He already had the plan before he stepped out of the room.
That was the only reason he moved at all.
The fire extinguisher was six metres away, mounted in the hallway firebox between rooms 312 and 314. He'd walked past it every day for two semesters without ever looking at it directly.
Red canister, shoulder-height, carbon dioxide — the label printed in white block letters, the kind of text designed to be read in an emergency, by someone who had never read it before.
Kael had read it. He just hadn't expected the emergency to arrive this quickly.
He crossed the corridor in four long strides, pulled the extinguisher free from its bracket, and felt the weight settle into his arms. Heavier than it looked. Good. That mattered for what came next.
The chattering grew louder as they reached the bottom of the stairwell.
He positioned himself in the centre of the corridor, legs shoulder-width apart, nozzle in his left hand, right hand curled around the handle. The safety pin was already out — he'd pulled it the moment he lifted the canister. He watched the corner of the stairwell and waited.
The first goblin came around at a run.
Then the second.
Then the third.
All three were moving fast, bloodshot eyes fixed on the body of the fat straggler still leaking green fluid across the corridor floor. They were carrying scimitars and clubs, the blades notched and dull but long enough to matter, and they were less than three metres away before they registered him standing there.
Kael pressed the handle down.
"EAT THIS!!!"
The sound was enormous in the enclosed corridor — a violent, pressurised hiss, like something tearing open. A white jet of gas erupted from the nozzle in a dense, billowing cloud, and the temperature dropped so fast he felt it on his own face, a sharp sting across his cheeks and forehead. The three goblins hit the cloud at full sprint.
They didn't slow down in time.
The gas caught them directly — face, throat, bare arms, exposed skin above the rags they wore. Carbon dioxide at pressure, vaporising on contact, pulling heat away from everything it touched. The working temperature near the nozzle was somewhere below -70 degrees Celsius. Kael had retained that number from orientation paperwork. He was very glad he had.
The sound they made was not a war cry.
It was something high and broken, three voices colliding in the white mist, and then they were stumbling — hands clawing at their own faces, corneas frosted over in an instant, skin along their arms and necks going dark with a reddish-black discolouration where the gas had made direct contact. They couldn't see. They could barely move in a straight line.
Five seconds. Then the canister emptied with a hollow sputter.
The cloud began to thin.
Kael dropped the nozzle, gripped the canister with both hands, and swung it like a bat at the nearest goblin's skull.
The impact was solid — metal on bone — and the creature went straight down, hands still pressed to its frozen face, no longer screaming. He didn't wait to confirm whether it was conscious. He transitioned immediately, dropping into a crouch over the fallen body, drawing the fruit knife, and driving the blade into its chest three times in quick succession.
[ -10 HP ] [ -11 HP ]
[ Goblin Eliminated. Contribution: 60% ]
[ EXP Gained: +2 ]
[ Lucky Dice — No trigger. Drop quality escalating. ]
Sixty percent. Lower than the first kill. The fire extinguisher had taken the other forty — shared contribution, split reward. He filed that away and kept moving.
He threw the canister.
Not at anyone specifically — he hurled it sideways, hard, across the floor toward the second goblin. The heavy steel cylinder scraped and clanged against the ground, loud and irregular, and both remaining goblins swung toward the sound. Their vision was still gone. They were operating on hearing alone, weapons raised, trying to find something to hit.
Kael moved left, circling wide, coming in from the angle they weren't tracking.
He drove a kick into the second goblin's knee from the side — the joint buckled, the creature went down — and followed immediately with the knife, pressing his weight behind it, one strike into the base of the throat.
The blade caught something and held.
He pulled.
There was a sharp, short snap.
The knife stopped moving.
He looked down. The blade had sheared off at the base — a clean break, the ceramic handle still in his fist, the blade buried in the goblin's shoulder where it had deflected off bone on the way through. He stared at it for exactly half a second.
The third goblin swung blind.
The club caught him across the left ribs.
The sound of it was worse than the pain — a dense, meaty thud that he felt vibrate through his chest cavity, rattling his teeth. He stepped back before his body told him to, using the momentum of the hit to create distance, getting his feet back under him.
[ Blunt Weapon Attack: -5 HP ]
[ Current HP: 45/50 ]
He pressed his left arm against his side. Nothing ground. Nothing separated. The Goblin Chest Plate had absorbed most of it — without the armor, two ribs would have been different shapes.
He took a breath.
Shallow.
Then a full one.
The third goblin was still standing, club raised, head turning in slow arcs, trying to locate him by sound. Its skin was mottled dark across the shoulders and upper arms where the gas had bitten deepest. Its eyes were open but filmed over, the irises clouded white. It swung again at nothing, the club cracking against the corridor wall, leaving a gouge in the plaster.
Kael looked at the floor.
Part of the broken bench from the common area was still there. Two legs had snapped off from the frame, one resting near the wall several meters down the corridor. The fire extinguisher was somewhere deeper in the mist behind the goblin.
He picked up one of the bench legs with his right hand. Solid wood, about sixty centimeters long, splintered at one end. Not sharp, but heavy enough to work.
Walking to the far wall, he struck the wood against it once.
Clack.
The goblin's head instantly snapped toward the sound.
It charged.
Kael was already moving. As the goblin slammed into the wall, he rushed in from behind and swung the bench leg hard into the back of its knees.
The creature collapsed to the floor with a shriek.
Its club swung wildly in panic, but Kael pinned it down with his knee and brought the wooden leg crashing into the base of its skull twice in quick succession.
[ -8 HP ] [ -9 HP ]
The thrashing stopped.
He pressed the splintered end of the bench leg against the side of its neck and pushed his weight down until the number cleared.
[ Goblin Eliminated. Contribution: 61% ]
[ EXP Gained: +2 ] [ Lucky Dice — No trigger. Drop quality escalating. ]
[ LEVEL UP ]
[ Level: LV0 → LV1 ]
[ HP cap +10 | STR +1 ] [ Free Attribute Point: ×1 ] [ Current HP: 55/60 ]
The warmth came through him all at once — not adrenaline, something different, something that moved from the centre of his chest outward through his arms and shoulders and down to his hands. His muscle fibres felt slightly denser than they had a moment ago, the way a muscle feels the day after a long climb when it's rebuilt itself overnight. Except it happened in under a second.
He straightened up slowly.
The corridor was quiet.
Three bodies. Green fluid spreading in slow pools across the floor, flies already finding it from wherever flies come from. The white mist from the extinguisher had mostly dissipated, leaving the air cold and faintly chemical-smelling. His left side ached where the club had landed. His right hand was still gripping the bench leg.
He set it down.
He stood there for a moment — just standing, just breathing — and let the adrenaline run its course. His hands were steady. That surprised him, faintly. He'd expected them to shake.
"I did it...."
Then he picked up what was worth keeping.
The scimitar was notched along the edge but still intact, blade about forty centimetres, the grip wrapped in something dark and stiff. He didn't examine it too closely. He took the club from the third goblin as well — solid hardwood, heavier than the wooden stool had been, built to last. He tested the balance in his right hand.
Acceptable.
Two gray orbs on the corridor floor.
He pocketed them without opening them, then backed into room 312 and pulled the door shut behind him.
The room was empty — whoever had lived here was gone. He moved the desk against the door handle the same way he'd done in his own room, then sat on the edge of the bed and opened the orbs.
[ Gray Mana Orb ×2 Opened. ]
[ Received: 2 Gold Coin. ]
[ Received: White Food Voucher ×1. ]
[ White Food Voucher ] [ Redeem for any combination of food items totalling 5 kg or less. Redeemable anytime, anywhere via Storage panel. ]
He read the voucher description twice.
It was a small reward. Five kilograms of food. It didn't change the goblins in the corridor or the portal still poured monsters into the courtyard below.
But in the back of his mind, he had already been worrying about supplies. Water. Food. How long would the campus systems keep working before everything collapsed?
This reward bought him more time.
He stored the voucher and opened his status panel.
[Name: Kael Arden | Level: LV1 | EXP: 8/50 ] [ STR: 6 | CON: 5 | AGI: 5 | SPI: 6 ]
[HP: 55/60 | MP: 60/60 ] [ DEF: 16 | Attribute Resistance: 4 ]
[Equipment: Goblin Chest Plate (Green) | Weapon: Goblin Scimitar (White) ]
[Sigil: Lucky Dice (Prismatic) ]
[ Free Attribute Points: 1 ]
He looked at the free point for a few seconds.
Strength. The level-up had already given him one automatically. A second point would push him further above baseline, widen the gap between what his hits could do and what most people at LV1 were working with.
He confirmed it.
[ STR: 6 → 7 ]
The warmth moved through his arms again, briefer this time, like an afterthought. He flexed his right hand once. Then he set the panel aside and leaned back against the headboard of someone else's bed and stared at the ceiling.
Four kills. LV1.
One piece of green-tier armor, a white scimitar, a food voucher, three gold coins, and a broken ceramic knife handle that he dropped into the bin beside the desk.
The Lucky Dice had failed to trigger twice in a row. By the sigil's escalating mechanic, the next successful trigger would generate a drop one tier higher than the base. He didn't know yet what that meant in practice — whether it scaled within rarity bands or jumped across them.
Something to test.
Outside, the corridor was quiet.
Below, the sounds of the building continued — irregular, distant, punctuated by the occasional crash from a lower floor. The goblins were still in the building. There were more of them between here and the ground floor than he'd cleared from this corridor.
He looked at the scimitar resting across his knees.
Then he stood up.