Kael woke to the cold bite of stone beneath him. Dust and shards of broken summoning glyphs clung to his skin. The others had already begun to stir—or flee. The murmur of voices drifted down from the summoning circle, mixing with laughter, disbelief, and pity.
"Dead weight... who even summoned him?" one mage muttered.
"Don't bother healing him," a knight added. "He won't survive five minutes in a dungeon."
Kael forced himself upright, though every movement felt like wading through lead. His vision wavered. The numbers and bars from the system flickered across his sight—then crashed.
[ERROR: SYSTEM OFFLINE]
[ERROR: MANA CAPACITY 0]
[WARNING: CLASS NOT RECOGNIZED]
He laughed bitterly, low and hollow. A laugh no one would hear over the chaos of whispered insults and shifting portals.
A dim light pulsed faintly in the distance—the dungeon entrance. No one seemed eager to enter it yet, not the knights, not the mages, not the summoners. Kael could feel the cold, suffocating weight of failure pressing down.
Good. Let them underestimate me, he thought.
He stumbled toward the dungeon. The air thickened, buzzing with mana he couldn't access. Shadows clung to his heels, whispering threats he couldn't yet see.
And then it happened.
A small creature—barely larger than a rabbit—hopped out from the rubble. Its body shimmered with a strange, sickly glow. Teeth glinted in the dim light. It lunged.
Kael flinched. His hands twitched. Nothing happened. The creature's claws grazed his arm. Pain. Sharp. Real. But... he felt something else.
Numbers bloomed in his vision. XP? Stat growth? He wasn't sure. It flickered. A faint line traced across his heart, then vanished.
[XP ACQUIRED: 0.001%]
The creature attacked again. And again. Each strike burned Kael with fear, pain, and something unfamiliar: hunger. Not for food... but for the fight itself.
Then, his vision split. One eye gold, one crimson.
...No.
The creature froze mid-lunge. Its glowing eyes dimmed. It lowered its head, submissive, its body trembling. Kael felt a pulse of power ripple outward from him—not controlled, not yet—but unmistakable.
[WARNING: SYSTEM DETECTED]
[Omni-System Core: ACTIVATING]
[EVOLUTION TRIGGER: NEAR-DEATH]
Kael's pulse raced. The dungeon seemed to lean toward him, the shadows bending, the very air thickening with energy. He didn't understand it... yet. But it was his.
The creature whimpered and scampered back into the shadows, leaving Kael alone. His chest heaved. His hands were trembling, but not from fear. From excitement.
I... am not nothing, he thought.
A sound behind him. Footsteps. Someone—or something—was approaching. Kael's ears caught the faint hum of mana. Not hostile... but curious.
And somewhere, deep in the distance, a voice whispered a single word he didn't understand:
"Vrak... Zul'ka...."
Kael didn't know what it meant yet. But he knew one thing: the world had just begun to notice him.