The world dissolved into blue.
Then it reformed — and it was wrong.
Where Suka had expected stone, or dust, or the dark, cavernous interior of a dungeon, he found grass. Impossibly tall grass, swaying in a wind that carried no warmth. Each blade rose to shoulder height, a dense, swaying wall of pale green that swallowed the horizon in every direction. The sky above was a dim, washed-out grey, like a cloudy afternoon that had forgotten the sun existed. The cold clung to him, tighter than outside.
He turned to confirm the rift's entrance still glimmered behind him.
It did not.
Only more grass.
Suka's stomach dropped. His eyes swept left, then right, then behind him again, as if the shimmering blue portal might simply be hiding somewhere, playing a prank. Nothing. Just the endless, rustling sea of pale green, swallowing every direction, swallowing every sound. He could not see beyond ten metres in any direction. He could not see the sky's edge. He could not see anything except grass, and the faint, circular patch of crushed blades where he stood.
A cold dread, far sharper than the rift's ambient chill, seeped into his bones.
This was a mistake.
His breath quickened. The certainty hit him like a furnace shovel to the ribs: he'd walked in completely blind. No research. No maps. No exit coordinates. He hadn't even checked whether this rift's rating — two stars — was suitable for a Necromancer with the combat stats of a particularly optimistic corpse.
His hands were trembling. He noticed it distantly, the way you notice a sound that's been present for a while only after it's been going long enough to become loud.
No. Stop. Think.
He forced a single, slow breath. Then another.
Panic is how you die. Panic is how you end up at the furnace again. The thought, grim as it was, helped. He clung to it.
He could not see danger. That was the problem. The tall grass pressed in like a crowd, every swaying blade a potential ambush, every rustling stalk a predator he couldn't identify. He needed eyes. He needed distance. What he had was bones.
He raised his right hand, mana pulling from his core in the familiar current, and summoned.
Fifty skeletons rose from nothing, birthed from pale light and the quiet hum of necromantic energy. They materialized in a ring around him, their hollow eye sockets flickering with cold blue flame, their finger bones clicking as they oriented toward their master. Their frames were slight, their movements stilted and mechanical, but they pressed into the grass on all sides with a complete and utter absence of self-preservation — because they had none. Within seconds, the crushing weight of the swarming blades was pushed back. A circle of visibility, perhaps twenty metres across, now surrounded Suka.
He exhaled.
Then he summoned five hundred more.
The grass retreated further. The sound of it parting, a dry, continuous hiss, filled the air. White bone replaced green stalk in a radius of roughly one hundred metres, a rippling perimeter of skeletal soldiers standing in eerie, silent formation. The blue flame in their eye sockets was the only light other than the grey sky above.
It was, Suka had to admit, deeply unsettling to look at. Even from the inside.
"All of you," he said, his voice steadier than he felt, "surround me. Form a perimeter. Nothing gets within ten metres of me."
They obeyed. Not because they understood the words — he knew by now that complex sentences meant nothing to them. But they felt him. They felt the taut, wire-tight anxiety radiating from their master like heat from an open furnace, and they responded to it. Protect. That was the feeling. Protect.
The skeleton ring tightened. Suka let out a long, ragged breath.
"Alright," he muttered, pressing the heel of his hand against his sternum as if he could physically quiet his heart. "Alright. Think properly. Not thinking properly will kill you here."
He paced slowly within his bone-white circle, his boots crunching against the flattened grass beneath his feet. The first thing he needed was an exit. He had, by his count, a single two-litre water bottle, a kitchen knife — which he was already beginning to deeply regret bringing instead of literally anything else — and whatever scraps of courage he'd managed to scrape together. He could not survive in this rift for days. He didn't have the supplies, and more relevantly, he didn't have the information.
That was the embarrassing truth of it. He'd been so consumed by the revelation of his talent, so dazzled by the thought of his ever-multiplying billions, that he'd entirely neglected the foundational knowledge any Awakener was supposed to have drilled into them before they ever touched a rift. Know the enemy. Know the terrain. Know your exits. Know the rift.
I really am an idiot, he thought. A furnace worker with a billion skeletons and no idea what he's doing.
He almost laughed. Instead, he started walking.
His army moved with him, a slow tide of white bone rolling across the grass in every direction. He kept them close, within a radius he could visually manage. He was looking for a door — a rift had more than one entry point, everyone knew that. What he hadn't known, until approximately five minutes ago when panic had forced him to actually drag up everything he'd ever overheard on the subject, was that the door you entered through was not the door you needed to find. The return door — the one that would spit him back out onto Blue Planet — was a separate point entirely. Deeper in. Or shallower. Or sideways. There was no guarantee.
A sound split the air.
It was not a sound that belonged to the world. It was a screech — high, grating, and somehow wet, like something tearing at the back of a throat that was far too large. The kind of sound that reached down through the human brain and grabbed at something old, something pre-rational, something that only knew one word.
Run.
Suka did not run. His feet stopped. His whole body stopped. He looked.
It came through the grass like the grass wasn't there, a wall of muscle and momentum wrapped in dark green skin. It stood nearly two and a half metres tall, its arms as thick as Suka's torso, its jaw a jutting, snarling shelf of yellowed teeth. It moved with the certainty of something that had never, in its entire existence, been seriously inconvenienced by anything it encountered.
His shaking hand stabbed at the air, pulling up the system interface.
**NAME: ELITE GOBLIN**
**LEVEL: - -**
**STATS: LEVEL DIFFERENCE MORE THAN 20 TO SEE MONSTER STATS OR LEVEL**
The world tilted slightly. Suka's ears rang.
More than twenty levels above him. That meant this thing was at minimum level twenty-one. Its stats, health, defense, attack — all of it would be multiplied accordingly. His skeletons, with their ten attack power, wouldn't leave a scratch on it. He'd known this in theory. Watching it in practice was something else entirely.
The Elite Goblin hit the front line of his skeleton perimeter like a boulder hitting a wall made of chalk. Bones exploded outward. Not shattered — exploded. Each swing of its massive fist sent two, three, four skeletons dissolving into pale light, their forms collapsing back into mana dust before they even hit the ground. It didn't slow. It didn't stop. It moved through them with the casual efficiency of a man walking through tall grass.
Suka's jaw tightened.
"All of you — everything in front of me — attack that monster!" he shouted.
He released ten thousand skeletons.
The field transformed. In the span of a few seconds, the landscape ceased to be a grass field and became a sea of bone, white as far as the eye could see in every direction, pressing toward the Elite Goblin in a silent, relentless tide. The creature faltered. Even something that large, that powerful, had limits when the sheer mass of opposition became too great to push through. An elephant will struggle when a thousand ants decide to make it their collective problem.
The Elite Goblin slowed. It was still killing them — still swatting skeletons aside in clouds of mana dust — but its advance toward Suka ground down to a crawl.
Then the other sounds started.
From six directions simultaneously. Then seven. The grass erupted in bursts of violent motion, the dry hiss replaced by pounding footfalls, by guttural snarls, by the same wet, tearing screech. Suka spun, his eyes going wide, his blood going cold.
Seven more Elite Goblins closed in from every angle, each one carving through his skeleton perimeter as if the skeletons were a mild inconvenience rather than a fighting force.
The colour drained from his face.
"No," he whispered. Then, louder: "No. No, no, no—"
His hands were shaking again. He felt it now, the thing he'd been holding back since he'd first seen the grass field. It wasn't panic this time. It was something quieter and more honest. It was fear. Real, genuine fear, the kind that prickles at the corners of your eyes and turns your throat into concrete.
His skeletons, feeling the shift in his emotional state, pressed tighter around him, crushing inward in a wall of cold, rattling bone. It helped. Barely.
Eight monsters. Elite level, all of them. Coming from all sides. Billions of skeletons in his talent pocket — and not one of them could scratch these things.
A tear, hot and humiliating, tracked down his cheek.
Am I really going to die here? After waking up yesterday? After everything?
He stayed very still for three seconds.
Then something in him shifted.
No.
Not a defiant shout. Not a surge of dramatic courage. Just a quiet, flat refusal. He hadn't spent five years shoveling mana crystals in that miserable furnace, hadn't spent four attempts at the awakening sphere, hadn't hidden his talent from an administrator, hadn't dragged himself out of bed at four in the morning and walked an hour and a half across open ground — to die in a grass field because he was too stupid to think clearly.
He wiped the tear off his face with the back of his hand.
"Alright," he said, quiet and low. "Alright. You can't scratch them. Fine. You don't need to scratch them. You just need to weigh them down."
He looked at the nearest Elite Goblin, still grinding through his perimeter, still killing skeletons by the hundreds. He looked at how it moved — powerful, yes, but not invincible. When enough skeletons pressed around its legs, it slowed. When enough pressed from above and behind, it staggered. An Awakener with a level twenty-five monster's stats could tear through flesh and bone — but not through gravity. Not through the compressive weight of ten thousand skeletons piling on from every direction.
Even a mountain can be buried.
"New orders," Suka breathed. "First target. All of you near it — grab on. Hold on. Don't let go."
He summoned one hundred thousand new skeletons. He didn't care about strategy any more, not in the way he'd imagined when he'd lain on his cot and thought of himself as a brilliant tactician. He cared about one thing: mass.
The tide of bone crashed against the nearest Elite Goblin like a wave against a cliff. Then another wave. Then another. The creature swung, and killed, and kept killing — but the dead were replaced faster than it could eliminate them. Slowly, agonizingly, its right knee bent under the weight. Then its left. The ground shuddered as it went down, and when it did, a mountain of skeletons was already waiting. They piled on without hesitation, without restraint. The sound it made was not something Suka would soon forget — a strangled, furious bellow that diminished, second by second, under the sheer compressive weight of a skeleton army that had no lungs to tire.
The bellowing stopped.
A notification pulsed at the edge of Suka's vision.
Killed a Level 25 Elite Goblin — 250 EXP gained.
He stared at it. Then he erupted.
"YES!" The word tore out of him, loud and unrestrained, echoing across the white bone field. He turned to the next monster, his expression shifting into something wild and triumphant. He summoned ten million skeletons. The number barely felt real any more — it was just a command, a thought, and they arrived, an endless tide that crested over the landscape in all directions like a breaking flood.
"All of you — groups of one million — go to every monster. Jump on top of them. Pin them down. Crush them."
They understood feeling. And Suka's feeling in that moment was abundantly, unmistakably clear.
The field became chaos. Eight enormous battles, each one a mountain of white bone pressed against a struggling, raging Elite Goblin, played out across the flattened grass like a scene from some impossible war. The monsters fought viciously. They killed thousands of skeletons per minute — tens of thousands. It didn't matter. The replacements came faster.
One by one, the bellowing stopped.
**Killed a Level 25 Elite Goblin — 250 EXP gained.**
**Killed a Level 25 Elite Goblin — 250 EXP gained.**
**Killed a Level 25 Elite Goblin — 250 EXP gained.**
. . .
**Levelled up to Level 2 — 2 free stat points gained.**
**Levelled up to Level 3 — 2 free stat points gained.**
**Levelled up to Level 4 — 2 free stat points gained.**
**Levelled up to Level 5 — 2 free stat points gained.**
Suka stood in the centre of it, the blue notifications cascading across his vision in a waterfall of light, and he laughed.
Not a polite laugh. Not a controlled, measured expression of satisfaction. He laughed like a man who had fully, sincerely believed he was going to die in a grass field twenty minutes ago and then killed eight level-twenty-five monsters with a kitchen knife he never even had to use. He laughed until his ribs ached and his eyes watered, the sound rolling out across the silent, bone-white plain.
"Did you see that?!" he shouted, to no one, to the bones, to the grey sky. "I am the Skeleton King! Level twenty-five and you couldn't even scratch me!" He swept a dramatic arm across the battlefield, grinning with the unhinged energy of a man who had nothing left to lose. "You want to fight? Surrender now, and I'll give you a painless death! Otherwise—" He gestured to his ten-million-strong army, still standing motionless across the field like the world's most unsettling landscape painting. "Otherwise, it's the pile."
He composed himself, barely, wiping his eyes.
"Alright. Serious now." He rolled his shoulders, the grin still threatening at the corners of his mouth. "Search pattern. Spread out in groups of one million. Anything you find, crush it. Anyone moving — come back and report." He considered that last part. "No, you can't report. Just come back if you find a door."
He sent them out.
One hundred million skeletons dispersed across the rift in an expanding ring, a slow, silent tide moving through the tall grass. And as they went, the grass came down. Not cut, not burned — simply flattened, crushed under billions of tiny bony feet, pressed into the earth by sheer, relentless weight. The horizon, previously invisible, revealed itself in expanding increments: a flat, wide plain, stretching in every direction under that pale grey sky. Enormous. Featureless. Silent.
It was, Suka thought, actually quite beautiful in a grim sort of way. An alien landscape made visible by his army's passage, like a tide pulling back to reveal the seafloor.
He was marvelling at it — at the strangeness, the scale, the sheer improbable fact of his survival — when something moved past his head faster than thought.
An arrow.
He felt the displaced air before he consciously registered the sound — a sharp, splitting crack that seemed to cut the world in half. The shaft punched through the three rows of skeletons directly in front of him, sending bone fragments skittering, before burying itself in the earth three metres behind him.
Three centimetres to the right and it would have gone through the back of his skull.
Suka did not move for a full second.
Then he turned his head, very slowly, toward the direction the arrow had come from.
The grass was down in that direction. He could see clearly. And what he saw stripped every trace of triumph and laughter from his face in an instant.
A settlement. Rough walls of dark timber and stacked stone, squat towers studded with archers. And in front of it, spreading across the plain in disciplined, ordered rows — an army.
Not stragglers. Not the wandering predators he'd stumbled across earlier. An army. Shields, clubs, crude short blades. Ranks and files, as far as he could measure. Three thousand monsters, at minimum. Likely more. And some of them had bows.
One of them had apparently already decided to use its bow.
Suka stared at the army.
The army stared back.
"Right," he said. His voice came out very quiet. "That is a settlement. With an organised military force. That I have apparently just declared war on." He swallowed. "By walking into their territory with one hundred million skeletons."
He needed an exit. He needed one now.
The second arrow hit the ground directly at his feet.
Suka ran.