The wolf came off the ground with more speed than the previous attempts. It learned. That wasn't supposed to happen with Beast I creatures, but the forums lied about plenty of things and apparently wolf intelligence was one of them.
I went low instead of lateral.
Dropped into a crouch that my F-rank Endurance immediately protested, felt the displacement of air where the wolf's jaws snapped shut on nothing, and drove upward with the blade.
The angle was wrong. The tip scraped along the wolf's underside without catching purchase, drawing a line through fur that went bright with blood but didn't penetrate deep enough to matter. The wolf twisted midair, landed behind me, and I was already turning when its weight hit my back.
We went down together.
My face found dirt. The wolf's claws scraped against the leather plating, looking for gaps, finding the space between chest and shoulder guard. Pain opened across my upper arm in three parallel lines that burned before they hurt. The wolf's breath was hot and rank against my neck, teeth searching for the killing angle.
This was bad.
This was very bad.
My right arm was pinned under me. The blade was somewhere to my left. The wolf had maybe two seconds before it figured out that my neck was right there and all it needed to do was close its jaws.
I threw my head backward.
Skull met something that felt like a muzzle. The impact sent stars across my vision but the wolf's weight shifted, just enough, just barely, and I got my left hand under me and shoved.
We rolled. The wolf came off my back. I kept the momentum going, found my feet before it found its own, and the blade was three steps away on the ground where I'd dropped it.
The wolf was between me and the weapon.
Fantastic.
My arm was bleeding. Not heavily, but consistently. Three claw marks running from shoulder to elbow, burning every time I moved. My shoulder from the first impact throbbed in rhythm with my pulse. My face had acquired dirt in places I would be tasting for hours.
The wolf watched me with those luminescent eyes, deciding if I was worth finishing or if I'd already lost enough blood to handle the problem naturally.
Chat was probably losing their minds right now.
Cassia was somewhere behind me, hopefully far enough back that the wolf considered her a secondary problem.
I needed the blade.
The wolf was not moving away from the blade.
Standard problem. Standard solution. Make the wolf move.
I picked up a rock. Fist-sized, good weight, probably wouldn't do meaningful damage but that wasn't the point. The wolf tracked the movement, ears flat again, reading the threat assessment.
I threw it.
Not at the wolf. At the ground three feet to its left.
The rock hit dirt and the wolf flinched right, just a half-step, just enough to clear the path, and I was already moving. Closed the distance in four steps that my Agility score said I shouldn't be able to close that fast. Adrenaline was a beautiful thing. I grabbed the blade's grip as the wolf realized what had happened and turned to correct.
It came at me head-on.
No feint this time. Just commitment. Jaws open, eyes locked on target, the kind of attack that said one of us was dying in the next three seconds.
I sidestepped. Not far. Just enough to make it miss by the margin I had available. The wolf's momentum carried it past my hip and I brought the blade down in an overhead arc that started at my shoulder and ended at the base of the wolf's skull.
The tip punched through hide this time.
Found meat underneath. Kept going. The wolf's forward motion did half the work, driving the blade deeper as physics and terrible timing met in the middle. I felt the resistance give way to something softer. Felt the blade scrape against bone. Felt the wolf's entire body go rigid for half a heartbeat before every muscle released at once.
The weight hit the ground.
I stumbled backward, blade coming free with a sound that was wet and wrong, and caught myself against a root before I went down too. My legs were shaking. My arm was on fire. My shoulder had moved past throbbing into something more concerning.
The wolf twitched once. Twice. Then stopped.
"YESSSSS." Cassia's voice carried through the trees like she'd just won something. "Chat, did you see that? Tell me you saw that. He actually did it. F-rank everything and he soloed an Ashfang."
I looked at the corpse.
At the blood pooling underneath it.
At my blade, which was now significantly redder than when I'd received it twenty minutes ago.
My first kill.
In the Tower.
On Floor One.
With borrowed gear and zero stats and eight thousand people watching through a camera I could hear repositioning behind me.
I started laughing.
Not the polite kind. The genuine kind that happens when your brain can't process what just happened and picks humor as the default response. My shoulders shook. My injured arm protested. I didn't care.
That was incredible.
That was the most alive I'd felt since waking up in Veilgate.
Maybe the most alive I'd felt in eighteen years.
"You good?" Cassia appeared at my elbow, camera angled to catch both me and the wolf in frame. Her expression sat somewhere between impressed and concerned, which seemed fair given the circumstances.
"I'm perfect."
"You're bleeding."
"I noticed." I looked at my arm. The three lines had stopped burning and started aching, which the medical forums said meant the damage was shallow. Painful but manageable. The leather had saved me from worse. "How bad does it look?"
"Like a wolf tried to open you." She pulled something from a pouch at her belt. Small glass vial, liquid inside that caught the filtered green light. "Healing draught. Low grade. It'll close the wounds but you'll still feel it for a day or two."
She handed it over. I pulled the stopper with my teeth and drank. The liquid tasted like mint mixed with something medicinal and slightly rotten. It hit my stomach and warmth spread outward through my chest, down my arm, finding the claw marks and doing something that felt like stitching from the inside.
I watched the skin knit itself back together. Not completely. The lines were still visible, still red, but no longer open. The bleeding stopped.
"That's unsettling," I said.
"Wait until you try the expensive ones. Those are worse." Cassia retrieved the empty vial and gestured at the wolf. "You going to harvest the Core or just admire your work?"
Right. The Core.
The entire economic engine of this place ran on Beast Cores. Kill the creature, harvest the Core, sell it to a broker for Ash. Basic Tower mathematics that I'd read about in a dozen different guides.
I approached the corpse.
The wolf looked smaller dead. Still dangerous. Just less immediately. The blood had stopped pooling. The eyes had gone dark, whatever luminescent quality they possessed shutting down when the rest of it stopped functioning.
I knelt beside it and reached for where the guides said the Core would be. Center mass, slightly behind the ribcage, embedded in tissue that required some effort to access.
My hand hovered over the fur.
Text appeared.
Not in the air exactly. In my vision. Blue lettering that shouldn't exist outside of video games, floating above the corpse like a notification I hadn't asked for.
" REGISTER AS SHADOW? "
" Y / N "
===
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!