Chapter 4: Stats Written in Blood

The dagger did not sit in Mason’s hand so much as argue with it.

It was the length of his forearm, jagged as a shard of broken glass, and black in the way dead screens were black—flat until it caught the light, then suddenly full of crawling color. Red error glyphs squirmed beneath its surface like worms under ice. Every few seconds, its edge flickered out of alignment with the world, leaving behind a thin blue afterimage that made Mason’s eyes water if he stared too long.

It had a handle, technically. The handle was a knot of hardened static that bit into his palm hard enough to draw blood. When he shifted his grip, the dagger chirped in a tone that reminded him of an old computer choking on startup.

ITEM ACQUIRED: [NULL-BITE DAGGER]

Category: Weapon / Corrupted / Beginner-Illegal

Damage: 3-7 + ???

Durability: ERROR / 19

Effect: On hit, may apply [Bleed], [Data Shear], [Unhandled Exception]

Warning: This item is not approved for Tutorial use.

“Yeah,” Mason muttered, flexing his aching fingers around the hilt. “Wouldn’t want the beginners to have anything unsafe.”

The dead slime spread across the cracked stone clearing behind him in a glistening lake of dissolving jelly. It steamed where it touched the ground, eating shallow grooves into the ancient tutorial path. The smell was somewhere between burnt sugar, swamp rot, and fried electronics. Mason had been killed by that smell twice before the slime ever touched him. He had opinions about it.

The red sky pressed low overhead, bruised with black clouds that moved in perfect square chunks. Far beyond the clearing, the tutorial forest creaked and whispered, a wall of trees grown too tall and too hungry over ten thousand unattended years. Their bark had split around old tutorial signposts, devouring instructions meant for players who had never arrived. The sign nearest Mason leaned at an angle, its cheerful blue paint mostly flaked away.

WELCOME, NEW HERO! FIRST QUEST: DEFEAT A BASIC SLIME!

The words had teeth marks through them.

Mason wiped slime residue from his cheek with the back of his wrist and immediately regretted it. The acid burned. He hissed, spat, and rubbed his wrist on his jeans until the denim smoked.

“Basic slime,” he said. “Sure.”

A blue window shivered open in front of him. It was cracked through the middle, like a pane of glass that had taken a bullet but refused to fall apart. The edges buzzed with pixelated snow.

COMBAT COMPLETE

Enemy Defeated: [LV. 1 BASIC SLIME] (Corruption Tier: Catastrophic)

Deaths Recorded: 7

Victory Classification: Improvised / Invalid / Entertaining

Experience Awarded: 85

Bonus Awarded: Pattern Recognition Under Duress +15

Bonus Awarded: Deathless Debugger Class Interaction +???

Mason stared at the word Entertaining.

“Glad somebody’s having fun.”

The window twitched, as if offended.

LEVEL UP!

You are now Level 2.

Attribute Points Available: 3

Skill Fragment Consolidation Available.

Enemy Data Cache Available.

Open Status?

Y / N

Mason’s heartbeat, already running hot from the fight, kicked harder.

Level two.

It should have been ridiculous. Level two was the gaming equivalent of learning which button made your character jump. In any normal game, level two meant a new hat, a rusty sword, maybe the ability to take two wolf bites instead of one. But here, beneath the blood-red sky of an abandoned tutorial world, after dying seven times to something labeled “basic,” the words hit him with the weight of a medal pinned into bone.

He had earned it with dissolved lungs, crushed ribs, snapped neck, acid in his eyes, and one deeply unfair incident involving the slime pretending to be dead.

“Open status,” Mason said.

The cracked blue window expanded. New panes unfolded around it, stuttering and overlapping. Some of the text appeared upside down before correcting itself. One panel tried to load in a language made of brackets and screaming.

STATUS: MASON VALE

Class: Deathless Debugger (Forbidden / Deprecated / Active)

Level: 2

Health: 34 / 34

Stamina: 19 / 22

Mana: 0 / ERROR

Condition: Acid Burns (Minor), Concussion (Fading), Existential Irritation (Persistent)

ATTRIBUTES

Strength: 5

Agility: 6

Endurance: 5

Perception: 8

Will: 9

Intellect: 11

Luck: -3 (Flagged)

Corruption Affinity: 1

Debug Authority: 0.07%

Unassigned Attribute Points: 3

Mason read the list twice.

“Existential irritation?”

The condition line flickered.

Condition update failed.

“Thought so.”

He lowered himself onto a chunk of broken paving stone, keeping the dagger angled away from his thigh. His whole body trembled now that the fight had ended. The crash. The death. The red sky. The seven extra deaths after that. The impossible interface. It all pressed at the edges of his mind, trying to become panic.

Mason took a breath through his nose, tasted slime vapor, gagged, and switched to shallow mouth breathing.

“Okay,” he said. His voice sounded too loud in the clearing. “Stats. I can do stats. Stats are friendly. Stats don’t dissolve you unless designed by a sadist.”

He paused.

The Shattered Tutorial rustled around him.

“Which, fair, might be the case.”

He focused on Strength.

The number brightened. A tooltip popped open.

Strength

Measures physical force output, lifting capacity, grip resilience, and ability to bully poorly secured doors.

Current Rating: Below Average Adult Human / Above Average Office Chair Occupant

Mason made a face. “Personal.”

He checked Agility.

Agility

Measures balance, reflex speed, bodily coordination, evasion, and how convincingly you can pretend tripping was tactical.

Current Rating: Untrained but Motivated

Endurance was predictably insulting. Perception, Will, and Intellect were higher, which made sense in the depressing way his life had made sense. Too much caffeine, too little sleep, years spent catching bugs other people missed while producers asked whether crashes were really “that bad.”

Then there was Luck.

Luck: -3

This attribute influences probability nudges, loot variance, critical coincidences, and whether mysterious portals open beneath your feet.

Current Rating: Statistically Concerning

Warning: Luck value appears externally vandalized.

Mason went very still.

“Externally what?”

The tooltip collapsed.

He tapped it again with his finger. His fingertip passed through the floating window with a cold static prickle.

Warning: Luck value appears externally vandalized.

Source: ACCESS DENIED

Repair: Requires Debug Authority 1.00% or higher.

A wind moved through the clearing, carrying the distant groan of trees and something deeper under it. A bass note. A huge sleeping thing turning over beneath the world.

Mason looked up.

The sky’s red clouds had formed a shape for half a second. Not a face. Not exactly. Just angles where angles should not be. A suggestion of an eye too large for heaven.

Then the clouds broke apart into blocky fragments, and the forest resumed whispering.

“Nope,” he said softly. “Not dealing with sky vandalism yet. One nightmare at a time.”

He looked back to the status pane.

Corruption Affinity sat at 1, pulsing faintly. Debug Authority read 0.07%, which was either laughably small or incredibly dangerous. Given the System had labeled his class Forbidden, Mason suspected both.

“Skill Fragment Consolidation,” he said. “Open.”

The air in front of him tore downward like a loading bar made of light. A new panel appeared, darker than the others, edged in red.

SKILL FRAGMENTS RETAINED THROUGH RESPAWN

Deathless Debugger passive interaction detected.

Upon death, fragments of sensory, muscular, tactical, and enemy-pattern data may persist beyond standard memory retention.

Available Fragments:

— Acid Splash Timing I: 41%

— Slime Pseudopod Telegraph I: 73%

— Pain Response Suppression I: 28%

— Panic Breathing Correction I: 34%

— Improvised Footwork: Circular Kiting I: 56%

— Weak Point Recognition: Nucleus Exposure I: 62%

Select up to 2 fragments to consolidate.

The clearing seemed to narrow around him.

For a moment Mason wasn’t sitting on broken stone beneath alien clouds. He was back in a dark QA room at 2:17 a.m., eyes burning, replaying the same boss encounter for the forty-third time because the studio’s combat designer swore the hitbox was fine. He remembered the tiny adjustments. The way hands learned before thoughts did. The way death in a game wasn’t failure if it bought information.

Only here, death had teeth. Death had acid. Death left echoes in his bones.

He touched his chest where the slime had punched through him on loop four. The flesh was whole now. His shirt was not. A ragged hole remained, stiff with dried blood around the edges.

Fragments of sensory, muscular, tactical, and enemy-pattern data may persist.

“So dying is grinding,” Mason said.

The System offered no comment.

“Horrible. Efficient, but horrible.”

He considered the list. Acid Splash Timing was useful, but specific. Pseudopod telegraph might apply to other tentacled nonsense, which this world seemed likely to provide in bulk. Pain suppression tempted him in a way that made him uncomfortable. Weak Point Recognition was the obvious prize.

“Consolidate Slime Pseudopod Telegraph and Weak Point Recognition.”

The words burned red.

Consolidating…

Needles of cold light slid into his eyes.

Mason jerked backward, but the window followed. His vision fractured. The clearing vanished beneath a flood of images: the slime bunching before it struck, the tremor in its membrane 0.4 seconds before launching acid, the way its core drifted left when threatened from the right, the almost invisible thinning of jelly above its nucleus when it prepared a full-body slam.

He felt his legs move through patterns while he sat still. His calves remembered pivots he had never successfully made alive. His hands twitched around phantom weight. A hundred tiny failures stitched themselves into one cleaner instinct.

Then it ended.

Mason bent forward, breathing hard. His stomach rolled. For a second he was certain he would vomit. He swallowed it down because he did not trust the local ecosystem with his DNA.

Skill Gained: Pattern Read I

You can identify repeated attack cues and timing windows with increased clarity.

Effect improves with Perception and Intellect.

Skill Gained: Weak Point Glimpse I

You may perceive brief vulnerability indicators on corrupted or analyzed enemies.

Effect improves with Debug Authority.

Warning: Some entities can perceive being perceived.

Mason stared at the last line.

“That is a terrible warning to put after the skill is already installed.”

He waited for a reply. The System, coward that it was, remained silent.

He rose slowly. The trembling in his legs had changed. It wasn’t gone, but there was a new awareness inside it, a sense of angles and stored momentum. He took a step to the left, then another, then pivoted around a crack in the paving stone.

His body knew something now. Not much. Not grace. Mason Vale was still a burned-out game tester wearing torn jeans and one sneaker with a melted sole. But when a drop of slime fell from a nearby branch, his shoulder shifted before his mind named the threat. The drop hissed against the stone where his arm had been.

Mason looked at the smoking spot.

“Okay,” he whispered. “That’s new.”

The dagger hummed in his grip, almost pleased.

He opened the next panel.

“Enemy Data Cache.”

ENEMY DATA CACHE: BASIC SLIME

Data harvested through combat, death, ingestion, suffocation, blunt trauma, acid exposure, and successful kill.

Completion: 78%

Would you like to analyze?

Y / N

“Analyze.”

The blue pane warped. A model of the slime assembled in midair, translucent and rotating. It was smaller than the actual thing had been, probably because displaying the full disgusting majesty of a cottage-sized murder blob would have blocked the entire clearing. Lines of code crawled through its body. Red knots marked corrupted sections. At the center floated a dense sphere the size of Mason’s fist.

[LV. 1 BASIC SLIME]

Original Tutorial Role: Low-threat physical engagement practice.

Current Evolution: Apex Scavenger Gelatinous Ambush Predator.

Primary Damage: Acid / Blunt / Suffocation

Resistances: Slashing 60%, Piercing 40%, Poison Immune, Shame Immune

Weaknesses: Core Exposure, Alkaline Compounds, Thermal Shock, Repeated Invalid Inputs

Behavioral Notes: Mimics low-level monster patterns to lure underestimating targets. Displays emergent spite.

Mason blinked.

“Repeated invalid inputs?”

A sub-window opened as if it had been waiting for him to ask.

DEBUG NOTE

Entity retains outdated beginner-monster command structure beneath corruption layers.

Conflicting stimuli may cause momentary behavioral lock.

Example: Feint attack + retreat + non-hostile gesture + rapid lateral movement.

Result: 0.8 to 1.3 second processing delay.

Mason’s mouth slowly curved.

“Oh,” he said. “You had a stun bug.”

The model of the slime rotated innocently.

He thought of loop three, when he had slipped, flailed, accidentally waved with his off hand, and the slime had paused just long enough for him to crawl away before immediately flattening him. He had assumed it was confusion. It had been, technically. Weaponized confusion.

A laugh escaped him. It came out raw and a little unhinged.

“I spent my whole life finding this garbage,” he said to the dead slime. “You think a haunted pudding with patch notes is going to beat me?”

The forest answered with a distant crack.

Not thunder. Wood.

Mason’s laughter died.

Something moved beyond the clearing. Something large enough to push old trees aside instead of weaving between them.

His status window remained open, still showing three unassigned attribute points.

“Right,” he said, voice dropping. “Spending spree before the next customer.”

He had played enough RPGs to know the trap. Dump points into damage and become glass. Dump into health and take forever to kill anything. Spread them evenly and become mediocre at dying in several ways.

This place was not normal. His class rewarded information. His best weapon was noticing the rule nobody else could see. Perception and Intellect helped Pattern Read. Debug Authority improved Weak Point Glimpse but looked like something he couldn’t buy directly. Endurance would keep him alive. Agility would keep him from needing to test Endurance.

Another crack echoed through the trees.

Closer.

Mason watched the forest line. Leaves trembled. A flock of tiny tutorial birds burst from the canopy, each with a glowing question mark over its head. Half were snatched midair by vines.

“Never mind, speed shopping.”

He assigned one point to Agility.

The number ticked from 6 to 7. Heat flushed through his legs, sharp and electric. Muscles tightened along his hips and spine. The world did not slow, exactly, but his body seemed to negotiate with it faster.

One point to Perception.

Perception rose to 9.

The clearing exploded with detail. The sourness of slime acid separated from the metallic smell of his own blood. He heard small things: sap popping under bark, grit sliding down fractured stone, the wet collapsing sigh of the dead slime behind him. The forest’s whisper became layered—leaves, insects, distant water, and the heavy dragging scrape of something armored.

He hesitated over the last point.

Endurance would be smart. Will might matter against fear, mind magic, whatever other unfairness waited. Intellect synergized with his class and probably helped him understand System nonsense before it killed him.

The dragging scrape came again. A shadow moved behind the trees.

“I hate responsible builds.”

He put the last point into Endurance.

Endurance rose to 6. His ribs expanded with a breath that hurt less than the last one. The acid burns cooled from bright agony to angry heat. His max health ticked up.

Attributes Assigned.

Agility: 7

Perception: 9

Endurance: 6

Health increased: 34 → 39

Stamina increased: 22 → 25

“Five whole hit points,” Mason said. “I am become tank.”

The trees at the far side of the clearing bent outward.

Mason closed his status with a thought and ducked behind the half-dissolved remains of a stone fountain. The fountain had once held a statue of a smiling robed woman pouring water from a jug. Time and corruption had removed her head. Moss grew from the neck stump. The water in the basin was black and reflected stars that were not in the sky.

He crouched low, dagger ready, and forced himself to breathe slowly.

A creature stepped into the clearing.

At first, Mason’s brain tried to label it wolf, because that was what beginner zones had. Wolves. Maybe giant rats. Maybe boars if the designer lacked imagination.

This was what happened when a wolf had been left alone in a broken tutorial for ten thousand years with nothing to do but sharpen itself.

It stood nearly as tall as Mason at the shoulder. Its fur was the color of old ash, matted with patches of glowing blue crystal that jutted from its spine like broken save points. Its jaws split too far back, revealing three rows of teeth etched with tiny tutorial runes. A rusted collar hung around its neck, the nameplate still visible beneath dried blood.

TRAINING WOLF – DO NOT FEED

The wolf sniffed the air.

Its nose wrinkled. Its head turned toward the dead slime, then toward Mason’s hiding place.

A red nameplate flickered above it.

[LV. 2 TUTORIAL WOLF]

Corruption Tier: Severe

Only level two.

Mason did not find that comforting.

Weak Point Glimpse stirred behind his eyes. For a fraction of a second, the wolf’s body overlaid with thin red lines. One pulsed along its left foreleg where crystal had grown into the joint. Another shimmered under its jaw, between armor-like plates of scar tissue. A third glowed faintly behind the collar.

Then the lines vanished.

The wolf’s head snapped toward him.

Mason’s blood cooled.

Some entities can perceive being perceived.

“Of course you can,” he whispered.

The wolf growled.

The sound shook dust from the fountain.

Mason moved before it lunged. Pattern Read caught the bunching of its rear legs, the drop of its head, the tiny flare of crystal light along its spine. He rolled left as the wolf smashed through the fountain, jaws closing where his chest had been.

Stone exploded. Black water sprayed across the clearing. A drop hit Mason’s sleeve and froze into a tiny screaming face before evaporating.

“Nope,” Mason said, scrambling up. “Hate the water too.”

The wolf pivoted with frightening speed. Its claws carved bright lines through stone. It lunged again, not straight this time but in a hooking path meant to cut off his dodge.

Mason saw it. Barely.

Agility 7 got him moving. Perception 9 told him why. He slid on loose grit, slammed his shoulder into a cracked signpost, and felt teeth graze his torn shirt. The wolf’s hot breath rolled over him, rancid with meat and ozone.

He slashed at its face.

The Null-Bite Dagger connected with the side of its muzzle. Not deep. The blade skipped off crystal-flecked bone, then caught in fur. Red code flared.

Hit!

Damage: 4

[Data Shear] failed.

[Unhandled Exception] failed.

[Bleed] applied.

The wolf recoiled more in surprise than pain. A thin line of black blood opened across its muzzle.

Mason grinned despite himself.

“That’s right. Bleed for QA.”

The wolf answered by headbutting him.

The world became sky, stone, and impact. Mason hit the ground hard enough to lose the dagger. Pain flashed white through his ribs. The wolf pounced, one massive paw pinning his left arm. Claws slid through skin into muscle.

Mason screamed.

The wolf’s jaws opened over his face.

There was no time to think. His right hand found a chunk of broken fountain stone. He rammed it upward into the wolf’s left foreleg—the weak joint, the red line he had glimpsed.

Crystal cracked.

The wolf’s bite missed his head by an inch, teeth slamming into stone with sparks. It yelped, weight shifting off him.

Mason ripped his arm free. Skin tore. His vision swam.

He crawled, grabbed the dagger, and rolled as the wolf’s claws came down. One claw opened his back from shoulder to hip. Fire spilled through him.

Health: 18 / 39

“Still alive,” Mason gasped. “Bad news for both of us.”

He staggered toward the dead slime.

The wolf limped after him, favoring its cracked foreleg. It was learning too. Its next steps were cautious, spreading wide to avoid another strike. Intelligent, or at least experienced. Great. The starter wolf had raid awareness.

Mason’s boots splashed into the cooling edge of slime residue. Acid licked at the rubber, smoking. The wolf stopped short, lips peeling back.