Zeke stood on a midsized boulder, holding aloft a pilfered spear. He had gotten it in the last village he’d destroyed, and it was obviously a higher quality than any he’d held before. The steel spearhead glistened in the faint light, a far cry from the iron tips he’d seen before. The enhancements didn’t end there, either. Indeed, the entire weapon – from the spreadhead to the straight shaft – had been vastly improved. And as he stood over the stream, watching various fish swim by, the weapon was precisely what he needed. After all, he couldn’t just wait for the fish to attack him. Instead, he needed to be proactive.

With a lightning quick movement, he sent the spear plunging into the depths of the stream, impaling one of the silvery fish. Over the last month, Zeke had gotten used to his increased dexterity, and his aim had developed in kind. That, coupled with a strength that sent the weapon flying with unnatural speed, made spearing fish an exercise in simplicity.

Zeke crouched to pick up the rapidly unspooling rope he’d attached to the end of the spear and began reeling it in, slowly coiling it around his arm, wrapping it from his palm to his elbow. The fish resisted, trying to wriggle free, but by this point, Zeke was an old hand at spear fishing, and the fish’s struggles were for naught. Soon, he’d hefted the thing out of the water and onto his perch.

It wasn’t a barracuda, like before. Instead, the fish was identified as a [Mana Trout], and he knew from experience that it tasted far better than its flying cousin. It had been almost five weeks since his first encounter with the fish, and in that time, he’d captured and eaten a few dozen of the things. Without them, he’d never have made it so far.

As Zeke gutted and cleaned the fish, expertly fileting it, he thought about his recent struggles with the trolls. Their population had grown denser the higher he climbed, and it felt like he found a new village every day. Some, he’d cleared out, just like before, but others, he left alone, knowing that they were far more trouble than they were worth. The experience just wasn’t worth the risk, especially for some of the larger villages. With huts made out of stone instead of loose timber, their population usually numbered more than five-hundred, and that was a conservative estimate. Even at his best, Zeke couldn’t kill so many – not even if he resorted to his strategy of assassination. One man can only do so much, after all.

That wasn’t to say that he hadn’t been busy. He had killed hundreds of trolls over the previous month, and he’d reaped the benefits from it, as well. Not only had he gained new equipment like his spear and the rope, but he’d also managed to gain a level, too. However, after he’d gotten level six, the experience – even when killing creatures twice his level – had slowed to a trickle. Even now, almost two weeks’ worth of near constant killing later, he could sense that he was less than a quarter of the way to level seven. His ideas about quickly reaching level twenty-five and gaining a class seemed like child’s fantasies in the face of his slow leveling speed. At his current rate, it would be years before he could reach such a lofty goal.

Zeke retreated back to his makeshift camp, where he’d already built a fire. Even as he entered the cave which had been his home for the past couple of days, he studied the walls. The Wall Creepers weren’t that common, but he’d been attacked a dozen times since that first encounter. The strange, octopus-like creatures were mostly harmless if he managed to ambush them, but if they got the jump on him, they were truly dangerous. On one occasion when he’d reacted too slowly, he’d nearly lost an arm to one. So, since that day, he’d grown careful to the point of paranoia, his eyes constantly searching the walls for the wall-crawling predators.

After living in the caves for close to six months, Zeke had changed in more ways than gaining levels. Certainly, if he could somehow go back to the old world, he’d be considered superhuman, and in every way possible. But aside from base attributes, Zeke’s mind had been sharpened by the constant struggle for survival. Around every turn, there had been one danger after another, and Zeke had been forced to either adapt or succumb. That meant that he was constantly searching for new threats, and even when he slept, there was a part of him that remained aware of his surroundings. The alternative was death via the innumerable threats hosted by the cave system. And though Zeke might lament the necessity for such constant vigilance, he had to admit that he felt more alive than he’d ever felt before – ironic, considering he’d had to die to achieve that feeling.

As Zeke cooked the filets over his meager fire, he studied his status page.

Name

Ezekiel Blackwood

Class

n/a

Level

6

Race

Human (G)

Alignment

Isphodel

Achievements

First Blood, Hasty Evolution

Strength

64

Agility

54

Dexterity

63

Endurance

57

Vitality

55

Intelligence

47

Wisdom

45

Unassigned Attribute Points

0

He had chosen to put his free points in strength and dexterity, with ten in the former and five in the latter, mostly because he’d begun to consider them his primary statistics. Endurance was obviously important, too, and he intended to focus on it in the future as well. His reasoning was that, with his preferred method of combat, strength was a crucial part of the equation because he couldn’t simply slice through enemies. Instead, he had to rely on blunt force, which made strength fundamentally important. Similarly, he couldn’t simply hack through body parts, clearing the way toward more vital targets. So, he needed the ability to hit where he aimed, with little margin for error. Dexterity took care of that as it improved his coordination to absurd levels.

That brought him to endurance. The simple fact was that, eventually, he needed to invest something into defense. Zeke was under no delusions. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to lean on the effects of [Leech Strike] forever. Certainly, it would always help, especially considering its low mana cost of activation as well as its nearly unnoticeable maintenance cost. But it was never intended to do the heavy lifting he was asking it to do. The same could be said for his vitality, which, while it was likely incredibly high for his level, would probably see diminishing returns as he – and his enemies – got stronger. He could easily imagine a situation where a monster wounded him to the point where he simply couldn’t heal from it before succumbing to death.

That left only agility and endurance. Agility was an attractive option, if for no other reason than that it would save him a good deal of pain. Dodging seemed preferable to simply taking a hit, didn’t it? But what about when he couldn’t avoid damage? If he didn’t have the necessary endurance, he’d be ripped to pieces. And if his six months in the caves had taught him anything, it was that there was no way to completely avoid getting hit. Eventually, regardless of how quick he was, he’d find himself on the wrong end of a claw swipe. Or a bite. A sword, axe, or spear. It was inevitable.

Focusing on endurance, by contrast, had no real weakness. It was equally effective against strong attacks as well as glancing blows. The only problem was that no matter how much endurance he had, everything still hurt. If his strategy was to simply withstand blows that would’ve otherwise killed him, Zeke knew he was in for quite a lot of pain. But he’d always been good at enduring pain.

Finally, Endurance was already his third-highest statistic, with his biggest modifier due to the percentage boost of his achievement, Hasty Evolution. So, while all of his other stats received a five-percent multiplier, endurance got a ten percent increase. That meant that each point he allocated into the stat meant that much more. That made his decision an easy one, giving him an idea of how he would progress with future levels.

Once Zeke had finished eating his meal and restoring his physical energy as well as his mana, he found himself leaning against the cave wall and examining the runes on his hands. They weren’t visible to the naked eye, so he instead studied them with what he thought of as his inner sense. On the surface, he was well aware that they were vastly complicated and impossible to truly understand, but even so, he felt like he was on the verge of seeing through the complexity into some sort of truth. A system underlying the intricate knot of patterns that would allow him to see past what they seemed to be and into what they actually meant.

After more than two hours, Zeke didn’t really achieve much in the way of quantifiable gains, but he did feel like he understood the runes a tiny bit better. Certainly, it could’ve been his imagination. After all, his lonely existence of constant struggle had taken its toll on his mental state, pushing him into a state of mind that might have influenced him to see things that just weren’t there. But his instincts told him he was on the right track, and over the course of the previous six months, he’d learned to trust those.

Once his body had processed the energy from the fish, Zeke stood up, refreshed. One thing he’d recently learned was that, so long as he wasn’t injured, his need for sleep had been vastly reduced. Even now, it had been four days since he’d had so much as a nap, but he was wide awake and full of energy. Of course, if he was hurt, that need for rest skyrocketed – which was something he wholeheartedly wanted to avoid.

Zeke doused the fire, then gathered his meager possessions. Using one of the flaps that served as the doors of the troll dwellings, he’d laboriously created a makeshift satchel, tying it together with the rope he’d managed to steal. It was crude but sturdy, and it served its purpose of carrying his various knives, the rune-covered ball that was his fire starter, and some tinder. After securing everything and throwing the satchel’s strap crosswise over his shoulder, Zeke set off to explore the caves, spear in one hand and club in the other.

His steps were soft and silent as he crept through the system. Even the Wall Creepers barely noticed him until they got a spear into their slimy torsos. He couldn’t leave them alive – not unless he wanted to be attacked at the least opportune moment. Besides, he had resigned himself to quantity over quality, in regards to experience, and every little bit counted.

Over the next couple of weeks, Zeke managed to kill hundreds of Wall Creepers as well as destroying two small troll villages, both containing around fifty of the monsters. He was like a deadly shadow, creeping through the caverns and leaving only death and destruction in his wake. Or that’s how he imagined himself, at least. In reality, he was well aware that he was more akin to an opportunistic ambush predator. Or a scavenger. Either way, he couldn’t concern himself with things like that. It was a simple matter of survival. Still, the veritable executions he carried out left a bad taste in his mouth, necessary though they obviously were.

Zeke monotonously slaughtered anything in his way, and if one could ever become bored with a life-or-death struggle, it certainly would’ve been him. It would have been different if they offered him any sort of challenge. Or if the scenery changed even the slightest bit. But neither was the case, and the only thing that kept him putting one foot in front of the other was the constant trickle of experience that pushed him toward his next level. Even the far-off goal of escaping the cave system paled in comparison to the real, concrete evidence of progress that the push toward level seven represented. The only thing that came even close to that was his ephemeral progress toward understanding the runes on his hands, though that was even less substantial than the promise of finally seeing the sun again.

However, on the eve of his seventh month in the caves, everything changed.

He’d just killed a pair of Wall Creepers that had tried to ambush him from above when a horrid smell assaulted him. He followed his nose and saw a yawning opening that actually led down. That wasn’t too abnormal. Many of the troll villages were situated in what looked like vast craters within even larger caverns. But none of them had smelled like this.

Trolls, in the best of times, didn’t exactly smell like petunias, but the stench emanating from that tunnel was truly nausea inducing. Without Zeke’s impressive constitution, he knew he would’ve been doubled over and spewing the contents of his stomach all over the cave floor. It was a rancid odor was like a sewage treatment plant and a garbage dump had somehow been combined into something that far exceeded both. Oh, and with a side of rotting bodies, too.

The smell alone very nearly defeated Zeke’s sense of curiosity, but the monotony of the past weeks asserted itself, forcing him into exploration. So, leaving the dead Wall Creepers behind, Zeke set off down the tunnel, and with each step, he came a little closer to vomiting. And by the time he finally reached the terminus of the cavern, tears were flowing freely down his dirty smeared cheeks to collect in his matted beard.

But the smell did nothing to prepare him for what he saw within the cavern. When he looked upon the scene that spread out before him, the vomit he’d so far managed to curtail was finally let loose.