At 3 AM, the greasy neon food stalls had finally shuttered their grates. The violent drunks had found their dark corners and passed out.
The ancient maintenance tunnels that connected the thirteenth level to the surface ran completely quiet. They carried only the faint, ghostly hum of recycled air through ducts that predated the Cataclysm by centuries.
Alvian moved swiftly with absolute purpose.
His new body felt completely different. The dense muscles in his legs were tightly coiled springs. Each stride covered significantly more ground than yesterday.
His fingers flexed naturally around the cold, heavy grip of an iron chisel.
He had bought it on credit from Hendricks Cole, the sleazy black market dealer who operated from a converted shipping container on the thirteenth level. Twelve credits owed, due in exactly one week.
The rusted shortsword had served its final purpose. Its edge was completely gone, the cheap blade horribly notched from repeated, brutal impacts against thick beetle chitin.
The chisel was noticeably shorter and much heavier. It was solid, crude iron with a sharply pointed tip designed specifically for punching through hard surfaces.
His bones literally hummed. That was the only way to accurately describe the bizarre sensation, low frequency that reminded him his mortal body was still adapting to Level 5.
His balance was razor-sharp.
His enhanced reflexes had been tested twice when he nearly tripped over loose, jagged debris in the pitch dark. His body fired and corrected itself before his conscious mind even registered the hidden obstacle!
The Rift entrance shimmered ominously between two collapsed slabs of pre-Cataclysm concrete.
"Whoosh."
That sickly, poisonous green glow pulsed steadily, breathing in and out.
He pushed fearlessly through the veil.
The foul air changed instantly. It was thicker. Wetter.
The sky above was the exact same bruised, sickly green, and the contaminated ground sucked greedily at his heavy boots the exact same way it had yesterday.
But the beetles were back.
The old scavenger had been entirely right.
Tobias Finch, the bitter one-armed man with the sparking mechanical limb who sat outside the Rift entrance picking through scrap, had dropped a valuable hint. He had told Alvian yesterday morning that abandoned Rifts cycle on strict twelve-hour timers.
Kill the monsters, and the ambient dimensional energy slowly recharges, completely respawning the local population overnight.
Early hunters absolutely got the freshest, healthiest spawns.
Three Sludge Beetles lumbered stupidly through the lower passages. Their thick shells glistened with foul moisture as they fed hungrily on something completely unidentifiable in the muck.
Alvian did not hesitate this time.
He gripped the heavy chisel, dropped his center of gravity low, and moved like a phantom toward the nearest beetle.
"Click. Click."
The creature’s single, bulbous eye swiveled rapidly toward him, its razor-sharp mandibles clicking in anticipation. It lunged aggressively.
He smoothly sidestepped.
It was a clean, flawlessly controlled motion. His AGI 8 made the movement feel completely natural rather than a desperate scramble for survival.
The clumsy beetle overshot its target.
Alvian viciously drove the iron chisel directly into its wet eye socket with both hands!
"Squick!"
The blunt iron tip punched effortlessly through the soft tissue and crunched violently into the skull cavity. The beetle spasmed exactly once and died on the spot.
The entire world froze.
[Ding! Combat action detected.]
[Random multiplier activated: 3x!]
[Common Roll!]
[Sludge Beetle Base EXP: 10]
[Multiplier: 3x]
[Total EXP: 30]
Then, a completely new, second chime rang out.
It was much duller. A flat, disappointing copper bell he had never heard before.
[Ding! Roll below 5x detected.]
[Karma Points +1. Current KP: 1]
[Tough luck, champ. Even the cosmos needs a coffee break.]
Alvian ruthlessly pulled the bloody chisel free and stared blankly at the floating notification.
Karma Points.
The System’s cosmic pity system. A pathetic consolation prize for having absolute garbage rolls.
’Ah, yes. A reward for being unlucky. How generous,’ he thought.
He did not know what KP actually did yet, but he filed the crucial information away.
He brutally killed the second beetle. The cosmic wheel spun again.
[Ding! Random multiplier activated: 2x!]
[Karma Points +1. Current KP: 2]
He slaughtered the third beetle.
[Ding! Random multiplier activated: 4x!]
[Karma Points +1. Current KP: 3]
Three clean kills. Three terrible, trash rolls. Three Karma Points.
The hidden pattern was now perfectly clear. Low rolls generated KP. The System was literally rewarding him for his bad luck. He just did not know what the mysterious reward was worth yet.
He moved deeper into the dangerous Rift, methodically and ruthlessly clearing the lower passages.
His enhanced body was a cold, calculating killing machine now. It operated with a terrifying precision that yesterday’s pathetic version of himself could not have possibly matched.
"Squick!"
"CRACK!"
The iron chisel punched through beetle eyes with flawless efficiency. His footwork was incredibly tight, his positioning utterly deliberate. He was always perfectly angling for the narrow corridors where the stupid beetles could not possibly flank him.
Fourth beetle down. The wheel spun.
[Ding! Random multiplier activated: 1x!]
[Karma Points +1. Current KP: 4]
[Wow. Just... wow. The System has no words. KP +1.]
A pathetic 1x multiplier. Ten measly EXP for a kill that should have been worth much more. The System’s sassy, mocking notification almost made him smile. Almost.
Fifth beetle dead.
[Ding! Random multiplier activated: 7x!]
[Total EXP: 70]
Seventy EXP. No Karma Point this time because the roll was safely above 5x.
The sudden surge of energy pushed him effortlessly from Level 5 to Level 6, and he felt his STR visibly tick up by one point. The minor increase was marginal, but the steady trend mattered immensely. He was actively building a reliable dataset.
Over the next grueling six hours, he brutally killed eighteen more armored beetles.
The cosmic rolls were a chaotic mixed bag. Fifteen Common rolls ranging pitifully from 1x to 9x. Five Uncommon rolls, the absolute best being 15x and 22x.
The glorious 22x yielded a massive 220 EXP from a single, low-tier beetle! It was more than enough to push him completely through two entire levels by itself.
By the time the Rift’s ambient energy finally began to destabilize, the green glow dimming and the foul air growing horribly stale, he had killed twenty-three beetles total.
[Level: 8 (Mortal Tier)]
[STR: 11 | AGI: 10 | VIT: 20 | INT: 6 | Essence: 6]
[Karma Points: 4]
[EXP Bank: ~4,500]
His body was noticeably much harder.
A glancing mandible strike that would have completely shredded his arm just two days ago now barely even bruised his skin!
His monstrous VIT 20 meant his Flesh Limit had expanded significantly too. This allowed him to safely absorb much larger EXP influxes without suffering the near-death experience of his very first jackpot.
He methodically harvested all twenty-three cores.
One hundred and fifteen credits total.
The brutal math was incredibly simple. Fifty credits for Martha’s absolute next medicine dose. That left sixty-five credits for absolutely everything else. Food for him and Leo. Essential equipment. Debt repayment to Hendricks.
Not enough. Never enough.
***
The thirteenth level was finally waking up by the time Alvian emerged from the Rift.
Greedy scavengers were already forming a loose, chaotic queue near the entrance, waiting impatiently for the respawn cycle to officially complete. A few shot him extremely dirty looks for getting there first and stealing their prey.
Hendricks Cole’s shipping container sat darkly at the very end of a narrow alley.
The shady dealer himself sat inside behind a dirty counter made of salvaged steel plating.
"Whir. Click."
His cybernetic eye glowed a faint, creepy blue as it instantly tracked Alvian’s approach.
The mechanical eye was a cheap, scavenger-grade optical implant. It was crude and asymmetrical, the direct result of a horrific industrial accident that had completely crushed his right eye socket years ago.
Before the Cataclysm, Hendricks had probably been a boring surface world accountant. Now he soldered illegal Essence capacitors and bought stolen monster cores from desperate teenagers.
"Cores?" Hendricks asked without even looking up from his delicate work.
"Twenty-three."
The hot soldering iron paused instantly. Hendricks slowly looked up.
His natural eye, the fleshy one, widened slightly in genuine surprise. His cybernetic eye whirred loudly as it focused intensely on the heavy bag Alvian dropped onto the counter.
"Twenty-three. In one single morning."
"The Rift was fresh."
Hendricks hastily dumped the cores onto the counter, sorting them by size and quality with practiced, greedy fingers.
His cybernetic eye scanned each one meticulously, running some internal, hidden appraisal algorithm that Alvian did not understand and absolutely did not trust.
"These are actually good specimens," Hendricks admitted begrudgingly. "Healthy, pure spawns. I will give you ninety for the entire lot."
"You clearly said five per core yesterday. That is one fifteen."
"The price fluctuates heavily with supply, kid. I got four other desperate scavengers selling to me this week. The market is completely saturated."
"One hundred. My final offer."
"Done."
Hendricks counted out the credits and aggressively pushed them across the metal counter.
Alvian pocketed them instantly without recounting. He had learned the hard way that recounting in front of a shady dealer was an open invitation to get completely shortchanged the next time.
As he left the damp shipping container, a raspy voice called out from the scrap hut next door.
"Hey, kid."
Tobias Finch sat on an overturned, rusted crate, his mechanical arm resting lazily on his knee.
"BZZZT!"
The arm’s crude Essence capacitors sparked once, a bright blue-white flash that made the old man violently twitch. He did not seem to notice or even care.
Alvian stopped. "What?"
Tobias squinted at him with a complex expression that was half deep suspicion, half grudging respect. His natural eye, dark and terrifyingly sharp despite his advanced age, tracked Alvian’s subtle movements the exact way a veteran hunter reads terrain.
"You move completely different today," Tobias said slowly. "Yesterday you walked like a terrified kid who was scared of his own damn shadow. Today you walk like you own the whole place."
Alvian said absolutely nothing. His face remained a cold, unreadable mask.
Tobias waited patiently for a response that simply did not come, then shrugged indifferently with his good shoulder. "Your chisel holding up?"
"Fine."
"Good. Because when it ultimately breaks, and it absolutely will break, you are going to desperately need something much better than cheap pig iron to survive down there."
"BZZZT!"
His mechanical arm sparked violently again. Tobias glanced at it with the weary, profound resignation of a broken man who had stopped caring about minor electrical fires on his own body years ago.
"Come find me when it does," he said quietly, turning his back to his scrap pile. "I know a thing or two about keeping sharp things extremely sharp."
Alvian nodded silently and walked away. Behind him, Tobias’s mechanical arm sparked a third time. The old man did not even flinch.
***
The tiny apartment was completely quiet when Alvian finally returned.
Martha was fast asleep, her ragged breathing noticeably steadier than yesterday. The expensive medicine was clearly working.
Leo sat quietly in the dark corner, happily scratching at the wall with his tiny charcoal stub. He had drawn a crude stick figure holding a massive sword, bravely facing off against a giant beetle with terrifying spikes coming out of its head.
Alvian sat heavily on his thin mattress and coldly counted his credits.
One hundred from Hendricks. Minus fifty strictly reserved for Martha’s next dose. Minus twelve owed for the iron chisel.
Thirty-eight credits remaining.
Leo’s innocent drawing stared mockingly at him from the wall. The brave stick figure’s sword was three times its own body length.
"Not enough," Alvian whispered into the dark.
He mentally pulled up his status panel.
Level 8. Four Karma Points. Forty-five hundred EXP safely in the Bank. An E-Rank Talent that still did absolutely nothing to help him.
Suddenly, his mother coughed in her sleep. The horrifying crystalline rasp was definitely softer today, but it was undeniably still there.
The medicine merely suppressed the fatal symptoms. It absolutely did not cure the disease.
He closed the glowing interface and stared blankly at the rotting ceiling.
The credits were constantly counting down. Martha’s medicine would last maybe two weeks at best. After that, the brutal cough would come back, significantly worse than before.
The Rift was entirely predictable. Safe. Twenty-three beetles a day, one hundred credits, fifty for medicine, thirty-eight for survival.
It was a sustainable, endless loop that would keep his family barely alive indefinitely, yet it would never, ever be enough to actually save them.
He needed to hunt higher and more dangerous beasts.
.
.
.
.
.
A/N:
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