The forest closed around us as we moved away from the entry point. The trees thickened. The light dropped a grade. The packed earth gave way to ground cover, roots threading across the path in patterns that made you watch your footing without being told to.
Cassia moved like she'd memorized the first hundred meters of this place, which she probably had. Two years of Floor One runs would do that. She talked to her chat while she walked, pointing out landmarks I had no context for. The split trunk at the first major fork meant we were in the outer zone. The blue-grey moss on the north-facing bark meant moisture nearby, which meant Ashfang territory was two hundred meters east. She said all of this with the ease of someone who found it genuinely interesting and happened to be describing it to eight thousand people while doing so.
I listened to all of it.
Filed it.
My hand found the compass through my shirt without me deciding to reach for it. The needle sat quietly for once. I dropped my hand before Cassia noticed.
"Chat wants to know if you're scared," Cassia said.
I glanced at her. "What do you think?"
"I think you look calm. Chat thinks you're hiding it."
"Chat's wrong."
"He says chat is wrong." She angled the lens at me briefly. "Are you though? Even a little? This is your first time."
I thought about the honest answer. The forest above me was wrong in scale. The air smelled of things that had no names. Somewhere in those two hundred meters east there were creatures with pack coordination and luminescent eyes that killed unprepared F-rank Awakened in groups of six or more. I had a borrowed blade, leather chest plating that had belonged to someone who no longer needed it, and statistics that didn't exist yet.
I'd wanted this for ten years.
"I've been waiting since I was eight years old," I said. "Scared would be a waste of that."
Cassia went quiet for half a second. The camera one or the real one, I couldn't tell.
"Okay," she said. To me, not the chat. Then back to the lens: "Okay chat, I think he means it."
Something moved in the undergrowth twenty meters to our left.
Not loud. Just the specific quality of silence that changes when weight shifts through it. I stopped walking. Cassia stopped half a step later. Her hand came up with a thread between two fingers that caught no light at all.
I looked left.
The grey-black fur appeared first. Then the eyes. Low to the ground, the Ashfang Wolf watched us from the space between two roots the size of car hoods, its eyes giving off light the way deep-water things give off light. Pale. Wrong. Interested.
One.
I scanned the surrounding undergrowth. No movement. No other displaced silence. One wolf, separated from the pack or scouting. The codex knowledge I'd absorbed from Cassia's description last night said they never hunted alone. Which meant either this one was a scout, or the rest were already repositioning somewhere I wasn't looking.
"There's probably more," Cassia murmured. Very quietly. Chat presumably reading lips or hearing the audio through the device.
"Probably."
The wolf took one step forward. Testing. It wanted to know if we'd run.
I looked at the blade on my hip.
F-rank zeros across everything. The wolf was Beast I. Whatever that translated to in actual stats, it was more than I had. This was the definition of fighting up. The definition of the fastest stat growth available. The definition of what I'd waited ten years for in an eight-year-old's bedroom watching Tower footage on a cracked phone.
"Stand back," I said.
Cassia turned to look at me. "Nox."
"I want a taste."
"You want a." She stopped. "It's a wolf."
"I can see that."
"With teeth."
"I noticed."
"You have F-rank everything."
"Also noticed." I put my hand on the blade's grip. The wolf tracked the movement. Its ears went flat. "Stand back and point the camera somewhere useful."
A beat of silence.
"Chat," Cassia said, very carefully, "I want you to know that I am legally distinct from whatever is about to happen."
The wolf lunged.
I moved right.
Not fast enough to clear it completely, not with F-rank Agility, but enough that the trajectory missed my throat and caught my shoulder instead. The impact spun me. My boots found the ground again and I used the rotation, let it carry me two steps back, created space.
The wolf landed. Turned. Its eyes found me again.
My shoulder hurt. The leather had held but the force underneath it was real. Something was going to bruise significantly.
Good. That was data.
The blade came out.
The wolf watched the metal appear with the specific attention of something that understood what metal meant. Its haunches dropped. Weight shifted forward. The tell before the second lunge was in the ears, I'd read that in three different climbing guides, and the ears went flat again and I was already moving when it came off the ground.
Left this time. I went left.
The wolf's momentum carried it past me. I had maybe two seconds before it corrected.
I hit it in the side with the blade.
The leather hide turned the edge. Didn't break the skin. The impact still landed, force transferring through the blade into something that didn't like it, and the wolf stumbled one step sideways with a sound that wasn't quite a yelp.
It found its feet fast. Faster than I'd expected. Turned on me with its lips pulled back.
We looked at each other.
My shoulder was singing. My grip on the blade was good. The wolf was bleeding from nothing because my F-rank Strength had done approximately zero penetrating damage to hide that the codex said deflected F-rank strikes without Ichor reinforcement.
This was fine. This was exactly the information I needed.
"Having your taste?" Cassia called from somewhere behind me.
"Getting there."
The wolf feinted left. I tracked it. It went right instead. I caught the redirect half a step late and it got inside my reach, closer than I wanted, and I threw my weight backward and we separated again with nothing exchanged but proximity and the understanding that we were both now committed.
My legs were steady. My breathing was steady. The part of me that should have been panicking had looked at the situation and determined that panic didn't have useful applications here and filed it somewhere quiet.
The wolf's haunches dropped again.
I shifted my grip.
There was something in knowing that I had one skill and zero stats and the situation still felt like mine.
Not because I was winning. I was not winning. I was surviving the first thirty seconds against a creature I had no business fighting, with borrowed equipment, on my first run, with eight thousand people watching.
That was fine. Surviving was the beginning. Everything else was just reps.
The wolf came off the ground a third time.
===
A/N:
Welcome to the end of the chapter, Chat. You want to see Nox rob the Tower blind and build his shadow army?
Then feed the algorithm.
Add this to your library, drop those Power Stones and Golden Tickets like Beast Cores, and flood the comments.
Every comment tells me to keep pushing the pace, and every Stone keeps the chapters flowing.
Don't be a lurker, let me know you're climbing with us!