William slumped against the trunk of an old tree, bark digging into his back. He closed his eyes and pulled up his status, too tired to feel much besides a dull kind of satisfaction.
Name: William Velmont
Level: 10
Class: None
Attributes:
Strength: 19
Agility: 21
Stamina: 17
Intelligence: 18
Mana: 13
Skills:
Chrono Shift (SSS-Rank): Allows the user to open a portal to a specific point in the past. (Details Unlocked)
Seven levels, in a few hours. More than he'd thought possible. He could feel it in his body, the strength in his limbs, the way his reflexes had sharpened. He wasn't the same kid who'd stumbled through the portal that morning.
A tired smile crossed his face. Elric had thrown him away, called him worthless. And here he was, alone in the wilds of a world that hadn't been born yet, proving that wrong one fight at a time.
He stayed by the tree a while, letting his body recover. The aches from the fights faded slowly, and underneath them he felt something else, some kind of energy running through the ground itself, like this place had a pulse of its own.
Once he had his strength back, he pushed deeper into the forest. The trees here were massive, their leaves tinted with twilight colors, shadows stretching long and strange across the ground. The air smelled like wet earth and flowers he didn't recognize, and something else underneath, sharper, wilder.
He found a cave, its mouth hidden behind moss and vines. Sword out, he crept inside. The air was cool and damp, and it smelled old. It would do for shelter.
William settled onto a bed of moss, back against the stone. He was drifting toward sleep when something caught his eye, a glint of light near the rocks. He got up, curious, and found a small stone half-buried in the dirt.
It wasn't like any stone he'd seen before. It glowed faintly from somewhere inside itself, smooth and cool under his fingers. He turned it over a few times, then put it in his pocket without really deciding to. Something about it pulled at him.
He lost track of time after that. He drifted in and out of sleep, dreaming in fragments, snarling shapes and flashing claws.
Then, all at once, he was back on the hillside, the portal fading behind him. He checked the clock. Same hour, same minute as when he'd left. No time had passed at all.
But Chrono Shift was greyed out now, a message underneath it:
[Skill in Cooldown. Time Until Reactivation: Unknown.]
He felt a flicker of disappointment, but it didn't last, not with everything else going on. Seven levels stronger, and a strange glowing stone in his pocket.
He walked back toward the village, sore but somehow lighter. Elara was outside Gorn's cottage before he even reached the door, and her face went pale at the sight of him.
"William!" she said. "What happened to you?"
He gave her a sheepish smile, trying to make it sound smaller than it was. "Went into the forest to train. Wanted to get strong enough to go with Gorn next time. Guess I overdid it."
She narrowed her eyes but didn't push. She pulled him inside and got to work on his wounds right away. "You're lucky it wasn't worse," she said, dabbing something on the marks. "And you've been poisoned. That venom could've killed you."
He winced as she pressed a poultice to his shoulder.
"There," she said, stepping back. "That'll help with the pain and the poison. But you need to be more careful. The forest's dangerous even for hunters who've been doing this for years."
"I know," he mumbled, feeling worse for lying to her than for the wounds themselves.
The door slammed open. Gorn stumbled in, pale, breathing hard, a handful of other hunters crowding in behind him, all wearing the same look.
"Gorn, what happened?" Elara ran to him.
Gorn leaned on his spear, and William had never seen him look afraid before now. "We found it," he said, voice rough. "Or it found us."
He told them what happened out there. They'd followed strange tracks deep into the forest, expecting goblins, maybe worse. What they found was worse than anything they'd braced for.
"It wasn't just goblins," Gorn said, still shaking. "There were other things. Twisted things. Claws like knives, eyes burning like something wasn't right inside them."
He looked at William. "Corrupted. But not like anything I've seen. Faster. Meaner."
"That's not even the worst part," he said, quieter now. "We found a cave. A lair. And inside it..." He stopped, swallowed. "We saw it. Whatever's causing all this. Something powerful. You could feel it before you even saw it, like the air itself went wrong around it."
A scream tore through the village outside, and the room went still.