The forest here was quieter than it should’ve been.

  Not safe-quiet.

  Wrong-quiet.

  Ryan stood in the shadow of a crooked tree and watched the undergrowth ripple thirty meters downslope, where something heavy shouldered through ferns and roots as if they were paper.

  The System hadn’t pinged him yet.

  That was the worst part.

  If the aura had been strong enough to earn an instant warning, it would at least have been honest about trying to kill him. This was just below that threshold — like the Tutorial was mocking him with, it might be fine, it might not.

  He adjusted his glasses on his nose before remembering he didn’t actually need them anymore.

  Old habits.

  The frames were gone, vaporized in a shower of white light when the Integration hit. His eyes were fine now. Better than fine.

  Didn’t stop him from trying to push up phantom lenses when he was stressed.

  The brush rippled again.

  A smell followed this time: damp earth, rot, and something sharp, like crushed nettles left too long in the sun.

  The System finally deigned to speak.

  [Local Threat Detected]

  Classification: Verdant Beast Pack

  Estimated Levels: 7–9

  Recommendation: Avoid direct engagement or seek group support.

  Ryan sighed softly.

  “Yeah,” he muttered. “That’d be nice.”

  Avoid them.

  Seek a group.

  He adjusted the straps of his System-issue pack and stepped back from the slope, moving more by instinct than stealth skill — weight on the balls of his feet, careful to avoid dry twigs.

  He could’ve gone to one of the big camps.

  He knew they were there. You couldn’t miss the distant light columns the System threw up, marking them when people clustered enough and declared “this is ours now”. He’d even seen one from a ridge on day four: a ring of sharpened stakes, people hauling logs and arguing and laughing too loudly for a world that had just ended.

  Never went in.

  He’d watched a group like that form once, years before the System, back when “threat” meant other kids, not monsters. It had started with a joke in a school corridor: someone mocking his shirt, his hair, the fact that he actually liked physics problems.

  Then it had been a crowd.

  God, he still remembered the circle closing.

  The way everyone smiled like it was all in good fun.

  His ribs remembered the bruises.

  “Not doing that again,” he told the forest under his breath.

  The forest didn’t answer, but the undergrowth did.

  Something big pushed through the last fringe of bushes and stepped into view on the slope below his position.

  Ryan’s brain tried to classify it as “bear”, failed, downgraded to “bad idea”.

  It was the size of a small car, broad-shouldered and hunched, with thick plates of greenish bark fused to its hide. Vines threaded through its fur, pulsing faintly with Verdant mana. Its head was all jaw and teeth, mismatched tusks jutting in odd directions.

  The System obliged with a label.

  [Verdant Mauler — LVL 9]

  Behind it, three smaller shapes prowled: leaner, faster, with hooked claws and too many eyes. Rippers. He’d met their type before.

  “Okay,” Ryan whispered. “Pack of four. That’s… not great.”

  He could avoid them, maybe.

  Drop back. Circle left. Lose them in the trees.

  If he’d seen them sooner.

  But the Mauler stopped, heavy head rising as it sniffed, and its gaze passed over the tree where he stood.

  The eyes didn’t glow.

  They didn’t need to.

  Every line of its body said it knew something was near, something off.

  One of the smaller beasts — a Ripper, long limbs and knife-blade claws — turned its head and looked directly at him.

  Its eyes did glow.

  Bright green slits.

  It hissed.

  The System pinged again, this time with less patience.

  [You have been noticed.]

  “Yeah,” Ryan said. “I got that part.”

  He could run.

  Void made him good at running, in its own way. Weight Shift in the right moment, a little distortion to make downward slopes more “forward” than “down”, a bit of invisible assistance to his strides.

  But Rippers were fast.

  Maulers, once they picked a direction, were worse.

  He’d seen what happened to a guy on day two who tried to sprint away from a charging Mauler in open ground.

  He really didn’t want to be red paste on a tree.

  The Ripper below tensed.

  It shrieked and launched itself upslope.

  The others followed.

  Ryan exhaled.

  “Fine,” he said. “We’re doing this, then.”

  He stepped out from behind the tree and moved halfway down the slope, boots sliding a little on the loose soil. He wanted angle, distance, and open sight lines.

  Void flickered at the edge of his perception.

  He raised his right hand.

  “Void Bolt.”

  Space tightened around his palm, collapsing inward into a dense point just in front of his fingers. The air wavered, as if seen through heat, then snapped forward in a needle of nothing.

  The Bolt hit the lead Ripper square in the chest.

  There was no dramatic explosion.

  Just a sudden, ugly implosion as a hole punched inward, dragging fur and bone and flesh with it. The beast’s body tried to fill the absence and tore itself doing it. It rolled, momentum carrying it a few meters before it went still in a twist of broken limbs.

  The other three didn’t slow.

  Right.

  They weren’t smart enough to be impressed.

  The second Ripper came up on the left, claws reaching for his legs.

  The Mauler took the center, each step making the slope tremble, jaws opening with a rumbling bellow that vibrated in his teeth.

  The third Ripper darted wide on the right, looking for a flank.

  “Of course you do,” Ryan muttered.

  He didn’t grab Void this time.

  He pulled it.

  Not inward — outward, like dragging a curtain.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “Void Aegis.”

  Space in front of him folded, then locked, forming a broad, faintly shimmering disk that only existed as a distortion. The tree trunks behind it looked subtly wrong, lines bending around a circle that wasn’t actually opaque, just incorrect.

  The Mauler hit it first.

  The impact slammed into the shield with a deep, muted thud, like someone punching a mattress in a vacuum. The Aegis bowed inward, its edges warping as the Void behind it tried to equalize, but held.

  Most of the kinetic force vanished into nothing.

  Not all of it.

  Ryan’s arm tugged forward.

  Pain lanced up his shoulder as if he’d taken the hit himself at a distance. The connection between his body and the warped patch of space shivered.

  [Void Aegis — Strain: Moderate]

  He grit his teeth and shifted his stance, letting his weight absorb the remainder.

  The Mauler staggered back a half-step, more startled than hurt.

  Its bark plates were intact, but the flesh under them looked dented, slightly sunken where the Aegis had drunk the impact.

  “Congratulations,” Ryan said under his breath. “You just punched a hole.”

  Claws raked at his side.

  He’d almost forgotten the Ripper.

  It came in from the left, using the Mauler as cover — clever for a murder-beast with plant blood.

  Ryan cancelled the Aegis with a thought. The warped disk snapped back into normal space with a sensation like popping his ears.

  He dropped his weight sideways.

  “Weight Shift.”

  Gravity nudged, twisting its vector for him alone in a narrow bubble.

  His body grew momentarily lighter, his step longer. The Ripper’s claws whistled through the air where his torso had been a heartbeat ago, catching only the edge of his sleeve.

  He came down hard on his other foot as weight spiked again. His knees complained; he didn’t care.

  Void pressed behind his eyes, eager for more.

  “Not yet,” he muttered.

  He flicked two fingers at the Ripper as it skidded past him on the slope, trying to turn.

  “Void Bolt.”

  The shot took it through the hind leg this time, punching a neat hole in the limb.

  The beast shrieked and collapsed, tumbling, but the wound was off-center; not fatal.

  Ryan made a mental note: Need to stop missing vital spots. This is how horror movies start.

  The third Ripper hit then, from the right.

  He didn’t see it so much as feel the vector — mass coming in fast on his blind side.

  He didn’t have time for a proper shield.

  “Weight Shift,” he snapped again, this time pointing at it.

  Gravity slammed down on the Ripper.

  It face-planted mid-leap, claws gouging trenches in the dirt as it tried to correct. Its whole body seemed to sag under an invisible load, limbs straining.

  It didn’t stop, but it became slow.

  “Better,” he said.

  The Mauler roared, drawing his attention back to the center.

  Its eyes were on him now, full of ugly intent. Verdant mana pulsed faster along the vines threading its shoulders, feeding muscle and rage.

  It lowered its head and charged.

  He had maybe two seconds.

  He could Void Bolt something that size; he’d done it before. But even a direct center-mass hit would only punch a hole the size of his fist. Enough to kill, if he got the right organ. Enough to get trampled to death in the meantime, if he didn’t.

  His stomach clenched.

  He didn’t want to use the other option.

  Void hummed, low and eager.

  He thought of a concrete overpass, tearing free in a rain of sparks. Of a chunk of city falling the wrong way.

  Of his hand too close to nothing.

  The Mauler thundered closer.

  The System — unhelpfully — offered no advice this time.

  Ryan sighed.

  “Fine,” he said. “Let’s antagonize physics.”

  He thrust his hand out, not at the Mauler, but at a point just in front of its path, slightly below chest height.

  “Micro Singularity.”

  The world flinched.

  A tiny black disk appeared in the air at the point he’d chosen. Not matte, not shadow — absence. Around its edges, light bent into a thin, bright ring, a faint, shimmering halo.

  He felt his mana rip out of him in a drain so intense it almost took his breath.

  [Micro Singularity — Rank D (Epic)]

  Duration: 1.9 seconds

  Zone: 3.0 m radius

  Void Strain: Rising…

  The pull hit.

  The slope itself seemed to lurch.

  Dirt, leaves, small stones — all yanked forward into a tight spiral. The Mauler’s charge stuttered as its front legs were yanked mid-stride. Its whole bulk lurched toward the point, chest and head pulled forward while its hindquarters tried to keep going.

  Its ribs creaked like green, wet wood under a boot.

  The wounded Ripper on the left, half-up, half-down, shrieked as it slid across the ground toward the singularity, claws carving furrows that didn’t help.

  The gravity well didn’t care.

  It didn’t like anything.

  It just pulled.

  Ryan clamped his jaw shut as his teeth tried to chatter from the way the Void resonated in his bones. He was well outside the main radius, but the edge of it tugged at his blood, at the small, needy bits of him that remembered falling.

  He poured will into the boundary.

  No farther.

  The singularity obeyed.

  Barely.

  The Mauler hit the edge of the event horizon.

  For something that size, “hit” was the wrong word.

  It entered.

  Its front half elongated obscenely as space curved, the front third of its torso drawn sharper, narrower, until bones snapped. Bark plates crumpled inward like tin foil drawn into a drain. Verdant vines ripped from the inside out.

  Its knees tried to bend the wrong way.

  Then the duration ended.

  The black disk winked out.

  Everything it had been dragging crashed down at once.

  The Mauler’s corpse — front crushed inward, spine shattered, chest cavity collapsed — slammed into the dirt, skidded, and rolled, tearing up earth in a messy slide.

  The half-crushed Ripper hit it a heartbeat later, little more than a twisted smear.

  The last Ripper, still struggling under extra weight, froze.

  Ryan staggered.

  Void backlash slammed into him like a wave, sending a spike of pain from the base of his skull to the back of his eyes. His vision narrowed, then blurred, edges going dark for a second.

  He reached for the nearest tree and grabbed it to stay upright.

  [Warning: Severe Mana Expenditure]

  Void Strain: Moderate

  Recommendation: Avoid casting Micro Singularity again in the next 6 hours.

  He laughed, a short, breathless sound.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That won’t be a problem.”

  The remaining Ripper didn’t run.

  That was the thing about these Tutorial beasts — no sense of morale, no concept of this was a bad idea. It dragged itself forward under the extra gravity, snarling, murderous intent undimmed by the smoking crater where its leader had been.

  Ryan’s hand shook as he raised it.

  “Void Bolt.”

  This time the shot went neatly through one of its eyes.

  The Ripper jerked once and collapsed in a heap.

  Silence leaked back into the forest in ragged pieces.

  Ryan let his forehead rest against the tree for a moment, breathing hard. Sweat cooled against his skin in the faint breeze.

  His hands were still trembling.

  He flexed them slowly, feeling the ache settle into joints and tendons, not metaphysical this time, just… tired.

  “So,” he said to nobody. “Great job. Totally sustainable fighting style. Ten out of ten, wouldn’t explode the fabric of reality again.”

  The System didn’t respond.

  He pushed himself upright and stepped carefully down the slope, avoiding the worst of the gore.

  The Mauler’s body was a mess of crushed bark, snapped bone, and collapsed organs. Its head had mostly survived, twisted at an ugly angle, tusks half-buried in the dirt.

  The singularity’s center point was marked only by a small, smooth depression in the ground, like a thumbprint pressed into the world.

  He hated looking at those.

  It felt like seeing a scar on something that shouldn’t have scars.

  Still, beasts meant loot.

  The System encouraged looting. Efficient, reward-based feedback: you kill things, you get things.

  He knelt, ignoring the way his legs protested, and laid a hand on the Mauler’s chest.

  “Extract,” he said.

  The corpse shimmered.

  A faintly glowing object phased free from the mass: a knot of wood and gemstone, roughly the size of his fist, shot through with green veins and dark, almost-black threads.

  [Mauler Core — Verdant, Minor]

  Quality: Uncommon

  Uses: Crafting, enchanting, profession advancement.

  “And where exactly am I supposed to take you?” he asked it.

  The core didn’t answer.

  Ryan added it to his Inventory anyway. The subspace swallowed it up with the same polite efficiency it gave to everything: weapons, food, random junk he’d convinced himself might be useful later.

  He did a quick, reluctant circuit of the battlefield.

  No other cores.

  Plenty of meat, but he’d learned the hard way that he didn’t have the tools to process beasts this big alone — and leaving half-butchered corpses around was a good way to attract more trouble.

  He settled for a few strips of usable hide and a handful of claws as generic crafting mats.

  The System chimed again.

  [You have defeated:]

  ? Verdant Mauler (LVL 9)

  ? Verdant Ripper x3 (LVL 7–8)

  Experience Awarded.

  Solo Kill Bonus Applied.

  [Ryan Holt has reached Level 11.]

  No fanfare.

  Just the quiet sense of something in him stretching and settling into a new shape. Stats nudging upward. His body feeling… more his.

  He dismissed the prompt to allocate stat points for now.

  Sitting down long enough to think about numbers felt like begging the forest to present a second course.

  One more notification hovered insistently at the edge of his vision.

  He opened it with a sigh.

  [Main Quest: Establishment Cycle — Phase Two]

  Objectives:

  ? Create a Base

  ? Join a Base

  ? Unlock a Profession

  Progress:

  ? Create a Base — Not Started

  ? Join a Base — Not Started

  ? Profession Path — Pending Selection

  Guidance:

  [Recommendation: Seek group support to increase survival odds.]

  He stared at the line about joining a base until his eyes went unfocused.

  “Sure,” he said. “Let me just go introduce myself. ‘Hi, I make tiny black holes when I’m nervous, want me near your children?’ That’ll go great.”

  He flicked the window away.

  He’d tried “group support” before.

  It had looked like: people smiling the wrong way. People promising “we’ll all look out for each other” while quietly agreeing that maybe it was funny to shove the weird kid into lockers. People deciding his name was easier to remember if you added “freak” to the end.

  He’d left those groups too.

  Not by choice.

  His fingers twitched unconsciously, curling as if around phantom backpack straps.

  He shook the memory off and looked up through the trees.

  The sky above the Tutorial was always a little wrong — too static, too evenly lit, like a game background. But today, in the distance, he could see something different.

  A bank of dark cloud hung over one part of the horizon, low and heavy.

  Every so often, faint forks of lightning flickered inside it.

  Not natural lightning.

  It pulsed in time with the System, a distant, angry heartbeat.

  The Core Dungeon.

  He’d heard people talking about it when he’d skirted the edges of what would become camps. Snatches of conversation carried on the wind.

  “…guy went in alone…”

  “…lightning everywhere…”

  “…took down something that should’ve wiped a party…”

  Rumors grew like mold.

  Someone always knew a guy who knew a girl who’d seen the hero, always just around the corner.

  He didn’t put much stock in stories.

  But the lightning was real.

  He watched the cloud for a while, leaning against a tree, letting his breathing slow.

  “If you’re real,” he told the distant storm, “I hope you’re smarter than I am.”

  Because whoever that was, down in the Verdant Maw, something liked focusing on him. Big dungeons didn’t keep throwing problems at you for no reason.

  Ryan looked back down at the crushed Mauler.

  Void hummed faintly under his skin.

  He knew what it was like to have something bigger than you take an interest you hadn’t asked for.

  He kicked a loose stone off the slope and listened to it rattle down.

  “Alright,” he muttered. “Find water. Find somewhere to not die for a few hours. Then maybe think about not being a complete social disaster.”

  He started moving, cutting across the slope at an angle, careful to leave as little obvious trail as he could. Not because beasts would follow — they didn’t care about footprints — but because people might.

  He trusted beasts more than people.

  Beasts didn’t pretend.

  Still, as he moved deeper into the trees, away from the fresh corpses and the faint, wrong depression in the earth, he couldn’t shake one irritating thought.

  Sooner or later, the Tutorial would stop tolerating loners.

  The Establishment Cycle wasn’t just a suggestion. The System had structure. It wanted bases, professions, hierarchies. It wanted people slotted into roles.

  Refusing to fit would work for a while.

  Not forever.

  He snorted softly.

  “Maybe I’ll get lucky,” he told himself.

  “Maybe I’ll find a group that doesn’t suck.”

  The forest rustled in what might have been agreement.

  Far away, lightning flickered again inside a dungeon cloud.

  For now, he walked alone, with a handful of skills, a head full of physics, and a small, hungry piece of nothing that answered when he called.

  It would have to be enough.

  Thank you for reading!

  If you are enjoing this story a like and follow help a lot. Thanks!

  Up to 50 early access chapters on Patreon:

  Join our Discord: