[Achievement Unlocked: ’Let Me Die’]

[Reward: Rune [4 Blue Box]]

[Rune Can Upgrade Equipment]

[Avenger Upgrade Plan: 3000 souls = 1 Rune Upgrade]

[Upgrade / Ditch This Info]

If you’re the kind of person who wakes up every morning with the dream of eventually opening your eyes to a random system interface, I’d advise against that. It’s math. And mentally, it was draining even when you weren’t half dead against a dormitory wall.

Four blue boxes. A three thousand soul rune upgrade. I could use the rune to complete a sword upgrade, but whether that was going to matter in the face of actual death was debatable. At that moment, I was two wrong steps from actual death, and the sword was somewhere on the other side of the room.

My ability was null; apparently preloading on a timeline it had not communicated to me. And judging from the sword movement I’d managed earlier, I still had a shot at protection. Something small, at the very least. Enough to bring a few of them down before the inevitable. I knew I was probably going down to these slimes eventually. I just had to be strategic about when.

I stood up. Brushed my fingers down the blade and stared at my reflection in the metal. A darker, more exhausted version of me stared back.

Just a month or two ago, I’d been sitting alone in class, marking days off a mental calendar where school had always been something to survive. Avoiding bullies. Taking hits and absorbing the weight of them. Grinding forward on nothing more than the stubbornness to graduate.

At the very least, I hadn’t felt this constricted. The system’s mystery. Rowan’s death. My parents’ disappearances. And for some reason, all of it was connecting to the same thread— my becoming stronger. Whatever the cost of that was going to be after this, I wasn’t planning to negotiate with it.

"Upgrade."

The sword appeared in my hand. Avenger. Three feet of blade with edges now glowing red at the tips, like metal fresh from a forge. The energy in it had more weight— noticeably heavier, noticeably more dangerous than it had been a minute ago.

[Upgrade Completed]

[Avenger: Attack +1102]

The first significant boost I’d gotten from the system in a while. It wasn’t enough to make me feel invincible, but it was enough to take a few of these things with me on the way down. I glanced at the timer. Forty minutes remaining. Not even halfway through whatever this node had been designed to throw at me.

There’s no way I survive this.

I charged anyway.

I sliced off a vine before it could reach my torso. Ducked under a second thread and slid into range on the nearest beast. I didn’t wait for it to recalibrate — SLICE— blade into the space between torso and lower abdomen.

It dropped.

Another vine whipped past my ear. A third came right after. I grabbed that one with both hands, held the grip firm, and braced for the pull. When it flung me, I let the trajectory work— landed with the sword already raised, drove it directly into the back horn of a second beast.

Two down. Eight to go, hopefully.

I’d been running on luck and force and I knew it. Both had a ceiling.

A slash into the torso of a third beast, finished with a dismantling kick. The surrounding ones screeched — apparently I’d just ended something significant to them — and one dove directly onto me, wrapping its slime around my neck before I could create distance. Another came in from the right, threads locking onto my foot. Then the others joined in, systematically binding my arms, my torso, cinching tighter in sequence.

The pressure built. My eyes watered. My face went red. The edges of my vision started going dark.

Then the threads went loose all at once.

They snapped back toward the beasts themselves, each one screeching in pain as the vines recoiled. The one on my neck slid off and hit the floor. Dead. The others tried to attack again and nothing happened — their threads disobeyed them, curling uselessly, going nowhere. For unintelligent creatures, they managed to look genuinely confused about it.

My nullification had activated.

That’s my opening.

I tightened the grip on Avenger, planted my feet, and leapt at the nearest beast. One clean slice through the forehead. Moved to the next, a slanted line from shoulder to chest, no calculation, no pause. Then the one after that. Then the one after that.

The last one caught the blade in its mouth. A brutal stab that came out through the back of its neck. I watched black blood run down the sword — thick, sticky, deeply unpleasant.

Man, that’s disgusting.

[Rank Up: 96]

But a job done, at least. I bent forward and put my hands on my knees, pulling air back into myself after however long I’d been holding it. Close. That had been extremely close.

I really have to learn how to control this ability.

And fast. If slimes were this much of a problem at rank 96, whatever was waiting further up the ranking wasn’t going to be any less cooperative. I couldn’t keep relying on it activating by accident at the last second.

The timer read thirty minutes.

I moved to the door. Decided just a peek— not a commitment to another suicidal stretch, just enough to understand what the difficulty ahead looked like.

I pulled the handle, but the door refused again.

The system on it came up:

[And what makes you think you’ve completed this node?]

[Think again, Loser]

I stared at that.

Something moved behind me. I turned.

Slime was curling across the floor, moving with purpose, gathering the carcasses of every beast I’d just killed, pulling them together, absorbing them. The mass grew. Reshaped. Pulled itself upright.

Then it grew about twelve feet tall. Four feet wide. A giant, unified slime— smooth, featureless, and radiating the specific energy of something that had just been given a lot of raw material to work with.

What in the—

[You Have Encountered: The Slime Boss]

[Level: Red]

GROWLLLLLL!!

"Fuck me."

---

The scary part wasn’t that it looked buffed or intimidating in any dramatic sense. Honestly, it was just a very large drop of slime slowly crawling through its own proximity, adjusting to its new body.

The actually scary part was my exhaustion.

My stomach grumbled, eating into itself at this point, probably well past 8am, which meant breakfast had already started. I had thirty minutes to defeat this thing and get to the cafeteria. That was the timeline I was working with. Not survive the apocalypse tournament. Get. Breakfast.

"And yet I have to fight this stupid thing?" I looked up at the slime boss, weighing what was left of my energy through the sword. "I swear I’m going to kill you."

I leapt. Tried to drive the blade into whatever counted as its brain. The slime boss just melted apart, let me dive through empty space, and I hit the ground behind it with the sword planted for landing support.

"It’s liquid." My eyes widened. "How am I supposed to beat something that’s—"

It didn’t let me finish. One purge from its enlarged hands sent a vicious thread of slime directly at me. I dodged, moved to the right corner of the room. The monster grabbed a bunk bed and hurled it. I jumped over it, the bed went through the wall on the east side instead, leaving a gap where solid material used to be. Threads came again while I was midair. I sliced them off and landed running, pushing toward the monster while it regenerated.

Then a shadow moved overhead. I looked up just in time to catch the outline of a fist the size of a small vehicle coming down. A quick side roll. The impact hit the floor and sent a shockwave through it.

I didn’t stop moving. When I finally reached close range, I went in, cold and precise, impaling the blade into what appeared to be its leg, going through with minimal resistance.

I expected a screech. Anything to confirm I was making progress. But the monster just looked at me like I was a mild inconvenience. Then it reached one hand down and flicked me.

The force was unreasonable. I genuinely reconsidered life for the two seconds I was airborne. But I landed. And I kept landing, kept picking myself back up with the specific expression main characters wear right before something shifts.

[Timer: 10 minutes]

"Alright you ugly drop of slime." The monster responded with a short, low growl. I raised Avenger, planted my feet. "En garde."

I moved.

Fast. Faster than I’d expected, honestly, for a person who’d been ignoring speed training in favour of reading tutorials. I avoided the threads before they could lock on. Outran a massive overhead swat. The strategy had been forming since I’d realised the body was liquid— find the core, which I’d already spotted sitting at the left side of its backbone, and get to it.

I took a running leap with more luck than precision behind it and somehow found myself twelve feet up the monster’s side, using the sword as a grip point to keep from sliding.

One chance.

I brought the blade up and drove it into the core, then let gravity carry me down, tearing through the skin the entire way.

The boss let out one final long growl. Then it hit the floor.

[Rank Up: 95]

[Rank Up: 94]

[Reward: 40,000 Souls]

[Achievement Unlocked: Strengthen Yourself]

[Reward: 10 Cosmic Runes]

[Carve A New Sword]

[Best Type Slot Available: Rare]

[Required: 10 Cosmic Runes | Cost: 95,000 Souls]

[Create / Stop Bothering Me]

"Create."