[Author’s POV]

The next morning was supposed to go well.

7:45am. I woke up to the most persistent stomach grumble I’d had in years. Every moment of restless movement on that bunk bed the previous night had been a cruel reminder that I’d barely touched the porridge.

Almost everyone had left their bowls mostly full. Everyone except Aria — she’d finished her bowl and quietly consumed mine alongside it, with the energy of someone who had no moral objections to that. The preference for going hungry was predictable, considering that most of us had walked into the cafeteria with the assumption that fried chicken was being served. It had smelled like it. It had strongly, specifically smelled exactly like it.

And this morning was supposed to be different. Cinnamon rolls. Omelettes. Toast with cream sauce, maybe. I’d gone to sleep with an actually watering mouth, impatiently waiting for the sun to come up.

It never did.

The first thing I registered was cold. Charged and aggressive — the specific kind that didn’t make sense after eight hours of sleep. The dorm room was dark. Empty. The windows were cracked and shattered in ways they hadn’t been last night. From where I was lying, I could already see that a row of bunk beds further down the room had been knocked over like dominoes, like something had walked in here at some point in the night and decided to rearrange things.

"What is going on?"

[Domain Rank: 97]

[Timer: 1 Hour]

[Task: Survive → Rank Up 3 Levels]

The screen shoved the task in my face without any consideration for my emotional state. Rank up three levels in one hour. It had taken me two full hours of challenges to move three levels the last time. No buffs. No lucky draws. No additional equipment. Just the same common-type sword that had already materialised in my right hand.

And no Amelia.

She’d gone silent after I’d asked her about past system users being converted into NPCs after the system killed them. Nothing since. Every summon since that conversation had produced no response— not avoidance, not attitude, just absence.

Which told me something more specific than avoidance would have. Someone was watching. The same person who’d pulled Amelia from my system specifically so I couldn’t keep digging.

And honestly? That was fine.

Removing Amelia was an answer in itself, and a big enough one to add to everything else I was piecing together. I’d read enough stories to recognise the pattern — final bosses who deliberately let the main character grow stronger, just so the eventual confrontation meant something. I had a feeling that was exactly where this was heading.

Until then, I just had to keep moving. This was the last tournament. I needed to rank up to top three to get anywhere close to whoever was running this. And right now I was sitting at 97, so I had a considerable amount of distance to cover before that conversation happened.

The immediate problem was survival, specifically keeping my head where it was—

SLITH!

Something came at me fast. I saw it in the fraction of a second before it arrived, dropped, and felt it pass directly over my head. It impaled into the wall behind me — black, sticky, vine-shaped, moving like it had intent.

What the actual—

[You Have Encountered A Slime Beast]

[Level: Red]

My breathing stopped briefly.

The creature was small. Skinny. A back horn extending a few centimetres from its head, skin an oily, shiny black with slime for claws and a mouth full of teeth that sat deeper than they had any right to. It looked like concept art from an alien film that someone had decided to make real without asking anyone’s permission.

It launched another thicket of slimy vines at my neck. I raised the sword and deflected, then rolled off the bunk without wasting a second on standing.

No strategy yet. I dropped low and moved, putting the frame of the bed between myself and it. One of the few things I understood about slimes — from absolutely everything except practical experience — was that they were sneaky. They didn’t announce follow-up attacks with noise. And if alien guy wasn’t alone in this room, which he probably wasn’t, making myself an obvious target was a very fast way to find out just how outnumbered I was.

I watched it come around the corner, head moving slowly, searching for wherever I’d disappeared to. I stayed still. Calculated.

The play was to wait until it turned its back. Then move fast, get a grip on it, finish it before any of its colleagues registered that one of them was gone. Clean. Quiet. Efficient.

That was the plan.

The plan lasted right up until the beast poked its head directly down into the gap of the bunk bed and made eye contact with me from approximately thirty centimetres away.

I screamed. Involuntarily, immediately, and without dignity. The sword went up on pure instinct and the blade went through its eye with a wet crunch that I was going to be thinking about for several days.

It died with a screech — the kind of screech that carries and echoes and travels through walls and announces itself to everything in the vicinity that shares its biology.

Screeches answered from across the room. Footsteps followed.

There goes the quiet approach.

I pulled myself out from the bunk and ran toward the dorm exit door. The logic was simple — get out, find space, restrategize with some distance between me and whatever was converging on that sound. Solid plan.

I grabbed the door handle. It didn’t move.

Shit.

Behind me, slime beasts were coming — stubby legs moving with a speed that shouldn’t have been possible given the leg-to-body ratio, screeching as they closed the distance. I pulled the handle again. Same result. Kicked the door. Added a sore to my left foot and accomplished nothing else.

The pain was what made me actually look at the door properly.

[Player Must Complete Current Node To Move On To The Next Node]

"What if I don’t want to complete this node?!" I kicked it again anyway, glanced back at the beasts. Gaining. "Let me out, you stupid door!"

[Nodes are PROGRESSIVE. Not OPTIONAL, you stupid human]

I stared at that last part for a full second.

I was being sassed by a door. That was a new development.

I turned back to the room and ran the numbers. Two beasts coming from the east. Three approaching from the south. Five more from the west. Ten total, now slowing to a stop roughly a metre away — apparently waiting, which was somehow more unsettling than if they’d just kept coming.

Rushing in was immediately off the table. Their vines had reach and they could set terms before I could close the distance. Dodging wasn’t a real option either — with ten of them working from different angles, I’d absorb a hit eventually no matter how much flexibility I had. My speed wasn’t refined enough to make that math work in my favour.

That left one thing.

Nullification. My ability. Which I had spent the last several days reading tutorials about rather than actually practicing, because reading tutorials had felt like the responsible preparatory step and practicing had required committing to being embarrassed in front of myself.

Deeply unfortunate timing to discover that gap.

But a life-or-death situation was technically also a practice environment. Possibly the most effective one available.

"Alright." I raised the sword. Took one step forward. "Come at me, ugly."

The beasts moved in pairs. First wave of vines — I cut them, barely. Second wave came immediately behind the first and I caught it with the flat of the blade, which was already the wrong response. One of the beasts locked its vines around the sword itself and started pulling.

Come on—

I pulled back. The creature was stronger than it had any right to be given its size. It yanked the sword clean out of my grip and threw it through a cracked window on the east side of the room. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

The sword was gone.

Okay. Ability. Now.

I closed my eyes for the split second I could afford — let the immediate noise of the situation drop back. The tutorials had described it as a mental connection with the body’s energy. Not a thought or a command. It was more like finding the frequency and letting it run.

Like cultivation, essentially. Every system novel I’d ever read had a cultivation arc. I just hadn’t expected mine to be happening in a demolished bunk room surrounded by alien slimes.

Something started. I felt it, a weight building in my palms, gathering, pressing outward like it had somewhere to go. The energy was real, more real than the tremors I’d felt before. It was actually about to—

SWISH.

Vines caught my right foot and removed me from the equation entirely. I left the ground, arced through the air, and introduced myself to the nearest wall with a sound that the wall was not apologetic about. My head hit debris. My spine registered its own separate complaint. I slid to the floor and stayed there.

For a moment, everything was just quiet internal inventory.

"You know what?" I exhaled slowly. Still checking if I could feel my head. "Just kill me already."