Chapter 59: The First of Many

David didn’t belong to a formation. He never had. While the others held their lines and covered each other’s blind spots, he moved freely across the field, weaving from fight to fight, using his talent *Gravitational Force* wherever it was needed most. A pull here, a shove there — enough to buckle a monster’s leg mid-charge or drag its weight sideways just as someone’s spear came down. He wasn’t fighting his own battle. He was fixing everyone else’s, one small correction at a time.

It was working. Fighters who should have been overwhelmed kept finding an extra half-second they hadn’t earned, and more often than not, that was enough. The field around him was a mess of noise and motion — shouted warnings, the wet crunch of spear points finding their mark, monsters shrieking as their footing gave out from under them for reasons they couldn’t understand. He was watching not only over his group but all other groups.

Then he saw something that had nothing to do with monsters at all.

At first it looked like an accident — one fighter stumbling into another, shoving him forward into the path of an incoming monster. But it wasn’t clumsy. It was deliberate, timed too well to be anything else. The man on the receiving end didn’t even get his spear up before the monster’s jaws closed on his shoulder. He screamed, high and raw, a sound that cut clean through the noise of the fight. It was the first time David had seen someone get seriously hurt out here — not grazed, not knocked down, but actually torn into.

*Fuck no.*

David was already moving before he’d finished the thought, cutting straight through the mess of the battlefield toward the sound.

A few heads turned at the scream. Nobody else moved. In a fight this size, there would always be wounded, and there would always be dead — that was simply the reality of it, bitter as it was. Stopping to help meant becoming the next one on the ground, so people did the only thing that made sense: they turned back to their own fights and gave the screaming man nothing more than that first glance. David was the only one on his way to help.

He wasn’t fast enough.

Before he could close the distance, he saw the same man — the one who’d done the shoving — draw a second monster in with a wide arc of movement, then peel off to the side at the last second, leaving the injured man alone and defenseless on the ground. The monster didn’t hesitate. It went straight for his throat. Blood sprayed out in a wide arc across the dirt. He didn’t even get the chance to scream this time. A heartbeat later, a spear from somewhere behind punched through the back of the monster’s skull, dropping it instantly.

Taken from NovelPhoenix, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

It didn’t matter. David had already seen everything he needed to see.

*NOOOO! I’LL KILL YOU, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!!!*

The rage that tore through him was immediate, and almost frightening in how little room it left for anything else. *How could you… you disgusting piece of trash.*

He forced himself to stop, just for a second. *What am I supposed to do now? Kill a person? Can I even kill him? Am I even allowed to kill him? FUCK!*

There was no clean answer, not one he could reach in the middle of a battlefield with monsters still pouring in from every direction. So he did the only thing he could. He burned the man’s face into his memory — every detail of it, the set of his jaw, the way he moved — and went back to work, dragging monsters off balance and out of stride for whoever needed the opening. But he never let the man fully out of his sight again, tracking him at the edge of his vision even while three or four other fights demanded his attention. If he tried that trick a second time, David would be close enough to stop it.

A few minutes later, he did.

David spotted him being chased by two monsters at once, cutting a path that led straight toward another fighter working alone nearby. The fighter saw them coming and planted his feet, spear raised. „Hey, what are you doing?!“ he shouted, swinging the point of his weapon toward the two monsters bearing down on him. At the last possible moment, the man peeled off to the side again, leaving the fighter to face both of them by himself.

This time, David made it.

He came in fast, wrenching one monster’s balance out from under it with a burst of gravity just as it lunged, buying the fighter the room he needed. The man who’d caused all of it looked briefly caught off guard — surprised David had actually shown up in time — but he recovered fast and threw himself back into the fight beside them like nothing had happened. Between the three of them, both monsters went down within seconds.

David didn’t waste time. He turned to the fighter he’d just saved. „Come with me,“ he said, and pulled him away, putting distance between him and the man who’d set the whole thing up.

The fighter didn’t fully understand what had just happened or why, but he didn’t argue either. He fell in beside David for only a moment before another monster closed in, and he was already turning to meet it, spear first.

Behind them, the culprit was questioning what just happened and if David’s intervention was just pure luck. Whatever David had meant by pulling the other fighter away clearly hadn’t landed the way he’d wanted it to. He would not bother himself over such things but David was one of the stronger ones, if not the strongest. He needed to become strong, way stronger even if it meant to go over mountains of dead bodies. *Even if he saw through me and my motives, I just need to be strong enough to fend him of, or even kill him. The time of law and justice is over. We are back at the law of jungle. Most of these guys may have not comprehended that fact but it has come undaubtetly.* He simply turned to face the next monster coming for him, like the whole thing had never happened at all.

Not long after, the fight in front of them died down. Bodies — mostly of monsters — littered the ground but here and there also lay some fallen human fighters.

But that was only the first fight. The first battle of many to follow.