Morning came and Kael was already outside before it finished arriving.

One twenty push-ups. Run, forest path, long route, ridge and back. Magic practice after that basics first to keep the channels warm, Hell’s Fire once for thirty seconds, Vector Authority under which he worked sword forms until his arms had filed enough complaints that continuing became counterproductive. Aether Step, sixty meters, the gap between coming down and going back up worked until it stopped wanting to collapse.

Blood ritual lasts. North corner of the cave, small cut, left palm, fifteen minutes, pond water after. The blood disappeared the moment it hit the stone the way it always did.

He sat against the cave wall for a while and talked about nothing in particular.

Then he walked back out.

*****

The system notified him on the way back to the estate.

[NEW TASK ASSIGNED.]

[A Level 5 Mutated Daemon has been detected wandering the eastern sector of the Northern Forest. It has been active for three days and is moving toward inhabited territory.]

[Objective: Locate and eliminate the target.] 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

[Reward: 300 PS.]

[Penalty: If the daemon reaches inhabited territory and causes casualties, 500 PS will be deducted.]

Kael read it twice.

Level 5.

He had hunted in the forest before wolves, the occasional One-Horned Rabbit that had made the mistake of being in the wrong clearing. Those were nuisances. Manageable. The kind of thing you dealt with between training sessions without adjusting your plans significantly.

Mutated daemons were a different category entirely.

The classification system the empire used had been established roughly two hundred years ago after the first major daemon incursion and had not changed substantially since because the fundamental nature of daemons had not changed substantially since. Ten levels. One through three covered things that trained soldiers handled in groups. Four and five were the line where people stopped sending groups. After that, numbers didn’t matter much anymore.

A Level 5 wandering the forest three days before it reached inhabited territory.

He checked his status window briefly. Silver grade mana heart, mid tier. Every stat is sitting at D range. Hell’s Fire, Vector Authority, Aether Step, Villain Halo available.

On paper he was not supposed to be able to handle a Level 5 alone.

He changed into his training clothes, packed the pond water, wrapped his left hand out of habit rather than necessity, and went back into the forest.

****

The eastern sector was further than his usual range.

He had run the long route enough times to know the terrain up to the ridge and back, but east of the ridge the forest changed character—older growth, denser canopy, the undergrowth thicker and less predictable underfoot. The light had a different quality here. Not darker exactly, more filtered, as though the canopy had been there long enough to have opinions about what it let through.

He moved carefully.

Mana breathing active, Ether Authority running at a low level in the background, enough to feel the ambient mana density without spending the reserves he was going to need shortly.

He had been moving for forty minutes when the baseline changed.

The birds stopped first. Then the undergrowth went quiet.

Then the wind in the upper branches kept going because wind did not have the instinct to stop, but everything that did have that instinct had already used it.

Kael slowed to a walk.

Then stopped.

He could feel it before he could locate it, a presence at the edge of his mana sense.

He pushed through a line of undergrowth and found a clearing.

The daemon was at the far edge of it.

He had time to register its size, substantially larger than the wolves he had hunted, the kind of mass that moved differently from the mass of things that had not been mutated and to register that it had not yet detected him, and to begin running the opening calculation of how to approach this.

And then the mana hit.

Not his mana. Not the daemon’s mana.

Everything’s mana.

A surge that moved through the entire forest simultaneously not from one direction, not from one source, from everywhere at once, pressing in from every point of the compass at the same moment, dense and total and carrying a quality that had nothing to do with any spell or aspect or affinity he had encountered before.

The daemon felt it too.

It stopped moving.

The forest, which had already been quiet, became something beyond quiet, the kind of silence that existed when every living thing in a space had simultaneously decided that being still and small was the correct response to what was currently happening around them.

Kael stood at the edge of the clearing with his hand still raised from where he had pushed through the undergrowth, and felt the mana pressing in from every direction, and thought one thing very clearly.

"..."

Something just woke up.

***

[VIEWER PEAK DETECTED]

[Goddess of love feels pity]

[Odin Laughing]