Osric

  Osric barely had time to react before the ground tried to eat him.

  The marsh lurched, something deep beneath the muck shifting like a stomach waking up hungry. It sucked at his boots like a starving thing. It had been doing that for the last mile, and it was starting to piss him off. He jerked his foot back in time to see a sickly red mass bubble up, dragging pieces of half-digested bone to the surface.

  Liora whistled. “That’s new.”

  Osric scowled. “It’s not new. You just weren’t here the last time the swamp tried to have a snack.”

  She crouched beside the bubbling mass, nudging a floating skull with the edge of her dagger. “Think it remembers you?”

  “If it does, I hope it chokes.”

  Alex remained exactly where he was, unmoving. If anything, he seemed curious, like a man watching a frog attempt to swallow a bird.

  Osric sighed. Young. Strong. Not yet aware that things existed which didn’t care how strong you were, how great your class was or how many skills you had.

  Liora straightened and flicked swamp water from her fingers. “So, I take it you and the Bloodmarshes have history?”

  “More than I’d like,” Osric muttered, stepping back from the sludge. “Last time I was here, I left a few things behind.”

  Liora raised an eyebrow. “Your dignity?”

  “My blood.”

  ***

  The Bloodmarshes were old. And in some places, just... wrong.

  The ruins didn’t erode properly. Stones cracked, but never crumbled. Rot spread, but the dead things never fully collapsed. Magic lingered in ways it shouldn’t. It was like the place had been built to resist time itself, and then time had gotten pissed off and decided to fight back.

  Some people believed the Blood God still existed somewhere, trapped or weakened. Osric doubted it. Gods didn’t get trapped. They died, violently, or they left.

  The real question wasn’t what happened to the Blood God. It was what kind of thing could kill one.

  Liora nudged him. “You look like you’re thinking about something awful.”

  “I usually am.”

  “You wanna share?”

  Osric kicked a half-buried slab of black stone, watching as the impact left no mark. “I was thinking about how gods tend to leave a mess when they die.”

  Liora hummed, walking alongside him. “That’s assuming they died.”

  Alex spoke, still watching the shifting swamp. “The System never confirmed it.”

  That was true. It only sometimes referred to the gods as dead, other times lost, as though it was the one who killed them and had forgotten its lies. That was weird.

  Two millennia ago, they had all disappeared. That was fact. The world had shattered, rebuilt itself, and the System had risen in their absence.

  According to the crown, it had not been there before the end. Now, it influenced and dictated the laws of everything.

  "The Imperial Master remains." He muttered under his breath.

  It was a message that appeared every few centuries. No one knew what it meant. The System never elaborated. No records. No messages. Just those words.

  Most people assumed it was a glitch. Osric had spent his entire life thinking about it.

  Because the System did not glitch.

  Liora was still watching him. “You think the Bloodmarshes are connected?”

  "Dunno," Osric grunted. “I think we’re walking through the leftovers of something that isn’t done eating,”

  Religious debate had spiraled into insanity after the gods vanished.

  Some claimed the System was the gods' final will. The Church of the System had risen from that belief, arguing that the System itself was divine, a construct of the lost gods' will. That if they followed it, they could ascend to where the gods had gone.

  Others called the System a usurper. They said it had killed the gods, replaced them, buried history. That it wasn’t meant to rule, and that the Imperial Masters were its creators, its true masters, still watching.

  Then there were the old believers. The ones who thought the God of Blood, Creation, and Magic was still out there, waiting. They took their blessed feat and the system messages as law and a tool for their worship, desperate for its quests, the lunatics.

  Osric had met too many dying men to care about what they believed. Faith didn’t save you. It just made you feel better before you died.

  Still, Liora had grown up in the Church of the System. She wasn’t devout, but she had been raised with its teachings. She had never been forced to question it.

  “Were the gods ever real?” she asked suddenly.

  Osric stopped walking.

  Liora met his gaze. Not joking now. That was rare for her.

  Osric sighed, rolling his shoulders. “They were real.”

  “How do you know?”

  Osric tapped the scar on his chest.

  Liora stared. “Wait. You—”

  “I’ve been in places they walked,” Osric said flatly. “Seen things people don’t survive seeing.”

  Liora exhaled. “Damn. You should’ve led with that.”

  ***

  Osric wasn’t sure when exactly people started calling him a legend. Probably around the third or fourth time he didn’t die doing something that absolutely should have killed him.

  In some parts, his name was famous for being impossible to kill—and for doing the kind of things that everyone else was smart enough to avoid. Over the years, his name had become a shorthand for impossible odds. Where most people would say, “I wouldn’t touch that job for all the gold in the kingdom,” someone else would pipe up with, “What about Osric, of the Wastes?” And invariably, the answer would be, “Sure, if you want the bastard to survive and bring back half of it burned, the other half cursed, and a story that makes no sense.”

  There was the time they said he’d defeated an Elder Medusa using only a shard of glass and a prayer. Which would have been impressive, except Osric didn’t pray, and the shard of glass turned out to be part of an already-broken mirror. All he’d done was show the Medusa his own reflection and let him spiral into an existential crisis. Was it skill? Probably not. But it worked, and now there was a drinking song that made him sound like a holy knight. Osric wasn’t exactly the type to bask in his reputation, mainly because most of the stories were completely wrong. Sure, he’d fought a basilisk once. Well, it had looked like a basilisk at the time, but when the dust cleared, it turned out to be a very angry tamer's pet that had somehow gotten its claws on a cursed amulet.

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  Take the infamous “Hydra egg heist," in the wastelands. By all accounts, it was a brilliant plan. By Osric’s account, it was a simple “in-and-out” job that somehow ended with him hanging upside down from a chandelier while an actual Hydra tried to swat him like a childrens toy. He got out, of course—he always did—but not before acquiring a nickname that stuck: “Osric of the Wastes.” It wasn’t his proudest title.

  That was the thing about being called a legend. It wasn’t the truth. It was what people thought would sell better. The actual story—wandering into a forgotten tomb to scavenge supplies, accidentally waking a cranky creature of myth whose ‘bad hair day’ could turn a legion of knights into lawn ornaments, and holding up the closest shiny object he could find—didn’t inspire much awe. But the truth wasn’t important. What mattered was that the job was done, the Medusi wasn’t bothering anyone anymore, and Osric was still alive to hear the terrible ballads about it.

  Good thing only a few people ever knew what he really looked like.

  It wasn’t all nonsense, though. Osric had done plenty to earn his reputation, just not in the ways people thought. He’d tracked monsters no one else could find, walked into ruins that were more trap than building, and come back with just enough treasure to keep things interesting. He wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty—or muddy, or coated in a very suspicious slime—if it meant coming out on top. Sure, it wasn’t glamorous, but who cared? He was alive, he was competent, and sometimes he even got paid—And sure, he’d fought some ridiculous things and lived to tell about it. But that didn’t mean he was walking around polishing his own statue or posing for the next bard. Most of the time, he wasn’t even sure how the tales got started.

  Osric had done a lot. Too much, probably. He’d fought creatures no one believed existed. He’d walked into places people swore were cursed and walked out again, usually more irritated than afraid.

  He knew when to run, too. Nobody ever mentioned that. All the stories painted him as the unrelenting force that never quit, never backed down. That was fine. It was what people wanted to hear. But the truth was that Osric’s success wasn’t just about strength or clever tricks. It was about knowing exactly when to turn around and stay among the living. Even legends needed a good pair of legs.

  The truth, as far as Osric saw it, was simple: surviving is hard. People who survive long enough get noticed, and once people notice you, they start making things up. If they want to believe he stopped a war by charming a banshee with a flute solo, fine. It wasn’t his job to correct them. His job was to keep doing what he did best—not dying in the dumbest ways imaginable—and letting everyone else fill in the details.

  “This place isn’t alive, is it?” Liora asked, hopping from one stone to the next like she was playing some kind of twisted childhood game. “Because it feels alive. Like it’s breathing. Or digesting.”

  Osric yanked his foot free of the muck with a wet pop. “It’s not alive. It just has a very shitty attitude.” He didn’t mention that he’d lost a perfectly good blade the last time he was here, the weapon slipping from his grasp and vanishing into the sucking mud. By the time he tried to retrieve it, the swamp had decided it owned that particular piece of steel, and Osric wasn’t interested in arguing with something that didn’t have vocal cords but somehow managed to hiss.

  Osric had lived this long because he never assumed he was the strongest thing in the room. Or swamp. He had met a lot of powerful people, too. Most of them were dead. The problem with being strong was that sooner or later, something figured out how to kill you.

  ***

  "The gods," Alex spoke while still watching the swamp. “The System never acknowledges them. Just the one so far.”

  “Because it doesn’t care,” Osric said.

  Liora frowned. “Or because they’re dead.”

  According to the different temples strewn across the Frontier and rendering half of the planet uninhabitable, there had been a lot of gods. But three seemed to be more powerful than most, and more notable. Their temples stood more pristine, their creations more deadly, and their lands more unyielding to change and time, and far more unnasailable. The Blood God had been missing for two millennia, and yet the marsh still bled. Not metaphorically—actual blood, centuries old, mixed into the water like it hadn’t gotten the message. The last known god to have walked the world, leaving behind nothing but rot and legend.

  Of course, legends scoured from fringe ruins and fragmented public historical records didn’t tell the full story. People imagined gods as divine, above mortal flaws. The Blood God had not been divine. He had been hungry.

  The others had been different. The God of Magic had been distant, unknowable, yet everywhere, his presence marking every tomb. The God of Creation? If there was a grand plan, it had failed. All of them had disappeared, in the end. But it was undeniable that they had been the most powerful- or had at least left the most of their mark upon the world.

  Liora, of course, was not struggling, not anymore. She was talented and had excellent senses and instincts, far beyond what someone her age and background should have. She practically skipped over the broken stone, moving with the blissful arrogance of someone who had never been here before. It was strikingly different to how she had been a while earlier. She was still skilled and competent, but the power of her party had led her to overconfidence. He would have to let something almost eat her to bring her back down to the mud. Keep her on her toes.

  “Can’t believe you dragged me back to this place,” he muttered.

  Liora huffed.

  “I don’t know what you’re so tense about,” she said, smiling as she stepped over a long-dead skeleton, probably one of the last idiots who thought this place was just a swamp. “We’ve got Alex. We’re practically invincible.”

  Osric grunted. “You say that like people stronger than him haven’t died here.”

  Liora waved a hand. “Sure, but they didn’t have me.”

  Osric stared at her. “That’s what you’re betting on?”

  She grinned.

  That was exactly what made Osric worried. He’d definitely need to let something eat her soon, she was strong enough to survive most onslaughts, initially. He'd just have to remind himself to stop whatever creature it was when it got too close to succeeding.

  ***

  They had been walking for another hour, deeper into the Bloodmarshes, heading toward a distant structure Osric had seen only once before. The last time he was here, it had been just a shadow in the distance, visible only when the swamp mist parted long enough to reveal its jagged silhouette. He hadn’t dared approach it back then—he was younger, and while he wasn’t reckless, he was still learning the fine line between boldness and stupidity. Now, with more years behind him and two companions who seemed blissfully unconcerned with their own mortality, he wondered if this time would be any different.

  “Is this the farthest you’ve been in?” Liora asked, breaking the silence again. She was smiling, as usual, which Osric found irritating in the best of circumstances. “Or did you get bored and leave last time?”

  “No, and I got smart and left,” he muttered.

  Liora looked intrigued. “Really... What’s the worst that could've happened?”

  Osric stopped and looked at her, genuinely curious if she wanted an actual list. Then he glanced over at Alex, who was standing still, his gaze fixed on something ahead. Alex didn’t speak often and seemed focused on their goal, so if his attention was fixed on something, it either needed killing or was about to try and kill them. Either way, it would likely become Osric’s problem in the next five seconds.

  Oh, and Liora's, too.

  He had watched expeditions walk in and never walk out. He had watched powerful mages burn away, watched warriors with names that shook kingdoms vanish into the mud like they had never been. Strength didn’t mean anything to a place like this. The god's lands didn’t care how strong you were.

  Alex finally spoke. “Something’s watching.”

  Osric didn’t ask where. Didn’t ask how he knew. Just rested his hand on his summoned bow of mana and waited. The thing about being this experienced was that eventually, you stopped questioning instincts and just prepared for the part where something tried to eat you.

  “What kind of something?” Liora asked, already repositioning her halberd. She was quick, light on her feet, and Osric had seen her take down creatures twice her size with that ridiculous, reckless style of hers. She always fought like she was just figuring out where her opponent’s weak spot was, twisting around until she found it, then striking heavily like it was the most natural thing in the world. It was impressive for someone so new. And infuriating in its recklessness and sheer grit.

  “Big,” Alex said simply. “And close.”

  Liora sighed, stretching. “I was hoping for at least ten more minutes before something tried to kill us again.”

  Osric snorted. “Optimistic.”

  The marsh shuddered. Something beneath the water shifted, slow and heavy, like it had been waiting.

  Osric hated being right.

  A low vibration rippled through the marsh.

  Osric’s hand pulled the thick bowstring of mana tight. The sound wasn’t normal.

  Liora tensed. Even Alex stopped walking.

  Then the ground shifted.

  The ruins ahead shuddered, stones moving, cracking apart as something beneath them began to rise.

  Osric muttered a curse. “Took longer than last time.”

  Liora drew both her blades. “You know what that is?”

  “Yeah.” Osric exhaled. “A problem.”

  The thing beneath the ruins groaned. It wasn’t alive. It wasn’t dead, either. Just something too old and too stubborn to stop moving.

  Alex stepped forward, eyeing the stream of kill and level-up notifications he had yet to take in. He had no blade, no weapon. He didn’t need one.

  “Think you can kill it?” Osric asked.

  Alex didn’t blink. “I can kill anything.”

  The swamp laughed.

  Not a real sound. Not an actual voice. But something deep, something too vast to be a single thing. It made the world shake as if it found Alex’s words amusing.

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