He ate slowly.
There was beef jerky in his desk drawer — two packs, bought on impulse from the convenience store downstairs three weeks ago and forgotten. He'd also found half a bar of chocolate in his jacket pocket, the kind that came in individually wrapped squares. He ate four squares, then stopped, then opened one of the jerky packs and worked through it methodically, chewing until the salt hit the back of his throat.
His hands were steady. His breathing was back to normal. The ache in his left side was there, dull and specific, but the kind of pain that was information rather than a problem.
He reviewed the fight while he ate.
Four kills. The first — the fat straggler — had been clean. Solo contribution, full EXP, Lucky Dice triggering on the first roll. Everything that followed was messier. The fire extinguisher had done the real work on the three, which meant the system had split contribution and he'd collected half the experience he should have. Sixty percent, sixty-one. Two EXP per kill instead of four.
He understood the logic. The system rewarded human effort, not borrowed force. The extinguisher had been the right tool for the situation — he had no argument with that choice — but he needed to account for it going forward. Every environmental assist he used would dilute his return.
The knife was gone. That was a more immediate problem. The scimitar from the third goblin was usable but short, the blade notched in two places, the grip wrapped in something he'd decided not to examine. He'd picked up the club as well. Two weapons. Neither of them made for a person of his build, both salvaged from creatures he'd killed minutes ago.
He was thinking about the Lucky Dice escalation.
Two failed triggers in a row. By the mechanic, the next successful trigger would produce a drop one tier above baseline — blue quality, if the escalation moved linearly across rarity bands. He didn't know yet whether the system respected that logic or applied it differently. Something to discover.
He folded the empty jerky packet and set it on the desk.
Then someone knocked on the door.
Two precise knocks. Not frantic, not the kind of pounding that meant something was chasing you. Deliberate. He stopped chewing, set the scimitar across his lap with his right hand resting on the grip, and said nothing.
"Ruyi." A male voice from outside. "It's me — Ethan. From 308. Marcus is with me."
Kael recognised both names. Room 308 was diagonally across the corridor — he'd passed them in the hallway enough times to know their faces, exchanged maybe forty words total over two semesters. Ethan Cole: tall, thin, rimless glasses, student council vice president. Marcus Reed: built across the shoulders, always had something in his hands — grip trainer, water bottle, phone — the kind of person who was constitutionally unable to be still.
The sound of him killing four goblins had not been quiet. The glass panel above the door meant anyone in the corridor had a partial view of what he'd been doing.
They'd seen enough to come knocking.
"What do you want?" Kael said.
A brief pause. Then Ethan's voice again, measured and even. "We want to talk about working together. I'll be direct — you can see how things are. You killed four, but you took a hit. If the three of us coordinate, we clear faster and everyone stays safer."
Kael considered that for a moment. Not the argument — he'd already reached his own conclusion about it — but the framing. Ethan had led with efficiency and safety. Not friendship, not desperation, not obligation. That was worth noting. It suggested someone who'd thought about what would and wouldn't work on him specifically.
He stood, crossed to the door, and opened it.
The smell came in first — blood and something chemical from the extinguisher residue, and underneath both of those something fouler that was just the corridor now, permanently. Ethan was standing a step back from the door, hands visible, posture deliberately non-threatening. Marcus was behind him and to the left, arms crossed, jaw tight, working very hard at something that looked like patience.
Kael looked at both of them. Then at the corridor behind them. Four bodies, no movement, the hallway clear in both directions.
"Terms," Kael said.
Ethan nodded like he'd expected that word. "Simple rotation. You do the primary kill. We support — lure, distract, position. Loot splits by turn. First drop to you, second to me, third to Marcus, repeat."
"No."
Ethan's expression didn't change. "Counter?"
"I take fifty percent of all drops. Anything green-tier or above is mine outright."
The silence that followed lasted approximately two seconds.
Marcus was the one who broke it.
"Are you serious." It wasn't a question — the inflection was flat, the kind of flat that meant something was being held back with effort. "You hide in a room and ambush one fat goblin and now you think you're running the show?"
Kael looked at him without particular interest.
"We're reaching out to you," Marcus continued, his voice climbing slightly despite himself. "That's us doing you a favour. You think it's easy luring monsters? You want us putting ourselves out front while you stay behind and collect? That's not a deal, that's extortion."
"Marcus." Ethan said it quietly.
"No, I'm serious — who does he think he is? I'm on the athletics team. You're student council. We don't need to stand here and—"
"If the terms don't work," Kael said, "find someone else."
He reached for the door handle.
Marcus stepped forward and put his hand on the door frame. Not a push — not yet — but the kind of placement that communicated intent. "You're not closing this door."
Kael looked at the hand on the frame.
Then he put his shoulder into the door.
He wasn't thinking about it as a decision exactly. It was more like a straightforward resolution of competing forces — Marcus's hand was on the frame, the door needed to be closed, and Kael's STR was currently sitting at seven points against a baseline human who hadn't refreshed a Sigil deck for four minutes to find a Prismatic. The math was simple.
Marcus went back two steps and hit the opposite wall.
The door clicked shut. Kael turned the lock.
Silence from outside for a moment. Then Marcus's voice, muffled by the door: "What the — he just — did you feel that? That's not normal strength. What did he pull?"
Ethan's reply was quieter, harder to catch: "...gold tier minimum, probably higher..."
Kael stopped listening and went back to the desk.
He finished the last two squares of chocolate. Looked at his panel.
[ Name: Kael Ruyi | Level: LV1 | EXP: 8/50 ] [ STR: 7 | CON: 5 | AGI: 5 | SPI: 6 ] [ HP: 55/60 | MP: 60/60 ] [ DEF: 16 | Attribute Resistance: 4 ] [ Equipment: Goblin Chest Plate (Green) | Weapon: Goblin Scimitar (White) ] [ Sigil: Lucky Dice (Prismatic) ]
The encounter had told him useful things.
Ethan was calculating — the rotation proposal was fair by surface logic, designed to sound reasonable while quietly ensuring Kael did all the dangerous work for a third of the upside. The good-cop delivery was smooth enough that a different person might have taken it. Marcus was emotional, easy to read, and his anger had burned through his patience before Ethan could manage him. As a team they were coordinated, but their coordination had a visible seam.
More relevantly: they had no equipment worth mentioning, no Sigil strong enough to matter, and they needed him more than he needed them.
He looked at the chat.
[ Earth Online — Total Active Users: 4,109,732,650 ]
The number had dropped by roughly a hundred and fifty thousand since the system first announced it.
He did the arithmetic without meaning to. A hundred and fifty thousand dead in under an hour. That was more people than lived in some mid-sized cities. It was also, by any historical measurement of large-scale violence, an extraordinary rate — faster than most battles, faster than most natural disasters. And this was week one. The beginner protection period. The interval the system had apparently designated as the gentle introduction.
He put the panel away.
There were still goblins in the building. More between here and the ground floor than he'd cleared from this corridor. The building had five floors, and he'd addressed exactly one stretch of the third.
He checked his weapons. Scimitar in his right hand, club in his left. The Goblin Chest Plate sat invisible over his t-shirt, its protection real even if its appearance wasn't.
He moved the desk away from the door handle.
The hallway outside was empty except for four bodies and the smell. He checked the peephole first, waited thirty seconds, heard nothing above the baseline sounds of the building — something distant on floor two, someone moving fast on floor four above, the intermittent crash of something structural giving way in a direction he couldn't identify.
He opened the door.
He stepped over the nearest body without looking at it.
He moved toward the stairwell.