Chapter 3: First Blood, First Drop

The laughter of the guild party stayed with him longer than the pain.

It bounced around inside Callum’s skull as he limped through the ash-choked bones of the village, echoing off broken walls and shattered memories that weren’t his.

Scavenger.

The word had appeared in cracked blue-white light above his own trembling hands like a judge’s sentence. No combat skill. No starter weapon. No armor. No tutorial fairy with freckles and a suspiciously cheerful voice. Just a Class name that had made six armored strangers laugh hard enough to wipe tears from their eyes before they left him on the road with the monsters.

One of them had even tossed him a copper coin.

Not at his feet. At his face.

Callum could still feel the sting on his cheek.

He clenched the coin in his fist until the edge bit into his palm. The little disk was warm from his blood and sweat, stamped with a crown on one side and a tree split by lightning on the other. Worthless, probably. Or maybe just worthless to him, which in Arkenfall seemed to be the same thing.

The sky overhead glowed a deep arterial red, veins of black cloud crawling through it like something enormous was bruising from the inside. There was no sun. There had never been a sun here, maybe. Light simply bled from above and left everything beneath it painted in shades of rust.

Callum kept moving.

The village had once had a name. He could tell by the rotted sign at the crossroads, though half the letters had been clawed away and the rest were swollen with damp. Houses sagged inward around narrow lanes, their roofs gnawed open by weather and worse. Doors hung from one hinge. Windows stared empty and black. Strange blue moss pulsed in cellar mouths, breathing spores that shimmered like dust motes until they touched the ground and curled into the cracks.

Somewhere behind him, something shrieked.

Callum froze.

The sound came again, higher this time. Not pain. Excitement.

His fingers tightened around the copper coin.

“Nope,” he whispered. His voice came out hoarse and thin. “Absolutely not. We are not doing this. We are not content.”

He ducked between two collapsed cottages, nearly slipping on a drift of gray ash. His bare feet had gone numb sometime after the guild party abandoned him and before the first horned rat tried to eat his toes. He had no idea how long he had been awake in this place. Long enough to die once? He hadn’t been able to check. The last clear memory from Earth remained a subway platform screaming apart beneath him, metal shrieking, concrete raining down, a stranger’s terrified face, and his own body moving before his brain could decide whether heroism was worth it.

Then darkness.

Then Arkenfall.

Then a System window hovering over his corpse.

He had not had time to process any of it. Processing was for people with couches, therapists, and reliable access to bottled water. Callum had a cracked status screen, a coin, a Level 1 body that felt like someone had assembled it out of bruises, and a Class with all the social value of infected garbage.

Something skittered across the roof to his left.

Callum didn’t look up. Looking up in horror movies was how characters got their faces eaten. He sprinted instead, or tried to. His ribs protested. His lungs caught fire. The alley spat him into a small square dominated by a ruined chapel.

It leaned at the far end like a drunk old priest. Its steeple had snapped halfway up, leaving a jagged finger pointed accusingly at the blood sky. Stained glass windows gaped broken in their frames, the remaining shards catching red light in slivers of green and violet. A statue stood before the doors, half-buried in weeds: a woman in armor holding a cup to her chest. Her head was missing.

Behind him, claws clicked on stone.

Callum turned.

Three things emerged from the alley.

They were knee-high and wiry, with skin the color of old bruises and eyes like burning match heads. Imps, his memory supplied from a System prompt he had glimpsed earlier while hiding under a wagon. Their ears were long and torn. Their mouths split too wide around needle teeth. One dragged a bent kitchen knife. Another had a shard of glass tied to a stick with intestine. The third wore a baby’s bonnet, badly stained, and carried nothing but its own enthusiasm.

All three stopped when they saw him.

Callum stopped when he saw them.

The imp with the bonnet licked its lips.

“Okay,” Callum said, lifting both hands. “Let’s be rational. You don’t want me. I’m extremely low nutrition. Ask anyone.”

The knife imp made a wet giggling sound.

A red nameplate flickered into view above its head.

Gutter Imp — Level 2
Disposition: Hungry

“Hungry is not a personality,” Callum snapped.

The glass-spear imp lunged.

Callum bolted for the chapel.

The doors were huge, blackened oak reinforced by rusted iron bands. One hung ajar just enough for him to squeeze through if panic made him thinner. He slammed his shoulder into it, bit back a cry as rotten wood scraped bone, and slipped inside. The imp’s glass spear stabbed through the gap a heartbeat later, slicing a line across his upper arm.

Pain flashed hot and immediate.

Callum shoved the door with both hands. The hinge screamed. Something on the other side cursed in a language made of spit and knives. He grabbed a fallen iron candle stand and wedged it through the door handle, bracing the other end against a cracked floor tile.

The first impact hit before he could step away.

Boom.

The door shuddered.

Boom.

Dust rained from the beams overhead.

Callum staggered backward into the chapel’s nave, panting.

It smelled of old incense, wet stone, mildew, and the sweet copper stink of things that had died here recently enough to matter. Pews lay overturned in rows like broken teeth. Torn banners hung from the rafters, their faded symbols eaten by mold. At the far end stood an altar split down the middle, its white stone stained brown-black. Behind it, a fresco covered the curved wall of the apse: warriors kneeling before the armored woman with the cup, all of them painted with expressions of ecstatic terror.

There were bodies.

Of course there were bodies.

Callum’s gaze snagged on them and refused to move.

Three skeletons near the left wall. One sprawled across the aisle in fragments. Another in rusted chainmail slumped beneath a collapsed beam, helmet split, jaw hanging open as if even death had disappointed him. A smaller shape near the altar wore the remnants of a brown robe, its bones picked clean but arranged too neatly, hands folded over the sternum.

Boom.

The chapel door jumped in its frame.

Callum swallowed bile.

“Right,” he muttered. “Lovely venue. Great acoustics. Zero exits?”

He scanned the walls. Broken windows, too high and jagged to climb through without shredding himself. A side door near the altar, swollen shut beneath a crust of fungus. A gap in the roof where the steeple had broken, useless unless he suddenly unlocked Double Jump.

Boom.

The iron candle stand bent.

Callum stumbled toward the nearest skeleton.

“Sorry,” he said to the dead adventurer, voice shaking. “This is not personal. I respect your journey. Also, I need literally anything.”

He grabbed a rusted sword from the skeleton’s side.

The blade came away from the hilt with a brittle snap and clattered to the floor in two pieces.

“Naturally.”

He seized the dagger at the skeleton’s boot. The sheath dissolved in his fingers. The blade inside had fused into a lump of orange corrosion.

“Excellent. Museum quality.”

The door boomed again. Wood split. A clawed hand poked through, grasping.

Callum jerked backward, heart punching his ribs.

He needed a weapon. Anything. Club, brick, holy paperweight. His eyes swept the floor, found chunks of masonry, broken pew legs, scattered bones. He dove for a pew leg, lifted it, and watched termites spill out in a writhing pale stream.

“You have got to be—”

The door exploded inward.

Not fully. The candle stand held for one more impact, bending into a tortured arc. But the gap widened enough for the bonnet imp to squeeze its head and one shoulder through. It grinned at him, eyes bright, bonnet strings dangling beside its twitching throat.

“Meat,” it said.

Callum stared.

“Did you just—”

The imp wriggled harder.

The candle stand shrieked.

Callum’s bare heel bumped against something smooth.

He looked down.

A femur lay beside the aisle, long and pale and cracked near one end. Human, probably. Adventurer, maybe. Once part of someone who had opinions, bad habits, favorite foods. Now a stick.

Callum picked it up.

The bone was heavier than he expected. Dense. Cold. One end jagged where the hip joint had splintered away. He gripped it with both hands and felt absurd, obscene, terrified.

The imp saw the bone and giggled.

“Stick boy,” it hissed.

“Yeah,” Callum said, raising it like a bat. “And you’re wearing infant formalwear. Nobody’s winning the aesthetic round.”

The candle stand gave out.

The door slammed inward.

The bonnet imp tumbled through first, followed by knife imp and glass-spear imp. All three landed low, claws scraping furrows in the dust. They spread out with sudden, animal cunning, blocking the path to the door.

Callum backed toward the altar.

Think.

He had no stats worth mentioning. He had seen them. Strength: 4. Agility: 5. Endurance: laughable in everything but name. The imps were Level 2, maybe weak by this world’s standards, but still armed predators designed by a sadist with a fondness for ankles.

He could not outfight three.

He might out-cheese them.

The chapel floor tilted slightly near the center aisle, where rainwater had pooled and dried into slick black patches of moss. Several pews lay scattered like barricades. The altar’s split stone created a narrow gap behind it. The support beam pinning the chainmail skeleton looked heavy, unstable, and one good shove away from rolling.

Game sense woke in him like an old vice.

Not confidence. Never that. Confidence had died on Earth in front of too many livestream viewers and one catastrophic championship throw. But pattern recognition remained. Space. Aggro. Line of sight. Enemy weapons. Cooldowns, if these things had any. Behavior loops.

The glass-spear imp jabbed at him.

Callum stumbled back deliberately, letting the spear tip slice air where his stomach had been. The imp overextended, one clawed foot landing in the slick moss patch.

It slipped.

Not much. Just enough.

Callum swung the femur.

The bone cracked against the imp’s wrist with a sound like a branch snapping. The glass spear flew loose and skittered across the floor.

The imp shrieked.

Glancing Hit!
You deal 3 blunt damage to Gutter Imp.

“Three?” Callum barked. “I hit him with somebody’s leg!”

The knife imp darted in from the left.

Callum barely saw the flash. He twisted, and the knife opened his side from hip to lower rib.

White-hot pain stole his breath.

You have taken 7 slashing damage.
Health: 11/23

The number hit harder than the cut.

Eleven.

Not abstract. Not UI decoration. Eleven tiny glass beads between him and being meat with a nameplate.

He swung wildly. The knife imp ducked, laughing, and the bonnet imp rushed his legs.

Callum kicked it in the face.

His bare foot struck teeth. Pain burst through his toes. The imp bit down.

“Ah! No! Bad goblin baby!”

He slammed the femur down on its skull.

The bonnet crumpled. The imp released him with a yelp, but the strike bounced off more than it broke.

Weak Hit!
You deal 2 blunt damage to Gutter Imp.

Callum hopped backward, blood slicking the floor under him. The glass-spear imp scrambled for its dropped weapon. The knife imp circled, too quick, eyes fixed on Callum’s bleeding side.

They smell low HP.

Of course they did.

The knife imp feinted. Callum flinched. The bonnet imp lunged again.

Callum retreated around the split altar, putting stone between them. The imps hissed in frustration and split to flank both sides.

“No, no, no,” he said, scanning fast. “You don’t get to be coordinated. That’s illegal at Level 2.”

The glass-spear imp recovered its weapon and climbed onto the altar, moving over the cracked stone on all fours. Callum jabbed at it with the femur. It jerked back, then smiled, realizing his reach was poor.

The knife imp came around the left.

The bonnet imp came around the right.

Callum looked past them at the collapsed beam.

He had one play. It was stupid. Stupid plays worked exactly once, which was one more than no plays.

He threw the femur at the glass-spear imp’s face.

The imp squealed and ducked. The bone clattered across the altar.

Callum grabbed the smaller robed skeleton by both shoulders and yanked.

The bones came apart in his hands.

“Sorry!”

He flung a ribcage at the knife imp. It wasn’t an attack so much as a cloud of disrespect. The imp hacked through it with a snarl, blinded for half a second by ribs, vertebrae, and dry grave dust.

Callum used the half second.

He sprinted straight at the bonnet imp.

It grinned and braced low, expecting him to dodge.

He didn’t.

Callum slammed his shoulder into it with all the force his ruined body could manage. The imp was light. Too light. It flew backward, arms pinwheeling, and hit the unstable beam wedged over the chainmail skeleton.

The beam shifted.

For one heartbeat, nothing happened.

Then the rotten support beneath it gave way.

The beam rolled.

The chainmail skeleton collapsed in a metallic clatter. The beam crashed down across the bonnet imp’s legs, pinning it to the floor. It screamed, high and furious, clawing at the stone.

Callum dove for the femur.

The glass-spear imp leapt from the altar onto his back.

Its claws sank into his shoulder.

Callum screamed.

You have taken 4 piercing damage.
Health: 7/23

The imp’s teeth snapped near his ear. Its breath smelled like spoiled milk and burned hair.

“Mine,” it hissed.

Callum dropped flat.

The imp’s weight drove into him, but his sudden collapse smashed it between his back and the stone floor. Something in it wheezed. Its claws tore free, shredding skin.

He rolled, grabbed the femur, and jammed the jagged end backward with both hands.

The bone point punched into the imp’s open mouth.

The shriek became a wet gurgle.

Callum shoved until his shoulders shook.

Critical Hit!
You deal 9 piercing damage to Gutter Imp.

The imp thrashed beneath him, heels drumming the floor. Its burning eyes widened with something almost human. Surprise. Outrage. Fear.

The knife imp hit him from the side.

Callum lost the bone. The blade raked across his forearm as he raised it to block. More blood. More pain. The System flashed red at the edge of his vision.

You have taken 5 slashing damage.
Health: 2/23
Warning: Health critical.

The world narrowed.

Two health.

Two.

Callum staggered, back hitting the altar. His knees almost folded. His vision pulsed black at the edges, each heartbeat squeezing red through his sight. The knife imp crouched five feet away, grinning. Behind it, the glass-spear imp spasmed around the femur lodged through its throat, not dead yet, not useful. The bonnet imp remained pinned, screaming curses under the beam.

The knife imp knew.

It could smell the ending. It twirled the rusty kitchen knife with exaggerated care, licking Callum’s blood from its edge.

“Soft,” it said.

Callum pressed one hand to his side. Warm blood seeped between his fingers.

He could not take another hit. A bad glance from a mean breeze would finish him.

The knife imp advanced.