A God's Playground

The ruins stretched for miles —
crumbling stone swallowed by creeping vines and moss,
half-buried under the endless open skies of Elysium.

Once, this place might have been a castle.
Now it was a graveyard.
And atop its broken spine, four brothers stood.

Across the field, a monstrous wyvern screeched, its serrated wings slicing the clouds as it barreled forward.

Behind it, packs of lesser monsters boiled from the woods —
gnarled, howling things half-born of nightmare.

Ray’s heart pounded — not from fear, but from focus.
This was how they survived.

Trey slammed his greatsword into the broken stone, the blade humming with dark magic.

"I got the big one!" he roared, his grin wicked.

Without waiting, Trey teleported forward —
slipping into the wyvern’s shadow and erupting out beneath it —
chains ripping from the earth to bind its left wing mid-flap.

The monster shrieked and twisted.

Dean didn’t even hesitate.

Wind burst from his feet in a deafening crack —
he flew like the winds were always behind him,
arcing high above the field, a spear of compressed air materializing in his hand.

With ruthless precision, he hurled it downward —
the weapon drilling through three smaller beasts before exploding into mist.

Dean was faster than anything Ray could track.
Cleaner.
Sharper.

He looked like he belonged here. Like he was made for this game.

Marsden’s laughter echoed through the air as he flashed across the battlefield in bursts of living lightning.

Every dash shattered the ground.
Every punch sent monsters flying, smoking and crackling with electric burns.
He whooped and hollered with each hit, a manic grin stretching across his face.

And Ray? Ray stood still. Watching. Calculating. Breathing slow.

Time slowed.

A beast lunged at Trey’s back.

Ray flicked his fingers —
sliding Trey two steps left —
just in time to avoid a rending wing slash.

Marsden stumbled, ankle twisting sharply as he struck a mob head-on.

Ray reached across time and rewound the injury mid-run —
Marsden never even noticed.

The wyvern gathered breath for a killing blast.

Ray froze its body —
just for half a second —
just enough for Trey’s blade to crash into its exposed chest.

The monster toppled, letting out a rattling death-scream.
The battlefield fell silent.
No one was hurt.
No one even looked winded.

Dean landed lightly, dismissing his weapons back into the air.

"Nice one, Mars," he called.

Marsden laughed breathlessly, wiping blood from his forehead.

Trey just cracked his neck and sheathed his sword with a grunt.

No one looked at Ray.
No one thanked him.
Ray smiled anyway, because that’s what he was supposed to do.
Because that’s what he always did.

Later, they sat around a fire inside the broken hall of the ruins.
The sky above was black, the stars cruel pinpricks of cold light.
Marsden poked at the flames with a stick, his eyes bright with unspoken thoughts.

"You see how Dean didn’t miss a shot?" Marsden said proudly, pointing upward like a kid bragging about his big brother.

Dean chuckled, rubbing the back of his neck.

Trey shrugged, unbothered. "Fast hands. Doesn’t mean shit if your target’s bigger."

Ray said nothing.
He stared into the fire, hearing their words in slow motion.
They didn’t mean to leave him out.
They weren’t cruel.
They were just... moving on.

And Ray wasn’t.

The next morning, Dean stood at the edge of a cliff, arms folded, wings of wind curling at his back.
Trey and Marsden stood beside him, frowning in concentration.
Ray sat on a broken stone nearby, watching.

Learning to fly wasn’t optional anymore — it was survival.

"You gotta catch the gusts under you," Dean said, his voice calm, almost teacher-like.
"Don’t force it. Feel it."

Trey grunted. "Yeah, yeah. Feel the air. Got it."

Trey tried to leap forward —
and immediately crashed into the dirt twenty feet below.

Marsden burst into laughter so loud he nearly fell over himself.
Dean laughed too, genuinely.
Even Ray smiled.

It was a real moment — a crack of light in the gathering dark.
Hours passed.
Trey managed to teleport between patches of shade, but real flight still eluded him.

Marsden did better —
crackling bolts of lightning under his boots to launch himself upward in sputtering, unstable bursts.

Dean coached them patiently.
No anger.
No mockery.

Just a brother helping his brothers.

Ray tried too.

Freezing his feet in time.
Launching upward with bursts of compressed energy.
But his body wasn’t built for it.
He could hover for seconds at best before crashing down again.

Dean offered a hand up without saying anything.
Ray took it.
That mattered.
Even if the silence afterward hurt worse than any fall.

That night, rumors reached them.

The Republic was growing stronger.

James — the man of explosive magic — was building true cities in the South now.

An army was forming.
Companies of mages and knights trained every day, preparing to hunt down the Totems and bring everyone home.

But the Kingdom...

The Kingdom was something darker.
It attracted the broken ones.
The lost ones.
Players who never wanted to leave.
Players who had nothing left in the real world to return to. 
They spoke of power freely, violently.
Of carving a new empire in Elysium.
Of ruling forever.

Marsden sat staring into the fire, the news gnawing at him.

"They’re forgetting," he whispered.

Ray looked over.

"Who is?"

Marsden clenched his fists.

"Everyone.
They’re forgetting that we were supposed to save each other. Thet we are supposed to work together to get out of this world. Not... not become this."

Trey leaned back against a tree, arms crossed, face unreadable.

Dean watched the fire in silence.

Marsden’s voice cracked.

"I don't care if I'm alone.
I'm not leaving the weak behind."

He looked at Ray — desperate, pleading.
Ray met his gaze and nodded.
A silent promise between them.

Far away, in the dead of the night —

Two players sprinted through the woods, lungs heaving, fear tearing at their throats.

They ran from something that didn’t belong to nature —
something stitched from myth and nightmare.

A creature with a goat’s legs, a man’s torso, eagle wings, and arms like twisted vines.

It crashed through the trees behind them, faster than anything that large should have been.

The first mage turned, throwing a blast of fire.

The beast shifted —
its arms becoming scaled like a crocodile’s —
the fire rolled off harmlessly.

The second mage screamed as a wing smashed into him, breaking his spine against a tree.

The first mage tried to blink away, teleporting forward —
but a whip-like tongue lashed out and wrapped around his throat.

It dragged him back into the darkness, kicking and gurgling.

When the screaming stopped,
only silence remained.

And from the clearing,
half-shrouded in moonlight,
the monster emerged.

A Green-Eyed Totem, wooden with a demonic face and wings, dangled from its neck, pulsing faintly with sickly light.

The first Guardian had been found.

And death was only just beginning.