31 years.
The reason Antonio had survived this long in the blood-soaked mercenary trade was the instinct for survival honed like a beast—and his caution.
On the brutal continent of Vertus, where mana formed sword auras and magic blanketed the skies, all the martial power he possessed amounted to muscles a little tougher than other people's and a trickle of mana flowing faintly through him.
Even so, he had crossed countless brushes with death while maintaining his sturdy 171-centimeter, 68-kilogram frame all the way to the age of fifty-one.
The dozens of ugly scars scattered across his body were medals awarded for perfectly distinguishing when to step forward and when to hide.
Even when his comrades' heads went flying and their guts spilled across the battlefield, Antonio had survived through his trademark coldheadedness.
But he had never dreamed that he would get blackout drunk while drinking with an old friend and end up being sold to a slave trader.
"Goddamn bastard..."
Wedged into the corner of the rattling wagon, he looked across at the little kid with a bitter gaze.
In the cramped, filthy space where not a single ray of light entered, the stench of filth and rotting blood hung heavy in the air.
The cold touch of the thick iron chains cinched around his wrists and ankles drove home the fact that, for the first time in thirty-one years, he had fallen from hunter to livestock.
Fifteen, maybe.
The scrawny child was emaciated enough for every bone to show. Perhaps because of severe malnutrition, he mumbled incomprehensible words with unfocused eyes.
Blue veins stood out unpleasantly beneath skin gone pale from years without sunlight, and blood seeped from his parched, cracked lips.
"So I really have gone crazy. With my own survival looking hopeless, what the hell am I doing feeling sorry for someone else? You senile old idiot."
Antonio clicked his tongue and mocked himself.
Lately, ugly rumors had been spreading that poor people and retired mercenaries around the outskirts of the fortress were being abducted indiscriminately and sold as meat shields for the coliseum.
Who would have thought he would become the victim of that vicious rumor?
The end of thirty-one years as a mercenary wasn't a glorious retirement or a warm fireside. It was becoming food for beasts—or a punching bag for nobles' amusement.
His disgust with the human race boiled up like stomach acid.
Then it happened.
The faint mana flowing through Antonio's body began to churn ominously.
This wasn't the killing intent of some ordinary beast in the woods or a bandit. It was a horrifying sensation, like a poisonous spider crawling up his spinal cord.
A huge, ominous mass radiating overwhelming violence was charging toward the wagon, snapping the forest's great trees as it came.
Thirty-one years of experience sounded an insane alarm inside his head.
"Fuck! Everybody down!"
With an immense roar, the wagon's outer wall was ripped away like a sheet of paper.
Rumble—! Boom!
What came pouring into the wagon amid the ear-splitting rupture wasn't warm sunlight, but a vicious stench of blood and the harsh breath of beasts.
Two enormous orcs stood on the floor strewn with wooden splinters, their jaws hanging open. The grotesque brands R-21 and R-20 were stamped across them.
They were a full head taller than ordinary wild orcs, and grotesque veins writhed across their bulging, near-bursting muscles.
They looked like hideous experimental subjects someone had manufactured by hand.
"O-Orcs! Stop them!" "Raise your spears! Aaaaargh!"
The orc swung its enormous club. Before the desperate scream of the armed guard blocking its path could even finish, his head burst like a watermelon and slammed into the wagon wall.
Crack! Crunch!
With a sickening rasp of pulverized bone, gray brain matter and blood splattered across Antonio's cheek.
A huge hole had been punched through the outer wall.
When the wagon, shuddering like an aspen leaf, barely managed to steady itself, people began fleeing through the gap amid the blood-soaked pandemonium, howling like animals.
"Help me! Please!" "Don't push me, you bastard! Aaaaah!"
Slaves and mercenaries still shackled together trampled one another as they sprinted toward the torn opening.
Antonio instinctively rolled toward the exit as well, but then he hesitated.
The little kid was still sprawled on the floor at the edge of his vision.
Even in the middle of that blood-spattered hell, the child lay crumpled as if dead, without moving an inch.
"Goddammit."
His mind knew he had no room to worry about anyone else in this hellscape, but Antonio's rough hand had already moved ahead of reason and clamped around the child's arm.
He began dragging the skeletal body outside the shattered wagon.
The first things to assault him when he regained consciousness were a vile stench and desperate sobbing.
"Sniff... It's over... The rumors were true. They're dragging us away to be meat shields..." "I don't want to die. Please... sob..."
The voices of trembling slaves struck his ears in the darkness.
The smell of sweat, filth, and the peculiar sour stench exhaled by humans gripped by extreme terror filled the air from every direction.
Bang! Bang-bang!
"Shut up, you livestock! Do you want to get beaten to death before we even reach the arena?!"
The rough pounding on the outer wall and the slave traders' vicious curses.
In the midst of incomprehensible chaos, his vision shook violently.
This wasn't the body with the perfect stats he'd spent several days and nights rolling dice to set up.
It was a completely different body—powerless and hollow, so feeble he could barely twitch a finger.
Along with a splitting headache, fragments of unfamiliar memories came pouring down like a waterfall.
A daily life spent wandering the streets, trampled underfoot.
The scream he had let out when a kick broke his ribs after he was caught digging through food waste.
The moments he collapsed from starvation, only to be tossed around like a piece of cargo by slave traders.
A fifteen-year-old orphan named Kyle.
The instant he realized who he was within those alien memories, he became Kyle in his entirety.
Kyle clenched his teeth, pulled his confused mind together, and retraced his memories.
He had definitely pressed the Start button in front of his monitor.
He had combined three fantastic traits and arrogantly started the game so he could cut that damned transcendent entity's throat again.
A blinding light had swallowed his vision, and just before he passed out, a horrifying blood-red notification window had been etched across his retinas.
The unlocking of a hidden trait: a brutal curse that would tear his stomach apart unless he periodically absorbed the life force of others.
The puzzle pieces that hadn't fit had finally clicked perfectly into place.
A slave wagon. Kyle, a fifteen-year-old orphan.
An event in which the wagon carrying him to the arena was wiped out in an orc attack. He was right in the middle of Vertus's vicious, death-guaranteed opening.
The moment his calculations concerning this brutal reality were complete—
"Ngh... Aaargh...!"
Pain like his entrails were being ripped out all at once slammed into his entire body, forcing a groan from him.
The bizarre curse he'd recalled moments ago had begun in earnest.
A horrific sensation of pain, as if tens of thousands of worms were gnawing through his intestines from inside his belly, bored into his brain.
His vision flickered red, and the hallucination of the enormous monster that appeared in his nightmares every night overlapped his retinas.
A voice screaming for him to bite through the throat of something in front of him and drink its warm blood poured into his mind, battering his reason.
Fortunately, Ironman, one of the traits he'd brought with him, activated immediately and barely kept his mind functioning with machine-like clarity. But it couldn't erase the beastlike hunger squeezing his stomach dry.
If he stayed like this, he would certainly die with his stomach ripped apart by the penalty before the orcs could kill him.
Kyle was just about to instinctively search for something's throat when—
"O-Orcs! It's orcs!" "Spears up! Stop them! Aaaaargh!"
The screams of escorting mercenaries having their flesh torn apart erupted outside.
A thunderous roar followed, and the wagon's outer wall was ripped away like a sheet of paper.
"Fuck! Everybody down!"
The muscular old man trapped in the same wagon shouted desperately.
When the wagon, rocking from the violent impact, finally ground to a halt, people caught in the pandemonium crawled like a swarm of spiders toward the hole.
In the middle of that chaos, the old man gripped Kyle's arm tightly and dragged him through the broken boards.
Why was the old man bothering to look after another person who was no more than a piece of cargo in this blood-spattered hell?
Kyle's cold reason couldn't immediately comprehend the old mercenary's inefficient behavior.
But there was no reason to resist.
For his feeble body, which could barely walk under its own power, the rough grip dragging him by the arm was its only source of momentum.
He had only just been pulled outside the completely demolished wagon by that powerful strength when—
Tap.
Someone grabbed Kyle's ankle hard from the blood-covered ground.
"Kgh... H-help... Cough! Help me. Please... sob..."
When he looked down, an armed mercenary whose entire lower body had been blown away by an orc's strike was clutching his foot, weeping tears of blood.
His face was twisted by despair as he vomited bright-red blood from his mouth, hot blood pouring from his severed lower half.
The old mercenary dragging Kyle faltered and looked down at the gruesome sight.
The wound was fatal. There was no hope of saving him.
"Goddammit. Move aside, kid. I'll give him an easy death."
Antonio had just clicked his tongue and reached for the dagger at his waist when Kyle's skeletal body began screaming instinctively beneath the bizarre hunger eating away at his reason.
Kill him. Cut off his breath right now.
Ironman's cold reason agreed completely. It was the only way to secure a weapon immediately and satisfy the hunger clawing through his insides.
The calculation was flawless, with not a moment wasted.
Before Antonio could even draw his weapon, Kyle picked up a dagger lying on the ground with his bony hand.
The instant the cold lump of metal touched his palm, he instinctively understood how to end the man's life in a single motion.
The angle at which to grip the hilt, the direction in which to drive his strength, the precise path that would sever the carotid artery most smoothly—all of it appeared vividly in his mind.
A strange talent for weapons that manifested through pure sensation, without any intervention from the system.
With the old man—the one who had intended to give him an easy death—staring blankly at him, Kyle drove the blade into the throat of the clinging mercenary without a moment's hesitation.
Stab.
"Ghk... Hek...!"
The sound of blood bursting free was horrifyingly crisp. The man's eyes rolled back grotesquely, and a metallic death rattle escaped him.
At the exact moment the man's breath stopped, a bizarre blood-red haze rose from between the torn edges of the wound and began rushing madly into Kyle's body.
An unknown energy poured through the wound and gathered around his heart.
Then, starting from that violently pounding heart, it explosively spread through the parched veins throughout his body.
A terrifyingly ecstatic sensation swept up his spine as his life force, drained to the point of breaking, surged until it felt ready to burst.
His veins swelled, and every cell seemed to dance as it devoured another person's life force.
The horrible hunger that had made him feel as if his breath might stop at any moment subsided in an instant, and he could feel hard muscle knotting onto his skeletal frame and quivering.
But the body that had awakened to sweet blood and life force knew no satisfaction.
Instead, the predator's instinct awakening deep inside him craved an even stronger, heavier life force with ravenous hunger.
This thin scrap of vitality wasn't enough to fully quiet the thirst engraved upon his soul.
Kyle tightened his grip on the dagger dripping with blood and turned his head toward the orcs tearing human limbs apart.
"Kraaagh!" "M-My leg... Aaaaargh!"
Every swing of the enormous clubs was accompanied by the crunch of breaking bones, while the mercenaries' death screams echoed through the forest.
With his body in its current state, he could never kill those monsters. Rational judgment immediately eliminated the orcs as targets.
Their overflowing life force was tempting, but if he charged them now, there was a one-hundred-percent chance he would be turned into a slab of meat.
At the edge of Kyle's blood-red vision, the old mercenary's rigid face came into view as he stared down at him in horror.
A fifteen-year-old brat who had stolen the moment when he was about to finish the job and cut down a living man's throat.
There wasn't any ordinary fear or guilt on that face—not even the faintest tremor of emotion.
It was a killing carried out with such dry, matter-of-fact ease that it looked like he had simply crushed a bug.
Faced with that chilling lack of anything recognizably human, Antonio looked as terrified as if he had seen a mad monster.
"That crazy little bastard... How can he look so calm after cutting a man's throat?"
Had they unleashed a real monster into this hellscape?
Antonio spat the words through clenched teeth, but whatever he thought was irrelevant to Kyle now.
The beastlike body consumed by blood and slaughter screamed for him to bury his blade in that old man's throat.
With those solid muscles and tough vitality, the old man could completely wash away Kyle's immediate hunger.
The veins stood out on the hand gripping the dagger.
But at that moment, Ironman's mechanical reason coldly suppressed the urge to kill.
Perfect friend-or-foe identification.
The old mercenary who had just dragged Kyle out of this hellscape and tried to save his life was not an enemy who needed to be eliminated immediately.
Killing the only witness and potential ally in this insane world would be the height of inefficiency. There was no need to create unnecessary variables.
Following that judgment, Kyle completely removed Antonio from his list of targets, and his gaze naturally fixed on the other armed mercenaries fleeing in confusion.
Their life force would be enough to completely fill this maddening hunger.
Right now, terror had narrowed their field of vision to the extreme.
They were ideal prey for driving in a dagger.
Kyle lightly shook off the grip of the old mercenary, frozen in shock, and moved forward.
Then, like a starving beast, he launched himself into the darkness toward the exposed napes of the armed mercenaries.