Stan’s mastery was operating at full capacity. But they were still faster than he could match.
The realization landed in the back of his mind with cold, precise clarity. He was blocking their attacks. He was intercepting their strikes. He was doing better than any modern human had any right to do against beings of this caliber. But they were playing with him.
They had not, in any meaningful sense, actually been trying to hurt him.
The specific, stinging humiliation of the moment cut through his focus.
He gritted his teeth and pushed harder, his body accelerating fractionally, his strikes carrying more weight, his blocks becoming more aggressive counters. The mastery in his mind supplied every technique it had. He was, by any honest measure, fighting at the peak of what his current physiology could produce.
The four men laughed hysterically...
’They’re laughing...’ Stan gritted his teeth...
The lead one, the one Stan had already identified as the most dangerous, caught Stan’s next strike with an open palm, closed his fingers around Stan’s fist, and simply held him there. Motionless. As if Stan’s arm had been made of paper.
Then he shoved. Stan was sent flying...
He tore backward through the polar air for twelve meters before his body hit the snow again, plowing through it in a long, spreading trench of white and ice.
He rolled to his feet.
The system’s map arrow was still fixed in his vision, glowing at the edge of his awareness. The Spirit Pool was somewhere in the direction he had been thrown from. He had, for the past minute or so, been moving progressively further away from it.
The four men, stood in a loose formation across the snow, watching him with unhurried, delighted patience.
The realization arrived in Stan’s mind with a kind of terrible completeness.
He was not going to reach the Spirit Pool. Not through these four. Not with his current strength. Not remotely. It was simply impossible.
He understood, in that moment, what the old world had actually been like. What the ’Introduction to Earth’ had been describing when it had used the word ’livestock’ on normal humans.
This was what humanity had lived with, for thousands of years, before the Night of Vanishing. This casual, effortless superiority. This complete and unquestioned confidence that ordinary humans were simply ’lesser’, beneath consideration, below the register at which real beings operated.
The old world was returning. And it was returning brutal.
The leadee raised a hand.
The other three stopped.
They straightened out of their attacking stances with the unified, coordinated calm of predators responding to a single leader. The polar wind picked up around them, sending long strands of their dark hair drifting sideways in the breeze. The steam rising off their bare torsos hazed the air between Stan and the four of them.
The lead one looked at Stan. The smile was still there.
"Kid." His voice was casual. "Are you from the Realm’s portal too, or are you a New Age human of this world?"
Stan said nothing. He did not have breath to spare on answers. His ribs on his left side had been fractured. His forearms were bruised down to the bone. His body was operating on adrenaline and system-tempered endurance, and he could feel, distantly, that both were finite.
The leader’s expression did not change. But when Stan didn’t answer, Stan immediately sensed that something had changed, these beings whatever they were, was annoyed now...
The leader’s face remain chill and calm as he began;
"You see," he said quietly, "I don’t think you understand your position. When I ask you a question, you’re supposed to answer. Because, in case you couldn’t tell, we’ve been playing with you throughout this entire encounter. We haven’t used one percent of our strength."
He stepped forward casually, and then with a slight smile, he flexed his right hand as he walked.
Stan watched as the skin of the werewolf’s hand rippled and thick, coarse dark-gray fur erupted from every follicle in a slow, deliberate wave that traveled from his wrist to the tips of his fingers.
His fingernails elongated, thickened, curved into hooked black claws that looked more like the talons of a predator than anything belonging to a humanoid.
The bone structure beneath the fur shifted, the knuckles enlarging, the tendons becoming visible through the fur, the entire hand transforming from something human into something distinctly, unmistakably lupine.
Stan’s mind raced. ’The fur pattern. The bone structure. The rate of transformation.’
’Are they werewolves, I thought they were gone. The book was right. Or is that they didn’t vanish permanently. They came back. Or they never left. Or...’
’They can change parts of their bodies at will. They’re not locked in either form. They’re both, at will. And they can control the ratio. I can’t believe Ive been fighting werewolves this entire time and didn’t know it.’
He remembered reading, as a teenager, novels about werewolves who transformed fully under the full moon. That had never been what these beings actually were. The reality was more terrifying.
They could weaponize any part of themselves, at any moment, without committing to a full transformation. They were not humans who occasionally became wolves. They were something older than either. Real Werewolves were thousands of times stronger than those beings depicted in movies...
Meanwhile, the werewolf casually lifted his transformed hand and looked at it appreciatively.
The air around him seemed to compress.
Stan’s mastery-trained senses registered the change immediately. The aura around the werewolf had multiplied. It had jumped, visibly, palpably, in a single instant, by a factor of at least five.
The version of this being that Stan had struggled to match a moment ago was gone.
This version could kill him without effort. That former version could probably still kill Stan too of they were not playing with him...
A cold bead of sweat traced down Stan’s temple.
’Fuck.’
The thought was the only articulate response his mind could produce.
’I’m actually going to die.’
He assessed his options with cold, mechanical precision. He had to be honest with himself as he no longer had the luxury of hoping.
Flight was impossible. The werewolves’ base speed had already exceeded his top speed by several times over. With even one of them partially transformed, the gap would be impossible to close. He would be caught within seconds of turning away.