"Fortune favors the bold." — Virgil
Ash was falling out of a sky that was not a sky. It drifted from a vast pale ceiling hanging somewhere miles overhead, dim and colorless like a sun viewed through frosted glass, and it shed grey flakes in a slow, endless snow.
The land rolled away from Joel in dunes of grey powder, broken here and there by ridges of black stone and the twisted skeletons of petrified trees, and the air tasted of burnt metal and cold cinders.
The borrowed memories supplied the name before he even had to ask for it, because this was the First Stratum, the Ash Barrens, the lowest hunting floor of the Zenith Spire, the place where Caelmont’s licensed teams earned their wages and where unlucky scavengers were carried home in pieces.
Joel assessed his condition with the only tool he still owned, which was his training. The crimson slash ran diagonally across his chest.
A pharmacist knew what hypovolemic shock looked like from the inside, and he estimated that he had minutes remaining, possibly fewer, before the lights went out for the second and final time.
His class offered its only contribution, a faint warmth pulsing along the wound, and Joel felt the trivial mending of the Flesh-Guide working and almost laughed, because it was a leaking faucet attempting to fight a burst dam.
The pale blue screen still hovered in front of his eyes, patient as ever, and it displayed the only thing he owned.
[Fate Point Balance: 1.]
He lay against the black rock and thought it through, because dying was no excuse for sloppy play.
[System Tips: You have to Spin on the wheel of Fate]
’Spin,’ Joel thought, and he pushed the point at the screen the way a man pushes his last coins across the felt.
[Ding!]
[Fate Point Consumed. The Wheel of Fate spins...]
Click... click... click... click... clack.
It was enormous, a great disc of pale light turning within a frame of black, and its rim was divided into segments marked with numbers, x100, x500, x1,000, climbing upward into values that made his fading vision swim.
It spun so fast that the segments blurred into a single ring of light, and then it began to slow, and the clicking of the mechanism counted down his remaining heartbeats along with the odds.
He watched the marker drag itself past x1,000 and past x5,000 while his blood ran out onto the ash, and then it settled into a segment that glowed.
[Result: x10,000 Multiplier Achieved.]
[Ding!]
[Multiplier x10,000 Locked.]
[Please select an application for Fate Energy:]
[A) Skill Proficiency - (Apply to a known skill or unlearned Skill Book)]
[B) Cellular Regeneration - (Apply to physical trauma for instant/sustained healing)]
[C) Body Evolution - (Apply to genetic structure for permanent stat/trait mutation)]
[Awaiting User Input...]
’B,’ Joel answered, and the system accepted the choice before the thought had even finished forming.
[Selection B Confirmed: Cellular Regeneration.]
[Target: Host Body (Critical Condition Detected: deep thoracic laceration, arterial involvement, advanced blood loss).]
[Host passive ’Flesh Mending’ amplified by x10,000.]
[Applying Healing Factor...]
The healing did not arrive as comfort, because it arrived as heat, a surge that began at the center of the wound and radiated outward through his chest.
Joel’s back arched off the black rock as his body began to repair itself at a rate that flesh was never meant to endure, the nicked vessel closing with a sensation like a knot being drawn tight, and the blood he had lost came flooding back in a rush of warmth that reached his elbows, his knees, and finally his frozen fingertips.
[Ding!]
[Trauma negated. Vessels resealed. Blood volume restored.]
[Bonus Effect: Excess Fate Energy grants ’Undying Vigor’ (minor wounds mend instantly) for approximately 6 hours.]
His fingertips were what broke him in the end. Feeling returned to them in a burst of pins and needles, the dead wet-sand numbness burning away all at once, and the metallic taste that had lived at the back of his tongue for weeks drained away like water pulling back down a drain.
The flood of regeneration was reforging him cell by cell, and it was evicting the poison along with the damage, two months of slow heavy metal carried out of his tissue and discarded into the grey sand as waste.
Joel stared at his own fingers while they answered him perfectly for the first time since he had woken up in this world, and something dangerously close to laughter came out of his chest.
’You poisoned a body,’ he thought, ’and the body just received a full refund.’
He sat up slowly, and the wound across his chest pulled only stiffly, closed to a raw pink seam that was already fading.
He ran two fingers along it out of professional disbelief, and the seam beneath his touch was smooth and whole, twelve hours of natural healing compressed into a single minute.
The screen hovered beside him, so he pulled his status out of it, because he wanted the numbers in front of him before he moved a single step.
[========== STATUS PROFILE =========]
Name: Joel
Level: 1
Class: [Flesh-Guide] (F)
Fate Points: 0
[--- Core Attributes ---]
Strength: 11
Agility: 14
Physique: 9
Mana: 4 / 4
[--- Passive Skills ---]
• Flesh Mending (F): accelerates natural recovery. Negligible.
[=================================]
The numbers were honest, which was the entire problem. A baseline adult human sat at 10 in every attribute, and he was a seventeen-year-old academy athlete running barely above that line, with a Physique below it and a mana pool that would not have powered a lantern.
By the arithmetic of this world he was still trash with a healed scar, and the Wheel had just spent his entire fortune on the simple privilege of keeping him alive.
Joel stood up anyway, and he did the math while he rose, because the math had changed. The system paid Fate Points for surviving lethal odds, and for the next six hours, minor wounds would mend on him instantly, which meant that risk had temporarily become cheap.
His healing window was a sale, and the correct play during a sale was to buy as much as the account could hold, so his next six hours had exactly one purpose, and that purpose was finding the most dangerous things on this floor and standing in front of them.
A waist-high cairn of black stone stood ten paces down the slope, which the relocation protocol had deposited him beside with the indifference of a machine following procedure.
A recessed slot glowed faintly on its face, and when Joel pressed his iron candidate plate into the slot, the cairn clicked and dispensed a rack from its interior.
The standard loadout for a probationary candidate consisted of one spear and one half-full water skin, and nothing about it suggested that the Spire expected probationary candidates to survive long enough to complain.
[Item Discovered]
Name: Rift-Iron Spear (Standard Issue)
Grade: Common
Durability: 44/80
Effect: +2 Strength.
[System Note: statistically, a pointed stick.]
He tested the balance of it, and the spear was heavy and blunt and about as elegant as a fence post, but it had a reach advantage over his hands, and reach was a strategy all by itself for a man who was currently very difficult to kill.
Joel drank a ration of the water and climbed the ridge behind the cairn to read the land, and the Ash Barrens spread out below him in grey waves, three basins, two dead tree stands, and a canyon mouth that centuries of wind had carved into the black rock.
Movement caught his eye along the floor of the nearest basin, a loose pack of low shapes rippling over the dunes at a speed that flesh should not have managed on soft ash.
The academy bestiary in his borrowed memories identified them before he finished counting, because every child of Caelmont learned the First Stratum vermin before learning to write.
Ash-Crawlers, dog-sized insectoids with black chitin and paired mandibles, pack scavengers that stripped anything that bled, and the memories helpfully added that a pack of them had taken a licensed hunter’s leg off at the knee two seasons ago.
Joel stood on the ridge with the wind moving ash past his boots, and he looked down at the pack for a long time.
They outnumbered him, they outweighed him, and they were faster than he was in open sand, but the canyon narrowed a quarter mile to the north, and he had six hours of being very difficult to kill, and the Wheel paid out to survivors.
He hefted the blunt spear, and the raw seam across his chest pulled faintly, already more memory than wound.
Joel Carrow started down the slope toward the pack, walking into the falling ash with the calm of a man approaching a table where the game had finally turned in his favor.