Velik wasn’t really sure how he felt. If the system notification was to be believed, Chalin was the previous owner of the champion seed. To Velik’s mind, that implied that Chalin was alive, or at least that he had been sometime in the past after they’d gone into the destroyed dungeon. When he’d woken back up, Chalin was already gone. There was nothing but the monster, and he’d done the only thing he could do: he’d run for his life.

Did I abandon him? I thought the monster had eaten him, that it was coming for me next. Maybe he got away. Wait, did he abandon me? He was already gone when I woke up.

He could vividly remember those first few seconds. His mind had been flooded with messages, notifying him about his racial subtype and his new class. The feeling of elation that had swept through him upon realizing that the class orb had worked would remain with him forever, but it would always be paired with the horror he’d felt seconds later when he saw that pulsing heap of flesh crawling out of the darkness toward him.

The gaping maws were the worst of it, all of them filled with gnashing teeth that opened and closed rhythmically as the whole thing undulated across the floor, moving in part by heaving its own mass and in part by dragging itself forward with grasping limbs that sprouted from its body like thick hairs.

Chalin had been nowhere to be found, and Velik’s imagination treated him to an image of his friend being pulled apart and stuffed into different mouths. He’d turned and fled, running like he’d never been able to before. That had been his first taste of the power of stats that came with having a class.

The champion seed had been added to Velik’s inventory in his status. He pulled it up to read the description, hoping for some clue about what it actually was, and how it was related to his childhood friend.

[Champion Seed: Used to grow a champion elite monster to guard a specified location. Requires mana to flourish.]

[Champion: Balzarith the Living Inferno (level 35).]

[Current Owner: Velik]

[Current Reserve: 0/175]

There was nothing there about Chalin now that Velik had claimed the seed, and he wasn’t sure what would happen to the seed’s ownership status if he died. If it remained his until somebody else picked it up, that it might not mean anything beyond the fact that Chalin had lived and gotten a few miles away from the dungeon.

Though I’ve never heard of a champion seed and I don’t know where he got it. Did it come fully powered up, or did he find a way to do that, too?

When they’d stumbled across the class orb, they’d decided to activate it while they both held onto it, that way they’d both get classes. It didn’t work that way, of course, but the logic had made sense to their seven-year-old brains back then. Velik had always assumed he’d been the lucky one who’d actually gotten the class, and that Chalin, unable to defend himself from the monster, had died.

That didn’t explain where the monster had come from, but ‘somewhere deeper in the dungeon’ had felt like a reasonable explanation. By the time he’d been strong enough to return years later, monsters were everywhere, both inside the dungeon and out. There was no way to tell where they were originating from.

If he proceeded under the assumption that Chalin was alive, though, that meant his friend was somewhere out here in the deep wood. He might know how to stop the monsters from appearing. This seed thing says it takes mana to make the champion show up. Is that how all monsters appear? Did this whole area just get flooded with it coincidentally? And if so, how do I fix that?

All he could picture was a primed water pump spilling glowing magical water out everywhere, with monsters growing out of the puddle and wandering off. That probably wasn’t remotely close to accurate, but for all Velik knew, it might be. He needed a way to detect mana, and that meant spending some of his hoarded decarmas in the system store.

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Before that, however, he needed to do something about his burns and find a safe place to camp. The field was no longer on fire, but it was still a giant swath of charred dirt. Safety out in the deep wood was difficult to find, however, and Velik’s standard strategy was to go on a massacre and kill everything within a thousand feet of wherever he was setting up. It didn’t prevent new monsters from finding him, but it gave him a bit of warning when he did. The rest was just being a light sleeper.

He left the field a few minutes later with one less healing potion in his pouch and one champion seed. He’d already poked through the system store and had discovered a few different pieces of gear that would let him sense mana in different ways, everything from a blindfold that let him see it while making it impossible to see the world around him to a pair of gloves that let him feel it, supposedly a useful trait for an enchanter, to an earring that would hum at various intensities and pitches depending on local mana conditions.

Velik had no idea which one of those would be the most useful but they all sounded terrible to him. Unfortunately, the kind of mana-detecting gear that came without weird downsides was so far out of his price range that he’d need to spend months in the deep wood doing nothing but slaughtering monsters sixteen hours a day to save up for them.

His other idea was to find somebody with some sort of magic-using class. Presumably, they’d have the ability to sense mana without a special piece of equipment, and if he could bring them out here, they could poke around and report back on what they’d found.

Now I just need to find somebody like that. Easy, right? It’s not like I’m a hermit who’s been living in the woods for a decade with no friends.

His musings were interrupted by a pungent aroma hitting his nostrils from hundreds of feet away. Eyes widening in alarm, Velik started backtracking. He’d dealt with that animal before, and had no desire to see the monster version of it. Its musk could probably melt through leather and wood.

Shamelessly, Velik fled to a safe distance and watched a skunk the size of a horse cart trundle through the trees, completely and utterly secure in its own superiority. He noticed that no other monsters got near it either.

There were some things that everybody knew better than to mess with.

* * *

Velik found a clean stream to set up camp in an area that had an abundance of fruiting trees. He didn’t particularly enjoy the diet, but he’d survived on worse, and his goal right now was to kill as many monsters as possible, as quickly as possible. He’d worry about meat once he got back.

His decarma count quickly climbed up past five thousand, enough to replace the haste potion he’d used, but he held off on that. Part of him was itching to replace it just in case, but he needed some way to track mana levels or whatever they were called, and since his thriving social circle probably wasn’t going to yield any positive results, he decided to focus on the backup plan.

Every morning, he returned to the same den beneath the roots of a massive oak tree and pulled a tangle of branches across the entrance to hide him while he slept. Three times, he woke up to the sound of a monster sniffing around outside and had to go kill it, then drag the body away. In that way, his planned week-long trip extended first to two weeks, then to three.

Eventually, he grew so weary of the non-stop killing that he was ready to return home. Only sheer stubbornness kept him in place, grinding out decarmas as fast as he could and hoping to hit level 30 soon. With each kill, he felt himself growing closer. Over the last day of his expedition, he kept expecting each fight to be the one that pushed him over the edge, only to be disappointed when he didn’t get a notification.

He was on his way back one morning, half an hour after the sun had risen and [Duskbound] had deactivated, when some sort of sparrow swooped down on him. Rolling his eyes, he batted it out of the air with his spear, only for it to explode into a cloud of feathers and blood.

[You have slain a common wood sparrow (level 3).]

[You have advanced to level 30. +2 Physical, +1 Mental, +2 free points.]

[You have unlocked a new class skill slot.]

“Wait, what? Seriously? From that, of all things? Not the poison-spitting giant toads? Not the dragonfly that was longer than my arm? Not the Morgus cursed swarm of fucking rats that blew up when they died?”

The system, as usual, didn’t answer him.

With a sigh, Velik resumed trudging back to his campsite. He’d pick his new skill, get a few hours of sleep, and then start the long trip back home.