Chapter 790: A New Fallen Evil
“Run! It’s a Fallen Evil!”
“He changed just a moment ago. Call the police — hurry, hurry!”
“He-help, I sprained my ankle—”
“He’s coming, watch out!”
“Ah—”
Roland followed the crowd out of the KFC and into a different kind of noise. The restaurant next door had become a single seething body of panic: diners scrambling for the hallway, shoulders wedging against shoulders, everyone funneling toward the one exit at once. Most people on the street had already reversed course the moment the word Fallen Evil reached them — some with phones raised, filming as they fled, unwilling to forfeit the spectacle even as they ran from it. A handful remained: the ones who went against the current, pulling a woman who’d frozen in the doorway, lifting a man clutching his ankle from the pavement.
Phyllis burped. “Didn’t you say this age is very safe?”
She had one hand resting on her stomach and happiness still lingering in her eyes, wholly unbothered by the screaming thirty meters away.
“Ahem. This is an accident. Don’t worry.” Roland felt the small embarrassment of it — he had wanted nothing more than a meal outside, and the Dream World had responded by dropping a monster at his feet. Apparently it has opinions about my emotional state.
He noted the phrase again. Fallen Evil. He’d seen it in the news feeds repeatedly over the past several days. Whether it was coincidence or something accumulating beneath the surface, he wasn’t certain — but recently, the reports of people awakening to the Force of Nature had multiplied, and most of those who awakened weren’t becoming fighters. They were becoming something that couldn’t be reasoned with.
His brow tightened. Garcia’s words from two months ago surfaced unbidden: erosion from an alien world.
“Who’s our enemy?” Phyllis asked. “Do you need me to take care of it now, or should we find Zero first?”
Roland glanced back toward the park and shook his head. “She’ll be safe there. Let’s kill this monster first.” He still remembered the burnt-face man — how the stranger had made clear from the first moment that he existed to hunt martialists. Leaving an active Fallen Evil in a crowded area wasn’t a risk worth taking.
There was another reason, one he didn’t mention: the sensation of absorbing a Magic Cyclone. When the last one had dissolved in his hand, warmth had flooded through him — not comfort exactly, but power expanding into new space, as though his body were a vessel that had been quietly learning its own capacity. He wanted to feel it again.
“The enemy is probably newly awakened,” he said. “Think of it as a hybrid demonic beast — the Force of Nature protects it from ordinary weapons, so you’ll need to use the same force against it.”
“The Force of Nature?”
“Magic power, but with no gender restriction in this world.” He bent, picked up a fragment of stone from the gutter, and channeled the current running through him. The stone crumbled to powder in his palm.
Phyllis stared. “You’ve… become an Awakened.”
He nodded, keeping his face composed — and quietly savored the pride underneath it. “Unfortunately, the power only works here, in the Dream World.”
She shook her head slowly. “You are not common in either world.”
He let that sit for a moment, then moved. “We need to draw it somewhere quieter. These two chain restaurants will share a back hallway into the shopping mall — come on.”
They slipped back through the KFC and found a staff door at the rear. Beyond it, the mall was almost empty — the bang had cleared it faster than any announcement could have. A mess of abandoned shopping bags and overturned display stands stretched through the atrium.
Rather than entering the McDonald’s directly, Roland told Phyllis to summon her Blade Claws and let her power radiate freely into the space. It was the same principle he’d learned from the burnt-face man: a Fallen Evil sensed the Force of Nature the way a predator sensed blood, and it followed. It would come.
The back door of the McDonald’s exploded off its hinges less than a minute later.
A man came through the smoke at a run — eyes unfocused, breathing ragged, both arms swinging — and the moment he saw Phyllis he locked on to her and charged without a word.
Roland tracked him clearly. The Force of Nature had sharpened his perception the way altitude sharpens cold: everything a little more distinct, a little more immediate. This Fallen Evil was different from the burnt-face man. The red cyclone spinning in his left hand was smaller, dimmer — still building, not yet settled. Newly born. Roland registered, almost with clinical interest, that the warm current in his own body didn’t accelerate the way it had last time. The hunger was quieter. This cyclone simply had less to offer.
The plan was to draw the man into the KFC. But before they could move, he stretched his left arm toward Phyllis and opened his palm.
The air in front of her collapsed inward and then exploded outward in a single instant — visible to the naked eye, a wall of compressed force. Roland had the angle to sidestep it. He didn’t. Phyllis’s body in this world had none of the God’s Punishment Warrior density she carried in the real one; the blast would have killed her. He stepped in behind her and took the wave across his back.
They went through a partition wall — soundproof panels, which offered nothing — and landed in a heap near the KFC counter.
Dust settled. Roland coughed. He moved his lower back experimentally and found: some numbness, no real pain. His resilience, it seemed, scaled alongside his strength. He catalogued this the way he catalogued most things about this world — as data, as a thing worth understanding later.
What surprised him more was the Fallen Evil’s ability itself. No hybrid demonic beast in the real world used anything like this — not the air-compression attack, not this form of awakened power. Even the burnt-face man, more formidable in every other respect, had never displayed it.
He looked down at Phyllis in his arms. “Are you all right?”
“Sorry. I was careless.” She lifted her head, and there was no self-pity in it — only the brisk assessment of someone already thinking about what came next. “But trust me. The fight ends soon.” She pushed herself upright. The cheap short-sleeved shirt was torn in several places, and one of the claws on her back had sheared off. She had used them as a shield.
The Fallen Evil walked through the KFC entrance, breathing hard. He spotted Phyllis, and his face opened into something that looked like a smile. He raised his arm again.
“Time to die, martialist.”
He didn’t look at the floor.
The broken claw found his neck before the words finished leaving his mouth — springing from the tiles where it had fallen, striking clean and fast. The ferocious expression locked in place, then unlocked, then the man’s head tilted and fell, and blood painted a wide arc across the KFC linoleum.
Phyllis brought the claw back under control, directed it to sever the left arm, slit the arm open with one precise stroke, and removed the Magic Vortex from inside.
The headless body finished falling.
“A broken claw within ten steps stays mine.” She picked up the vortex and held it out to Roland. “An enemy who watches the intact claw rarely watches for the broken one. That’s when it kills.” A pause. A faint smile. “Is this the Force of Nature you mentioned?”
“Yes. Like a Magic Cyclone.” He took it from her hand — and felt it change the moment it touched him. In her palm it had been still, like a cut gemstone, solid and inert. When his fingers closed around it, the spinning resumed instantly, the color bleeding from red through pink to a clear, cold blue. Then it accelerated — faster, brighter — until it threw a column of dazzling light toward the ceiling and dissolved in a silver thread, thinning upward until there was nothing left to see.
The warmth spread through him the way he remembered: steady, deep, filling in the edges. He let himself be satisfied.