Unrivaled in another world

[: 3rd POV :] 

For the past few years, the Forbidden Continent had changed.

Not from rebirth or restoration. Not from salvation.

But from pure, undiluted fear.

And at the heart of that fear—no, beyond it—stood a lone figure.

Daniel.

A human, yet not.

A man, yet something far worse.

A calamity carved into flesh.

He did not arrive with an army.

He bore no banners, no declarations, no gods at his back.

And still, the earth cracked beneath his step, and the sky dimmed with his silence.

Where others sought balance, Daniel brought erasure.

He had become a living anomaly—"The Death Calamity."

That was what the monsters named him in their burrows, dens, and dying breaths.

The Death Calamity.

A name not spoken aloud, but whispered in gurgles and screeches and clicks, each syllable soaked in trembling dread.

Not because he was loud.

But because he was inescapable.

Stories spread like a disease among the creatures of the land.

"He walks in daylight and moonless night…"

"Avoid the winds that carry no scent."

"If the trees fall silent, run…"

Those few that lived long enough to witness him… didn't truly survive.

They were fractured things, broken not just in body, but in mind.

"I saw him… I saw him—he didn't speak. He just looked at me."

"His eyes—his eyes were empty! Void that breathes!"

"No matter how deep you go… he will find you."

They said these things with frothing mouths and shattered claws, scratching at their scales or pelts like the fear itself had rooted inside them.

One day, a legion of Thromgul Wretches—bone-laced hyena monsters known to tear apart entire cities—gathered in an obsidian canyon.

Over ten thousand of them, snarling, rabid, feral and ancient.

The ground shook with their marching feet, and the cliffs crumbled with their battle cries.

They thought themselves invincible in numbers.

Until a single ripple of void mana rolled across the dust.

Just a flicker—one strand.

The first to feel it let out a scream so shrill it pierced its skull.

Then another.

Panic infected them faster than flame. B

easts that had known only bloodlust now turned on each other, snapping limbs and trampling kin just to escape the phantom presence.

"He's here!"

"No! He's not real, he's—"

"HE'S WATCHING US!"

Within seconds, the entire canyon was a stampede of chaos.

They flung themselves off cliffs.

They tunnelled into the stone with their bare claws.

One tried to slit its own throat with its teeth.

But Daniel never came.

Not that day.

He didn't need to.

The idea of him was enough.

In the western reefs, among the scaled Ul'Kai Myrmidons, a coastal empire of deep-sea warlords, an emergency exodus took place.

They flooded their underwater city, collapsing centuries of coral halls and flooding their sacred trench, all to evade a lone black ripple spotted on the tide.

"I don't care if it's rumour—pull the eggs from the vaults!"

"He walked on the seabed once. My brother saw him—he never swam back."

"Better to drown with dignity than meet his gaze…"

It was comical, in a way.

This level of terror, this relentless hysteria, from back before the Gates arrived.

Back before this continent was overrun.

Perhaps this was the balance of fate.

Back then, the humans ran.

Now?

Now, they ran.

The irony burned like a cold flame. The fear that had once defined Daniel's world now defined him in theirs.

Except, unlike before, this continent was swallowed by the continent… Daniel needed no comrades.

He needed no gates.

He was enough.

Not even ancient titans escaped his wrath.

The Xelvanti Shardfather, an elemental horror encased in crystal, revered as a demi-god, once slumbered beneath the roots of the dead forest for millennia.

When Daniel passed through, it awoke—only to shatter into dust without even seeing what had hit it.

In a cavern deep beneath the western ridges, a horde of Burrowfangs—armoured mole-beasts—gathered in a frenzy.

One of their sentries burst in, shaking uncontrollably.

"—He's near! HE'S NEAR!"

Gasps. A claw dropped a stone. Another creature choked on its meal.

One of the chieftains turned. "How do you know?"

"I—I smelled it," the sentry sobbed. "The mana. Hollow. Empty. Too pure. No predator smells like that."

"You said he is near," a smaller beast croaked. "Who? Say it."

The sentry's jaw locked up. It couldn't.

His body spasmed as if saying the name would summon the thing itself.

So another whispered to him:

"…The Death Calamity"

Then all chaos broke loose.

"RUN!"

"Collapse the tunnels! COLLAPSE THEM!"

"No! If we seal the caves, we'll trap ourselves—"

"Better trapped than being watched by him!"

Screams echoed as the horde scattered like mice beneath thunder, some trampling their kin, others clawing blindly at walls just to get away from a name.

Near the blighted marshes, a group of amphibious Zull-Crawlers emerged from the muck, celebrating a recent slaughter of a rival tribe.

They were monstrous—towering, tusked things that walked like toads but roared like bears.

One of them grinned, hoisting a severed head.

"None can stop us now! We are the kings of the swamp!"

Another laughed.

"Let him come, whoever he is!"

"You shouldn't say that name," a third croaked nervously.

"What name?"

"The one they all whisper. The ghost-man."

"The Death—"

"DON'T SAY IT!" the nervous one hissed.

But it was too late.

As soon as the name left their lips, the swamp fell deathly still.

Just silence.

A silence that crushed the air.

One by one, the Zull-Crawlers looked around, their eyes wide, breath halting.

"…You think he heard that?" one whispered.

The oldest among them turned and sprinted without another word, collapsing into the mud as he cried, "HE HEARD! HE ALWAYS HEARS!"

Moments later, the group was gone.

Not by battle.

They tore each other apart just to run faster.

Even underwater, terror held sway.

In the abyssal trenches, where Kyr'den Leviabeasts swam like gods of the deep, word had spread that the man with void in his veins had walked the ocean floor.

One of the younger beasts growled, bubbles oozing from its scaled mouth.

"We rule this domain! What can a surface-walker do to us?"

The elder leviathan hissed, curling its massive body into the shadows.

"You think this trench shields us?"

"You think water drowns death?"

"I saw it. With my own eyes. He walked the trench. Without air. Without movement. And the light followed him… until it didn't."

The younger trembled. "No… no, it's just rumour."

"No, child. It is judgment."

Then came a whisper, passed from reef to reef, gill to gill, trench to trench:

"Even the ocean cannot bury him."

On land, in the ruins of a collapsed beast city, the ghosts of war still lingered.

The Krelach Devourers, once proud tyrants of the southern plains, had carved fortresses into the bones of titans.

Now?

They scrawled symbols on their walls.

Not for protection.

Not for faith.

But out of desperation.

A crude figure of a man—faceless, cloaked in smoke, with jagged red lines where his eyes should be.

They didn't worship it.

They feared it.

One of the younger devourers knelt before the wall.

"Great Death, spare us. We left the eggs behind. We did not resist."

An older one, blind and shaking, spoke through a cough, "He doesn't want offerings."

"…Then what does he want?"

The elder smiled with bloodstained fangs.

"Nothing. That's why he always gets everything."

Those who witnessed the aftermath wept at the quiet left behind.

No battle. No crater. Just ruin.

"I saw the Shardfather… I saw him cry before he cracked."

"No creature can make gods weep… unless it's worse than one."

The myths of Daniel only grew darker.

They said his mana warped space.

Birds fell from the sky when he walked below.

The stars blinked out if he looked up long enough.

Some began worshipping him, not as a saviour, but as the end.

A thing not to be reasoned with, but to be avoided at all costs.

Others called him:

The Black Silence

The Last Breath

The Grave-Treader

World-Kin Slayer

He-Who-Devours-Fate

But among all the names… The Death Calamity stayed.

Because it wasn't just a title.

It was a warning.

That Daniel wasn't just a man.

He was the death of stories.

A walking, breathing extinction.

And monsters now told their spawn not to fear the dark…

But to fear him.

Because he was real.

And if you ever saw him—

You were already dead.