Tck tck tck.
The sound crawled along the underside of the bridge.
Its coming for me.
"Level five," I whispered, voice hoarse. "I'm level five. I killed it. That should mean something."
The bridge didn't care.
The voice didn't care.
And whatever was making that sound definitely did not care.
Tck. tck. tck.
Right. I should be able to grow stronger.
The system interface opened with a soft pulse.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
AIDEN VALIN — LV 5
Stat Points Available [4]
Strength: 5
Intelligence: 1
Magic: 1
Resistance: 1
Mana: 132 / 156
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
I dragged a hand through my hair, thinking.
Strength kept me alive in close-range hell.
Magic was probably tied to Kinetic Blast and whatever spells came next.
Resistance meant not dying instantly to damage.
Intelligence...I honestly had no idea.
I wasn't trying to become unstoppable. I was trying to survive long enough to get there.
"Fine," I muttered, exhaling through my teeth. "Let's fix the parts of me that get killed first."
I tapped:
[ +2 Strength ][ +1 Magic ][ +1 Resistance ]
The panel flickered, confirming:
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Strength: 7
Intelligence: 1
Magic: 3
Resistance: 2
Mana: 168 / 168
Heath: 220/220
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
The numbers faded from my vision, dissolving back into the humming darkness.
The strength hit first.
A slow, hot thrum under my skin. My muscles tightened and I felt strength flowing through my blood.
Magic followed. A faint shimmer crawled up my fingers, filling me with a strange warmness. My veins tingled.
Resistance was the last.
A dull pressure settled deep under my ribs, grounding me. It wasn't anything like invisible armor. More like a reminder that I could take one more hit than before. One. Not two.
The stat window snapped shut with a soft ping.
Tck.
The bridge vibrated beneath me.
Tck-tck.
Then to my left.
Then behind me.
Like it was circling under the bridge, feeling the tension in my footsteps, pacing me from the shadows.
I swallowed, throat dry.
The creature rose from below the bridge like a nightmare dragging itself over the lip of the world.
First came the spine.
A centipede chain of vertebrae snaked over the stone, clacking together as they shifted. Each bone moved independently, like a hundred disgusting insect legs wrapped in a continuous twitch.
Then the torso followed.
It was as black as nothing.
The same armless silhouette. Head hung limp. Shoulders swollen with pulsing nerves. Neck split with a vertical wound that leaked grey air.
The rest of it crawled up after.
Slow. Deliberate. Listening.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
[ENTITY DETECTED: SPINE TWITCHER]
Armless Variant — Level 3
Threat Level: LETHAL
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
The Twitcher clicked once, almost waiting for me to slip up.
"…help…"
My blood turned cold.
That was my voice. Weak. Gasping.
This thing had been listening to me the entire time.
A predator.
A mimic.
"Okay," I whispered, barely breathing. "Don't move. Don't—"
It answered me again.
"Don't move…"
The Twitcher's spine snapped downward.
A vertebra launched.
Fast.
Faster than the Armless.
I dove barely.
The bone shard carved a line across my cheek, searing hot, and buried itself in the bridge with a deep, violent crunch.
The stone cracked around it.
If that hit my skull, I wouldn't get a second chance.
The Twitcher's head slowly turned toward me. Its jaw twitched open, then shut, like it was practicing biting.
Tck.
The separate segments of its external spine curled upward, aligning again like a railgun charging for another shot.
I didn't wait.
I sprinted.
The Twitcher moved instantly.
Its spine flared, vertebrae rippling in a wave that propelled its body in a blur. It didn't run like something human, it skittered like a centipede wearing a corpse as a cape.
Straight at me.
I stomped.
HARD.
The bridge boomed.
The Twitcher spasmed, the vertebrae clacking violently, confused by the sudden overload of vibration.
But it adapted faster than the Armless ever did.
It angled its head, filtering the noise, and fired another vertebra.
I twisted, barely avoiding it, feeling the wind of the bone shard shave past my ear.
I'm faster now.
My mind raced for a solution. Dodging would only get me killed at this rate.
I stomped again, sending a shockwave through the cracks.
The Twitcher shifted, recalibrating.
Then it changed tactics.
In a single horrifying moment, the centipede spine unwrapped itself from its torso like a blooming flower of bone.
The vertebrae spread outward, dozens, maybe more, lifting the creature off the ground like a skeletal spider.
"What the—"
The Twitcher lunged with precision.
It aimed directly for my center of gravity, predicting the recoil of my last stomp.
I jumped backward. The creature's mandible-like jaw snapped inches from my ankle, teeth clamping onto stone instead.
Grey mist burst from the impact.
Then—
It mimicked my voice again.
My scream.
"What the—"
The perfect copy reverberated across the bridge, bouncing between the cracked stone until it was impossible to tell where I truly stood.
I froze.
The Twitcher didn't.
It fired three vertebrae at once—a spread-shot, one aimed at each false echo of my breath.
I hit the ground and rolled, the bone shards spearing the stone around me like javelins.
Jagged cracks spidered across the bridge.
That was the wrong move.
The Twitcher heard the tension in my muscles as I pushed myself up.
It shot toward me.
It slid across the stone on its centipede spine, body low, head tracking my every exhale.
Closer.
Closer.
I stomped—
It processed the vibration instantly.
It dodged the noise instead of falling for it.
"Oh shit—"
It coiled.
The entire vertebral chain pulled tight behind it like a spring.
It launched.
A blur. A distortion of motion. A lethal streak of bone and nerves.
I met it.
"KINETIC BLAST!"
The invisible force rippled from my palm, slamming directly into the creature's throat slit.
It didn't stop but I managed to tilt it a few degrees off target.
Its jaw snapped shut beside my ribs, teeth carving now molten air.
The impact shoved it sideways, scraping along the cracked stone. Bones scraping bone. Sparks scraping nerves.
There's an opening.
I stomped again.
The Twitcher spasmed mid-turn, vertebrae misfiring, clacking out of sync.
I lunged in.
Fast.
Not fast enough.
A vertebra detached and fired point-blank.
It punched through my hoodie and grazed my side—white-hot pain lancing through my ribs. Blood spilled warm down my hip.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
[MINOR INJURY DETECTED]
HEALTH: 175/220
RECOMMENDATION: Proceed With Caution
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
"NOT NOW!" I screamed, forcing the system's text to vanish from sight.
I hissed, grabbing the nearest vertebra shard embedded in the bridge and ripped it free.
The Twitcher corrected its angle.
Too slow.
I slammed the bone dagger into the swollen nerve-joint at its shoulder.
The thing convulsed.
The centipede spine thrashed wildly, whipping the air in every direction. Vertebrae fired like bullets in blind panic, some shooting off into the void, others embedding randomly across the bridge.
One clipped my shoulder, spinning me sideways.
I held the dagger tighter.
The Twitcher screeched—another mimic of my own voice.
I drove the bone deeper.
Its neck split wider.
I could see the inner throat now, layers of calcified plates grinding against each other like broken machinery.
I stomped again, this one right on its extended spine.
CRACK.
The whole chain buckled.
The Twitcher collapsed to one knee, if it even had knees, its external spine twitching out of rhythm.
It fired again, but it was directionless.
It pinged harmlessly off the bridge railing.
This was my moment.
I tore the bone dagger upward.
The slit along its throat ripped open, grey steam hissing out in a violent plume.
The Twitcher spasmed—
Tck…Tck…Tck—
Then went still.
The spine curled in on itself like a dying insect.
The body slumped.
And evaporated.
Nothing was left.
My voice cracked open before I could stop it. "W-what is happening…? I'm… I don't belong here."
The air under the bridge pressed against my skin—cold, heavy, watching. My heartbeat thrashed in my chest, too fast, too loud, each thud reminding me I still existed when I shouldn't.
Fear gripped my chest, tightening until it felt like something inside me wanted to tear out again. Bile poked up my throat, hot and sour, the same way it did the day I watched that purple thread slide into my skin and hollow me out from the inside.
That helplessness—the same flavor of dread. The same shaking breath. The same choking panic.
I swallowed it down. Barely.
"I shouldn't be here," I whispered. "I'm not… this."
My knees wobbled. I felt stupid for kneeling at all, but standing felt like lying.
I stared at the bone in my hand, still warm from the Twitcher's body, faint nerve-static buzzing against my palm. A reminder that I'd rammed it into a monster's throat. A reminder that I didn't freeze. A reminder that I fought.
That disgusted me.
"I'm a shut-in. A fucking nobody," my voice quivered. "I stock shelves at a gas station. I study until I passed out from exhaustion. I avoid conflict because just existing around people was already too much. I died screaming on a sidewalk, begging the world to stop killing me, and I couldn't even stop that either."
I didn't recognize the voice escaping my lips.
"What the hell was I thinking stepping foot inside this place?"
I squeezed the shard tighter until it bit into my palm.
"I should've turned back," I muttered. "I should've left the second I saw the stairs. I should've—"
My voice broke.
God, I hated that. I hated the sound of myself falling apart. I hated that the system kept pushing me, nudging me forward like I had any business being someone who could survive things like this.
The truth spilled out, raw and pathetic.
"I'm not some hero who… evolves or whatever. I shouldn't even be alive." My shoulders shook. "I'm… I'm nothing."
Hot tears stung my eyes before I could blink them away.
And that made me feel even worse.
Crying here, after barely scraping through something that shouldn't exist, felt like failing all over again. Like I was proving every awful thing I'd ever thought about myself.
I wiped my eyes with the back of my wrist, breath shuddering out of me.
"I don't belong here," I said again, quieter. "This world… this place… whatever this dungeon is—"
My throat closed up.
The Twitcher's mimicry replayed in my head.
Don't move…
My voice. My panic. Thrown back at me. Used to hunt me. Used to force me into decisions I didn't know how to make.
I dragged my hand down my face hard enough to sting. I hated how pathetic I sounded. I hated how familiar this all felt, this sinking shame, this sense that no matter how many stat points I dumped into myself, I was still the same useless kid who died terrified and begging. The same kid who spent nights in a gas station trying to pretend mediocrity was safety.
My voice dropped to a whisper.
"…I felt proud for a second."
It was barely a breath. Barely a sound.
"I survived something I shouldn't. And that… that part of me—the part that's supposed to stay scared—felt proud."
My stomach twisted at the admission.
Because if I start feeling proud of this…Of killing…Of surviving monsters…Of getting stronger…
Then what happens to the part of me that remembers who I was?
What happens when this place stops being horrifying and starts feeling normal?
I clenched the bone shard and forced myself back to my feet, legs trembling with leftover adrenaline and shame.
"This is wrong," I whispered. "Everything about this is wrong… and so am I."
"But I made this choice."
Unsteady, I stood, then took a single step forward.
My legs almost buckled again.
The bridge shifted under me, just the natural flex of stone cooling in dead air, but my nerves jolted like something else was moving.
I'm scared.
I forced my jaw shut to keep from whimpering. My breath kept snagging in my throat, chest tightening every time I imagined another Twitcher pulling itself over the edge.
I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. The tears hadn't even fully dried, they clung stubbornly, hot and humiliating.
"Get it together," I muttered. The words sounded empty. Like I was reciting a line someone else told me to say. "It's one step. Just one."
It felt like I was walking deeper into something I wasn't meant to understand. Like each footfall was another thread tying me to this place. Like the version of me that died on the street, the weak one, the one who froze and cried and begged, was getting dragged further and further behind.
I hated that thought.
My hand tightened around the bone shard until a sharp edge dug cleanly into my skin. It didn't hurt enough to matter, but the sting grounded me.
The system didn't speak. The bridge didn't rumble. Nothing crawled up from below.
Silence stretched out, thick and absolute.
"If I go back now…" I whispered. "Back to the entrance… back to Floor One… what then? I stay there? Hide? Starve? Wait for something stronger to crawl down after me?"
The ugly truth settled over me.
I wasn't going back.
Didn't mean I was brave.
There was just nowhere else to go.
Forward was hell. Backward was pointless.
So I stayed standing.
My pulse slowed, enough to feel like it belonged to a living person again instead of someone seconds from passing out. I rubbed my ribs where the Twitcher's shard grazed me. The wound throbbed, warm and sticky, a reminder I wasn't invincible just because the system slapped numbers on me.
"I don't know how long I can do this," I said to no one. "I don't even know what 'doing this' means."
My voice was small. Honest.
"I just… don't want to die again."
That was the real center of it. No bravery or destiny. Just fear of the thing I already experienced once and couldn't bear the thought of feeling again.
Another step.
Then another.
My legs steadied. The bone shard clicked faintly against my knuckles as I walked, each tap syncing with my breathing.
One step. Then the next.
I was already here.
And I was done pretending I had a choice anymore.
I exhaled slowly, a shivering breath dragged from the bottom of my lungs.
"…Just don't fall apart again," I whispered.
But even as I said it, I knew I would. Probably soon. Probably often.
And I moved anyway.
Because broken or not, disgusted or not, terrified or not—
I was still walking…