Kaius sat in shock, the jagged stone that dug uncomfortably into his back entirely forgotten. What did it mean that he was an Observed? That shouldn’t have been possible. It was a children's tale!

The evidence hung there, the notification staying stable in his vision as he tried to burn a hole through it with his gaze. He knew that he had a lot to learn about the Great Depths, after all, every time he tried to cajole his father for more information he’d just been fobbed off with more training.

Yes, that was probably his fault. After he’d been caught reaching out to one of the glimmering runic circles that acted as portals to the Depths he hadn’t been able to sit right for a week. In his defence, what sort of teen wouldn’t be fascinated with the world dungeon after umpteen stories about how that was where the strongest were forged?

He had thought that he would learn things that were mostly common knowledge! Like the existence of Champions. Not massive discoveries, like the fact that an ancient set of legends were secretly accurate, and society at large had simply forgotten how to trigger the attention of the system.

The secret was dangerous. Many, many of his fireside talks with his father had been about how people would kill for an advantage. It was the whole bloody reason they lived in the Arboreal Sea, hells!

A good hour of their conversation after his first brush with a Depths portal had been dedicated to exactly how pointless it would have been to dive in by himself. Father had hauled him back to camp, neck bulging in his rage. Throwing him down onto his bed roll, he had bellowed about how much of an idiot he had been. How a chaperoned unclassed in the Depths was all but completely neutered in their growth, and how its treasures would crumble to dust if passed into his hands.

Mostly though, his father had ranted about how if he had had to dive in after them they would have ended up weeks or months behind schedule. Kaius had stopped listening then, even if he had agreed in private that it would have been a disastrous result.

If people, especially those of means and power, learnt that not only could an unattended unclassed earn a natural treasure, but that by doing so they would be observed by the system?

It would be a slaughter.

Kaius could see it in his mind. Droves inexperienced scions, shunted towards almost certain death just for a simple chance at success.

He had to keep this secret. Had to learn more. Learn what it meant. Push himself harder. If the system recognised him for earning a simple, albeit rare, reward… What would it do if he slew a Guardian without a class?

He tore his eyes away from the notification, looking back to the aethereal tree that grew out of the pond. He had to spend his points. Get a move on and finish his trip around the glade. Rumination could wait until he was back behind closed doors.

He was tempted to divvy them up optimally. He knew what he wanted from a class, and from there the kind of stats it would favour. Bumping up those values could help to influence the options he was offered. He had no way to know for sure though.

He also knew he couldn’t afford to make that decision. There was really only one he had available. He’d come too close to death, too many times. He had to increase his Endurance.

Chewing on his lip, Kaius hesitated for a moment before confirming his choice. He slammed the points through as quickly as he could.

His body rippled, each muscle contracting at once. Lightning shot down his spine, branching to spread to every crevice and edge of his body. His head cranked back, smacking into the rock wall behind him with a loud crack. The pain of the impact was lost, overwhelmed in the swelling sensation of power surging through him.

The well of power in his soul that held his Health rocketed out, the boundaries of the misty pool expanding by half again. Every cell of his body seemed to condense, the constituent parts that made up his being bolstered by the flow of foreign power. Making him just that little bit harder to injure.

Slowly the wave receded, leaving him limp and panting on the floor.

That had been …. Hellish. Overwhelming. Not exactly painful, but different.

“Note to self… Don’t increase a stat by fifty percent all at once” He panted, pushing himself up off the floor with a still quaking limb. He slumped back against the wall, wincing as his bruised head bounced off its surface.

He pulled up his Status to check on his gains.

Status:

Name: Kaius

Dynasty: Unterstern

Age: 18

Class Selection: 1 Year, 47 weeks, 2 days

Race: Human (Dynastic) - +1 free stats per level

Layer Reached: 2

Resources:

Health - 300/300 (2/min)

Stamina - 200/200 (2/min)

Mana - 120/120 (2/min)

Stats:

Endurance - 30

Vitality - 20

Strength - 20

Dexterity - 20

Intelligence - 12

Willpower: - 20

Stat Points: 0

Class Skills (0/10):

N/a

General Skills (9/10):

Rapid Adaptation (Heroic) - 14

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Warforged (Unique) - 19

Explorers Toolkit (Unusual) - 4

Block (Common) - 2

Parry (Common) - 5

Footwork (Uncommon) - 5

Toughened Physique (Rare) - 5

Light Armor Mastery (Uncommon) - 4

Medium Armor Mastery (Uncommon) - 4

Kaius looked over his sheet, smiling at the gains he had made in such a short time. The increase to his Health was going to be massive, and once he managed to cap out Toughened Physique it would help to decrease the amount of the precious resource that he had to spend.

Every scrap of Health counted. He knew, deep in his bones, that he wasn't going to be able to avoid taking risks now. Both champions he had faced had provided invaluable resources. The potions he had secured from the butcher had saved his life twice over now, and the natural treasure had just given him an edge he might be able to leverage into future gains.

It was always about balancing risk. That much had been a focus of a lot of his training. Being punished for messing around with strange mushrooms and portals hadn't been because it put him in danger, but because it did so for no benefit.

He remembered the moment when he first learnt Pain Resistance, the first skill he had ever learnt. Father had told him that it was a choice. That no matter how much he wanted him to take up the mantle of the dynasty, he couldn't force him. That the first few skills were a risk, one that many of his ancestors hadn’t survived.

It hadn’t even taken him a second to agree, burying his hand into a biting nest of ants up to his wrist. He had kept it there, trembling as a thousand thousand stinging bugs crawled over him, not retreating until he went numb from the shock.

It had been worth it. He had never regretted that decision. Not even when the tortures grew more extreme over the coming years.

The Champions were the same.

He could afford to wait until he had his next skill, but after that? He would hunt them. Their rewards might give him the edge he needed to get out of the Depths alive.

…

Kaius left the cavern with the radiant oak, making sure to collect the potion bottle he had discarded mid battle with the bear, and retrieved his pack. Setting off around the rim of the glade, Kaius made what he thought was good time.

Without access to the sun and stars he had no reliable way to tell the time, but by his reckoning he had been walking for what felt like just under half a day. That is, if he considered his forced nap after consuming a gladeplum ‘night’.

The cavern which held the impressive underground woodland was roughly circular as far as he could tell, though it was hard to make any halfway accurate measurements with the just-brighter-than-twilight glow doing little to penetrate the fog of distance.

He doubted that the glade was much bigger than a day's walk, though if he was wrong he did have enough supplies to last a night. Climbing a tree to bed in safety from ground-bound predators was never fun, but he had done it often enough.

Walking through the thin strip of borderland between the cavern wall and the treeline, he passed several more tunnels that wound their way into the rock. So far only one more had shown any differences like the passage with the watch house had been.

The undead defenders had been a breeze to push through. These ones had been dressed as miners, clad in rough canvas and armed with picks. The clumsy weapons and lack of armour had left them too open, too easy to kill. After his monstrous growth in his fight against the bear he found himself a little disappointed that he hadn’t gained a single skill from the confrontation. Nor had he from the smattering of beasts that had charged him from the trees- most of them only slightly more dangerous than their counterparts in the forest above, at least to him.

As the hours ate away, his legs began to ache, Health and Stamina not enough to soothe the mundane discomforts of long travel. Finally, his eyes widened as he saw a familiar sight far off in front of him. A yawning opening in the cavern wall, a squat building made from stacked stone poking out of its entrance.

The Butchers lodge.

He picked up his pace, glad to be back in familiar territory. He should be back safe and sound in a few hours now. Luckily he had been right on the money. By the time he arrived, it should be just about time for him to get some rest. He was exhausted.

The lodge opened up to his right, the shadow-cloaked stone buildings, rotting furs and general disrepair of the place cooled his enthusiasm. He stared at the corpse of the Butcher, still laying where he had put it down in the centre of the space between the buildings. Its grey, boil-ridden flesh had decayed further, undead body quickly collapsing in the preceding days without its animating magics. An unidentifiable soup of liquid seemed to melt between its starkly white ribs, the sweet scent of rot rolling over him to raise the hair on his arms.

His face blanched, saliva pooling in his mouth. Snapping his gaze back to his path, Kaius hurried onwards. Happy to leave the grizzly scene behind him as soon as possible. To his relief, the withered undead hunters seemed to have desiccated without the presence of puppeteering necromancy. The trail of their corpses looked years old, yet still oddly preserved. More a mummification, than active decomposition.

He left the trail of bodies behind, putting distance between himself and the carnage he had previously wrought.

…

Kaius restrained himself from slipping into a jog, smiling as he saw a slight rise appearing in the distance, the consistent flat land of the cavern slowly drifting up at a gentle curve.

There was only one place he had seen that in his entire trip around the glade, the end of the scree slope where he had entered the cavern. He was close. While the dim and softly pulsing light of the moss was more than enough for him to see, it was gloomy lighting. It blurred vision at a distance, far off objects fading into shadow and mist.

If he could see the slope, it wouldn't take him much longer at all to reach it.

He’d started his eventful walk right at the entrance of the cave he had entered from, and purely for the sake of completionism, he planned to finish it at exactly the same spot. Part of that was that there was a small chance of another tunnel somewhere on this side of the slope; he had seen a few of them surprisingly close together. Mostly though, it simply didn't sit right with him to leave things unfinished.

Father might have been a harsh taskmaster, but never once had he complained about Kaius’s work ethic. Hells, he remembered how surprised his father had been when he had been training for Warforged. Day after day, he had woken early - even earlier than his father. Going through his routine of stretches to limber himself up for a day of sparring. It had been a point of pride when Father had broken first, asking him if he wanted to take a day off to go swimming in a lake they had found.

In hindsight, Father had probably been worried that he had taken some sort of mental damage from the process of acquiring Rapid Adaptation. The reality was much simpler. He had committed to gaining the skills of his dynasty before his class, and after his first skill? A little weapons training had practically felt like a holiday.

Kaius hit the slope at pace, lengthy strides eating away at the gradually increasing slope. Eventually he hit the scree, forced to clamber up on all fours in order to keep traction. So far, no extra cave exit, just more dusty rubble and jagged rock walls. As he grew closer, the far off ceiling of the cavern came into greater relief.

A thousand roots pierced through the solid rock of the roof, playing off the light of the pulsing moss to create shifting shadows. Tendrils grasping, undulating in the lightning-like the limbs of some massive beast. From the bottom of the slope it looked far different, a simple mat of light..

The tree roots confused him, like they did every time he saw them jutting out of a cave wall. He didn't claim great knowledge of the Depths, it could be very literally underground. He hadn't exactly ever gotten a shovel and dug to find it. Yet even if it was, trees didn't lay down roots to bedrock, and they certainly didn't burrow through it.

Though, from what he had heard of other biomes, rocky caverns and glowing plants was by no means a universal feature. Maybe it was all just dressing? Like the church and the lodge. An idle curiosity, but one that kept grabbing at him.

He would have to ask around when he got out, someone had to know.

All of a sudden, slightly up the slope and off to his left, Kaius heard a roar of crashing water. Quickly followed by a squeak of panic.

Kaius’s eyes snapped to the source of the sound.

It had come from the cave that led to the entrance room.