Chapter 2: Level One in the Wolfgrass

The sky was the color of a fresh wound.

Rowan Vale lay on his back in grass tall enough to swallow him, staring up at a crimson dome where two pale moons hung like puncture marks. The air smelled wrong. Too green. Too alive. Wet soil, crushed herbs, animal musk, and something sweet rotting beneath the blades. Every breath scraped cold down his throat, then bloomed warm in his chest as if his lungs were trying to remember how to be lungs.

For three seconds, he did not move.

For three seconds, he let himself believe he was still under the subway, pinned beneath concrete and rebar, the emergency lights flickering red through dust, the stranger’s fingers slipping out of his grasp. He let himself believe the grass was insulation foam, the sky a hallucination, the moons a concussion symptom.

Then something hissed six inches from his ear.

Rowan came up with a strangled yelp, flailing backward on elbows and heels. The grass thrashed around him. A beetle the size of his fist skittered away on glassy legs, its shell reflecting the red sky in oily highlights. It paused atop a bent stalk, unfolded translucent wings, and produced a noise like a dentist’s drill before vanishing into the meadow.

“No,” Rowan said. His voice came out hoarse, thin, not nearly as authoritative as he intended. “Absolutely not. I reject the bug.”

The meadow answered with a chorus of clicks.

He froze.

All around him, the wolfgrass swayed though no wind blew. It stood nearly to his shoulders even while he crouched, narrow blades edged in silver, their tips trembling with dew that looked too much like saliva. Beyond the grass, maybe thirty yards away, a line of black trees clawed upward from a low ridge. Their leaves shimmered dark blue, each one shaped like a little knife. Between the trees and the meadow, pale stones formed a broken path that led nowhere he could see.

And in the corner of his vision, impossible to blink away, floated a translucent interface.

UNAUTHORIZED SOUL DETECTED

Containment failed.

Class Assignment: ERROR

Spawn Protection: NOT FOUND

Health: 3 / 3

Mana: 0 / 0

Stamina: 9 / 9

Status: Disoriented, Unarmed, Extremely Edible

Rowan stared at the last line.

“That is not a status effect.”

Developer Console: Response not recognized.

“Good. Great. So the afterlife has patch notes and sarcasm.”

His laugh came out too close to a sob. He clamped his mouth shut, because the clicks in the grass had changed. They were no longer random. They were answering one another.

Something moved to his left.

Not the beetle. Bigger. Low to the ground. The wolfgrass parted in a smooth, predatory ripple, one dark shape sliding through another. Rowan’s skin went tight from scalp to heels. He had designed enemies like that. Not the monster itself—he hadn’t seen it yet—but the language of it. The grass parted just enough. The clicks stopped just before the attack. Audio cue, visual cue, half a heartbeat for a player to dodge.

Except he was not a player at a keyboard with coffee gone cold beside him. He was barefoot in damp dirt wearing the same torn dress shirt he had died in, his tie missing, one sleeve ripped at the cuff, no weapon, no minimap, and three hit points.

The grass exploded.

A creature sprang at his face with a scream like tearing metal. It was rabbit-sized if rabbits had been designed by a committee of knives: long hind legs, a hunched spine bristling with thorny quills, a blunt foxlike head split by too many teeth. Its fur was matted green-brown, perfect camouflage among the blades. Yellow eyes burned above a wet, twitching nose.

Wolfgrass Gnawling — Level 1

HP: 6 / 6

Behavior: Ambush predator. Cowardly when isolated. Aggressive in packs.

Weakness: Fire, crushing, poor vertical navigation.

Hidden Note: Pathing mesh incomplete near boundary stones.

Rowan did not read all of that. He read HP 6, saw teeth, and threw himself sideways.

The gnawling hit where his throat had been and tumbled through the grass in a flurry of claws. One claw raked his forearm as it passed. Pain flashed white-hot, immediate and insulting, nothing like game damage and everything like being opened by a dirty hook.

Health: 2 / 3

“Ow! You little—”

The gnawling spun, already coiling for another leap. Its yellow eyes locked on him. Behind it, two more trails began cutting through the wolfgrass.

“Nope.”

Rowan ran.

He did not run heroically. He ran like a man who had once pulled a hamstring jogging to catch a bus and had spent the next three weeks complaining about it. Grass whipped his face. Mud sucked at his bare feet. Something thorny tore a line across his ankle. His lungs burned with new-world air.

Behind him, the gnawling shrieked. Another answered from the right. Then another.

“Okay,” Rowan gasped. “Okay. Level one rats. Classic. You hit them with a stick, learn the controls, loot three copper, meet a village elder with suspiciously clean robes.”

A gnawling burst from the grass ahead, jaws wide.

Rowan skidded, windmilled, and nearly fell on his face. The creature landed in the path he would have taken, claws digging furrows into the soil. Its lips pulled back from needle teeth slick with green saliva.

“I see we’re skipping the village elder.”

He darted left. The creature lunged, but its hind legs tangled in the dense grass for the briefest instant. Rowan saw it—saw the little hitch in animation, the hesitation between tracking and pouncing. His brain, traitorous and useful, translated terror into design critique.

Turn radius too wide. Acceleration burst after lock-on. Cooldown between pounces maybe two seconds. Pack AI tries to flank but won’t overlap lanes.

Another one came from his right. He juked left again, and the first slammed into the second with a wet yelp. They tumbled, biting each other in confusion.

“Friendly collision enabled,” Rowan wheezed. “Amateur hour.”

The third hit him from behind.

Its weight drove him into the mud. Teeth snapped shut on the loose fabric between his shoulder blades, ripping shirt instead of skin. Rowan screamed anyway, rolled hard, and felt quills scrape his ribs through cotton. The gnawling clung, claws scrabbling for purchase.

He grabbed blindly and found one of its ears.

It was warm, leathery, and pulsing.

“Sorry,” he snarled, not sorry at all, and yanked.

The creature shrieked. Rowan slammed his elbow backward. Bone met something soft. The gnawling let go and sprang away, shaking its head. A tiny red damage number floated above it.

1

Rowan stared at the number despite the circumstances. “I do one damage? With an elbow? That’s information.”

The three gnawlings spread through the grass, circling. Their backs arched. Their quills rose. Clicking began in their throats, a quick staccato rhythm that made the hair on Rowan’s arms lift.

He backed away, hands raised as if they might respect a time-out. His heel struck stone.

Boundary stones.

The pale rocks he had seen from where he woke were not a path. They formed a jagged crescent in the meadow, half-buried and old, each stone waist-high and carved with spirals eaten by moss. Beyond them the grass thinned, replaced by mud and clusters of purple mushrooms. A shallow ditch ran along the stones, full of rainwater and buzzing gnats.

Pathing mesh incomplete near boundary stones.

The words pulsed in his vision like a dare.

Rowan risked a glance back. The nearest stone leaned at an angle, its top slick with lichen. Too high to easily climb. But there was a crack down one side. A human foot might find purchase.

A gnawling leapt.

Rowan dropped flat.

The creature sailed over him, hit the stone face-first, and made a sound like a dropped melon. It slid down, stunned, little paws twitching.

Wolfgrass Gnawling HP: 4 / 6

Status: Dazed

“Crushing weakness,” Rowan panted. “You beautiful idiot.”

He scrambled toward the leaning stone. Claws tore at the grass behind him. His fingers slipped on moss. He jammed his toes into the crack, hauled himself up, and nearly cried out as stone scraped the cut on his ankle. The first gnawling recovered and snapped at his heel. Teeth clicked shut close enough to trim a toenail.

Rowan kicked backward. His heel connected with its snout.

1

“That’s for the shirt.”

He flopped belly-first across the top of the stone, then rolled onto his back, chest heaving. The stone was narrow and damp, but it lifted him four feet above the ground. Below, the gnawlings gathered with furious little shrieks. One jumped. Its claws scraped the stone, failed to grip, and it dropped back into the ditch.

Another jumped. Same result.

The third, the dazed one, ran in a tight circle, then leapt at an angle and smacked into the side.

2

Rowan let out a breathless laugh. “Poor vertical navigation. God, I love bad AI.”

The laugh died when the three gnawlings stopped jumping.

They looked at one another.

Then they began chewing the base of the stone.

Rowan’s smile fell. Wet grinding filled the air. Chips of pale rock flaked away under their teeth. The stone vibrated beneath him.

“No, no. That’s not in your behavior note.”

Developer Console: Hidden behavior triggered by inaccessible target.

Patch 0.9.12: Low-tier predators granted anti-perch response after excessive player farming.

“Of course you were patched. Of course.”

The stone lurched.

Rowan flattened himself and grabbed at the mossy spirals. His mind raced faster than his pulse. Three enemies. One damaged to four, one maybe five after the kick, one full health. He had two health. No weapon. The stone might fall. The ditch had water. Mushrooms. Grass. Boundary stones. Incomplete pathing near stones, but anti-perch if he stayed up.

He scanned the meadow with the frantic precision of a designer debugging a live build while the servers burned.

There—a gap between two stones, half-blocked by a tangle of dark vines. Beyond it, the ditch widened into a muddy puddle. Purple mushrooms clustered on the far side, caps speckled white. Something about them shimmered faintly, not quite visual, more like a tooltip waiting to be noticed.

Rowan focused.

Bloatcap Cluster

Hazard Flora — Level 1

Effect: Releases concussive spores when ruptured.

Damage: 3 blunt in small radius.

Warning: Chain reaction possible.

Hidden Note: Monsters do not evaluate Bloatcap hazard radius unless damaged by it previously.

His terror made room for something sharp and gleeful.

“Oh,” he whispered. “You don’t know about barrels.”

The gnawlings chewed harder. The stone tilted another inch.

Rowan looked down at them. “Hey. Dental plan.”

He tore a strip from his ruined shirt, wrapped it around his bleeding forearm, and let it soak red. The smell hit the air immediately—hot copper and human panic. The gnawlings froze. Their noses twitched as one.

“Yeah,” Rowan said, voice shaking despite the grin trying to cut across his face. “Aggro table updated?”

He dangled the bloody cloth over the side, then flung it toward the gap between the stones.

The gnawlings exploded after it.

Rowan slid off the opposite side of the stone at the same time, landing badly in the ditch. Mud swallowed his feet to the ankles. Pain spiked through his cut ankle; his vision flashed at the edges, but no health dropped. He shoved himself upright and sprinted along the inside of the stone crescent, keeping the rocks between himself and the monsters.

The bloody strip landed short of the Bloatcaps.

“Naturally.”

The first gnawling pounced on it, shaking the cloth like it was prey. The other two barreled into the gap behind it, snarling and biting. They were clustered, but too far from the mushrooms.

Rowan needed a trigger.

He needed a rock. A stick. Anything.

His hand closed around a loose shard of boundary stone lying in the mud, triangular and heavy. He yanked it free, nearly losing his balance. The gnawlings noticed him. Yellow eyes snapped up.

“I was never good at darts,” Rowan told them.

He threw.

The shard spun end over end, missing the mushrooms by a humiliating foot and vanishing into the grass.

For half a second, even the gnawlings seemed unimpressed.

“Okay,” Rowan said. “In my defense, I’m dead.”

They charged.

Rowan stumbled backward through the ditch, hands scraping mud, searching. His fingers brushed another stone shard, smaller. The lead gnawling gathered itself to leap. Behind it, the Bloatcaps pulsed gently, oblivious.

He did not aim at the mushrooms this time.

He aimed at the gnawling’s face.

The shard struck its snout with a satisfying crack.

1

The gnawling squealed, twisted mid-pounce, and slammed sideways into the Bloatcap cluster.

The world hiccupped purple.

A muffled whump rolled across the ditch. The mushroom caps burst in a cloud of violet spores, expanding in a perfect sphere. The lead gnawling vanished inside it. The other two, too close and too stupid, plowed straight into the cloud.

3

3

3

All three monsters were flung backward. One hit a boundary stone and collapsed, legs curling inward. Another cartwheeled into the ditch, landed on its back, and did not move. The third—the one he had stunned earlier—hit the ground, twitched, and tried to crawl away with half its quills broken.

Wolfgrass Gnawling defeated.

Experience gained: 4

Wolfgrass Gnawling defeated.

Experience gained: 4

Rowan stared at the messages, chest heaving, mud dripping from his elbows.

“That,” he said, “is encounter design.”

The surviving gnawling hissed weakly and dragged itself toward the grass. Its health bar hovered above it in a sliver of red.

Wolfgrass Gnawling HP: 1 / 6

Status: Frightened, Crippled

Rowan’s body wanted to sit down. His lungs wanted to resign. His hands trembled so hard he could barely curl them into fists. The creature was running, or trying to. It was no longer a monster so much as a broken thing with eyes wide and shining.

For a moment, the subway came back.

The stranger’s hand in his. The concrete groaning overhead. His own voice, stupidly calm, telling her to crawl, keep crawling, don’t look back. He remembered the exact pressure of her fingers slipping from his when the beam dropped between them. He remembered deciding, in one clean impossible instant, that if one of them had to stay pinned beneath the world, it should be him.

The gnawling made a small choking sound.

Rowan swallowed.

“It’s a rabbit with knives,” he muttered. “It tried to eat your face. Don’t be weird.”

He picked up another shard of stone.

The gnawling looked back at him.

It had yellow eyes. Animal eyes. Not human. Not pleading. Just afraid.

“Damn it.”

He followed, limping, and brought the stone down fast. Once. Hard. The creature went still.

Wolfgrass Gnawling defeated.

Experience gained: 4

Continue Reading

You are reading a free preview (50%). Log in to unlock the full chapter and join comments.

Log In to UnlockCreate Account