The Grinding Plateau

Five days after the wolf pack, Gesbiek had become a farmer.

The first day had very nearly killed him. His traps were badly dug and worse placed, and the beetles either walked around them or fell in and got out again, which was somehow more insulting. A 2-Green Razor-Cat cornered him in a ravine and he spent an hour submerged in cold water breathing through a reed until it lost interest. A swarm of Flesh Wasps stung him twenty-three times before he got into the smoke of a lightning-struck tree and lost them. He counted the stings afterwards. He was not sure why he counted them. It had felt important at the time.

The second day he found the hollow.

It sat under the roots of an ancient oak, a chamber about eight feet across where the roots made walls on three sides and the canopy overhead was thick enough that rain had apparently never reached the floor. The dirt in there was dry. Nothing with teeth came near it. He dragged his first successful kill inside, an Iron-Back Beetle the size of his own head, and cracked it open on a flat rock, and by nightfall the flat rock had a permanent green stain and a name.

The Processing Station. He had said it out loud, once, and then found he could not stop.

The third day he stopped improvising and started measuring. Iron-Backs followed the same paths within about two metres of error. Their stride came out at seven tenths of a metre, reliably, on flat ground. A pit dug with the far wall raked back thirty degrees dropped them onto their own carapace and left them upside down and helpless. He scratched all of it into the oak bark in tallies and lines, a chart nobody else would ever read.

Sixty-seven beetles. Forty-one centipedes. Eighteen rats. A hundred and twenty-six kills in five days, which was a rate he was quietly proud of and which had stopped mattering on the fourth.

All of them 1-Green. All of them, it was becoming clear, insufficient.

* * * *

He lay along a mossy overhang and watched the game trail without moving, which was a skill he had accidentally spent his entire childhood training.

An Iron-Back came lumbering up the trail with its dull green glow, and Gesbiek felt nothing about it at all. Five days ago that glow had meant a creature that outranked him. Now it meant one and a half percent.

The beetle went into the pit and landed on its back with a satisfying thud and began hissing at the walls.

Gesbiek came off the overhang. Twelve feet, and he took it in a crouch, and it felt like stepping down off a rock.

"Morning," he said to the beetle.

The beetle disagreed.

He had a piece of flint in his hand, worked to an edge over several evenings. It was his fourth. The first three had gone to nothing and broken, and he had learned to keep spares hanging from the root hooks in the hollow, because a tool that snaps mid-swing is worse than no tool at all.

The Analytical Sight turned the beetle into a blue wireframe, and inside the wireframe a single red point sat at the junction of head and thorax. The ganglion. The only place in all that armour where the beetle had been careless.

Gesbiek put the flint through it.

The shell went with a sound like puncturing fruit. The legs kicked twice and stopped, and the tag over it changed from a thing that could hurt him to a thing that could not.

He moved to the next trap.

By midday he had six beetles and three of the long centipedes laid out in a row, and he carried them back to the hollow two at a time, because he had tried three and dropped one and spent twenty minutes finding it.

* * * *

Inside, everything had a place.

Carapaces in one corner, sorted by size, because the big ones made passable digging scoops. Centipede segments in another, because lashed together with vine they made something that was not armour but was better than skin. Shallow alcoves scraped into the dirt wall for storage. The flat rock, permanently green. Three spare blades, a scraper and an awl hanging from root hooks in the order he used them.

Zog would have had opinions about the living-in-a-hole-full-of-insect-corpses element of the arrangement. Zog would also, Gesbiek was fairly sure, have gone quiet for a moment at the tool hooks and the sorted shells and said something gruff about how at least the boy kept his workspace decent.

"He would have," Gesbiek said aloud, prying the first chest plate open with the awl. "He absolutely would have."

He had started talking about three days into the second week. There was nobody to hear it and no reason not to, and after five years of being punished for making sound it turned out that the noise of his own voice in a small space was worth a great deal.

His hands went into the warm interior and came out with a core. The green had stained into the creases of his palms weeks ago, mixed with the blue from a centipede, and it had stopped washing off. He had decided to regard that as a uniform.

Nine cores went onto the rock in a line, each one humming faintly at its own pitch. Together they made a chord. It was not a pleasant chord, but he had grown fond of it.

He picked up the first and ate it.

The crunch, the pine sap, the sweetness underneath. This one had a copper edge to it, which meant the beetle had been drinking somewhere with iron in the water. He could tell things like that now, which was either expertise or a warning sign.

Then he waited for the rush, and the rush did not come.

[XP: +0.4%]

He looked at that for a moment.

On the first day one beetle had been worth fifteen percent of a rung and he had eaten them the way a starving thing eats. Level 2 had come before dark. Level 3 the next morning. He had watched the number climb and had assumed the climbing was simply what happened now.

Level 4 had taken the third day. Level 5 had taken the fourth and most of the fifth.

Each rung had come with three points, and each time the System had spent all three before he could get a look at them. Two into Agility and one into Vitality. Then two into Intelligence and one into Agility. Then one each into Strength, Agility and Vitality. Then three into Intelligence in a single block on the fifth day, which had not felt like a reward and had felt like somebody reaching a conclusion about him.

He had tried, at Level 3, to hold them back and spend them himself. There had been no holding them. The panel opened and closed inside the same instant and the numbers were already different, and there had been nothing in between to put a hand on.

The value had been sliding the whole time, in increments too small to notice inside any single day and impossible to miss across five days.

He ate the second, and the third, and worked through all nine, and by the fifth he had stopped tasting them at all.

[TOTAL: 9 x TIER-1 CORE | XP +3.6%]
[LEVEL 5 | PROGRESS TO LEVEL 6: 28.5%]

Gesbiek sat back against the root wall and looked at that for a long time.

At Level 0, one core had been an entire level. One meal, and everything changed. Now nine kills, a full day of work, five days of measurement and technique and dug pits, bought him three and a half percent of one rung.

He ran the arithmetic, which his Intelligence made unpleasantly fast. Eight more days at today's rate for Level 6. Nineteen for Level 7, if the beetles held their value, which they would not, because they never did.

Somewhere around Level 9 the curve went past anything a forest floor full of beetles could pay for, and after that he could work this ground until he died of old age and not move.

The stronger he got, the less the weak had to give him. He was not climbing. He was running on something that moved underneath him at exactly his own speed.

* * * *

There was a pool of standing water near the hollow mouth, brown and stagnant but flat, and he looked into it on his way past.

The goblin in it was not the one from the Sludge Pits.

The hollows were gone from under the cheeks. There was meat on the arms, wiry and close to the bone but real, and the skin had come up from sick olive to something more like polished bark with a green cast under it. He could no longer count his own ribs from the outside, which had been possible at a distance of ten feet in the spring.

He was still three feet tall. His claws were still blunt, good for bark and useless for anything that fought back. His teeth were the same jagged unhelpful arrangement they had always been.

He pulled his shirt open and looked at the Grey Shard.

The crack was not a crack any more. Five days and a hundred and twenty-six cores had turned the single fissure into a network, branching across the dull stone like lightning stopped mid-strike, and the widest channel was thicker than his thumb.

He did not have to focus to see the silver now. It was simply there, a steady leak of light through the grey, pulsing with his heartbeat and then, occasionally, a fraction off it. As though something underneath were keeping time on its own and only mostly agreeing with him.

Down in the deepest part of the widest crack, when the light caught it, he could see something with a shine on it. Not stone. Chrome.

Whatever was in there had spent five days pushing.

* * * *

Something moved above him and he went still without deciding to.

An Emerald Viper came down an Ironside trunk head first, unhurried, scales throwing back the light in shifting jade. It was beautiful in the specific way that poisonous things are usually beautiful, which is to say entirely on purpose.

[EMERALD VIPER | 2-GREEN]
[THREAT: HIGH | VENOM: LETHAL]

Two shards, set symmetrically in the neck scales on either side of the spine.

Below it, in the ferns, a Razor-Rat the size of a small dog was foraging with the total confidence of something that had never once looked up.

Gesbiek did not move, and watched a lesson happen.

The rat worked out that it was in trouble at the last possible moment. It hissed and threw its quills out and turned to run, and it was already far too late, because 2 is greater than 1 and there is nothing in the arrangement that allows for effort to make up the difference.

The strike was too fast to follow. One instant the viper was on the trunk, the next its fangs were in the rat's neck with green mana sheathing the ivory, and then it let go and pulled back and simply waited.

Three seconds and the rat's legs stopped agreeing with each other. Four and it went down. Five and it was finished.

The whole thing had made almost no sound.

The viper came forward, tasted the air twice to confirm, and then unhinged its jaw in a manner that Gesbiek found genuinely upsetting, and swallowed the rat whole over the course of a slow minute.

Then it stopped. Its body convulsed, twice, rhythmically.

It brought the rat's 1-Green core back up and dropped it in the dirt, still glowing, coated in fluid.

The viper hissed and flicked its tongue rapidly and shook its head from side to side like something trying to get a taste out of its mouth, and then it left the shard lying there and went off to digest the parts it could use.

Gesbiek counted to sixty before he moved.

He crawled to the discarded core and crouched over it, and the understanding arrived all at once and cold.

They could not eat these.

Everything out here killed for meat and grew slowly on meat and time, and the core was the one part of a kill that no creature in this forest could take, because the mana in it was too pure and would come out of solution in the blood and turn it to glass from the inside.

Every predator in the Darkwood was walking past the most valuable thing in every body it opened.

Except one.

He picked up the viper's leavings and looked at it, sitting green and glowing in a hand stained with five days of the same colour.

The world had built him wrong, and had spent five years making that unmistakably clear to him, and it turned out the specific way in which he was wrong was the one way that could eat this.

"Right," Gesbiek said, to a forest. "Fine. That is fine, then."

* * * *

Behind a tumbled rock at the back of the hollow, wrapped in leaves so they would not degrade, sat close to fifty 1-Green shards. His stockpile. His insurance against the week when the traps came up empty.

Sitting there with the viper's core in his hand and the arithmetic still stacked up in front of him, an idea presented itself.

Why ration.

Fifty cores in one sitting. Force the whole savings account through in an evening and come out the other side at Level 2, and let tomorrow's problem be tomorrow's.

He dug them out and lifted three to his mouth.

Red went across his vision, and something in his skull made a noise he had never heard it make.

[ERROR: TIER-1 CORE SATURATION (90%)]
[CRYSTALLIZATION DETECTED IN BLOODSTREAM]
[FURTHER CONSUMPTION WILL RESULT IN MANA POISONING]

He tried anyway, because he had come a long way in five days but not that far.

His throat shut. Not tightened. Shut, with a decisiveness that was not his, and his stomach folded, and his body triggered a gag reflex against something that had not even got past his lips. The dizziness came up in a wave and took his vision in from the edges, and he sat down hard in the dirt with the shards still in his fist.

[SATURATION COOLDOWN: 23:59:58]

A full day. Nine cores was the ceiling, and he had already spent it before midday.

Gesbiek buried the stockpile again with hands that were not steady, and understood that his shards had changed category. Not a meal. Not even a resource. A savings account with a daily withdrawal limit, and an interest rate that got worse every time he grew.

Weeks to Level 2. Then longer to Level 3.

And then something occurred to him.

Tier-1 core saturation.

The System had not said cores. It had said Tier-1. A thing that counts in tiers has other tiers to count, and a limit written against one of them is a limit on that one only.

The green filled some vessel in him and the vessel was full. That said nothing whatsoever about blue.

He sat in the dirt in a hole full of insect shells and turned that over, and his chest hummed while he did it, the cracks going brighter, something under the grey taking an interest.

Gesbiek called up the numbers one last time.

[LEVEL 5 | XP 28.5%]
[STR 3 | AGI 10 | VIT 6 | INT 12]

Not one of those had moved in a week.

They had moved before that. Four rungs had bought him twelve points and the System had spent every one of them without asking, exactly as it had the first time, and by now he had watched it happen four times and had stopped saying anything about it. It leaned on Agility when something had recently tried to eat him and on Intelligence when nothing had, which meant the thing was watching him work and drawing conclusions, and he was not certain he liked being a subject of study.

But that was rungs. Rungs paid.

The week had not been rungs. He had built a perfect machine for turning beetles into almost nothing, and he had run it flawlessly, and it had brought him exactly to the wall.

Two hundred metres northeast, the tree line thickened and the canopy shut out the sun entirely, and the vibrant green of the readouts went over into a low humming blue. Even from here the air over there looked heavier. That was where the 2-Greens hunted, and the things above them, and it was not a place Snarl would have walked into alone.

Gesbiek picked up his best flint and tightened his belt and did not look back at the traps he had spent five days perfecting.

The temperature dropped as he crossed. The mana thickened until each breath had weight in it, and the cracks in his chest pulsed harder with every step, and fifty metres ahead of him, through the trunks, something was carrying a single point of azure light.

Not three lights. One.

But blue.