The first thing that came back was the taste of dirt, and the second was a voice assembling itself behind his eyes like something that had been waiting.
[SYSTEM: Resurrection complete. 72:00:00 elapsed.]
[Soul Integrity: 100%]
'Three days.'
Wren pushed himself up on his hands and knees and spat something dark into the grey dirt.
His body felt like someone had taken it apart and put it back together with most of the pieces in the right place but not all of them.
He was in the Ashwilds.
The dirt was flat and grey and the trees were ash-barked and leafless and grew too close together, there was no city noise at all, just wind through dry brush and something moving in the trees at a distance he could not judge.
He could have been three miles from Eisenwall or ten.
He checked himself starting at the top and working down.
One boot fit, the other had come half off and was covering mostly his toes.
His shirt had a hole in the back the size of a fist, right where the spear had gone through.
'So that was real.'
He pressed his thumb along his chest until the skin went raised and smooth, a scar running from behind his shoulder blade to just under his collarbone.
When he pressed harder, he felt nothing.
The nerves were gone or the resurrection hadn't bothered with them.
His fingernails had gone dark at the tips, and there was a smell coming off his clothes that he recognized from the tannery district, the one Stellan had been so afraid of ending up in.
The skin across the backs of his hands was looser than it should be.
He had been dead for seventy-two hours and the system had fixed the hole in his chest but apparently drew the line at cosmetic details.
He stood up and his legs held. That was something.
'Gerold doesn't know.'
Gerold had been screaming his name and reaching over a guard with the same hand that had clapped his shoulder an hour before the spear went through.
His uncle thought he was dead, and he was three days away in a city full of guards who had put that spear in him.
He could not go back looking like this.
He could not go back at all until he understood what had killed him and why.
He started looking for a rock.
◆ ◆ ◆
The Brand was still on his palm, burning faint at the edges.
He rubbed his thumb across it and the system text came without him asking.
[Class: Aschenschlund (SSS) — FORBIDDEN]
[Talent: Devour — Consume the skills of anything you kill.]
[WARNING: Each Devour accelerates Soul Erosion. At 0%, the host ceases to be human.]
[Soul Integrity: 100%]
He read it twice.
'SSS.'
He had read every Class manual Gerold had paid for.
S-Rank was the highest rank in any of them.
Kronbrand, Eisenwille, Sturmherz.
Continental fame, generational wealth, the kind of Class that got entire families moved into the upper districts.
SSS was not a rank that existed.
Forbidden was not a classification that existed.
And Aschenschlund appeared in none of the manuals, not even the old ones with water damage that Gerold had found in a secondhand stall for half a mark.
'They killed me for this.'
He looked at his palm, at the Brand that had turned every torch in the Grand Hall black, and he understood that the guards had not hesitated.
They had known the word before the announcer finished saying it.
Whatever Aschenschlund was, someone had written a protocol for what to do when it appeared, and that protocol was a spear from behind.
The text was not giving him anything he could use in the next hour.
He found a rock near the treeline and wrapped his fingers around it to find the balance point, the check Gerold always ran on new hammer handles before he would trust the weight.
Front-heavy but workable.
He put it in his right hand.
Wren had no knife, food or way back to Eisenwall without better resources than a scar and a rock, because the last time he had been near guards they had come from different directions with spears.
Gerold's Fieldcraft pamphlet said Grauwolves hunted at dawn and dusk and could be killed by a prepared adult with a long knife.
Wren had read that pamphlet twice because Gerold had paid three marks for it.
The second time through, he noticed it had been written by people who survived Grauwolf encounters, which meant everything in it described the slower wolves.
'And I have a rock.'
The light was already going flat across the tops of the trees.
He moved through the brush until he found a cart track, two ruts running east-west through the grey dirt, and picked east and started walking.
He was hungry enough that his right hand had a faint shake in it, and he pressed his fist against his thigh until it stopped.
◆ ◆ ◆
The cart came around a bend ten minutes later: two wheels, one tired horse, a man on the seat and a guard walking alongside with a sword at his hip.
The guard saw Wren first and the whole thing stopped.
"You alive?" the guard said.
"Yes."
The guard looked at the hole in the back of Wren's shirt, and the blood dried brown on his left forearm, and then at the Brand on his palm.
His jaw tightened and his hand moved toward his sword grip.
"What rank?"
"C-Rank," Wren said, the lie came out easily.
The guard's hand came back from the sword. "What happened to you?"
"Wolf."
"One wolf did all that?"
"Two, both in the brush back there."
The merchant leaned over the side of the seat.
He was older, in a coat that had been expensive once. "And you killed them with what, exactly?"
Wren didn't answer that.
The merchant sat back and said something low to the guard, and the guard looked at Wren again.
"Grauwolves have been on this track since yesterday, at least four of them." He looked at the rock in Wren's right hand.
"Walk with us to the junction, the track runs north from there."
Wren looked at the merchant's horse.
Both ears turned east, weight shifted back on its haunches.
He looked at the treeline and then at the light, which had maybe forty minutes left in it.
"I'm staying," Wren said.
The guard stared at him for a long moment.
The merchant said, "Leave it, Dav," and the cart started moving and neither of them looked back.
They were moving north because north was away from the wolves, and Wren was staying because the wolves were what he had.
◆ ◆ ◆
He walked east until the track bent and found a piece of ground slightly raised above the approach on both sides, and he stood there.
He tested the rock's balance one more time with his fingers at the center point and held it and waited.
A Grauwolf at dusk came from the direction it had been moving since late afternoon.
He had a good idea which direction was from the sound in the brush to the northeast.
He heard the wolf before he saw it, moving at a steady pace through the brush, and then it came out of the treeline fast and low.
It covered the ground between the trees and Wren in about half the time the pamphlet had suggested.
'Faster wolves.'
He sidestepped and the claws caught his left forearm along the outside, not deep but enough to open the skin in three lines that burned before they bled.
He swung the rock and connected with the side of the jaw as the wolf went past.
Something cracked in his right hand, and he was fairly sure it was his hand and not the wolf's jaw.
The wolf turned and came again, and this time Wren did not have room to go sideways cleanly.
He went down instead, back against the ground with his knees up, and took the wolf's weight on his shoulder.
His collarbone screamed where the scar was, the nerves apparently not as dead as he'd thought.
The rock came down twice.
The second time it connected with the base of the skull and the wolf stopped moving.
He counted to four.
Then he pushed the wolf off his shoulder and sat in the grey dirt and pressed his sleeve flat against the cuts on his forearm.
His right hand had a bruise forming along the outer edge, and when he made a fist the middle finger did not close all the way.
His left forearm was bleeding through the sleeve.
Then the system text arrived.
[Devour Available: Predator's Lunge (F)]
[Cost: 1% Soul Integrity]
[Current Soul Integrity: 100%]
[Accept / Decline]
He looked at the warning he had read three times. At 0%, the host ceases to be human.
He understood the math, which was simple: one hundred kills at one percent each before the number hit zero.
He did not know what zero looked like, but he understood it was a bottom and that this did not go backwards.
Something moved in the treeline.
Close enough that he could hear it stop and start, the pause of something checking the air.
'One percent. Ninety-nine left after this.'
He thought about the stew Gerold had made with the old goat, the one Gerold had killed that morning because dinner was more important than milk.
Gerold made decisions like that.
You lose something, you gain something, and you eat tonight.
He pressed Accept.
It went through him like a current.
Not pain, but something that moved in the space between pain and cold, running up through his hand and into the base of his skull.
For half a second the world tilted and he could feel every muscle in his legs as if someone had taken them apart and was showing him the pieces.
He understood that had no words attached to it how to move his weight forward and low and cover ground in a way his body had never been built for.
Then it stopped, and he was sitting in the grey dirt with the taste of copper on his tongue.
[Talent Acquired: Predator's Lunge (F) — Proficiency: 40%]
[WARNING: First activation may be unstable.]
[Soul Integrity: 99%]
Then he stood up because the second wolf had found the edge of the treeline and was already committed.
It came out fast and Wren's body moved before he finished deciding to move.
The angle was wrong.
Predator's Lunge was calibrated for a longer stride than his, and his back foot came down in a divot in the grey dirt and his knee buckled partway through.
He came out of it two feet further left than he had intended, still moving, overcorrecting, every instinct screaming that his center of gravity was in the wrong place.
But his hand came down on the back of the wolf's neck as it passed under him, and the wolf's front legs buckled and it hit the grey dirt face-first and skidded.
'That wasn't me.'
The movement had come from somewhere behind his own muscles, like a memory from a body that was not his.
The proficiency was at forty percent and he could feel the gap between what the skill wanted to do and what his legs could actually execute.
The gap was wide enough to get him killed.
Down the track, the merchant's cart had stopped.
The guard was standing next to the horse with his hand on his sword grip, watching.
He stood there for a few seconds and then said something to the merchant.
The cart started moving again and did not slow down.
Wren straightened up, to the left of where he had been trying to stand. He made a fist with his right hand and the middle finger still did not close.
The wolf was getting its front legs under it, shaking its head, and he shifted his grip on the rock and watched it find its feet.
'Two wolves. Two percent. Ninety-eight after this.'
The math was simple, and the math was a trap.
Because every fight from here on would be easier with the skills he took, and every skill he took would bring the number closer to something he did not understand but that the system called not human.
The wolf found its footing and turned its head toward him and he could see the moment it decided to come again.
He adjusted his grip on the rock and the wolf charged.
[Soul Integrity: 99%]