The night wasn't quiet.
The screams were growing in intensity — the deaths that had previously arrived in a cadenced and distant way now seemed to have no interval, as though the spacing that had existed before was the product of some calculation that had been abandoned. I tried to build theories to understand what had changed. The number of remaining human screams shouldn't have increased — it should have decreased. Unless what had changed wasn't the number of humans being found, but the behavior of those hunting them.
And then the answer arrived before I finished formulating my theory.
[ Individual Mission generated: ] [ You are an example to the human race — the first living being to kill a race more than 1000 positions above your rank. ] [ Due to this, a new mission has been generated in exchange for double the reward. ] [ Accept? Yes / No ]
I went still.
Individual missions didn't exist — or at least, I had never read about them. The system always operated in groups or by race, never by individual. The Oasis recognized collective events, recorded race achievements, announced victories that mattered for the whole. It had never personalized a reward for a single being of a single race in a single moment of the Purge.
And what made me most curious wasn't the mission itself, but the fact that it seemed to be optional. Accept or refuse. The Oasis offering a choice was something even more incredible than the announcement itself — as though the system had recognized it had reached the limit of what it could demand and had decided to ask instead of order.
The problem was there was no way to know the content of the mission without accepting it. Which was, by definition, madness. The possibilities could be many — but none as easy as killing a Birman from behind, with the advantage of terrain and the element of surprise. Not for double the reward, at least.
"Can I know what I need to do before accepting?"
Silence. I knew that speaking as I did with Zeus would probably have no effect — the system wasn't Zeus, there wasn't the same interface, there wasn't the same channel. But trying was the least I could do before making a decision with incomplete information.
My hands were trembling while the mission blinked, occupying a large part of my vision with the insistence of something that had learned that persistence overcame resistance. I still had forty hours until the end of the Purge. I was hungry and thirsty, but safe — the enemy didn't know my location, I had confirmed that when the brother had passed meters from me without hesitating. If I stayed still, I would earn the reward regardless of whether I accepted or not. The double was tempting, but the unknown mission was a variable I couldn't calculate. The correct thing would be to stay still and wait.
Even so, my fingers slid to the option.
"Yes."
There was a very clear reason why I had risked killing that Birman — and the reason was power. Not the power to survive. The power to prevail. To carry everyone important to me without depending on luck or circumstance, without needing the planets to align in a specific way for the people I cared about to stay alive. Surviving wasn't enough — I needed to be strong enough that fear was the catalyst for peace before any conflict needed to happen. And for that, I needed every opportunity the Oasis placed before me, even when the opportunity came wrapped in risk without a label.
[ Mission accepted… Identifying objective. ] [ Death to the Mad Brother. ] [ Trasco has disrespected the Oasis and must be stopped. Help Zurko stop him. ]
The mission was simple on the surface. But there was much implicit in those three lines — questions the system hadn't answered but the formulation raised naturally.
Why was Trasco being considered "mad"? He was just doing what he had been set to do — kill humans. It was a hunter's function in the Purge. Unless the problem wasn't killing, but how he was killing. Which meant there was a rule about how the Purge was supposed to function, and Trasco had clearly broken it — not by accident, but with the deliberation of something that had decided the rules didn't apply to it.
My theory was simple: there should be survivors. The Purge wasn't extermination — it was selection. And if it was selection, killing everyone should be considered a failure of execution, not victory. That was exactly what Trasco was doing — killing indiscriminately, with all the tools his race possessed for it, without the filter that made the Purge something more than a massacre. Probably not even the Oasis itself had anticipated the specific madness of that Birman. That was why it was intervening — not out of compassion for humans, but because the interruption of the selection process was a system failure, and systems didn't tolerate failures in their own functioning.
The truth was clear to anyone other than a madman. If every Purge were extermination, no human would return to the Oasis — no matter what benefit was promised. There was no point in fighting for power if death were the only guaranteed consequence. The system needed some to survive. Not out of kindness. Out of function.
The Oasis was diabolical in ways I could barely keep up with.
[ You will be teleported in 3… 2… 1… ]
"What?"
✦
Before I could understand what was happening, I felt my eyes burn with what should have been high-speed displacement — not the smooth transition I had experienced at the Colosseum, but something more abrupt, as though the system was in a hurry and had decided comfort was a secondary detail. When I finally managed to focus on what was in front of me, it took me a second longer than it should have to process what I saw.
"The lake."
It wasn't a lake in the sense I knew — it was an expanse of dark water that didn't reflect light the way water should, as though there was something below the surface that absorbed it before the light reached the bottom. And within it, emerging to the waist with the naturalness of something that had chosen that position and not the position the environment had tried to impose, two creatures that made any previous comparison irrelevant.
"What the hell are you doing? How dare you interfere with my revenge."
"The rule was clear about what we should be doing. You crossed the line."
"And what are you going to do about it, you worthless Aquamarine?"
"I… nothing. But someone will."
Zurko was impossible not to notice — the same way it was impossible not to notice a storm when you were inside it, not by choice but by inevitable presence. A mixture of blue-scaled fish with a giant human — larger than Trasco, considerably larger, with the size difference that only made sense when one considered that Aquamarines in water weren't just dangerous. They were another category of existence. Out of water, they were threats of an order that already rendered most races irrelevant. In water, they were creatures for whom "strongest in the known universe" wasn't an exaggeration, it was a technical description — the kind of statement that in any other context would sound like arrogance and in that context sounded like scientific notation.
Seeing that ancestral creature emerging from the dark lake wasn't the strangest thing.
The strangest was understanding every word it said.
Aquamarines had rudimentary vocal cords — they communicated through sounds no land race could replicate precisely, a combination of frequencies that the human vocal apparatus hadn't been designed to produce. But what came from Zurko's mouth was my language. Clean. Without accent. With the naturalness of something that had learned it not as a second language but as a first — or as though the very concept of language didn't apply to what was happening, as though the comprehension was direct and the language was just the wrapping that came along.
It was clear both were speaking in their own languages but I could understand as though it were my own. Probably the Oasis was facilitating the interaction somehow — making communication possible as a condition for the mission it had generated to be executed. But the reason still escaped me, and there was something unsettling about depending on a system that offered tools without explaining why it offered them.
In that place there was only the lake and the two creatures and me — and they still didn't seem to have noticed me, caught in the specific dynamic of two forces measuring each other before deciding what to do.
Unfortunately, being in the position I was in, my arrival didn't go unnoticed for long. Both creatures turned to me at the same time — with the specific expression of something that hadn't expected to find that there, that had made a calculation about what the environment contained and had found a different result than expected.
"You are Leonidas…" — Zurko said, and there was something in the tone that wasn't exactly disdain, but was close — the tone of something that had heard about a thing one way and had found the thing another way and was reconciling the two. — "So it's really true… A mere… human."
He seemed genuinely shocked for a second — not the kind of shock that comes from fear, but the kind that comes from unmet expectation. As though he had built an image of what had done that and the image hadn't included what was standing before him.
Trasco didn't react the same way.
"Hey… Human… It was you, wasn't it? It was you who killed my brother…"
The voice had changed. It wasn't the calculated rage from before — it was something else. Something deeper, more personal, the kind of emotion that warrior races rarely let show because letting it show was admitting there was something beyond battle that mattered.
"I think we both know the answer."
It wasn't intimidation — it was the purest truth, said with the calm of someone who had calculated that inflating the answer would be wasteful and that the simple truth already carried enough weight. The mission clearly stated that Zurko would help me. Either way, I just needed to buy time for whatever the Aquamarine was going to do. It was clear I would be the bait — my function was to occupy Trasco's attention while Zurko used whatever it was that an Aquamarine used to end something of that size.
What I hadn't expected was that the confirmation, even implied, would be enough to change something in that Birman so visibly and so immediately.
The rage in his eyes was the kind that no longer calculated — it had crossed the threshold where calculation existed and had arrived at the place where there was only direction. The body was changing visibly: previously lean like the Tiger brother, now as stocky as the first one he had killed, the musculature swelling beyond what the structure should support, the tendons visible under the greyish skin like cables tensioned beyond their design capacity. Saliva dripped. The red eyes focused on nothing specific beyond me — not with a hunter's precision, but with the saturation of something that had reduced the universe to a single point.
Berserk Mode.
I knew what it was — I had my own version. Unrestricted strength in exchange for sanity. The problem was that the sanity he had traded was the only thing preventing him from being simply a directionless predator — and a directionless predator, of that size, in Berserk Mode, was a variable I hadn't calculated when I had confirmed I had killed the brother.
Before he advanced, he sank.
Not gradually — abruptly, as though the weight had multiplied by a hundred in a single moment without warning. His knees gave first, then his feet — disappearing into the ground that had seemed solid a second before and had become something else by the will of something that wasn't stepping on it but was deciding what it was.
"Better act fast, human." — Zurko said without looking at me, his attention fixed on Trasco with the concentration of something exerting considerable force and knowing that considerable force demanded considerable attention. — "I can't hold him forever."
I hadn't expected the Aquamarine to have difficulty holding a Birman — even a Birman in Berserk Mode. But there was something in the way Zurko was positioned, the tension in the immense shoulders, the effort that appeared in the details even when the face tried not to show it, that communicated it was costing more than the casual statement suggested.
Now that the roles had reversed — Trasco trapped, me free — I had to act. And I needed to act with what I had, which was considerably less than I would have liked.
"Hold him and I'll kill him."
Zurko turned his head. Looked at me with the expression of something that had heard and found unexpected — not for the content, but for the source. Then he smiled, darkly, with his serrated teeth showing, the kind of smile that wasn't an invitation but was an evaluation.
"Surprise me."
✦
I wished for two swords.
The tattoo moved — dividing itself with the fluidity I had learned to recognize, sliding down the arms until materializing into two curved blades of thirty centimeters. More than I needed under normal conditions. Exactly what I had asked for under those specific conditions — compact enough for control, long enough for reach, with the weight I had learned those blades carried regardless of the form they assumed.
"YOU DARE THINK YOU CAN KILL ME — YOU PATHETIC INFERIOR CREATURE—"
The moment the blades appeared, Trasco began to move against the weight holding him — with the specific Berserk strength that didn't consult what the body could endure, only what the rage demanded. The ground exploding in pieces around him, the earth that had seemed solid yielding to the effort of something that had been built to move what shouldn't be moved.
"Ohhhh what a peculiar race."
Zurko elevated the limit further. Trasco fell chin-first into the ground, sinking even deeper into the earth, while all the water from the lake seemed to be absorbed by the surrounding soil — disappearing inward with the speed of something being sucked in, the multiplied gravitational pressure creating a vacuum where there had been a surface. The area around Trasco had become something that was neither earth nor water but was the boundary between the two, under the control of something that had decided where the boundary was.
I ran.
Without mana for Zaetar, I would have to use the body. I reached Trasco and leaped with everything I had — using the depth of the hole where he had sunk as an involuntary ramp, the angle converting fall into impact velocity. And when the blade touched where it should touch, I felt as though I had tried to pierce diamond. The skin was impenetrable — not resistant, not difficult, impenetrable. As though the surface had decided that blade simply wasn't the kind of thing that passed through it.
My strength wasn't enough.
"Damn. I don't have the strength."
"Useless human—"
Zurko seemed irritated with the efficiency of something that had bet on a variable and found the variable below expectation. The irritation wasn't emotional — it was operational, the kind that appears when a plan depends on a piece and the piece doesn't fit.
I didn't have enough power — that was the fact. Berserk Mode probably also interfered somehow with Trasco's defenses, adding a layer that hadn't existed in the brother he had killed in a normal state. But there was one option I still hadn't used, and it was the only one I could use in that moment without depending on mana I didn't have.
I cut my hand with one of the blades — quickly, without hesitating, with the specific cut the ritual needed. The blood began to flow as I drew the circle on Trasco's back, the symbols I had learned not from text but from practice, from repetition, from nights of training that had carved the patterns into muscle before carving them into memory.
"What the hell are you doing, you useless human?"
"Shut up and give me time. Hold him."
The Blood Magic ritual lasted a few seconds — shorter than under resting conditions, because the urgency had compressed what normally took longer, the body cooperating with what the situation demanded. When I finished, the power had returned — not much, but enough. I climbed out of the hole that was now nearly five meters deep, the crumbled earth walls creating irregular steps I used with my feet and elbows, and looked at Zurko who was still sinking Trasco with visible concentration in his eyes — looking at me with something that mixed anger at the delay with curiosity at what he was seeing.
Trasco was still trying to get out. Even sunken, even under pressure that had doubled and then doubled again, Berserk didn't consult impossible — it only pushed, with the persistence of something that had lost access to the concept of giving up.
"Zurko. Your power is gravity manipulation, right?"
His face answered before he spoke — a minimal contraction that in a smaller creature would have been a clear expression, but on that immense face was only the shadow of one. His power was something considered epic even without coming from any hero — I knew it existed, knew how it worked from what I had read, knew that Aquamarines were one of the only races that could use it without casting time, which made them the only race to use that ability in real high-speed combat. Multiplying the gravity around objects or living creatures. Extremely complex in mechanics. Extremely precise in execution.
"Use it on my blades."
The idea was simple and crazy at the same time, and I had arrived at it by the path that led to the best ideas: eliminating everything that didn't work until only what could work remained. I didn't have enough strength to penetrate that skin with my force. But I knew those blades weren't normal — they had passed through the first Birman's heart as though the skin were paper, which communicated there was something in them that went beyond material. And if they weighed enough, gravity would do what strength couldn't. I just needed to direct them — two hearts, two blades, one chance, the precision needed to hit both simultaneously or in sequence fast enough that the second wouldn't have time to react.
"OK." — Zurko said, with the brevity of something that had evaluated the idea, reached a conclusion, and decided that verbalizing more than necessary was wasteful. — "But make it quick."
I didn't wait further.
I leaped as high as I could. Nearly ten meters above Trasco, I felt the blades become impossible to hold — not from the weight itself, because the weight had changed in nature, had become something that wasn't weight but attraction, as though gravity had decided those blades belonged to the center of the earth and was collecting the debt with the interest of everything it had waited for.
I couldn't let go. I didn't know if it would work without contact — if the multiplied gravity of the blades needed my direction or would go on its own wherever it went, and it wasn't the moment to find out by the wrong attempt. And I needed to direct — with the precision the Codex had described, two targets, one window, the certainty that Trasco in Berserk Mode with one heart still functioning was more dangerous than Trasco with both.
My arms ached in a way I had stopped cataloguing as pain and had started cataloguing as information — information about what was still available before it wasn't anymore.
"Die, you son of a bitch."
"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH—"
The blades tore through. The skin that had resisted the previous impact yielded to the weight that had multiplied beyond what the resistance could absorb — not because the resistance had diminished, but because what had arrived had surpassed what the resistance had been designed to encounter. Trasco screamed with the quality of something that hadn't processed the pain yet, only the shock that pain was possible — the same shock I had seen in the brother, the same expression of a universe that had been reorganized around a certainty that had just been removed.
Zurko's power yielded — and a giant hand closed around my neck before I finished falling, with the Berserk speed that still had enough for one last movement, for one last attempt to take with it what had caused that.
"You son of a bitch… Die."
"Shut up." — I said, with the voice that still came out despite the pressure — hoarse, smaller than it should be, but coming out. — "This fight is over. You lost."
The pressure increased for a second — and then, before the fingers could squeeze further, blood began pouring from his mouth. Not the blood from the wound, but the blood of systems that had stopped being able to maintain the pressure needed to continue.
The hand loosened.
Trasco's face — still with the expression of disbelief, still processing how he had died to something that shouldn't have been capable of killing him, the calculation that didn't add up — disappeared as the body fell.
I fell with it.
My arms had broken from the impact — not at the moment of the blades, but in the fall, when the body had met the ground without the cushioning capacity that had been spent on other things. The exhaustion arrived all at once, the kind that isn't just physical but is the accumulated result of everything that had happened since the counter had begun — hunger, thirst, the days of wet earth and calculated silence, the Birman at the lake, the ritual, the leap. Everything together, all at once, like debt collected with compound interest.
✦
"Honestly, I didn't think it was possible for someone like you to kill him."
Zurko was there. Looking down at me with the expression of something that had recalibrated its assessment and was still processing the result — not with admiration, which presupposed a level of relationship that didn't exist between us, but with the specific curiosity of something that had found data that hadn't been in the model.
"Why didn't you kill him?"
I couldn't understand. The Birmans were strong — but comparing Birmans with Aquamarines was the same as comparing Birmans with humans. The scale wasn't the same. Zurko could have ended it in dozens of ways without needing me — had chosen not to, had waited, had managed the situation in a way that kept Trasco contained until I finished him. There was a reason for that and I just didn't know what it was.
"Ohh. Smart on top of everything else." — he said, with the tone of something that had been slightly impressed against its own will. — "Didn't expect that from such a… cute creature." — a deliberate pause, as though savoring the word before continuing. — "Very well. Look at this."
A screen appeared before me.
[ Aquamarine Mission: ] [ The Purge has failed and you will be punished for it. ] [ However, if you accept this mission, you will be rewarded double. ] [ Protect Leonidas and allow Trisco to join his brother in the afterlife — or let Leonidas die by his own incompetence. ] [ Restriction: 90% of primordial ability — Gravity. ]
Now things made sense. I had been his mission — not the help, but the object. And the ninety percent ability restriction explained why he had seemed strained: it wasn't that Trasco was difficult to hold for an Aquamarine. It was that Zurko had been deliberately limited to ten percent of what he could do, turning what should have been trivial into something that required real concentration. The Oasis had calculated the difficulty level with the precision of something that had done this many times — making it possible enough to be a mission, impossible enough to deserve double reward.
"Who would have thought the perpetrator of all this would be a human." — Zurko said, with something that was perhaps the Aquamarine equivalent of humor — not joy, but the recognition of irony in a situation that contained it. — "Well. I think that's that — we won. Actually, I should thank you for allowing me to earn a reward. My race hasn't gained anything from this tight-fisted system in almost a thousand years."
I had theorized as much — that there were races the Oasis had stopped remunerating, not from their failure, but from the absence of opportunity the system had considered relevant enough to reward them. But seeing it confirmed made things more unsettling, not less. The Oasis was conscious in ways I could barely keep up with — fair in ways that seemed arbitrary until you understood the logic behind them, and diabolical in ways that seemed fair until you understood the total cost.
"Of course, I could take you for study." — he said, with the casual tone of something that had genuinely considered the option, weighed the pros and cons, and had arrived at a conclusion still pending finalization. — "After all, you are very peculiar for your species. The data you represent would be of considerable interest to those who study accelerated evolution."
I tried to get up. My arms didn't cooperate — broken was broken, regardless of how much the situation asked them not to be. I managed to sit up. That was what there was.
"Ohh — you still have fight in you." — a pause with the quality of something that had assessed and arrived at a different conclusion from where it had started. — "I'm joking. Relax. For me, you're still just an insect." — another interval, shorter. — "An extraordinarily inconvenient insect. Perhaps in a million years you might manage to be something more than rats."
He turned and left without waiting for a response — with the naturalness of something that had finished what it came to do and saw no usefulness in prolonging its presence beyond that. The lake closed around him without waves, without a splash, with the fluidity of something returning to the place where it belonged.
I was on the ground, with broken arms, looking at where the Aquamarine had been. The sun had changed angle while I had been in the hole — more hours had passed than I had noticed, as tended to happen when urgency consumed the perception of time.
Alive. Completely spent. But alive.
There was still time — little, but enough to heal what could be healed, to verify what remained of Trasco beyond the immense body that was beginning to dissolve with the specific slowness of Oasis creatures after their end, to breathe without breathing being an act of emergency. I had survived the Purge. I had done more than survive — I had done something the system had considered relevant enough to generate an individual mission.
But before I finished calculating what to do first, the message arrived.
[ Mission complete. ] [ Congratulations on surviving the Purge — 1 / 190. ]
One out of a hundred and ninety.
I stared at that number for longer than the number deserved. I had entered with hundreds. One had been left — and the one was me, not because I was the strongest, not because I had planned every variable correctly, but because I had accepted every opportunity that had appeared even when the opportunity seemed like madness.
This was the moment I had most waited for.
And at the same time it was the moment when the weight of what it had cost arrived all at once.
[ Calculating rewards… Please wait. ]