Chapter 1: Spawn Point Zero

Callum Voss woke up dead, naked, and already being looted.

The first thing he felt was cold fingers in his mouth.

Not metaphorical fingers. Not the phantom numbness of a dying brain firing its last spiteful sparks. Actual fingers—thin, jointed wrong, tipped with nails like splinters of dirty glass—prying at his lips and scraping along his teeth as if checking whether any of them were gold.

Callum bit down.

The thing shrieked.

It tore its hand free with a wet pop and stumbled backward over the rib cage of a corpse that was somehow not his. Callum came up choking on mud, blood, and grave stink, swinging blind. His fist connected with something small and leathery. The impact jolted all the way up his arm.

“Get out of my mouth, you bargain-bin goblin!”

His voice cracked on the last word. Too raw. Too alive.

The creature skittered away on knuckled hands, flapping ragged wings too small to lift it, its gray-green skin stretched over bones like old parchment. It had a head like a drowned baby fox, eyes yellow and pupil-slitted, and a grin packed with needle teeth. One of those teeth had broken off and remained stuck in Callum’s lower lip.

He yanked it out with a hiss.

Blood welled. Red. Warm. Real.

That should have been comforting. It wasn’t.

Because the last thing Callum remembered was the subway ceiling coming down.

He remembered the woman in the blue coat frozen between the rails and the platform, eyes wide behind rain-specked glasses. He remembered the scream of metal as something gave above them. He remembered his own stupid legs moving before his brain finished calculating odds. He had tackled her back toward the emergency recess just as the tunnel folded in on itself with the sound of a god punching through concrete.

Then pressure. Darkness. His lungs full of dust. His phone buzzing somewhere near his cheek with a notification he would never read.

Defeat screen, he thought wildly. No respawn timer. No post-game lobby. Just…

The sky above him was red.

Not sunset red. Not emergency-light red. Blood red, pulsing behind bruised black clouds like the world had a heart and it was diseased. Three moons hung there in a crooked line: one pale as bone, one green as rot, one cracked open and leaking silver light.

Callum lay half-buried in a pit of bodies.

Human bodies. Mostly.

Men and women sprawled in heaps, naked or wrapped in scraps of cloth, their limbs tangled, skin smeared with black soil. Some looked fresh and sleeping. Others were too still, too waxy, their eyes open toward that impossible sky. There were elves, maybe—sharp ears, long limbs, faces too beautiful even in death. Stocky bearded people with stone-gray skin. A boy no older than fifteen with scales glittering faintly along his collarbones. All dumped together in a basin of churned mud ringed by broken stone markers.

A mass grave.

And things were moving through it.

Dozens of the little carrion creatures scampered over the dead, chittering to one another in wet, greedy clicks. They wore stolen jewelry threaded through ears and nostrils. Some dragged belts. One had jammed a silver spoon through the string around its neck like a holy symbol. They rooted through hair, pried open fists, sniffed at armpits, and sliced shallow cuts into thighs and bellies as if checking for hidden pockets.

A cracked window flickered in front of Callum’s face.

SYSTEM INITIALIZATION ERROR

Anchor soul detected.

Death confirmed.

Reconstitution complete.

Welcome to ARKENFALL.

Callum stared.

Then he blinked.

The translucent pane bobbed with him, edges glitching like broken video compression. Symbols he shouldn’t have recognized crawled along the border, rearranging themselves into English when his eyes touched them.

“No,” he said.

The imp he’d bitten crouched a few feet away, cradling its injured hand to its chest. It hissed at him, then glanced toward the others.

“Absolutely not.” Callum pushed himself upright. His muscles trembled. His stomach tried to crawl out of his throat. “I am not doing an isekai. I don’t even watch the bad ones ironically anymore.”

The window refreshed with a sound like cracking ice.

NAME: Callum Voss

SPECIES: Human (Otherworld)

LEVEL: 1

CLASS: Pending…

STATUS: Naked, Disoriented, Recently Deceased

HP: 17 / 17

MP: 3 / 3

STAMINA: 11 / 11

“Recently deceased?” Callum rasped. “That’s not a status effect. That’s a lawsuit.”

Something wet flapped overhead.

Callum looked up just as a larger shape dropped from the rim of the grave.

It hit a corpse three bodies away and crouched there with its wings mantled, twice the size of the others, its skin mottled purple-black. It wore a cracked leather cap and a necklace of finger bones. Its long snout twitched. Its gaze fixed on Callum.

The smaller imps went still.

The big one smiled.

“Fresh,” it croaked.

Callum’s brain did what it always did when panic went nuclear: it analyzed.

Enemy type. Pack behavior. Alpha unit. No weapon. No armor. Unknown ruleset. Terrain: unstable bodies, mud, broken stones. Resources: corpses, bones, possible loot, profanity.

“You talk,” Callum said.

The imp tilted its head. “You bleed.”

“Technically we both have hobbies.”

The big imp bounded forward.

Callum scrambled backward and slipped on an arm. His heel punched into someone’s open rib cage with a crunch that sent lightning up his leg. The imp landed where he’d been, claws carving four furrows through a dead man’s chest. Smaller imps erupted into shrieks, excited now, circling.

Callum grabbed the first solid object his hand found.

A femur.

It came free of the mud with a sucking sound and a scrap of meat attached.

“Sorry,” he muttered to whoever had owned it.

The big imp lunged again.

Callum swung.

He had never been strong. Quick, sure. Fast hands, faster eyes, the kind of reflexes that got you signed at seventeen and dropped at twenty-one when your wrist started burning and your confidence curdled. He’d spent years clicking heads in shooters, tracking cooldowns in MOBAs, reading greedy opponents two seconds before they outplayed themselves.

None of that made him good at clubbing a corpse-gremlin with another corpse’s leg.

But timing was timing.

The femur cracked against the imp’s snout. The creature yelped and veered, claws raking Callum’s shoulder instead of his throat. Pain flashed hot and bright.

-4 HP

HP: 13 / 17

“Oh, there are damage numbers,” Callum said through clenched teeth. “Great. Immersive.”

The imp landed in a crouch, black blood dripping from one nostril. It no longer looked amused.

A woman screamed somewhere behind him.

Callum twisted.

One of the bodies was not a body anymore. A woman with cropped black hair had jerked awake beneath a tangle of limbs. Two smaller imps were on her already, one tugging at her ear, the other dragging a copper ring off her finger along with strips of skin. She thrashed, gasping, eyes white with terror.

“Help me!” she screamed.

The big imp took advantage of the distraction and came low.

Callum barely got the femur down in time. Claws struck bone. The impact knocked him backward. He hit the mud hard, breath blasting out. The imp clambered over him, jaws snapping inches from his nose. Its breath smelled like spoiled meat and pennies.

Callum jammed the femur crosswise into its mouth.

“Bad dog.”

It bit through the bone.

Splinters exploded. One sliced Callum’s cheek. The creature’s weight crushed his chest as it clawed closer.

A notification popped, politely obscuring half the monster trying to eat him.

CLASS ASSIGNMENT COMPLETE

Congratulations!

You have been assigned the class:

SCAVENGER

“One person’s trash is another person’s brief delay before death.”

Class Rank: Common

Primary Attribute: Luck

Combat Skills: None

Starting Trait: Forager’s Eye

Callum stopped struggling for half a heartbeat.

“Scavenger?”

The imp bit down on the last of the femur.

“I die saving somebody and your matchmaking algorithm gives me raccoon?”

The imp’s claw rose.

Callum shoved his left hand into the mud, fingers closing around something jagged. He didn’t look. He just drove it upward.

The broken stone shard punched into the imp’s throat.

It made a strangled gargle. Hot black blood spilled across Callum’s chest. The imp recoiled, clutching at the shard. Callum bucked, rolled, and kicked it off him. It stumbled backward, wings flapping uselessly.

The smaller imps hesitated.

The woman screamed again.

Callum pushed to his feet, swaying. The grave tilted around him. His HP hovered in the corner of his vision at 9 / 17 now, which was rude because he hadn’t even seen the last few hits land.

The big imp yanked the shard from its throat. The wound puckered, black fluid pulsing. Not dead. Not even close.

“Okay,” Callum breathed. “Mini-boss. Of course.”

He backed away, scanning the grave.

Forager’s Eye activated without him asking.

The world changed.

Most of the pit dulled to washed-out gray, but certain objects gleamed with faint outlines: a rusted buckle beneath a corpse’s hip, a chipped knife near a dead dwarf’s bootless foot, a length of wire tangled in hair, a cracked clay bottle, three loose teeth sparkling weakly in the mud. Above each object hovered tiny labels.

Chipped Bone Knife — Poor Quality. Damage: 1-3. Durability: 4 / 7.

Rust-Flaked Buckle — Junk. Vendor Value: 1 copper.

Gravewire — Crafting Component. Flexible. Sharp.

Unidentified Vial — Contents unstable.

Callum’s pulse kicked.

Loot vision.

Bad class or not, loot vision was information, and information had won him games he had no business winning.

The big imp advanced, slower now, letting the pack circle. It knew he was hurt. It knew he was cornered. Or thought he was.

Callum spotted the knife eight feet to his right, half-buried beneath the dwarf. Between him and it: two imps. Behind him: screaming woman, more waking bodies, chaos. To his left: a slope of corpses leading toward the grave wall, too steep to climb fast. Above: red sky, wing shadows.

He feinted right.

The nearest small imp pounced.

Callum dropped flat.

The imp sailed over him, struck the big one in the chest, and both creatures shrieked in fury. Callum rolled through mud and cold limbs, slammed his elbow into a dead dwarf’s stomach, and closed his hand around the chipped knife.

Item Acquired: Chipped Bone Knife

Scavenger Class Bonus: Improvised weapons suffer 15% less durability loss.

“Finally,” he said. “A perk that doesn’t sound like a threat.”

A small imp grabbed his ankle.

He kicked backward, but its claws dug in.

-2 HP

HP: 7 / 17

Callum twisted and slashed. The bone knife scraped across the imp’s face, opening one yellow eye. The creature howled and released him.

Critical Hit!

Carrion Imp takes 5 damage.

“Critical?” Callum gasped. “Now we’re talking.”

Then the big imp hit him like a sack of bricks with teeth.

They went down together. The knife flew from Callum’s hand. Claws punched into his side.

-5 HP

HP: 2 / 17

Warning: Low Health.

The warning pulsed red in time with the sky.

Callum’s vision tunneled. The imp’s jaws opened over his throat.

He thought, absurdly, of his last professional match.

Game five. Lower bracket finals. His team down twelve kills, gold graph buried, commentators already talking like they were attending a funeral. Callum had been playing a washed mid-laner with a champion nobody respected anymore. He remembered his coach’s voice in comms: Play safe. Wait for mistake.

But safe had been losing slowly.

So Callum had flashed blind over the dragon pit wall, stolen the objective with a pixel-perfect skillshot, died instantly, and bought his team the thirty seconds they needed to win. The crowd had chanted his name like a spell.

For one night, before everything fell apart, he had been undeniable.

The imp’s teeth descended.

Callum spat blood in its eyes.

It flinched.

He slammed both thumbs into the stone shard wound in its throat.

The imp convulsed. Callum pushed deeper, screaming now, not words, just raw refusal. Black blood flooded over his hands. The imp clawed at him, tearing skin, but its strength stuttered.

Something beside Callum moved.

The woman with the cropped hair, still bleeding from her ear, swung a rock with both hands.

It smashed into the big imp’s skull.

Once.

Twice.

On the third hit, bone caved with a sound like a boot through rotten fruit.

The imp collapsed across Callum.

Assist Kill!

Carrion Imp Rummager slain.

EXP gained: 18

Progress to Level 2: 18 / 100

Callum lay beneath the twitching monster, breathing in shallow cuts.

The woman stared at the rock in her hands, then at him. Her face was spattered black. She looked like a nightmare trying very hard not to cry.

“Are you,” she panted, “insane?”

“Historically?” Callum wheezed. “Debatable.”

“You let it get on top of you.”

“It didn’t RSVP. Also, you’re welcome.”

She barked a laugh that sounded almost painful.

A chorus of shrieks rose around them.

The smaller imps had not fled. Their leader was dead, but death in this place apparently did not inspire caution. It inspired math. There were more of them than there were waking people, and Callum was at two HP, naked, half-crushed under a monster corpse, and armed with sarcasm.

The woman grabbed his wrist and tried to pull him free.

“Move,” she snapped.

“Can’t. Corpse blanket.”

“Then wiggle!”

“That is not a tactical command.”

She planted one bare foot against the imp’s shoulder and hauled. Callum slid out with a wet sound, leaving behind some skin and most of his dignity. He rolled onto his stomach and nearly blacked out.

Warning: HP critical.

Seek healing immediately.

“Would love to,” he muttered. “Point me toward the naked corpse grave clinic.”

The woman didn’t answer. She was staring past him.

Callum followed her gaze.

More people were waking.

A broad-shouldered man with a shaved head rose from the dead heap like a furious statue, shouting in a language Callum didn’t know. A teenage boy vomited into his own hands. An elderly woman crawled toward the grave wall, sobbing prayers. A horned man sat upright, looked at the sky, and began laughing with the empty despair of someone who had seen it before.

The imps descended.

They came in a wave of snapping teeth and greedy hands, not hunting cleanly but harvesting. One leapt onto the shaved man’s back and tore at his neck. Another dragged the vomiting boy down by the hair. Three converged on the elderly woman before she had crawled six feet.

Callum’s stomach turned.

This wasn’t a spawn zone.

It was a feeding trough.

“We need out,” the woman said.

“Brilliant. I vote for the door.”

“There is no door.”

“Then we file a complaint with map design.”

She glared at him. “Do you ever stop talking?”

“Usually when my HP hits zero.”

Her eyes flickered, unfocused, like she was reading her own interface. “My class is Weaver. Level one. I have… thread sense? No weapon skills. You?”

Callum grimaced. “Scavenger.”

For half a second, even amid the screams, she looked sorry for him.

“Don’t make that face,” he said. “I’m workshopping denial.”

An imp rushed them.