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“Keep behind me!” I shouted to Kou Ren and his family.

I readied my Glave and Axe, cycling my Frenzy to imbue my body with [Steel Skin]. I took quick assessment of the chaos erupting around me. One of the Takrids was already being fended off by what appeared to be a group of mid-tier cultivators. The four others were attacking the rest of the tributes en-mass, like sharks shredding a bait ball.

No time to lose!

I launched into the air with a scream, charging my weapons with [Frenzied Lightning]. Bringing them down heavily upon the thorax of the closest Takrid, it felt like I was striking a steel wall. The force of my hit was still enough to crack its armor though and green goop sprayed from its hard, chitinous exo-skeleton that I could now see was at least three inches thick. I wasted no time leaping back up at it for another strike, but with its attention draw, it turned and stabbed me right out of the air with one of its spindly forelimbs.

A grunt of pain escaped my clenched my teeth as the spear-like tip punctured straight through my [Steel Skin] and into my shoulder. My back hit the ground as it pinned me down and I had a flashback to that poor guy getting his head bitten off.

What the hell?

Were these things so strong on this planet that I was going out the same way as some mortal?

Nah… to hell with that…

I was a cultivator.

No.

I was a damn Berserker!

My infuriation and rage combined to light a righteous indignation of defiance in my heart. My Flame surged with Frenzy and I channeled every ounce of it into my strength as I gripped the spindly limp piercing my shoulder. Using both hands and I pulled hard in opposite directions, grunting with exertion.

It felt like I was trying to break concrete, but then with another primal yell, the exo-skeleton gave way like crab leg being snapped and the giraffe-sized beast lurched away from me, spewing green blood from its broken limb. I didn’t bother to remove the tip of its leg from my shoulder as I went on the counter offensive. I’d played this all wrong from the start. My twin Axe and Glave technique was for fighting other cultivators, not monsters.

I stowed my axe on my back and gripped my Phalanx Glaive in both hands. I’d slain hundreds of monsters in wild to strengthen Venja with this style and now I needed to use it to the fullest to kill all these things. I’d attacked the Takrid as if it were a C or B class monster, but clearly these Takrids were the equivalent of an A or S class even.

Maybe I’d been a big fish in a small pond all along.

But no matter.

I had the power of rage on my side. I needed go old school, like back when I was weak. Back when every hit needed my all. When every hit had to count.

When every hit had to kill!

I flew upwards with a battle cry, channeling every chunk of solid Frenzy into my next swing. Lightning flashed with a thunderous boom! as the Glaive cut clean through one of the Takrid’s massive leg joints.

My [Lust for Battle] surged and I went in for another [One Chop Cleave], taking off two legs at once. As the beast fell and toppled over, its chitinous jaws clacked and squeaked and I spun with a somersault to delivery an overhead killing blow that silenced the creature by removing its head.

I had scarce time to cultivate all the Frenzy flowing from my Flame, but I did so quickly to replenish everything I had dished out to slay the Takrid. And it’d been a hell of a lot too. In the time it had taken me to kill it though, I saw that the other four had sliced through nearly half the crowd. Bodies and limbs lay severed on the ground. Blood flowed as screamed filling the air. I looked for Kou Ren but couldn’t find him in the din.

Shit! I thought. If I didn’t act fast all these people were going to die!

I couldn’t hold back any longer.

If I didn’t up my game, it was going to be game over!

Cycling my Frenzy, I surged with [Mark of the Giant], holding back the throttle only slightly to remain just above my normal size. Hopefully not too many people would notice in the fray, but it was more than enough to equalize the heightened gravity pulling against my bones.

I cleaved into another Takrid with my newfound strength, just as it was about to devour a woman caught between its limbs. I took its huge bulbous abdomen right off in a single cleave.

Heck yeah!

I backflipped with my martial forms as it retaliated with a swipe of its legs, its insectoid brain still controlling its body sans its vital organs somehow. I flew back at it with another surge of Frenzy and finally ended its life in full for good with a follow up strike to its head and thorax.

I looked for my next target and pushed through the fleeing crowd to get to the last three.

Luckly one of them already looked partially subdued by a group of ten or so cultivators, who were peppering it with elemental Qi techniques. I changed direction and went for the last two. They were involved in a sparring match of their own, fighting over a pile of fresh corpses that had to be comprised of some thirty people or more.

My stomach lurched at the sight, but the thought of these things killing more people spurred me on. I dug deep within my Frenzy reserves to lay into the closest of the giant insects with a series of Glaive strikes, spinning and hacking to spew green blood.

I was so engrossed in my handiwork that I didn’t see the other Takrid lurch at me until it already had snared my leg within its jaws. I cried out in white hot pain as the force of its bite threatened to cut through my [Steel Skin] and take my leg with it. There wasn’t as much pressure as when the first one had piercing me before, but it was damn near close enough. I cultivated the Frenzy from my [Pain] to fight back and erupted with a burst of [Frenzied Lightning].

“[Wrath of a Thousand Slain Souls]!”

The lightning shocked the creature away from me and I used the time to both recover and finished the other one off before it got any ideas. I then turned about to see the last Takrid still recovering from my lightning hit, convulsing and jittering. Limping, I closed the distance to it and then summoned my Frenzy to dispatch it quickly before it could recover.

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“[Three log Chop]!”

My Glaive cleaved straight through the creature’s insectoid-like head and its convulsions stopped instantly. A sudden weakness overcame me after landing the killing blow. Like I had just run a marathon or something. My breathing was ragged, my skin bathed in green goop, blood and sweat. I was then that I realized that I was throwing around twice my weight now, burning Frenzy like crazy.

I finally pulled the tip of the Takrid leg from my shoulder, wincing with the pain. Dropping it to the ground I then noticed that all the violence had ceased. I looked for the final Takrid the other cultivators had engaged but didn’t see it anymore. What I did see however was a small crowd of Tributes gathering around me. They all gawked with wide eyed stares while their souls spewed lemonade. Murmurs and mumbles came next.

“You see the size of that son of a bitch?”

“He killed four of those things by himself? It took ten of us to kill one!”

“Big deal. The bastard had weapons, we didn’t.”

“How’d he get ‘em?”

“He was a Free Tribute.”

“He volunteered for this shit?”

“Must be high Teir Core Realm, at least!”

The speculative banter continued, and I realized the group before me had to be the same guys who dispatched the other Takrid. A group of more familiar faces then popped out of the crowd and I was relieved to see Kou Ren along with his family—all of them still alive and unscathed.

“Master Iron Bull!” Kou Ren shouted. “You saved our lives! You are the most powerful cultivator I’ve ever seen!” He turned about to face the masses. “Hear this! We who are still standing, own the Iron Bull our lives. He alone slew those beasts! Give him your gratitude!”

Kou Ren fell to his knees along with his family, prostrating himself with a kowtow. A good portion of the rest of the group did the same, which I now saw had been cut down from over a thousand to what looked like less than a hundred.

Holy shit… I thought.

This world was brutal.

The bodies of the slain lay in huge, bloodied piles. Most didn’t seem to care, all prisoners perhaps, but a few who I recognized as fellow sect members from Kou Ren’s town or village were crying unconsolably, perhaps having lost loved ones in the fray.

“Like hell he killed them all,” a slim man with a stubbled beard and long hair said. “We killed one too. And with our bare hands. Ain’t nothing special about a man who got weapons.”

He spit on the ground as if to emphasize the fact.

The bastard then stared at me, sizing me up, anger and resentment in his soul, but I didn’t have time for such bullshit.

My handler senses were tingling.

I ignored him with [Indifference] as I turned to the rest of the crowd.

“We all need to clear out of here,” I said. “These bodies and blood will attract more predators. And trust me when I say this. I come from a world with a Bloodmoon and we all need get to the Academy before it rises.”

The same man scoffed. “What’s this ‘we’ shit? It’s everyman for himself, jackass.”

“Yeah, and who the hell are you tell us what we should do?” another man said. He was thick and burly with dark skin and a shaved head, a white beard that was gnarled and plaited into locks. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m done with taking orders. We’re practically free now. You want to believe that dumb bitch and run to a damn prison for safety, be my guest? Me… I’m finding a way off this rock.”

He began walking away and few stragglers followed after him.

“Wait!” Kou Ren shouted. “We should all stick with the Iron Bull! Clearly, he’s strong enough to protect us. You’ve seen it for yourselves.”

Murmurs of uncertainty and debate filled the air.

I hadn’t planned on becoming the leader of this mob but damn it if Kou Ren wasn’t pushing me and everyone else in that direction. Heated conversations broke out and few more people left to follow the black guy with beard.

Then suddenly a voice shouted above the din.

“You’ll all die!”

Everyone paused to stare at the woman with short cropped blonde hair and gray eyes who had spoken. She was petite with pale white skin, which was now flushed red, perhaps from fighting the last Takrid considering she fit the build of a cultivator to a tee with her toned arms that where on display in her sleeveless robe.

“We have creatures like these back on my home world,” she said. “If you don’t move fast enough and quietly enough, you’ll pop a swarm like we did just now. If you want to survive, your best bet is to move fast and alone.” She then paused and looked right at me. “Stay with these people and you’ll die, Iron Bull.”

With that said, the woman suddenly took off in a sprint, heading in the opposite direction of the bearded guy and towards the academy. A few more seconds passed before the asshole who sized me up took off as well. After this it was a free for all, with tributes leaving in droves.

Even some of Kou Ren’s fellow townsmen left, following the crowd.

After a few minutes when I looked at who remained, there was only Kou Ren’s family along with perhaps a dozen more tributes who were either wounded or maimed.

Son of bitch, I thought.

But then maybe I was expecting too much of them to band together for their fellow man. Most of these people were criminals, after all.

“What are we going to do?” Kou Ren asked.

“What that woman said made sense to me,” Su Ren said, leaning on her husband’s shoulder for support. “We need to move quickly so those things can’t jump out of the ground to grab us.”

“But what about all these other people?” Kou Ren looked back to the dozen or so other tributes with us. “Some of them don’t look able to walk.”

“I say we leave them,” the youngest son, Lo Ren said, his dark eyes lowering as he looked over the wounded tributes with disdain. “They’re all criminals anyway.”

His callous statement took me by surprise. He definitely wasn’t a chip off the old block. But he wasn’t exactly wrong either. Still, the cultivator, dog eat dog mindset of it all just rubbed me the wrong way.

“Would you do the same to your mother?” I asked.

He stared back at me shocked with his mouth open.

I didn’t wait for an answer and instead went to work, doing the only thing I knew that could help. There was no way we could move at any kind of speed without making a ton of noise. And we needed to get moving quickly to beat the sun. We were bound to attract more Takrids, but there was a solution for that.

“On my world, my job was to escort cultivators through territory like this,” I said. “Avoiding large predators and spirit beast was what I was trained to do.”

I found the giant abdomen of the Takrid I had cut clean off. Using my [Mark of the Giant] strength, I gripped the ends of its carapace and cracked it wide open like a peanut. Guts and foul-smelling offal burst free. I then rooted around in the nauseating stuff until I found what I was looking for.

I didn’t know these creatures, but there were plenty of insect type monsters back home and from my years of training as a handler I knew how to avoid them. Finding what I was looking for, I raised a banana shaped organ in the air for all of them to see.

“Insects communicate mostly by chemicals,” I said. “This organ is what produces them. It’s going to be nasty, but if we smear this on us, it’ll be our best chance to survive if another one of those things pops out of the ground to attack.”

I didn’t have to speak twice.

The tributes lined up in front of me as their souls oozed lemonade.

I handed the organ to Kou Ren. “You go first and then help the others. I’ll get more sacs.”

I popped three more Takrid abdomens open to get the organs needed to cover the sixteen people with me. Two of the tributes were missing limbs and already half dead, but I put a tourniquet on their wounds and after smearing them with Takrid gunk, threw them on my back.

“Why do you care so much about these strangers?” Lo Ren said frowning at me. “They would have likely left just like the others if they could.”

If seemed a genuine question. A good one too. Lo Ren and Chu Ren were near identical in appearance. Both close to my age, Lo Ren maybe being a few years younger. They were everyday people, dark hair cut short so as not to interfere with their working in the fields, ordinary features. But that was where the similarities ended. Now I realized that Chu Ren and Lo Ren were like night and day. Chu Ren seemed much more like his father, a man of the people.

Lo Ren seemed a man in it for himself.

“Maybe,” I said, finally answering him. “But leaving them here would make us no better.”

That seemed to stump him.

“Bring your mother to me, I’ll carry her as well.”

“Three people?” he said.

I was still pumping [Mark of the Giant] and my increased frame size could handle the bulk if placed them right. With Kou Ren’s help I fit Su Ren on my back. The weight was enormous, especially with my weapons and I found I had to spend a steady stream of Frenzy just to stay upright. Luckly there was enough lemonade in the air to help recoup some of it.

“Wait,” Kou Ren said holding up one of Takrid sacs. “You forgot to use this on yourself, Master Iron Bull.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not wearing any. If worst comes to worst, I want to be able to lure those things away from you guys, if I can.”

I still didn’t know if I could even pull this off.

The [Odds were Against Me] indeed.

Kou Ren smiled as his eyes welled with tears.

“You are truly an honorable soul, Master Iron Bull,” Kou Ren said, giving me another bow of respect. “Somehow, be it in this life or the next, I will repay you for this great kindness.”

“Let’s just worry about this life for now,” I said with a grin. I found my bearings for the academy and then shouted to the rest of the crowd. “Okay, let’s move out. We’ve got twenty miles to cover. And that sun isn’t going to wait for us to set.”