‘Warmth,’ Sunny thought, his eyelids fluttering as a faint, prickling sensation spread through his chest.
It wasn’t the kind of warmth that came from a roaring fire or a thick blanket.
It was a cold, dense heat—a contradiction that pulsed from the deep recess of his soul where the Obsidian Shard had linked itself to his essence.
He sat completely still in the pitch-black cavern, his back pressed against the freezing rock wall, the massive skeleton of the ancient warrior remaining a silent sentinel beside him.
Outside, the howling gale of the mountain pass was just a distant, hollow murmur, filtered through the thick stone layers and the curtain of crawling fog.
‘How long was I asleep?’
Sunny shifted his posture, testing his body.
The exhaustion that had weighed down his limbs like heavy lead was gone, replaced by a strange, sharp alertness.
His frostbitten fingers no longer throbbed with agony; the dark blue skin under his fingernails had regained a pale, healthy hue.
He brought his mind inward, summoning the golden runes that hovered in his consciousness.
[Name: Sunless]
[True Name: None]
[Rank: Common]
[Class: None]
[Attributes: Fated, Mark of Divinity]
[Aspect: None]
[Soul Fragments: 0/100]
[Memories: Obsidian Shard]
[Echoes: None]
Sunny’s eyes narrowed as his gaze locked onto a new line that hadn’t been there before: [Soul Fragments: 0/100].
‘A counter,’ he realized, his inner voice calm and analytical.
‘The Nightmare Spell doesn’t just track my physical condition… it tracks the capacity of my soul core.
Zero out of a hundred.
That means to break past the mortal rank and truly awaken my Aspect, I need to feed my soul core with fragments.’
His fingers tightened around the leather-bound hilt of the Obsidian Shard rested across his knees.
The sleek, pitch-black dagger felt impossibly light, yet when he ran a thumb along its edge, he could feel the terrifying, latent sharpness of the Awakened metal.
It wasn’t just a physical weapon; it was a Memory, a piece of soul-forged reality bound directly to his being.
He could summon or dismiss it into a shower of white sparks with a simple thought.
‘A Common human trying to kill an Awakened Nightmare Creature with a rusted iron sword is suicide,’ Sunny thought, turning the blade in his palm as his dark blue eyes glittered in the gloom.
‘But an Awakened Memory ignores mortal armor.
It cuts through bone and chitin like dry parchment.’
He stood up silently, his wool cloak falling around his ankles like a shadow.
His physical body was still thin, malnourished, and frail compared to the towering soldiers he had seen in the camp, but his movements were no longer sluggish.
The ‘Mark of Divinity’ passive attribute seemed to react to the presence of the Awakened Memory, causing his shadow to stretch and twist across the cavern floor with eerie, fluid independence.
‘It’s time to check the surface,’ Sunny decided.
‘A hunter doesn’t stay in his burrow forever.’
His shadow-sight carved through the dimness effortlessly, mapping out every stone, every crack, and every hanging stalactite.
As he neared the entrance, the bitter, unpolluted mountain wind rushed into his lungs once more.
He paused at the lip of the ledge, flattening his back against the granite cliff face and peering up through the swirling white fog into the canyon above.
The world above was dead silent.
The battle at the camp had long since ended.
The fires had burned out, leaving only cold ash and the scent of charred, frozen meat wafting down through the crags.
Sunny willed his shadow to detach from his feet, sending it slithering up the vertical cliff face toward the narrow trail where he had encountered the lone scavenger hours earlier.
‘Show me,’ Sunny instructed mentally.
Through the faint, spiritual thread connecting his mind to the shadow, his perception expanded.
He could ‘see’ the upper trail.
The sight was a brutal, frozen graveyard.
The wooden supply wagons were splintered into kindling.
Dozens of iron armors lay scattered across the blood-stained snow—some crushed flat like tin cans, others torn open from the chest, emptied of their contents.
The horses, the officers, the slaves… everything had been harvested.
The mountain scavengers had picked the bone clean and retreated back into the high peaks to digest their feast.
Except for one.
Sunny’s breath hitched slightly.
Near the ruins of the central bonfire, hunched over the frozen carcass of a draft horse, was a single bone-white creature.
It was smaller than the massive, eight-foot alpha that had led the initial assault—likely a younger, weaker scavenger left behind to pick over the scraps that the larger beasts hadn’t bothered to carry away.
Its white chitin carapace was chipped in several places, stained with dried, dark blood from a sword strike it had taken during the battle.
It was gnawing on a heavy thigh bone, its jagged vertical maw making a dull, wet *crunch* every few seconds as it cracked the frozen marrow.
‘A straggler,’ Sunny’s mind hissed, a dark, predatory fire igniting deep within his chest.
‘An injured, isolated, lower-tier scavenger.’
He didn’t feel fear.
He didn’t feel hesitation.
In the slums of Sector 25, when a rival gang member was wounded and separated from his crew, you didn’t offer him mercy.
You waited in the dark alleyway, stepped up behind him, and took everything he had.
‘It’s alone.
It’s injured.
And it’s distracted by food,’ Sunny calculated, his fingers gripping the Obsidian Shard so tightly his knuckles turned white.
‘This is my target.’
Sunny recalled his shadow.
The dark silhouette slithered back down the cliff face, merging seamlessly into his feet once more.
Sunny didn’t climb straight up the main trail where the monster would easily catch his scent or spot his movement against the white snow.
Instead, he utilized the treacherous, vertical crags on the eastern side of the cliff, climbing up through the blind spot of the rocky overhang.
He moved like a phantom—silent, cold, and entirely hidden within the dense blanket of white fog.
Every foot step was placed with extreme care.
He didn’t disturb a single loose pebble; he didn’t allow his wool cloak to brush against the sharp stone.
He was a shadow crawling out of the abyss.
Within three minutes, Sunny reached the crest of the ledge, pulling himself over the lip of stone just ten paces behind the hunched, bone-white creature.
The scavenger didn’t react.
Its featureless, chitinous head remained buried in the horse’s carcass, its translucent mandibles working furiously to scrape the last bits of frozen flesh from the bone.
Crunch… crunch…
‘Eight paces,’ Sunny thought, dropping into a dead-silent, low crawl.
‘Six paces.’
He willed his shadow to wrap around the blade of the Obsidian Shard, dampening the weapon’s faint, metallic reflection in the dim light.
The black dagger seemed to absorb the surrounding darkness, becoming an invisible edge of pure void.
‘Four paces.’
The monster’s long, needle-thin ear-slits twitched slightly.
It sensed a subtle shift in the wind, a tiny disturbance in the cold air.
It began to turn its featureless head.
‘NOW!’
Sunny exploded from the snow like a coiled spring.
He didn’t aim for the thick chitin on its back, nor did he strike at its heavily armored limbs.
He knew the weak point of an apex predator.
As the creature’s jagged maw split open to let out a warning screech, Sunny leaped onto its hunched back, wrapped his left arm around its featureless chitin plate to anchor himself, and brought the Obsidian Shard down with all the concentrated weight of his body and soul.
STAB!
The Awakened obsidian blade didn’t bounce off.
It didn’t slip.
With a sickening, wet THWACK, the black dagger plunged straight through the creature’s eye-socket, sinking six inches deep into its soft, fleshy brain cavity.
“GAAAAAHHHK!”
The scavenger let out a muffled, gurgling shriek, its jointed limbs thrashing violently as it bucked against the snow, trying to throw the human off its back.
Sunny gritted his teeth, his face smeared with hot, foul-smelling monster blood, and twisted the blade with brutal, unrelenting force.
“DIE, YOU BASTARD!” Sunny roared into the howling wind.
CRACK!
The creature’s body shuddered once, its long, needle-thin limbs collapsing beneath it like a house of cards.
It crashed face-first into the blood-stained snow, twitched twice, and went completely still.
Silence returned to the mountain pass.
Sunny lay on top of the dead monster’s back, his chest heaving, his hands slick with steaming dark fluid, breathing heavily into the freezing air.
And then, deep within his soul, the golden runes erupted into a blazing, glorious light.
[You have slain a Nightmare Creature: Mountain Scavenger.]
[Your soul receives nourishment.]
[Soul Fragments +1.]
[You have received a Memory: ‘Scavenger’s Carapace’.]