Beast Slayer Online: Initialization
Copyright© 2026 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 55: The Last Gate Of Velen
Nenneke felt as though he had fallen into a long dream.
In the dream, he had returned to his hometown in Cidaris, back before the royal house collapsed, before the Temerian Restoration Army marched in.
The air there did not stink of rotting corpses and burned houses. It carried the scent of flowers from town planters, the aroma of sea fish frying in roadside taverns.
People were not tense. They did not eye every stranger like a hidden knife. They did not starve badly enough to gnaw on human corpses.
The air was mild there. The warmth mild too. Nothing like Velen, with its endless swamps and foul miasma, a vast pit of mud and decay.
Nenneke found himself aching for everything his homeland had been before the war.
“Wake up, scum.”
Then the dream changed.
He was running through a forest without direction or purpose. He did not know why he fled, only that a horror like grinding teeth and sucking blood was crawling out from the marrow of his bones.
Behind him came heavy footsteps.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Fast. Closing.
Dream-Nenneke found the whole thing absurd.
Running through woods in heavy armor? Chasing someone like that?
What are you, some kind of leshen?
Then again, dreams made no sense. None at all.
Just a dream...
“I said wake up, scum.”
Through the haze, Nenneke saw a figure moving before him. His own perspective seemed pressed against the ground.
Then he felt someone step on his wrist.
The sensation dragged him back into reality.
He opened his eyes blankly and stared at the boot pinning his arm down.
At first, that alone was not so bad. The purpose seemed to be restraint, not crushing.
But why pin the wrist?
A faint sizzling reached his ears.
Meat roasting over heat. Fat bursting under flame.
Nenneke’s blurred eyes snapped into focus.
Then terror swallowed them whole.
“Aaaaaahhh!!!”
His hand.
His hand was being pressed into a pile of live coals.
The firepit from their camp. Not long ago, a greased human arm had been roasting above it.
Pain arched his whole body off the ground in an instant. He jerked like a madman, trying to rip his wrist free, but the steel-shod boot planted on him might as well have been nailed into the earth.
It did not move.
“What are you doing?! What are you doing?! Who are you?! Help! By the Plague, help!”
Lannor tilted his head slightly, watching the man writhe like a maggot beneath him.
Then, slowly, he dragged his foot sideways, pulling Nenneke’s wrist away from the glowing coals.
The break from the constant burning pain gave Nenneke a ragged gasp of relief.
His face had gone bloodless. Sweat rolled from his scalp in thick drops.
Instinctively, he looked around.
The sight shattered whatever reason he still possessed.
Tears burst from his eyes together with mucus from his nose. His lips shook as though he had been dropped naked into winter water.
“Aaaaaahhh!”
All seven men from the camp had been gathered in the clearing.
The three cut down outright were one thing.
The ones who had fled were worse.
One corpse knelt upright, both hands clawing toward its own head, except the head had become a lump of blackened charcoal. The mouth hung open, and Nenneke could almost hear the desperate screaming frozen inside it.
Another had a neck swollen grotesquely thick, veins burst beneath skin gone blue-black.
The confusion of waking from dreams, the shock of pain, the horror before his eyes, all of it crashed together inside him.
Trembling, Nenneke slowly turned toward the man standing over him.
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