Elijah was awoken by a stabbing pain in his right leg. As his eyes flashed open and he searched desperately for what had happened, it quickly became apparent that something had bitten through his pant leg and into his calf. The thing was small, maybe a foot long, but long claws anchored it onto his leg and a long tail covered in vicious hooks wrapped around his ankle. Like the earlier creature, the thing was incredibly front heavy. While overall it had a rat-like appearance, especially on the back half, its front was easily two or three times larger than any rat he had seen before. The additional mass was pure muscle, like somebody had replaced the front of the rat with the upper half of a hulk action figure. The things head was covered by the fabric of his jeans as it desperately forced its way through the hole it had chewed in his pant leg.

Because of the tail and claws anchoring the thing, when he attempted to kick it off of him the creature remained tightly stuck in place. In fact, the only apparent result was those curved hooks cutting into the flesh around his ankle like a saw blade and leaving him in more pain. This was followed by the abomination digging more firmly into his leg’s flesh with its front claws as it sensed someone attempting to take away its meal. Claws that were revealed to be massive, almost an inch long on the otherwise diminutive creature, and anchored into his flesh like fish hooks.

As he attempted to unhook the creature’s claws and release himself, the monster removed its head from his pant leg and he got his first real look at the thing’s face. Rodent ears and pure black eyes with no whites. A twitching nose and long whiskers that were stained red. All of this warranting no more then a glancing interest when compared to a mouth that was every bit the horror show he had imagined when observing the unknown skeletons. Long teeth that shot from its mouth with no apparent pattern were covered with his own blood and scraps of flesh. The thing couldn’t close its mouth thanks to the mass of pink and red fangs cramming its jaws, giving the thing a permanent Cheshire grin as it glared at him and chittered menacingly. Then it sent out what was a screech for Elijah, but a tectonically deep bellow for a creature of its size.

This screech was answered from outside the tree by several identical calls, before the thing ripped another chunk from his thigh as it leapt off his leg. Soon though, the little monstrosity was joined by three others of its kind and he could hear more skittering along the outside of the tree trunk. It appeared his luck had not held this night, landing him with an entire pack of vicious little predators desperate to consume him.

Thinking quickly, he activated his Blood Roil Aura. He previous experience had shown that the smaller the creature, the faster the spell would incapacitate them. Something was off about these creatures though. Thanks to his spell, he could feel the blood flowing through their veins. It was…slow. It felt like the blood had partially solidified into a sludge being grudgingly forced through their bodies. He also had a sneaking suspicion that that actual blood flow was merely a product of spellwork as some instinct of his magic made him think that each of these thing’s hearts were sitting dead in their chest. An unbeating core of rotten mana. Thankfully, the same sense that told him these creatures had no natural pulse also told him Blood Roil would work. Eventually. He just needed to survive long enough for the effects to begin.

“Blood Drinker Armor!” As he called out to activate his defenses, resulting in a strange feeling of bursting as blood force itself through his pours in the form of a red mist. In places, this mist solidified into what seemed to be a deep red metal, but the result wasn’t really armor. More like adornments for armor. A pair of pauldrons that were little more than spikes on his shoulders. A crown like protrusion around his brow. Spikes running up the front of his shins in a rough approximation of greaves. Red orbs that appeared on his chest and the back of each hand. Each piece floated on the red mist, which was the real protection. Anything that hit it would be slowed or stopped while any blood that was touched by it would be instantly drawn away as more red mist. In fact, his injured calf was already darkening the color of the armor around his legs.

While he did this the four rat creatures stalked toward him. Each had originally been entirely focused on his leg when they first appeared, but now they seemed overwhelmed by his armor. As they continued to stand frozen, noses twitching wildly, he came to a sudden realization. It’s the blood. They are attracted to it. Now I’m absolutely covered in the stuff and they must have no idea what to think about it. I probably look like a damn feast.

Moving quickly, he stabbed his sword at one of the small creatures. Despite being seemingly enraptured by his armor spell, the thing managed to leap to the side at the last moment. While it managed to escape the worst of the blow, his glancing hit left a long gash running along its side as the sludge he had felt in the beast’s veins slowly worked its way to the surface.

The stuff was more black than red, a gelatinous clot with just enough liquidity to ooze out of the wound. The armor didn’t seem to care though, to it blood was blood and in the confined space inside the tree trunk it quickly set to work draining this impudent sack of vital fluid. Feeling the effects of his greedy spell, the creature shrieked at him and charged, quickly followed by the remaining three as another whiskered head forced its way through the entrance.

There wasn’t enough room in the tree for any fancy swings. In fact, Elijah had so far failed to leave his sitting position. He wasn’t sure if standing would give him better chances anyway. As it was, he had his back to the wall and could stab, punch, or kick at the things as they tried to get close enough to bite at anything too important. As he thought about what his options were, Elijah instinctively formed a blood blade around his leg using his bleeding calf wound as he sent a kick at the creature just now getting its bulky shoulders through the entrance to his hideaway. He was lucky and the blade cut deep into the creature’s skull, apparently killing it instantly as he took up his short sword in his left hand.

This relief was short lived however, as the four already inside took this opportunity to attack him. The already injured rat leapt at his throat, and he used his right arm to block it, resulting in the creature wrapping its tail around his arm and biting deeply into the wrist. Meanwhile, two others went to attack his left thigh. The first was stopped as it tried to chew its way through his leather armor, but the second managed to find a gap where the protection it afforded was thin and rip out a chunk of his flesh. The last of the group started using it’s claws to climb the inside of the trunk, apparently intent on attack him from above.

Taking advantage of his new application of the Blood Blade spell, Elijah attempted to create a blade that would stab up from the bite on his wrist and into the rat that caused the wound. At first the spell worked without difficulty, but the blade immediately dissolved if he tried to push the tip too close to the rat. Giving up on simply growing the blade into the creature, he left it as a small spike before slamming his arm into the wall.

Somehow, the rat once again managed to survive. Instead, the thing took a long cut across its face that blinded one eye. It released his arm, dropping to the ground on his right and Elijah was forced to ignore the beast as the other three prepared to attack him again. Meanwhile, the dead rat at the entrance had been dragged back and two more of the creatures were beginning to force their way in as they tore apart the branch barricade.

Having to split his focus so many different ways, he desperately kicked out toward the entrance in an attempt to drive the newcomers away. At the same time, he swung the sword toward the rat climbing the inside of the trunk, allowing the two on his left to attack his thigh again. The mist managed to ward both off, apparently strengthened by the blood it had been consuming, and by some stroke of luck he managed to land his sword blow. The blade decapitated the thing, leaving its body to cling to the wall while the head fell into his lap. Immediately, his armor was harvesting the blood to continue to strengthen him and he felt his wounds beginning to heal.

Before he could celebrate too much though, the injured one was back. Rather than settle for his leg, the thing barreled into his chest and began tearing away at the leather, apparently intent on digging its way into his stomach. A rushed punch knocked it off him and into the two on his left side, leaving all three in a pile just in time for his focus to be drawn from them as one of the rats at the entrance managed to bite down on his foot.

Hissing in pain as he kicked his foot to the side, he slammed the things body into the side of the trunk and heard a sharp crack as its neck broke. What should have been a killing blow proved anything but as the creature rose back to its feet, neck hanging at an unnatural angle. At the same time the other three returned to attacking him, finally having gotten themselves untangled.

All four were unsteady on their feet though, his Blood Roil Aura having finally begun to have an effect on the abominations. And not a moment too soon. He may not have taken a serious injury, but he was bleeding heavily and he wasn’t sure how much longer he could have kept up with them if this had continued. They weren’t nearly as helpless as the rabbits and birds he had previously hunted, but it was enough. He could keep track of all four and keep more from getting in thanks to their now severely reduced speed. Apparently, his aura had spread to the outside of the trunk too, because even the one with the broken neck who had managed to get in and the other still fighting at the entrance were obviously less coordinated than he had been dealing with earlier.

When they came at him this time, he managed to pin the one with the broken neck between his foot and the wall. Its tail lashed wildly at his right leg to try to get him to release it, but he grit his teeth through the pain of the occasional spike making it through his armor. His left leg sent a kick toward the entrance again, the sudden motion throwing the three other rats inside the tree with him off target as they pounced at his injured thigh. This presented just enough opportunity for him to stab forward with his sword again, decapitating the one he had pinned and actually killing it.

After ending yet another of the monsters, Elijah brought his sword down in a sweep blow on his left and sent the three still alive in here with him scattering. He managed to remove one’s tail, leaving only a single member of their little rat pack uninjured. Grinning, he realized that this was perfect opportunity as he remembered a spell he had not yet had a chance to use.

Pointing at the rat the had survived his attacks twice, he commanded in an imperious voice, “BLEED!”

The result was beyond anything he expected, as what seemed like a torrent of the black ick forced itself from the creature’s body. The spell had come with a price though. All the blood he had taken from the two dead rats in here with him was consumed as he subconsciously used Sacrifice to empower the spell beyond his normal limits. This resulted in his Blooddrinker Armor quickly loosing efficacy and allowed the other two’s following attack to once more break through his defenses and take chunks from his body. The first from his thigh, the other from his upper arm as the attacking creature leapt upward.

“Two left, I can do this! Just need to keep any more from making their way in here.” As he exalted in his coming victory, Elijah heard a sharp crack from above his head and looked up in time to see a pair of claws ripping through the wood above him, opening another entrance into his hiding place. As the claws retreated and a small, twitching nose replaced them at the hole, he could only curse himself for tempting fate and turn toward the two remaining opponents.

In the following moments he was able to bifurcate one of the two are it was distracted by biting into his leg and grab the other with his free hand. This was followed by him slamming it repeatedly into the wall before stabbing it in the head. He even managed to kill the one attempting to make its way in through the main entrance with another blood blade. Unfortunately, it was quickly replaced by another. At the same time, others were making even more holes in his refuge for the night. Soon he would be absolutely swarmed by a ravenous horde of the things and there would be nothing he could do.

“Or is there?” Doing his best to ignore the situation around him, he began searching his new sense for blood magic and examining the spell he had become most familiar with while hunting meals for the last week. He felt the flows of the blood and mana in the spell beneath him, trying to find what each section did. Trying to modify the spell, to increase its output by feeding it the blood of the rats he had just killed.

Originally his senses told him that the use of Sacrifice in combination with this spell would slowly drain a target of health, keeping the field going as long as the creature being used as a sacrifice was alive. He needed to use a mass sacrifice of blood to create a pulse in the spell. Something meant to quickly increase the stage of the spell targets were experiencing.

When he finally found it, he realized the boost wouldn’t be cheap. It would cost him a full quarter of his mana, even with the sacrifice, and would only get him the equivalent of ten minutes of exposure. Based on the rate at which they had been succumbing, he needed something more like fifteen or twenty more minutes. An affect that he could achieve, but that would leave him without the mana or health necessary to keep the field up afterward. A useless proposition.

He began quickly throwing together the modification to the spell though, watching the blood drain from the four bodies, dry, and flake away as dust before being drawn into a complex pattern around him. He tried to kill another of the rats waiting at the entrance as he worked in order to add more blood to the sacrifice, but when he did the two backed off. Apparently, the things were content to wait for other members of their pack to secure additional entrances into the tree before going in themselves. It seemed as though the initial brutality and competitiveness of the group has been replaced by an animalistic cunning. Guess they realized fighting two on one was a bad idea after I killed the first seven.

Then the spell was ready, a deep black and red circle gathered beneath him that pulsed in time to heartbeat. He activated the spell, causing a blood mist to begin to rise from the circle as it dulled in color. Quickly he was seated in a column of red mist impenetrable to the eye, a column that in a single moment collapsed as the circle beneath him winked out. The mist flew away from him, phasing through the tree trunk around him, and immediately the claws digging at the tree slowed. They didn’t stop, but the creatures were having a noticeably more difficult time getting in to him.

The following five minutes were a blur. Despite the effects of his aura, more and more holes began opening in the trunk. Soon he was desperately stabbing at any rat that poked its head inside the trunk like some demented game of whack-a-mole. Time was on his side though and soon none of the creatures had the strength to keep up the attack. Deciding that turnabout was fair play, Elijah prepared to counter attack these nightmares. He cut the ropes holding the branch in place and forced his way through the hole in the tree, killing the four rats guarding the exit as he went. When he made it outside, he found no fewer than twenty of the creatures clutching the outside of the trunk and barely able to move.

While he failed to kill all of them, at the end of his slaughter ten more little bodies littered the ground around his hiding place. Each had been entirely drained of blood and his armor was beginning to take on an actual shape. The mist pulling itself into the vague outlines of a breastplate, gloves, and greaves. His wounds had healed quickly using the surge in energy and he even felt slightly less tired than he had been when this all began. He also had a small, blinking notification just on the edge of his vision. When he acknowledged it, a number of notifications appeared in front of him.

You have been necromantically poisoned. An undead creature has pumped your veins with negative energy. Current poison level – Minor.

Hysterical Strength has been activated – Major Boost to Physical Stats for duration. You will suffer severe debuffs when this effect ends.

Congratulations! Through ingenuity and dangerous circumstances, you have discovered a new Beginner level spell.

Blood Roil Burst: Spend mana to concentrate the essence of your Blood Roil Aura spell and unleash it upon your surroundings.

Congratulations, you have gained 155 Racial Experience (x10 Ghoul Rats, 100 XP; x11 Ghoul Rats, 55 XP). As you have no class, you have gained 0 Class Experience. You have gained 14 Evolution Points.

Congratulation! You have collected 100 racial experience and leveled up! The core of your existence has strengthened as you pursue survival. You have gained 12 Free Stat Points to distribute. Access your status page to spend these and strengthen your chosen stats. You have gained 15 Evolution Points. As you are in a dungeon, the wild mana is extra dense. Additional Mana has been brought into your core. The mana in your core is extremely receptive to the dungeon’s mana. Benefit increased. You receive one extra Physical Stat Point, one extra Mental Stat Point and 7 extra evolution points.

Before he could think about what these messages meant for him, Hysterical Strength deactivated and immediately Elijah felt like his bones had been replaced with lead weights. Even the influx of energy from his level up, something that would have left him giddy at any other time, could not take the away weight that seemed to push down on him at every moment. Too tired to think on the events of the night more, he made his way back into his hiding place. He barely had the self-control to tie the branch back into place before passing out.

That night Elijah had the closest thing to a full, restful sleep he had experienced since waking up in the forest. Nothing woke him from his slumber and he didn’t even dream. When the light of the morning sun finally made its way through the holes in the tree trunk and forced open his bleary eyes, he felt well rested for the first time in recent memory. He had never slept well, even back on earth. Too many memories and too much anxiety to sleep soundly. Apparently, the secret to curing his insomnia had been being thrown into life threatening situations that left him too physically exhausted to have the mental energy to overthink things. “Not the solution for everyone, and certainly not a solution I want to rely on in the future, but a solution of some kind.”

Continuing to think out loud, Elijah began packing stuff away as he spoke, “I obviously overslept, not even a hint of the sunrise coming through the tree trunk. Damn, did I really spend the night in this place? It’s more holes than wood at this point.”

Indeed, the rats had done quite the number on the tree the night before, ripping holes an inch or two in diameter all over the place. There must have been more of the rats before his final assault on them, there were simply to many holes for that not to be the case. They must have been smart enough to run when the aura began leaving them truly vulnerable to being attacked, most likely after he used Blood Roil Burst and the skittering had drastically died down. It hadn’t just been a loss of energy; it had been a decrease in their numbers. Meaning he’d been dealing with the slow, dumb, or desperate during those final terrifying moments.

If the rest had stuck around, perhaps he would have been the one to wind up dead. Who knew? The important part was that now he knew these Ghoul Rats existed and that he needed to be on the lookout for them. Preparation was nine tenths of victory after all, and the best way for him to prepare right now was to figure out what to do with his rewards from the night before.

For now, he ignored the evolution points. Thirty-six points was a lot, but not enough to buy anything major and he’d much rather save them for a new ability than anything else. Instead, he debated on where to put his fourteen stat points. The obvious thing would be to increase his health regen, which meant increasing his resistance stat. This would have the added benefit of reducing the damage he took while using Sacrifice according to the voice. Since sacrifice directly drained blood from the target, it was apparently considered an attack against the physical body. He had also learned that similar effects to those produced by his spells could be achieved by draining a targets soul, but that fell in the realm of Necromancy.

Apparently, Constitution would also help his recovery rate, if to a lesser degree. At the same time though, it would increase his total health pool which never hurt. He could also put some points into Dexterity or Strength, which could help with his actual fighting.

On the Mental stats front, his best bet would probably be Wisdom. If he could increase his regeneration to the point where he could just leave his Blood Roil Aura spell on, he would be fairly confident of his ability to survive in this forest.

Other stats that could come in handy included Perception and Resilience. He hadn’t run into anything that used mental or spiritual attacks yet, but if these things were undead he wasn’t sure how much longer that would last. For now, though, he supposed Resilience could be put on the back burner. As for Perception, while it was true if the stat had been higher he might not have taken the initial surprise attack from that rat he felt that being a harder target would be more useful to him in the long run. Besides, Perception was a Lesser stat for him. Using points on it would be squandering some of his minor gain. While he might be able, or even required, to pay that cost at a future point, this early on every point was precious.

Decision made, Elijah called out to the voice,” Please put four points each in Constitution and Resistance. Place an additional three points in Wisdom, two in Dexterity, and One in Strength.”

“As you wish Elijah,” came the immediate response.

“Thank you voice. As I said before, I will be saving my remaining Evolution Points.”

Done with his small spending spree, Elijah left the tree and set out into the forest like any other day. Despite the feeling of routine to his actions, he couldn’t help but add a slight skip in his step as he basked in the feeling of his increased stats. It didn’t look like that much, but he just experienced a base increase to his quality of life in a cellular level. Small pains that he never even knew he had to live with disappeared or decreased as his new Constitution and Resistance rectified them. His steps on the rolling, root covered forest floor were just a little surer and his stumbles a little less common. His things felt just a little bit lighter.

Leveling up, increasing his stats. It was like nothing he had ever experienced before. The closest he could come would be that moment where, after you have been visiting a gym for a while, you notice a tangible increase in your ability. A noticeable affect on your body and life. Only accomplished in a moment rather than weeks or months.

Most of all, the level up and full night’s sleep left him feeling like today was going to be a good day. Something that had been nonexistent in this new world so far. As he picked a handful of cherries from a tree, he couldn’t help but begin humming in joy at the thought to discovering what lay ahead of him.