The crimson bullet shot through the freezing night air spinning with terrifying lethal precision.

As the condensed mana round tore across the gap between the mountain peaks, a suffocating wave of unnatural darkness followed in its wake.

It consumed the silver moonlight, blanketing the jagged rocks in a pitch-black void... The stars vanished and the wind stopped howling.

All Klaus could see was the glowing red trajectory of the bullet heading straight for the center of his forehead.

The distance was closing in a fraction of a heartbeat. With the supersonic speed it was traveling at, the harsh reality settled into his bones: he would not be able to outspeed it as he couldn’t dodge.

’Magnetic Field...’ Klaus thought with his jaw clenching tight.

He didn’t hold anything back.

He expanded his Magnetic Field, pushing the invisible dome outward with as much raw mana as he could manage and the air around him distorted, humming with a high-pitched metallic frequency.

The bullet entered the edge of his expanded range.

Sparks ignited in the empty air as the hyper-dense metal clashed against his invisible barrier.

The bullet slowed, fighting the repulsive force, but it didn’t sputter... It didn’t stop. The kinetic energy behind the sniper’s shot was monstrous. The projectile continued shooting through the air, fighting through his magic inch by agonizing inch.

The glowing red tip came closer, grinding through the magnetic resistance to the point that Klaus could see the grooves cut into the metal.

It was coming right for his face and the pressure inside his skull spiked.

"Ngh!" Klaus grunted.

He gritted his teeth so hard his jaw popped.

Hot, thick blood started coming out of his nose, dripping down his chin as he pushed his brain to the absolute limit. He couldn’t stop the bullet’s forward momentum, but he could alter its trajectory.

He focused every ounce of his output on the underside of the projectile, redirecting it upward.

The bullet fought him with the friction generating a blinding orange heat, but it curved upward slowly. It was a game of millimeters.

As the scorching metal was about to hit his face and shatter his skull, Klaus strained his neck back.

’Fuck!’ Klaus thought.

He directed it upward with a final desperate surge of power. The glowing round whooshed past his face, the intense heat singeing his eyelashes and the edge of his hair.

It went upward, shooting in a steep arc right past Seo and Neo, carrying its terrifying payload into the sky.

BOOM!

The bullet hit the top half of the towering mountain peak above them. It carved through the solid granite instantly, detonating deep inside the bedrock with a deafening explosion and the shockwave rattled the teeth in Klaus’s mouth.

Klaus took a deep, ragged breath, wiping the blood from his lip.

"F-fuck..." Klaus cursed aloud with his knees shaking.

The ground beneath their boots began to rumble as the structural integrity of the peak above them gave way.

"Klaus!" Seo shouted, pointing a trembling finger upward.

He turned back to face both the Protagonist and the Heroine. His eyes widened at the sight of the crumbling cliff face.

"Move!" Klaus commanded.

He didn’t wait for them to process the danger. He shot upward immediately, his boots kicking off the uneven stone.

He began bouncing from ledge to ledge as the top part of the mountain caved in completely. A terrifying avalanche of massive rocks and jagged boulders came rushing down the slope, crushing everything in its path.

Neo grabbed Seo by the arm, using his wind magic to lighten their steps as all of them moved frantically across the treacherous terrain.

As the rocks tumbled and smashed into the path where they had just been standing, the weird suffocating darkness finally dispersed, letting the pale moonlight return to the pass.

Miles away, crouching on a high vantage point, the Crimson Starshooter lowered the barrel of her rifle as her rotting, green-tinted lips twitched in disbelief.

’Did he just redirect my bullet?’ she thought, her dead heart failing to beat but a spark of genuine shock registering in her decayed brain.

She looked through the advanced scope, tracking the dust cloud across the valley.

She watched all three of them weave through the falling stones. They were using the massive, tumbling boulders as a way to hide from her line of sight, breaking her lock-on.

She gritted her teeth with her fangs scraping against her lower lip as her dead eyes glowed in a vibrant toxic green.

She wasn’t going to let her prey escape that easily. She pulled her rifle tight against her chest and began running along the vertical edge of the mountain.

Her undead muscles contracted with terrifying force, generating a visible shockwave against the stone as she leapt through the empty air. She launched herself toward another nearby mountain peak to get a better angle.

Mid-air, she executed a flawless, unnatural spin. She reared her massive crimson sniper rifle, bracing the stock against her shoulder without needing the ground for support, and looked straight through the glowing lenses.

Through the swirling dust of the avalanche, she could see Klaus moving along the narrow mountain shelf. He was hugging the wall, using the falling rocks to obstruct her view.

A small twisted smirk covered her rotting face as the world around her lost its color. Time seemed to slow down for her, stretching the seconds into minutes as her unique undead perception took over.

She placed her pale, decaying finger on the cold metal trigger.

’I would like to see how you stop this...’ she thought.

She squeezed the trigger twice in rapid succession.

THOOM! THOOM!

She let out two bullets. Each one shot across the valley in his exact direction immediately, tearing through the cold air with a massive sonic boom.

A secondary, twin shockwave rippled from the muzzle, and that familiar, suffocating darkness followed the glowing red tracers.

Across the valley, Klaus moved toward the next outcropping, and then he stopped dead in his tracks. He had to turn.

That weird, sensory-depriving darkness filled the air around him again.

The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. He really didn’t know much of her specific abilities from his memories of playing the game, so he couldn’t understand the exact mechanics of the weird darkness, but his instincts screamed at him.

He could feel the two bullets coming right at him, tearing through the void.

His brain dumped adrenaline into his system.

His perception had slowed down as well, granting him the agonizing ability to watch his own demise approach as he could feel them coming, but he simply couldn’t push his exhausted muscles in time for them to stop running. His boots felt like they were cast in iron.

The two glowing red bullets entered his Magnetic Field again.

"Nghh!"

Klaus raised his hands, trying to force the twin projectiles to move upward. The strain was agonizing and his invisible barrier warped under the dual impact. They curved upward a bit, shifting their fatal trajectories by an inch, but his mana was draining fast.

It poured out of his core in his last desperate bits.

’Come on...’ Klaus thought with his vision blurring.

He moved his eyes, tracking the glowing red metal. He could practically see his own death reflected right in those spinning bullets.

If they hit his chest, there would be nothing left of his torso to heal.

Klaus held nothing back as he poured the last remaining bits of mana into his Magnetic Field, pushing the magnetic repulsion to a breaking point.

The invisible force spiked.

The two bullets screamed against the friction, curving upward even more. They missed his shoulders by a hair’s breadth and punched directly into the mountains behind him, blowing massive craters into the stone.

Klaus fell to one knee, gasping for air.

His mana was drained completely to zero and the tank was empty. The oppressive darkness grew weaker as the edges of the void started fraying but it didn’t fully recede.

Klaus turned his head and shifted his body, trying to check on Seo and Neo.

Only for everything to slow down again... A third bullet was sailing right toward his chest.

It had been hidden perfectly in the slipstream of the first two.

A trap... A guaranteed kill shot designed for the exact moment his defenses dropped. Klaus stared at the spinning red metal. He had zero mana left to deflect it so he couldn’t move.

’Goddess!’ Klaus called out in pure alarm in his head.

There was no incantation or prayer.

Immediately, a brilliant, blinding blue glow surrounded his entire body. The cold night air turned warm as the aching pain in his chest vanished as his mana was rejuvenated completely by the divine power of the Goddess Luneth.

The energy surged through his veins like liquid lightning and the third bullet shot toward his heart.

Klaus didn’t dodge. He brought both of his arms up to the side of the bullet, clapping his hands inward and condensing a massive, hyper-dense wall of magnetic force right between his palms.

He clamped down on the projectile, stopping it dead in its tracks.

The kinetic transfer was apocalyptic.

Catching the bullet sent a devastating shockwave rippling outward in a perfect sphere. The blast sent Klaus flying backward off his feet, launching him past Neo and Seo, tearing through the air.

He smashed through a few falling boulders, turning them to dust, before his back collided violently with the solid wall of the mountain.

CRASH!

The impact created a deep, spider-webbed crater in the stone. Klaus’s spine screamed, several ribs snapping under the pressure, but immediately, he could feel the bones shifting and beginning to heal under the warm blue glow of the divine blessing.

"Haah..." Klaus let out a ragged breath with dust raining down over his face.

He held his hands out, his magnetic grip keeping the glowing, smoking bullet suspended tight between his palms.

He didn’t let the metal cool down. He gritted his teeth and immediately spent more of his newly restored mana.

Klaus manipulated the polarity, pushing the bullet backward and then he hit it through the air with an explosive burst of electromagnetic force, launching it with enough kinetic energy to create a small shockwave in the air.

BOOM!

The red bullet was sent directly back across the valley, screaming toward the exact position where it had come from.

Down the path, Seo and Neo stopped running, staring in horror at the cloud of dust where Klaus had crashed. Klaus removed himself from the crater with a burst of wind, landing on his boots.

"Are you dumb?" Klaus yelled, glaring at the two of them standing still. "Why the hell would you stop?"

And they began moving however Klaus coughed, clearing his throat and spitting out a mouthful of dark blood onto the stone.

He raised his arm and pointed a single finger across the vast canyon, directly at the distant peak where the sniper was falling.

"Neo, fire some Wind Cutters there!" Klaus ordered with his voice echoing over the rumbling rocks. "As far as you can!"

Neo gritted his teeth as his yellow eyes wide with confusion and panic.

"Neo, do as he says!" Seo shouted, finding her courage.

Neo gritted his teeth harder with his hands empty. "What sword?!" he yelled back.

He didn’t have his weapon... He had lost it in the cavern but as the words left his mouth, the ambient mana in the cold mountain air converged around his empty grip.

The particles materialized condensing into a solid blade of steel.

He didn’t question the miracle as he tightened his grip on the hilt, and his eyes flashed in a vibrant glowing green.

The Protagonist looked forward across the canyon.

They all jumped onto a higher, stable rock, reading the direction of the wind howling through the pass. Neo pulled the glowing sword back over his shoulder.

He channeled his affinity into the blade and then he stepped forward and shot a singular Wind Cutter as his sword glowed in a blinding green light.

"Wind Cutter!" Neo shouted.

He slashed horizontally through the empty air with the sword in hand.

SHATTER!

The sheer output of his magic was too much for the makeshift weapon. The sword shattered into a million glowing pieces, dissolving back into the wind but the spell was cast.

A massive, single green line of condensed, razor-sharp air followed his swing, tearing through the night sky. It generated a deafening shockwave as it moved, screaming toward the distant peak.

Miles away, the Crimson Sharpshooter widened her dead eyes.

She was still in mid-air, suspended over the gap between the mountains. Something glowing red shot straight back toward her. It was her own bullet, returning on the exact same trajectory.

Before she could adjust her aim or twist her undead body away, the bullet tore through her head.

SQUELCH!

The impact exploded the top part of her skull as fragments of bone, rotting flesh, and dark, coagulated blood sprayed out into the wind.

The bullet made that top section, as well as her decayed brain, explode outward in a gruesome mist. Her glowing green eyes instantly became glazed with the unnatural light dying out as her head snapped back.

But her suffering wasn’t over.

Suddenly, a massive, screaming slash of green wind tore through the air. It followed right behind the bullet, crossing the distance in a heartbeat.

The Wind Cutter hit her directly in the waist.

It sliced through her rotting clothes, her pale skin, and her spine without a hint of resistance. The sheer force of the wind magic split her cleanly in half.

Her torso separated from her legs in a geyser of thick black blood and dark intestines spilling out of her severed midsection, raining down into the abyss below.

On the other side of the canyon, Neo dropped his empty hand, panting heavily.

"I hit!" Neo said with a triumphant smile breaking across his face as Klaus brushed the stone dust off his shoulders, his eyes scanning the crumbling terrain.

"That’s good..." Klaus said. "However, we need to focus on the bigger matter here."

"Bigger matter?" Neo asked, his smile faltering.

They looked up, following Klaus’s gaze to the towering peak directly above their heads. The part of the mountain that had been torn through by those two initial bullets groaned.

Massive, jagged fissures spread across the stone like a spider web, and more debris started falling, the rocks raining down around them in a deadly shower.

"Move!" Klaus barked.

They didn’t hesitate this time. They sprinted down the winding mountain path, escaping the massive debris falling from the sky.

Boulders the size of carriages smashed into the trail just inches behind their heels, shattering into deadly shrapnel.

Klaus kept to the front, navigating the treacherous drops and narrow ledges and as he continued, he looked around while jumping across a wide gap in the path with his muscles remaining coiled tight.

He expected another attack... but the attack never came as the night air remained clear of magic.

Klaus leaped forward onto a wide stable ledge jutting out from the side of the mountain. He lands smoothly with his boots skidding slightly on the gravel and then he stood up and looked out over the edge.

Down below, cutting through the darkness of the valley, he could see the warm flickering lights of a human town.

The glowing lanterns marked civilization and the end of their nightmare which made him smile as he turned around to face the two nobles landing on the ledge behind him.

"The town is up ahead..." Klaus said, letting out a long exhausted breath. "Hurry up."

Seo landed on another ledge with Klaus up ahead, her cloak was torn and her face was coated in grey dust.

She looked at the lights up front with her heart swelling with an indescribable relief.

’How do I apologize to him once we leave here?’ Seo thought. ’How do I say sorry for everything I put him through?’

She opened her mouth with the words forming on her tongue as she was about to start however... there was a deafening roar.

BOOM!

A massive, unnatural hole blew straight through the center of Klaus’s chest from behind.

Seo blinked as her mind refusing to process the image.

The fabric of his cloak vanished, replaced by a jagged, gaping tunnel of missing flesh and shattered ribs. Klaus froze with his eyes widening in pure shock as thick hot blood rolled out of his mouth, spilling over his chin.

"Klaus!" Seo screamed his name.

His knees buckled. He fell forward, tipping off the edge of the rocky ledge and plummeting past them, falling downward into the dark, bottomless abyss toward the ground below.

In the exact place where he had been standing, a nightmare materialized from the shadows.

It was the Crimson Sharpshooter.

Her face was twisted into a terrifying, bloody smile. Her head was still catastrophically wounded, the entire top half of her skull missing, with thick black blood and chunks of grey matter coming down her face in sluggish streams.

She raised her heavy rifle with a trembling rotting arm aiming the barrel directly between Seo’s terrified eyes.

"Boom..."

She clicked the trigger.

THOOM!