The training pits had emptied, leaving only the echo of distant grunts and the metallic scent of sweat lingering in the air. Kaelren stepped off the packed dirt path, glancing back one last time at the mixed sparring grounds. His limbs still trembled slightly from exertion, but it wasn't fatigue that slowed his steps — it was absence.
Dren hadn't come back.
It had been Too long for a short-range mission. Too silent for survival.
As Kaelren cut across the camp, his boots crunching the frost-hardened soil, a crackling voice burst across the old loudspeakers lashed to wooden poles. A reedy projection, half-drowned in static, barked out the next bloodstained ritual of the camp:
"Attention, all combatants of Camp 12. Winter Cull begins in eleven months. Final standing evaluations will commence two weeks prior. The twenty lowest-ranked will be terminated. Prepare accordingly."
Kaelren's eyes narrowed, but his pace didn't change.
The Winter Cull — a death sentence by bureaucracy, dressed up as survival of the fittest. A distant threat, once. Now it loomed like a blade already descending for the weak.
Dren had joked about it, once. " Either we'll be monsters by then — or dead before it matters."
They'd known each other for barely a month. That was all. Just one month — of shared battles, laughs over half-burned rations, whispered dreams of escape. But in the hell of Camp 12, a month was enough to make someone your blood or mostly Your sworn enemy.
Kaelren veered off the main row and passed the scattered tents of the mid-tier barracks. The canvas structures rustled faintly in the wind, stitched together with salvaged hides and patchworked tarp. He stopped outside Dren's — small, ragged, but familiar. A place he'd sat in, bled in, talked about everything and nothing.
He pushed the flap aside.
Empty.
No sign of return. Just a faint draft and the cold trace of abandonment.
Kaelren exhaled, breath white in the air, and stepped out.
The Mission Tent stood on the camp's northern edge, held up by thick poles wrapped in faded runic strips. Inside, the smell of blood-ink and damp parchment hit harder than any punch. Record boards were nailed to the interior support beams, each with layers of scratched entries and faded red stamps of FAILURE or COMPLETED.
Kaelren approached the mission wall.
He scanned until he found it.
MISSION: Resource retrieval
COMBATANT: Dren
STATUS: FAILED.
No recovery crew. No note of return. Not even a confirmation of death. Just silence. A failed stamp. Erasure.
The tension in Kaelren's body crystallized.
That was it, then. No second chances. No return. Dren was gone — swallowed by the wilderness or whatever monsters stalked the fringes of Camp 12. The only person he'd ever called "brother" in this forsaken place.
Kaelren's jaw clenched. His breath slowed. He could feel something shift inside him — resolve welding itself into his bones.
He would never let this happen again.
No more friends.
No more failure.
No more weakness.
By the next Cull, they would know his name.
And by the end of it, they would never forget it.
Dren was gone.
He didn't mourn aloud. He didn't rage. He simply turned — and walked to the opposite board.
Where new missions waited.
No one stopped him. No one cared. The warden behind the hide-and-bone desk barely lifted her eyes as Kaelren scanned the task list. Most were garbage — foraging patrols, recon checks, pest exterminations. But one line burned brighter than the rest.
TARGET ELIMINATION: BLOOD TUSK MATRIARCH
REWARD: 75 BLOOD COINS
RANK: HIGH-RISK
Kaelren grabbed the mission.
Minutes later, he was gone.
The northern fringe of Vel'Drakka was graveyard-quiet when Kaelren found her — the Blood Tusk Matriarch.
She moved like a living siege beast. Plates of jagged armor rose from her back like layered stone, steam hissing from vents in her flanks. Her tusks were the size of Kaelren's body, gnarled and battle-worn. Every step left craters in the moss and stone.
Kaelren crouched in silence, the wind scraping cold across his skin. He didn't wait.
He attacked.
He came in low, a blur of muscle and momentum. His shoulder slammed into the joint of her front leg, buckling it with a bone-jarring crunch. The Matriarch shrieked — a scream that shook the trees — and snapped her head around with terrifying speed.
Too slow.
Kaelren had already vaulted up her side, scrambling over ridged plates, fists hammering into exposed tendon near her neck. She reared up, shaking violently. He held on with one arm and drove his knee down, again and again, into the seam of shell and meat.
Then she slammed into the ground — hard.
Kaelren was flung like a ragdoll into a dead tree, ribs cracking on impact. He spat blood, rolled, and sprinted back in with a snarl. His elbow struck a back vent as he slid beneath her swing — a jet of burning steam burst out, scalding his arm, but he didn't stop.
He climbed her again — using claws, fingers, grit — and when he reached her spine, he bit into the base of her neck. Muscle tore. Blood sprayed. She bellowed and thrashed, smashing into stone, but he didn't let go.
He twisted his body, wrapped his legs around her throat like a vice, and began to beat his fists into the side of her skull — over and over — with the rhythm of a war drum.
When she slammed him to the earth, he bounced once, bones howling, and then pounced again.
His head crashed into her exposed eye. Bone shattered. He followed with an elbow into the socket — crunch — and bit down hard on the base of her jaw.
Her tusks slashed the air wildly — but she was already tipping.
Kaelren raked his claws into the soft spot beneath her chin, hauled himself up her twitching form, and ended it by driving his knee into the open vent he'd cracked earlier. The blow landed deep.
The Blood Tusk Matriarch collapsed like a mountain breaking apart.
Kaelren staggered back, bleeding from his mouth, one arm hanging useless at his side, clothes soaked with gore. He reached down, wrapped both arms around her tusk, and ripped.
Bone tore free.
No roars of triumph. No words.
Just him. Breathing.
Victorious.
Kaelren dragged one of its tusks back to Camp 12.
He dumped it at the foot of the Mission Tent's desk. The warden raised a brow. He said nothing — just reached for another mission.
By the end of that day, he'd completed three more. And the next day, five.
For two days straight, Kaelren ran himself to the edge of death — returning only to drop off trophies, heal, and eat ration bricks between limps. Sleep became a casualty. His body broke and reforged itself with rhe gene refinement sutra. Bone ached. Qi strained. Blood burned like fuel.
He didn't speak to anyone. Not in the mess. Not on return. Just mission after mission.
And no one stopped him.
Camp 12 didn't care about rest. Didn't care about training hall attendance or pit rankings if the missions were being completed. Kaelren became a ghost of the field — a name on scrolls, a blood trail on the ground.
Weeks passed. Then months.
Kaelren climbed through the stages of Body Refinement faster than anyone had seen in Camp 12 in years. His muscles condensed, bones reinforced, senses sharpened. By month eight, his fists could crack bone-shells barehanded. His eyes read movement before it began.
By month ten,he had fully stepwd in to stage 9 of body refinment and his Qi reached deep into the first stage of the Qi Gathering Realm — giving him range, force, perception. He could determine the cultivation level of enemies before they acted.
He was no longer a beast in the making. He was becoming a weapon.
On the morning of the eleventh month, the loudspeakers cracked once more.
"ATTENTION: COMBATANTS OF CAMP 12. WINTER CULL BEGINS IN TOMORROW . RANKS WILL BE FROZEN AT MIDNIGHT. PREPARE FOR EVALUATION."
Kaelren stood in line at the mission desk, fresh blood still dripping from his knuckles.
His body was honed by eleven months of relentless training — every bone, every muscle pushed to its breaking point and reforged. The gravity band on his arm was locked at its maximum: twenty times normal weight. He no longer resembled a youth. His frame had stretched taller, forged in brutality, layered with dense, streamlined muscle. If one didn't know better, they'd swear he was sixteen — not twelve. His body's age only lagged 3 years behind his mental age now.
He didn't look up.
He just smiled.
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