Chapter 2: Respawn at Broken Hollow

Kael came back screaming.

Not with his throat—his throat was too busy dragging air into lungs that remembered being shredded open—but with everything beneath his skin. His nerves lit all at once. His hands clawed at cold stone. His heels slammed against a surface that was not grass, not subway tile, not the wet rubber flooring of a train car crumpling under concrete, but something older and rougher, slick with moss and dew.

For three heartbeats, he was still dying.

The wolf’s jaws were around his shoulder. Its antlers were hooks tearing through muscle. His blood steamed in the red light. Its breath stank of old meat and crushed flowers. He could feel teeth scraping bone.

Then he blinked.

The monster was gone.

Above him sprawled a sky the color of an open wound. No stars. No sun. Just scarlet clouds dragging their bellies over a jagged horizon, slow and heavy, as if the heavens had been bruised and never healed. A black moon hung half-hidden behind them, a coin pressed into blood.

Kael sucked in another breath. It hurt less this time.

He rolled onto his side and vomited.

Nothing came up except spit and a thread of something luminous and gray that evaporated before it touched the shrine floor. The sight of it made his stomach clench harder. He coughed until his ribs ached, then stared at his own hands.

They were whole.

No missing fingers. No torn palms. No bite marks. He flexed them, slowly. Dirt under the nails. A tremor in the knuckles. Skin pale in the red dusk. His hoodie was still there, ripped and smeared with blood that should have belonged to a dead man. The shoulder where the wolf had opened him from collarbone to ribs was unmarked beneath shredded fabric.

Kael pressed his fingers against it anyway.

Solid flesh.

Alive.

He laughed once, a broken sound with too much panic in it.

“No,” he rasped. His voice scraped out dry and unfamiliar. “No, no, no. I died.”

The word did something to the air.

A faint chime rang in his skull, delicate as glass tapped with a fingernail.

RESPAWN COMPLETE.

Bound Location: Broken Hollow Shrine

Cause of Death: Horncrown Straywolf — Level 3

Class: Gravebound Novice — Level 0

Death Debt Applied: 12% Soul Attrition

Stolen Trait Activated: Last Grasp

Ability Acquired: Pounce I

Kael stopped breathing.

The blue-white text hovered in front of his eyes, crisp against the blood-red sky. It did not shake when he shook his head. It stayed there, etched into vision itself.

He stared at the line again.

Ability Acquired: Pounce I.

His heart began to hammer, hard enough that it felt like something trying to escape him.

He had seen interfaces like this all his life. Skill unlocks. Death recap. Respawn timer. Passive proc notifications. His hands had danced over keyboards under stage lights while casters screamed his name and crowds turned every clutch into thunder. He knew systems. He knew exploit windows and hidden mechanics and balance mistakes that only revealed themselves when a desperate player did something stupid enough to count as genius.

But he also knew pain.

He knew the exact shape of his own death.

And no game had ever made him smell his own blood pooling in the grass.

Kael pushed himself up. The world tilted, then righted itself in layers. He was on a circular stone platform cracked into six uneven slabs. Knee-high pillars ringed the platform, each carved with symbols weathered almost smooth: skulls wearing crowns, trees growing from rib cages, birds with human hands. At the center stood a shrine no taller than his chest, a broken obelisk split down the middle. From the crack leaked a faint violet flame that gave off no heat.

The hollow around the shrine had been gouged out of a dark forest. Twisted trees leaned inward, their branches braided together overhead like fingers trying to cage the sky. Mushrooms glowed in clusters along roots, blue and sickly green. Beyond the shrine circle, mist pooled ankle-deep among black grass. Something clicked in the woods, then clicked again from the opposite direction.

Kael froze.

The notification still hovered.

“Status,” he whispered.

Nothing happened.

He swallowed and tried again, sharper. “Character sheet. Stats. Interface. Menu.”

A panel unfolded in front of him with a sound like parchment tearing.

KAEL VEY

Species: Human (Unregistered Origin)

Class: Gravebound Novice

Level: 0

Experience: 0 / 100

Health: 38 / 38

Stamina: 24 / 24

Mana: 6 / 6

Strength: 4

Agility: 6

Endurance: 4

Sense: 7

Will: 8

Grave Affinity: 1

Class Skills: Grave Touch I

Stolen Abilities: Pounce I

Traits: Last Grasp (Hidden), Deathbound (Locked), ???

Kael read every line twice. Then a third time, because his mind kept snagging on Level 0 like a nail under skin.

“Level zero,” he said. “Amazing. I got isekai’d and spawned as a tutorial mob.”

His own attempt at humor fell flat into the mist.

A second panel blinked open.

Pounce I

Type: Movement / Beast

Cost: 8 Stamina

Effect: Launch toward a visible target or point within 7 meters. Gain increased momentum and impact force. If used from concealment, first strike gains minor bonus damage.

Instinctive Use: Available

Warning: Insufficient body adaptation may cause collision trauma.

Kael stared at the warning.

“So it can kill me.” He dragged a hand over his face. “Of course it can kill me.”

Another click came from the woods.

This time, something answered with a low growl.

Kael dropped into a crouch before thought caught up with him. His body moved too quickly, jolting on borrowed panic and some unfamiliar thread of animal tension coiled in his thighs. The mist parted near the tree line. Two yellow eyes opened between roots.

Then another pair.

Then a third.

His first killer stepped into view.

The horned wolf looked exactly as his nerves remembered it. Tall as a pony, all lean muscle under matted charcoal fur, with antlers of black bone rising from its skull in jagged curves. Its muzzle was stained dark. One ear had been torn halfway off. Its lips peeled back from teeth too long for its mouth.

A label hovered above it in faint red.

Horncrown Straywolf — Level 3

Status: Feeding Frenzy

Kael’s shoulder throbbed with the memory of teeth.

Behind the first wolf, two more shapes circled through the mist. Smaller, perhaps, but only in the way knives were smaller than swords. Their antlers scraped branches. Their paws made no sound on the black grass.

“Okay,” Kael breathed. “Respawn point camp. Classic griefing.”

His fingers searched the stone around him for a weapon and found only pebbles, moss, and a broken chunk of pillar the size of a brick. He grabbed it. Its weight was miserable. Better than nothing.

The lead wolf lowered its head.

Kael knew that posture.

His body knew it better.

The attack came not as a leap but as an explosion. Muscle snapped. Black paws tore through mist. Antlers dropped toward his chest.

Kael threw himself sideways. Not elegantly. Not like an action hero. He hit the shrine floor shoulder-first and slid across wet stone, the wolf’s antlers screaming sparks where his ribs had been. The beast crashed into one of the knee-high pillars and shattered it. Stone fragments sprayed across the platform.

Kael rolled, came up on one knee, and hurled his broken pillar chunk.

It struck the wolf’s flank with a dull thud.

The monster did not even flinch.

“Worth a try,” Kael said, voice cracking.

The wolf turned.

The other two advanced.

A ridiculous calm spread through Kael’s mind, thin and fragile but familiar. It was the feeling before a final circle in a battle royale, when the noise of the crowd faded and every input mattered. When his coach used to say his eyes went dead. When commentators called him cold-blooded. Before the sponsorship collapse, before the benching, before he became a highlight reel people watched to argue about wasted potential.

Three enemies. Level disparity. No weapon. One movement ability.

Respawn location behind him. Unknown penalty twelve percent soul attrition. Not ideal.

Don’t think about dying. Think about cooldowns.

He glanced at his stamina.

Stamina: 22 / 24

No cooldown shown. Cost only.

The lead wolf lunged again.

“Pounce!”

Power detonated through Kael’s legs.

For one glorious fraction of a second, he was weightless.

Then he realized he had aimed badly.

He shot backward and upward, not toward safety but directly into the broken obelisk. His hip clipped stone. Pain burst white across his vision. Momentum spun him over the shrine, and he crashed onto the far side in a tangle of limbs, skidding through violet flame that felt like cold fingers passing through his bones.

Stamina: 14 / 24

Health: 31 / 38

“Warning appreciated,” Kael groaned.

The wolf slammed into the spot where he had been, claws scraping stone. For a heartbeat, its momentum carried it too far. Its rear legs slid. Its head dipped.

Kael saw the opening.

No weapon. No damage. Except—

Grave Touch.

He had chosen the class in blind panic because the interface had shoved options in his face while the wolf charged. Gravebound Novice had been the worst of them, the gray-rank pity choice. Its skill description had flashed by too fast, something about contact with dead matter. But the class panel showed it. Maybe useless. Maybe not.

He lunged from the ground and slapped his palm against the wolf’s hind leg.

“Grave Touch!”

Cold poured out of him.

Not from his skin—from somewhere behind his heartbeat. A cemetery chill sank through his palm into the beast. Frost-gray veins crawled across the wolf’s fur for the length of a breath. The animal yelped, a sharp, startled sound. Its leg buckled.

Mana: 2 / 6

Minor Necrotic Damage dealt.

Movement Impaired: 1.5 seconds.

Kael grinned despite the terror.

“Oh, you felt that.”

The wolf twisted and snapped at him.

He jerked back. Teeth closed on air so close he felt the wind of them against his nose. The second wolf used that moment to charge from the right.

Kael had no time to stand.

He kicked off the stone and used Pounce again—not with words this time, but with intent. The ability answered like a reflex stolen from another skeleton. His thighs compressed. His spine aligned. He launched sideways under the second wolf’s antlers and slid across moss, stamina burning through him like alcohol in an open cut.

Stamina: 6 / 24

He hit the edge of the shrine platform and tumbled down into the hollow.

Mist swallowed him.

The ground beyond the stones was mud and tangled roots. He rolled into a patch of glowing mushrooms. They burst under his shoulder, releasing powder that smelled like wet copper and cinnamon. He bit back a curse and crawled behind a root as thick as his torso.

The wolves prowled above, claws clicking on shrine stone.

Kael pressed both hands over his mouth.

His body shook in delayed revolt. His right hip screamed from hitting the obelisk. His mana was nearly empty. His stamina was a joke. Three Level 3 monsters were sniffing for him less than ten meters away.

And he was smiling.

Not because he was safe. He was very obviously not safe.

But because the impossible thing had happened exactly the way the notification claimed. The wolf had killed him. He had come back with its movement ability. He had used it. Badly, sure. Like a toddler handed a rocket launcher. But he had used it.

Death had not ended the run.

Death had added something to his kit.

That realization was more terrifying than the wolves.

Because Kael knew himself. He knew the ugly little spark in him that woke up when a system could be bent. He had lost contracts because he would rather test forbidden angles than play safe. He had thrown matches in scrims not out of laziness, but because he needed to know whether a frame-perfect exploit worked under pressure. His coaches called it arrogance. His fans called it genius until the day he stopped winning.

Now the exploit was his own corpse.

A wolf’s nose appeared over the edge of the platform. It sniffed. Yellow eyes swept the mist.

Kael’s smile died.

The third wolf dropped silently from the shrine to the hollow floor.

Its paws sank into mud. Its head swung left, then right. It was smaller than the first, ribs visible under fur, one antler broken near the base. A label blinked overhead.

Horncrown Straywolf — Level 2

Status: Hungry

Level 2.

Still enough to tear him open.

It stepped closer to the root.

Kael looked around, searching through mist and roots and scattered stones. His hand closed around a shard of broken shrine pillar, thinner than the first piece and sharp along one edge. Not a knife. A shitty rock with ambition.

The wolf sniffed again.

Kael’s stamina ticked upward.

Stamina: 7 / 24

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