You are prey. A predator has you in its sights. Run or die.

Forty soldiers broke immediately, their discipline shattering under the weight of supernatural dread. They threw down their weapons and ran, screaming, their minds unable to cope with the existential horror of being hunted by something that registered as apex predator.

The remaining two hundred sixty soldiers held their ground, but Satou could see their hands shaking, see the wideness of their eyes, see the way they gripped weapons with white-knuckled desperation.

Good. Fear made prey easier to kill.

He launched himself into their formation.

[ENHANCED AGILITY] + [BERSERK MODE BOOST]

His speed was supernatural. One moment standing over the officer’s corpse, the next moment in the middle of the human formation, his claws tearing through armor like paper.

A soldier swung his sword at Satou’s head. The dragoblin’s enhanced reflexes made the attack look frozen in comparison. He ducked under the blade, drove his clawed hand through the man’s stomach, lifted him off his feet, and threw him into three other soldiers hard enough that all four bodies crashed to the ground in a tangle of broken bones.

Another soldier thrust a spear at Satou’s back. His enhanced perception had already tracked the attack. He spun, caught the spear shaft with one hand, yanked the wielder forward off-balance, and decapitated him with a backhand swipe of his claws.

Five more soldiers rushed him simultaneously from different angles, trying to overwhelm through coordinated assault.

[SHADOW BLADE]

Phantom weapons materialized in the air around Satou—eight blades made of solidified shadow, each one as sharp as steel and controlled by his will alone.

The shadow blades shot outward, each one targeting a different attacker. They punched through armor, through flesh, through bone. Five soldiers fell with weapons protruding from their chests, their coordinated attack ending before it properly began.

Satou didn’t pause. Didn’t slow. Kept moving through the human formation like death incarnate, his claws and shadow weapons creating a zone of absolute lethality wherever he passed.

[DRAGONFIRE MANIPULATION]

Flames erupted from his hands, not the normal orange-red of conventional fire but the white-hot intensity of dragonfire. He swept his arms in wide arcs, the flames washing over soldiers in gouts of superheated destruction.

Armor melted. Flesh burned. Men screamed as they died in agony, their blessed equipment providing no protection against draconic flame.

A squad of heavy infantry tried to form shield wall against him, their training and discipline holding despite the horror surrounding them.

[DRAGON’S ROAR]

Satou drew in a breath, feeling draconic power surge through his Dragon’s Heart, then released it in a focused sonic attack.

"RAAAAAAHHH!" 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

The sound wasn’t just loud—it was reality-shaking force that hit the shield wall like a physical battering ram. Shields shattered. Bones broke from the concussive impact. The entire squad was blown backward, their formation destroyed, their bodies tumbling across the battlefield.

Satou followed the roar with [SHADOW ABSOLUTE MOVEMENT], teleporting into the scattered squad before they could recover. His claws found throats, hearts, spines. Seven soldiers died in as many seconds.

A cavalry unit tried to flank him, their mounted charge aiming to run him down with lances and horse mass.

[TREMOR SENSE]

He felt the vibrations through the ground—hoofbeats approaching from his left at high speed, fifteen riders in coordinated formation.

Satou planted his feet and drew on another ability:

[EARTH MANIPULATION]

The ground in front of the cavalry unit suddenly erupted upward, a wall of stone and earth rising ten feet high directly in their path.

Horses crashed into the barrier at full gallop. Riders were thrown from saddles. Bones shattered on impact. The cavalry charge ended in a chaos of screaming horses and broken bodies.

Satou leaped over the earth wall he’d created, landed among the scattered cavalry, and began systematically killing every rider who wasn’t already dead from the crash.

[ENHANCED STRENGTH + BERSERK MODE]

He grabbed one cavalry rider by the leg and swung the armored human like a club, using the soldier’s body as a weapon to batter down three other riders. The improvised weapon died from the impacts, bones pulverized inside armor.

Another rider tried to stab Satou with a lance while he was occupied. The dragoblin’s enhanced perception tracked the attack, his superhuman reflexes allowing him to catch the lance shaft mid-thrust with one hand.

He yanked the rider from his saddle, slammed the man into the ground hard enough to crack stone, then impaled him through the chest with his own lance.

The entire cavalry unit—fifteen riders—dead in under thirty seconds.

Satou stood among the corpses, his crimson aura blazing, and scanned for the next threat.

The remaining human soldiers in this sector—maybe one hundred eighty left after his initial rampage—had pulled back into defensive formations, their earlier aggression replaced by desperate survival instinct.

Good. Let them see what was coming.

[NIGHTMARE LORD’S DOMAIN - GRAND MASTER]

Satou released his grip on reality, allowing nightmare energy to flow outward and warp the battlefield into something that belonged in darkest dreams.

The ground beneath the human soldiers turned black, reflective like obsidian. Shadows began moving independently of any light source, writhing and reaching toward the terrified humans. The air itself seemed to thicken, becoming harder to breathe, carrying the scent of blood and decay.

And in the shadows, faces appeared—twisted, horrifying visages of every person each soldier had ever killed, their expressions frozen in the moment of death, their mouths open in silent screams.

"What... what is this?!" one soldier shrieked, his sanity beginning to crack under the nightmare assault.

"It’s hell," another whispered. "We’re in hell. The demon sent us to hell."

[FEAR INCARNATE]

Satou activated one of the most terrifying abilities he’d absorbed from Merc Assault—the power to literally become the physical manifestation of terror itself.

His body shifted, his dragoblin features distorting into something that human minds couldn’t fully process. He was still physically present, but he was also something more—an impossible geometry of scales and claws and eyes that existed in too many dimensions, that hurt to look at, that made rational thought difficult.