the same.

He thought, too, of the Spire. Of the Seventh Ring. He would go there. He needed to. The Bugs could not have it. They would not steal his power or his people. In fact, he made plans. If the Bugs had not come in a week, he would send the others back and attempt to join the forces here in trying to take the Spire.

The days passed quickly, and every night, Ryu wondered if today would be the day the Sixty-Four came. He was unsure what to do if they did. Fighting seemed the best option, with making sure his sister escaped a close second.

He desired strength. For a better world, maybe. For his family. Oh, who was he kidding? For a time, those had been his desires, but Ender had robbed him of them. No, Ryu wanted strength because it was simply in his nature. The dead demanded it.

A better world. Keira wanted the same, but he imagined their versions of better were different things. She wanted a world without undesirables, while he wanted a place of peace. Their methods, however, seemed the same. After all, the only real peace is the one enforced by the sword over the man without. Power was just the way to make sure one had the sword.

He hadn’t quite made a decision when they arrived.