The first thing that came back was the taste of dirt, and the second was a voice assembling itself behind his eyes.
[SYSTEM: Resurrection complete. 72:00:00 elapsed.]
[Soul Integrity: 100%]
'Three days.'
Wren pushed himself up on his hands and knees and spat something dark into the grey dirt. His body felt wrong in small ways, put back together with most of the pieces in the right place but not all of them.
He was in the Ashwilds.
The dirt was flat, grey and the trees were ash-barked, leafless and grew too close together, and there was no city noise at all.
Just wind through dry brush and something moving in the trees at a distance he could not judge.
He could have been three miles from Eisenwall or ten.
He checked himself starting at the top and working down.
One boot fit, the other had come half off and was covering mostly his toes.
His shirt had a hole in the back the size of a fist, right where the spear had gone through.
'So that was real.'
He pressed his thumb along his chest until the skin went raised and smooth, a scar running from his shoulder blade to just under his collarbone.
When he pressed harder, he felt nothing.
The nerves were gone or the resurrection hadn't bothered them.
His fingernails had gone dark at the tips, there was a smell coming off his clothes that he recognized from the tannery district, the one Stellan had been so afraid of ending up in.
He stood up and his legs held.
That was something.
'Gerold doesn't know.'
Gerold had been screaming his name and reaching over a guard with the same hand that had clapped his shoulder an hour before the spear went through.
His uncle thought he was dead, and he was three days away in a city full of guards who had put that spear in him.
He could not go back looking like this.
He could not go back at all until he understood what had killed him and why.
He rubbed his thumb across the Brand on his palm and the system text came without him asking.
[Class: Aschenschlund (SSS) — FORBIDDEN]
[Talent: Devour — Consume the skills of anything you kill.]
[WARNING: Each Devour accelerates Soul Erosion. At 0%, the host ceases to be human.]
[Soul Integrity: 100%]
S-Rank was the highest in any of them.
Kronbrand, Eisenwille, Sturmherz.
Continental fame, generational wealth, the kind of Class that got entire families moved into the upper districts.
SSS was not a rank that existed.
Forbidden was not a classification that existed.
And Aschenschlund appeared in none of the manuals, not even the old ones with water damage that Gerold had found in a secondhand stall for half a mark.
'They killed me for this.'
They had known the word before the announcer finished saying it.
Whatever Aschenschlund was, someone had written a protocol for what to do when it appeared, and that protocol was a spear from behind.
The text was not giving him anything he could use in the next hour.
He found a rock near the treeline and wrapped his fingers around it to find the balance point, the check Gerold always ran on new hammer handles before he would trust the weight.
Front-heavy but workable.
Wren had no knife, no food and no way back to Eisenwall without better resources than a scar and a rock.
Gerold's Fieldcraft pamphlet said Grauwolves hunted at dawn and dusk and could be killed by a prepared adult with a long knife.
Wren had read that pamphlet twice because Gerold had paid three marks for it.
The second time through, he noticed it had been written by people who survived Grauwolf encounters, which meant everything in it described the slower wolves.
'And I have a rock.'
The light was already going flat across the tops of the trees.
He moved through the brush until he found a cart track, two ruts running east-west through the grey dirt, and picked east and started walking.
He was hungry enough that his right hand had a faint shake in it, and he pressed his fist against his thigh until it stopped.
◆ ◆ ◆
The cart came around a bend ten minutes later: two wheels, one tired horse, a man on the seat and a guard walking alongside with a sword at his hip.
The guard saw Wren first and the whole thing stopped.
"You alive?" the guard said.
"Yes."
The guard looked at the hole in the back of Wren's shirt, and the blood dried brown on his left forearm.
Then at the Brand on his palm.
His jaw tightened and his hand moved toward his sword grip. "What rank?"
"C-Rank," Wren said and the lie came out easily.
The guard's hand came back from the sword. "What happened to you?"
"Wolf."
"One wolf did all that?"
"Two"
The merchant leaned over the side of the seat.
He was older, in a coat that had been expensive once. "And you killed them with what, exactly?"
Wren didn't answer that.
The merchant sat back and said something low to the guard, and the guard looked at Wren again.
"Grauwolves have been on this track since yesterday, at least four of them." He looked at the rock in Wren's right hand.
"Walk with us to the junction. The track runs north from there."
Wren looked at the merchant's horse.
Both ears turned east, weight shifted back on its haunches.
He looked at the treeline and then at the light, which had maybe forty minutes left in it.
"I'm staying," Wren said.
The guard stared at him for a long moment.
The merchant said, "Leave it, Dav," and the cart started moving and neither of them looked back.
They were moving north because north was away from the wolves, and Wren was staying because the wolves were what he had.
◆ ◆ ◆
He walked east until the track bent and found a piece of ground slightly raised above the approach on both sides, and he stood there and waited.
He heard the wolf before he saw it, moving at a steady pace through the brush to the northeast, and then it came out of the treeline fast and low.
It covered the ground between the trees and Wren in about half the time the pamphlet had suggested.
'Faster wolves.'
He sidestepped and the claws caught his left forearm along the outside.
Not deep but enough to open the skin in three lines that burned before they bled.
He swung the rock and connected with the side of the jaw as the wolf went past.
Something cracked in his right hand.
He was fairly sure it was his hand and not the wolf's jaw.
The wolf turned and came again, and this time Wren did not have room to go sideways.
He went down instead, back against the ground with his knees up, and took the wolf's weight on his shoulder.
His collarbone screamed where the scar was, the nerves apparently not as dead as he'd thought.
The rock came down twice.
The second time it connected with the base of the skull and the wolf stopped moving.
He counted to four.
Then he pushed the wolf off his shoulder and sat in the grey dirt and pressed his sleeve flat against the cuts on his forearm.
His right hand had a bruise forming along the outer edge, and when he made a fist the middle finger did not close all the way.
Then the system text arrived.
[Devour Available: Predator's Lunge (F)]
[Cost: 1% Soul Integrity]
[Current Soul Integrity: 100%]
[Accept / Decline]
He remembered the warning he had read three times.
At 0%, the host ceases to be human.
The math was simple.
One hundred kills at one percent each before the number hit zero.
He did not know what zero looked like, but he understood it was a bottom and that the number did not go backwards.
Something moved in the treeline.
Close enough that he could hear it stop and start, the pause of something checking the air.
'One percent. Ninety-nine left after this.'
He thought about the stew Gerold had made with the old goat, the one Gerold had killed that morning because dinner was more important than milk.
Gerold made decisions like that. You lose something, you gain something, and you eat tonight.
He pressed Accept.
It went through him with no warning.
Not pain, but something that moved in the space between pain and cold, running up through his hand and into the base of his skull.
For half a second the world tilted and he could feel every muscle in his legs as if someone had taken them apart and was showing him the pieces.
He understood with no words attached to it how to move his weight forward and low and cover ground in a way his body had never been built for.
Then it stopped, and he was sitting in the grey dirt with the taste of copper on his tongue.
[Talent Acquired: Predator's Lunge (F) — Proficiency: 40%]
[WARNING: First activation may be unstable.]
[Soul Integrity: 99%]
The second wolf had found the edge of the treeline and was already committed.
It came out fast and Wren's body moved before he finished deciding to move.
The angle was wrong.
Predator's Lunge was calibrated for a longer stride than his, and his back foot came down in a divot in the grey dirt.
His knee buckled partway through.
Wren came out of it two feet further left than he had intended, still moving, overcorrecting, every instinct screaming that his center of gravity was in the wrong place.
But his hand came down on the back of the wolf's neck as it passed under him.
The wolf's front legs buckled, it hit the dirt face-first and skidded.
'That wasn't me.'
The movement had come from somewhere behind his own muscles.
The proficiency was at forty percent and he could feel the gap between what the skill wanted to do and what his legs could actually execute.
The gap was wide enough to get him killed.
The wolf was getting its front legs under it, shaking its head.
He shifted his grip on the rock and watched it find its feet.
The second kill would cost another percent if the system offered a Devour, and he would have to decide fast.
The wolf turned toward him and he could see the moment it decided to come again.
He adjusted his grip and the wolf charged.
The wolf went down harder this time because Wren leaned into Predator's Lunge instead of fighting it.
His back foot found solid ground and his weight dropped forward the way the skill wanted.
The rock came down on the back of the skull, something cracked and the wolf did not get up.
'Better.'
Still ugly, still landing left of where he'd meant to stand, but the wolf was down and he was on his feet.
[Combat Complete]
[Devour Available: Grauwolf Sensory Package (F)]
[Cost: 1% Soul Integrity]
[Current Soul Integrity: 99%]
[Accept / Decline]
He looked at the dead wolf.
The Devour pull was there, an itch behind his eyes and in his teeth, the same pull he'd felt with the first wolf but stronger now.
His fingers were already drifting toward the carcass before he caught himself and closed his fist around the rock instead.
Gerold had a rule about the forge that he repeated so often Wren could hear it in the exact pitch of the bellows room.
'You don't run out of iron all at once. You run out one bad pour at a time, and by the time you notice, the stock's empty and the order's due.'
One percent did not sound like much.
But Wren had watched Gerold count every nail, every ingot and every scrap of usable bar stock at the end of every single week.
He had learned that the numbers that killed you were the ones small enough to ignore.
He pressed Decline.
[Devour Declined.]
[Soul Integrity: 99%]
[Devours Declined: 1]
The itch faded, but not all the way.
He tore a strip from his already ruined sleeve and wrapped it tight around the cuts on his forearm.
Then he picked up the rock and started walking east because standing still next to two dead wolves was a good way to attract something that ate wolves.
He found the ruin about an hour before the last light gave out.
It had been a building once, maybe a waystation, collapsed inward so the walls leaned against each other.
The roof was gone but two walls met at a corner with enough overhang to keep rain off.
He checked the perimeter twice and sat down with his back against the cold stone.
He could not sleep.
The cuts on his arm burned when he shifted, and every time the wind moved through the broken walls he heard wolves that were not there.
So he sat in the dark and made rules the way Gerold made rules for the forge.
'Rule one: no Devours below B-Rank unless the trait fills a gap I can't cover any other way.'
'Rule two: walk away from every kill. Don't stand near it.'
'Rule three: find Gerold before the number gets low enough that he wouldn't recognize what came home.'
The system had said it ceases to be human.
He did not need to see zero to understand that the road to zero was the problem, not the destination.
Then something moved in the back of the ruin.
He had the rock in his hand and was on his feet before the sound finished.
It had come from behind a collapsed section of inner wall, where the rubble was piled thick and he had been sure nothing could fit through the gaps.
But something was back there.
He could hear breathing now, uneven and ragged, catching, stopping and starting again.
The way a person breathes when they are trying to be quiet and failing.
Three seconds of dead silence.
Then a voice came through the gap in the stones.
Thin and cracked and so quiet he almost missed it.
"You're not supposed to be awake."
Wren's hand tightened on the rock.
The voice was a woman's, and it had said awake, not alive, which meant the voice knew what had happened to him?
Or at least knew what was supposed to have happened.
"Who told you that?" Wren said.
The silence lasted long enough that he thought she had stopped breathing entirely.
Then the voice came again, quieter than before.
"The same people who put the spear in you."
[Soul Integrity: 99%]