Joel sat on the rock spine above the gorge and did the thing he had always done best in either of his lives, which was paperwork.
The numbers sat in front of him on the pale blue screen, and he read them the way a pharmacist reads a chart at shift change.
The Undying Vigor buff had roughly four hours and fifty minutes left on it, his Survival Accumulation stood at nineteen percent, and the gauge required one hundred percent to convert into a Fate Point.
The gorge fight had cost about thirty minutes from approach to last kill, and if he assumed the following engagements would run similar, then his remaining hours could cover perhaps eight to ten more battles before his body went back to being ordinary flesh.
’Eighty-one percent to go,’ he thought, ’and a closing time I cannot negotiate. So the quota is set. Ten engagements, average gain of eight percent, and no wasted minutes between them.’
There was, however, a pricing problem, and he had already spotted it while reviewing the notifications from the gorge.
The system had not paid him seven percent for the moment the first Crawler bit into his arm by accident, and it had paid the largest single share of the fight at the instant the pack had ambushed him in the restricted terrain, which meant the gauge rewarded the danger survived rather than the slaughter itself.
Killing monsters safely was apparently worth less than nearly dying to them, and that single rule had consequences for his entire afternoon, because a man who trapped everything perfectly would fill his gauge too slowly and run out of buff before the payout arrived.
’So the exchange rate is pain,’ Joel concluded, ’Traps for efficiency, but every fight needs at least one moment where something’s mandible touches bone, or the house underpays me.’
He spent the first hour building infrastructure, because the ash itself turned out to be a material.
The drifts piled against the north faces of the dunes were loose and deep, and a spear butt could excavate a conical pit in fifteen minutes that no Crawler would ever see, since a thin crust of wind-packed ash over the mouth would hold long enough to look like solid ground right up until sixty kilograms of chitin stepped onto it.
He dug four of these along the patrol lines, and he also harvested the kills from the gorge, because the Crawler leg joints turned out to carry cords of dry sinew that a knife could strip and braid into rough twine.
Two hours of patient work gave him twelve meters of cord, a trip-line, and two deadfall levers rigged on the rock spine where flat slabs of stone waited above the crawl routes like suspended sentences.
The patrols moved through the basin in predictable crescents, and Joel began intercepting them one by one, opening a line on his own palm each time and dragging the blood across the sand as bait, then walking backward onto silent stone while the pack turned toward the scent like iron filings toward a magnet.
The first two engagements went exactly to plan, and the plan worked so well that it taught him the limits of the plan.
The Crawlers funneled onto his blood trail, the lead pair dropped into the ash pits with dry clattering screams, the deadfall crushed a third against the rock, and Joel killed the survivors at his leisure with the gorge wall at his back.
The whole exchange lasted minutes and cost him nothing but a healing palm.
[Ding!]
[Lethal engagement survived (trap-assisted ambush, minimal hostile contact).]
[Survival Accumulation: 31%.]
He looked at the six percent payout and then at the five fresh carcasses, and he filed the result the way he filed a warning label.
Safety was efficient and safety was cheap, and the numbers said that a whole afternoon of clean ambushes would leave his gauge at perhaps seventy percent when the buff expired.
So Joel changed the product he was selling, and the change was the moment the last of the academy boy burned off him.
From the third patrol onward, the traps became the opening move instead of the strategy.
He let the pits wound and scatter the crescent, and then he walked into the broken survivors in open sand with his back to a single boulder, and he deliberately let them reach him.
Mandibles closed on his forearms and hips while he worked the spear in the compressed space, and the pain arrived on schedule and left on schedule, and the flesh knitted shut while the notifications scrolled.
[Ding!]
[+0.1 Physique detected. Micro-adaptation logged.]
[Ding!]
[Lethal engagement survived (close-quarters, multi-contact).]
[Survival Accumulation: 45%.]
[Ding!]
[’Thrust’ has reached Lv. 2.]
Somewhere in the middle of the fifth engagement, a Crawler came at him out of the ash haze with two legs sheared off by a pit and its abdomen crushed, still moving, still hungry, and Joel killed it with a downward stroke while thinking not about the monster but about the conversion rate of wounded ambushes versus healthy ones.
He registered, in a distant and administrative way, that the old Joel’s memories contained a boy who had once felt sick for an hour after seeing a hunting dog put down, and that the person currently wearing that boy’s body had just dispatched a mangled creature without a single change in his breathing.
He noted the difference the way he noted a patient’s improved chart, and he moved on, because the gauge did not pay for introspection.
The afternoon became a ledger. Patrol six broke against him at a dead tree stand and paid eight percent, and patrol seven, the largest so far at eight Crawlers, cornered him against his own trip-line in a moment of genuine arithmetic error and paid nine, because two of them got onto him at once and one took a second chunk out of his calf before he rammed both against the rock spine.
His Physique climbed in the margins of every exchange, tenth by tenth, and by the eighth patrol his hands had stopped losing their grip entirely, since the tendons had now been shredded and rebuilt so many times that the system had apparently lost patience with the original specifications.
[Ding!]
[Lethal engagement survived (encircled, partial equipment failure).]
[Survival Accumulation: 79%.]
[You are now Level 6.]
[+1 Free Attribute Point allocated to Physique (forced adaptation).]
The ninth patrol was a family unit of nine, and among them moved a soldier caste, a Level 4 Crawler with ridged armor and mandibles like pruning shears, and Joel chose to fight it in the worst ground he could find, an open basin with no walls and no pits, purely because the gauge had eleven percent left to pay and he had one hour and ten minutes of immortality remaining, which was exactly enough time for one more purchase and nothing else.
The soldier caste opened his thigh to the bone on the second exchange, and the regeneration closed it while he pivoted on the healing leg, and he put the spear through its eye seam while its mandibles were still wet with a version of him that no longer existed.
[Ding!]
[Lethal engagement survived (superior-grade hostile, open terrain).]
[Survival Accumulation: 89%.]
[You are now Level 7.]
[+1 Free Attribute Point allocated to Physique (forced adaptation).]
The tenth and final patrol found him at dusk under the pale ceiling, because they came hunting the smell of the day’s massacre, and Joel stood in the open and let all ten of them come, and the last eleven percent cost him exactly what he expected it to cost.
Three Crawlers converged at once in the closing seconds, one of them scaled his back, and its mandibles closed on his shoulder while he reached the spear around at an angle no academy had ever taught, so he simply ran backward and crushed it against a boulder with his own body weight, and he finished the other two with his shoulder still sealing.
[Ding!]
[Survival Accumuation: 100%.]
[Gauge converting...]
[Lethal encounters survived against statistically superior forces. The Wheel acknowledges your gamble.]
[+1 Fate Point Earned. Current Balance: 1.]
[Survival Accumulation reset.]
Joel stood in the settling ash with the point burning quietly in his account, and he pulled the day’s final paperwork.
[========== SESSION REPORT ========]
Engagements: 10. Eliminations: 69.
Levels gained: 3 (Level 4 to Level 7).
Forced adaptation: +3 Physique (level allocation).
Micro-adaptation: +1.6 Physique (cumulative).
Loot harvested: Rift-Core (Fragment) x46. Sinew Cord: 12 meters.
[=================================]
[========== STATUS PROFILE =========]
Name: Joel
Level: 7
Class: [Flesh-Guide] (F)
Fate Points: 1
[--- Core Attributes ---]
Strength: 11
Agility: 14
Physique: 17.0
Mana: 4 / 4
[--- Active Skills ---]
• Thrust (Common) - Lv. 3
[--- Passive Skills ---]
• Flesh Mending (F): accelerates natural recovery. Negligible.
• Undying Vigor: active, 55 minutes remaining.
[=================================]
He strung the forty-six core fragments on sinew cord and hung the bundle across his chest, because a dead man’s economy had become his economy, and the fragments were individually worthless but collectively a stake.
Sixty-nine carcasses lay scattered across the basin behind him, and the man standing in the middle of all that math felt nothing about it except a craftsman’s satisfaction at a quota met before closing time, and he noted that too, coldly, and filed it with everything else.
It was the rock that told him the day was not finished.
The vibration came up through his boots rather than the sand, which was how he knew it was heavy, a slow and enormous rhythm of spaced impacts, each one deeper than any Crawler had ever produced, and it was getting closer.
Around him the basin went silent in a way it had not gone silent all day, because the vermin of the First Stratum had stopped chirring, and everything that could hide was already hiding.
Joel Carrow looked north along the dune line, checked the fifty-five minutes remaining on his immortality, and set his feet with the spear leveled at the coming rhythm.