“What do you mean, ‘Overlord’? You never mentioned anything about an Overlord nearby, that seems like a pretty big oversight!” Sebastian said in a panic.

  The two stood nearly frozen by the might of the Domain. Their eyes flitted across the area in search of any sign of the natural disaster in living form.

  Although the trees in this biome were sparse, large, and rather far in between, they interlocked in a thick canopy that blocked out much of the sky. The soft glow of twilight filtered through the forest as dusk fell.

  “There hasn’t been an Overlord anywhere near here for over a hundred years! They’re supposed to be monitored at all times. If one even looked this way they should know weeks, even months, in advance. They should have stopped all hunts, evacuated the woodlands.”

  “What, and no one told you guys? How does that make sense?” Sebastian said, his breath quickening.

  “It doesn’t!” Dolan almost shouted the words but forced himself to lower his voice. “Each team leader would have been called in. Bishop would have been informed. The president would have called a meeting— Wait… Damn it!”

  “What?”

  Dolan sighed. “Bishop was called in for a meeting, multiple times over the weeks before we left. He never went. He thought it was about us not meeting quotas or some other bullshit.”

  Sebastian struggled to move. He took a step back and turned to face Dolan. “Well that’s just great! So now what, what do we do?!”

  “If it noticed us, we’re already fucked. There’s not much of anything either one of us can do against an Overlord.”

  Sebastian could hear it in Dolan’s voice, and see it on his face—the hunter had given up.

  “That’s not good enough, Dolan! We can’t just stand here and wait for this thing to kill us.” Sebastian closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he opened his eyes again, he looked at Dolan. “OK, here’s what we do; we’re only a meter or two into the Domain, right? So, we back up, carefully, until we’re out of range of its Domain. And… and then we take it from there.”

  Dolan did his best to calm down and silently nodded. Even the Domain couldn’t stop his body from shaking. They slowly backed up, hoping that the Overlord hadn’t sensed them. What little hope they could muster, however, gradually faded with each step. They backed up one meter, then another, and then a third. They reached far beyond where the Overlord’s [Tyrannic Domain] had first reached them.

  “Damn, we should be out of range by now!” Dolan said with increasing panic in his voice.

  “Yeah, that means one of two things: either it’s just expanding the range of its Domain for some reason or—and this might be the more probable reason—it’s moving this way. That doesn’t mean that it knows we’re here!”

  But that doesn’t really matter anymore. If it’s coming this way then it’ll find us eventually anyway. Fuck, fuck, FUUCK! Ok, calm down! What can we do? We can’t stay here, we need to get out of this Domain. Where do we— right, the passage!

  “Dolan,” Sebastian said as he looked Dolan in the eyes. “Change of plans. We need to get out of its Domain, right now! We turn around, sprint out of range of the Domain, and then we move east as fast as we possibly can. The troll won’t be there, not now that we know why it left its territory to begin with. We get to the old passage and run through.”

  “Then what?!”

  “Then we hope this Overlord stays on this side of the mountain.”

  They shared a look and a nod, turned around and dashed back the way they came. Sebastian immediately circulated his essence to its max. Even as they strained themselves to their limits, using every ounce of strength and energy that could they muster, they were moving at a snails pace. The [Tyrannic Domain], this Overlord’s aura, was weighing them down. It was like running while completely submerged in an ocean of wet cement. An ordinary person, or even an above average person, would be instantly crushed under the pressure.

  Sebastian ran faster than Dolan. In spite of the level difference, and the fact that Dolan was a ranger so speed and agility was his specialty. The difference came in part from the essence which circulated through him along the path of his Technique but mostly from Sebastian’s physical cultivation. Now that he had reached [Core Formation] his body cultivation had climbed to new heights, even the Domain of an Overlord couldn’t fully suppress him.

  He still couldn’t move very fast. It was basically a jog rather than a sprint, but it was still faster than Dolan who moved as though he was speed walking. Dolan tried to activate his Movement Skills, but the [Tyrannic Domain] prevented his Skills from working properly.

  Sebastian wasn’t using any Skill, but he was circulating his essence in accordance with the [Fleeting Cloud Step] Technique. For some reason, he felt little to no resistance from the Domain as he moved his essence, nothing like what Dolan experienced.

  He tried to activate his [Mind’s Eye] to see how the Domain affected his Skill. It activated, but not at full capacity. [Mind’s Eye] was a Skill combined with a Technique, it seemed like the Skill aspect was suppressed while the Technique aspect fought against the suppression. It only reached out about a third of its usual range.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  That was enough to catch something moving along the canopy.

  He couldn’t tell exactly what it was. It looked almost like a snake without a proper head. Whatever it was, it was moving faster than them, and as soon as it caught up to them, it darted down toward them.

  “Duck!” Sebastian shouted.

  Dolan barely had time to realize what happened. The business with the nighthounds must have taught him to trust Sebastian’s senses, in spite of not knowing how they worked, because he lunged to the side without hesitation. He rolled away just as the tip of the snake-like attacker split into three prongs and pierced into the ground where Dolan had just been.

  Before Dolan even had time to look up to see what had happened, the snake-like creature had vanished. It had receded back into the canopy.

  Sebastian tried to look for it with his [Mind’s Eye]—which at this point was basically just a weaker version of his [Spirit Union] Technique rather than the combined Skill—but it was gone.

  “What the hell was that?!” shouted Dolan as he got back up.

  “I have no idea. It looked like a snake, but I doubt it actually was.”

  Dolan visibly slumped as the last shred of hope evaporated from him. “There aren’t many monsters that would live inside the Domain. That has to be the Overlord. It found us,” he said, dejected.

  Sebastian didn’t allow himself to lose hope. He was going to survive, no matter what it took. Exactly how he would do that in this current situation was another question. He ignored Dolan’s despair, and he pushed his [Spirit Union] out as far as he could muster and was ready to react the moment that thing came back.

  He didn’t have to wait for very long.

  Less than a minute later, it returned. Although, it seemed to have learned from last time.

  It didn’t linger in the canopy before attacking but shot through the branches and swerved down toward Sebastian in one fell swoop. Even though he was ready for it, and wasn’t quite as suppressed by the Domain as Dolan, he still barely had time to dodge.

  His essence was already circulating according to the path of the [Fleeting Cloud Step] as he waited, so when the time came he jumped to the side in a fraction of a second.

  This time, since he was ready and focused, his senses caught it.

  The snake-like creature—which at this point Sebastian was certain was a part of the Overlord like Dolan suggested—looked more like an strange arm and hand. It was roughly the thickness of a man’s leg and the tip split into three gnarled and gangly fingers, or rather—appendages, which formed what he guessed was this monster’s version of a hand. This whole thing was sickly grey, as though there was no life within the flesh.

  It receded just as quickly again after Sebastian dodged. This time, however, Dolan saw it as well.

  “Dolan, have you ever seen this thing before? Or at least heard of something? You said the Overlords are monitored, right? Isn’t there something you know about this thing that we can use to our advantage?”

  Dolan scoffed. “Are you kidding me? They don’t exactly hand out classified information about Overlords to the public. I’ve never seen anything like this before in my life.”

  An exasperated sigh escaped Sebastian at the sight of Dolan’s attitude. “Even so, you’re the expert here! We don’t have time to just stand around and dodge this thing!”

  Dolan turned to Sebastian and held his hands out in defeat. “I don’t know! I guess the fact that it hasn’t just caught us and it’s just prodding us with this thing means it’s not serious at least. It might lose its interest—“

  SCHWOOP!

  Dolan was interrupted by another strike. This time, he couldn’t dodge.

  Neither of them saw it coming, it emerged from the distance along the ground rather than the canopy, which was where their focus had been.

  It grabbed Dolan by his waist.

  He was shot to the ground, and just as he looked up at Sebastian, terror evident in his eyes, the claw dragged him away at a speed beyond anything Sebastian could match, even at his peak.

  A trail of blood covered the ground along the trail where the strange hand had dragged Dolan away. Sebastian took a few steps to follow it but quickly stopped. He knew in his heart that Dolan was dead, even though he refused to truly believe it.

  Being caught by a level 80+ monster was a death sentence.

  He dropped to his knees. His legs simply couldn’t hold his weight anymore. It wasn’t a matter of strength or fatigue, it was as if his brain was no longer connected to them. As if he was floating around and his body was merely a shell, a broken husk, disconnected from his mind.

  He sat there for a minute. Grief, guilt, and despair flooded every fiber of his being.

  After the troll, the only thing that kept him sane was the fact that he was not alone. Dolan had become his anchor once the rest were gone.

  Now, he found himself all alone, again.

  Although he wasn’t quite dead or dying just yet, images of everything that he had been through so far raced through his mind. The excitement of arriving in a new magical world. The pain and anger of being discarded and left to die. The excitement of discovering cultivation. The comfort of being accepted by a group of hunters. All of which led him right here, alone in the heart of the Silvervale Woodlands hoping that an Overlord was satisfied with taking his friend, that it would simply leave him be.

  That minute felt like a year.

  Finally he decided that he couldn’t just wait around and see if the gangly arm came back.

  He had to survive.

  He had to run.

  This was the second time that Sebastian was forced to run away as his friends were caught by monsters stronger than them. It pained him to his very core. Not just the sorrow from their deaths, but that he was so weak that he had no choice but to use the death of his friend as a distraction.

  Still, he had no choice.

  Running back to the passage Dolan had pointed out and reaching the other side of the mountain—in the hope that the Overlord would stay on this side and basically just ignore him—was still his best option.

  He took a deep breath and turned around to keep running. He closed off his mind and simply ran as fast as he could.

  Whoosh!

  Thud!

  Sebastian hit the ground, face down, hard enough for the air pressure to blow the ground clean of leaves around him.

  “What the fuck!” he exclaimed in shock.

  He looked down toward his leg. Those three gangly fingers gripped his leg, just above the ankle—hard.

  He tried to kick at it but before he had a chance to do much of anything, the hand yanked him away.

  Dragged across the ground of the forest, he weaved between giant trees. He reached out and tried to grab hold of a tree trunk, but he didn’t even slow down as his nails tore through the wood.

  His other hand was gripped tightly around his sword. The simple sword belt wasn’t enchanted at all and snapped when he was dragged away. He only just caught it due to his [Spirit Union] still being active. His backpack fortunately was enchanted, nothing major but enough that it endured as he flitted across the forest floor. Although that was probably because he was mostly on his stomach.

  If not for the protection of his physical cultivation, he would have been ground to paste by the friction as he was dragged across small rocks and tree roots sticking out of the ground.

  His recent breakthrough kept him in one piece but he still accumulated countless cuts and bruises.

  Night had fallen, Dolan was gone, and Sebastian disappeared into the depths of the forest.

  Patreon to stay 10 chapters ahead of Royal Road and to get a preview of my next story!