Bullseye.

  Tristan grinned as his arrow whizzed through the air, striking his target dead in the eyes, the sharp metal arrowhead superior to any defense an eye could provide. He let his bow drop to his side as he began walking towards his dead target. He whistled a tune as he calmly put one foot in front of the other, paying no attention to the nervous looks his squadmates shot him at the cold-heartedness he'd just displayed.

  Without a shadow of a doubt, he'd been seen by the rest of them as nothing more than an unfeeling beast let loose, but he didn't care in the slightest. If a beast was what they made of him, then let them—after all, he was unfeeling. Popularity contests had never been his strong suit; he was an introvert by nature and had started to become an ambivert before the apocalypse came and decided to return him back to default settings.

  Even as he took another step towards his fallen prey, Tristan's mind brought on more and more thoughts, but he only latched on to one: he knew that they were only following him because he gave them a feeling of security, but Tristan didn't care about them. If push came to shove, he'd abandon them in a heartbeat.

  He'd protected them from the rabid humans in the tutorial, but he wasn't going to protect them now. They were on their own, and the faster they got that into their thick skulls, the better for them because he'd already started figuring ways to ditch the dead weight.

  Speaking of dead weight, Tristan looked down where his dead target lay, arrow still sticking out of the eye. With a grimace, he ripped out the arrow from the man's eye. A little part of him chafed at the fact that killing the man hadn't been enough to earn him the next level. He was so close to level 20, he just needed a little push, and this dead man hadn't even given him that.

  I just wasted my time and arrow on this buffoon.

  The woman whom the man had been trying to force himself on looked at him fearfully, but Tristan couldn't care less. He'd just used the attempt as an excuse to kill the man; an arrow to the legs or even the man's privates would've been a good enough deterrent, but Tristan didn't shoot to injure—he shot to kill.

  Turning away from her, he glanced carefully at the man, crouching down and rifling through the man's pockets in search of anything that could help. At the moment, their phones didn't work; they'd also been teleported into a rural city that Tristan couldn't identify, and most of the other humans seemed content just to kill other humans, loot, or engage in stupid acts like the man that lay before him dead.

  Pigs.

  The lot of them were nothing but pigs. Monsters were abundant, but some humans still stuck to preying on the weak, like the man had just done. Tristan preferred to hunt monsters as they tended to be worth the effort, but in a city—even as rural as the one he was currently in—human nature had begun to rear its ugly head.

  The apocalypse had brought with it lawlessness, the kind of lawlessness that one only saw when society had failed as a whole. From what he could tell after his first two weeks in this shithole of a city, it seemed as though local gangs had begun joining up to become the new order. They weren't the only ones though; a couple of goody-two-shoes had begun collating their own forces. He'd even heard rumors of a stronghold from one of the humans unfortunate enough to draw his gaze. He'd killed the human shortly after, of course.

  That was one of the few times that Tristan hadn't preferred to do his business from far; he'd gone up and personal with the lady. The things he'd seen her do with the little children was enough for the little bit of morality in him to return. The woman deserved every broken bone that she received courtesy of him.

  She was disgusting, and she deserved everything she got.

  The lady had been a priestess by Archetype; she'd been sacrificing children like they were animals. Tristan might claim to be cold-hearted to the others, but he wasn't that cold-hearted. He'd seen her murdering children and couldn't contain the rage that had filled him up at the sight. She'd tried to fight him, but she was no match for Tristan, even if he hadn't been as angry as he'd been then.

  He'd utterly and ruthlessly beaten her down, stomping on her offending hands out of sheer disgust. The Priestess didn't respond how the others he'd slayed responded; she'd had a crazed expression on her face as she stared at him as if he hadn't just broken her four limbs. He could still remember the very last words that the woman had said:

  "...My cult shall repay you for this interruption of Demon Prince Kabash's Feast. The Cult of Kabash shall find you, and your blood shall be ours. Prince Kabash shall emerge into earth. Our Stronghold shall rise to..."

  Tristan hadn't heard the rest of the lady's statement as she'd given up the ghost. A little bit of regret tried to rise up in him at the sight of all the dead children, but he crushed the feeling. It wasn't his fault that the children had died; if the people of the world had actually taken a second to take care of the defenseless amongst them, then this wouldn't and shouldn't have happened.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  The fault had laid on the lady, the lady who'd been so desperate for power that she'd sacrificed children for it. By the looks of things, the lady's sanity had long left her. All the power she'd gotten hadn't been enough to leave a scratch on him, and he wasn't even that high leveled. The thought gave him pause, but he shook it off; the words spoken by the woman before her last breath was the main thing he should've been thinking about.

  Demons.

  There were demons out there handing out power to desperate priests and priestesses in exchange for lives. The disgust Tristan felt tripled at the thought. He turned to look at those who'd lost their lives to the crazed Priestess of... Kabash, was it? The blood had begun to soak into the cobblestones as the woman had chosen to perform her ritual in an open space, just beside a deserted fountain. The amount of blood should've bothered him, but it didn't; even the smell of blood should've caused him to gag or puke, but it hadn't.

  The apocalypse had brought out another side of him that he hadn't even realized he had—a bloodthirsty side. His indifference had started to return to him, the last thought laced with emotion was hoping that the dead rested easy knowing that they'd been avenged by him. While he wasn't going to bury them, he hoped that his little deed would count for something.

  A demon Prince, A cult, and a stronghold.

  A stronghold with demon worshipers seemed like the kind of thing that Tristan ought to look into, and not because they were dirty, stinky bastards—no, more because everyone else would turn a blind eye to him slaying every one of them. Those who stooped so low to serve demons for power.

  He scoffed at the thought. After everything, he had actually been right; the biggest threats that humans were going to fight against would be other humans. It was just simply the way the world worked—so many people harbored dark thoughts just waiting for the power to materialize them, and the apocalypse had just given them the power to do just that. Shaking his head to rid himself of the memory, he looked at the woman whom he'd just saved as she cowered away from him.

  I wonder which part of the fence I'm on?

  ---

  Pavlo grinned at his fellow ranger—Gagoro. After three days of senseless scouting, hoping that they'd pick sight of the native inhabitant that had killed their comrades, they finally had a lead. No, that wasn't right—they didn't just have a lead, they'd found them.

  Them.

  The Commander had said it was only one more native inhabitant that had escaped, but Pavlo saw seven. The group looked like the corpses that he'd seen when he and Gagoro had been part of the group to follow the commander to see the dried-out corpses.

  "...Slashed...the...brook..."

  Pavlo couldn't believe how easy it'd been to track the group once he'd caught sight of them—not really sight, as Gagoro had heard rather than seen them. The one with the sword had been talking since, and the native inhabitant had been the one with the voice that Gagoro had heard and pointed out to Pavlo, leading the two to tailing the group from afar, of course.

  They watched as the group walked. The one with the sword kept talking and talking, with the occasional word from a member of the rest of the group, and Pavlo wondered how stupid the native inhabitants had to be, walking in the forest at night, talking without a care for what could be following them.

  Or are they that strong?

  Pavlo resisted the urge to snort at the thought. First off, he wasn't an amateur who'd make such a noise when tracking, and secondly, he didn't believe it would matter, especially when the bloodthirsty miners came for their heads. Seven natives wouldn't be a problem for them; right now, he and Gagoro were trailing them to find out where they slept. As scouts, he and Gagoro needed to find out the total numbers of the group. While he didn't think that there were more than the ones he'd currently seen, he wouldn't mind if there were more of them that he was yet to see.

  A part of him wished to Veron that there were more of them yet to be seen. The more the better, in his opinion. He knew he wasn't the only one who wanted to use his hammer to crush something. Mining Tora in the settlement was mind-numbing work, repetitive and boring. Pavlo had never been so excited to take on scouting as he was at the moment.

  "Pay attention, Pav. Gate ahead," Gagoro said.

  He'd been paying close attention to the group, so he'd seen the gate, but there was no point in getting into an argument with Gagoro. Instead, he grunted his acknowledgment of the information and continued creeping up to the group, Gagoro beside him. The gremlin was the quiet type, and so was he; they rarely had to exchange words, and he could tell that both parties appreciated that part of the agreement.

  "...Nate...today...run..."

  Pavlo listened as closely as he could, but that was all he could pick up before the squad got in through the gate. He'd considered following the group through the gate but stopped at his cover; at the moment, he and the gremlin were still a ways from the gate that the group entered. Gagoro copied his motion, the gremlin stopping in his tracks as he stared at him.

  "Too risky, we go back and report," Pavlo whispered.

  The gremlin nodded in agreement. Without another word shared, the pair turned back and began walking back towards camp. They'd barely made it five steps before a flash of white fur ran past them, the animal pausing to look back at them before continuing towards the gate. Pavlo shook his head at the questioning look in the gremlin's eyes before they resumed their walk back to the settlement.

  It took the pair about two hours of nonstop walking to get to their destination. From there, it was only a matter of moments for them to get to the Camp Commander's office. Pavlo rapped at the door while the gremlin stood still beside him.

  "Come in," the commander's voice echoed from the other side.

  Pavlo didn't hesitate one bit, opening the door as both he and Gagoro walked into the commander's office, which was just a big tent. The gremlin closed the door behind them.

  "I believe you have information on the whereabouts of the loose native inhabitant," asked the Camp Commander.

  "Native inhabitants, sir," Pavlo corrected respectfully, "and yes, sir, we do."