Dawn pierced the blinds of King's apartment, painting stripes of pale gold across his floor. But today, his eyes opened not to the slow, groggy transition from sleep, but with immediate, crystalline focus. The first conscious thought was not a wandering one; it was a target, painted in bold, red letters across his mind: Demon-level.
He swung his legs out of bed, the floorboards cool beneath his feet. His morning routine was performed with a quiet, ritualistic precision. Every movement—brushing his teeth, splashing water on his face, pulling on his familiar, high-collared shirt and pants—felt like the arming of a soldier. He was not just getting dressed; he was girding himself for war.
As he turned to leave, his gaze caught on the corner of his living room. There, stacked in a neat, vibrant tower, were his games. The plastic cases gleamed in the morning light, each one a portal to a world of controlled challenge and guaranteed victory. The latest fighting game, its seal still unbroken, seemed to call to him with a silent, siren song of effortless mastery and simple fun. His fingers twitched with a phantom memory of controller vibrations and perfect combo chains.
For a long moment, he stood frozen, a man torn between two worlds. The lure of the familiar, the safe, the enjoyable, was a powerful gravitational pull. He could spend the day here, in the comfort of his apartment, the only stakes being his virtual win-loss record.
But then the memory flashed—a white-hot spike of pain in his chest, the terrifying, helpless feeling of his heart seizing after using King's Authority. The image of Talon's razor-sharp wings slicing through the air, a threat he could only run from. The stark, red system warning: [Severe recoil damage is probable.]
The temptation shattered.
He shook his head, a single, decisive motion. The games could wait. They would still be here tomorrow, next week, next year. But his window to change, to become strong enough to survive the escalating threats of this world, was open now. This grind was not a chore to be escaped; it was the foundation of his very survival, the price of his future.
"Focus," he rumbled to the silent, tempting stacks of plastic. The word was not a chastisement, but a reaffirmation.
With his purpose steeled, he walked out the door, locking it behind him. The journey into Z-City felt different today. Before, his treks into the ruins had the feel of a commute to a job—a necessary, focused task. Today, it was a deployment. He moved with a predator's gait, his King's Eyes already active, their golden glow scanning the periphery not just for immediate threats, but for signs, for trails. The usual, picked-clean streets of the outer ruins were beneath his notice; he was a deep-sea fisherman now, and he needed to cast his line into the abyss.
He pushed beyond his old hunting grounds, into territories he had only ever skirted. The air grew thick and cold, tasting of ozone and decay. The ruins here were older, more completely assimilated by the hostile ecosystem that had sprung up after the city's fall. Strange, phosphorescent fungi clung to the skeletons of buses. Twisted, thorny vines with the girth of pythons choked the facades of ancient office blocks. The silence was no longer empty; it was watchful, pregnant with a malevolence that the weaker, more numerous monsters of the outskirts lacked.
His King's Engine, which had beat a steady, purposeful rhythm since he left his apartment, began to shift. It was no longer just the drum of determination. It was a sonar, a deep, resonant pulse that echoed through the canyons of shattered concrete and steel. He was not just listening with his ears or seeing with his eyes; he was feeling for the presence of something colossal, something that would resonate with the immense power he now sought.
He climbed a precarious slope of collapsed scaffolding, his armored boots finding purchase where no normal human could. Reaching a vantage point atop a half-collapsed parking garage, he surveyed the true heart of Z-City. It stretched before him like a jagged, gray sea, a urban wasteland where nature and ruin fused into something alien and terrifying. In the far distance, a perpetual, sickly green storm cloud seemed to hang over one particular district, occasionally flickering with internal lightning that was the wrong color.
There, he thought, his instincts humming. That was where the energy was wrong. That was where something powerful had made its lair, its very presence warping the environment.
He didn't hesitate. He descended the garage with controlled, powerful leaps, his King's Armor flickering around his legs to absorb the impacts. The game was over. The training was complete. Now, it was time for the final exam. Every sense was dialed to its maximum, his mind a calm, clear pool reflecting his surroundings, his High Combat Instincts running constant, silent calculations.
He was no longer the fraud, no longer the grinder, not even the student in the proving grounds.
He was King, the Hunter. And his prey was a demon. The city held its breath as he moved, a solitary figure of immense purpose, stepping into the shadows where only the strongest—or the most foolish—dared to tread. The fate of this hunt would determine not just a bounty of Belief Points, but the very trajectory of his legend.
-
King moved through the skeletal remains of the inner city with the grim certainty of a surgeon navigating anatomy he had already dissected. His King's Eyes painted the world in shades of threat and decay, but the red blips of life that had once dotted his mental map were entirely absent. He had created a vacuum, a sterile zone of his own making. The silence was his trophy, and it was a clear sign he was heading in the right direction. True power would not be found in these picked-clean bones; it would be festering in the untouched, rotten heart.
He turned a corner onto a wide, debris-choked boulevard, his boots crunching on a carpet of broken glass. And then he stopped.
A figure stood about a hundred yards down the avenue, its back to him. It was tall, easily three meters, and bulkier than any monster he'd faced before. Its skin was a mottled, greyish-green, like old granite, and its form was unnaturally still. Then, it shifted, and King saw its profile. A single, massive, bloodshot eye dominated its chest, pupil contracting in the hazy light. Where a face should have been was just a wide, horizontal gash of a mouth, lined with needle-like teeth. In one clawed hand, it held something. Something that made King's blood run cold.
It was a human, or rather, the upper half of one. The body was limp, uniform torn and stained, the face locked in a final, silent scream. The monster raised the corpse with a casual, almost fastidious air.
King's breath hitched. His King's Engine, which had been a steady, low thrum of focus, gave a single, powerful THUMP that echoed in the silent street. It wasn't fear, not entirely. It was a cold, sharp fury that cut through his calculated calm. This wasn't a Tiger-level beast driven by mindless hunger. This was something else. This was a predator that took its time, that understood the horror it was inflicting. The casual brutality of the scene ignited a fire in his gut he hadn't felt before.
The monster, as if sensing the shift in the atmospheric pressure caused by the King Engine, paused. It didn't spin around in alarm. It turned slowly, deliberately, its chest-eye swiveling to fix its gaze on King. The mouth below it twisted into something that might have been a smile.
"I say," the monster began, its voice a deep, rumbling baritone laced with a crisp, almost aristocratic British accent. It was utterly incongruous with its horrific form. "You wouldn't happen to be the fellow who's been making such a dreadful mess of the local wildlife, would you?"
It gestured with the corpse in its hand, a grisly pointer. "One does hope for a bit of peace and quiet when relocating. A nice neighborhood, a few weak-minded morsels to snack on... it's not too much to ask, is it?"
King said nothing. His golden eyes were locked on the monster, but his peripheral vision remained fixed on the remains of the human. A life, ended for a snack. A prop in this thing's monologue.
The monster sighed, a theatrical, put-upon sound. "But no. You had to go and clear out the entire borough. Ruined the ambiance. Spoiled the larder." It brought the corpse to its mouth. "A dreadful inconvenience."
With a final, sickening crunch, it consumed the last of the human, discarding the scraps of cloth and bone with a flick of its wrist. It then wiped its maw with the back of its hand, the gesture fastidiously human.
"Now," it said, its chest-eye narrowing, the pupil contracting to a malicious slit. "I do believe you owe me for the disturbance. And I'm rather peckish."
King's body moved before his mind fully processed the command. His feet slid apart, settling into a low, grounded stance he had practiced ten thousand times in the valley. His right hand came up, palm open, fingers curled slightly. His left arm hovered closer to his body, ready to manifest a defense. It was a stance that spoke of neither blind aggression nor panicked defense, but of lethal, adaptive efficiency.
The King's Engine shifted its tune. The single, shocked thump was gone. In its place was a rising, steady, and deafening BOOM... BOOM... BOOM... It was no longer the sound of a nervous heart, but the pounding of a war drum, each beat pumping not just blood, but raw, focused power through his veins. The air around him began to shimmer with the gathering pressure of his King's Aura.
He didn't speak a word. He didn't announce his name or his intentions. His stance, his eyes, and the terrifying rhythm of his heart were his answer. The time for talk, for grinding, for preparation, was over.
The monster's eye widened a fraction, a flicker of genuine interest replacing its condescending boredom. "Oh? The local nuisance has a bit of spirit to him. How delightful."
The hardest fight of his life was about to begin. And for the first time, King faced it not as a man pretending to be a legend, but as a warrior who had forged himself in fire, staring down a demon with a cold, clear, and utterly furious resolve.
A cold, digital script flashed in the corner of King's vision, a confirmation of his grim expectation.
[Target Designation: Behemoth-Cyclops. Threat Level: DEMON.]
The system's warning was a split-second prelude to the attack. The monster's massive chest-eye glowed with a violent, gathering purple light, the air crackling with malevolent energy. King's King's Eyes, already active and scanning, didn't just see the glow; they perceived the trajectory a fraction of a second before the beam was unleashed. The world seemed to slow down.
He didn't leap; he threw himself into a controlled, lateral dive, his body a blur.
VVVRRRR-ZZZZZZZZZZTTT!
A thick, incandescent purple beam screamed past where he had been standing. It didn't just impact the ruins behind him; it erased them. A line of four-story buildings, their skeletal frames and crumbling concrete, simply vaporized in an instant, leaving behind a trench of molten glass and superheated air. The shockwave that followed was a physical wall, slamming into King and sending him tumbling across the rubble-strewn ground. The sound was not an explosion, but a continuous, screeching roar of annihilation.
He had barely skidded to a halt, his ears ringing, when his High Combat Instincts screamed a new warning. Not energy. Kinetic.
He pushed off the ground not a moment too soon. The Behemoth-Cyclops was already upon him, its movement belying its immense size. A fist the size of a small car, wreathed in the same purple energy, hammered into the space he had just occupied.
BOOOOOM!
The punch didn't just hit the ground; it unleashed a localized shockwave that detonated outward. The facade of the half-collapsed department store behind the impact point disintegrated, its windows, framework, and concrete exploding outward in a devastating shower of shrapnel. The very ground cratered, a web of fractures spreading outwards like a spiderweb.
King landed in a low crouch several yards away, his heart hammering against his ribs. The King's Engine was a frantic, roaring drum now, but it was matched by the cold, analytical clarity forced upon him by his instincts. One direct hit from that beam and he would be vaporized. One clean impact from that fist without protection, and he would be pulped into a fine mist. This was not a fight; it was a high-wire act over a pit of instant death.
With a focused thought, he summoned his King's Armor. It wasn't the full, flowing suit he could manage in training. It was a desperate, prioritized defense. Brilliant, solid gold gauntlets and greaves snapped into existence around his forearms and shins, the energy humming with a strained intensity. It was all he could maintain under the dual pressure of the monster's oppressive aura and his own skyrocketing adrenaline.
The Behemoth-Cyclops straightened up, its chest-eye swiveling to find him again. The wide gash of a mouth twisted into a scowl.
"Oh, for heaven's sake," it grumbled, its British accent laced with profound irritation. "All this hopping about. It's terribly undignified." It flexed the hand that had just obliterated the city block. "If you'd just taken the punch like a good little morsel, this would all be over. Much easier for the both of us, don't you think? Now I'm going to have to work up a proper appetite."
King said nothing. There was no breath to waste on words. His entire world had narrowed to the monster's chest-eye and its fists. He was a calculator of trajectories and lethal force, his own power a fragile shield against an avalanche. He had come to hunt a demon, and he had found one. Now, he had to survive it. Every dodge, every block, would have to be perfect. There was no room for error.
The calculus of survival was brutal and immediate. King's Kinetic Blasts, which could punch through solid iron, slammed into the monster's granite-like hide with sharp PANG sounds, only to scatter harmlessly, leaving behind faint, smoking scorch marks. A focused Seismic Clap, directed at the beast's knee joint, produced a jarring CRASH and made the monster stagger a single step, its leg buckling momentarily before it straightened with a grunt of annoyance. It was like trying to erode a mountain with a sandblaster.
"Persistent little pest, aren't you?" the Behemoth-Cyclops rumbled, swatting at King as if he were a fly. A clawed hand the size of a park bench swept through the air where King's head had been a millisecond before, the wind shear alone enough to make his eyes water.
But King was learning. His King's Eyes, pushed to their absolute limit, were the only thing keeping him alive. They tracked the minute tensing of the monster's muscles, the subtle shift in its weight, the almost imperceptible flicker of its chest-eye before it fired. He was a ghost in the rubble, using the devastation as his ally. He'd fire a Kinetic Blast at a precariously leaning support column, bringing a wall down between them to block a line-of-sight for the purple beam. He'd use a downward Seismic Clap at his own feet, not to attack, but to propel himself backwards in a explosive reverse leap, just as a fist turned the ground he'd been standing on into a crater.
It was during one of these desperate maneuvers that he saw it. He fired a Kinetic Blast not at the body, but directly at the massive, bloodshot chest-eye. For the first time, the monster didn't tank the hit. Its hand—fast enough to blur—snapped up and swatted the blast aside, the energy dissipating against its palm with a sizzle.
A weak spot.
The monster's facade of bored annoyance finally cracked. "You dare?!" it roared, the sound waves physically painful. "You think to blind me, you parasitic insect?"
The pace of the fight shifted from a hunt to a frenzied extermination. No more theatrical beams. The Behemoth-Cyclops closed the distance, its bulk moving with terrifying speed. It unleashed a barrage of punches, each one a localized detonation.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
King weaved and ducked, his world reduced to a storm of concussive force and flying debris. He was a leaf in a hurricane, his King's Eyes showing him the path of survival a hair's breadth before it was erased. He saw the tell-tale shift in the monster's shoulder, knew the next punch was coming in a wide, hooking arc too fast to fully avoid. He twisted, bringing his fully-armored left arm and side to bear in a desperate block.
The impact was beyond anything he had ever felt or imagined.
KRA-KOOOM!
It was like being hit by a meteor. The golden light of his King's Armor flared blindingly bright as it absorbed the cataclysmic force, the intricate energy patterns screaming under the strain. But it held. For a single, miraculous moment, it held, preventing him from being instantly atomized.
But physics remained. The force that didn't vaporize him translated into pure, concussive kinetic energy. He was launched from his feet like a cannonball, flying backward through the air. He crashed through the wall of a gutted office building, then the next, and the next, a human projectile shredding through concrete and steel rebar like tissue paper. He finally came to a stop in a cloud of pulverized drywall and dust, buried in the darkness of a collapsed interior.
The King's Armor flickered and died, the strain too great. Every inch of his body screamed in protest. He coughed, tasting copper, his ribs feeling like they'd been used as an anvil. Without the armor's protection and his Eyes' last-second adjustment to minimize the direct impact, he would have been a red smear across the city.
As he pushed himself up, shards of broken furniture and glass raining from his clothes, the monster's voice echoed through the holes he'd just made.
"You see? You strain, you struggle, you use your little parlor tricks," it called, its tone now one of cold, final contempt. "You are a parasite, clinging to a life you have no right to. You cannot hurt me. You can only delay the inevitable. Your death is a mathematical certainty."
King rose to his feet, his body aching, his spirit bruised, but his resolve hardening into something colder than steel. The monster was right. His attacks were useless. All except one.
He looked down at his hands, then back through the destruction, towards the towering silhouette of the Behemoth-Cyclops. He had one card left to play. A card that hurt him as much as his enemy. But it was the only one that could target the eye.
The King Engine, which had faltered for a moment after the impact, began to beat again. Not a frantic drum of survival, but a deep, ominous, and deliberate rhythm.
BOOM... BOOM... BOOM...
It was the sound of a king refusing to kneel. The fight was not over yet.
King's world snapped back into focus just in time to see the Behemoth-Cyclops vanish from his mid-range position. There was no blur, no tell-tale shift of air. It was simply there, directly in front of him, having closed the distance in an instant he couldn't perceive. Its massive fist was already cocked back, the purple energy wreathing it like a violent halo.
And then, something happened.
His King's Eyes didn't just see the present; they were flooded with a phantom future. A single, horrifying frame: the fist connecting with his chest, his King's Armor shattering like glass, his body erupting into a cloud of red mist and fragmented bone against the ruined cityscape.
The vision lasted a nanosecond, a searing premonition of instant death. It was so visceral, so real, that his body reacted before his mind could even form the question what was that?! He threw himself into a desperate, graceless dive, not away from the monster's current stance, but from the point in space his instincts screamed he would be a moment from now.
KRA-BOOM!!!
The space he had just occupied ceased to exist. The monster's fist slammed forward, exactly as foreseen, and the concussive blast tore a new, deeper canyon into the street. The Behemoth-Cyclops stared at the empty space where its target should have been pulverized, its chest-eye narrowing in genuine, seething confusion.
"How...?" it began, but King was already rolling to his feet, his mind reeling. A vision? A premonition? He had no time to process it.
"Enough of this farce!" the monster bellowed, its patience utterly spent. It moved again, a tidal wave of muscle and malice. King, still disoriented by the psychic flash, was a fraction of a second too slow. A clawed hand, moving faster than a bullet, snapped out and closed like a vice around his right arm. Before he could even react, another hand clamped onto his leg, lifting him effortlessly into the air.
He struggled, firing a point-blank Kinetic Blast from his free hand into the monster's wrist. It sizzled harmlessly against the granite skin. He was trapped. utterly and completely.
The Behemoth-Cyclops held him aloft, positioning him directly in front of its massive chest. The great eye began to glow, not with the wide-area erasure beam, but with a concentrated, pinpoint vortex of purple light. The air hummed, pulling dust and debris toward the gathering point of annihilation. King was staring down the barrel of a cannon.
"It seems you can dodge no longer," the monster hissed, its voice dripping with finality. "A pity. I was starting to find your squirming almost entertaining. But all games must end. This is yours."
Desperation clawed at King's throat. He couldn't break free. His armor was spent, his blasts were useless. The King's Engine, however, responded to his sheer, defiant will. It roared to life, not a drum of fear, but a blaring air-raid siren of pure, unadulterated power. BOOOOOOM! The sound was so immense it made the monster's grip momentarily loosen in surprise, the very vibrations rattling its bones.
It bought him a single, crucial second.
As he stared into the heart of the gathering purple death, his own power answered. He drew not on his muscles, not on his speed, but on the very core of his legend—the fear, the belief, the absolute authority he projected. He felt it all condense into that familiar, agonizing point before his own chest. But this time, he didn't aim for a wide wave. He focused it, sharpened it, funneling every ounce of his being into a single, concentrated lance of Intent, aimed directly at the monster's one and only weakness.
The monster's eye widened, sensing the shift. "What—?"
"King's Authority," King whispered, the words a death sentence.
He unleashed it.
A spear of golden-tinged reality, no wider than a man's arm, shot from his chest. It wasn't a wave that disassembled; it was a drill that penetrated. It struck the center of the monster's glowing purple eye.
There was no sound. For a heartbeat, there was only a perfect, silent contradiction: the ultimate offensive power meeting the ultimate defensive weak point.
Then, the world exploded.
The monster's head snapped back as its eye ruptured inward, the purple energy it had gathered detonating prematurely in a catastrophic chain reaction. A geyser of black ichor and violet fire erupted from the socket. The grip on King vanished as the Behemoth-Cyclops staggered, a deafened, guttural roar tearing from its mouth-gash before it froze, teetered, and then crashed to the ground like a felled redwood, the earth shaking with the impact of its death.
The recoil of the point-blank King's Authority slammed into King like a physical train, hurling him backward through the air. He hit a pile of rubble and slid down, coughing violently, each breath a knife in his bruised ribs. His whole body felt hollowed out, his chest a furnace of pain.
For a long moment, he just lay there, listening to the return of the silence. Slowly, painfully, he pushed himself up and staggered towards the colossal corpse.
The sight was humbling. The monster's body was almost completely pristine. Its granite hide was barely scorched, its limbs intact. The only damage was the ruined, smoldering crater where its chest-eye had been, tendrils of smoke curling from the edges. The victory wasn't one of overwhelming power; it was a surgical strike. A single, perfect, desperate blow to the only target that mattered. Without that weakness, he would have been annihilated.
A wave of exhaustion so profound it felt like gravity itself washed over him. He had done it. He had survived.
It was only then, as the adrenaline began to recede, that he noticed the system notification that had been blinking, unnoticed, during the fight's final, frantic seconds. He focused on it.
[Demon-level Threat: Behemoth-Cyclops - DEFEATED]
[Bonus BP for Exploiting Critical Weakness and Surviving Overwhelming Power Disparity: +61,030]
[Total BP: 61,030]
King stared at the number, his mind struggling to comprehend it. Sixty-one thousand. The number was so vast it seemed to dwarf all his previous struggles. The difference between a Tiger-level and a Demon-level wasn't just a step up; it was a chasm, and the reward for crossing it was a king's ransom.
A slow, weary, but triumphant smile finally broke through the grimace of pain on his face. The cost had been nearly unbearable, the risk absolute. But the payoff... the payoff changed everything.
He looked at his hands, then back at the towering, silent city around him. The game had indeed changed. He was no longer just arming himself for war.
With this, he could finally build the foundation to wage it.