Jun stared at the words for an unknowable amount of time.

  Scouring them. Imprinting them. Burning them into his mind.

  He thought he should feel something. Remorse perhaps? All laid out on paper like this, his actions weren’t exactly the noblest sort.

  And yet this place…?

  It made a mockery of the human condition. Dulled sensation. Stymied emotion. And it didn’t help that the only times when he could feel things like pain, regret, or the pangs of his conscience with any degree of urgency, were the times when he was also effectively immortal.

  He knew, intellectually, that he was losing parts of himself. And yet, whether it be out here, or in there, he couldn’t find the will to care.

  His deeds had earned him a hundred additional attribute points to bolster his already padded numbers—truly unheard of levels of growth. And all it had cost him, was to pick up the butchers bill on his way out—a fairly hefty sum all things told. Still, he didn’t regret it.

  He hadn’t killed anyone who wouldn’t have killed him first, and deserved far worse than what they’d got besides.

  Though that wasn’t to say he was terribly proud of himself either. He really didn’t know how he felt. Numb mostly? Excited at the prospect of trying again? And yet…? What his mind kept straying back to, time and time again, was just how easy it had been.

  How easy it had felt.

  He decided it probably wasn’t something he should get used to, that strange ease—simulation or not. He’d try to avoid raising the Butcher’s Bill series for the time being.

  Especially since it looked like acting the good samaritan was just as profitable, if not more so.

  In any event, he felt the tug of the trial worlds calling to him. And, feeling somewhat guilty at not feeling guilty, he promptly answered that call with a smile on his face. Pulling up the next in a long line of test mantras, he didn’t even wait to read the resulting prompt.

  “Assimilate!”

  Trial Difficulty: 2 Stars

  Western Fief of the Northern Principalities

  A Barren Stretch of Bone Dry Fallow

  Weren’t for the first time Will Neff slowed old Bessie girl to a lax and leisure so’s he could assess the worst of it, and he figured it wouldn’t be the last time neither.

  Didn’t take but a minute to spot the culprit, pry the little sucker free, and set the plow back to rights before nudging Bessie on. Slipping the plow-stone into a pouch at his waist, his thoughts drifted back to little William and his collection, as they were like to do wherever small rocks were concerned.

  God only knew what the boy saw in the darned pebbles. Still, reckoned his naming day was just around the corner, and a little forethought now went a long way, as his Da’ would always say.

  Times were hard enough as is, what with the drought and all, and if keeping an eye out for the odd rock here and there was all the complication the lord saw fit to send his way? Well, he’d consider himself a lucky man indee-!

  Will Neff broke off from his inner monologue. Something he couldn’t quite make out pricking up Bessie’s ears.

  “What is it girl? What do you hear?”

  Just about as soon as the words had left his mouth, however, he caught it. The faintest whisper. Like a buzzing in his ear. A quiet whine that only seemed to be growing louder by the second.

  “…aaaaaaaaAAAHHHH!”

  THOOM!

  About a hundred paces distant, dry dirt exploded upward into a mushroom shaped cloud—the reverberations of the impact enough to make an old man’s knees wobble, and send a shiver up his spine.

  Will Neff and Bessie both stood there in twin states of slack jawed stupefaction.

  Like as not his lovely wife, prudent soul that she was, would’ve already had them packing—hoofing it as far and as fast as their legs would carry them. Will, on the other hand, was simply too darn confused to be sensible. Eventually the dust settled enough to reveal a young man in dirt caked overalls, slowly staggering to his feet—looking like he’d had a few too many, wherever it was he’d come from.

  The young man coughed, waving away what dirt still hung in the air. Will Neff approached cautiously, Bessie plodding close behind.

  “You alright son? Was a mighty hard fall you just took to be getting up so soon like it weren’t nothing,” tipping back the brim of his straw hat, Will Neff scrutinized first the cloudless blue sky, then the unplowed fields extending for acres all around, with growing incomprehension. “A mighty hard fall…”

  Eventually the boy cleared his lungs enough to answer.

  “I’m fine. Just… a bit out of practice. Still need to get a handle on things. Work out a few kinks, you know how it is. This your land?”

  “Aye,” Will grunted in the affirmative.

  “It’s… uh, nice!” he looked out over the desolate expanse of dry soil, a strained smile on his face. “Anyway, I don’t intend to impose on your hospitality any more than I have to. Just need a chance to catch my breath, if that’s alright with you, and then I’ll be on my way.”

  Will Neff watched the way the young man wobbled on his feet, like a newborn calf barely a breath into this world, and looked at him somewhat skeptically.

  “Aye…”

  He reached under his hat to scratch at his sweaty temple.

  “Well, not that I’m impartial to folks falling out from the sky and the like, but I reckon it’s best if you stayed a while. Figure the local priest would like a word, whatever the case may be.”

  “No, really. Like I said, I just need a second to recalibrate and then I’ll be out of your hair.”

  Will Neff shifted the hoe he’d been carrying so that it sat more comfortably on his shoulder. Not brandishing it so much as bringing attention to it—reminding the suspicious looking character that the sharpened implement was there.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Reckon I’ll have to insist, if you don’t mind. Ain’t right, folks falling from the sky like that,” the more he spoke, the more certain of his conclusions he became. “Reckon that sounds a lot like witchcraft to me. And so I’m figuring it’s best if you come along now and let the good priest see to you, so’s we can set this all to rights.”

  A look of what he could’ve sworn was exasperation briefly flit across the strangers features before he spoke. Will Neff might’ve mistaken the words mumbled under his breath for witch speak if’n his hearing weren’t so sharp.

  “Witches. Why is it always witches with these people?”

  And then, before Will Neff could reach forward and restrain the witch, for that was surely what he was, he crouched down low and exploded upward—quickly disappearing from sight. For a time, Will Neff and Bessie both stared up where the witch had flown, their expressions equally unreadable.

  Then, Will Neff set to the lengthy task of unharnessing old Bessie.

  He would need to set out soon, after all, if he were to have a chance of contacting the village priest before nightfall.

  He didn’t know what exactly he’d been expecting, raking in celestial dew by the bucketful, and effectively multiplying every single attribute overnight.

  He knew what he hadn’t been expecting was that he’d effectively be forced to relearn how to be a person from scratch. You know, simple things like: how to walk, how to run, or, how to stand upright without accidentally flexing a minor muscle in his leg he hadn’t even known existed, and so launch himself through the red side of a far off barn.

  Jun crashed through the forest canopy to the staccato snap of breaking branches. The occasional leafy appendage refusing to give way before him, instead making a valiant effort to break him as he pressed ever onward.

  He was folded, bundled, and blinded in rapid succession.

  Rebounding off of obstacles when he didn’t plow straight through them outright. Flipping, spinning, dashing his head left and right. Unsure whether up was up, or down was down, and too nauseous to really care either way.

  Thankfully, where there might’ve been pain before—the debilitating jolt of a broken bone or twenty—now there was only the dull thump of an especially sharp gust of wind. His one hundred and forty six points in resiliency no joke, it would seem.

  Eventually, his wayward tumble came to an end. The blanket of gnarled roots he landed on about as soft as a sack of goose down bedding, thanks to his titles.

  Not that he was feeling particularly thankful at the moment.

  For a time he merely lay there, staring—leaves drifting down from the meandering path he’d cleared in the canopy. Rolling out of the indent he’d made in the root system, he then carefully, carefully, rose to his feet.

  It was like trying to master his circulation technique all over again, except several dozen times worse in every respect. It had taken him a great deal of practice, and not a small number of demolished homes, just to confidently put one foot in front of the other.

  His efforts at gaining control over himself not aided in the least by the locals’ not taking too kindly to him in general. Indeed, it was as if he couldn’t go two wobbly steps without the threat of a visit from some priest or another.

  An appointment which, if kept, he could immediately tell, simply by the ominous notes in their tone—as if they were delivering some dire and weighty pronouncement—he was not likely to enjoy overly much.

  The first thing he’d noticed, upon entering the two star ranked trial, was that gravity no longer worked the way it ought. Or, that was to say, because of his enhanced might, gravity no longer constrained him the way it should.

  The second thing he’d noticed was how dreary everything was. Somehow overcast and desaturated, even when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Foliage was sharp, brambles were prevalent, and the people were the prickliest of all.

  Unlike the previous trial worlds, he didn’t suspect he’d be spending an awful lot of time here. Only so long as it took for him to truly get a handle on his newfound capabilities.

  Or, at the very least, stop slinging himself at anything that didn’t move at great, no, scratch that, damn near suicidal speeds. Seriously. He could’ve sworn he’d seen a person shaped indent in the last tree he’d “bumped into.”

  And that just couldn’t be good for the local ecosystem.

  Somewhere, tucked away beneath the eaves of a dark and twisted forest, a coven of witches make ready their grim ritual.

  Chanting in a language not meant for mortal tongues, and even less so for mortal ears, they sway in time over a bubbling cauldron aglow with sinister light. Black blood, as thick as tar, dribbles from identically slit wrists. Tracing an oily procession down sallow, pockmarked skin.

  Drops parting reluctantly from thick rivulets of corruption, to water the thirsty soil at their bare and bony feet. As they list from side to side, the forest around them seems to sway in turn. The creaking of wood, the cracking of branches, the guttural pronunciations of a vile and demonic tongue.

  And over it all rang the sorrowful wailing of a child far away from home. Of several in fact.

  A desperate cry for help which—so deep within the forests most learn from early childhood never to tread—they each knew was unlikely to be answered.

  And yet, nailed to the trunks of trees by their hands and feet, crucified before the alter of a dark and sadistic god, and overseen by hideous chimeras—the slapdash melding of human and animal flesh—it wasn’t much that they could do but to voice their horror.

  Very soon the savage chanting turned from barely audible mumble, to unbearable outcry, the chorus of tone deaf voices practically racing towards the dreaded crescendo.

  And as raspy voices are raised in exultant ecstasy, as chimeras fall to their knees and thrash in writhing agony, the children grow increasingly hysteric in turn—frantic with pain and panic and sorrow. Their screams grown to a fever pitch, the shrieking of tea kettles all, as the bloody symbols carved into their bare flesh begin to glow like burning coals.

  In moments their eyes begin to transform as well, the black overtaking the white in very short order. Their hair to grow white, and long, and luxurious. The marks on their young flesh to become permanent fixtures, burned directly into the tissue like some sadistic form of brand.

  And in the midst of all this?

  Above the bubbling cauldron, a figure begins to emerge, coalescing from the billowing clouds of acrid smoke. A horned silhouette, twice the size of a man, whose mere presence drenches the entire forest in waves of manifest dread. Feelings of inexplicable terror which only seem to heighten by the second.

  Two glowing red eyes emerge from the gloom, snapping wide to take in the mortal world for the first time in a millennia. Its voice comes out the rasp of razor blade on bone.

  “Ahhh… freedom at long last! But… what is this? Mortals…? No… No, I smell a hint if my mark upon you. My descendants then…? How very curious…”

  “Y-yes lord!” croaked the high priestess of the coven. “It has taken many generations, but the blood compact, first signed by our foremothers during the dark ages long past, has been repaid in full!”

  “Oh? I see. And so it would seem we’ve reached a final accord. And yet… you still seek to ply me with treats?” the shadowy figure chuckled, gesturing towards the crucified children—a red scaled claw of flesh and blood briefly emerging from the smoke, before disappearing into the murk once more. “You’ll be wanting something more then, I suspect?”

  “I-if you would be so amenable lord!” the high priestess managed past a wave of fear and disbelief.

  Breaching the smoke as it just had should not have been possible at this stage of the binding. Was the demon lord really so strong as to pierce the veil separating the in-between from the mortal plane by force of will alone?

  “That… remains to be seen,” the demon purred. “I am much diminished from my time in the under realms. It has left me… quite famished. First I shall feast. Then we may go over the… particulars of your request,” the coven shared wary looks at this, not bolstered in the least by the demon’s capriciousness.

  Nevertheless, they set to unraveling the binding circle with practiced gestures and guttural words. After all, what else could they reasonably do?

  “Glory…” the demon shuddered as he watched them work. “But it is good to be back-!”

  A wailing something hurtled end over end, battering it’s way through the tangled forest canopy like an enraged bull through an alchemist’s shop.

  ”What in the-?!”

  BONG!