Twenty years after the First Outbreak, Ethan Vale learned that survival was just another word for slow death.
He crouched in the dim light of the F-rank Fracture, knee-deep in monster gore, and tried not to vomit. The smell was always worst after the Hunters finished their work– a combination of sulfur, rotting meat, and something chemical that burned the inside of his nose. Around him, other Scavengers picked through the remains with practiced efficiency, harvesting claws, fangs, and the occasional mana crystal that the Hunters had missed.
"Hey, Vale! You gonna work or just stand there looking pretty?" Marcus Chen– different Marcus, not his childhood friend who'd moved to Europe years ago– waved from across the cavern. He was elbow-deep in a dead Razorwolf's chest cavity, extracting its core with a serrated knife.
Ethan forced himself to move. His knee protested—an old injury from a fall two years ago that he'd never had the money to heal properly. F-rank Hunters like him couldn't afford B-rank Healers. Hell, most F-ranks couldn't afford the E-rank ones either.
He approached the nearest corpse, a Tunnel Spider the size of a motorcycle. Its eight eyes were clouded in death, mandibles still frozen in a final screech. The retrieval team had already taken the valuable parts—the venom sacs, the silk glands. What remained was his: the chitin plates that crafting shops bought by the pound for cheap armor, the legs that alchemists ground into generic mana potions.
Scraps. That's what Scavengers got. The leftovers of someone else's victory.
Ethan pulled out his harvesting knife—a cheap, dull thing he'd bought at a pawn shop—and started cutting. The chitin was thick, and his knife slipped twice before finding purchase. Sweat dripped down his face despite the Fracture's cold air. His muscles ached. His back screamed. But he kept working because that's what you did when you had bills to pay and a family counting on you.
*Sixty credits per pound of chitin*, he calculated as he worked. *This spider's got maybe fifteen pounds. That's nine hundred credits. Two more spiders and I'll have enough for Mom's medication this month. Maybe even some left over for Kai's tuition.*
The thought of his brother made Ethan's jaw clench. Kai had awakened as a C-rank Hunter three months ago—a miracle, really, for someone from the Rust District. He'd been accepted into New Seattle Hunter Academy on a partial scholarship. The tuition was still crushing, but it was Kai's ticket out of the hell they'd been born into.
Ethan would bleed himself dry before he let his brother lose that chance.
"Vale! We got a problem!"
The shout came from the Fracture's entrance. Ethan looked up to see Jake Morrison, the team's de facto leader, waving frantically. Jake was an E-rank, which made him royalty compared to the rest of them.
Ethan dropped his half-harvested spider and jogged over, ignoring his knee's protest. The other Scavengers were already gathering—twelve of them total, the dregs of society scraping by in the monster economy.
"What's wrong?" asked Sarah Kim, a middle-aged woman with three kids at home. She'd been doing this longer than anyone.
Jake's face was pale. "The clearance team... they missed something."
Cold dread pooled in Ethan's stomach. "What do you mean they missed something?"
"There's movement in tunnel seven. Something's still alive in there."
The group went silent. In the distance, Ethan could hear it now—a wet, dragging sound. Something large pulling itself through stone.
"We need to leave," Sarah said immediately. "Protocol says if there's an active threat, Scavengers evacuate. This is the Hunters' job."
"The Hunters already left," Jake said. "Next scheduled team isn't for six hours. By then—"
"By then it could leave the Fracture," Ethan finished quietly.
Everyone understood what that meant. If a monster escaped into the city, people died. Lots of people. The Hunters would respond eventually, but in a place like the Rust District where they were now? Response time could be thirty minutes. An F-rank monster could kill dozens in thirty minutes.
"So we call it in and wait at the entrance," said Marcus. "Let the professionals handle it."
"And if it rushes the exit?" Jake challenged. "We're standing right in its path."
The dragging sound was getting louder. Closer.
Ethan's mind raced. F-rank Scavengers weren't fighters. Most had barely passed the minimum threshold to register with the Hunter Bureau—just enough mana to operate basic equipment, nowhere near enough for real combat. They were here to harvest, not fight.
But Ethan had trained. Not officially, not in any academy. But every night for the past five years, he'd practiced with whatever weapon he could get his hands on. Watched tutorial videos. Studied Hunter techniques. He'd never been able to afford the mana-enhancement drugs that let you rank up, never had access to the high-grade equipment that made fighting possible. But he'd learned the theory, at least.
Theory didn't mean much against a living monster.
"I'll go look," Ethan heard himself say.
Everyone stared at him.
"Are you insane?" Sarah demanded. "You're F-rank. You'd be dead in seconds."
"I'm just going to look. Figure out what we're dealing with. Then we call it in with actual intel." Ethan grabbed a glowstone from his pack. "If it's something serious, we'll have time to run. If it's just an injured straggler, maybe we can handle it."
"With what?" Jake gestured at their pathetic equipment. "We've got harvesting knives and prayer."
Ethan didn't have a good answer for that. But he thought about his mother, bedridden with Essence Sickness, her body slowly crystallizing from years of exposure to low-grade Fracture radiation. He thought about Kai, who deserved better than to end up like Ethan—thirty-five years old and still crawling through monster guts for survival money.
"I'll be careful," he said.
Before anyone could stop him, Ethan headed toward tunnel seven.
The tunnel was narrow, forcing him to move in a half-crouch. The glowstone cast dancing shadows on walls slick with condensation and something darker. The dragging sound echoed from ahead, accompanied now by a wet breathing noise that made his skin crawl.
*This is stupid*, his rational mind screamed. *You're going to die down here and no one will remember you.*
But his body kept moving forward. One step. Then another.
The tunnel opened into a small chamber. Ethan raised his glowstone and immediately wished he hadn't.
The creature was a Bonecrawler—a D-rank monster that shouldn't have been in an F-rank Fracture. It was roughly humanoid, if humans were made of exposed muscle and jutting bone spurs. One of its arms was missing, torn off in the earlier fight, and black ichor leaked from a dozen wounds. It was dying, but that somehow made it more dangerous. Cornered, wounded animals were unpredictable.
The Bonecrawler's head snapped toward Ethan. Its eyes—too many eyes, clustered across its skull like a spider's—fixed on him with predatory focus.
For a frozen moment, neither moved.
Then the Bonecrawler lunged.
Ethan threw himself backward, and the creature's bone-spur fist cratered the stone where he'd been standing. He scrambled back, heart hammering, as the Bonecrawler advanced. It was slow, injured, but still faster than him.
His hand found his harvesting knife. Pathetic against a D-rank, but it was all he had. He raised it in a trembling guard.
The Bonecrawler cocked its head, almost curious. Then it raised its remaining arm for a killing blow.
*I'm sorry, Mom. I'm sorry, Kai.*
Time seemed to slow. Ethan saw the bone spurs extending from the creature's fist, each one sharp enough to punch through steel. He saw his own death reflected in those clustered eyes. He felt the cold certainty that this was the end.
And then something inside him *broke*.
Not physically. Deeper than that. Like a lock clicking open in his soul, or a door that had always been there finally swinging wide. Power flooded through him—cold, vast, hungry. It felt like drowning in ice water while something ancient and terrible whispered in his ear.
**[SYSTEM INITIALIZATION DETECTED]**
The words appeared in his vision, glowing crimson letters that shouldn't exist.
**[ANALYZING HOST...]**
**[COMPATIBILITY: 100%]**
**[SYNCHRONIZATION BEGINNING]**
The Bonecrawler's strike descended.
Ethan's body moved without conscious thought. His knife came up, angled perfectly, and slid between the bone spurs into the soft tissue beneath. The Bonecrawler shrieked. Ethan twisted, drove the blade deeper, and felt something in the creature *give*.
Black ichor sprayed across his face. The Bonecrawler staggered back, clutching its wounded arm. Ethan pressed forward—when had he become the aggressor?—and struck again. And again. Each blow landed with impossible precision, finding weak points he shouldn't have been able to see.
The Bonecrawler collapsed. Its many eyes dimmed.
Ethan stood over it, chest heaving, covered in monster blood, and watched crimson text scroll across his vision.
**[SYNCHRONIZATION COMPLETE]**
**[WELCOME, ETHAN VALE]**
**[YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN BY THE ABYSS]**
**[DEVOUR FEATURE UNLOCKED]**
**[WOULD YOU LIKE TO CONSUME: BONECRAWLER (D-RANK)?]**
**[YES/NO]**
Ethan's hand moved toward the corpse without his permission. The moment his fingers touched the Bonecrawler's cooling flesh, the world *lurched*.
The creature's body began to dissolve, breaking down into streams of black and crimson energy that flowed into Ethan's hand. He tried to pull away but couldn't. The energy poured into him, and with it came *sensation*—the Bonecrawler's final moments, its rage and pain and hunger, all of it flooding his mind like a foreign memory.
And underneath it all, that ancient voice whispered: **Consume. Grow. Evolve.**
The process lasted maybe ten seconds. When it ended, the Bonecrawler was gone. No corpse, no evidence it had ever existed. Just Ethan, standing alone in the chamber, staring at his hands.
New text appeared:
**[CONSUMPTION SUCCESSFUL]**
**[BONECRAWLER ESSENCE ABSORBED]**
**[+5 STRENGTH]**
**[+3 ENDURANCE]**
**[+2 AGILITY]**
**[SKILL ACQUIRED: BONE SPIKE (BASIC)]**
**[CURRENT LEVEL: 2]**
**[RANK ADVANCEMENT: F → F+]**
Ethan's legs gave out. He collapsed against the tunnel wall, mind reeling. What the hell had just happened? What was this system? Why was it in his head?
And why did he feel... *hungry*?
Footsteps echoed from the tunnel entrance. Jake's voice called out: "Vale? You alive in there?"
Ethan looked at his hands again. They were covered in black ichor, but underneath, he could feel it—new strength, power that hadn't been there five minutes ago. Real, tangible power.
The kind of power that could change everything.
"Yeah," he called back, his voice surprisingly steady. "Yeah, I'm alive. The monster's dead. It's safe."
He stood, testing his new strength. His knee didn't hurt anymore. His back didn't ache. He felt... good. Better than good.
The crimson text faded from his vision, but he could still feel it—the Abyss System, waiting patiently in the back of his mind. Watching. Waiting.
*What are you?* he thought at it.
No response. But Ethan could swear he felt something like satisfaction radiating from that foreign presence.
He made his way back to the others, already planning. This changed everything. If he could get stronger by consuming monsters, if this system was real and not some dying hallucination...
Maybe he didn't have to be a Scavenger anymore.
Maybe he could actually protect the people he loved.
The thought should have excited him. Instead, as he emerged into the main chamber and saw his fellow Scavengers' relieved faces, Ethan felt only a cold certainty settling in his chest.
Power always had a price.
He just hoped he could afford to pay it.
***
**[STATUS WINDOW]**
**Name:** Ethan Vale
**Level:** 2
**Rank:** F+
**Title:** None
**Stats:**
Strength: 12 (+5)
Endurance: 10 (+3)
Agility: 9 (+2)
Intelligence: 8
Perception: 7
Luck: 5
**Skills:**
- Bone Spike (Basic): Manifest bone projectiles. Cost: 10 MP
**Special Abilities:**
- Devour: Consume defeated enemies to gain permanent stat increases and skills
Current MP: 45/50
Current HP: 100/100
Abyssal Corruption: 1%
remove all — instead use comma or whatever
Twenty years after the First Outbreak, Ethan Vale learned that survival was just another word for slow death.
He crouched in the dim light of the F-rank Fracture, knee-deep in monster gore, and tried not to vomit. The smell was always worst after the Hunters finished their work, a combination of sulfur, rotting meat, and something chemical that burned the inside of his nose. Around him, other Scavengers picked through the remains with practiced efficiency, harvesting claws, fangs, and the occasional mana crystal that the Hunters had missed.
"Hey, Vale! You gonna work or just stand there looking pretty?" Marcus Chen, different Marcus, not his childhood friend who'd moved to Europe years ago, waved from across the cavern. He was elbow-deep in a dead Razorwolf's chest cavity, extracting its core with a serrated knife.
Ethan forced himself to move. His knee protested, an old injury from a fall two years ago that he'd never had the money to heal properly. F-rank Hunters like him couldn't afford B-rank Healers. Hell, most F-ranks couldn't afford the E-rank ones either.
He approached the nearest corpse, a Tunnel Spider the size of a motorcycle. Its eight eyes were clouded in death, mandibles still frozen in a final screech. The retrieval team had already taken the valuable parts: the venom sacs, the silk glands. What remained was his: the chitin plates that crafting shops bought by the pound for cheap armor, the legs that alchemists ground into generic mana potions.
Scraps. That's what Scavengers got. The leftovers of someone else's victory.
Ethan pulled out his harvesting knife, a cheap, dull thing he'd bought at a pawn shop, and started cutting. The chitin was thick, and his knife slipped twice before finding purchase. Sweat dripped down his face despite the Fracture's cold air. His muscles ached. His back screamed. But he kept working because that's what you did when you had bills to pay and a family counting on you.
*Sixty credits per pound of chitin*, he calculated as he worked. *This spider's got maybe fifteen pounds. That's nine hundred credits. Two more spiders and I'll have enough for Mom's medication this month. Maybe even some left over for Kai's tuition.*
The thought of his brother made Ethan's jaw clench. Kai had awakened as a C-rank Hunter three months ago, a miracle, really, for someone from the Rust District. He'd been accepted into New Seattle Hunter Academy on a partial scholarship. The tuition was still crushing, but it was Kai's ticket out of the hell they'd been born into.
Ethan would bleed himself dry before he let his brother lose that chance.
"Vale! We got a problem!"
The shout came from the Fracture's entrance. Ethan looked up to see Jake Morrison, the team's de facto leader, waving frantically. Jake was an E-rank, which made him royalty compared to the rest of them.
Ethan dropped his half-harvested spider and jogged over, ignoring his knee's protest. The other Scavengers were already gathering, twelve of them total, the dregs of society scraping by in the monster economy.
"What's wrong?" asked Sarah Kim, a middle-aged woman with three kids at home. She'd been doing this longer than anyone.
Jake's face was pale. "The clearance team... they missed something."
Cold dread pooled in Ethan's stomach. "What do you mean they missed something?"
"There's movement in tunnel seven. Something's still alive in there."
The group went silent. In the distance, Ethan could hear it now, a wet, dragging sound. Something large pulling itself through stone.
"We need to leave," Sarah said immediately. "Protocol says if there's an active threat, Scavengers evacuate. This is the Hunters' job."
"The Hunters already left," Jake said. "Next scheduled team isn't for six hours. By then..."
"By then it could leave the Fracture," Ethan finished quietly.
Everyone understood what that meant. If a monster escaped into the city, people died. Lots of people. The Hunters would respond eventually, but in a place like the Rust District where they were now? Response time could be thirty minutes. An F-rank monster could kill dozens in thirty minutes.
"So we call it in and wait at the entrance," said Marcus. "Let the professionals handle it."
"And if it rushes the exit?" Jake challenged. "We're standing right in its path."
The dragging sound was getting louder. Closer.
Ethan's mind raced. F-rank Scavengers weren't fighters. Most had barely passed the minimum threshold to register with the Hunter Bureau, just enough mana to operate basic equipment, nowhere near enough for real combat. They were here to harvest, not fight.
But Ethan had trained. Not officially, not in any academy. But every night for the past five years, he'd practiced with whatever weapon he could get his hands on. Watched tutorial videos. Studied Hunter techniques. He'd never been able to afford the mana-enhancement drugs that let you rank up, never had access to the high-grade equipment that made fighting possible. But he'd learned the theory, at least.
Theory didn't mean much against a living monster.
"I'll go look," Ethan heard himself say.
Everyone stared at him.
"Are you insane?" Sarah demanded. "You're F-rank. You'd be dead in seconds."
"I'm just going to look. Figure out what we're dealing with. Then we call it in with actual intel." Ethan grabbed a glowstone from his pack. "If it's something serious, we'll have time to run. If it's just an injured straggler, maybe we can handle it."
"With what?" Jake gestured at their pathetic equipment. "We've got harvesting knives and prayer."
Ethan didn't have a good answer for that. But he thought about his mother, bedridden with Essence Sickness, her body slowly crystallizing from years of exposure to low-grade Fracture radiation. He thought about Kai, who deserved better than to end up like Ethan, thirty-five years old and still crawling through monster guts for survival money.
"I'll be careful," he said.
Before anyone could stop him, Ethan headed toward tunnel seven.
The tunnel was narrow, forcing him to move in a half-crouch. The glowstone cast dancing shadows on walls slick with condensation and something darker. The dragging sound echoed from ahead, accompanied now by a wet breathing noise that made his skin crawl.
*This is stupid*, his rational mind screamed. *You're going to die down here and no one will remember you.*
But his body kept moving forward. One step. Then another.
The tunnel opened into a small chamber. Ethan raised his glowstone and immediately wished he hadn't.
The creature was a Bonecrawler, a D-rank monster that shouldn't have been in an F-rank Fracture. It was roughly humanoid, if humans were made of exposed muscle and jutting bone spurs. One of its arms was missing, torn off in the earlier fight, and black ichor leaked from a dozen wounds. It was dying, but that somehow made it more dangerous. Cornered, wounded animals were unpredictable.
The Bonecrawler's head snapped toward Ethan. Its eyes, too many eyes, clustered across its skull like a spider's, fixed on him with predatory focus.
For a frozen moment, neither moved.
Then the Bonecrawler lunged.
Ethan threw himself backward, and the creature's bone-spur fist cratered the stone where he'd been standing. He scrambled back, heart hammering, as the Bonecrawler advanced. It was slow, injured, but still faster than him.
His hand found his harvesting knife. Pathetic against a D-rank, but it was all he had. He raised it in a trembling guard.
The Bonecrawler cocked its head, almost curious. Then it raised its remaining arm for a killing blow.
*I'm sorry, Mom. I'm sorry, Kai.
Time seemed to slow. Ethan saw the bone spurs extending from the creature's fist, each one sharp enough to punch through steel. He saw his own death reflected in those clustered eyes. He felt the cold certainty that this was the end.
And then something inside him broke.
Not physically. Deeper than that. Like a lock clicking open in his soul, or a door that had always been there finally swinging wide. Power flooded through him, cold, vast, hungry. It felt like drowning in ice water while something ancient and terrible whispered in his ear.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZATION DETECTED]
The words appeared in his vision, glowing crimson letters that shouldn't exist.
[ANALYZING HOST...]
[COMPATIBILITY: 100%][SYNCHRONIZATION BEGINNING]
The Bonecrawler's strike descended.
Ethan's body moved without conscious thought. His knife came up, angled perfectly, and slid between the bone spurs into the soft tissue beneath. The Bonecrawler shrieked. Ethan twisted, drove the blade deeper, and felt something in the creature give.
Black ichor sprayed across his face. The Bonecrawler staggered back, clutching its wounded arm. Ethan pressed forward, when had he become the aggressor?, and struck again. And again. Each blow landed with impossible precision, finding weak points he shouldn't have been able to see.
The Bonecrawler collapsed. Its many eyes dimmed.
Ethan stood over it, chest heaving, covered in monster blood, and watched crimson text scroll across his vision.
[SYNCHRONIZATION COMPLETE]
[WELCOME, ETHAN VALE]
[YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN BY THE ABYSS]
[DEVOUR FEATURE UNLOCKED]
[WOULD YOU LIKE TO CONSUME: BONECRAWLER (D-RANK)?]
[YES/NO]
"Yes!" He said it in heat of the movement.
Ethan's hand moved toward the corpse without his permission. The moment his fingers touched the Bonecrawler's cooling flesh, the world lurched.
The creature's body began to dissolve, breaking down into streams of black and crimson energy that flowed into Ethan's hand. He tried to pull away but couldn't. The energy poured into him, and with it came sensation, the Bonecrawler's final moments, its rage and pain and hunger, all of it flooding his mind like a foreign memory.
And underneath it all, that ancient voice whispered: Consume. Grow. Evolve.
The process lasted maybe ten seconds. When it ended, the Bonecrawler was gone. No corpse, no evidence it had ever existed. Just Ethan, standing alone in the chamber, staring at his hands.
New text appeared:
[CONSUMPTION SUCCESSFUL]
[BONECRAWLER ESSENCE ABSORBED]
[+5 STRENGTH]
[+3 ENDURANCE]
[+2 AGILITY]
[SKILL ACQUIRED: BONE SPIKE (BASIC)][CURRENT LEVEL: 2]
[RANK ADVANCEMENT: F → F+]
Ethan's legs gave out. He collapsed against the tunnel wall, mind reeling. What the hell had just happened? What was this system? Why was it in his head?
And why did he feel... hungry?
Footsteps echoed from the tunnel entrance. Jake's voice called out: "Vale? You alive in there?"
Ethan looked at his hands again. They were covered in black ichor, but underneath, he could feel it, new strength, power that hadn't been there five minutes ago. Real, tangible power.
The kind of power that could change everything.
"Yeah," he called back, his voice surprisingly steady. "Yeah, I'm alive. The monster's dead. It's safe."
He stood, testing his new strength. His knee didn't hurt anymore. His back didn't ache. He felt... good. Better than good.
The crimson text faded from his vision, but he could still feel it, the Abyss System, waiting patiently in the back of his mind. Watching. Waiting.
What are you? he thought at it.
No response. But Ethan could swear he felt something like satisfaction radiating from that foreign presence.
He made his way back to the others, already planning. This changed everything. If he could get stronger by consuming monsters, if this system was real and not some dying hallucination...
Maybe he didn't have to be a Scavenger anymore.
Maybe he could actually protect the people he loved.
The thought should have excited him. Instead, as he emerged into the main chamber and saw his fellow Scavengers' relieved faces, Ethan felt only a cold certainty settling in his chest.
Power always had a price.
He just hoped he could afford to pay it.
[STATUS WINDOW]
Name: Ethan Vale
Level: 2
Rank: F+
Title: NoneStats:
Strength: 12 (+5)
Endurance: 10 (+3)
Agility: 9 (+2)
Intelligence: 8
Perception: 7
Luck: 5Skills:Bone Spike (Basic): Manifest bone projectiles.
Cost: 10 MP
Special Abilities:Devour: Consume defeated enemies to gain permanent stat increases and skills
Current MP: 45/50
Current HP: 100/100
Abyssal Corruption: 1%