He pushed himself upright.
His eyes snapped open. They weren't brown anymore; they were a muddy, animalistic gold.
Val released a sharp hiss. ‘You’re alive. Just breathe...”
His skin was pale, stretched thin over newly knitted muscle, and his breath came in ragged, steaming hitches. The healing factor hadn't just fixed him; it had rebooted him into a state of pure, primal survival.
Health : 183/300 | Status: Stabilized – System Reboot Successful
Stratum : Thrall II
‘The gamble had paid off.’
The numbers of his soul lay bare. In the dark of his mind, the nodes pulsed like dying stars, their brightness dictated by the "potential" he was born with.
Ferocity [★★] – 06/60
Integrity [★] – 06/45
Velocity [★★] – 07/60
Serenity [★★] – 09/60
Proximity [★★★] – 04/70
[Velocity check: 6→7. Asset Withdrawal Rate accelerating… 00:44 → 00:43]
[Integrity check: 4→6. Health increasing... 200→300]
[Proximity check: 1→4. Asset Storage Capacity increasing... 1→4]
Obsidian veins pulsed beneath his skin. The evil eye on his palm returned back to slumber.
'What is this thing...?' Val stared at his hand, his mind racing through biological and etheric possibilities. 'Is it a curse, or a blessing?'
He didn't have the data yet.
The sensation of the Abyssal Hound's maw still lingered at his throat. But as Val looked down at the carcass, his animalistic gold eyes narrowed.
The beast was headless, yes—but it was also heartless.
A hole had been carved into the center of its chest. The Abyssal Heart was gone.
Val's gaze drifted to the north, following the heavy, armored boot prints of the man who had wielded the knife.
‘Marcus...’
They thought they’d left a corpse.
They’d actually just cleared his conscience...
A shadow appeared across the silt. Someone was coming from behind.
Val coiled back and let out a predatory glare.
“Easy there, Scientist,” a familiar voice drawled. “You’re looking at me like you’re deciding which part to eat first.”
Happy Dan stood at the edge of the clearing; his yellow Hawaiian shirt was impossible to ignore in this twisted jungle.
On his hand, blood smeared wooden club resting casually in his grip. With a flick of his wrist, Dan tossed the weapon.
It skidded through the silver silt and stopped inches from Val’s boots.
“Found it on a guy who didn’t need it anymore,” Dan said cheerfully. “Martyr One-Zero-Two-Two. Real tragic he is. Anyway, you looked under-equipped for the neighborhood.”
Val didn’t thank him.
He didn’t move. His eyes fixed on the weapon.
An Iron-Oak Rungu, similar to Marcus’s—but wrong. The hilt was warped, the grain twisted by localized spatial distortion, as if reality itself had tried and failed to bend it cleanly.
Val reached down with his right hand and gripped the hilt.
[ITEM IDENTIFIED: IRON-OAK RUNGU (DAMAGED)]
[WARNING: CRITICAL STRUCTURAL INSTABILITY DETECTED IN ETHERIC CORE]
“A scientific audit is required,” Val murmured.
Val didn’t swing it. He dismantled it.
The club came apart piece by piece in his hands. His vision shifted: not seeing wood and iron, but flows, pressure points, misaligned resonance. His thumb traced the cracked housing where a small etheric orb had been embedded.
To most, it was a blunt instrument. To Val, it was unfinished math.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
He felt the core vibrating against the wood.
Fractured, off-axis, barely contained. A weapon only by accident.
“The orb is misaligned,” Val said flatly.
Then, after a beat, a thin smile touched his lips.
“…It’s perfect.”
Dan snorted, leaning against a nearby tree. “Trash kills just as well as treasure if you hit hard enough.”
“Where’s the Vending Beacon?” he asked.
Dan jerked a thumb toward the thickening fog. Blue pathfinding lights flickered faintly in the distance.
“Two clicks northeast. Past the Iron-Oak grove.”
Val looked down at the midnight-black fur. It had hidden his heat signature during the fever, but now it was just dead weight.
He touched the oily surface. ‘Store.’
The pelt didn’t just vanish; it shattered into blue geometric voxels, sucked into the glowing ring of his Phaistos Halo.
[ASSET: ABYSSAL HOUND PELT — RETRACTED] [STORAGE CAPACITY: 1/4]
Weight lifted from his shoulders. He felt lighter. Leaner. Ready.
Ahead, the Vending Beacon rose from the clearing like a monolith of polished obsidian, humming with the low-frequency vibration of a processing world.
The Beacon didn't belong here. In a world of chitin, iron-oak, and silver silt, this monolith was too smooth, too perfect. It was a fragment of a higher civilization pinned into the dirt like a needle.
It didn't look like it had been built; it looked like it had been inserted into Ortho.
Val stepped toward it. As he approached, his Phaistos Halo hummed in sympathetic resonance.
The Beacon’s surface rippled, and the UI bloomed into existence.
The same crisp, voxel-based geometry he had seen back in the Halo Processing Sector.
It was the same architecture. The same code.
To the Ortho locals, this was a sacred font of the Mandate. To Val, it was just a terminal.
Two interfaces hovered before it.
One was a dull, flickering blue, the standard "Martyr" tier.
The other, however, rippled with a shimmering, recursive gold. A high-protocol gate that only pulsed into existence when Val's specific biometric signature drew near.
Val stepped toward the standard blue interface first.
[CURRENT BALANCE: 30 RUBAL; 22 GOLDEN RUBAL]
The prices were insulting.
A standard ration pack was 18. A basic iron-oak splinter was 120.
Val scrolled past the "Martyr Essentials" with a look of pure clinical disgust. He wasn't here to survive; he was here to scavenge.
He tapped the "Scrap & Disposal" tab.
[ITEM: MONOFILAMENT SCALPEL — 30 RUBAL] [DESCRIPTION: A DISCARDED HARVESTING TOOL. DULL EDGE. NON-REPAIRABLE.]
To the System, it was trash. To Val, it was a precision instrument capable of bypassing the reinforced cellular walls of Abyssal flora.
He tapped "Purchase." The Rubal balance hit zero, and a slender, vibrating blade materialized in the retrieval slot.
"Cutting it close, aren't you?" Dan strolled up.
Val didn't answer. He turned to the second screen. The Golden Interface.
[CURRENT BALANCE: 22 GOLDEN RUBAL]
"Whoa," Dan whistled, his eyes widening. "Where did you get that many Golden Rubal, you sicko? Most Abyssal elite kills only amount to five at most. You’ve got a whopping twenty-two? You’re sitting on a fortune, Scientist."
Val’s fingers moved with surgical speed. He didn't look at the weapons. He looked at the tools.
- High-Tensile Synthesis Cord (2 Gold): Standard utility rope for securing cargo.
- Stabilizer Brackets (4 Gold): Heavy-duty clamps.
- Reinforced Green Tarp (2 Gold): A heavy, weather-resistant polymer.
“What is this purchase? Green Tarp? What do you think this is, a picnic?”
As Val finalized his tactical acquisitions, Dan’s gaze drifted to the "Luxury & Consumables" tab. His toothy grin softened into something almost reverent.
"Man, look at that beauty," Dan whispered, pointing to a crystalline bottle in the display.
[ITEM: HYPER ETHERIC ABSINTHE— 96% POTENCY] [PRICE: 14 GOLDEN RUBAL]
"I'd trade my wife in a heartbeat for a sip of that," Dan muttered, his voice thick with a sudden, genuine hunger. "God, I can practically smell the burn from here."
Val didn't look up from his manifest. He closed his tactical windows, his account now sitting at 14 Golden Rubal.
He paused. Without a word, he reopened the consumables tab, tapped the Hyper-Etheric Absinthe, and confirmed the purchase.
[BALANCE: 0 GOLDEN RUBAL (ACCOUNT CLEARED)]
The heavy, cold bottle of violet liquid slid into the slot with a dull thud. Dan stared at it, his jaw literally hanging open.
"Wow," Dan breathed. "I didn't take you for a man of ‘hard taste’ Val.”
“I guess I was wrong. You just burned a hell of a retirement fund. That bottle is worth 14,000 standard Rubal. You’re gonna drink that right now?"
Val picked up the bottle, its glass freezing to the touch. He didn't even look at the label. With a casual, almost bored flick of his wrist, he tossed the 14,000-Rubal bottle toward Dan.
Dan scrambled to catch it, nearly tripping over a tree root as he clutched the liquor to his chest like a newborn child.
"I don't have 'hard taste,' Dan," Val said, already packing the Synthesis Cord into his lab coat. "But you do. Christmas comes early this year."
Val adjusted the Monofilament Scalpel in his pocket. The audit was over. It was time for the harvest.
Dan watched Val for a long moment, crumbs dusting his fingers.
“By the way,” Dan said casually, “what’s with all this mumbo jumbo?”
He gestured at the samples, the vials, the strange crystallized sap Val had carefully sealed.
“You’ve been collecting forest junk all day.”
Val didn’t answer right away.
He stared at the high-tier chemicals in his hands. Then past them. Into the forest.
To where Marcus and the others had vanished.
“They took the heart,” Val said finally.
“My Abyssal heart.”
Dan stopped chewing.
“Without it,” Val continued, voice level, “I can’t enter the wormhole.”
He turned to Dan.
“I’m going to take it back. And to do that, I might have to kill another human being. Someone like Marcus.”
No anger.
No hesitation.
“Are you in?”
Dan looked at him.
Not at the weird components.
Not at the plan.
At the certainty.
He swallowed his cracker and broke into that wide, casino-floor grin.
“Fuck yeah.”
Make of that what you will.
Thanks to the early Martyrs holding the line since Geneva. Chapter 8 drops tomorrow — the harvest begins.