Chapter 2: The Worst Starter Class

The first hook missed Callum’s eye by less than an inch.

It punched through the cheek of the corpse above him instead, iron barb splitting gray flesh with a wet crunch. A chain snapped taut. The body jerked off the heap, dragging a sleeve of congealed blood across Callum’s face before vanishing into the torch-glare beyond the pit.

“Still warm enough,” a man’s voice called from above. “Core’s probably soft. Pull it.”

“That one twitched.”

“They all twitch when you tug the wrong nerve.”

The corpse-pit answered with the slow, settling sigh of hundreds of dead bodies. Somewhere beneath Callum’s ribs, nothing beat. Nothing breathed. Yet his thoughts raced so violently they seemed to scrape sparks against the inside of his skull.

Okay. Not dead. Technically dead. Functionally mobile. Prioritize.

The second hook descended through the red murk.

Callum flattened himself into the meat of the pile, sliding between a bloated man in a butcher’s apron and a woman whose jeweled collar had been cut from her throat. The movement should have been impossible. His limbs were stiff, his skin cold, his joints reluctant as rusted hinges. But panic had its own physics. He wriggled lower as the hook raked over his shoulder.

Pain detonated white through his vision.

Not heat. Not the living flash of nerves screaming for blood. This was cleaner and stranger, a chime of damage through a system that no longer cared whether he flinched. The hook tore a strip from his upper arm. Black blood welled sluggishly, thick as old ink.

Damage Received: 3 Piercing

Status: Dead Flesh — Bleed effects reduced by 90%

Pain Response: Active

Callum bit down on a sound. His teeth clicked too hard. One felt loose.

Above, a bald head leaned over the rim of the pit. The man wore a leather mask stitched around the mouth, a butcher’s apron lacquered in old blood, and a crescent-shaped brand burned into the center of his forehead. His eyes caught the torchlight like wet stones.

“There,” the scavenger said softly. “Fresh crawler.”

Callum froze.

The scavenger’s grin spread behind the leather mask. “Thought you could burrow, did you?”

Three more faces appeared at the lip of the pit. Men and women in rusted mail, all carrying hooks, knives, and long tongs tipped with silver. One held a glass jar in which something pale and pulsing floated in brine.

“Core intact?” another asked.

“Find out.”

The hook came down again.

This time Callum caught the chain.

His fingers closed around iron links slick with corpse-fat. The impact nearly pulled his shoulder from the socket. He had no leverage, no footing, no pulse, and apparently the muscle density of a drowned accountant. But the chain trembled in his grip, and a cracked blue pane flickered across his vision.

Strength Check Failed.

Trait Triggered: Grave Grip — dead hands do not tire.

Grip decay reduced by 100% while target remains in contact.

Callum stared at the message.

Oh.

The scavenger above pulled. Callum did not let go.

The man’s grin vanished. “Stubborn one.”

“Cut the chain?”

“And lose a hook? Are you paying for it, Sella?”

Callum’s dead fingers held fast. He could feel no fatigue creeping into them, no burn in his forearms. The rest of him was useless, wedged in a collapsing stack of corpses, but his grip might as well have been welded shut.

Passive perk. Narrow use case. Abusable.

The scavenger braced a boot against the rim and hauled with both hands. The chain snapped taut enough to hum. Bodies shifted around Callum. The butcher rolled away. The jeweled woman’s stiff arm broke at the elbow. Suddenly Callum had less corpse and more air beneath him.

He fell upward.

The chain wrenched him out of the heap, and the hook’s barb—still caught in the meat of his shoulder—ripped deeper. He slammed into the pit wall, dragged against stone slick with grease and frozen blood. His head cracked against an iron drainpipe. His vision stuttered.

Damage Received: 6 Blunt

Cranial Integrity: 82%

Pain Response: Active

“He’s got hands on the chain!” Sella shouted.

“Then take the hands.”

A blade flashed.

Callum let go an instant before it chopped down. The knife rang against iron, showering sparks. He dropped, hit the slope of bodies, and slid in a foul avalanche. A dead horse broke his fall. The impact drove stale air from his lungs in a ragged croak that sounded too much like laughter.

He scrambled, found a loose femur, and swung it at the first silhouette descending into the pit.

The bone club struck a shin with a hollow crack. The scavenger cursed and slipped. Callum lunged for the man’s belt knife, fingers clawing at leather.

A silver-tipped tong clamped around his neck.

The world became lightning.

Not metaphorical lightning. Actual blue-white arcs crawled across his dead skin, branching from the tongs in writhing veins. His muscles locked. His jaw snapped shut hard enough to shear the tip of his tongue. The taste of rot and copper flooded his mouth.

Damage Received: 12 Radiant

Warning: Radiant damage bypasses Dead Flesh reduction.

Status Applied: Staggered

Callum dropped to his knees in the corpses.

“That’ll teach it,” Sella said.

The bald scavenger climbed down with a practiced ease, boots finding skulls and shoulders as steps. Up close, he smelled of smoke, vinegar, and old organs. He pressed the silver tongs harder into Callum’s throat, and Callum’s vision filled with crawling error lines.

“Undead with eyes open,” the man murmured. “Arena will pay more than core-rate for you.”

Callum tried to speak. What came out was a rasping grind.

“It’s mouthing,” Sella said.

“They do that. Echoes of hunger.” The bald man leaned close. “You understand me, corpse?”

Callum forced his jaw to work around the numb meat of his tongue. “I understand your tutorial design is hostile to new users.”

The scavenger blinked.

Sella made a warding sign. “That is not an echo.”

The bald man’s eyes sharpened. Greed and caution wrestled in them; greed won by a landslide. “Speaking undead. Chain it. Don’t crack the core.”

They came down on him together.

Callum fought because the alternative was lying still while men with hooks opened his chest. He used the femur until someone knocked it away. He clawed faces. He bit a thumb down to bone and discovered his teeth were better weapons than his fists. He kicked, slipped, thrashed, and took three more bursts from the silver tongs that made his thoughts scatter like frightened birds.

In the end, numbers beat cleverness. They pinned him under a cargo net woven with silver thread. Every strand burned where it touched his skin. Manacles snapped around his wrists and ankles, iron lined with runes that hissed against dead flesh. A collar closed around his neck with a final, intimate click.

Status Applied: Bound

Status Applied: Sanctified Restraint

Strength reduced by 40%.

Class features suppressed: 1/??

Callum lay panting out of habit while the scavengers rolled him onto a sled of stained wood.

“What’s it worth?” Sella asked.

“Depends who’s buying. Bonewrights pay for talkers. Magisters pay more. Arena pays fastest.”

“Arena also takes fingers if you bring them cursed goods.”

The bald man crouched beside Callum and tapped the collar. “You cursed goods?”

Callum stared up at him through the net. The cracked System window hovered at the edge of his vision, still jittering with damage readouts.

“I prefer ‘early access build,’” he said.

The man’s smile returned. “Arena, then.”

They dragged him out of the pit through a gate made of black bars as thick as tree trunks. The corpses receded behind him, a mountain of failed stories. Hooks continued to fall. Chains creaked. Men laughed over the wet work of harvest.

The corridor beyond the pit sloped upward through the underbelly of the Bloodspire. Callum saw it in fragments between the silver threads of the net: basalt walls sweating mineral water; gutters carrying diluted blood; shrine-niches filled with candle stubs and little iron masks; murals of gladiators painted in gold leaf, their heroic poses undercut by the stink of slaughter below.

Every few yards, the floor trembled.

At first Callum thought it was machinery. Then a roar rolled down through the stone, deep enough to vibrate in his empty chest cavity. Above them, unseen thousands answered with applause that rained like thunder.

The arena.

A vertical dungeon-coliseum, if the scraps of visual design were telling the truth. Industrialized death wrapped in imperial pageantry. Exactly the sort of setting marketing would have called “visceral” while the content team quietly drank themselves numb.

Congratulations, Callum. You finally got inside one of your competitors’ games.

The thought steadied him. Sarcasm was a handhold on the cliff.

They hauled him past cages.

In one, a woman with bronze scales along her jaw sat cross-legged while a healer stitched her abdomen closed with glowing thread. She watched Callum pass with yellow eyes and no expression.

In another, three men in prison rags played dice beside a fourth whose head had been replaced by a sealed iron pot. The pot-man turned toward the sled as if he could see through metal.

A child-sized thing with too many elbows hissed from behind a curtain of chains. A giant slept on his feet, forehead resting against bars, each breath stirring straw across the floor. Somewhere, someone sobbed prayers to seven different gods in rapid succession, hedging bets.

“Fresh meat!” called one prisoner.

“Not meat,” said another. “Look at the color. That’s grave-stock.”

Laughter followed. Not friendly laughter. Hungry laughter, the kind men used when relieved the joke was not on them.

Callum lifted his head as much as the net allowed. “Is there a player guide, or do I just infer the meta from hazing?”

A scarred woman leaning against cage bars barked a laugh. “It talks.”

“Everything talks before the hooks go in,” said the man beside her.

The bald scavenger kicked the sled. “Quiet.”

“Wasn’t talking to you,” Callum muttered.

The kick that followed cracked two of his ribs. He knew because the System told him.

Damage Received: 4 Blunt

Skeletal Damage: Minor fracture detected.

Dead Flesh: Mobility impact reduced.

Useful. Horrific, but useful.

Past the cages, the corridor opened into an intake hall vast enough to swallow a train station.

Chains hung from the ceiling in orderly rows. Branding braziers glowed along one wall, their coals white-hot and smokeless. Clerks in red lacquered masks sat behind desks of black marble, stamping slates while prisoners shuffled forward in lines. Above it all towered a statue of a faceless emperor holding a sword in one hand and a set of scales in the other. The scales hung unevenly; the sword was spotless.

Callum’s sled was dragged to a square marked with chalk and old burns.

A clerk glanced up from her slate. Her mask had painted lips curved in permanent boredom. “Acquisition source?”

“Lower corpse-pit nine,” the bald scavenger said. “Recovered active. Vocal. Core unharvested.”

The clerk’s stylus paused. “Vocal?”

“Ask it.”

She turned the mask toward Callum. “Designation?”

Callum considered lying. Unfortunately, he did not yet know what counted as magically binding speech. Also, his best lie under pressure was probably going to be “Steve,” and no one in a fantasy death arena trusted a Steve.

“Callum Vale.”

The clerk wrote it down. “Species?”

“Recently revised.”

Her stylus scratched. “Undead, self-aware. Probable revenant variant. Property claim?”

The scavenger slapped a token onto the desk. “Bloodspire recovery license. Half bounty to pit crew.”

“Denied.”

His face tightened. “Denied?”

“Unregistered intelligent undead recovered within imperial arena waste channels are automatically property of the Bloodspire under Salvage Edict Forty-Two. You receive hazard credit.”

“Hazard credit doesn’t feed my crew.”

“Then eat slower.”

Sella snorted. The bald man looked ready to drive a hook through the clerk’s mask, but two guards in polished red armor shifted near the braziers. Their spears had silver heads etched with scripture. He swallowed his anger and spat on the floor beside Callum.

“Arena can choke on it.”

The clerk stamped the slate. “Arena often does.”

The scavengers left him there, their boots fading into the intake roar. Callum watched them go with the focused calm of a man adding names to a list. Not a revenge list. Revenge was too emotional. This was a bug tracker.

Issue: bald scavenger with hook. Priority: later. Severity: satisfying.

Two guards lifted the net off him with long poles. Air touched his burned skin. The relief lasted half a second before they hauled him upright by the chain between his wrists.

His legs buckled. Dead muscles twitched, remembering how to stand from cached data. He found balance after an ugly stumble. The intake hall tilted, corrected itself, and settled.

A new System pane flickered into view, more stable than the damage messages but still cracked across the top like broken glass.

Identity Confirmed: Callum Vale

Origin: [REDACTED]

Current Ownership: Bloodspire Arena

Legal Status: Property / Monster / Combat Asset

Welcome to Veyrath.

“That’s cute,” Callum said. “Three mutually incompatible statuses. Great backend.”

The clerk looked up. “Do not speak unless assessed.”

“I’m being assessed?”

“You are being inventoried.”

A guard shoved him toward the braziers.

The branding station was operated by a woman built like a siege tower. Her arms were bare to the shoulder, corded with muscle and patterned in old burn scars. She wore no mask. She did not need one. Her face had the flat patience of someone who had heard every scream and found most of them repetitive.

She selected an iron from the brazier. Its head glowed the same red as sunset through blood.

Callum eyed it. “I don’t suppose there’s a consent form?”

“There is a scream if you want to be traditional,” the woman said.

Her voice surprised him. Low, calm, almost gentle.

“Pass,” he said.

“They all say that.”

The guards forced him to his knees. One yanked the ragged remains of his shirt away, exposing his chest. Callum looked down despite himself.

He expected horror. There was plenty. His skin had the waxy pallor of a drowned thing. Bruises bloomed in colors that belonged under rocks. A long tear in his shoulder showed meat too dark to be healthy. Over his sternum, beneath the translucent skin, something faintly blue pulsed once every few seconds.

Not a heart.

A core.

Small. Cracked. Wrong.

The branding woman followed his gaze. “Keep that hidden if you last long enough to care. Men have killed cellmates for less glow.”

“Noted.”

She pressed the iron to his left pectoral.

The burn did not feel like fire. Fire required living tissue to negotiate with destruction. This was an argument written directly into his existence. The brand carved through skin, class, ownership, and whatever passed for a soul in one merciless stroke. The smell hit him a moment later: sweet, charred, obscene.

Callum did not scream.

He tried not to because pride was stupid but useful. Then something else happened.

The pain rose, peaked, and hit a ceiling.

A System window flashed.

Pain Threshold Exceeded.

Trait Discovered: Nociceptive Nullity I

As an undead vessel, pain does not protect you. Pain is converted into signal.

Effect: Pain intensity reduced by 10%.

Callum’s eyes narrowed.

Converted into signal?

The branding woman pulled the iron away. A stylized tower bled smoke from his chest, its lines red-black and perfect.

“Quiet one,” a guard said.

“Dead one,” the woman replied. “Different.”

Callum barely heard them. He was staring at the fading System pane, at the wording that smelled like design space.

Pain did not protect him. Pain was signal.

Signal for what?

The clerk’s voice cut through. “Proceed to class verification.”

The guards dragged Callum from the branding square to a raised dais at the center of the hall. An oval mirror stood there in a frame of bone and gold wire. Its surface was not reflective. It was depthless black, pricked with tiny lights like stars drowned in oil.

A priest waited beside it.

He was young, beautiful, and dressed in white robes hemmed with red. His hair fell in silver braids around a face too perfect to trust. Seven rings glittered on each hand. Each ring bore a different divine symbol: sun, scale, eye, flame, crown, blade, open mouth.

He smiled at Callum as one might smile at a stain about to be cleaned.

“Kneel.”

“You people have a theme.”

A guard hit the back of Callum’s knee with a spear haft. He knelt.

The priest’s smile did not change. “I am Adept Varro of the Imperial Systemic Order. You have been granted the mercy of classification. Your nature, level, class, and utility will be known. Should corruption exceed permitted thresholds, you will be refined.”

“Refined?”

Varro gestured toward a side alcove.

Callum looked.

A man in chains stood inside a circle of salt while two acolytes chanted. His eyes were black from edge to edge. Something moved under his skin, bulging and retreating like rats under a carpet. When the chant reached a sharp note, his body collapsed inward. Flesh became ash. Ash became light. The light condensed into a thumb-sized crystal that dropped into a silver bowl with a cheerful ping.

Varro said, “Refined.”

“Efficient,” Callum said, because his mouth had apparently decided to sprint ahead of survival. “Terrible retention strategy.”

For the first time, the priest’s smile twitched.

“Touch the mirror.”

The guards lifted Callum’s bound hands and slapped his palms against the black surface.

Cold poured into him.

The intake hall vanished.

He stood nowhere, under a sky made of menus.

Hundreds of translucent panes unfolded around him in a sphere: attributes, resistances, hidden values, reputation flags, inventory slots, locked skill trees, error logs in a language that made his eyes ache. Most of them were shattered or redacted. Some blinked in and out as though the world could not decide whether he was allowed to see them.

Then his character sheet opened.

Name: Callum Vale

Level: 0

Species: Graveborn Undead [Anomalous]

Class: Graveborn

Subclass: None

Vitality: 1 / 1

Strength: 4

Agility: 3

Endurance: ERROR

Intellect: 14

Will: 11

Faith: -3

Luck: [INSUFFICIENT PERMISSIONS]

Core Integrity: 37%

Experience: 0 / 100

Callum stared.

“Vitality one,” he said faintly. “That’s not a stat line. That’s a prank.”

The void collapsed. The intake hall crashed back around him, bringing noise and torch-smoke and the priest’s cold perfume.

Varro’s eyes shone with reflected text only he could see.

Then he laughed.

It was not loud. That made it worse.

“Graveborn,” he said.

The nearest clerk stopped writing.

One guard muttered, “Ah. Rotten luck.”

The branding woman made a soft sound through her nose.

Callum looked from face to face. “Judging by the room, I didn’t roll paladin.”

Varro lifted a hand, and the mirror projected Callum’s class in pale letters above the dais for everyone nearby to see.

GRAVEBORN

A remnant class formed from failed resurrection, battlefield saturation, mass death, and unresolved intent.

Role: None

Growth Curve: Severely Impaired

Known Advancement Paths: None verified

Recommended Disposition: Harvest / Disposal / Experimental Use

The intake hall noticed.

A ripple of whispers spread through prisoners, guards, clerks, acolytes.

“Graveborn?”

“Worst starter.”

“They can’t level.”

“They rot before second bell.”

“Saw one in the pits once. It tried to eat sand.”

“Did the sand win?”

Laughter, sharper now.

Callum kept his expression still. Inside, every old instinct from a decade of designing progression systems lit up at once.

Worst starter class. No verified advancement paths. Recommended disposal.

That did not mean useless. That meant underexplored, undertuned, or deliberately suppressed. Sometimes the worst class was truly bad. More often, it was bad because its power budget had been hidden behind conditions no sane player would pursue. Corpse mechanics. Pain thresholds. Negative Faith. Core integrity. Status interactions.

Unplayable was a dare.

Varro leaned closer. “Do you understand, creature? You are not a revenant knight. Not a lich seed. Not even a proper ghoul. You are refuse that failed to finish dying.”

“And yet,” Callum said, “here you are giving refuse a full diagnostic.”

The priest’s smile vanished.

The guard on Callum’s left whispered, “Shut up, corpse.”

Varro placed two fingers on Callum’s burned brand. The touch was light. The holy power that followed was not.

Radiance speared through Callum’s chest.

His back arched. The brand flared like molten wire. The blue pulse of his core stuttered wildly beneath his sternum. For one impossible second, he saw himself from above: kneeling on the dais, chained, smoking, a dead man outlined in divine contempt.

Damage Received: 8 Radiant

Pain Threshold Exceeded.

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