He was eating berries.
Just sitting against a tree, completely healed, no blood, no cuts, no bruises.
"This is really good actually," he said, chewing slowly.
[Regeneration complete. Wounds restored as part of standard task reward. Consider it a basic system function.]
"Yeah, yeah." He popped another berry in. "Still wild though. I was basically dead and now I feel like I slept for eight hours." He looked down at his arm where the claw had gone through. Smooth skin. Not even a scar. "This really does feel like a game." He paused. "Except it doesn't. It feels too real to be a game. The pain was too real."
The system didn't respond to that one.
He finished the last of the berries, wiped his mouth, and stood up. His legs felt solid. His chest didn't hurt. It was genuinely bizarre how good he felt.
Then he remembered, before he passed out, there had been a reward.
"Whisperfang," he said, mostly just trying the word out.
Something appeared in the air in front of him.
A dagger materialized out of nothing, hovered for just a second, then dropped straight into his open hand. He wasn't expecting the weight. It was heavier than it looked solid, real, the handle fitting into his grip in a way that felt almost intentional. He turned it over slowly, getting a proper look at it.
Curved blade. Serrated edge. Claw-shaped handle. The gold detailing caught the light filtering through the canopy and threw it back in thin bright lines.
"Okay," Lucas said quietly. "That is genuinely cool."
He held it up higher and checked the stats.
__________________
[Name: Whisperfang]
[Type: Weapon — Dagger]
[Rarity: Uncommon]
[Base Damage: 5]
[Bonus Stats: Agility +2]
[Durability: 100/100]
[Special Effects:]
[ Mana Resonance: Improves mana flow, enhancing spell casting efficiency.]
[ Precision Strike: Increases attack accuracy.]
__________________
"Base damage five." He turned the dagger over again, running his thumb carefully along the back of the blade not the edge, he wasn't stupid. "That's actually solid. And the accuracy bonus..." He nodded slowly. "Yeah, I can work with that."
He tilted it back and forth, watching the light move across the blade.
"Mana Resonance though. Mana flow, spell casting..." He squinted at it. "I don't actually know any spells. So I have no idea what that does for me yet."
He looked around the small clearing. Found a tree about ten meters away with a decent-sized trunk. Planted his feet. Raised the dagger.
"Only one way to find out."
He swung.
A streak of white light shot from the blade- clean, sharp, a perfect arc and hit the tree trunk with a sound like a whip crack. A cut appeared in the bark, a few inches across, glowing faintly at the edges before the light faded.
Lucas lowered the dagger slowly.
Stared at the tree.
"...Did I just do that?"
He looked at the dagger. Looked at the tree. Looked at the dagger again.
There was an apple hanging from a branch a few meters up. He pointed Whisperfang at it, almost as a test, not really expecting anything different.
Swung again.
The arc curved upward this time, caught the branch clean, and the apple dropped straight down and landed softly in the grass below.
Lucas stood there for a second with the biggest stupid grin on his face.
"Okay." He started spinning the dagger in his hand, which he probably shouldn't have been doing this early but whatever. "Okay. I think I understand now what the headmaster meant about points." He laughed a little to himself. "We earn them out here. By doing exactly this." He looked at the forest stretching ahead of him dark, deep, full of things with stats he could now read.
Full of things he could now hunt.
"Alright," Lucas said, and his voice had shifted slightly. Lighter. More dangerous. "Time to go to work."
---
He went deeper.
The trees packed closer together the further in he went. The canopy thickened until the light came through in narrow broken strips. Roots crossed the forest floor everywhere and fallen branches made the ground uneven and loud if you weren't careful. Lucas moved slowly, watching his feet, keeping his breathing quiet.
"System," he whispered. "How many goblins are in the area?"
[Calculating... approximately 20 to 25 goblins within a 200 meter radius.]
"Twenty." He crouched behind a cluster of ferns, scanning through the gaps between the trunks. "Okay. Twenty goblins." A pause. "That's a lot of points."
He spotted two of them near a small fire, roasting something that had probably been a mana beast before they got to it. They were relaxed. Not watching their surroundings. One of them got up and wandered away from the fire to collect sticks.
Lucas's eyes followed it.
He moved without thinking about it too hard. Slow, low to the ground, testing each step before committing. The ferns rustled once and he froze, waited, kept going. He raised Whisperfang.
Okay. Steady. Just like the tree.
He swung.
The white arc shot from the blade and caught the goblin across the back. The creature groaned and stumbled, reaching behind itself like it was trying to grab whatever just hit it.
"What — it's still up?" Lucas's heart spiked. He swung again immediately.
The second arc landed clean. The goblin went down.
Lucas breathed out. Slowly. "Two hits. Okay. Two hits is fine. I can do two hits."
A snarl came from the direction of the fire.
The second goblin had seen its friend fall. It locked eyes with Lucas across the clearing, and then it jumped full sprint, launching itself into the air with both claws out, furious and fast.
Lucas smirked.
He didn't know when he smirked, but his hands were already moving, Whisperfang crossing through two arcs in quick succession, mana slicing through the air in an X.
The goblin hit both of them on the way down and landed in the dirt without finishing its jump.
Lucas looked at it. Rolled his shoulders.
"Okay," he said, quieter now. "Yeah. I'm getting the hang of this."
_____
After that it stopped feeling like survival and started feeling like something else.
He moved through the forest and the goblins came and he handled them. Some solo, some in pairs, once a group of five that found him before he found them and that one got messy, but he came out the other side of it and kept going. The dagger felt less foreign in his hand with every swing.
He started mixing it up mana arcs at range, then closing the gap and using the blade itself, feeling the serrated edge do its work, learning what distance suited him and what angle gave him the most out of each swing.
The fear from earlier- the tree, the goblin standing over him, the ground, it didn't disappear exactly. It just got quieter. Pushed back by something louder.
He couldn't name the feeling. It was somewhere between scared and alive.
Every kill added to it. Every stat increase that popped up in the corner of his vision added to it. He kept going deeper. Kept hunting. Lost track of how many.
---
Three days passed.
Lucas sat with his back against a tree, cleaning the blood off Whisperfang with a strip of cloth, watching the blade go from dark red to bright silver. The forest was quiet around him. He'd cleared this section out pretty thoroughly.
He pulled up his status without really thinking about it.
_______________________
[Player: Lucas Ironhart]
[Level: 4]
[Health: 100]
[Mana: 40]
[Strength: 11]
[Agility: 9]
[Defense: 10]
[Stamina: 13]
[Unallocated Stat: 5]
[Magic: Not awakened yet]
[Skills: Mana Perception]
[Weapon: Whisperfang]
______________________
He looked at the numbers for a long time.
"I've really come a long way," he said quietly, to nobody. He almost didn't recognize the stats as his own. Then he smiled, small but real. "Which five do I put the points into..."
The ground shook.
Not an earthquake, something more specific than that. A deep, rhythmic vibration, the kind that comes from something very large moving nearby. Leaves dropped from branches above him. The ferns shivered.
Lucas went completely still.
He looked through the treeline.
And then he saw it.
It was massive. Easily twice the height of anything he'd fought so far, moving between the trees like they weren't even an obstacle. Its fur burned actually burned, deep orange and red like something between fire and flesh, shifting with every step. Its tail swung lazily behind it and left trails of flame hanging in the air that took a few seconds to disappear.
A fox. Or a wolf. Something between the two, something that didn't have a clean name, something that looked at the world like it was waiting to be bothered.
Lucas did not breathe.
'Okay,' he thought, with ridiculous wording 'That thing would step on me, crush me and, keep walking without noticing. I back up slowly. I go the other direction. I find more goblins. There are plenty of goblins. I like goblins now. Goblins are fine.'
He started easing backward, one slow step at a time, keeping his eyes on the creature.
A message appeared.
[Task: Defeat the Gigantic Fox.]
Lucas stopped moving.
He read it again.
He looked at the fox.
He looked at the message.
"Are you," he said, his voice very quiet and very flat, "Absolutely fucking kidding me!?"