Chapter 68 — The Weight of the Hunt
The cliff was cold.
Not the natural cold of the mountains — Steve had already grown used to that, had learned to ignore it after weeks of hiking at high altitude. This was a different kind of cold. The kind that is born inside the chest when the eyes land on something the mind still cannot fully process.
She was there.
In the fifth wagon.
The black iron cage had bars as thick as an adult's fist, spaced just wide enough to let light through. Five padlocks. Chains wrapped around the outside as if the bars and iron alone weren't enough. As if whoever had placed her there knew exactly what they were imprisoning.
Steve didn't blink.
He wasn't breathing properly.
Skin white as freshly fallen snow. Hair that shifted between pure white and silvery-gray tones, falling in waves down to her waist even inside that filthy cage. The eyes — green. Emerald green. Visible even from a distance, even through the bars, as if they produced their own light instead of merely reflecting it.
It was her.
The same one he had seen in the temple of the Death Cult. The same one who had fought the eyeless corrupted entity while the ceiling collapsed and everyone ran. The same one who had been whispering inside his head for months in dreams of endless white plains.
"Kid."
Dagon's voice came low. Close.
Steve didn't move.
"Steve."
Nothing.
Dagon placed a firm hand on his shoulder — a grip that didn't allow ignorance. Steve felt the weight of the fingers pass through his clothes, through his skin, anchoring his body to that moment.
"What is it?"
Steve opened his mouth. Closed it. Tried again.
"It's her," he finally said, almost soundlessly.
Dagon followed his gaze. The veteran's eyes swept the caravan below with the methodical precision of someone who had spent three years learning to read battlefields in fractions of a second. Ten wagons. One hundred and fifty prisoners of various races. Twenty werewolves positioned in pairs along the column. Three figures in the center — the General, the Mage, the Swordsman.
And the fifth wagon.
The special cage.
Something shifted in Dagon's expression. Subtle. Almost imperceptible. But Steve was close enough to notice — the slight tightening of the jaw, the eyes that lingered one second longer on that cage before continuing their sweep.
*It's her. The same girl from that place.*
He didn't say it out loud. He didn't need to. The memory of the destroyed temple returned whole and without warning — the collapsing ceiling, the two figures colliding in the center of the chamber, the silence that had cut through all reality when they touched. It had taken Steve months to confirm that he had survived. About her, he had never known anything.
Until now.
"Steve." Dagon's tone had changed. Not urgent. Not soft. Direct. "Pull yourself together. We have a hundred and fifty prisoners down there and three hunters who won't hesitate. We need a plan."
Steve turned his head slowly.
Dagon was looking at him. Not at the wagon. At *him*. Evaluating. Measuring what he saw.
"Yes," Steve said.
He tilted his head. Took a deep breath. Let the air out slowly.
"Yes. You're right."
"Good." Dagon turned to the group. "The plan is simple. We descend together, split the werewolves, keep the three hunters occupied long enough to open the wagons. Jelim — aerial rearguard. Keara — support and healing. Orzun, Steve — with the werewolves. I'll handle the rest."
Orzun gripped both knives. His knuckles turned white. His eyes fixed on the scene below with an intensity that wasn't strategy — it was ancient anger finally given a direction to go.
"For the freedom of the Underworld," he said, his voice low and hard as stone.
No one argued.
---
Down below, among the wagons, Fanzel stopped.
He closed his eyes for three seconds. His fingers traced an invisible pattern in the air before him, the tracking magic spreading like a silent net over the surroundings.
"Lord Dregor," he said, opening his eyes. "I believe we are being watched."
Dregor didn't turn immediately. He continued walking along the column with slow, deliberate steps, like a man who knows no haste because nothing in the world has ever inspired enough haste in him — until today.
"What do you mean, Fanzel?" he said. "Who?"
"Up there." Fanzel pointed with two fingers toward the cliff. "On that cliff, my lord."
Dregor stopped. He turned his single functional eye in the indicated direction.
Calculated silence.
"Are they a threat to our merchandise?"
Fanzel tilted his head, the magic still active. His blue pupils pulsed faintly with mana.
"From my detection… there is an elderly man. His presence is… considerable. He might give us some trouble." He paused. "Other than that, the rest are all weak. A girl with a mask — presence and power completely neutral, impossible to assess accurately. The others barely register."
"So just him, then."
"Essentially, my lord."
Dregor remained quiet for a moment that stretched longer than it should have. Then he broke into a wide smile that didn't reach his seeing eye.
"It doesn't matter. If we eliminate one, it will be enough to throw the rest into disarray."
He turned to Fanzel.
"Your teleportation magic. What is the farthest place you can send someone from here?"
Fanzel returned the smile with one of his own — narrower, more calculated.
"The Great Forest, my lord. Near Thornvale. Two days' walk from the nearest city."
"Place that portal in front of me," Dregor said. "And make it invisible."
"Understood, my lord."
On the other side, Dragf grumbled without bothering to turn his head.
"Why don't we just let them attack and finish them off at once?"
Dregor didn't get irritated. He never got irritated with Dragf. It was like getting irritated with a rock for being a rock.
"Because underestimating an enemy is the greatest mistake a warrior can make," he said, his voice flat as a fact taught to a slow student. "I respect my enemies. That's why I'm still alive."
Dragf didn't reply. Which meant he had heard and silently disagreed — the only type of disagreement Dregor allowed him.
Fanzel was already working. His hands traced runes in the air in front of Dregor's armor. The portal formed as a seventy-centimeter-wide circle, its surface translucent like liquid glass. Then it disappeared completely. No trace. No glow. Just air.
"Ready, my lord."
---
Up on the cliff, Dagon said simply:
"Let's go."
Jelim raised her hands.
The descent was silent. The group rose from the cliff, suspended by her telekinesis — Steve felt his stomach rise as his feet lost contact with the rock, the underground world opening up beneath him in all its dark expanse. The torches of the wagons below looked like inverted stars.
Then someone in the caravan shouted.
"Invaders!"
The descent became a controlled fall. Orzun's feet touched the ground first, and the orc didn't wait even a second — the two knives were already in his hands, his body already in motion, his voice tearing out full of something that had been trapped for far too long.
"For the freedom of the Underworld!"
And he ran.
Steve landed and drew his sword by instinct. The werewolves turned from the line of wagons, partial transformation already active — elongated jaws, fingers ending in claws, yellow eyes in the underground darkness. They were big. They were fast. They were scared on the inside but trained not to show it.
*Slaves,* Steve thought, looking at one that was advancing. *Just like the prisoners in the wagons. Except these carry their chains on the outside.*
The sword slashed.
The werewolf didn't even flinch.
His arm simply intercepted the blade with his bare forearm, the metal scraping against skin that was harder than it should have been, and the look he gave Steve wasn't one of threat — it was the look of someone staring at something irrelevant that insists on existing.
The punch came before Steve could process it.
Impact to the face. A white explosion of light behind his eyes. The floor of the underground valley met his back with enough force to knock the air out of his lungs all at once, and Steve rolled two meters before stopping, staring up at the stone ceiling with that strange clarity that comes immediately after pain.
A few meters behind, Orzun was leaping over a wagon, knife sinking into a werewolf's shoulder, body twisting to absorb the impact before disappearing into the shadows between the wheels. He reappeared on the other side, slashed, and vanished again. He was good. He was very good — movements born from years of surviving in tunnels where space was always too small and the enemy always too big.
But it wasn't enough.
A hand closed around his ankle as he tried to leap again.
Fingers like claws. Strength that didn't belong to a body of that size.
The werewolf grabbed Orzun by the ankle and spun — a simple, almost casual motion — and the orc described an arc through the air with a speed that made the wind whistle before slamming into the ground with an impact that echoed through the entire valley. Steve heard the sound from where he was. He saw Orzun try to get up and fail, his arms giving out before completing half the motion.
Then he heard footsteps.
Fast. Firm. Familiar.
Dagon passed over him without slowing down — literally over him, a jump that left him clearing Steve's prone body as if it were a training obstacle — and the kick that followed struck the nearest werewolf in the face with enough force to send him colliding into the three behind him.
The four fell like dominoes.
Dagon landed. Looked at the werewolves on the ground. Then at those still standing, who had stopped moving.
"Don't fall behind, boys," he said, his voice casual as if commenting on the weather.
And he advanced.
From the air, Jelim worked in silence. There was no warning. No elaborate gesture. Just werewolves who suddenly stopped, heads tilting at an angle that wasn't voluntary, followed by the dry snap that ended everything.
"Jelim!" Steve had managed to sit up, his face throbbing. "You don't have to kill them! Knock them unconscious!"
The mask turned in his direction. The eyes hidden beneath it assessed him with that particular coldness that wasn't cruelty — it was simply the absence of hesitation.
"I prefer to eliminate evil at the root," she said. "And don't interfere in my fight. Worry more about your own."
Steve opened his mouth to reply.
Golden light landed on him before the words could come out.
Warm. Immediate. Like someone lifting a weight off his shoulders that he hadn't even known he was carrying. The ribs that had contracted from the impact opened again. The throbbing jaw stabilized. Steve turned.
Keara was behind him, hands glowing, a brief smile on her lips.
The same light moved sideways, found Orzun on the ground, and enveloped him. The orc took a deep breath and his eyes opened with the immediate confusion of someone who had just received strength he hadn't expected.
"Go," Keara said, and there was something in her voice that wasn't an order but reached the same place. "Show what you're capable of."
Steve remained still for a second.
Then he closed his eyes.
There was no other way. The sword wasn't enough — that had been proven thirty seconds ago. Fighting with the body was insufficient. He knew it. Keara knew it. Even Orzun probably knew it now.
He raised his hands.
The sensation was immediate — not like pain, but like recognition. Something inside his chest that moved in response, like a muscle that had been contracted for too long and was finally given permission to relax.
**[SYSTEM PERCENTAGE — PARTIAL ACTIVATION]**
**User: Steve Matsinhe**
**Attribute: Chaos**
**Percentage: 10%**
**Usage Time: 5 minutes**
**Warning: Limited control — fragment observing**
*Five minutes. Less than last time.*
Steve looked at the notification with the part of his mind that still processed numbers while the rest prepared itself.
*Doesn't matter. Five minutes is enough for what I need to do.*
The scythe materialized in his right hand. Black handle with purple runes that pulsed like something alive. The curved blade that distorted the light around it, that made the eyes receive information they didn't know how to organize.
---
In the fifth wagon, she felt it.
It wasn't gradual. It was immediate — like a switch flipped violently, like a door opened to a cold draft. She rose from the crouched position where she had been sitting and her emerald eyes swept the space between the bars with an urgency she hadn't shown in days.
The connection.
That specific vibration. That pattern of chaos that didn't belong to this world but existed within it anyway.
She forced herself to look at the battle outside. The distance and the darkness of the Underworld made it difficult but not impossible. And then she saw him.
The boy with the scythe.
The defenseless face from the Death Cult temple — older now, more marked, different in ways that weren't just physical — but recognizable.
She trembled.
Not from fear. From something more complicated.
"It's him," she said to herself, her voice so low that the walls of the cage barely absorbed it. "He who has been using the power of chaos."
---
Dregor watched Dagon advancing through the line of werewolves with that specific satisfaction of a man who recognizes an equal weight to his own.
He left the werewolves behind. He walked in the opposite direction, each step opening space between himself and the chaos of battle, until there was only empty ground and a distant torch between him and the gray-haired veteran who moved like someone who had long stopped worrying about what could harm him.
"Why don't you fight someone your own size?"
Dagon stopped.
He looked at Dregor — one meter eighty tall, one hundred and fifty kilos of muscle, the double-bladed axe that must have weighed as much as Steve, the three braids in his beard, the blind eye that looked at nothing while the other looked at everything.
And he smiled.
"You finally decided to show up," he said. "This was starting to get boring."
"The ones who are easy to kill are always the ones who think the most of themselves," Dregor replied, drawing his axe.
"Let's see."
Dagon burst forward at speed. Not the speed of a trained human — the speed of three years accumulated in a fantasy world inside a body that had long stopped obeying normal limitations. The underground ground passed beneath his feet like an irrelevant surface.
And then he felt it.
Something wrong.
Not a threat. Not physical danger. Something more subtle — an absence where there should have been resistance, a pocket of air that behaved slightly differently than it should.
He slowed down by half a step.
It was enough.
Dregor didn't run. He didn't retreat. He ran toward him with the speed of a man who fears no impact, still smiling, and the distance between them closed to thirty centimeters before Dagon fully processed what he was seeing.
The portal was in front of Dregor.
Invisible. Perfect. Positioned exactly at the point where Dagon would have to pass.
"*Shit—*"
The thought didn't finish.
The translucent surface swallowed him whole without resistance, without sound, without any ceremony for the disappearance of someone who had spent three years surviving everything this world had to offer.
Dregor stopped. He looked at the spot where Dagon had been.
"Problem solved," he said simply.
---
The Great Forest did not welcome the arrival kindly.
The impact was hard — ground of roots and damp leaves, the body rolling on instinct before any conscious thought, the sword scraping against stone as he tried to brake. Dagon remained still for a second that felt longer than it should have, staring at the sky visible through the dense canopy.
Sky.
Real sky. With light filtered in green and gray and that specific quality of air that only exists on the surface, with wind and humidity and the smell of living earth.
He sat up slowly.
He looked around. Enormous trees with trunks meters in diameter. Moss covering everything in a dark green mantle. Pale blue crystals embedded in the bark pulsing softly.
He knew this place.
This was the forest where he had first found Steve. Where the cultists had hunted them. Where everything had begun.
Dagon remained quiet for exactly five seconds.
Then he placed a hand on his forehead and closed his eyes with the expression of a man who had just realized the full extent of how thoroughly he had been tricked.
"*Son of a—*"
---
In the Underworld, the space where Dagon had been was empty.
Steve saw it.
Keara saw it.
Orzun, still on the ground, saw it.
The silence that followed lasted only a second but was dense enough to be physical. The battle continued around them — werewolves, wagons, prisoners trying to understand what was happening — but in that specific second, every member of the group was looking at the same empty spot.
"How did he—" Keara began, her voice failing midway.
"It was a trap," Steve said.
The scythe was still in his hand. The purple runes pulsed. The timer on the HUD advanced.
*Four minutes and twelve seconds.*
Steve looked at the hunters in the distance. At Dregor, who had already turned his back on the spot where Dagon had disappeared, as if the matter were closed. At Fanzel, who observed the battle with that calculated smile that wasn't joy — it was the satisfaction of a plan executed.
Then he looked at Keara. At Orzun, who was trying to get up again. At Jelim in the air, who, for the first time since Steve had known her, had completely stopped.
"Damn," Jelim said. "I was stupid. Again."
There was no anger in her voice. There was something worse — the dry acknowledgment of her own mistake, spoken aloud, which for Jelim was the equivalent of screaming.
Steve took a deep breath.
Dagon was gone. Orzun was out of the fight. It was three against three hunters, twenty werewolves, and a hundred and fifty prisoners to free.
The scythe pulsed in his hand.
*Four minutes.*
Steve looked at the fifth wagon.
At the black iron cage with its five padlocks and the figure with white-silver hair who watched him from inside with emerald eyes that produced their own light.
He breathed again.
"Alright," he said, his voice steadier than he felt. "Without Dagon, it's just us. So we finish this with what we have."
---
Translation complete. Let me know if you need any adjustments!