The blade pierced through my ribs at an angle that suggested the bandit wasn't particularly skilled, but he was efficient enough.
I coughed blood onto the cobblestone, watching it pool around my face with the kind of detached curiosity you only achieve when you're certain you're dying. The valley around me—impossibly tall mountains ringed with bioluminescent forests—spun gently. Beautiful, really. Shame I'd only see it for about two more minutes.
"Loot him," a voice called from above, in a language I shouldn't have understood but did. That was perhaps the strangest part of this whole nightmare. I'd woken up three days ago in an alley with no memory of arriving here, and somehow every word made sense regardless of what strange guttural tongue these people spoke.
"Already did." Another bandit—broader, scarred—crouched beside me and rifled through my pockets with the focus of someone checking his mail. He found the 47 credits I'd earned selling salvage in the refugee camp. He whistled low. "Not much."
"He's wearing better armor than most refugees," the leader said. She was a woman with silver streaks in her hair and a sword that looked like it had seen better centuries. "Probably some half-blood trying to escape the camps."
I tried to respond, to explain that I wasn't trying to escape so much as I was trying to survive, but my lungs weren't cooperating anymore. The blood had switched from coughing to drowning. Classic signs of organ failure. I'd read about it once, back when I had time to read about things that weren't immediately going to kill me.
The woman watched me die with the emotional investment of someone watching water boil.
Three days in this world. Three days of learning that I wasn't special here, wasn't powerful, wasn't anything except another warm body trying to scrape out another meal in a refugee camp that barely had food for half its inhabitants. I'd read the quest boards. Survival was apparently a job description. The pay was abysmal.
My vision went dark at the edges.
At least it would be quick.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZED]
The notification blazed through my consciousness like lightning through a corpse.
"What the—" I gasped, eyes snapping open. My lungs drew air. Not normal air. Something crystalline that burned but didn't hurt. My hand shot to my ribs where the blade had entered. The wound was still there—I could see the torn leather and exposed flesh—but it wasn't bleeding anymore.
[CRITICAL CONDITION DETECTED][INSUFFICIENT BIOLOGICAL DATA TO HEAL PHYSICAL TRAUMA][INITIATING EMERGENCY EVOLUTION PROTOCOL]
The bandits were staring at me, and I understood—somewhere in the strange new processing speed my brain had acquired—that they saw something. Their hands went to their weapons, hesitant. Afraid.
My body moved without permission.
I mean, technically it was still my body. But the movements came from somewhere else, some deep reptilian part of me that had been waiting for permission and suddenly found the door unlocked. I pushed off the ground and the bandit closest to me took a step back, his scarred face going pale.
"It's consuming him," the woman hissed. "It's eating through—"
I didn't hear the rest. The pain was a symphony and I was conducting it with every nerve ending. Bones restructured themselves. My ribs—the broken ones, the dead ones—reformed incorrectly first, then corrected themselves with little clicks like locking joints. My lungs inflated with that same crystalline air and suddenly I could feel it, the system scanning through me, categorizing, measuring.
[EVOLUTION IN PROGRESS...][BIOMASS: INSUFFICIENT][ALTERNATIVE SOURCE: DETECTED]
The scarred bandit was closest. He'd been crouching over me, checking for loot, a victim of proximity and instinct.
My hand shot out—faster than either of us were prepared for—and seized his wrist. I didn't decide to squeeze. The system decided. The pressure was mathematical, perfect, designed to extract exactly what it needed. His scream was short and professional. The energy—I had no other word for it, some kind of light that existed between thermal and invisible—transferred into me like water draining downward.
The other bandits ran. Even the woman with the ancient sword ran.
But the scarred one stayed, too shocked by the speed of it, until his knees buckled and he fell. Dead or nearly so. I honestly couldn't tell from the empathetic distance I'd found myself positioned at.
[EVOLUTION COMPLETE]
[PROFILE UPDATE]
Name: Unknown Level: 1 → 2 Species: Human (Evolutionary Status: 0.3%) Health: 14/45 HP (Critical → Stable) Biomass Capacity: 2/100 Next Evolution Threshold: 50 Biomass
My hands—they were the same hands, but different. The skin was clearer. The fingernails were harder. When I flexed, the movement was smoother, more efficient. I looked down at the bandit and felt something like hunger, and something else underneath that might have been horror if I'd had enough energy to care.
The valley was getting dark. The sun wasn't moving—I could see it was fixed in the sky—but the shadows were deepening. System night. That's what the refugees called it. Not real night. Something else.
[MISSION GENERATED: SURVIVE THE FIRST NIGHT][REWARD: +500 EXP, +10 Biomass, System Expansion Unlock][FAILURE: Permadeath (Non-Reversible)]
I looked at the dead bandit. At the blood drying on my hands. At the notification still hanging in my vision, patient and cold and waiting for me to understand.
"I'm not dying tonight," I whispered to the system that couldn't hear me, or could hear me, or was me. The distinction felt increasingly uncertain. "Not like this."
The mountains towered above, indifferent.
Behind them, something vast shifted in the darkness, and I felt the system's attention turn upward like a cat sensing prey.
[WARNING: Entity Detected - Classification Unknown][Threat Level: Extreme][Recommended Action: Flee or Die]
I started moving toward the distant lights of the refugee camp. My legs were stronger now, faster. The evolution had changed something fundamental in my muscle structure. I could feel it.
"Well," I said to the empty air, to the system, to whatever god or chaos had thrown me into this valley three days ago, "let's see what happens next."
The first night had only just begun.