Kelix found a log that looked solid enough to count as furniture.
It was half-sunk into the gelatin soil like the world had tried to swallow it and gotten bored halfway through. The bark was pale, almost gray, with faint spirals in it that looked too neat to be natural.
Kelix sat anyway. His legs were starting to feel like they belonged to someone else, and thinking while standing felt like tempting another collapse.
He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and glared hard at nothing in particular.
Not at the horizon. Not at the bubble-sky. Not even at Endigo.
Just forward, like his stare could pin the day down and force it to make sense.
Thoughts clicked in his mind. A system. Essence. Level ten to eleven.
A skill name that had echoed in his head like a notification.
He drew in a slow breath and let it out through his nose. His mind itched for structure. For something he could open, read, and categorize.
How did you pull the status screen up on purpose? ZiE had poked him and it had appeared. The slime kill had popped messages into his vision. That meant the interface was there. It was attached. It was waiting.
Kelix focused on the feeling of it, the way he had felt the core text overlay his sight. He tried to imagine the screen sliding forward. He tried to will it the way he had willed lightning out of his palm.
Nothing.
He clenched his fist. Fine.
He shifted slightly on the log. Endigo climbed up beside him with quiet ease and sat as well, cloak pooling around its small frame. It looked like a child's toy left on a bench, if that toy carried the weight of a name that had made another monster flinch.
Kelix sighed.
"You are really committed to the silent thing, huh?"
Endigo kept staring ahead.
Kelix tried again anyway, because he knew what unchecked quiet did to a mind. Solitude was not neutral. It was an echo chamber. Leave a person alone with fear long enough and their thoughts stopped looping and started tightening, spiraling inward until every possibility pointed toward disaster.
Talking was not comfort. It was ballast.
"So," Kelix said, voice low, rough at the edges, "you going to explain any of this, or am I supposed to figure it out before my brain eats itself?"
Endigo did not answer.
Kelix stayed seated, fingers curling against his knees, and kept talking anyway.
"What are you," he asked, slower this time. "Not your name. What you are? Why you look like you do now? Why ZiE called you her knight? Why you were…"
Again. No response. Kelix's gaze dropped to Endigo's shoulder. For a moment he considered not touching it. For a moment he considered that touching might trigger another invisible shove. Or perhaps a zap.
He tapped it anyway, light and careful, more to ground himself than to demand a response.
Endigo did not flinch.
Suddenly Kelix's own vision flickered. The status screen snapped into place in front of his eyes, clean and immediate, as if it had been waiting for him to remember the correct thought.
Name: {Kelix}
Rank: F [11/20]
He had not said anything. He had only thought about it again when his hand moved. His brow furrowed. So thinking was the trigger? But not just thinking. There was a timing to it. A pattern. Like the system wanted intent, and his intent had been clearer when he did something physical.
He stared at the screen until his annoyance steadied into focus.
Name: {Kelix}
Rank: F [11/20]
Progress: [32%]
Discipline: {None}
EX = [41%]
AP = 125 {Total} [81%] | MP = 40 {Total} [68%]
STR: 26 END: 26
AUR: 58 RES: 13
SPD: 58 TEQ: 62
[Passive] LMT: 25 · INS: 45 · CTRL: 20
Kelix blinked once, slow.
Rank: F.
So he was F in this world too, even if the level was already ten. The bracket beside it, [11/20], looked like a progress bar pretending to be a fraction. Eleven out of twenty. Until what? Until the next rank? Until E? Until whatever came after?
His eyes slid to EX.
Forty-one percent.
Experience, he guessed, because it was the most obvious and he was tired of guessing. But it had dropped from fifty. Of course it had. He had been shoved into the ocean, dragged through a slime fight, and dropped into a world that looked like dessert furniture. Maybe the system counted stress like damage. Maybe it counted survival as consumption.
His gaze slide to AP. One hundred twenty-five total. Eighty-one percent.
Next. MP. Forty total. Sixty-eight percent. He guessed it was Mana. Magic points. He did not like how natural that assumption felt, but the lightning and the aura and the skill names did not leave him much choice.
Kelix's gaze moved down to the stats.
STR and END had ticked up by one. RES had ticked up by one. AUR had climbed to fifty-eight. SPD fifty-eight. TEQ sixty-two.
Those numbers were not evenly distributed, and he did not like that either. It felt like being built for a role he had not chosen.
Kelix stared at Discipline: None. That one made his stomach tighten.
No discipline. No class. No designation. No label to tell him what he was meant to be.
He glanced at Endigo again, still sitting beside him like a shadow wearing a skull.
"You are not going to explain what any of this is, are you?" He tried the question again, hopeful.
Endigo's head tilted slightly.
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Kelix did not know if that meant yes or no. It probably meant nothing. He was starting to hate head tilts.
He exhaled and stood up. The jelly-ground flexed under his feet. The status screen stayed for a beat longer, then faded when his focus shifted.
He held his right hand out in front of him and narrowed his eyes. If MP was mana, then Doom Zap used it.
He could test that.
Kelix concentrated, pulling the memory of the slime fight forward and trying to recreate the sensation. Blue heat crawled over his palm. Then the crackle started, faint at first, then sharper, blue electricity threading over his fingers. He kept it there. Held it.
The lightning crawled up his wrist, wrapping his forearm in thin arcs. It tickled along his skin and made his arm feel light, like his bones had been replaced with wire.
Kelix forced his eyes to focus on the idea of the status again.
It appeared.
MP = 40 {Total} [68%]
As he held the lightning, the percentage began to tick down.
Sixty-seven.
Sixty-six.
Kelix frowned. So maintaining it cost mana. Not just firing it. Holding it.
He released the concentration slightly, and the lightning faded. The blue heat clung a moment longer, then dispersed.
Kelix opened the status again.
MP = 40 {Total} [65%]
It had not jumped back up. So MP did not regenerate instantly. Or it did, but slowly. Or it required something.
Kelix stared at the line until his eyes hurt.
EX. AP. MP.
STR. END. AUR. RES. SPD. TEQ.
LMT. INS. CTRL.
The acronyms still meant nothing in detail, but the outline was starting to form. Experience. Action points. Mana points. Strength. Endurance. Aura. Resistance. Speed. Technique.
Limit. Instinct. Control.
He did not know if those guesses were right. He only knew they were the closest thing to a map he had.
Kelix looked out over the jelly field. The bubbles in the sky drifted slowly. Somewhere in the distance, something moved behind a ridge, too far to identify.
He felt Endigo step down from the log behind him, cloak brushing against the bark.
Kelix did not look back. "If you are going to follow me, then at least tell me what you want."
Endigo did not answer.
Kelix's hands flexed at his sides.
He stared hard forward again, at nothing in particular, and tried to swallow the rising frustration before it turned into something reckless.
He had a rank, a level, and a skill. Still, he had no idea what any of it meant.
Unwilling to be confined to a single place, he stepped off the log and into the field, ready to discover how far he could push himself before the world tried to stop him.
?? ?? ??
Kelix learned quickly that the jelly-grassland had a rhythm.
The slimes did not wander like animals. They appeared in patches, dark blue teardrops half-submerged in the gelatin surface, quivering faintly as though the land itself was exhaling them.
If Kelix moved too fast, he missed them. If he stayed still too long, one would bounce into him like it had been waiting for his attention.
He stopped treating them like a question and started treating them like a resource.
The next slime hit him in the thigh. Kelix pivoted, let it slide past, and fired [Doom Zap] without letting his frustration build into sloppiness. Blue lightning snapped from his palm in branching arcs. The slime burst into particles and left behind a {Dark Blue Core} that rolled once before settling into the jelly.
A diamond-shaped crystal drifted up after it, clear and sealed like a tiny vial.
{60 Essence}
It dissolved into his skin before he could decide whether to fear it.
He came across a couple more slimes. They, too, were swiftly dispatched with a blast of lightning.
{50 Essence}
{55 Essence}
Two more {Dark Blue Cores} dropped.
Kelix counted the cores by habit. One, two, three. And four, if he included the very first slime he had defeated.
He kept them in his pockets at first, then realized the cold weight was going to bruise his legs. He tore a strip of cloth from the inside of his attire and made a crude pouch, tying it shut with a knot that made his fingers ache.
Endigo followed him through it all, silent and watchful.
Kelix could not tell if Endigo approved. He could not tell if Endigo cared. It simply moved at Kelix's side and tugged once at his pants whenever Kelix hesitated too long, like a reminder that standing still in a strange world was a choice you paid for.
The fifth slime hit his forearm. Kelix took the impact, teeth clenched, and brought his palm down on its surface just to confirm blunt force still did nothing. The slime wobbled, reformed, and bounced again as if offended.
Kelix let it. Instead, he evaded, drew the slime into a straight line, and then released [Doom Zap].
The arcs surged. The slime burst.
Another {Dark Blue Core}. Another crystal. Another quiet seep of {50 Essence} into his skin.
A notification flashed bright enough to make him blink.
[Level Up!]
Level: 11 → 12
Kelix froze mid-step, breath held. Then he released it slowly, like he was afraid breathing too hard would make the words vanish.
So he could climb. That should have been reassuring. But it was not.
It felt like a confirmation that he was on a track someone else had built.
Kelix thought about the status screen and it appeared, obedient now as if the system had decided he had earned the privilege of looking.
Name: {Kelix}
Rank: F [12/20]
Progress: {11%}
Discipline: {None}
EX = [32%]
AP = 125 {Total} [78%] | MP = 40 {Total} [59%]
Points: {44}
STR: 27 END: 27
AUR: 61 RES: 14
SPD: 61 TEQ: 64
[Passive] LMT: 25 · INS: 45 · CTRL: 20
Kelix stared at the new line.
Points: {44}.
He read it twice, then again, as if the word would change into something more helpful.
Points. Of course. He should have expected it. A system loved points. A system loved turning people into numbers that could be moved around.
Kelix did the math automatically because his brain needed something it could solve.
Level twelve. Points forty-four.
He had leveled once here, from ten to eleven, then eleven to twelve. If he had gained four points each time, that would be eight points gained since arriving. That meant he likely had thirty-six points at level ten.
Thirty-six divided by nine was four. So yes. Four points per level. It made sense in the way systems made sense. Clean. Predictable. Cold.
Kelix's eyes dropped to EX.
Thirty-two percent.
He stared at it and felt his stomach tighten.
It had been higher earlier. It had been fifty when ZiEnitra showed him the first time. It had been forty-one after the slime fight and the level up. He had assumed it was experience and it should rise.
It had not. It had been dropping.
Kelix swallowed hard. He thought about all the times he had taken a hit today. The shove into the ocean. The fall from the sky. The slimes crashing into him. The shockwaves in the park. The building splitting behind him. The pressure of those auras that made Sheryl collapse.
All the moments where his body had absorbed damage, even if it had not bled.
EX was not experience. It was something else.
His gaze flicked to AP and MP. Action points and mana points, he still assumed, because those behaved the way he expected. MP drained when he held lightning. AP dipped slowly with exertion.
EX was the odd one.
Kelix's throat went dry. He did not like the implication that the system was tracking his life as a percentage.
He lowered the status screen and looked out over the jelly-grassland again, suddenly aware of how empty it felt.
He needed more slimes. Not for points. Not for cores. For a test.
Kelix moved faster, scanning ridges and shallow depressions. He climbed one gelatin hill and looked down into a low basin, expecting to see dark blue shapes quivering beneath the surface.
Nothing.
He crossed into another patch, watching for glossy teardrops or ripple patterns that did not match the land's breathing.
Nothing.
He went farther, past crystal-like trees that chimed faintly when the bubbles overhead drifted, past a shallow stream of green water that flowed uphill without apology.
Nothing.
The slimes were gone, or hiding, or he had moved into the wrong zone.
Kelix slowed and felt the irritation return, sharper this time because it carried fear beneath it.
He turned toward Endigo, already forming the question in his head.
What is EX?
What does it mean when it drops?
How do I raise it?
He stopped himself, as asking Endigo something like that felt pointless. Endigo had given him silence for everything else. It was a wall Kelix had been throwing words at, hoping it would turn into a door.
Kelix frowned and changed tactics. He looked down at Endigo, who stood beside him with the same calm stillness, cloak fluttering slightly as if the air around it obeyed different rules.
Kelix kept his voice as even as he could. "Hey. Hit me."
Endigo's skull face tilted upward.
Kelix held up a hand. "With a light attack. Not enough to kill me. I need to test something."
Endigo did not move for a terribly long moment. Then it reacted.
It straightened slightly, like Kelix had finally said something that fit into its world. The dim glow in its hollow eyes brightened a fraction, not crimson lightning, not yet, but a clearer ember.
Endigo looked up at Kelix and spoke. Its voice was quiet, controlled, and surprisingly clear.
"With which technique?"
Kelix paused, stunned and contemplating. Not because of the question, but because Endigo had finally answered anything at all.
Then a cold unease began to coil in his stomach. The thought that had seemed daring moments ago now felt reckless. He was asking something of a creature that could very well be Death itself.
Its small, still frame and quiet demeanor were deceiving, and yet, the power behind those empty eye sockets felt like it could shatter him in an instant. He had asked it to touch him. And now, he was not sure he could bear the consequences.
