Chapter 2: The Skill That Should Not Drop

The goblin scout came down the corpse slope on all fours, snuffling.

It moved wrong in the red light, too quick and too low, like a child’s nightmare of a starving dog wearing a person’s skin. Its ears were long and torn at the edges. Its nose had been broken more than once, healed crooked, and pierced through one nostril with a ring of blackened bone. A strip of human hair—brown, braided, still tied with a pink elastic—hung from its belt beside a rusted knife.

Mason saw the elastic before he saw the blade.

His lungs seized.

A dozen bodies lay between them. Not bodies. People. He forced himself to think the word even as his stomach rebelled. Men and women in hospital gowns, business suits, pajamas, a high school letterman jacket, a wedding dress stained with black mud. Newly dead, newly delivered, newly abandoned beneath a sky the color of an open wound.

The goblins had been harvesting them.

The larger ones had moved on minutes ago, dragging corpses by their ankles toward the smoking treeline where crude torches bobbed like fireflies in a storm. This one had stayed behind. A scout, maybe. A scavenger. It had circled back for missed valuables, for meat, for whatever these things considered worth taking from the dead.

And now it had found Mason breathing.

His glitched System window jittered at the edge of his vision, translucent blue shot through with veins of static. Words flashed and disappeared faster than he could read them. Class selection unavailable. Error. Initialize? Initialize? Initialize? A red symbol pulsed in the upper corner like an infected heartbeat.

ANOMALY FLAGGED

Class: NULL

Level: 0

Status: Unregistered Soul

Recommendation: Remain stationary for collection.

“Sure,” Mason rasped under his breath, his throat raw with grave dirt and old smoke. “Let me just wait here politely.”

The goblin’s head snapped toward the sound.

Mason froze.

He was half-buried beneath a dead man twice his size, one arm pinned under a cold shoulder, his legs tangled with somebody’s torn cloak. His paramedic uniform was gone. In its place he wore a gray linen shirt thin enough to see his ribs through, trousers tied with a cord, and no shoes. No boots, no radio, no shears, no trauma bag. Nothing from the life he had traded away in the fire and screaming metal of the bus.

His hands shook anyway with the memory of work.

Check scene safety. Check responsiveness. Airway, breathing, circulation. Stop the bleed. Stabilize the spine. Package and move.

There was no package. No ambulance. No hospital. No protocols for waking up in a corpse pit while green predators looted the dead.

The goblin’s nostrils flared. Its lips peeled back from needle teeth.

“Nuh?” it grunted.

Mason did not speak. He eased his trapped arm one inch. The dead man’s shoulder rolled wetly against him.

The goblin heard it.

Its eyes were yellow marbles, too bright, slitted like a cat’s. They locked onto Mason’s face. For one strange second, neither moved. Red clouds churned overhead. Ash drifted in lazy flakes. Somewhere beyond the corpse pit, a woman screamed once, then cut off with horrible suddenness.

The goblin smiled.

“Fresh.”

It spoke the word in a cracked parody of language, and Mason’s blood turned cold.

Then it lunged.

Not a rush. Not a clumsy scramble. A sudden, snapping burst of motion that closed the distance faster than instinct could process. It sprang from hands and feet, rusted knife flashing, throat opening in a high shriek.

Mason moved because not moving meant dying.

He slammed his free elbow into the dead man’s jaw, levering the body aside with a grunt that tore at his ribs. Cold weight slid off him. He rolled left. The goblin’s knife punched into the corpse where Mason’s neck had been, sinking to the hilt with a wet crunch.

The scout snarled and yanked. The blade stuck.

Mason’s hand closed on something sharp.

Bone.

A rib, maybe, snapped from one of the bodies and stripped clean at one end. The other end jagged into a vicious white point. He did not think about whose it was. He did not have the luxury. He gripped it so hard the edge sliced his palm.

The goblin planted one bare foot on the corpse and wrenched its knife free.

Mason kicked upward.

His heel caught the creature in the knee. The joint bent, but not enough. The goblin shrieked, staggered, and came down at him again, knife raised overhand.

Mason saw the attack as a line.

Years of back alleys, overdose calls, bar fights, wrecks at two in the morning. He had never been a fighter, not really, but he knew motion. He knew panic. He knew the way bodies committed to violence and could not stop in time. He threw himself into the goblin instead of away from it, inside the arc of the blade.

The knife glanced off his shoulder, opening a hot line of pain.

He rammed the bone shard under the goblin’s ribs.

It hit resistance. Slid. Caught.

The goblin made a startled little cough against his cheek. Its breath stank of rotten fruit and old blood. Mason drove with both hands, screaming now, not words, just sound from somewhere beneath exhaustion and terror. The shard punched deeper. Something gave. The goblin’s knife clattered onto a dead woman’s chest.

Its claws raked Mason’s face.

White fire exploded across his cheek. He twisted, lost his grip, and the goblin hammered its forehead into his nose. Pain burst bright behind his eyes. He fell back onto bodies that shifted beneath him like a raft of meat.

The goblin staggered three steps away with the bone shard jutting from its side. It looked down at the wound. Black-green blood welled around the white point.

For one absurd heartbeat, it seemed offended.

“Mine,” it hissed, and reached for the shard.

Mason’s vision swam. His shoulder burned. Blood poured hot over his mouth. He spat red into the dirt and tried to stand, but the corpse pile moved under him, treacherous and soft. His bare foot slid between two bodies. Fingers—dead fingers—brushed his ankle.

Get up.

The goblin yanked the bone shard out with a wet pop.

Get up, Mason.

It bared its teeth and hefted the shard like a second knife.

A laugh nearly broke out of him. Not because it was funny. Because his brain was trying to escape the impossible by shattering into pieces. He had died. He had died pulling a boy with a melted backpack through the emergency hatch of a burning bus while diesel flames chased oxygen. He remembered the roof collapsing. Remembered heat so intense it erased his skin. Remembered someone screaming his name from the road.

He had given everything.

And the universe had answered by dropping him into a garbage heap for monsters.

“No,” he said.

The goblin tilted its head.

Mason got one knee under himself. His System window flickered madly, trying to put a health bar over the creature’s head. Text fractured across his vision.

Goblin Scout — Level 2

Disposition: Hostile

Estimated Threat: Fatal

Tip: Choose a class to access combat tutorials.

ERROR: NO CLASS FOUND

“Yeah,” Mason said, panting. “Great tip.”

The goblin attacked again.

This time Mason was ready for speed and still almost failed. The thing vanished into motion, pushing off with one foot in a razor-straight burst. Its whole body became a thrown weapon. The bone shard aimed for Mason’s belly.

He did not dodge. He dropped.

The goblin sailed over his lowered shoulder. Mason caught one skinny ankle with both hands as it passed and pulled down with every scrap of strength left in his shaking body.

The scout hit face-first on the slope.

Its skull cracked against a stone hidden among the bodies. The sound was small. A coconut dropped on tile. Its limbs spasmed. The bone shard flew from its hand and disappeared between corpses.

Mason scrambled after it, not giving it time, not giving himself time to hesitate. He crawled over a dead soldier in lacquered leather armor, fingers skidding through blood, and found the goblin trying to rise. Its nose was smashed flat. One eye had gone cloudy with burst fluid. It still reached for him.

He grabbed the back of its head.

“Stay down.”

He slammed its face into the stone.

Once.

The goblin twitched.

Twice.

Its claws scraped trenches in the mud.

Three times.

The body went loose.

Mason remained kneeling over it, both hands buried in greasy hair, breath coming in broken animal pulls. His own heartbeat thundered so hard he felt it in his teeth. Warm blood—his, the goblin’s, somebody else’s—soaked the knees of his linen trousers.

He waited for it to move.

It did not.

A chime rang inside his skull.

Not a sound in the air. Something cleaner and colder, like glass struck underwater.

Enemy Defeated!

Goblin Scout — Level 2

Experience awarded: 12

Level progress: 12 / 100

Mason flinched so hard he nearly fell off the corpse.

“Nope,” he whispered. “No, no, don’t do that.”

The window expanded anyway. Blue light washed over the dead goblin, scanning its slack limbs in stuttering bands. Static chewed the edges of the text. The usual crisp game-like neatness buckled, distorted, and then peeled open into something underneath.

Black text on a red background.

Not red like an error warning.

Red like blood seen through closed eyelids.

LOOT TABLE ACCESSING…

Coin: 0

Consumables: None

Equipment: Cracked Scout Knife (Bound to Goblin Tribe: Ashgut) — INELIGIBLE

Hide Scrap — INELIGIBLE

Bone Nose Ring — INELIGIBLE

…

UNREGISTERED CHANNEL DETECTED

FRAGMENT ACQUIRED

Mason stared.

The words did not fade.

They pulsed.

He tried to dismiss the window with the mental equivalent of swiping away a notification. It clung to his vision.

Skill Fragment: Lunge

Origin: Goblin Scout

Rank: Common

Compatibility: ERROR

Description: Compress leg and core musculature for a short forward burst. Designed for Goblin physiology.

Install? Y/N

“Install?” Mason said.

The corpse pit answered with silence, flies, and a distant goblin horn blowing somewhere in the trees.

His mouth went dry.

Designed for goblin physiology.

That sounded bad. That sounded very bad. That sounded like a warning label on a medication bottle written by someone who had watched the test subject explode.

He looked down at the dead scout.

Its legs were wrong by human standards—shorter femurs, longer feet, dense cords of muscle bunching around the hips. Its spine curved forward. Its whole body had been built like a spring trap.

Mason’s body was not.

He was six feet of exhausted former paramedic who had spent the last few years living on gas station coffee, protein bars, and six hours of sleep split across two days. His knees cracked when he stood up too fast. His back had never forgiven him for lifting a three-hundred-pound man out of a bathtub alone because the fire crew was five minutes out and the man’s lips were blue.

Installing a goblin muscle burst into that sounded like a quick way to turn his hamstrings into pulled pork.

“No,” he said.

The prompt flickered.

Install? Y/N

“I said no.”

Nothing happened.

Maybe it needed thought, not speech. He focused on N. He imagined pressing it. He imagined refusing the whole insane system. The letter dimmed for a fraction of a second.

Then the red pulse surged brighter.

CLASS SLOT NOT FOUND

SKILL INVENTORY NOT FOUND

DEFAULTING TO AVAILABLE STORAGE…

Available Storage: Body

Installing Fragment.

“Wait—”

The goblin corpse dissolved.

It did not rot. It did not burn. It came apart in threads of greenish light, unraveling from the wound in its skull outward. Muscle became code. Bone became thin luminous lines. The smell of blood sharpened into ozone. Mason tried to scramble backward, but the light moved faster, flowing across the bodies like spilled mercury.

It hit his cut palm.

His world inverted.

Pain nailed him to the slope.

Every muscle from his toes to his lower back clenched at once. Not cramped—rewritten. Fibers twisted under his skin. Tendons tugged against bone with hideous precision. His calves knotted so hard he felt something tear. He opened his mouth to scream and got mud instead because he had fallen face-first without noticing.

The System window splintered into a dozen overlapping panes.

INSTALLING…

Mapping foreign activation pathway…

Warning: Missing anatomical anchors.

Warning: Joint stress exceeds safe threshold.

Warning: User lacks class-based reinforcement.

Warning: Pain suppression unavailable.

Mason screamed then.

He had heard people scream in pain. Real pain stripped dignity away. It made bankers sound like children and bikers sound like wounded deer. He had held a woman’s hand while hydraulic tools peeled a dashboard off her femurs. He had talked a teenager through a compound fracture while the kid begged him not to look. He had thought he understood pain as landscape: peaks, valleys, edges, aftermath.

This was not a landscape.

This was architecture being rebuilt while he lived inside it.

His thighs convulsed. His spine arched. The soles of his bare feet scraped bloody furrows in the grit. He clawed at the ground, at corpses, at anything. A dead woman’s necklace snapped in his fist. He bit through the inside of his cheek and tasted copper.

Then, as suddenly as it began, the pain cut off.

Not faded. Cut.

Mason lay trembling in a nest of dead strangers, cheek pressed to cold mud, eyes open so wide the red sky blurred.

For several seconds, he could not remember how to breathe.

A new icon hovered in the corner of his vision: a stylized goblin footprint cracked down the middle.

Fragment Installed: Lunge

Type: Active Movement Skill

Rank: Common (Corrupted)

Activation: Intent + Forward Motion

Effect: Short burst acceleration.

Side Effects: Severe strain. Microtears. Loss of balance. Possible skeletal damage.

Cooldown: Variable.

Note: This skill should not be obtainable by your current class.

Mason laughed once, a broken sound that turned into coughing.

“What class?”

The window twitched, as if insulted.

Class: NULL

“Right.”

He pushed himself up on one elbow. His legs quivered beneath him, hot and wrong. Not stronger. Not exactly. More like someone had threaded tripwires through his muscles and left the trigger in his head. He could feel it: a coiled instruction buried beneath instinct. Lean forward. Compress. Release.

He hated that he understood it.

He hated more that part of him wanted to test it.

Another horn sounded from the treeline.

Closer.

Mason’s head jerked up.

Beyond the lip of the corpse pit, the world crawled into focus. The pit occupied a shallow basin of black dirt and exposed roots, as if some gigantic hand had scooped a wound out of the hillside. Around it, gray grass bent beneath drifting ash. Beyond the grass stood a forest of bone-white trees with red leaves hanging limp as wet cloth. Smoke rose behind them in several columns. Torches moved there. Voices chattered, harsh and high.

Goblins.

The main group had not gone far.

And if this scout failed to return…

Mason scanned the bodies with a medic’s ruthless urgency. Tools. Weapons. Shoes. Anything.

The dead soldier in lacquered armor had a sword, but the scabbard was trapped under two corpses and the hilt was wrapped in a faint gray shimmer. Mason grabbed it anyway. The moment his fingers touched the grip, the System chimed.

Item: Militia Saber

Requirement: Warrior, Guard, Duelist, or compatible martial class.

Status: Soulbound to deceased owner for 03:12:44.

Equip Failed.

The hilt burned his palm like dry ice. He cursed and let go.

“Of course.”

He tried a hatchet. Same shimmer. A spear. Same rejection. A bow nearly shocked his fingers numb. Elarion, apparently, had opinions about workplace licensing.

“I’ve intubated in a moving ambulance with a drunk guy trying to punch me,” he muttered, staggering between bodies. “But sure, I’m not qualified for pointy stick.”

At last he found something the System did not care about: a broken femur sharpened by accident or violence, heavier than the rib shard and long enough to use as a club. A strip of belt. A pair of boots on a dead merchant close enough to his size.

He hesitated over the boots.

The merchant was an older man with a silver beard and ink stains on his fingers. His eyes stared at nothing. A small book lay crushed beneath his shoulder, pages soaked black. Mason’s hand hovered over the laces.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

The words felt useless. He took the boots anyway.

They were stiff, and one had something wet inside that he chose not to identify. He pulled them on with shaking fingers, then wrapped the belt around his left forearm as crude protection. His shoulder wound throbbed. Blood glued his shirt to his skin. The scratches on his face burned with every breath.

He needed water. Antibiotics. Sutures. A tetanus shot, if this world even believed in tetanus. He needed sleep. He needed a supervisor to tell him this was the last call of the shift and mean it.

Instead, he got goblin voices.

Three of them. Maybe four.

Coming from the trees.

Mason dropped flat behind the curve of the corpse slope, heart slamming. His new skill twitched inside his legs in response to fear, eager as a loaded gun with no safety.

“Skik late,” one goblin voice snapped.

“Skik stupid,” another said.

A third laughed. “Skik find soft one. Hide. Eat alone.”

They emerged through the red leaves in a loose cluster, smaller than the brutes Mason had seen earlier but armed. One carried a hooked spear made from a branch and scrap metal. Another had a sling wrapped around its wrist. The largest wore a cap stitched from rat hides and dragged a sack that left a dark smear behind it.

Mason pressed himself lower.

The corpse pit stank enough to hide him if they did not look closely. His gray shirt blended with dead cloth and ash. He slowed his breathing until his chest ached.

The goblins shuffled to the lip of the basin.

“Skik?” called the one with the spear.

No answer.

The sling goblin sniffed. Its nose wrinkled. “Blood.”

“All blood, dung-head.”

“Fresh fresh.”

Mason tightened his grip on the femur club.

Four goblins. He had barely survived one, and that one had been alone, surprised, and killed mostly by terrain and luck. Four would butcher him. They would pin him down, open his belly, and argue over pieces.

He had to run.

His eyes cut to the opposite side of the pit. The slope there rose toward a tumble of black rocks and a narrow ravine beyond. If he reached the ravine, maybe he could break line of sight. Maybe the rocks would slow them. Maybe there would be somewhere to hide.

Maybe.

The spear goblin started down the slope.

It saw the blood trail where Mason had dragged himself. Its ears lifted.

“Skik?”

The bodies shifted beneath Mason’s knee with a soft squelch.

All four goblin heads snapped toward him.

For half a breath, the world held still.

Then the largest goblin grinned wide enough to split its face.

“Soft one!”

Mason ran.

He exploded up from the corpses, boots slipping, femur club clutched in one hand. A sling stone cracked past his ear and struck a body with a meaty thud. The spear goblin shrieked and bounded after him. Mason scrambled on hands and feet, climbing the far slope, every movement sending sparks of pain through his torn calves.

“Catch! Catch!”

Something hooked his shirt. He twisted. The spear’s jagged point ripped cloth and scraped ribs. He swung the femur backward without looking and felt it connect with bone. The goblin yelped.

Mason crested the slope and nearly fell over the other side.