The siren cut across the factory floor in a ragged wail, the kind that meant a conveyor jam or a busted line.
Callum lifted his head from the housing he'd been torqueing and felt, rather than heard, the change.
The sound didn't fade.
It sheared off mid-scream.
Voices around him froze in throats. A dropped wrench hung in the air like it had forgotten how to fall.
Light crawled across everything—machines, steel rails, oil slicks—like frost spreading on glass.
Callum straightened slowly. He was six feet of stubborn habit and old discipline, brown eyes narrowing as the world went still.
He opened his mouth to say Alana's name and watched the breath stall halfway out.
A tone struck inside his skull—pure, clean, indifferent. It came with words that weren't sound at all:
[System Integration: TERRA]
[Calibration In Progress]
[Population Index: 8,019,442,211]
[Latency Compensation: Applied]
Everything moved again, but not like before. Gravity remembered itself. The wrench clanged. Someone swore.
Callum's heartbeat slammed back into his chest like a hammer finding a nail. He didn't panic. He did what habit allowed:
looked for exits, for cover, for threats you could put an axe through—except he didn't have an axe, just a torque wrench and a promise he'd made at a kitchen door.
The lights overhead flared white, then bled into a color that didn't have a name. Lines sketched themselves into the air.
A translucent window unfolded in front of his face with the elegance of a knife being unsheathed.
[Tutorial Pathways Available]
• Bronze — Minimal Risk | Minimum Exit Level: 5
• Silver — Moderate Risk | Minimum Exit Level: 10
• Gold — High Risk | Minimum Exit Level: 15
• Diamond — Extreme Risk | Minimum Exit Level: 20
[Select Difficulty]
Men shouted. Someone tried to bat the window away and hit nothing.
A woman near the line sobbed once and clapped a hand over her mouth.
Callum stared at the word DIAMOND until it stared back.
He thought of five small faces and one steady pair of hands pressing against his chest.
He didn't believe in omens. He believed in costs.
He raised a finger.
Callum's fingertip touched the glowing word. The other options bled away like ink dropped in water.
[Selection Confirmed: DIAMOND]
[Warning: Extreme Mortality Risk. Minimum Level Required to Exit: 20.]
[Allocating Tutorial Environment…]
The factory around him groaned like steel under strain. Shapes buckled, colors fractured.
He staggered as the ground split into seams of light and dropped out from under him.
There was no falling—only being unmade and redrawn.
Darkness.
Then: damp air, thick with the scent of loam and iron. A cavern roof hung overhead, ribbed with stone veins that pulsed faintly as if alive.
The factory floor was gone. In its place stretched a tunnel of jagged rock and slick moss. Water dripped in the distance, the sound hollow, endless.
Callum crouched, hands splayed on rough stone. His torque wrench was gone.
In its place lay a hafted axe—primitive, broad-bladed, the edge shimmering faintly as if the metal resented being bound to wood.
He closed fingers around the grip. Weight settled into his palm, heavy, real. The System had armed him.
[Quest Accepted: Survive the First Hunt]
Objective: Defeat your first hostile creature.
Reward: +10 EXP, Chance for Loot Drop
His jaw tightened. The air was colder now, carrying a musk that prickled the hairs on his arms. Something moved beyond the edge of the tunnel's dim glow—low to the ground, too fluid to be human.
Callum raised the axe, body falling into the old habits: feet braced, weight balanced, eyes narrowing to fix on movement.
The first trial had already begun.
He eased forward, testing the ground with the ball of his foot before committing weight. The tunnel breathed—slow, damp exhalations that tasted like rust. Water ticked somewhere ahead, irregular as a faulty metronome. He lifted the axe into a high guard and let his off hand brush the wall; stone thrummed faintly, a bass note of something big moving far below.
Boot prints? None. Scrapes, though—curved gouges along the lower rock, as if something with too many claws had dragged its belly through. He crouched, touched the furthest groove, and felt grit crumble under his thumb.
Fresh.
He picked a fist-sized stone and tossed it down the passage, not hard—just enough to ping off the wall and skitter. The sound traveled, thin and bright, and died.
Silence answered. Then a soft rasp, like scales against stone.
He shifted two steps right, away from the centerline. The tunnel narrowed here, one wall bulging inward with a seam of glittering quartz, the other sloping out to a black shelf.
He could use that: force a choke point, deny a flank. The old training didn't care that the enemy might not be human.
A shadow peeled off the floor.
It came low and fast, a blur of jointed legs and a head like a wedge, mouth furred with hook-teeth. Not a wolf; something on the wrong-side-of-evolution, all hinge and leverage. It didn't snarl. It hissed—a sound without breath.
Callum shoved the haft forward first. The thing hit the wood with the impact of a sledgehammer, momentum screaming to carry through. He turned that force, angling the haft, letting the wedge-head slide past as he stepped offline. Teeth raked the air where his thigh had been.
Weight, then blade.
He chopped at the joint behind the forelimb.
The axe bit chitin; shock banged through his arms like he'd struck a railroad tie. Not deep enough. The creature skated sideways, legs scrabbling, and came back in a jittering zigzag that didn't match any predator he knew.
[Hostile Detected]
Classification: Unknown Juvenile
Behavior: Pounce–Latch–Shear
Advisory: Target limb seams / submandibular gap
"Noted," he breathed.
It darted again, faster; he reversed his grip, met the rush with the axe-head low, and yanked hard. The mouth scissored, teeth catching the haft and peeling splinters. It twisted, trying to lever the weapon away.
Callum stepped in instead of back, shoulder to carapace, and drove with his legs. The creature slid. Boot heel found purchase on a ridge; he heaved.
They crashed into the quartz seam. Cracks spidered the glittering vein. The thing writhed, spine flexing like a bow. A hind claw hooked, found his forearm, and raked. Cloth tore. Heat flared up his skin.
He grunted, not giving it breath enough to be a shout. Pain was information; he filed it and moved.
The wedge-head recoiled to strike again—perfect. He slid his left hand to the axe throat, shortened the lever, and chopped upward at the angle where jaw met neck. Edge met softer plate. This time the axe sank. Not clean, but enough. Black ichor misted warm across his knuckles.
The thing convulsed. It tried to reverse off the blade. He pinned it with a knee, drove the edge in deeper, twisted. Plates parted with a wet click.
A final shudder, legs drumming the rock, then stillness.
He stayed crouched a breath longer, waiting for the phantom second strike that always came after a close one. When it didn't, he exhaled slowly and pried the axe free. The cut steamed in the cold air. Whatever passed for blood down here smelled faintly of copper and vinegar.
[Combat Result]
Enemy: Juvenile Lurker
EXP Gained: 12
Total EXP: 12 / 60 (20%)
Loot Chance: Common (Rolled: Success)
Loot Acquired: Hooked Fang (Common), 1x Chitin Shard (Common)
Condition: Minor Lacerations (Forearm)
He wiped the blade on rough hide, then knelt and sawed the hooked fang free with the axe edge, working careful so he didn't dull it more than necessary. The chitin shard came away with a crack; light shimmered inside it, a dim internal flicker like trapped lightning that couldn't remember how to strike.
"Useful if you're true," he muttered to the shard, and stowed both. He tore the sleeve, wrapped his forearm—tight, enough to keep blood from slicking his grip—and flexed his hand until the burn faded to a steady throb.
The tunnel widened ahead. Moisture feathered the walls, each droplet catching the faint glow that bled from fungus lamps tucked high in crags. He took a cautious pull of the air.
Behind the iron and rot—something else.
Sap? No, sweeter. Resin, maybe. Tree, underground. He filed it with the other strange.
A flicker like distant heat shimmered crossed his vision. He froze, expecting another panel. Nothing came. Just the tick of water and his own breath.
He moved again, slower. The cavern floor here wasn't uniform; fat slabs of stone had settled at different angles, making shallow terraces. On the left, a narrow gutter cut along the wall where runoff trickled. He followed it for thirty paces, pausing every three to listen.
Scrape. Pause. Scrape-scrape.
Different cadence. He crouched behind a knee-high spur of rock and risked a glance over.
Two shapes skittered in the near-dark like animated mantles—flat and wide, with frill-edges that rippled as they moved. They hugged the wall, pausing to rasp at it with mouthparts like serrated spoons. Where they scraped, the stone paled. Feeding? Mineral?
He couldn't tell.
One raised its body slightly, exposing a triangle of soft tissue under the frill. Submandibular gap. He filed the advisory with a mental circle around it.
Pick the closest. One strike. Don't let the other get your back.
He looked for the approach and saw it immediately: a line of irregular stones that would carry his weight quiet if he placed his feet just so. He eased out from cover, rolled his shoulders down, and let the world tunnel to a sight-picture: angle, distance, timing. The axe grew light in his hands, not from weight but from familiarity—the way a tool learns a man as much as a man learns a tool.
Three steps. Then two. Then—
The frill nearest him flared in warning. It felt him. He committed anyway, driving off the back foot, bringing the axe from low to high in a rising cut meant to lay the gap open.
The creature folded like bad origami. His blade scored the rim of the frill instead of the throat. It screamed. The sound knifed his ears, a pitch that tried to turn muscle to water.
He drove forward to stay inside the arc. The second frill-thing launched from the wall, gliding on its rippled edge like a thrown tarp.
He dropped, let it pass, and hammered the axe head down in a short, brutal stroke at its center mass. The edge punched through and bit rock. The thing pinned itself on his blade and thrashed, weight surprisingly heavy.
The first slammed into his shoulder. He felt the hit in the joint, a white-hot pulse that wanted to make his grip loosen. He didn't give it that. He yanked the axe free, rolled his wrists, and chopped at the first's underside as it reared to strike again.
Edge met gap.
This time the cut landed true.
[Combat Result]
Enemy: Frilled Gnasher x2
EXP Gained: 9 + 9
Total EXP: 30 / 60 (50%)
Loot Acquired: Resinous Membrane (Uncommon, 1), Frill Edge (Common, 1)
New Condition: Tinnitus (Temporary) — Perception checks: -10% (1 min)
He blinked through the ringing, jaw clenched to keep the pressure in his ears even. "You're not taking my hearing on day one," he growled, and waited out the worst of the spin before he bent to work. He cut a length of the membrane free—tough, flexible, slightly sticky—and tested it. Might make a decent strap. He tied it over the sleeve bandage to keep it from slipping and flexed. Held.
The gutter thickened into a trickle here, running out from under a boulder that had wedged itself into a natural arch. He crouched to sniff—cold, mineral, no rot-stink. He cupped a palmful to his mouth, letting it sit on his tongue to taste for bitterness. Clean enough. He drank, not greedy, then rinsed his cut and hissed as cold bit the raw.
Another panel chimed, softer, like the System respecting the quiet.
[Micro-Objective Complete: First Hunt — Extended]
Bonus Award: +3 EXP (Cumulative)
Exploration Hint: Follow water to progression nodes.
He stood and looked where the runoff pointed. The tunnel dropped a few degrees, the floor smoothing, carved by persistent flow.
Farther along, a faint glow pulsed in a steady rhythm, like a heartbeat.
Progression node. He didn't know how he knew that—only that the word fit.
He checked the axe edge with a thumb—still keen, the nick from chitin small enough to leave—and started toward the glow, keeping to the shadowed side of the passage.
The light resolved into a shallow basin scooped into the stone, filled with water clear as glass and rimmed by a crown of crystalline growths that hummed faintly. Not music. Something like it. A coin-sized puck of metal lay at the basin's edge, stamped with a sigil he didn't recognize.
He reached for it. The humming intensified, feelable on skin like static.
"Easy," he said and picked up the puck between forefinger and thumb.
[Progression Pool Discovered]
Function: Minor Recovery & Calibration
Token Detected: 1 (Eligible)
Spend Token?
— Cost: 1 Progression Token
— Effects: Close Minor Wounds | Reset Temporary Conditions | +2 EXP
He weighed the token in his palm. Edge still throbbed. Ear still rang. But the cut would clot and the ringing would pass. Spend when you must, not when you can.
He slipped the token into his pocket and drank instead, cupping water to his mouth and splashing the rest over his face until the ache behind his eyes eased.
A line of text stitched itself across his vision and faded.
[Advisory: Night-Cycle Approaching (Simulated). Predation increases by 30%.]
"Of course it does," he said, and stood.
The tunnel forked beyond the basin: left into a low crawl where the air smelled like mushrooms, right into a wider run that carried a faint draft. He knelt, set a fingertip to the rock again, and felt that old bass note return—deeper now, closer. Not here. Below. But motion meant life; life meant threats; threats meant experience.
He went right.
The passage opened by degrees into a chamber with a roof high enough that the sound of water ticked like rain on tin. Slabs of stalactite had fallen long ago and shattered, leaving knife-edged rubble. Good and bad—cover and ankle-breakers both. The glow came from clumps of fungus that liked the ceiling better than the floor.
He was three steps in when a shape uncoiled in the rubble to his left. Bigger than the first lurker. Same wedge head, thicker forelimbs, the beginnings of spines along the back that hadn't hardened yet. Adolescent. Meaner. Learning.
It came in a bounding S-curve that ate distance. Callum slid left, tried to turn it past him the way he had the juvenile, but this one corrected mid-lunge, hips swiveling with ugly grace.
Teeth flashed. He jammed the haft sideways into the mouth, wood groaning. It shoved. He let it. He stepped with the push, pivoted, and used the thing's momentum to sling it into a shoulder of rock.
Stone boomed. Chitin cracked. It landed already scrambling. He chased, not to give it room to think, and chopped at a forelimb seam. The blade bit; a front leg buckled.
It tried to circle to his bad arm. Smart. He pivoted on his heel, kept his front to it, and found his breath again—short, controlled, every exhale a metronome beat.
"Again," he told himself, not the beast, and cut for the throat. The axe sang on stone when the creature threw itself low to avoid the stroke, then surged to latch to his calf.
Teeth found leather and scraped hide. Pain lit his shin. He kicked, hard, and felt something give under the heel—jaw hinge or eye ridge. It shrieked, too close; hot breath slicked his skin. He brought the axe down in a tight arc, no wind-up, all body, and felt the edge slide between plates into a place nature hadn't armoured properly yet.
The fight ended the way they all ended: suddenly.
[Combat Result]
Enemy: Adolescent Lurker
EXP Gained: 18
Total EXP: 48 / 60 (80%)
Loot Acquired: Reinforced Chitin Plate (Uncommon, 1), Adolescent Fang (Common, 1)
Condition Updated: Minor Lacerations (Forearm), Bruised Shin
He leaned his back against a cool pillar and breathed through the throb in his leg until his breath stopped trying to run away from him.
The cut on his arm had bled through the makeshift wrap; he tightened the resin strap, then tore another strip from his shirt and bound it over.
He checked the ground for the slick bloom that meant more lurkers. Nothing moved except his breath and the steady drip. The night-cycle advisory ticked in the back of his skull like a timer he couldn't see.
"Keep moving," he said, because stillness here felt like permission for something worse to find him.
He limped deeper into the chamber. On the far side, a narrow fissure climbed at an angle, not quite a staircase, not quite a chimney. Marks clogged its mouth—scores and gouges like the ones he'd seen earlier, but older, layered.
Traffic. He studied the pattern, then put his shoulder to the axe and began to climb.
Halfway up, the fissure squeezed tight enough that he had to slide the axe ahead and drag himself after. Cold seeped through his shirt. Stone rasped his bandage. The world narrowed to sound and breath and the next hold.
He emerged into a gallery that made his chest go still.
Trees grew here—pale, columnar things with glassy bark and leaves like translucent coins.
Their roots dove through rock as if it were soil, gathering around pools that glowed from within. The air was warmer, wetter. Something clicked in the canopy—small feeders, dozens of them, their voices like a rain of pebbles.
He stood there too long, letting the sight fill him and file down edges that had grown jagged in the tunnels. It was beautiful, and beauty in a place like this frightened him more than teeth. Beauty was bait.
The System agreed.
[Zone Entered: Bioluminal Grove]
Modifiers: Visibility +, Cover ++, Predator Density ++
Note: Abundant resource nodes present. Increased ambush risk.
"Right," he said, and put his back to the nearest not-tree, eyes tracking the coin-leaves for movement that didn't match the sway of the others.
He almost missed the trap because it wasn't the ground.
Two coin-leaves near his head were the wrong color—too matte. They flexed, then shot downward like thrown blades. He raised the axe on instinct. The leaves rang on steel and caromed off, burying themselves in the trunk with a thunk that hummed through bark and bone. A third whistled from the side; he ducked and felt it kiss the top of his ear.
Warmth ran along the curve.
A whisper of motion above. Something unfolded from the canopy, spider-thin limbs spread wide between the trunks, its torso a bundle of hard, gleaming plates. Not a spider.
Not anything kind. Its mouth was a simple slit that widened and widened and—
He dove as a lattice of silk-hard threads snapped down where he'd been standing, webbing the trunk behind into a shivering cage.
He rolled, came up kneeling, and hacked at the nearest thread. The blade cut, but the fiber snapped back like elastic, whipping the edge.
The creature adjusted its angle, triangulating him with predatory math.
He threw the chitin shard.
It wasn't much of a weapon. It didn't need to be. It clipped one of the thing's support lines high in the canopy. Tension lost symmetry.
The creature sagged half a foot, then over-corrected, scissoring limbs to catch a new hold. In that breath it wasn't hunting; it was falling.
He charged.
One step. Another. A third. He leaped, driving the axe in an overhand strike at the junction of its limbs and torso. The blade bit, skittered, then caught in a seam. He hung there for a wild second, axe buried to the socket, arms screaming, as the creature flung itself sideways to shake him off.
He let go.
He dropped, rolled, and came up with the axe in both hands as gravity did what it did best.
The creature slammed into the ground, stunned, limbs flailing. He stepped to the side of the closest, avoided a blind rake, and chopped twice—first to ruin the limb, second to open the torso seam he'd found on the jump.
It shrieked. The sound hammered the grove. Every coin-leaf trembled.
"Quiet," he snapped, and finished it.
[Combat Result]
Enemy: Canopy Shearling
EXP Gained: 14
Total EXP: 62 / 60 (103%)
Level Up! → Level 2
Stat Points Awarded: +5
Minor Recovery Applied
The glow in the pools brightened for a heartbeat, as if the grove approved. Or noticed. He wasn't sure which he disliked more.
A calmer chime sounded, distinct from the harsh fight tones. He glanced at the air as the panel unfolded.
[Status — Player: Callum Ross]
Level: 2
Class: Unassigned
Strength: 11 → 12
Vitality: 10 → 11
Agility: 8
Perception: 7 → 8
Intellect: 7
Willpower: 10 → 11
Available Points: 2 (Allocated: +1 STR, +1 WIL, +1 VIT, +1 PER; Reserved: 2)
Traits: Grit (Passive)
Skills: Improvised Axe Techniques I (New), Survival Sense I (New)
EXP: 2 / 70 (3%)
Loot (Recent): Hooked Fang (C), Chitin Shard (C), Reinforced Chitin Plate (U), Adolescent Fang (C)
Conditions: Minor Lacerations (Forearm), Bruised Shin, Superficial Ear Cut
He read it without letting his stance relax, eyes still tracking the canopy. A level meant a little more give in the joints, a little more breath at the end of a sprint. It wasn't salvation. It was permission to keep working.
He eased around the pool, checking the other trunks for those matte leaves that were knives in disguise, and found a path that ran along the grove's edge. The draft came stronger there, cooler—an exit, or just another throat for darkness to blow through.
The ear cut stopped bleeding. The forearm stopped complaining so loudly. The shin would ache later; he'd make sure there was a later.
Beyond the grove, the path tightened again and bent left. He marked the bend with a shallow axe nick in the wall—habit and breadcrumb—and moved on.
The tunnel sloped more steeply. The sound changed with it. The gentle tick of the grove sharpened into a steady rush; somewhere ahead, water moved fast. Good and bad again—noise to cover his own, noise to cover theirs.
He rounded the last curve and saw the river.
Not wide—eight feet, maybe ten where it undercut the far wall—but quick, clear, knotted with small standing waves that popped and hissed. A curved spine of stone made a natural bridge halfway across, slick as oiled glass. On the other side, a ledge ran along the wall toward a dark, high arch.
He measured the crossing with his eyes. Two steps on the spine. A third to the ledge. Axe low. Center of gravity lower. If he slipped, the current looked hungry enough to drag him under the far wall and grind him into the rock.
Not a death he'd accept.
Something flicked in the corner of his vision. A shadow in the water. He froze and let his eyes unfocus, seeing movement instead of shapes.
There you are.
He waited a beat, then another. The shadow passed again, a yard below the surface, long and sinuous with a dorsal line of plates like broken bottle glass. It patrolled. Territory or habit, didn't matter.
He needed bait.
He took the frill edge from his belt and tore it into a narrow strip. He tied one end to the chitin shard and left a tail like a streamer. Then he crouched, let the current catch the strip, and flicked the shard out into the river two feet from the spine. It sank, fluttering.
The shadow angled. Fast.
He rose, set his feet, and in the moment the river thing struck the strip—water humped, white, then swallowed—it was moving hard to his left. He stepped onto the spine, weight low, and counted: one, two—on three he lunged for the ledge as the surface exploded where he'd been.
Teeth like cracked slate snapped air. Water sheeted his boots. He hit the ledge with his chest, forearms, axe scraping stone. For a long second he hung there, feeling the river take his lower legs like a hand trying to pull a man through a door he didn't fit.
He growled and shoved. Stone rasped skin.
He slithered onto the ledge, rolled, and pressed flat, chest heaving.
Behind him, the water thing churned in frustration and slid back under, glass-spine fading into the run.
He lay there and laughed once, a sound with no humor in it, then pushed to his feet. The arch waited, black and patient.
Night-cycle was coming. He could feel it in the way the air cooled against his sweat, in the way the fungus glow seemed to draw itself inward. The System hadn't lied: predation would go up. He needed a place to put his back to rock and his eyes on only one direction.
The arch delivered him into a chamber the size of a gymnasium, rough-oval, with a ceiling lost in shadow and a single exit on the far side: a slit too narrow for anything bigger than him. Good. The floor was scattered with stone blocks fallen from above—bad for sprinting, good for cover.
He picked a corner where a boulder made a natural blind and cleared loose rocks away with careful hands, stacking them into a knee-high wall he could shoot a weapon over if the dungeon ever gave him one. He drank the last of the water he dared, checked the bandages again, and set the axe within immediate reach.
Only then did he let himself sit with his back to stone and close his eyes—not to sleep, just to gather all the pieces of himself and stack them in the right order: breath, heartbeat, vow.
When he opened them, the darkness had deepened by a fraction that felt like the difference between a warning and a promise.
The System chimed—soft, not to startle.
[Chapter Status — End of Cycle Threshold Reached]
Rest Advisory: Short Rest (Safe-ish)
Ambush Probability: 22% (Mitigated by Positioning)
He huffed. "Safe-ish," he whispered, and let the word sit.
He tightened his grip on the axe until the tremor in his hands quieted, then laid it across his thighs like a thing to be trusted, and watched the dark watch him back.
The darkness thickened until it wasn't just absence but a weight pressing against his eyelids. Callum sat with his back to the boulder, axe across his knees, ears straining past the steady beat of his pulse. The System had warned of night-cycle predation, and every instinct told him this place did not sleep.
A skitter came first—stone ticking against stone, too light for a lurker, too irregular for water. He slid the axe into his grip and lowered his breathing.
From the chamber's edge, shapes resolved: three, maybe four. Low to the ground, their bodies carried a phosphorescent glow along the ridges of their backs. Eyes like coals burned in their wedge heads. Not lurkers—something new. They moved as one, triangulating his position.
He didn't wait. He surged up, catching the first mid-pounce with the axe haft. It shrieked, momentum bleeding away as he twisted and chopped down on its spine. The blow cracked but didn't kill. The others rushed, claws scraping. He pivoted, back to the stone, keeping them in a narrow arc.
One lunged. He dropped to a knee, let it sail over, and split its belly with a rising stroke. Black ichor splattered warm against his face.
The second rammed his shoulder, staggering him against the wall. Pain flared, but he shoved off the stone, reversed the axe, and buried it in the thing's flank. The haft rattled as it went still.
The last one hesitated. Callum growled low in his throat, a sound meant for enemies and memories alike, then advanced. The beast backed, hissed, and fled into the dark.
He stayed ready until the echoes faded. His pulse slowed by degrees. The System's chime came like a reward and a reminder both.
[Combat Result]
Enemy: Phosphor Stalker x3
EXP Gained: 8 + 8 + 8
Total EXP: 76 / 70 (108%)
Level Up! → Level 3
Loot Acquired: Luminescent Ridge (Uncommon, 2), Stalker Claw (Common, 2)
Condition: Bruised Shoulder, Minor Fatigue
The panel lingered, then shifted.
[Status — Player: Callum Ross]
Level: 3
Class: Unassigned
Strength: 12 → 13
Vitality: 11 → 12
Agility: 8 → 9
Perception: 8
Intellect: 7
Willpower: 11 → 12
Available Points: 2 (Allocated: +1 STR, +1 VIT, +1 AGI; Reserved: 2)
Traits: Grit (Passive)
Skills: Improvised Axe Techniques I, Survival Sense I
EXP: 6 / 80 (7%)
Loot (Recent): Hooked Fang (C), Chitin Shard (C), Reinforced Chitin Plate (U), Adolescent Fang (C), Resinous Membrane (U), Luminescent Ridge (U x2), Stalker Claw (C x2)
Conditions: Minor Lacerations (Forearm), Bruised Shin, Bruised Shoulder, Superficial Ear Cut, Minor Fatigue
Callum lowered himself back to the ground. His arm burned. His shin ached. His shoulder throbbed. But he was alive, the axe heavy and certain in his hand, and the vow still burned hot in his chest.
"Level three," he whispered, as if the words could be traded like currency across distance.
He closed his eyes—not to rest, not truly, but to let the rhythm of breath steady itself for the fight to come.
The chamber stayed dark. The dungeon stayed hungry.
And Callum endured