First Level-Up

He should have been dying. That was the part he kept coming back to afterward.

The taste was still going. Concentrated sunlight, if sunlight could be held in the mouth. The first warm day of spring, and pine sap, and something wilder underneath both: wind through leaves, rain landing on stone, the whole idea of things growing, boiled down until it fit on a tongue.

The energy went down his throat cool instead of burning, which was wrong. Everything he had ever been told said burning.

*Mana Burn*, Zog had called it, on one of the cold nights when the old goblin ran out of useful things to teach and started on the cautionary ones. Young warriors who had killed something bigger than themselves and got greedy about it. Their blood cooked inside them. Their organs came apart in the order of importance. It took about four minutes and they screamed for most of it.

"Only the Earth eats the dead," Zog had said. "Only soil can digest what was never meant for the living. Say it back."

"Only the Earth eats the dead."

"Good. Now never find out whether I am right."

Gesbiek lay among the fern roots with green blood drying on his chin, four minutes came and went, and nothing cooked.

What happened instead was that the pain stopped.

Not eased. Stopped, the way a noise stops. The gnawing hollow in his middle that had been the central fact of his existence for as long as he had been able to form facts about anything simply was not there any more, and the silence where it had been was so total that for a moment he thought something had gone badly wrong.

Then the rest of it started.

The blood under his nose dried and flaked off his lip. The bruises Snarl had left across his ribs went from purple to yellow to gone in the space of a few breaths, and he could feel each of them going, a warm crawling sensation moving under the skin like something being tidied. The rope grooves in his palms from a thousand buckets smoothed out. His lips stopped being cracked. Small cuts he had stopped noticing years ago sealed themselves without asking him first.

Somewhere in his chest a rib that had never quite set properly clicked, once, and set properly.

Gesbiek lay in the leaves and breathed, and discovered that breathing was easier than it had been. It had always taken a certain amount of effort. He had assumed that was simply what breathing was.

He was full.

He turned the word over and could not get it to fit anywhere. He had eaten before. He had, twice in his life, eaten enough that his stomach stopped complaining for an afternoon. This was not that. This was every part of him having what it needed at the same time, which he had believed was a thing that happened to other goblins in stories about other goblins.

"Oh," he said, out loud, to the ferns.

He lay there a while longer. Minutes, or an hour. He could not have said.

* * * *

The static behind his eyes cleared without warning, folding down into something clean, and a chime went off in the middle of his skull. Not a sound. The idea of a sound, delivered directly, and unmistakably pleased with itself.

[LEVEL UP]
[LEVEL 0 > LEVEL 1]
[TUTORIAL PHASE: COMPLETE]
[CONGRATULATIONS, ADMINISTRATOR]

Gesbiek looked at it for a long moment.

He did not have the language, but the meaning arrived anyway, whole and without translation. There was a number. He had one. It had gone up.

The world he had been raised in had exactly one measure of worth and it was set into your chest at birth and it never changed. Grey stayed Grey. That was the entire arrangement, and everything else about the Red-Tooth Clan followed from it.

This was a different arrangement. This one had rungs.

It was not an impressive rung. He was aware of that. But it was one more than he had possessed yesterday, and yesterday he had been the lowest thing in a camp of the low.

A second window slid in beside the first, showing him a wireframe of his own body, every rib countable, every hollow rendered in careful lines. It was not a flattering diagram.

[GESBIEK | LEVEL 1 | CLASS: ADMINISTRATOR]
[STR 2 | AGI 3 | VIT 4 | INT 7]
[AVAILABLE STAT POINTS: 3]

Light began to move.

It came out of the last line like water that had been told to behave like metal, and it pooled toward AGILITY, and the number went up. Three. Four. Five. Six.

Gesbiek watched it happen and noticed, distinctly, that nobody had asked him.

"I might have wanted those elsewhere," he said.

The System declined to comment, and continued not asking him, and finished.

He decided to let it go. He was a goblin who, two days ago, had found an unidentified metal object in a graveyard and eaten it. On the available evidence, he was not the strongest candidate in this partnership for making decisions.

His legs twitched as the change went through them. Muscle restructured itself, tightening, becoming denser without becoming larger, and his tendons drew up like bowstrings being brought to tension. The soles of his feet went sensitive enough that he could feel individual grains of grit through skin that had been callus since childhood.

He got up.

He had intended to get up carefully, and instead he was simply standing, and it had cost him nothing at all.

* * * *

Then his eyes caught fire.

Gesbiek doubled over with both hands pressed to his face, gasping, tears cutting two clean tracks down through the dirt on his cheeks. The burning climbed, peaked, and stopped.

He blinked.

The forest had changed while he was not looking. Not brighter. Sharper. The blurred undergrowth had resolved into individual leaves and he could see the veins in each one. The tangle of twigs above him had come apart into separate twigs. Twenty feet away a small pale flower sat in the moss and he could count the petals on it without moving.

[SKILL UNLOCKED (PASSIVE): ANALYTICAL SIGHT]
[PROFICIENCY: NOVICE]

The meaning poured in behind it, the way water goes into a container.

Gesbiek looked down at the river stone lying in the mud where he had dropped it.

[RIVER STONE (COMMON)]
[DURABILITY: 45/50 | WEIGHT: 0.8 KG]
[USES: BASIC TOOL, IMPROVISED WEAPON | DAMAGE 8-12]

He dropped it again, which was impressive given that it was already on the ground and he had only been looking at it.

"Right," he said. "Fine. Yes."

He picked it up. This time he held the focus, and the stone opened further: thin red lines threaded through it where the granite would fail, hairline weaknesses running from one face to the other, invisible to anything that was only an eye. Five more good strikes. Six if he was lucky about the angle. Then it would come apart along those exact lines and he would be holding gravel.

He was not looking at a rock. He was looking at how much rock he had left.

Gesbiek turned in a slow circle, and the Darkwood lit up around him.

The Ironwoods carried a dull grey-green tag. Moss came up in emerald outlines, some brighter than others, and when he settled on a bright patch it told him it was Star-Moss, edible, mildly medicinal, not remotely filling, which was more than any goblin in the Red-Tooth Clan had ever bothered to tell him about anything growing.

A cluster of mushrooms twelve paces off pulsed a purple so intense it was uncomfortable to hold in the eye. That one came with a number attached to how long he would take to die.

"Purple is bad," Gesbiek said. "Understood. Frankly I might have guessed."

He had spent his whole life being told the world was unknowable and dangerous, and had built a personality out of the second half of that sentence. Zog had taught him to fear it because there was no way to see into it.

There was, though. There had been all along. Nobody in the clan had simply been able to.

Which raised a question.

Gesbiek pulled the torn edge of his shirt aside and looked down at his own chest, at the dull stone with the silver crack running across it, and he held the focus the way he had held it on the rock.

The forest went on obligingly labelling itself around him. Moss, bark, mushroom, root.

His own chest returned nothing.

Not an error, and not a blank box. There was simply no tag there at all, the same way there is no tag on the air. As far as the thing living behind his eyes was concerned, the middle of his own body was not an object in the world.

He let the shirt fall closed.

"That is fine," he told the ferns. "That is completely fine and I am not going to think about it."

Then something red crossed his vision, off between the trunks, and the pleasant feeling went out of the morning.

[HOSTILE ENTITY | DISTANCE: 187m | THREAT: MODERATE]
[RECOMMENDATION: AVOID]

He could not hear it. He could not smell it. He could see the line of it moving between trees that he could not see through, and the number at the end of the line was getting smaller.

180.

It was coming toward the blood.

* * * *

Gesbiek's whole warm floating hour cooled off in a second.

He glanced at the Leaf Chicken, or what was left of it, and the corpse returned a flat grey tag saying there was nothing left in it worth having and it would be gone entirely in a little over four hours.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and smeared green across his cheek, and turned to go, and stopped.

Something small was moving through the roots ahead of him. A forest rat, barely bigger than his fist, going about its morning.

Yesterday he would have watched it leave. Yesterday it would have been food he had no way of catching, which was the category most food had fallen into.

Today a thin dotted line came out in front of it, showing him where it was going to be in three seconds if nothing changed.

Gesbiek did not decide to move. His legs, which were now other legs, moved.

He came down on the projected line and closed his hand on nothing at all. The rat had broken left at the last instant, because rats do not consult projections.

The line redrew itself in the air while he was still off balance, curving hard left and then straightening out toward a hollow log.

He pivoted. The new legs took it without complaint. Two steps, three, and his hand came down.

The rat squeaked once and stopped.

[TARGET ELIMINATED: FOREST RAT]
[XP: +0.3%]

Nothing at all, in other words. Three tenths of one percent of one rung.

Gesbiek stood there holding a dead rat by the tail and found that he did not care about the number in the slightest.

The number was not the point. The point was that he had missed, and the world had told him why he missed, and then it had told him where to be instead, and he had been there.

He had never once in his life been where he needed to be.

170.

He put the rat in what was left of his shirt and turned away from both bodies, and moved.

He got some distance before he noticed how he was doing it.

His head was up. That was the strange part. Five years of walking through the Red-Tooth camp had taught his spine a particular curve, chin down, eyes on the ground two paces ahead, shoulders drawn in to occupy as little of the world as possible. He had not made a decision to stop doing that. His body had simply put itself into a different shape while he was busy with a rat.

The Darkwood was still going to try to kill him. Nothing about that had changed. There was a red line 160 metres behind him with a moderate opinion of its own chances.

But it was not a wall of shadow with teeth in it any more. It was moss that could be eaten and mushrooms that could not, distances that could be counted, a rock with five strikes left in it, and a line showing him where a thing would be before it got there.

It had rules. Rules could be read.

Gesbiek went deeper into the trees, and he was not running from anything.