Chapter 6: Bounty of the Broken God

The bounty appeared above Cassian’s head like a halo forged by a sadist.

REALM-WIDE TUTORIAL BOUNTY ISSUED
Target: Cassian Vale
Classification: SYSTEM ERROR / FORBIDDEN CLASS HOLDER
Reward: 10,000 Shards, 1 Rare Class Token, 3 Attribute Cores
Condition: Dead or Subdued
Broadcast Range: All registered challengers within Tutorial Zone 9-F
May the worthy profit.

For one blessed second, no one moved.

The ruined plaza of Thornwake Station held its breath. Broken tracks jutted from cracked stone like ribs. Blue moss glowed along the old subway walls, painting everyone’s faces in corpse-light. Beyond the collapsed archways, monsters clicked and scraped in the dark. Somewhere overhead, a siren wailed in the voice of a choir that had forgotten how to be human.

Cassian stood in the middle of it all with a chipped dagger in one hand, a half-looted corpse-rat monster at his feet, and the words 10,000 Shards blazing above his head in gold bright enough to make saints weep.

Then Bram laughed.

It was a short, ugly sound. Disbelief first. Hunger second.

“Ten thousand,” Bram said, taking one step back from Cassian. The broad-shouldered man’s knuckles tightened around the ironwood club he’d been using to smash skulls since the tutorial began. “Vale. Tell me that’s fake.”

Cassian looked up at the bounty text hovering in his peripheral vision, then back at the five people who had been, until three heartbeats ago, his allies.

“Good news,” he said. “I finally know what I’m worth.”

Nessa, the archer with the shaved side of her head and a strip of red cloth tied around her arm, raised her bow halfway. Not fully. Not yet. Her fingers trembled around the string.

“Cass,” she said, voice thin. “What did you choose?”

Behind her, Milo the apprentice scribe clutched his wand like a drowning man clutched driftwood. Tamsin, the baker’s daughter turned shield-bearer, looked from Cassian to the floating bounty to Bram. Her face had gone pale beneath the dirt and monster blood.

Only Old Jorry didn’t look surprised.

The stooped man with the cracked spectacles and beginner healer robe stared at Cassian as if he had seen a grave open and the thing inside wink back.

“Forbidden class,” Jorry whispered. “Saints below.”

“It’s not as dramatic as it sounds.” Cassian lifted his free hand. “Okay. Actually it’s exactly as dramatic as it sounds, but in my defense, the other choices were terrible.”

Bram’s gaze flicked over the reward again. Cassian could practically see the arithmetic happening behind his eyes. Ten thousand Shards meant food. Armor. Weapons. Safety. A ticket out of the tutorial slums and into one of the lower cities where people didn’t sleep in ruins with knives under their tongues.

It meant not dying.

For people who had been ripped from their worlds and thrown into a monster grinder, morality was a luxury item.

Cassian knew that. He understood it with a bitter, personal clarity. Back on Earth, he’d delivered food to penthouses while his bank account begged for mercy. He knew what desperation did to the spine.

He still felt something inside him go cold when Bram shifted his stance.

“No hard feelings,” Bram said.

Cassian barked a laugh. “That’s the official motto of stabbing someone for cash.”

Nessa’s arrow came up another inch. “Bram, wait.”

“Wait for what?” Bram snapped. “For the System to punish us for standing near him? You saw the message. Error. Forbidden. Reward. We bring him in, we all live.”

“He fought with us,” Tamsin said.

“And now he’s worth more than all of us combined.” Bram’s jaw clenched. “Move aside.”

The dark plaza answered with a low chitter.

Cassian didn’t look toward the sound. He kept his eyes on Bram, because the first person to make a decision would decide whether this became a conversation or a butcher’s bill.

His new class interface throbbed behind his vision like an infected wound.

Class: Loot God Fragment — Level 1
Status: Unstable / Hunted / Glitch-Tier
Active Skill: Preemptive Plunder — Steal one eligible loot table result from a hostile target before death.
Active Skill: Junk Alchemy — Convert low-value drops into volatile improvised effects. Results may vary.
Passive: Greed’s Hand — Increased chance to detect hidden loot and item properties.
Warning: Continued use may attract attention.

Attract attention? Cassian thought. Buddy, we’re past attention. We’re at fireworks taped to my forehead.

The chittering grew louder.

Nessa noticed first. Her eyes widened past Cassian’s shoulder. “Skitterlings.”

Everyone turned.

They came boiling out of the subway tunnel in a glossy black tide.

Skitterlings were the tutorial’s idea of a joke: waist-high insectile scavengers with knife legs, lamprey mouths, and the enthusiasm of starving toddlers. Cassian had seen three of them disembowel a man in a parking garage turned mushroom forest. Now at least twenty poured through the broken archway, antennae lashing, mandibles wet with blue saliva.

Bram swore.

Cassian smiled without humor. “I vote we postpone the betrayal.”

“Grab him!” Bram roared.

So much for that.

Bram lunged.

Cassian had survived two years of delivery driving in a city where cyclists, taxis, and pedestrians all treated traffic laws as optional prop comedy. He knew how to move when large things came at him.

He dropped under the club swing, shoulder-rolled over broken tile, and came up beside the corpse-rat he had killed moments earlier. His fingers plunged into its matted fur.

The Loot God class stirred.

Not like a menu. Not like a tool.

Like a starving hand reaching through his bones.

Preemptive Plunder unavailable.
Target deceased.
Accessing residual scraps…
You obtained: Ratgut Twine x3
You obtained: Cracked Incisor x5
You obtained: Moldy Hide Strip x2

“Amazing,” Cassian muttered. “Arts and crafts.”

An arrow hissed past his ear and shattered against the stone beside him.

He glanced at Nessa.

Her face twisted. “I aimed wide.”

“Deeply touched!”

Bram barreled toward him again. Behind him, the skitterlings hit the plaza like spilled knives. Milo screamed and fired a bolt of pale light that struck one in the face, popping an eye. Tamsin braced her dented shield as two slammed into her, driving her boots back through glowing moss.

Cassian ran.

Not elegantly. Not heroically. He sprinted like a man whose market value had inspired a committee.

The plaza became chaos around him. Skitterlings shrieked. Nessa fired. Bram cursed and shoved a monster aside to keep chasing. Jorry shouted prayers that sounded suspiciously like complaints. Cassian vaulted a fallen ticket kiosk, slipped on slime, pinwheeled, recovered, and dashed toward a narrow service corridor half-choked with vines and rusted rails.

A skitterling sprang from the left.

Cassian’s stolen dagger flashed on instinct. The blade scraped off chitin and nearly spun from his hand. The monster’s mouth opened, concentric rings of teeth flexing.

His skill pulsed.

He didn’t have time to think. He grabbed the feeling and yanked.

Preemptive Plunder activated.
Target: Skitterling Scavenger — Level 2
Rolling loot table…
Stolen before death: Chitin Button x1

A small black disk popped into his palm.

Cassian stared at it for half a breath. “A button?”

The skitterling lunged.

“Of course. Why would crime pay?”

He hurled the button into its open mouth.

The monster gagged. Cassian kicked it hard in the face, felt something crack beneath his boot, then scrambled backward as Bram’s club smashed down where his skull had been.

Stone exploded. Chips stung Cassian’s cheek.

“Stop running!” Bram bellowed.

“Stop committing light murder!”

Cassian ducked into the service corridor.

The air changed instantly. The plaza’s open, blood-bright chaos narrowed into damp darkness and the smell of wet concrete, old oil, and fungal rot. Emergency lights flickered along the ceiling, each one occupied by clusters of translucent eggs. The corridor sloped down into the bones of the station.

Cassian’s sneakers slapped through puddles. Something tiny crunched underfoot. He did not look down.

Behind him came pursuit: Bram’s heavy strides, Nessa’s lighter steps, and the clicking avalanche of skitterlings pouring after anything warm.

His lungs burned. His side cramped. The bounty light followed him, of course, shining merrily through darkness like a divine “kick me” sign.

Need distance. Need tools. Need to not die in a sewer hallway after finally getting superpowers.

A skitterling skated along the wall to his right, claws punching into concrete. Cassian thrust his hand toward it.

“Come on, come on—”

Preemptive Plunder activated.
Target: Skitterling Scavenger — Level 2
Stolen before death: Sour Gland x1

A pulsing yellow sac dropped into his palm, slick and warm.

“Gross. Useful gross?”

The skill answered with a secondary flicker.

Junk Alchemy available.
Combine eligible low-value drops?
Ratgut Twine x1 + Sour Gland x1 + Cracked Incisor x1
Potential Result: Unstable Snare

Cassian almost laughed. “Now we’re cooking.”

He slammed the items together by instinct. The gland burst, soaking the twine in hissing acid. The cracked incisor warped, lengthening into a hooked barb. In less than a second, he held a disgusting little bolas that smoked in his grip.

Created: Unstable Snare
Quality: Awful
Effect: Entangles target briefly. May corrode armor. May corrode user. May scream.

It screamed.

A thin, mosquito whine came from the object as Cassian spun and flung it behind him.

“Gift!”

Bram saw it too late. The snare wrapped around his leading ankle, twine snapping tight. Acid smoked against his boot. He stumbled with a startled roar, crashed shoulder-first into the corridor wall, and disappeared beneath three skitterlings that had been too committed to stop.

“Bram!” Nessa shouted.

“He’s fine!” Cassian yelled back. “Probably medium fine!”

The corridor split ahead. Left sloped deeper and smelled like flooded tombs. Right angled upward toward a sign that read MAINTENANCE / PLATFORM C / DO NOT FEED THE SAINTS.

Cassian chose right because any hallway with instructions not to feed saints was either safer or so much worse that his death would at least be interesting.

He burst through a hanging curtain of roots into a maintenance chamber.

The room had once housed electrical equipment. Now the machines were shrines of rust, crowned with candles made from bone-white wax. Vines threaded through control panels. Faded murals of commuters had been scratched out and replaced with symbols: an open eye, a broken coin, a hand reaching from a grave.

And monsters.

Three corpse-moths clung to the ceiling, each the size of a dog, wings patterned like screaming faces. Their bodies were swollen and gray, human fingers dangling where legs should have been.

Cassian skidded to a stop.

The moths turned their eyeless heads toward the bounty glow.

“Nope,” he said.

He pivoted.

Nessa appeared in the doorway with her bow drawn.

For a moment, they faced each other across the candlelit chamber: Cassian breathing hard, covered in slime and rat blood; Nessa pale, eyes wet, arrow aimed at his chest.

“Don’t,” Cassian said quietly.

Her mouth tightened. “You don’t understand.”

“I understand ten thousand reasons.”

“My brother is in the south camp.” Her bow trembled. “He got poisoned by a thornback. He needs a cleanse token before the next bell or he dies. The healer asked for eight thousand Shards.”

The corpse-moths above began to unfurl their wings.

Cassian swallowed. The anger in him hit something jagged and changed shape.

“Nessa…”

“Don’t say my name like that.” Her eyes hardened through the tears. “You think I want this?”

“I think wanting stops mattering when your finger tightens.”

Behind her, Bram’s roar echoed up the corridor, followed by the wet crunch of club on carapace. He was alive. Great. Cassian’s day remained committed to variety.

The corpse-moths dropped.

Nessa fired.

Cassian threw himself sideways. The arrow sliced across his upper arm, hot and bright. One moth slammed into the space he’d occupied, fingers scraping sparks from metal flooring. Another swooped toward Nessa, wings beating out a stench of grave dust and sour milk.

She cursed and rolled away.

Cassian hit the ground beside a rusted toolbox. His wounded arm flared. Blood slicked his sleeve. A moth crawled toward him upside down along a broken console, mouthparts unfolding into a needle.

His hand found the toolbox latch.

Locked.

“Naturally.”

The moth lunged.

Cassian thrust his bleeding arm up—not at the monster, but toward the skill’s hunger.

Preemptive Plunder activated.
Target: Corpse-Moth — Level 3
Stolen before death: Dustwing Scale x4

Four gray scales fluttered into his palm, soft as ash.

The moth’s needle-mouth stabbed down.

Cassian shoved the scales into its face and blew.

A cloud of powder exploded.

The moth shrieked, wings spasming. Its body slammed into the toolbox, needle punching through the rusted lock. Cassian yanked the lid open as the monster thrashed beside him.

Inside lay treasure, if one defined treasure as the contents of a maintenance worker’s worst afternoon: copper wire, bent nails, a cracked glass fuse, a roll of tape fossilized at the edges, and a wrench with a handle chewed by something small and furious.

To Cassian’s Loot God senses, the junk gleamed.

Not gold. Potential.

Little threads of possibility shimmered over each item, labels twitching in his vision.

Greed’s Hand triggered.
Detected: Conductive Scrap
Detected: Adhesive Relic, Degraded
Detected: Impact Tool, Minor

“Oh,” Cassian said, grabbing everything. “We’re going full goblin.”

Nessa screamed.

He looked up.

A corpse-moth had pinned her bow arm to the floor with three finger-legs. Its needle-mouth hovered over her eye. She struggled, boots scraping, one hand reaching for a knife at her belt and falling short.

Bram thundered into the chamber, bleeding from a dozen cuts, a skitterling corpse still clamped to his shoulder. He saw Nessa, saw Cassian, and somehow chose rage over triage.

“Vale!”

“Priorities, big guy!” Cassian shouted.

He snatched up the cracked fuse and copper wire. Junk Alchemy surged.

Junk Alchemy available.
Copper Wire x1 + Cracked Glass Fuse x1 + Dustwing Scale x2
Potential Result: Flash Spitter

“Please don’t remove my fingers,” Cassian said, and crushed the items together.

Light snapped into being.

The fuse twisted into a tiny glass tube wrapped in wire and moth ash. It spat sparks like an angry firework.

Created: Flash Spitter
Quality: Poor
Effect: Emits blinding burst on impact. Unreliable.

Cassian hurled it at the moth pinning Nessa.

The device struck the creature’s swollen abdomen and detonated in a white flash. Cassian’s eyes slammed shut too late. Pain burst behind his skull. The moth shrieked. Nessa cried out. Bram roared something unintelligible.

When Cassian blinked vision back through purple spots, Nessa was free, crawling backward, face streaked with tears and ash. The moth writhed blindly, wings hammering candles into sprays of wax.

“You saved me,” Nessa gasped.

“Yeah.” Cassian grabbed the wrench. “Very inconvenient for your whole murder plan.”

Bram charged anyway.

The man was built like a refrigerator that had discovered religion and chosen violence. He smashed through a corpse-moth’s wing without slowing, club raised, eyes locked on Cassian and the bounty above him.

Cassian’s wounded arm throbbed. His legs felt hollow. His inventory—if a handful of trash counted as an inventory—was down to tape, nails, hide strips, teeth, wire scraps, and one questionable wrench.

Bram swung.

Cassian stepped inside the arc because outside meant losing his head. The club grazed his shoulder with enough force to numb his ribs. He slapped the fossilized tape onto Bram’s forearm and jammed three cracked incisors into it like caltrops.

Junk Alchemy flickered.

Not a full recipe. More like a hiccup.

Improvised Conversion: Adhesive Relic + Cracked Incisor
Created: Bite Tape
Effect: Clings. Bites. Regrets nothing.

The tape tightened.

Tiny toothlike ridges sank into Bram’s skin.

Bram howled and backhanded Cassian.

The blow lifted him off his feet.

For a weightless instant, Cassian saw everything with terrible clarity: Nessa on one knee, bow forgotten; the corpse-moths circling again; Bram tearing at the tooth-tape; Milo and Tamsin arriving in the doorway behind a wave of skitterlings; the bounty glow painting them all gold.

Then he hit a control console hard enough to break old plastic and newer ribs.

Air vanished from the world.

Cassian slid to the floor, wheezing. His dagger clattered away.

Warning: Health below 40%.
Bleeding detected.
Bruised Rib detected.
Recommendation: Stop being struck by large objects.

“Working on it,” he croaked.

Bram stalked toward him, face red, arm bleeding where the Bite Tape chewed happily.

“I didn’t want it this way,” Bram said.

Cassian coughed and tasted copper. “You keep saying things like that. Does it help?”

“Shut up.”

“Because from here, it sounds like you very much wanted it in a way that involved my skull and your club becoming close friends.”