Ethan stirred awake to pale light filtering through the gaps in his crude shelter. His muscles ached, but for the first time since being ripped into this nightmare, he'd managed a couple of hours of real sleep. He pushed himself upright, blinking against the glow, when the familiar hum rippled through his skull.
The system's voice was detached, echoing across the sky itself.
[Day 2 Begins]
Species Report:
Civilizations terminated: 12 Civilizations conquered: 4 Civilizations in flux: 78
Note: Terminated species will respawn as feral mobs stripped of intelligence. Given enough exposure to Civilization Codes, they may regain sentience and rebuild their lineage.
The words scrolled without pause, clinical and cold. Ethan's mouth dried as he waited. And then, something new appeared—something marked only for human eyes.
[Human-Only Insight]
Population Remaining: 7,520,811,940 (↓ ~6.0%)
Civilization Code Remaining: 93.9% (dynamic; decreases reflect individual losses and fragmentation)
Ethan sat up straighter. His throat tightened. Fourteen entire species gone—erased. And nearly half a billion humans are dead in under a day. Not individuals he knew, not names, just a number large enough to feel numb—and somehow that made it worse. Civilization Code… ninety-three point nine. It wasn't abstract anymore. It was a literal measure of how much of humanity still existed to push back.
Before panic could settle in, he forced himself to open the global chat. He needed to know what others were thinking. Maybe someone had answers. Perhaps someone had a plan.
The feed bloomed with new lines, names blurred to preserve anonymity, but their voices were clear enough in his head.
[User: Survivalist23]
Almost half a billion dead in less than a day. Things are getting worse fast.
[User: Mira_S]
I saw the report. Entire species exterminated… What happens to them after? Do they just vanish?
[User: Harun]
No. I ran into one of those extinct species. Or what's left. They are no longer alive in the ordinary sense; it's more like they are driven by pure instinct, with not a single ounce of fear.
[User: Lian]
This isn't right. This whole thing… it feels designed. Like we're rats in a lab.
[User: Prophet_of_Dawn]
You don't understand. This is judgment. God's wrath has descended on us. The wicked will be burned away. Salvation is close, I feel it.
[User: KaelR]
Shut the hell up. We don't need preaching. We need water, food, and weapons. If your god's saving you, ask him for a rifle.
[User: Toma]
I can't stop shaking. I watched a kid get torn apart last night. It's not fair. It's not fair.
[User: Mira_S]
We can't lose it now. We have to think. Survive today, and tomorrow—just one step at a time.
Ethan stared at the screen for a long moment, his throat dry. Some voices clung to reason. Others cracked under the weight. And some, like the zealot, saw divine hands in the chaos. None of it mattered right now. He shut the chat with a flick of his wrist. He didn't have space in his head for arguments about gods or conspiracies.
He had to work.
The knife sat where he'd left it, a crude thing of sharpened stone lashed to a short wooden handle with fibers. It was ugly, jagged, but it had kept him alive. He ran a thumb along its chipped edge and grimaced. Too dull already. Useless if it couldn't cut clean.
He found a flat stone outside, rough and ridged. Kneeling in the dirt, he pressed the knife against it and drew the blade carefully, dragging with steady pressure. The scrape echoed in the quiet morning. Over and over, he repeated the motion, wrist aching, shoulders tight.
After what felt like an eternity, the blade caught the light in a different way. The edge gleamed faintly, honed just enough to bite into the fibers of a leaf. A soft chime pulsed in his vision.
[Stone Tool Refinement +10 XP]
[Progress: 10/100]
He blinked at the notification. Progress. Practice had weight.
He sat back and flexed his stiff fingers. Ten out of a hundred. One attempt, one notch of experience. It would take time. But the time invested here wasn't wasted.
Still, a knife wasn't enough. Not against what he'd seen last night.
He pulled a length of wood from the pile he'd gathered—straight, as thick as his wrist. The wood was harder than it looked. Ethan braced the branch against his knee and tried carving the end into a taper, but the knife's edge slipped, dragging a shallow cut across his thumb. He hissed, wiping the bead of blood onto his pants before it could smear the handle. The bark peeled away in uneven strips, resisting his grip with every stroke.
He tried again, pressing harder, until his wrist ached. The point finally began to form, jagged and crooked at first. Too brittle. He snapped it off, cursed under his breath, and started over. The second attempt fared no better—fibers split sideways, leaving the point useless.
Frustration burned through him, but he forced himself to slow down. Think. Adjust. He braced the shaft differently, shaved more carefully, then angled the knife against the grain. Bit by bit, the wood surrendered, shaping into a narrow, hardened point.
Next came the binding. He stripped long fibers from bark, twisting them into makeshift cordage. The first lash unraveled the moment he tested the tension. The second slipped loose after only a few pulls. By the third, his fingers were raw, but the fibers finally bit into the shaft with a tightness that held.
He tested the balance by hefting it, stabbing into the dirt with short, sharp thrusts. The point stuck just deep enough to matter. Not perfect, but real.
He ran a thumb along the haft, sweat dampening his grip. This wasn't a tool anymore. This was the line between prey and survivor. Primitive, ugly, barely holding together—but it was his.
A real advantage. A weapon that might keep teeth and claws away from his throat.
[Spear crafted.]
[Wooden Spear Crafting Proficiency: Progress 10/100]
He turned the spear slowly in his grip, testing its weight—crude, but functional. Yet the weapon alone wasn't enough—not nearly. Last night's chaos had made that clear. His shelter, nothing more than stacked branches and woven leaves, wouldn't stop claws or teeth. A single push, and it would collapse.
He crouched by the dirt, dragging the spearpoint across the soil until it left a deep line. His breathing steadied as the sketch formed—rough, uneven marks, but a plan nonetheless.
First: walls. Not just branches leaning together, but sharpened stakes driven into the ground, angled outward to make something like a spiked palisade. Even the smaller predators might think twice before charging a wall of jagged wood.
Second: traps. Nothing elaborate yet, but pits, trip lines, and sharpened sticks buried beneath loose leaves. He didn't need to kill anything that wandered too close—just slow it, distract it, buy himself time to strike or flee.
Third: fire. A controlled blaze at night could keep some things at bay. He'd need dry wood, stones to spark against, maybe resin for fuel. But the fire had its own risks—smoke could give him away, light could draw in predators as much as repel them.
And water. Always water. The basin would not last forever. He'd need a way to store it, carry it, maybe even filter it if it soured. A waterskin. Clay, if he could figure out how to harden it. Something.
Ethan leaned back and looked at the messy lines scratched into the dirt. It was pathetic as blueprints went, but it was the first step toward more than scrambling for scraps. He wasn't just surviving anymore. He was planning.
His hand tightened on the spear. "Shelter. Defense. Tools. Then food," he muttered, the words grounding him.
A bitter smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. Yesterday, he'd been running for his life. Today, he was thinking like a settler.
The thought should have been comforting, but instead it chilled him. Settlers came to stay. Settlers built for the long haul. And deep down, some part of him already knew—this wasn't ending tomorrow.
Hunger gnawed. His throat begged for water. He took two careful sips from the basin pool, then stopped—rationing by instinct more than plan. He scanned the tree line, cataloging shadows, wind shifts, and ird calls. The world looked gentler in daylight, but gentler didn't mean safe.
The sound came first—soft, uneven footfalls in the undergrowth. Not the steady rhythm of an animal. Staggered. Shuffling.
At first, he thought it was just the forest settling. A branch cracking somewhere in the distance. Leaves rustling without wind. But then he caught it again—softer this time, uneven. A step. Then another.
He froze, lowering his body into a crouch, spear clenched tight in his hands.
The usual background chorus of the forest dimmed. No insects. No calls from the treetops. Only silence pressing in on all sides, thick and heavy. Ethan's pulse quickened. In every survival story he'd ever heard, silence meant one thing: something nearby that others feared.
The sound came closer, dragging across undergrowth. A stagger, a stumble, then the wet patter of something dripping. His throat tightened. Blood?
He scanned the tree line, every muscle coiled. Shapes shifted behind the foliage, too fast to confirm. His grip slipped on the spear, palms slick with sweat.
Whatever it was, it wasn't hunting carefully. It was clumsy. Desperate. Wounded.
Ethan fought the urge to bolt. Running blind would only get him killed faster. He steadied his breathing, tried to slow the pounding in his ears.
Then it emerged.
A figure stumbled from between the trees, gray skin slick with blood. It was small—barely three feet tall—but built strangely, with four arms sprouting from its sides. Or three now. One limb hung in tatters, severed at the shoulder. The creature clutched its own detached arm against its chest as if it could will it back into place.
Its head lifted. Three black eyes locked on him, wide with terror. Its chest heaved.
And then Ethan heard it, not with his ears, but in his skull.
Scared. Scared. Hurts.
The voice was raw, jagged with panic. He flinched, eyes widening. It wasn't words in the air. It was inside him.
The creature staggered back, trembling violently.
[Species identified: Zarnathi]
Before he could move, before he could even speak, the Zarnathi turned and fled into the trees, vanishing between the trunks in a spray of blood drops.
Ethan stood frozen, spear trembling in his grip. His chest was tight, his breathing shallow.
Not all species here were monsters. Some were intelligent. Some could speak—even without words.
And they bled.
He looked down at the prints the Zarnathi had left in the damp soil—small, three-toed, dragging slightly on one side. He listened to the forest and heard nothing chasing him. No predator's cry, no stalker's heavy passage. Just the hush of leaves and a wind that didn't quite reach the ground. He could follow. He could try to help. He could risk everything.
His hand closed over the spear haft until his knuckles whitened.
"Not yet," he whispered to the empty clearing. "First—live through today."
He turned back to the shelter, to the piles of stone and wood, to the ugly, essential tasks that had to come before mercy or curiosity. The suns climbed, harsh and indifferent, and somewhere behind the blue of the sky, numbers shifted—lives lost, code reduced, a ledger balancing without pity.
He set the spear within arm's reach and got to work.