The Silver Core

The spider had been in a fight, and it had lost most of it.

Gesbiek watched from fifty feet up in a bioluminescent Sequoia, flat along a branch, and took his time.

A Crystal Weaver, the size of a wagon, with a carapace like spun glass that broke the forest light into colours as it shifted. Under normal circumstances it was one of the things the Blue Zone had at the top.

Two of its legs were gone at the joint. The stumps were ragged rather than cut, which suggested something had torn them off rather than severed them, and blue ichor was leaking out into the moss underneath.

[CRYSTAL WEAVER | 1-BLUE | LEVEL 18]
[HP: 34% | STATUS: RECOVERING]

A territorial dispute, at a guess. It had met something in this forest that outclassed it and had got away by a margin it would not want discussed, and now it was sitting still and pouring everything it had into growing legs back.

And in its cephalothorax, entirely undiminished by any of this, the 1-Blue Shard was burning like a lit window.

Gesbiek looked at it for a long moment.

He could not fight that. Even now, even bleeding, it would take him apart while barely paying attention. But fair was a concept invented by creatures that had a chance, and he had given up on fair some time ago in favour of things that worked.

He shifted his attention off the spider and onto the tree above it.

* * * *

A slab of granite hung in the Sequoia's upper branches, wedged in place, the sort of thing a hillside drops and a growing tree eventually swallows.

To an eye it looked settled. Decades settled.

Under the Analytical Sight it was flickering.

[GRANITE SLAB | 2,847 KG]
[STABILITY: 1%]
[COLLISION ERROR DETECTED]
[PHYSICS RECALCULATION PENDING]

A single red point sat where the stone met the bark, going on and off. The world had made an arithmetic mistake about the friction there some time ago, and had been holding three tons in the air on the strength of it ever since, and it had not yet noticed.

Gesbiek felt his mouth go up at the corners in a way he could not entirely control.

The rock did not need pushing. It needed correcting. Anything that forced the world to look at that contact point again would do it, and the world, once it saw the error, would fix it with enthusiasm.

Most creatures looked at a flaw in the world and saw somewhere to avoid.

He was becoming aware that he looked at a flaw in the world and saw somewhere to put an enemy, and that this was probably not a healthy way to be, and that he was going to keep doing it.

He climbed down to twenty feet and got to work.

* * * *

The spider was resting slightly off to the left of where three tons of granite would arrive, which was inconvenient but solvable.

He took the dead rat out of his bag, a leftover from the Green Zone that he had been saving without any clear reason, and opened it up with the flint so it would smell like something. Then he dropped it into the middle of the space under the slab.

It landed with a soft sound in the moss.

Then he threw a hard nut at a hollow log nearby.

Thwack.

The Crystal Weaver's eyes rotated. All of them, together, in a single motion that made Gesbiek's skin crawl and gave him a new appreciation for the phrase *many-eyed*. Its mandibles worked once, tasting the air.

Fresh blood. Easy meat. Fuel for regrowing two legs.

It came up on the six it had left and started limping toward the bait.

Gesbiek stopped breathing and watched the System paint a red cylinder down from the slab to the forest floor: exactly where the granite would be, and how much of the ground it would be there across.

The spider entered the cylinder at an angle. It reached the rat. It paused.

He needed this exact. If the slab took the legs, the spider survived and would want a word. If it took the head, the shard might go with it and all of this would have been an expensive way to make a mess.

[ALIGNMENT: 87%]

The spider leaned forward to feed.

[ALIGNMENT: 96%]

Its body settled fully into the red.

[98%]

Gesbiek took a river stone from his pouch. The same kind that had killed the Leaf Chicken. He had kept picking them up out of habit and had never asked himself why.

He did not aim at the spider.

He aimed at the flickering red point where the granite met the bark, and he put everything an Agility of 10 could give him behind it, and threw.

The stone crossed forty feet of air and struck the error dead centre.

*Click.*

The world looked at the contact point, saw what it had been doing, and corrected.

The slab did not tip and slide. It had been wrongly weightless for a very long time, and when the correction landed it acquired all of that back at once, and it went from stationary to terminal velocity with nothing in between.

BOOM.

The impact came up through the tree and into Gesbiek's chest. He grabbed the branch with both arms as debris went past him: chitin, earth, glowing ichor, a fine mist of blue mana spreading out in a ring that flattened the ferns for thirty feet.

When the dust settled there was a crater with a rock in it.

[TARGET DESTROYED: CRYSTAL WEAVER]
[DAMAGE: OVERKILL (847%)]

Gesbiek dropped down into the dust cloud, coughing.

Eight hundred and forty-seven percent did seem like more than the situation had required. On the other hand, he had learned with the Leaf Chicken that when a goblin goes after something well above his tier, excessive is simply a longer word for adequate.

* * * *

He found the core by digging under the edge of the slab with his bare hands.

The stone's curvature had left a pocket, a space where the thorax was crushed rather than erased, and he got his arms into the mud and the wreckage and cut himself repeatedly on carapace fragments that were as sharp as they looked. Green blood mixed with blue in the mud and he did not stop.

He felt the heat before he found it. The air down there tasted of ozone and something acidic, thick enough to make his eyes water.

Then his fingers closed on something hot and vibrating and he pulled it out.

It was the size of a chicken egg, and heavy in the way that things are heavy when they contain more than their volume ought to allow. The light coming off it was flat sapphire and did not flicker at all.

A Green core in his palm had felt like a cup of water.

This felt like weather.

[TIER-2 MANA CORE]
[PURITY: 96.4%]
[EVOLUTION PROBABLE]

Gesbiek read the last line twice.

Not a level. Evolution.

He thought about three weeks of beetles. About the saturation lock and the savings account and the arithmetic that said three hundred and fifty more kills would buy him one rung.

Then he put the shard in his mouth and bit down.

The Green cores had crunched like hard candy. This one did not. He had to put his whole jaw into it, molars grinding, and for a moment he genuinely thought his teeth would go first.

CRACK.

It was like swallowing a live wire.

Blue lightning came out of his mouth and scorched his lips, and he went down onto his knees with both hands at his throat as something molten went down into him. There was nothing cool about it. It was fire and ice at the same time, two sensations that had no business coexisting and were doing it anyway.

His veins came up blue under the skin. He tried to scream and what came out instead was a blast of raw mana that lifted the dust in a circle around him.

[MANA DENSITY EXCEEDS SAFE THRESHOLD]
[SATURATION: 127%]

He went over onto his back in the dirt and began to convulse.

* * * *

Then the energy reached his chest, and the Grey Shard failed.

For five years that stone had been the whole argument against him. Grolm had called it the Old Rot. Snarl had called it a mistake the world made while it was distracted. Gesbiek had scrubbed at it in a pond until his thumb split, asking it to be something else.

It cracked from the middle outward, and the cracks were not fine any more.

Light came out of the fissures, white and blinding, and it felt exactly like being opened from the inside with something blunt. Gesbiek arched off the ground with his heels digging trenches in the earth and his hands clawing at his own ribs.

Pieces of grey stone flaked off his chest and fell into the dirt like dead skin.

Underneath each piece was silver.

The understanding arrived while he was still screaming, and it went through him harder than the mana had.

It had never been a shard.

Every goblin born under a Grey stone, every one of them called broken and empty and cursed, had been carrying a lid.

The Grey was a shell. Something had been placed over the top of what was actually in his chest, and it had held for five years, and one Blue core had been enough to finish what a metal beetle started.

[GREY SHELL: COMPROMISED]
[CORE INTEGRITY: EMERGING]

The last of the husk went with a sound like breaking glass played backwards, and the pain stopped as though a hand had been lifted off him.

Gesbiek lay in the dirt and breathed and looked down at his own chest.

There was a sphere in it. Polished chrome, mirror-smooth, showing him the canopy above in a small curved reflection. It did not glow the way the coloured shards glowed. It pulsed, white and silent and cold, and what came off it was not warmth and not power.

It was information.

He could feel the forest. Sap moving in the trunks around him. Insects going about their evening in the undergrowth thirty feet away. Wind arriving as direction and speed rather than as air on skin. And underneath all of it, running steadily, the thing that kept the whole arrangement calculated and consistent, ticking over in the background the way a heart does.

Gesbiek got to his feet on legs that shook.

He was still three feet tall. He was still a goblin standing in a crater next to a dead spider with blood under his fingernails.

He did not feel small.

[EVOLUTION COMPLETE]
[GREY SHARD > SILVER CORE (REVEALED)]
[RANK: SILVER (ADMINISTRATOR, RESTRICTED)]
[LEVEL: 5 > 12]

Seven levels.

Three weeks of beetles had bought him twenty-eight percent of one. A single Blue core had gone past the saturation limit as though it were not there and handed him seven, because it had never been the same kind of fuel and the ceiling had never applied.

He had been right. He allowed himself a moment about it. The arithmetic was so lopsided it went past unfair and came out the other side as something close to beautiful.

* * * *

The notifications kept coming.

[ADMIN TOOLS UNLOCKED]
[EVOLUTION POINTS: 1]

He reached out and the menu opened in front of him like something growing.

[WORLD EDIT: LOCKED, LEVEL 100]
[DELETE: LOCKED, LEVEL 100]
[SPAWN CONTROL: LOCKED, LEVEL 50]
[FORGE: LOCKED, LEVEL 50]
[MERGE: LOCKED, LEVEL 25]
[POSSESSION (v1.0): AVAILABLE, 1 POINT]

One door out of six that would open, and one point to open it with.

[POSSESSION (v1.0)]
[OVERRIDE MOTOR FUNCTIONS OF LOWER-DENSITY ENTITIES]
[HOST CONSCIOUSNESS REMAINS INTACT BUT SUPPRESSED]
[RANGE: 20 METRES]

Gesbiek read it through twice, and then a third time, and stopped at one phrase.

*Remains intact but suppressed.*

The host would be in there. Awake. Watching its own body do things it had not chosen, unable to reach any part of itself, for as long as he decided.

He knew precisely what that was like. He had spent five years in a camp where larger creatures moved him around and he had no say in any of it, and he had made a personality out of enduring it.

He looked at the skill for a while longer.

Then he took it, because the alternative was Level 12 in a forest full of things that were not Level 12, and because he had learned in the Sludge Pits that the goblin who refuses a tool on principle is simply a goblin without a tool.

[SKILL ACQUIRED: POSSESSION (v1.0)]
[INSTALLING]

Cold went into his ear and through his skull, and something wrote itself onto him.

When it finished, a small silver reticle had appeared in the middle of his vision and began drifting wherever he looked.

He looked at a tree. [INVALID TARGET: INORGANIC]

He looked at a beetle in the ferns. [VALID TARGET: DENSITY < USER]

The rule was immediately obvious. His core was the strongest signal in the area, and he could speak over anything quieter than himself, and nothing else.

Gesbiek looked at his own hands. The skin had gone from sick olive to something with life in it. There was more muscle across the back of the fingers. His claws had come to a point.

[GESBIEK | LEVEL 12 | ADMINISTRATOR]
[CORE: SILVER (REVEALED)]
[STR 6 | AGI 15 | VIT 10 | INT 21]
[ASCENSION PROTOCOL: 12/100]

Twenty-one points across seven rungs, and it had put nine of them in one place. Whatever the thing in his chest had decided he was for, it had stopped being coy about it.

Twelve.

Eighty-eight to go, and the curve got steeper with every one of them, and somewhere out past miles of forest there was a cavern with a drake's ribcage over the entrance and a goblin on a throne who had refused to have him killed in case the curse spread.

Gesbiek was not going back there at Level 12. He was not stupid.

But he had tools now, and a number in the corner of his eye, and a reticle that drifted where he looked and told him what he could and could not speak over.

He turned away from the crater and went to find something else with blue in it.