The meteors streaked in red and landed, one after another. From the arena they couldn't see the impacts clearly, just flashes along the horizon and distant thumps rolling through the ground under their feet. Whatever was inside those things only had eyes for what lay in front of them.
People with guns had taken the front line. Deputies, off-duty soldiers, a few hunters; anyone who had a working weapon and knew which way to point it. They had pistols, a couple of shotguns, one or two rifles between them. The clips, magazines, and shells they carried were all they had.
Looking back, Elias knew it had been a waste. Most of that ammo would be burned in the first wave, and what was coming later made these first targets feel like training dummies.
"Calm," Donald said.
The word rode out over the small arena with a firm edge. It slipped into the air more than it dug into it, but everyone could feel it. His COMMAND power sat underneath the sound, nudging nerves down a notch. Breaths evened out. Hands stopped shaking quite so badly. Elias felt the tight band around his chest ease just enough to think straight, like someone turned the volume down on the panic inside his skull.
The power worked best if you already wanted what he was pushing. Right now, everyone wanted to be calm.
Sheriff Ann raised her voice next, cutting across the noise from the stands. "We'll open fire on anything that comes out. Everyone be prepared."
The arena smelled like dust and old fuel, with a stale tang of beer and fried food still hanging near the concession stands. Gravel crunched under boots as people shifted, squeezing closer toward the center or edging up along the railings. Kids cried in the bleachers until parents and strangers alike hushed them.
Then they saw the first Rockman.
It came over the low lip of the fairground's outer berm in a slow, deliberate step. Then another followed, and another behind that.
They were roughly human-shaped, but only in outline. About six-foot-three, heavy in the shoulders, weighing maybe two hundred and fifty pounds each. Their bodies were made from compacted earth—clay, mud, and crumbled rock pressed into a solid mass. Limbs thick and slightly uneven, like someone sculpted them quickly by hand and didn't care about fine detail. The surface looked damp in spots, drier and cracked in others, dirt flaking off when they moved.
Their heads sat directly on their shoulders with no real neck. The faces were smooth. No eyes, no nose, no mouth, just a rounded front, featureless and blank. Across their chests, where a human sternum would be, each one carried a white gem half-buried in the packed earth. The stone was the only clean thing on them—smooth, polished, and glowing with a faint white light under the outer layer of mud.
When they walked, their footsteps landed with a dull, soft thud against the dirt, like dropping a wet sack on the ground. Clods of earth fell from their arms and legs as they moved, but the bodies held shape, Ki keeping everything together.
This was the first version. Later waves would be harder, denser, closer to solid rock. This was the starter set.
One of the sheriffs brought up a shotgun, braced it, and fired. The slug punched into the Rockman's arm. The limb exploded outward in a spray of mud and loose stone, a chunk of "flesh" spinning away and thudding into the dirt. The creature staggered but kept walking, the stump already knitting back together in a slow, ugly stretch of wet earth.
The Rockmen were slow and clumsy. Their arms swung wide. Their legs dragged a bit. Looking back, they were child's play compared to what came later. At the time, they were still six-foot-three piles of moving earth walking straight at them.
The sheriff fired again. This time the shot hit higher, catching the white gem dead on. The stone cracked with a sharp, glassy sound. Light inside it flared, then went dull. The Rockman sagged where it stood, body losing shape. The packed earth slumped, shoulders collapsing, torso melting down into a heap of mud and dirt. When it finished, all that remained was a shallow pile of soil and the cracked gem lying on top, still glowing faintly.
Elias had about half a second to think that's not so bad before more crested the berm.
One.
Four.
Ten.
Then twenty.
They came in an uneven line, some ahead of others, all heading directly toward the arena. The sheriffs started shooting for real then, shotguns barking, pistol rounds snapping through the air. Bits of earth sprayed, arms snapped off, parts of torsos tore away, but unless a core was hit the Rockmen just kept coming, reforming piece by piece.
Except for the old man.
Elias caught a glimpse of him off to one side. Metal bat resting across his shoulder, pistol still holstered at his hip, stance loose. His expression didn't change. He watched the advancing Rockmen like he'd seen worse.
Elias tightened his grip on the crowbar and stepped forward toward the line instead of back.
At the edge of his vision, new text floated.
KILL COUNT: 0
ASSIST: 0
RANK: Tied for last
He drew a breath. His ribs complained, but not enough to stop him. He needed to do this. Hiding in the stands wouldn't change anything—not the wave, not the manuals, not where he ended up in this new world.
Some of the defenders took a half step back as the Rockmen pushed closer. The kid with the lightning power thrust out his hand, fingers spread. A jagged white-blue bolt snapped from his fingertips and cracked against a Rockman's shoulder. The smell of ozone cut through the dust and exhaust. The mud on the shoulder blackened, but the creature barely slowed. Unless Shocker hit the core directly, the lightning just danced across earth and dispersed.
And the Rockmen weren't exactly advertising their cores. Even now, with these first slow versions, some of them turned a little sideways as they approached, chest angled, arms raised, earth thickening around the gem. Later, as the species evolved, they would get smarter about it. For now, it just made aiming harder.
The Rockmen kept coming.
Closer. Closer.
Donald drew in a breath and shouted, "CHARGE!"
The word hit harder than it should have. Command rolled through the front ranks, intent and power packed into that one syllable. Elias felt his legs move before he could second-guess himself. Confidence surged up—not the deep, earned kind, but enough to override hesitation.
He ran forward with the others, crowbar in hand, as the first wave of Rockmen marched in to meet them.
One thing about the Rockmen—slow, clumsy, nothing quick about them—they were not weak. Even these first-wave versions could hit with enough force to bench two hundred and fifty pounds without strain. All that packed earth moved with steady, grinding power.
An uncultivated human shouldn't meet them head-on. The smart way was to keep moving, drag them around, and go for the core when you had an angle. With how slow they were, it was doable, as long as you didn't freeze.
Elias met his first one a few strides past the sheriff line.
It swung an arm at him, a wide, heavy arc. The limb cut through the air with a low whoosh, bits of dirt flicking off in a trail. Elias's legs did what they'd been trained to do for years—he stepped back and to the side, feet light on the packed ground. The arm missed him by a clean half-meter, continuing past where his head had been. For a heartbeat he saw the whole body up close: the cracks in the mud, the faint white glow of the core under its chest, the way dried clods shook loose with each movement.
Scary, yes. But easy to dodge.
He shifted his weight, ready to counter, but someone else got there first.
A biker-looking man—tall, around six-foot-five, maybe two seventy-five, big through the shoulders and stomach both, muscle and bulk together—lunged in from the side. He carried a metal pole, some piece of torn fencing or signpost, both hands wrapped around it. He drove the end straight into the Rockman's chest.
The pole hit the core dead center with a sharp, cracking sound. White light flared, then fractured. The Rockman's body sagged all at once, earth losing its shape, sliding down around the pole into a collapsing heap. The gem dropped free and rolled, still faintly glowing.
Elias blinked, the kill notification he'd hoped for staying absent in the corner of his vision. The biker didn't spare him a glance. He wrenched the pole free, turned, and moved on toward the next one, boots pounding over dirt.
Not everyone was so lucky.
Another man, further down the line, had grabbed a rough wooden beam—probably ripped from one of the small structures. He raised it across his chest like a makeshift shield as a Rockman stepped in. The creature's arm came down in a straight, heavy swing.
The beam met the blow with a sharp crack. It snapped in half like dry kindling. The same motion carried through into the man's head. There was a wet impact, a sound more dull than sharp, and the top of his skull gave way. Blood and bone sprayed backward, spattering the dirt and the legs of people behind him. His body dropped in place, folding straight down as the ruined beam fell from slack hands.
Death up close wasn't quiet.
The body with the crushed skull twitched once, then stopped. Blood ran out in a dark, steady sheet, soaking into the dirt and clumping the loose gravel. People near him flinched back, boots skidding, one woman gagging as the metallic smell hit.
Before the Rockman could take another step, the old man moved.
He came in from the side, metal bat already in motion. The bat whistled through the air and hammered straight into the Rockman's chest, right where the white gem sat. There was a sharp, cracking sound, like a rock smashed with a hammer. The core split. Light inside it flared once and went out. The Rockman's body collapsed, earth losing form, dropping around the old man's boots in a heavy slump.
Another Rockman swung at him almost immediately, arm coming down in a slow, brutal arc. The old man ducked under it with a short, practiced dip of his shoulders, the bat tucked in tight. The strike passed over his back, stirring his thinning white hair. He shifted with the motion, turning the duck into a step, and came up on the creature's other side.
The bat flashed again. This time he drove it up and across, catching the next Rockman's core at an angle. The gem fractured, and the creature folded just like the first, its mass spilling into a collapsing pile that barely missed his legs.
Elias dodged another swing of his own, feet moving on instinct. The crowbar felt solid in his grip, weight familiar now. He slipped past a Rockman's arm and surged in close, ribs pulling tight, ready to bring the bar down on the glowing stone in its chest.
The core shattered—but not from his strike.
A gunshot cracked over his shoulder. The Rockman's gem blew apart in a spray of white shards, light snuffed in an instant. The body slumped, taking his angle with it. Elias stumbled a half-step, staring at the collapsing earth.
He turned his head and caught sight of the old man lowering his pistol, smoke curling from the barrel. The bat still hung from his other hand, resting against his shoulder, as if he had all the time in the world.
"Dammit," Elias thought then. Another kill stolen.
Looking back, he knew how skewed that was—a man had just had his head smashed in, and what stuck in his mind in that moment was frustration over a missed point on a counter.
That kind of thinking, though, fit right into the law of the jungle the world shifted into. Kills meant cores. Cores meant strength. Strength meant manuals, survival, rank. Fairness didn't enter into it.
There were future leaders of humanity in that crowd. Fighters who would one day stand on front lines far worse than a county fair. And there was a fallen prodigy, ranked as trash on paper, who would eventually shake the planet hard enough that people remembered his name.
Because he didn't just walk the path of a weapon form or a neat movement style.
For Elias, battle was his path of enlightenment.
He was the future Sage of Battle.