Chapter 4: How Do You Slay a Dragon?

Seeing the Hound still stirring, Sol felt only a flicker of surprise. On this forsaken island, persistence was a stubborn weed. He did not hesitate. A chain crystallized from light shot from his palm, wrapping tightly around the Hound’s neck, ready to finish off his tenacious prey.

But the chain stopped mid-air, trembling.

Anomaly.

Sol recognized it instantly. This energy didn’t flow; it warped. It rewrote the rules. He felt his Ki being scrambled by an invisible, chaotic force, like trying to draw a straight line on rippling water.

From between the coconut palms, ravaged by their battle, a figure slowly emerged.

He wore a heavy, hooded coat, the kind sailors wore against the salt wind. In the moonlight, all that was visible was a snow-white beard and a pair of reading glasses that faintly reflected the dim light. The way he moved put Sol on high alert. He didn’t walk on the sand; he seemed to glide upon a non-existent plane, centimetres above the ground. Not a single grain of sand was disturbed.

A powerful Anomaly-user. Very powerful. Powerful enough to interfere with his Ki from three hundred metres away. This kind of strength didn’t belong to nobodies.

If Wil were here, with his access to the central databanks, he might have identified the man in an instant. But Sol couldn’t. To him, this was a dangerous unknown, an old mystery man who had appeared on an isolated island, and who clearly wasn’t here for a holiday.

“That’s enough for today, Sol. You’ve achieved your goal,” the old man’s voice was deep and raspy, the voice of someone who had spoken too much in the past and now saved his words only for what mattered most.

Sol didn’t reply. He let out a guttural roar as the Ki within him erupted, shattering the invisible Anomaly cage that bound him. He lunged at the newcomer.

Jack didn’t take a single step back. He was like a boulder standing firm against a hurricane.

“Don’t forget our arrangement.”

A meaningless sentence to a man about to get his face rearranged. But that voice… that uncomfortably familiar cadence…

Sol’s fist stopped just before the tip of the old man’s nose, a hair’s breadth away. The gust from the blow sent the hood flying back, fully revealing the man’s face.

The white beard. The reading glasses. And the incredibly sharp eyes.

“Jack?” Sol blurted out, his fist still hovering in the air. “Old man, what the hell are you doing here?”

He slowly withdrew his hand, the ferocity vanishing, replaced by a look of annoyed scrutiny. He sat down right there on the sand, crossing his legs and resting his chin on his hand. A wordless posture, but the message was clear: Talk. And you’d better have a damned good reason.

Jack sighed, a sigh of ingrained weariness.

“If I recall correctly, the Dawn clan does not pass judgment on animals.”

Sol frowned. The old man’s words were nonsensical. He glanced at the creature lying motionless. It had two legs. It had no feathers. By the simplest definition of the ancient philosophers, it qualified as a “human.”

But then another thought surfaced, a necessary addendum to that overly broad definition.

A human is a creature that possesses reason and speech.

And that’s where logic began to fray. He replayed the battle in his memory. He had never heard it speak a single word. Not a curse, not a plea. Only the growls of a predator and instinctual actions.

So, what was it? A human who couldn’t speak? Or an animal shaped like a human?

Sol looked at Jack, his eyes full of suspicion. The old man wasn’t just playing with words. He was challenging his entire definition of “human.”

Jack looked at the creature lying on the ground, then back at Sol.

“The Dawn clan has a fine motto: ‘It is not our past, but our choices that make us who we are.’ But that only holds true when one has the right to choose. Does this child? It was never taught human speech, only trained to kill. It’s not a warrior, Sol. It’s a weapon that was raised.”

Sol was silent, but his eyes showed he was thinking. A weapon… created by whom?

“Have you ever heard the name Sa Ti?” Jack asked abruptly.

“The man-eating witch from the northern mountains of Wrymfrey? I heard she was eliminated long ago,” Sol replied, a hint of caution in his voice.

“Eliminated is a very precise word. But before she was eliminated, she did one last thing. Something insane. She wanted a child who would inherit the power of her greatest enemy. Can you guess who that was?”

Sol frowned. An enemy of Sa Ti… someone powerful enough for her to covet their strength…

“Durin,” Sol said, his voice lowering. “But… he’s been dead for a hundred years.”

“Dead, but not gone,” Jack said, a bitter smile flashing across his lips. “Seventeen years ago, Durin’s tomb was broken into. We announced that the theft of his body had failed.”

“A lie,” Sol concluded, his eyes sharpening. “You lied to maintain public order.”

“Sometimes, an easy lie is more important than a hard truth, Sol. Who could have imagined someone would disrespect a hero like that? The corpse that the people of Trilium visit every year… is just an exquisitely carved block of wax.”

Sol said nothing, but his fists were clenched. All this time, he and the entire nation had been bowing to a mannequin.

“So…” Sol began, his voice laced with disgust, “…she used black magic to… conceive with a corpse?”
“Precisely,” Jack nodded. “And the child born of that sickness, is this one right here.”

“Then she used the kind of black magic that only the truly desperate cook up, to conceive with a dead hero. An act that was as disrespectful as it was… well, creative, one has to admit. But the universe’s law of conservation of tragedy is always in effect: nine months and ten days later, when she was at her weakest, we moved in. A great battle.”

Jack paused, his eyes fixed on the horizon.

“Three days and three nights. Sounds heroic on paper, doesn’t it? The reality was just a chaotic mess of blood, mud, and screaming. I lost over a thousand men. All of them kids, boys who believed the recruitment posters. Good seeds, yes, but sown on barren ground. At that moment, I hated only one thing: why did old age give me the wisdom to survive, instead of the ignorance to die gloriously?”

He clenched his fist.

“I was furious. I held a knife. I stabbed. And stabbed. And stabbed. In my mind, it was a Xenomorph monster. But when the blood stopped spraying and I calmed down… it was a pregnant woman. I was disgusted with myself. But that disgust was nothing compared to the disgust I felt when the high-ranking officials showed up after it was all over. They’re like a pack of hyenas, always showing up after the lion has done the hard work, to ‘reap the rewards’.”

Sol listened intently, his face a mask.

“The bodies of the fallen were packed up neatly, labelled ‘In Service to the Nation’, and sent to the labs. Very efficient. Very scientific. Very inhuman.”

“They said I was a bad commander. I agreed. A good commander doesn’t let better men die before him. But in this country, the best and the brightest have a very early appointment with the grave. All that’s left are bastards like me, and bigger bastards sitting on high. They tell me I must love my country. But how can you love something that’s rotten from the inside out?”

“So I decided to dig a very deep pit to trap those dragons. I pretended to be depraved, I did dirty work. But there’s a problem with digging dragon pits: to dig deep enough, your hands have to get dirty. And when you look down into that hole, you see your own reflection. And you realise that somewhere along the way, you’ve started to grow scales.”

Jack sighed, a weary, soul-deep sigh. He pulled a bottle of cheap rice wine from his coat, the drink of men with nothing left to lose, and took a long swig.

“But I’m awake now, Sol. I’ve realized a simple truth. Only a dragon can kill a dragon.”

“This Hound, leave it to this old man. It will be much more useful to our game.”
Hearing this, Peter clutched at Jack’s coat, his eyes welling with tears. Jack raised his hand. Peter flinched, shutting his eyes tight, expecting the familiar slap. He was all too used to the idea that asking for something was a sin.
But what he got wasn’t a slap. It was a rough, warm hand, gently ruffling his hair.
“This child is just a bird in a cage. He’s not to blame,” Jack said, his voice surprisingly soft. Then he turned to the empty space where Sol had just vanished. “And you, you should rest for a while. Let our comrade Wil breathe a little. I played a rather heavy hand on him last time. Now I have to go clean up the mess you two made and rearrange the pieces.”
Sol was gone. The Hound, no longer sensing its opponent, let out an aggrieved whimper. Jack looked at it, shaking his head wearily. He didn’t need to touch it; with just a glance, the super-alloy blade in the Hound’s hand levitated into the air, hovering before him. Jack observed it meticulously, then flicked it with his finger.
Ting.
The blade shattered into metallic dust.
“Keep fighting, and with a broken blade, you’d lose anyway.”
As if it understood, or perhaps simply out of sheer frustration, the Hound convulsed once and passed out.
“Honestly,” Jack muttered, “Such an overly aggressive weapon.”

In a private room, a commendable effort was being made to create a warm and alluring atmosphere. The lotus-pink lighting, the sort of light that interior designers call “romantic” and physicists call “a failure to reproduce the full spectrum,” was doing its level best to dye everything pink. It had partially succeeded with the walls but failed miserably against the bright red carpet, creating a visual conflict that could make an artist weep.

Honey-scented candles were burning, emitting a sweet fragrance. In theory, this was meant to soothe fatigue. In practice, when combined with the leathery scent of a horsewhip and the fresh, slightly spicy notes of bergamot orange emanating from Wil, the result was a highly complex olfactory cocktail. Sabata didn’t know what the smell was; he just knew it made him profoundly confused. A man about to use a horsewhip on you shouldn’t smell that sophisticated.
And amidst this scene of conflicting visual and olfactory efforts, were our two main characters.

One was Sabata, in a state of semi-undress, a tactically vulnerable position.

The other was Wil, still in full uniform, weighing his options with a horsewhip.

At this moment, Sabata was handcuffed to the bedpost, in a pose that ancient Greek sculptors might have appreciated for its curvature, but was highly impractical in reality. A sharp smack echoed through the space, an unmistakable sound.
“Owie, owie, that hurts! Please, Daddy, spare your boy!”
“No, no, no, you’ve been a very naughty boy! Daddy must deliver a harsh punishment!” Wil replied, in the tone of someone who had watched far too many cartoons, before swinging the horsewhip decisively.
And that’s when Sabata shot awake, drenched in sweat.
He gasped for air, hastily checking his body. Still intact. No whip marks. The handcuffs were gone. It was just a dream, a vivid byproduct of a brain that had just processed too much information and an empty stomach.
Sugar Daddy, he thought. There was that word again.
The word he had uttered when he saw his social media profile. Now, his subconscious, with its boundless creativity and somewhat worrying aesthetic taste, had decided to take that word and build an entire three-act play around it, complete with haunting details.
Sabata breathed a sigh of relief, then shuddered. That feeling… it had been disturbingly real. Perhaps this was a side effect of sleeping on a mattress that was too comfortable. When you’re used to springs digging into your back every night, your body learns not to have overly vivid dreams as a self-preservation mechanism. Now, freed from physical discomfort, his subconscious had decided to throw a party full of uninvited mental images.
He tried to go back to sleep, but it was useless. Every time he closed his eyes, the image of Wil with the horsewhip and his “No, no, no” voice appeared. He decided to stay awake. Better to face a sleepless night than return to that depraved circus.
And so Sabata sat there until morning, his eyes swollen, his mind seriously considering a return to sleeping on the floor.
The next day, every news channel was buzzing like a disturbed beehive. Sabata didn’t even have to look for it; the biggest headline scrolled across every screen: “GOODMAN MANSION ATTACKED.”
It turned out the “Businessman X” they’d been talking about was the Minister of Finance. Sabata swallowed hard. A familiar chill ran down his spine. He instinctively touched his pocket, where the 50,000 pims lay dormant. I have money too. Am I the next target?
But then he reassured himself. Let’s be real, I’m not even in the same league as those guys. He muttered, a crooked smile on his face, “How many rich mansions have been trashed this month, anyway?”
To banish his fear, he decided to look for something more positive on NowTube. But it seemed “positive” wasn’t in the vocabulary of today’s content creators. The homepage was still flooded with news of the attack. He vaguely remembered seeing some news yesterday about the police scamming citizens, but it had vanished within seconds. Under one of the few remaining posts, a comment stood out: “Slandering our people’s police, getting your account locked is what you deserve.”
Sabata sighed and randomly clicked on a clip about the Goodman mansion. The beginning was heavily blurred, probably for reasons of “violent or graphic content,” which was a polite way of saying “too much blood and dismembered body parts.”
“OMG why blur it, does anyone have the full uncensored HD link pls!” a user named Diablo commented.
Instantly, a slew of links appeared in reply. But seconds later, the comment section was flooded with a sea of vomiting emojis. Sabata, with a rare display of wisdom, decided not to click.
The clip cut to the inside of the mansion. Sabata’s eyes widened. Luxurious. That was the only word he could think of. But what caught his attention was a massive oil painting of Mr. Goodman… eating a hamburger. A combination so absurd it was hard to believe. The subject was ugly, but the composition and colours created a strangely overwhelming feeling.
He couldn’t help himself and typed a comment:
“It’s like a pile of vomit filtered through a rainbow with magical effects.”

Very quickly, analytical comments appeared:

“Sir, you have failed to grasp the artistic intention of the work. The centrepiece of the painting is the image of Mr. Goodman, a symbol of satisfaction and prosperity, enjoying the fruits of his labour in the form of a hamburger. The master painters have used their unique skills and styles to render each part of the painting. Note the soft, flowing brushstrokes of the flowers, the delicate and meticulous rendering of light on the grilled beef, and the subtle combination of colours to create overall harmony. This is a work that praises harmony and success. You should learn more about the art history of the Trilium Renaissance to gain a deeper perspective.” – Budding Virtuoso

This comment received three likes and one laughing emoji.

But the comment that got the most attention was from a user named Stalking Pervert.

“Utter nonsense. This is a painting of a man-eater. What he’s eating isn’t a burger, it’s human flesh. The red is blood, the yellow is shit. He eats everything. Eats them down to the marrow.”

Sabata, who might be blind to art but wasn’t blind to life, read the second comment and felt a chilling sense of empathy. It was terrifyingly plausible.
He immediately closed the clip. Society out there was too dangerous. Goodman’s wealth, Stalking Pervert’s fury—it was all beyond his reach. He needed something to protect himself, a skill, a weapon.
With that thought, he typed a new keyword into the search bar: “Hacker.”

A flood of results appeared. There were dry articles, lively forums, and websites with dark themes and green code scrolling down the screen.
A site named “The Vulnerability” caught his eye. No ads, no clickbait articles. Just technical analyses. Sabata skimmed through it: Proficient in programming… Skilled in computer networks… Exploiting security flaws… The words were foreign, but they sparked a strange curiosity in him. He read about “white hat hackers,” people paid to break systems, the silent guardians of the digital world. Then he read about “black hat hackers,” ghosts in the machine, phantoms who could steal identities and erase fortunes with a few clicks.
Interesting, Sabata thought. This wasn’t a job. It was a playground with its own rules, where the line between hero and villain was as thin as a firewall. Could this be the path for him?
He clicked on a tutorial with the highest view count, titled: “Hacker – The King of All Professions.”
A beautiful girl appeared on screen, her hair dyed a galaxy pattern, her eyes sharp.
“A hacker,” she said, her voice full of confidence, “can be said to be the king of all professions. In a world increasingly dependent on technology, whoever controls the flow of data controls the flow of the world. But remember, when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. The algorithms, the security systems—they evolve too. To be the king, you don’t just have to change; you have to become the change.”

The girl on the screen continued, her tone shifting to something more serious, the tone of someone about to deliver some unpleasant truths.
“And so, hack-surgery was born. A procedure that transforms a human into a semi-Silicon lifeform, allowing direct communication with the Network. However, this isn’t for the average person. The success rate is only about 30%, and the cost is enough to buy an apartment in downtown New Era. Besides, there’s always the risk of psychological instability, known in professional circles as Data Babel Syndrome—when the brain can’t handle the information overload.”
The screen changed. A deep, gruff male voice, dripping with the condescension of a doctor from the OmniCorp Medical Conglomerate, boomed.
“Silicon lifeform modification surgery will allow your brain to operate at a higher efficiency, to calculate with greater precision. A necessary evolution in our era…”
Then the image appeared. Sabata frowned. This wasn’t a polished promotional video. It looked more like footage leaked from a black market lab.
The image was of a dissected human body, blood and other biological fluids tangled with fibre-optic cables and gleaming microchips. Sabata shuddered, feeling a wave of nauseating disgust. This wasn’t evolution; this was vivisection, the most brutal violation imaginable. He pictured himself on that cold operating table, feeling the laser scalpels and robotic arms reconfiguring his very being.
But the person on the table laughed, a dry, almost mechanical laugh. Then the doctor, an anonymous figure behind a surgical mask, casually sliced open the person’s brain. Sabata could see the brain vibrating, blue sparks flashing from the electrodes plugged into it. He couldn’t watch anymore, hearing only the sound of metal against bone and the whine of a drill.
When he opened his eyes again, the doctor was removing his gloves, his voice as steady as if nothing had happened.
“A pity. Test subject 734 was incompatible. Proceed with disposal and prepare the next subject.”
No. He would never let himself become a “test subject.”
He quickly closed the video, breathing a sigh of relief. He realized a harsh truth. In this world, some paths to power were only for those with the money to buy them, or those desperate enough to sell themselves. He needed another path. A safer one.
He frantically switched to another clip, one that looked safer.
“Fifty years ago, the hacker was king,” a clear voice said, “but today, the Idol is the king of all professions. With a large enough, fanatical enough fanbase, you hold a power comparable to a demigod.”

Sabata listened, then imagined himself in a magical girl outfit, shooting beams from his hands and breathing fire from his mouth. It was so beautiful he genuinely couldn’t bear to imagine it any further.

The voice in the video continued, like a warning.
“But be careful. In the long run, you will forget your true self. You will no longer be you, but a role model, a product, an ‘idol’ living in the hearts of the public.”
No way, no way, Sabata shook his head vehemently. Losing himself was no different from dying.
Tired of these life-lesson videos, he decided to seek wisdom from the crowd. He posted a simple question on Trilium’s largest forum: “What’s the best profession for a beginner?”
Instantly, his phone vibrated like an electrocuted fish. A barrage of replies assaulted his screen.

“Best profession is Knight. Pay-to-win enough and you won’t fear anyone.”

“Wrong, best profession is Idol. My Kirara-chan could solo 1000 of your raggedy-ass knights.”

“Your mom’s raggedy-ass!”

“You’re all wrong, the strongest fighting class is Fighter, like my man Sol. Chest to chest, pecs to pecs, sweat mingling together, that’s what a real man is!”

“There are no weak superpowers, only weak users.”

“Yeah, sure, the power to piss blood isn’t weak at all.”

“All you weak and pathetic failures should start cultivating immediately! Only cultivation can save you and grant you infinite power far beyond fantasy, superpowers, or science… None can compare to the supreme path of cultivation. Quickly, cast aside the distracting thoughts in your mind, sit cross-legged, raise your head, and breathe in the spiritual energy of heaven and earth to begin the great path… Repeat after me: Cultivation is number one and no other power can stand against it!”

“[Comment deleted for violating terms and services]”

“…”

Sabata’s head spun. The wisdom of the crowd turned out to be as chaotic as a riot. He realised something. Maybe it was better to ask a real person about real things.
But who to ask?
The question hung in his mind, as heavy as a stone. And just like that, exhausted, he slumped to the floor and fell asleep amidst a chaotic mess of choices and unanswered questions.