[STATUS — EMERIC HALDEN]
TIER: 9th (40% → 8th)
STRENGTH: 14
AGILITY: 11
MANA: 6
MANA CORE: Inactive
SKILL — DEVOTION LEDGER (Passive/Active)Converts genuine sacrifice or care directed at Isolde Rowan into stat growth and Tier progress. Scales with risk and sincerity. Cannot be triggered by performance or intent alone; the act must be real.
He stared at the numbers longer than he probably needed to. Fourteen strength, eleven agility, meant nothing to him in isolation. He had no baseline to measure them against, no idea what an ordinary 9th Tier vessel carried on their sheet, let alone an 8th or a 7th. But the mana core entry caught him harder than the rest. Inactive. Not absent. Did that mean he could make it active and use magic?
His hands trembled at the thought of it all.
He recalled the fear that flashed through Isolde’s eyes and he never wanted that to happen again.
She was his responsibility now.
[TUTORIAL AVAILABLE]
He sat forward.
A Rift has been designated for calibration. Entry will place you inside a contained low-tier instance. Clearing it will register your first independent Tier progress, separate from Ledger-based growth. Recommended for new affinities.
[Y/N]?
He thought, briefly, of waking Isolde to tell her that he had to head out. He decided against it. Whatever this turned out to be, he’d rather come back with something to show for it than a half-formed question he couldn’t yet answer.
"Yes," he said.
The room didn’t so much vanish as get quietly replaced — and what replaced it wasn’t anything he’d braced for. It was heat first, a wall of it, dry enough to catch in his throat before his eyes had even adjusted. Then light, harsh and white, nothing like the muted glow he remembered from the rift tearing through his sitting room. When his vision cleared, he was standing on sand.
Sand in every direction, stretching to a horizon broken only by what looked like mountains. The sky above had no sun he could find, only a flat, colorless brightness that seemed to come from everywhere.
The system window appeared before him.
[RIFT INSTANCE — RANK: D][BIOME: ARID EXPANSE][OBJECTIVE: CLEAR ALL HOSTILE ENTITIES]
He could feel the heat shimmer against the hot sand and his skin, bending the air over the black rock formations, that were scattered indiscriminately over the whole place.
So this was what a rift looked like? Or was it just this once. The whistling of the wind rustled up sand in the air.
"Alright," he said, mostly to hear a voice that wasn’t the system’s. "Where are you."
Just then, he noticed something. The sand a few feet in front of him was splitting in a long seam, tearing open down the slope as something surged up out of it. Emeric’s first coherent thought was that it was too big to have been hiding that close the whole time. It came up in segments, with chitin the color of old bone, each plate the size of a shield. A centipede, if the word still applied to something that size. It was easily twenty feet with legs along its underside churning sand into a fine spray with every motion.
He backed up fast, boots sliding in the loose sand, and it was only the second creature announcing itself that kept him from backing straight into a worse position.
This one didn’t burst from the ground. It rose from it, sand climbing and compacting around a rough humanoid shape thirty feet to his right. It had shoulders and arms with a blunt, featureless head assembling themselves out of the dune. By the time it finished forming, it stood twice his height, its surface grainy and shifting, faint cracks of black glass running through it like veins where the heat had fused patches of it solid.
[HOSTILE DETECTED: SAND-WROUGHT COLOSSUS]
[HOSTILE DETECTED: GLASSBACK CENTIPEDE]
[CORE DESTRUCTION REQUIRED FOR ELIMINATION]
He didn’t have time to ask the system what that meant. The centipede came at him first, fast in a way its size shouldn’t have allowed, the front third of its body rearing up before slamming down in a strike he only avoided by throwing himself sideways into a roll that scraped his skin raw across one forearm.
He came up in a crouch, breathing hard, and understood two things at once: he had no weapon, and hitting this thing with his fists was going to accomplish nothing against plating that thick.
The golem solved that problem for him, in the worst possible way. It closed the distance with slow, ground-shaking steps and swung one massive arm in a wide arc, and Emeric barely got clear of it, close enough that the wind of the blow staggered him sideways into the centipede’s next strike. The mandible caught him across the ribs — not the full force of it, but enough to fold him over and drive the breath out of him.
He hit the sand hard, rolled on instinct, and came up.
Core. The word sat in his mind from the notification he had seen earlier.
That was it. He needed to destroy the core for it to be eliminated.
With the Sand Golem, he could easily see a red pulsing stone that was lodged in its torso.
The centipede was a much different story.
He needed to get a clean shot at it. The centipede lunged again before he’d finished the thought, and this time he moved on time, ducking under the strike and driving his fists up into the softer underside behind its head. All that fourteen points of strength had to count for something, he told himself.
It wasn’t the core. It was close enough to make the thing recoil, a shrill shriek tearing out of it as it fell back a little bit.
Without missing a beat, the golem used the opening. A fist the size of a barrel came down where he’d been standing, and he threw himself clear only barely as sand exploded upward from the impact the blow had made into the ground.