The Convergent Path (Reincarnation/LitRPG)

The air around Crie hung heavy with the acrid aftermath of Fin's cataclysmic strike, thick enough to taste. The perfect crater where the Low Tier Four beast had stood mere minutes ago continued to shimmer under the fading afternoon light, its geometrically impossible edges catching the sun like polished glass.

Five pairs of eyes remained fixed on Fin with the focused attention usually reserved for sleeping dragons. The mixture of emotions radiating from the group was palpable: awe at what they'd witnessed, fear of what it implied, and deep suspicion about what else their seemingly innocent porter might be hiding.

"I know you all have questions," Fin said, raising one hand in a gesture meant to forestall the verbal storm he could see brewing in their collective gaze. His voice remained steady despite the dull ache in his back. "And I'm telling you right now, I won't be answering them."

Triana's mouth opened, her expression shifting toward righteous indignation, but Fin pressed on before she could gather momentum for what would undoubtedly be a lengthy interrogation. "We genuinely don't have time for this. Two hours until the next wave arrives, and all of you are running on fumes. You need to get inside the walls, find somewhere to rest, and use whatever mana potions you've been hoarding for emergencies. Because if this qualifies as anything, it's definitely an emergency."

The group erupted in immediate protest, their voices overlapping into an incomprehensible wall of sound that spoke to frayed nerves and accumulated stress finally finding an outlet.

Daryl spoke the loudest, his voice cutting through the chaos. His white-streaked hair had fallen into his eyes, giving him a wild, almost feral appearance. "You don't get to pull off whatever the hell that was and just walk away without explanation, porter boy. What kind of technique was that? What concept are you wielding? And more importantly, why the fuck are you pretending to be some harmless baggage carrier when you can apparently delete things from existence?"

Vance crossed his massive arms over his blood-crusted armor. "He's right. That kind of power doesn't come from nowhere. Explain yourself."

Onrio's voice trembled with barely controlled emotion, his thin frame practically vibrating. "That wasn't just an advanced skill. That was something fundamentally unnatural. Reality itself bent away from your fist. I've never seen or even heard of anything like that outside of ancient legends."

Harbour's void-like stare cut through the cacophony like a blade through silk. When she spoke, her voice carried. "Be completely honest with us, Fin. Strip away the pretense and the deflections. Are you actually stronger than us?"

The question hung in the air like a guillotine blade, everyone waiting to see how Fin would answer. He hesitated, weighing his words carefully before meeting her gaze.

"Individually, in a straight fight with no preparation or special circumstances?" Fin said slowly, choosing each word with the precision of someone navigating a minefield. "I'm probably weaker than any single one of you. Your experience, your tier, your battle instincts, all of that gives you overwhelming advantages in direct confrontation."

He paused, then continued with the inevitability of a falling axe. "But could I kill you if circumstances favored me? Yes. Harbour, Vance, Onrio, given the right setup and enough preparation time, I could end any of you before you realized the fight had started. Daryl, you're faster and more paranoid, so I'd probably only manage to take an arm or leg if you weren't being careful. Triana..." He glanced at their leader, noting the way her jaw tightened and something flickered behind her eyes, perhaps recognition that her damaged core made her more vulnerable than she wanted to admit. "I'd need significant prep time, like what you just saw, to even scratch you. But here's the thing, none of you are fast enough to catch me if I decide to run, and mana expenditure isn't a limiting factor for me the way it is for you."

The brutal honesty of his assessment fell across the group like a physical weight, silence settling as they processed the implications of what he'd just admitted. Fin's voice softened, taking on an almost pleading quality that contrasted sharply with his earlier matter-of-fact delivery.

"Please, all of you, go inside and rest while you still can. I genuinely don't want to die in this dungeon, and more than that, I don't think my grandfather would be particularly happy if I did." He allowed a grim smile to touch his lips. "And trust me when I say that an unhappy Theron tends to be very, very bad for the local environment and anyone in the vicinity."

Triana's jaw tightened, her entire body language screaming that she wanted to argue, to demand answers, to reassert some measure of control over a situation that had spiraled wildly beyond her expectations. But before she could voice any of those impulses, Harbour placed a hand on her shoulder. She shook her head once, a clear message passing between the two women.

Triana deflated like a punctured balloon, exhaustion and pragmatism finally overriding wounded pride and burning curiosity. "Fine," she muttered through gritted teeth. "Everyone inside. We rest, we recover, and we prepare for the next wave. Questions can wait until after we're not actively fighting for our lives."

The group trudged toward the massive gates. Their armor clinked with each movement, the sound somehow mournful in the late afternoon air. Blood and dust caked their forms.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Fin waited patiently until the gates groaned shut with the finality of a tomb sealing, the heavy timbers and reinforced metal cutting off the city from the outside world. Then, without wasting another precious second, he sprinted exactly seventy-five yards from the wall, far enough to avoid collateral damage to the fortifications but close enough that anything approaching would have to cross his prepared killing ground.

His Electromagnetic Synchronization swept the surrounding area in expanding waves, searching for any electromagnetic signatures that might indicate early arrivals or scouts. Finding nothing but ambient background noise, he knelt in the blood-soaked earth and began his work.

Creating Plasma Compression Cores was becoming almost meditative. Each orb coalesced in his palm. He planted them methodically two feet apart, embedding them just shallowly enough in the dirt that they remained stable but would detonate with even modest pressure applied from above.

Each core was linked directly to his consciousness through the skill that created them, giving him perfect awareness of their status and the ability to detonate them remotely if tactical circumstances demanded it. They were essentially magical pressure mines, ready to unleash the fury of miniature suns on anything unfortunate enough to step on them.

He worked with machine-like efficiency, circling the entire city's perimeter in a wide ring that would force the next wave to either trigger his traps or waste valuable time circumventing them. The task required a steady drain of mana, but Convergent Inevitability operated in the background like an automatic pump, drawing ambient energy from the dungeon's mana-saturated environment. The Sovereign skill treated the abundant magical power like a buffet spread specifically for his benefit, natural confluences of energy pooling toward his core like rivers finding the sea.

By the time he finished planting the final core, the sun had dipped noticeably lower toward the horizon, painting the sky in shades of amber and crimson that looked disturbingly like fire and blood. A faint sheen of sweat coated his brow, not from exhaustion but from the sustained concentration required to create dozens of stable plasma constructs. His mana reserves, thanks to his skill's passive regeneration, remained near full capacity despite the expenditure.

Fin reentered the city with approximately an hour remaining before the next wave would crash against their defenses. The streets were eerily quiet. The few militiamen he passed looked at him with expressions that mixed gratitude, fear, and the kind of awe usually reserved for divine intervention.

Inside Mayor Elmur's command hall, heated voices echoed off the stone walls with enough force to be heard from the street. Fin paused in the doorway, taking in the scene of internal conflict that had apparently erupted in his absence.

"We absolutely cannot leave after just the second scenario!" Daryl snapped, his fist slamming down on a wooden table hard enough to make it jump. "We've gone deeper than this before! We've cleared four scenarios when we were all fresh, we can't just abandon the run because it's harder than expected!"

Harbour's voice emerged low and measured. "This scenario set is demonstrably harder than any of our previous delves. Without access to proper healing potions or a dedicated healer, we're operating with zero margin for error. If the difficulty continues to escalate at this rate, we'll lose someone before we see the third scenario. We're only surviving this long because Fin happened to join our party, without him, we'd have lost someone in that first wave."

"You know exactly why we're doing this!" Daryl shot back, his eyes blazing with an intensity that spoke to deep personal investment. "We all agreed! This isn't just about loot or advancement!"

Harbour's dreads fell forward, briefly hiding her face before she looked up to meet his gaze directly. "I know. We all want to help Triana with her core damage. Every single one of us wants to. But we'll die if we push too hard too fast, and a dead party can't help anyone. The next wave won't be easier, it'll be harder. And what about the third wave? If this pattern continues, we're looking at potential Tier Four enemies in significant numbers."

Vance coughed deliberately and suddenly all eyes turned to find Fin standing awkwardly in the doorway. He rubbed his hair self-consciously, feeling like an intruder in a private moment.

"Maybe we should focus on surviving these next two waves before we worry about pushing deeper into the dungeon," he suggested, moving to sit beside Onrio, who looked like he desperately needed someone nearby who wasn't actively arguing. "Have all of you managed to recover your mana?"

Daryl snorted. "As much as possible given our circumstances. Which, for the record, isn't much. We're all operating at maybe half capacity if we're being optimistic."

Fin nodded. "I've planted surprises outside the wall, a complete ring of traps about seventy-five yards out. They should take out a significant chunk of whatever the next wave throws at us, assuming the enemies are stupid enough to charge straight at the walls."

Triana laughed, but the sound was brittle and sharp-edged, lacking any genuine humor. "I sincerely hope they're not as dramatic as your last surprise. The city walls are old, and I'm not sure they'd survive another detonation of that magnitude in close proximity."

Fin allowed himself a small grin, trying to ease some of the accumulated tension crackling through the room. "Nothing quite that spectacular, I promise. But they'll definitely hurt anything that steps on them. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to meditate and prepare myself mentally for whatever is heading our way."

He closed his eyes, deliberately shutting out the world as he sank deep into his core's familiar landscape. The meditation was both rest and preparation, allowing him to organize his thoughts.

Forty-five minutes seemed more like 5. They assembled atop the battlements as shadows lengthened and the sky took on the purple-gray quality of approaching dusk. The city's militiamen clutched their bows with hands that trembled from renewed fear rather than exhaustion, their earlier relief at surviving the first wave completely consumed by dread of what came next.

The horizon began to stir with ominous movement. Trees at the forest's edge shook as if caught in a localized earthquake, their branches thrashing despite the complete absence of wind. The ground itself seemed to tremble with approaching footsteps, hundreds of them, thousands perhaps.

Fin's Electromagnetic Synchronization painted his awareness with electromagnetic signatures that made his breath catch. Five hundred distinct sources, each one registering as solid Mid Tier Three. The variety of beast types created a chaotic symphony.

"Here they come," Fin announced, his voice cutting through the rising wind. "Five hundred hostiles, all Mid Tier Three."