Chapter 4: Rabbit King, First Farm

Miles Vale learned two things during his first hour as an immortal punching bag.

First: pain did not get easier with repetition.

Second: pain got cleaner.

The first time a horned rabbit had cored through his rib cage, his brain had dissolved into white noise. There had been no room for strategy, no space between punctured lung and black screen to observe anything useful. Just terror. Just meat recognizing it had become scenery.

By the seventh death, Miles could tell which organ failed first.

By the twelfth, he knew that the horned rabbits lowered their ears half a heartbeat before lunging, that their rear paws dug twice when launching from soft ash and once from exposed root, that their ivory horns vibrated faintly when they used whatever murderous beginner-zone version of a charge skill they had been gifted by a designer who hated children.

By the nineteenth, he stopped screaming.

He still made sounds. Nobody got impaled through the liver and maintained dignity. But the noises changed from blind animal panic into bitten-off curses and breathless commentary.

“Bad hitbox,” Miles rasped as a rabbit’s horn slid under his ribs and pinned him to the trunk of a gray-barked sapling. Blood bubbled up his throat hot and coppery. The animal’s red eyes reflected his face in four tiny, dying fragments. “Should’ve clipped my coat. Not my—”

The rabbit twisted.

Miles died with a wet snap in his ears.

YOU DIED.

Cause of Death: Piercing Trauma — Tutorial Hornrabbit Lv. 7

Class: Dead Beginner

Perk Activated: Last Lesson

Analyzing killer skill pool…

Compatible Skill Detected: Needle Charge

Skill acquired.

Light folded.

The world inhaled him through a needle’s eye.

Miles hit the ground beside the cracked fountain with a gasp that scraped his throat raw. Cold stone pressed against his cheek. Somewhere overhead, the broken tutorial sky flickered like an old monitor with a dying backlight, its blue surface split by jagged black seams. Chunks of impossible geometry drifted beyond those cracks—half-rendered mountains, upside-down forests, an ocean hanging vertical and shedding silent waterfalls into nothing.

The abandoned starting plaza sprawled around him in ruins. Training dummies rotted in neat rows, their straw bellies chewed open. A sign that might once have said WELCOME, NEW HEROES! leaned against a moss-choked wall, most of the letters clawed away. The fountain at the center had no water, only a basin full of ash and tiny bones.

Miles pushed himself up on shaking arms.

His shirt was whole again. His ribs were whole again. His body remembered the wound anyway.

He sat back against the fountain and laughed once, too hard, too sharp.

“Okay,” he whispered. “Okay, that’s disgusting.”

A translucent pane blinked in front of his face.

STATUS UPDATE

Name: Miles Vale

Class: Dead Beginner

Level: 1

Strength: 1

Agility: 2

Endurance: 1

Mind: 4

Luck: 0

Skills: Burrow Dash Lv. 1, Needle Charge Lv. 1

System Note: User remains invalid.

Deletion pending.

“Yeah, yeah.” Miles waved the pane away with a bloodless hand. “Put it in the queue.”

The message stuttered, letters briefly smearing into unreadable glyphs before vanishing.

He took inventory the way he used to after a failed run: breathe, reset posture, check resources, identify time loss, plan next segment. Except his old segments had been dungeon skips and boss animation cancels under the soft glow of monitors at three in the morning. This segment involved letting wildlife turn him into a cautionary tale.

Miles flexed his fingers. They trembled. His palms were scraped from falling, though the respawn had fixed the worst damage. The System restored him physically, but not entirely. Death left residue. A phantom ache behind the sternum. A memory of pressure in his lungs. His nerves still rang, as if some invisible hand had plucked them and not let go.

Treat agony like patch notes.

That thought steadied him.

Games lied in their tutorials. They said, Press A to jump, then hid the real movement tech in frame-perfect nonsense discovered by degenerates with too much caffeine and no fear of carpal tunnel. The Broken Tutorial was no different. It had rules. It had systems. It had exploits.

Miles was not strong. He was not armed. He had no party, no map, no quest marker, and the universe had already labeled him a clerical error.

But he had information.

And now he had mobility.

He stood, rolled his shoulders, and aimed himself toward the field beyond the plaza.

The starting meadow had once been picturesque in the way corporate fantasy worlds always were: soft grass, friendly slimes, maybe a smiling instructor NPC with a wooden sword and dental insurance. Centuries of abandonment had turned it feral. Grass grew in silver-black blades sharp enough to cut skin. Mushrooms pulsed with faint internal light beneath leaning stones. The distant training fence had collapsed into a maze of splinters. Every flower faced away from the cracked sky, petals clenched like fists.

Between the warped hills hopped death with whiskers.

Tutorial Hornrabbits grazed among the ash weeds, each one the size of a terrier, with powerful haunches, dirty white fur, and a single spiraling horn jutting from its forehead. Their red eyes tracked movement with the hungry focus of snipers.

Miles crouched behind a broken fence post and watched.

Four rabbits. Maybe five, if the lump near the burrow was alive and not a rock with ears. Patrol routes were loose but readable. They kept about ten meters between each other, crossing sightlines near the center of the meadow. Aggro radius seemed inconsistent—based on movement speed, sound, maybe line of sight. Their charge had a windup. Burrow Dash had a displacement component but miserable control. Needle Charge probably required open distance and a target.

“So,” Miles murmured, “we lab.”

He stepped into the meadow.

A rabbit’s head snapped up.

Miles grinned despite the cold sweat crawling under his collar. “Come on, you little lawsuit.”

The rabbit lunged.

Miles activated Burrow Dash.

The world dropped.

His stomach slammed into his spine. Dirt swallowed him in a rush of damp cold and root-scrape. For an instant he was not running so much as being fired through the earth by a drunken cannon. Mud filled his mouth. Pebbles battered his cheeks. The skill dragged his body along a shallow underground path with no respect for comfort, then spat him upward five paces to the left in an explosion of soil.

He emerged on one knee, coughing mud.

The hornrabbit’s charge cut through the space where he had been, horn punching into a fence post hard enough to split the wood.

“Ha!” Miles barked.

A second rabbit hit him from the side and shattered his hip.

He went down screaming, which ruined the laugh.

The kill came three seconds later when the first rabbit freed itself and finished the job.

YOU DIED.

Cause of Death: Coordinated Gore — Tutorial Hornrabbit Lv. 8

Perk Activated: Last Lesson

Analyzing killer skill pool…

Compatible Skill Detected: Threat Ping

Skill acquired.

Respawn.

Gasp. Fountain stone. Broken sky.

Miles rolled onto his back and stared upward while his heart tried to beat its way out of him.

“Coordinated,” he said hoarsely. “So they have pack AI. Great. Love that. Very beginner friendly.”

He checked the new skill.

Threat Ping Lv. 1

Passive/Active Sensory Skill

Effect: Detects hostile intent within a short radius as directional pressure. Active pulse reveals recently focused threats.

Warning: Skill degraded by user’s invalid status.

The moment he read it, the world acquired a new texture.

Not sound. Not sight. Something behind both. A faint pressure brushed the back of his skull from the direction of the meadow, like someone pointing a finger at him from far away. Hostility had weight. It prickled along the scalp and tugged at his attention.

Miles smiled.

It was not a pleasant smile.

“Now we’re talking.”

The next dozen runs became less like suicide and more like science.

He tested Burrow Dash distance by carving lines in the ash near the plaza with a splinter. Six paces minimum, eight if downhill, three if he clipped a root and arrived vomiting. Cooldown felt like twelve seconds, though pain stretched time enough to make counting unreliable. Needle Charge was harder. When he triggered it, his body compressed into a forward thrust, legs and spine aligning behind an invisible point. Without a horn, the skill improvised.

The first attempt slammed his forehead into a rotten stump.

YOU DIED.

Cause of Death: Self-Inflicted Cranial Trauma

Perk Activated: Last Lesson

No valid killer detected.

No skill acquired.

Miles respawned with bark splinters ghosting behind his eyes.

“Okay,” he said, sitting up very slowly. “Needle Charge requires a needle. File that under obvious in hindsight.”

He hunted for materials in the plaza. The tutorial had scraps if one stopped expecting loot chests and started thinking like a raccoon. A rusted spearhead beneath a collapsed weapon rack. Leather straps from a training dummy. A broken broom handle. Three bent nails. A strip of cloth that smelled like mildew and old smoke.

He lashed the spearhead to the broom handle with the leather, tested the wobble, tightened it with his teeth.

The result was less weapon than tetanus delivery system.

He loved it immediately.

“Behold,” he told the empty plaza, raising the crooked spear. “The Beginner’s Regret.”

No one applauded. A distant rabbit screamed like a child in a well.

Miles lowered the spear. “Tough crowd.”

Needle Charge with a spear was a different creature. The skill grabbed his muscles and narrowed the world into a tunnel. When he aimed at a fence post, the spearhead punched through with a crack, momentum dragging him after it. His shoulder nearly dislocated. His knees buckled. But the post split.

Damage, finally.

Not much. Not safe. Not sustainable.

Enough.

On run thirty-four, he killed his first rabbit.

It was ugly.

Threat Ping warned him a breath before the lunge. He Burrow Dashed under the charge, erupted behind the hornrabbit, and stabbed downward with all the grace of a man trying to unclog a drain. The spearhead glanced off the rabbit’s spine. The animal shrieked, twisted, and opened his forearm to the bone with its horn. Miles screamed back in its face, planted one knee on its thrashing body, and used Needle Charge at a distance of six inches.

The spear punched through fur, ribs, and wet resistance.

The hornrabbit convulsed beneath him. Its red eyes dimmed.

Miles knelt there panting, blood running down his wrist, one hand locked around the spear shaft.

The meadow went quiet.

ENEMY DEFEATED.

Tutorial Hornrabbit Lv. 7

Experience gained: 1

Due to Class: Dead Beginner, experience conversion reduced by 99%.

Progress to Level 2: 1/100

Miles stared at the message.

Then he started laughing.

He laughed until his arm throbbed and his throat hurt and the nearby rabbits began turning their heads toward him.

“One percent,” he wheezed. “You beautiful, spiteful garbage system. You’re scared of me leveling.”

The System did not answer.

A pressure touched the back of his skull.

Then another.

Then four at once.

Miles looked up.

The hornrabbits had stopped grazing. Every red eye in the meadow fixed on him. Their noses twitched. Their ears rose.

“Right,” he said, staggering upright and ripping the spear free with a wet sound. “Loot later.”

There was no loot.

There was only running.

He made it fifteen paces before the pack hit him.

YOU DIED.

Cause of Death: Excessive Rabbit

Perk Activated: Last Lesson

Analyzing killer skill pool…

Duplicate Skill Detected: Burrow Dash

Skill resonance increased.

Burrow Dash Lv. 2

Respawn.

Miles coughed, spat phantom blood, and slapped the fountain rim.

“Excessive Rabbit,” he said. “That’s going on my tombstone.”

The spear had not respawned with him.

For one bleak second, he thought the run had taken his only weapon. Then he spotted it leaning against the fountain, right where he had left the materials before crafting. Not restored—duplicated? No. The weapon in the meadow was gone because the instance reset on his death? Or personal objects returned? He picked it up and checked the leather lashings. Same knots. Same bloodstain on the shaft from his cut palm.

“Inventory persistence without inventory,” Miles murmured. “Player-bound object flag? Or the plaza is a save room.”

The fountain basin crackled.

A line of red text crawled across the ash inside it.

INVALID USER ACTIVITY DETECTED.

Behavior resembles prohibited exploit pattern.

Cease recursive death acquisition.

Miles leaned over the basin.

“Make me.”

The ash shivered.

Deletion pending.

“You keep saying that.”

He went back to the meadow.

Farming became a rhythm.

Approach. Trigger aggro. Watch ears. Feel Threat Ping. Bait the charge. Burrow Dash. Stab. Die if the angle was wrong. Die if a second rabbit flanked. Die if his spear caught in bone. Die if he forgot the twelve-second cooldown. Die if Needle Charge dragged him too far and he face-planted into a burrow hole. Die if he got cocky.

He got cocky often.

But between the deaths, kills appeared.

One rabbit became three. Three became seven. Experience crept upward at an insulting crawl. Skills shifted faster. Duplicate Burrow Dash raised its level. Threat Ping sharpened until hostile intent pressed against him like heat from a stove. Needle Charge upgraded after a Lv. 9 hornrabbit took him through the throat while using a stronger variant, and the System reluctantly folded the improvement into his stolen version.

Needle Charge Lv. 2

Effect improved: Increased forward acceleration. Minor piercing enhancement applied to held pointed object.

Minor piercing enhancement meant the Beginner’s Regret stopped bouncing off ribs.

Miles began aiming for the skull.

The first successful headshot left him standing over the corpse with his hands numb around the spear. The rabbit’s horn had grazed his cheek, laying it open from jaw to ear. Blood dripped from his chin onto the dead animal’s fur.

He wiped his face with his sleeve and looked across the meadow.

More rabbits watched from the grass.

“I know,” he said. “It’s a whole thing now.”

His voice sounded different in the empty zone. Rougher. Less like the man who had died in front of a livestream audience with energy drinks on his desk and donation alerts chiming over his corpse. More like someone scraped raw against the underside of reality and left to harden.

Hunger found him sometime after the fortieth death.

It came with cramps so sharp he nearly mistook them for another attack. Respawn fixed wounds, but it did not fill the stomach. The Broken Tutorial smelled of ash, damp soil, old rot, and now blood. Rabbit blood. Rabbit meat.

Miles looked at the hornrabbit corpse at his feet.

“No,” he said.

His stomach twisted.

He looked toward the plaza, where no helpful merchant sold starter rations and no friendly NPC waited with stew.

Then he looked back at the corpse.

“I hate immersive design.”

Fire took work. The tutorial had flint in an emergency kit beneath a collapsed awning, because apparently whoever built this place had considered hunger but not murder rabbits. Miles gathered splintered wood, dry weeds, and pages from a moldy beginner manual whose surviving text included cheerful advice like Remember to assign your first attribute point!

“Would if I could,” he muttered, feeding it to the sparks.

The meat cooked badly. He had no salt, no pan, and no culinary confidence beyond microwaving leftovers. The smell was gamey and greasy, but when he bit into the charred strip, his body nearly wept with gratitude.

He ate crouched beside the fountain, spear across his knees, eyes on the meadow.

Halfway through the meal, a voice spoke behind him.

“That was somebody’s cousin.”

Miles choked.

He snatched the spear and spun so fast his back hit the fountain.

No one stood there.

The plaza remained empty. Dummies. Bones. Cracked stones. The leaning welcome sign. The broken sky buzzing faintly overhead.

“Who said that?” Miles demanded.

Silence.

Threat Ping gave him nothing. No hostile pressure. No prickle.

He swallowed, throat tight, and aimed the spear at the shadows beneath the collapsed awning.