I Siphon the Dead to Become the Strongest

The walk back to the gosiwon was significantly less painful for Ethan, mostly because he wasn’t the one doing the walking. Lindis had practically scooped him up and tossed him over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes, though she had eventually shifted him into a more comfortable piggyback ride.

”Thanks for the lift,” Ethan muttered, his chin resting on her shoulder. ”My legs are still basically gelatin, so I appreciate not having to crawl home.”

Lindis let out a soft, humming laugh, her stride steady and effortless. ”It’s the least I can do. You did save my skin during that slime incident in the E-Rank gate, after all.”

As the memory surfaced, her bright expression suddenly shifted. Her nose wrinkled in a look of profound, visceral disgust, and she shuddered violently, the image of emerald-green goo and suffocating slime clearly flashing through her mind. She looked as though she had just swallowed a lemon wrapped in a dirty sock.

She quickly shook her head, snapping back to her usual cheerful self. ”Anyway! Since you were so adamant about the public indecency laws, we’ll just do the massage at your place. Just like you wanted!”

”Uh-huh. Yeah. Exactly like I wanted,” Ethan replied. He shifted slightly, a thought occurring to him as they turned the corner toward his apartment complex. ”But... aren’t you a little nervous?”

Lindis tilted her head, her pink hair swaying. ”Huh? Nervous about what?”

”About... me?” Ethan asked, his voice trailing off.

”What do you mean, ’about you’?” she asked, looking back at him with wide, blinking blue eyes.

Ethan sighed. He tried to guide her toward the realization without being too explicit—mostly because the idea of actually explaining it felt awkward. ”I mean... we’re going to my gosiwon. It’s a tiny room. Basically a shoebox. And it’ll be the two of us... alone... in there. And, you know, I’m a man. Hello?”

He paused, waiting for the lightbulb to go off. He waited for the blush, the stutter, or the sudden realization of the ”situation.”

Instead, Lindis just blinked again. She looked at him with a completely flat, bewildered expression, as if he were reciting a math problem in a language she didn’t speak.

”So?” she replied simply. ”If you’re a man, then I’m a woman. That’s just how biology works, right? Does the floor in your room have a weird allergy to women or something?”

Ethan stared at the back of her head, completely speechless. He had expected a thousand different reactions, but ”pure, unadulterated confusion” wasn’t on the list. He leaned his forehead against her shoulder with a defeated groan, wondering if her density was actually a passive skill.

The peaceful atmosphere of the afternoon was shattered by a sound that sliced through the city noise like a jagged blade—a woman’s scream. It came from the left, echoing from the direction of the narrow commercial alleyway just a block ahead, raw with genuine terror.

Lindis stiffened. Her head snapped toward the sound, her pupils dilating.

”Wait—that was a scream!”

Before Ethan could even process the words, the world shifted. Lindis didn’t just move; she launched. With the explosive force of a coiled spring, she surged forward, her legs pumping with a power that sent her blurring into a sprint.

The problem was, she was still carrying Ethan.

Because her acceleration was instantaneous and her trajectory was now a dead-straight line, Ethan was left behind by the laws of physics. He didn’t slide off; he was effectively ejected.

SPLAT.

He hit the asphalt face-first, his backside bouncing once with a wet, pathetic thud.

”Are you kidding m—”

CLANG!

His momentum carried him a few more inches, and the back of his skull collided squarely with the rim of a metal trashcan. The sound echoed like a church bell made of garbage.

”SON OF A—!” Ethan howled, clutching the back of his head as he rolled onto his side, seeing a constellation of stars dancing around his vision. ”Who just... what is wrong with her! Who drops a human being like a piece of unwanted luggage?!”

As he groaned and tried to pull himself up, the scene in the alleyway came into focus, and the irritation died in his throat.

The street had turned into a war zone. Several creatures—small, wiry, and malicious—were tearing through the area. These were the ’Twig-Legs,’ the spindly, green-skinned goblins with jagged blades and eyes that glowed with a murderous, feral light. They were smashing car windshields with manic glee, overturning fruit stalls, and shattering shop windows, sending shards of glass raining down on the pavement.

Civilians were screaming, scrambling in every direction to escape the sudden ambush.

In the center of the chaos, one of the creatures, a particularly nasty specimen with a notched blade, lunged through the air. Its target was a mother who had collapsed on the ground, clutching her two terrified children against her chest in a desperate, futile shield.

The goblin’s mouth was open in a hideous, toothy grin, its claws reaching out—

BOOM.

A blur of pink and steel intervened. Lindis didn’t use the blade; she swung the heavy, reinforced butt of her axe like a sledgehammer. The impact sounded like a car crash. The goblin was caught mid-air, its trajectory instantly reversed as it was hammered backward.

The creature flew ten feet, slamming into the side of a parked sedan with a sickening crunch. The metal of the car door caved inward, forming a deep, goblin-shaped dent before the monster slid off the chassis and slammed face-first into the concrete, unconscious or dead.

Lindis landed in a crouch, her axe held low, her expression switching from protective fury to utter confusion. She glanced around at the surrounding chaos, her brow furrowed.

”What the...?” she whispered, her voice laced with worry. ”Is there a gate leaking somewhere? Why are there so many of these pests out here in the open?”

The Twig-Legs weren’t particularly formidable. On their own, they were low-tier fodder, barely worth the effort of a full-power strike. But their strength wasn’t in their muscle; it was in their malice and their instinct for the ambush.

As Lindis stood her ground, two of the creatures materialized from the shadows of the alley, leaping from the ruins of a smashed stall. They lunged in unison, their serrated blades aimed precisely for the gaps in her armor, targeting her kidneys with predatory precision.

Lindis didn’t even look back. In one fluid, explosive motion, she leaped forward, her body clearing the blades by a fraction of an inch. While mid-air, she whipped her axe behind her in a devastating, sweeping arc.

”Hah!”

The heavy steel edge whistled through the air, catching both goblins mid-leap. The sound was a wet, singular thwack. The force was so concentrated that it didn’t just kill them—it bifurcated them. The two creatures were cleaved cleanly in half, four pieces of green flesh collapsing onto the pavement in a heap of gore.

As she landed, a third goblin attempted a desperate, low-angle slash at the back of her heels. But Lindis possessed a physical resilience that bordered on the unnatural; the blade sparked against her skin as if hitting reinforced rubber, failing to leave so much as a scratch.

Without breaking her gaze forward, she snapped her leg back in a blind, reflexive kick. Her heel slammed into the goblin’s stomach with the force of a piston, folding the creature in half. Before it could even wheeze, she brought the flat side of her axe down in a crushing slap, pinning the monster to the ground with a bone-shattering thud.

She took a momentary breath, glancing toward the mother and children. They had used the distraction to scramble away, disappearing safely into the crowd.

---

”Yeah, yeah, I’m early. Blame it on the ’Big Brother’ side-quest. 🤒 Between the medicine runs and the school walks, I’ve had plenty of time to think about how much I love making Ethan suffer.

Hope you guys enjoy seeing him treated like a piece of luggage. I’m going back to my real-life struggle now. See ya! 🚩✨”