Ronan found a suitable stone easily enough.

The ridge was littered with debris, chunks of collapsed buildings, rusted vehicle parts, fragments of a world that had died long before he’d ever set foot in it.

He selected one roughly the size of his torso, a jagged slab of concrete with rebar jutting from one end like exposed bone.

It weighed somewhere north of a few hundred kilograms.

He lifted it with one hand.

"Huh."

His shoulder didn’t even protest. The same porter who’d spent three years hauling other people’s equipment through gates, who’d been looked down on as nothing more than a pack mule with a pulse, was now holding a boulder like it was a slightly heavy grocery bag.

’It suits me, really.’

Ronan tested the weight, tossing the concrete slab a few inches into the air and catching it.

"Alright," he muttered. "Let’s see what happens."

He planted his feet, squared his shoulders, and wound up like a pitcher on the mound.

Then he threw.

The concrete slab left his hand with a crack that split the air. It didn’t arc like a normal thrown object; it blasted forward in a straight line, a gray blur that crossed the distance between ridge and highway in less than a second.

The impact was apocalyptic.

The slab hit the center of the highway below and detonated. The concrete pulverized on impact, but the force behind it kept going, transferring into the asphalt and tearing a crater meters wide into the road.

The sound hit a heartbeat later. A thunderous boom that rolled across the dead city and echoed off the surrounding buildings like a war drum.

Ronan dropped into a crouch, binoculars already pressed to his eyes.

Dust billowed up from the crater in a gray cloud, obscuring the impact site. Chunks of asphalt rained down across the surrounding streets, clattering against abandoned vehicles and shattering windows that had somehow survived centuries of neglect.

And then he waited.

***

Nothing happened for three full minutes.

The dust settled. The crater sat there, a smoking wound in the highway, surrounded by a spiderweb of cracks that stretched fifty feet in every direction.

No monsters emerged.

No lights flickered.

No sounds answered the thunder.

Ronan frowned behind his binoculars.

"That’s not right."

A disturbance that loud should have drawn something. Even if the city was empty, even if every monster in the area had migrated elsewhere, something should have responded.

A scout, a curious predator, a territorial alpha. That was how this world worked. Violence attracted attention.

Always.

But the lit city remained still and silent, its warm orange lights glowing steadily in windows and along streets that showed no sign of life whatsoever.

"Of course."

He lowered the binoculars and sat back on his heels, thinking.

Three possibilities.

One: the city was genuinely empty. Whatever had turned the lights on was gone, automated, or long dead. Unlikely, given how fresh the lights looked, but possible.

Two: whatever was down there was disciplined enough to ignore a massive disturbance. That implied intelligence. Something that didn’t operate on instinct alone.

Three: whatever was down there couldn’t leave the city.

All the terrifying options were more likely than the first one.

"Alright," he said, pushing himself to his feet. "New plan."

He’d hoped the stone would draw something out. Give him a target, at least let him fight on his own terms instead of walking blind into an unknown situation.

But the city wasn’t playing along.

"Fine..."

Ronan sighed. If something that loud didn’t get a reaction, then throwing more at it wouldn’t help, and with the kinds of monsters this world had, he wasn’t ready to go inside yet.

Grinding again would be his best option, but this time, he wasn’t going to stop at a single flesh golem.

Whatever was inside, he decided to measure it against the strength of fifty flesh golems combined.

It was better to overestimate his enemies than underestimate them, after all.

Ronan pulled up his status window one more time, letting the numbers settle in his mind like a weapon being cleaned and oiled before a fight.

[Ronan Night]

[Class: God-Bound (???)]

[Level: 12]

[STR: 26 +20 +110]

[AGI: 24 +20 +15]

[CON: 22 +20 +150]

[MAG: 16 +20 +0]

A hundred and fifty-six strength. A hundred and seventy-two constitution. His agility sat at fifty-nine, not monstrous, but fast enough. His magic was thirty-six, his weakest stat by far, but he hadn’t needed it yet.

And he was level twelve.

If he could push to twenty, twenty-five, maybe even thirty before entering the city, the stat gains alone would make him unrecognizable. And if he found more flesh golems, or something stronger, he could inherit their stats too.

***

He chose north.

The terrain shifted gradually. Crumbled urban sprawl gave way to open plains studded with the skeletons of dead forests, trees that had turned black and brittle.

The ground was hard-packed dirt veined with cracks that glowed faintly, pulsing with the same sick light as the moon.

Something had broken this world. Ronan didn’t know what, and he didn’t care. He was here to get stronger, not to solve the mysteries of a dead civilization.

The first pack found him an hour later.

They came from the tree line, six creatures that moved low to the ground, their bodies long and sinuous, covered in scales that shifted color to match the terrain.

Chameleon wyrms, C-Rank ambush predators that hunted by blending into their surroundings and striking before their prey knew they were there.

Ronan saw them immediately.

Not because of enhanced senses or some new skill. Simply because he’d spent forty-seven days watching his team get picked apart by ambush predators, and he’d learned what to look for.

The subtle shimmer of scales against bark, and the faint displacement of dead leaves. It was obvious enough for Ronan by now.

He didn’t have his skitter anymore. Couldn’t summon it while the golem’s inheritance sat heavy in his chest, that fist-sized disc of darkness pressed against his sternum.

It was just him.

But something told him that he was enough.

The first wyrm lunged, its jaws unhinging to reveal rows of needle teeth, and Ronan met it with his bare hands. His fingers closed around its throat mid-strike, the momentum of its charge absorbing into his arm like a wave hitting a cliff face.

A hundred and fifty-six strength meant the creature’s full body weight meant nothing. It thrashed in his grip, scales rasping against his palms, tail lashing against his legs.

He squeezed.

The wyrm’s neck collapsed with a wet crack, with black blood spraying across his forearm. He dropped the corpse and turned to face the others before it hit the ground.

[Soul Absorbed: 150 EXP]

The remaining five scattered, their camouflage flickering as panic overrode instinct. Ronan didn’t let them regroup.

He pulled a javelin from his inventory and threw.

The weapon punched through the nearest wyrm’s skull and kept going, skewering the creature behind it before embedding itself in a dead tree with a crack like thunder.

[Soul Absorbed: 150 EXP]

[Soul Absorbed: 150 EXP]

Three left, all of them trying to flee.

The chain whip materialized in his hand.

One lashed out, wrapping around a wyrm’s hind leg, and he yanked it back across the dirt. Another javelin took the second fleeing creature through the spine. The third made it to the tree line before Ronan’s thrown dagger, a B-Rank hunter’s backup weapon, caught it at the base of its skull.

[Soul Absorbed: 150 EXP]

[Soul Absorbed: 150 EXP]

[Soul Absorbed: 150 EXP]

Six kills.

Barely a warm-up.

He didn’t bother with the shadows. C-Rank wasn’t worth the storage space anymore.

Ronan knelt beside the nearest corpse and wiped the black blood from his hands onto its scales. His heart rate had barely risen. His breathing was steady.

"That felt good," he said quietly. "So this is how other hunters feel..."