What.
I pulled my hand back. The text remained. I looked at Cassia. She was talking to chat about something, gesturing with her free hand, completely unaware that reality had just produced a prompt that made zero sense.
Could she see this?
"Cassia."
"Mm?"
"Do you see anything weird right now?"
She glanced at me. "Define weird."
"Above the corpse. Any text?"
She looked. Frowned. Looked harder. "No? Should I?"
No. She shouldn't. Nobody should. Beast Cores were physical objects you harvested with your hands, not digital prompts that asked yes or no questions about registering shadows.
This was the Devour ability.
Had to be. The Akashic Record had listed my Ichor Type as Devour with a skill called Plunder and a talent called Shadow Sovereign. I'd filed all of that under problems to solve later because the immediate problem was surviving my first run.
Apparently later had arrived.
Register as shadow. What did that mean? The wolf was dead. Dead things didn't register as anything. They decomposed and left Cores behind and you sold those Cores for money that paid your debts.
Unless.
Unless Devour worked differently.
Unless the ability that my corrupted Akashic Record had given me operated outside standard Tower mechanics in the same way everything else about my status operated outside standard Tower mechanics.
The Race field that displayed static instead of Human. The voice that asked three times why I climbed before pulling me through a roof. The ??? danger rating that made Registry scanners turn red.
I was Vein affinity. The rarest category. The one that produced unique abilities the Tower Research Institute couldn't replicate or predict.
This was apparently what mine did.
"Nox?" Cassia had stopped talking to chat. "You okay? You're just staring at it."
I looked at the prompt again.
Y or N.
Accept or decline.
Take the wolf as something other than a Core, or harvest it normally and move on like every other climber in the Tower.
The smart play was probably to decline. Unknown abilities with vague descriptions were how people died in ways the Tower Safety Council wrote warnings about. Register as shadow sounded harmless until it bound your soul to a creature that ate you from the inside out.
But.
I'd wanted this for ten years.
I'd entered the Tower despite having no right to be here. I'd lied to Registry. I'd fought a wolf with zero stats. I'd survived the first thirty seconds of actual combat through movement and timing and the specific arrogance of someone who refused to accept that F-rank meant helpless.
Playing it safe was what civilians did.
I reached forward and thought yes as clearly as I could manage.
The text flickered once.
The wolf's corpse dissolved.
Not slowly. Not gradually. Just gone, like someone had hit delete on reality. The blood vanished. The fur vanished. The body that had been occupying space three seconds ago stopped existing in any form I could perceive.
Cassia made a noise that was half gasp, half swear. "What just—"
Darkness pooled where the corpse had been. Actual darkness, not shadow, not the absence of light but something with presence and weight. It collected itself, pulling inward, condensing, forming a shape that looked familiar because I'd just killed the thing it was copying.
The wolf stood again.
Different. Wrong. Made of something that shouldn't be standing.
Its eyes were empty. The luminescent quality gone, replaced with nothing. Its body was black the way deep water was black. Light touched it and didn't bounce back. Its edges were slightly too sharp, like someone had drawn the outline with a blade instead of letting it form naturally.
It looked at me.
Turned its head toward me with the kind of attention that said it knew exactly what I was and what I'd done and was waiting for the next instruction.
My pulse was hammering.
My injured arm had stopped aching because my brain had assigned higher priority to processing what currently stood three feet away from me.
"Nox." Cassia's voice was very small. "What is that."
"I don't know."
"Why is it standing?"
"I really don't know."
The shadow wolf took one step forward, testing whether its legs worked the way legs were supposed to work. It found stable ground and shifted weight to all four paws and stood there.
" PLUNDER ACTIVATED "
" Ashfang Wolf - Beast I "
" STR acquired: +8 "
" AGI acquired: +11 "
" END acquired: +6 "
" Skill acquisition: 14% chance - failed "
The notification appeared and vanished before I'd finished reading it.
Stats. The wolf had given me stats. Not through harvesting a Core. Through whatever Plunder did when I registered something as shadow instead of treating it like normal Tower currency.
I looked at my hands. They didn't look different. I didn't feel different. But the system said I'd just acquired twenty-five combined stat points across three categories from a single Beast I kill.
The forums said grinding Floor One for a month produced maybe thirty points if you were efficient about it.
I'd done twenty-five in three minutes.
"Nox." Cassia again. Still small. "The wolf is looking at you."
I looked at the wolf.
It was still looking at me.
Waiting.
"Sit," I said.
The shadow wolf sat.
Its haunches dropped. Its front legs remained straight. It adopted the exact posture a trained dog would adopt, except it was made of darkness and shouldn't be capable of adopting anything.
Cassia's camera was pointed directly at us. I could hear the faint whir of it adjusting focus.
Chat was going to have opinions about this.
"Can you," Cassia started. Stopped. Started again. "Can you make it do something else?"
I thought about it. "Stand."
The wolf stood.
"Okay." Cassia's voice had climbed half an octave. "Okay. So you have a shadow wolf now. That's. That's fine. Completely normal. Just a regular Floor One thing that definitely happens to everyone."
I looked at her. "Can you see it?"
"Can I—yes. Yes I can see the nightmare creature you just summoned from a corpse. Chat can see it too. Chat is losing their absolute minds right now."
Good. That was good. If they could see it then it wasn't just happening inside my head. The shadow wolf was real in whatever way Tower constructs were real.
I had killed a wolf and turned it into something that obeyed commands.
Shadow Sovereign. The talent listed on my Akashic Record. This was what it did.
And Plunder had given me stats. Twenty-five points. Enough to pull me out of F-rank zero across three categories.
This was.
This changed everything.
"We should keep moving," Cassia said. Very carefully. Like she was trying not to startle me or the shadow wolf or possibly both. "Before anything else decides to investigate why there's fresh blood on the ground."
I looked down. The blood was still there. The wolf's body had vanished but the blood it had spilled remained, dark against the dirt.
Right. Movement. We were here to hunt. This was my first run and I'd just spent fifteen minutes fighting one wolf. Cassia did three runs a week. She probably cleared a dozen creatures in that timeframe.
"Lead the way," I said.
Cassia stared at me for three full seconds. Then at the shadow wolf. Then back at me.
"You're bringing it."
"It's mine."
"It's made of nightmare."
"It's still mine."
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked at chat. "Okay. Fine. We're bringing the nightmare wolf. Everyone's fine with this. Nobody has concerns." She pointed deeper into the forest. "That way. Try not to let it eat anyone we meet."
I looked at the shadow wolf. It looked back with eyes that didn't exist.
This was going to be complicated.
This was going to be incredible.
I started walking. The shadow wolf followed exactly two steps behind my left heel, matching my pace without being told to, moving through the undergrowth without making a sound.
My first taste of combat had been everything I'd wanted.
The part that came after had been something I hadn't known existed.
Good. I was here for both.
===
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!