He stepped first.
Reeds parted around his shins with the soft complaint of a room not ready for company. The pocket was a failed pond - a saucer of mud ringed by root and scrub, reed ceiling low enough to teach posture. The ground under the hump held just enough firmness to keep a man honest if he listened. He listened.
Heat pressed from the far rim where the shadow had been practicing being a body. A breath sawed through bristle, unashamed of its noise. The smell rode the waterline - fur, iron, wet bark, and a rank note thinner than rot and more confident than sweat.
He set his left foot on the root lip that made a shelf just above the mud. Right foot back a hand, heel light. Blade low, edge forward, not advertising.
The reeds gave up a wedge of brown and muscle. Shoulder first, then the head, wide and ridged, tusks with a polish that was not nature's. The glyph above its skull did not feel like the others - not brighter, exactly, but more certain of its right to be here.
[Hidden Boss: Boarhide Bully]
The name felt like the system had been paying attention to how the world called things and then correcting their grammar. Good.
It did not charge at once. It held the doorway of reeds like a bouncer who had decided that the party was over. Its breath took the room's measure. Its eye counted angles and decided which would be rude to ignore.
Smarter than the L7. Good. Means it will pick a plan and commit to it.
He offered it one - a straight line that looked appetizing and lied about mud depth. He let his shoulder be a little too open, his stance a little too forward, the way you talk to someone who loves their own voice. Then he put the edge where the conversation would go if it were a trap.
The Boarhide Bully obliged. Mass came first, then speed. The reed ceiling dragged bristle, shaped the line, and made the creature believe in momentum. It put a foreleg down to own the room.
He corrected its ownership.
The first cut went in at the inside of the planted ankle - not heroic, a quiet veto. Hip turned, hand followed, edge did the work he had asked it to.
[Critical Hit.]
The leg remembered softness. The boss tried to spread its weight to the other foreleg to bully balance back into the room. He was already there with the second line, low on the opposite shoulder, the cut that makes turning a confession.
[Critical Hit.]
Mud took the argument and translated it into slipping.
The bully raised its head and tried to make the room be about tusks. He stepped into the space where a tusk's story cannot find punctuation, off-line and too close for arcs to matter, and pressed the third cut in under breath where chest pretends to be fortress. Not a throat cut. A memo: breath is a renter.
[Critical Hit.]
Reeds hissed. The boss learned to hate ceilings. It tried angle instead of charge - a lateral shove meant to catch a body's habit of liking its own ribs. Ethan borrowed half a step from the root shelf and returned it with interest. Fourth cut - the tiny seam where neck muscle wraps toward the ridge, a place that thinks it is safe because it is boring.
[Critical Hit.][No damage taken.]
It did not show him pain. It showed him stubborn. Better. Stubborn plans reveal the fifth cut by insisting there are only two options. He put the edge under the insistence and let grammar win.
[Critical Hit.]
The room exhaled. The bully's weight arrived at the mud as if concluding an argument. Reed tips flicked. Insects lost their place and found it again. Silence sat down with a ledger.
He held still for one count longer than ego would have. Then he lowered the blade point to a patch of grass that didn't mind truth and wiped it clean. No flourish. No pose. He watched the reed ceiling for a twitch that meant company and heard only the small, thin noises of water and wings.
Coins clicked - modest, firm.
[Copper +]
A square, gray item rolled out of the boss's shadow and stopped against a root. He crouched, keeping his shoulders uninteresting, and palmed it.
[Item: Whetstone]
Plain, honest weight, the kind of thing you'd find at the bottom of a drawer in a workshop run by someone competent and poor. He set it into inventory where noise would not be made of it.
A discreet breath at the top of his vision, as polite as a librarian.
[Skill Proficiency: Blade Mastery Lv1 -> progressing.]
Another whisper even thinner than that.
[Weapon: Dragon-Slaying Blade (Growth) - Advancement: in progress.]
No glow, no sound. The steel merely warmed against his palm the way tools do when they agree with their owner.
He did not dissect the carcass. He did not loot for theater. He looked at the mud for what it remembered and saw tracks leading in from a slit opposite his approach - heavier than most, old and refreshed - and tracks leading out short and messy, as if something had fetched itself and then decided not to go anywhere after all.
He brushed a reed with the back of his knuckles. The plant wrote him out of its sentence. He turned to the water and bled his boots into it until the swale forgot the story of his feet.
Voices, a long way off, wearing excitement like a hat. Sloshes where enthusiasm outweighs balance. The bell had sent them hunting. He let the bell own them.
He moved to the pocket's far slit and read its manners. Lower ceiling, tighter pinch. This one would force even smarter bodies to remember joints. He liked doors that told the truth.
The slit took his shoulders scrape by scrape. The reed mats on either side bent back, reconsidered him, and then decided to forget. Mud underfoot gave one sharp lesson about where weight should live, then learned better.
Beyond, a low lane of reeds ran parallel to the swale at a slight remove - an alley made when water changed its mind a season ago. The air was cooler. The sounds carried different. A dragonfly wrote cursive above his blade and pretended it had invented speed.
A splash behind him, back at the pocket, too loud for animals.
"Bro, look at that - gouges -"
"Careful, careful -"
"The bell pinged here -"
The alley halved and halved again. He rode the narrow like a patient thought. The roots underfoot formed a ladder that a man could climb sideways without insisting on being seen doing it. He climbed.
The lane opened into a wider sheet of reeds waving slow like a field of tiny hands. In the middle, a raised bar of earth held a stand of scrub that had learned the value of saying no. The gouge-line continued across its side, higher than a man would reach without a tool. The width was wrong for boar and not proud enough for something that loved its horns. Something else taught it.
He knelt. The ground was colder here, as if shade had been brought rather than merely found. Flies did their sums and failed to make a party out of it. He pressed his off-hand to the dirt beside the line and felt the faintest tremor transfer - not steps, not breath, but weight set way out there, at a remove he couldn't see through the reeds.
His inventory hummed the small, bureaucratic weight of the whetstone. He considered the blade. An edge like this, freshly fed killers and a boss, could be told to be better. The stone would help. But stones talk. The rasp would summon ears.
He put the stone away and kept the edge's agreement with him unspoken.
The copper amount did its math in his panel. He did not open the tab. He kept adding without writing the number down.
Water sighed under a mat to his left and made a new small river. He followed with his eyes and not his feet and watched it point at a gap where reeds had been shouldered aside by a thing that did not name itself. The gap led toward the cold.
He went lower, posture a thought rather than a person. Reeds brushed his shoulders and then chose not to. The lane's end was not an end - a kink, a bend, then a corridor of scrub with the bark rubbed smooth at hip height. Smooth bark made by repetition, not accident.
He tasted the air for iron and got a faint, used-metal note that had nothing to do with blood. The kind of smell huts get when tools live there. There were no huts.
The corridor quivered once as if a sigh had been returned to it. The cold sank half a degree. Other players' voices softened and bent off the wall of reeds and went somewhere he was not. Good.
He came to the scrub's turn and held there just long enough to borrow the ground's patience one more time. The blade offered to do half his job. He let it. He angled edge and stood where he could lend force without inviting drama. He had choices. He could pivot left onto the bar and take a higher route that would see more and be seen more. Or he could step into a tunnel where the air carried less light and more answer.
The deeper gouge-line disappeared into the tunnel. The cold belonged to it.
"Now or later," he told the quiet.
The bell kept its own counsel.
He chose.
He set his shoulders to the narrower hunger and slid into the darker corridor, letting the bright reeds behind him close like a hand deciding not to wave.