The news hit Max way harder than he ever thought it would. In his past life, he hadn’t really given a damn about other people, especially someone he’d only actually met twice. But the second the words left Aron’s mouth, Max snapped. He told Aron to get the car keys, and within minutes, they were tearing down the road toward the mountain peak—heading straight for Hercules’ secret cabin.
Sitting in the back of the speeding car, Max stared out the window, watching the city streetlights blur past in the dark. He found himself wondering why he felt this sudden, frantic sense of urgency.
I guess it’s because the giant actually threw me a lifeline when I was drowning, Max thought, his jaw tightening. If he had never taken the time to teach me the Vow and show me how to manipulate its restrictions, I wouldn’t be sitting in this car right now. Honestly, I’d probably be rotting at the bottom of that lake again under a pile of chains.
I owe him my life, and I haven’t done a single thing to balance the ledger.
In a way, racing up the mountain to help Hercules—if the titan was even still breathing—was Max’s only way of paying back the debt. But the situation didn’t make sense. What kind of terrifying enemies could a monster like Hercules actually have?
I heard stories about his past. He used to be a completely fearsome fighter, the kind of ghost who could walk into a criminal organization’s headquarters and slaughter everyone inside without breaking a sweat. It’s a statistical guarantee that he has a massive trail of enemies hunting for his head.
But after a certain point, the syndicates learned to just leave him the hell alone. The ones who didn’t back off were completely crushed by his bare hands, making the entire underworld understand that Hercules was a sleeping dragon.
If the major gangs knew better than to poke the nest... does that mean the attackers weren’t from a criminal organization at all?
Max leaned his head against the glass, remembering the odd request Hercules had made during their last encounter. Didn’t the giant mention he had an estranged student? From the way Hercules had talked about it, the two of them were on incredibly bad terms.
There was a very high chance that the student had finally come back to settle the grudge. But if this was just a bloody family dispute between a master and his apprentice, Max knew he wouldn’t need to launch into a massive revenge campaign. That was their own private business to settle with blood. Max also knew that Hercules had butchered plenty of people throughout his life; in their world, a violent death was always the final Chapter of the blueprint.
Still, Max needed to see the crime scene with his own eyes before he could make an executive decision.
Just like their last trip, Aron pulled the car off the main road, parking it in a hidden ditch at the base of the trail. They stepped out into the freezing night air and immediately began scaling the steep, rugged terrain of the mountain.
"Did the scouts you stationed out here get involved in the crossfire? Are any of our people hurt?" Max asked, his eyes tracking the dark tree line as they climbed.
"No," Aron replied, his breathing steady despite the vertical incline. "Because of Hercules’ sheer physical power and volatile nature, I calculated that he wasn’t someone we should actively monitor or anger. I just had a small surveillance team run a digital check on his location once a week from a safe distance."
He pushed aside a heavy branch, clearing the path for Max. "It was simply good tactical data to know where a weapon of that magnitude was resting. After we met him, I had a lingering fear that our enemies might try to approach him and buy his strength, even though I highly doubted a man like Hercules would ever agree to play mercenary for a street gang. My scouts already swept the immediate area before we arrived. It’s completely clear; whoever did this is already gone."
Max nodded. He knew that if there was even a fraction of a chance that a live ambush was waiting for them at the peak, Aron either would have blocked him from leaving the base or demanded they bring the entire frontline of the Bloodline group along for backup.
The moment they neared the crest of the mountain, the sheer scale of the destruction hit them. It looked like a localized hurricane had torn through the peak. A massive swath of the dense forestation was completely ruined—ancient trees had been violently uprooted from the soil, their heavy trunks snapped like toothpicks.
But as Max looked closer, he realized this wasn’t the work of a natural disaster. There were deliberate markings scarred into the surviving bark, sharp, deep gashes lining the rock faces. Aron stopped dead in his tracks, his eyes narrowing as he knelt down to evaluate a shattered trunk.
"Is something slipping past our calculations?" Max asked, stepping up beside him.
"Look at the entry angles of these cuts," Aron explained, his fingers tracing a jagged groove in the wood. "Some of these markings on the trees look like they were executed with a small, high-velocity projectile. Maybe a throwing dagger or an assassination dart. But the real problem is the cleanup. Even with all this massive chaos, the attackers took the time to sanitize the area and erase their biometric trail. A common street gang doesn’t do a clean forensic wipe after a bloodbath. It’s highly irregular."
"Well, anyone capable of hunting down a titan like Hercules isn’t going to be a normal human, right?" Max muttered, his heart dropping.
When they finally breached the tree line and reached the cabin, Max’s breath caught in his throat. The entire structure was completely demolished, the heavy log walls collapsed in on themselves in a heap of splintered wood and crushed stone. They carefully climbed over the debris, searching through the ruins until Max spotted dark, heavy smears of crimson staining the shattered floorboards.
"The structural damage is completely wild," Aron noted, his eyes scanning the crater where the porch used to be. "The impact force in these specific zones is too entirely different. One strike looks like pure blunt force trauma, while the neighboring sector was sliced apart by compressed air. I can only form one logical conclusion, Max. This wasn’t a duel. Hercules was ambushed by a highly coordinated team of elite killers."
Max stared down at the dried blood, a cold dread settling deep into his chest. He turned to his guardian, his voice dropping into a tense whisper.
"Can I ask you an honest question, Aron? If we mobilized the entire line of the Rangers—including you, Wolf, and me operating at the absolute ceiling of my Vow—do you think our group could have taken Hercules out in a cage match?"
Aron paused for a long, heavy second. He closed his eyes, mentally simulating the sheer physical output of the giant against their current defensive parameters.
"Honestly, Max? I’m not sure we could."
"Right," Max whispered, his eyes narrowing as he stared out over the empty, ruined peak. "If these monsters actually managed to overpower and eliminate Hercules... I highly hope our paths never cross. Because if they become our enemies, we are absolutely not ready for that level of war."