Aleria wiped her axe blade on wet grass and opened her Status again, the information unspooling inside her skull like a remembered nightmare—clean, sharp, immediate:
Player: Aleria Pendragon
Class: Barbarian
Level: 5
Experience: 22680 / 22680
Strength: 45
Dexterity: 20
Vitality: 30
Energy: 11
Attack Power: 10–27
Attack Rating: 102
Defense: 31
Stamina: 107
Life: 105
Mana: 16
Fire Resistance: 0
Cold Resistance: 0
Lightning Resistance: 5
Poison Resistance: 0
Compared to Level 1—blank, pathetic, soft—this was a leap.
She wasn't strong yet.
But she wasn't helpless anymore.
And the funniest part—if anything in this mud-soaked slaughterhouse could be called funny—was that her body had changed along with the numbers. Not in a heroic, armored-knight way. In a way that felt almost mocking. Petite still, short still, but tighter everywhere—strength packed into curves, a sharp four-pack under gore and rain, legs with that compact runner's power, hips and waist carved into a shape that looked built instead of born.
A weapon wrapped in a body the world would underestimate.
Aleria learned quickly the improvements didn't come only from leveling.
Equipment mattered.
During the last few hours of butchery, monsters had dropped scraps—cheap, ugly things that still meant the difference between living and bleeding out in wet grass. She wore what she could, layered like a scavenger, the way you'd dress for a storm if the storm had teeth.
The most notable piece was the battered cap she'd ripped off a corpse and jammed onto her head:
[Red Citrus Energy Hat]
The name was so stupid it almost made her laugh.
Like the universe had time for comedy while it was actively trying to turn her into meat.
But the effect wasn't a joke.
+1 Energy
+5% Lightning Resistance
That explained the small bump in mana. The tiny nudge in resistance—an umbrella in a hurricane, but still… something.
She "looked" inward again and opened her backpack.
In this world it wasn't a menu.
It was a space.
A small cut in reality lined with a grid like an invisible crate—forty slots, hard limits, no mercy. One potion per slot. Larger items devouring space like guilt.
And right now?
It was completely full.
Not of heroic treasure.
Of nonsense.
Chicken legs. Cabbage. Sunflower seeds. Wheat seeds. Broken tools—hammers, saws—junk that felt like the world was looting her back. Potions, yes, and scraps of equipment—leather armor, battered gloves, things that looked like they'd been chewed and spit out by war.
And the sick truth she'd learned out here?
A Quill Rat spike went through leather the same way it went through skin.
So what was the point?
Aleria stood in the rain, dripping blood, inventory stuffed with garbage, and made a decision.
She reached inward and triggered a Town Portal Scroll.
A low hum answered her—resonant, wrong—and space folded beside her. A swirling blue oval bloomed into existence, taller than she was, its surface rippling like disturbed water.
She hesitated only a moment.
Because stepping through a portal still felt unreal, quite insane.
Then she stepped through anyway, because this whole world was insane and she didn't have the luxury of being picky.
The moor twisted.
For a moment she felt stretched thin—pulled down a narrow tunnel of compressed air and light—then snapped back into place like a rubber band.
When her eyes cleared, she was standing inside the Survivor's Encampment.
Safe—for now—under the stares of half-starved people peeking from ragged tents. Eyes following the blood on her skin, the weapon in her hand, the way she moved like someone who'd learned a new language made of violence.
Aleria ignored them and walked straight toward Akara's tent.
As if sensing her approach, Akara stepped out to meet her.
And Aleria felt something close to relief—small, bitter relief—because Akara wasn't just a quest-giver.
She was a merchant.
Which meant gold.
Which meant she could dump this trash, stuff her face with the edible parts, and maybe—maybe—walk into the Den of Evil with something better than a shitty axe, a flimsy shield, and hope held together by spite.
Aleria exhaled slowly, rainwater dripping from her hair, and stepped forward.
"Alright," she muttered under her breath. "Let's turn corpses into shopping money."
She went straight to Akara.
Everything she didn't need—which was, realistically, almost everything—was sold. One by one, the items vanished from her inventory, and the gold count climbed. Akara never physically took a thing; instead, each item Aleria sold reappeared in small flashes of light inside the crates and barrels stacked behind the woman's tent. Akara turned, noticed the sudden abundance, and smiled—not politely, but with real, unguarded relief.
That was when the camp noticed.
Women and children emerged from the tents, bowls clutched in thin hands, forming a quiet line like a makeshift soup kitchen. Akara began handing food out immediately—no ceremony, no questions. The people thanked her. Some thanked Aleria too, awkwardly, shyly, as if unsure how much gratitude was appropriate for someone who looked like she'd just walked out of a massacre.
Aleria watched it happen, rain streaking down her face, and felt something inside her settle.
She'd been back to the camp a few times already. Enough to know this wasn't just junk she was selling. Even the miserable scraps of leather armor were useful here—handed to a woman who immediately began studying how to cut and stitch it into something wearable.
Her gold total ticked higher.
Eight hundred.
Then more.
With everything counted, scavenged, and sold, she passed fourteen hundred coins.
That felt… significant.
She spent it without hesitation.
Each purchase manifested in a brief flash of light—items snapping into place on her body like the world itself was helping her get dressed.
Her armor—if it deserved the name—was a savage joke.
It clung to her in ragged straps and scraps, less protection than provocation. A leather thong bit into her hips, cords winding upward across her torso in a mockery of coverage. Her chest was mostly bare, framed by bone and torn leather like bait, though she bound herself tightly with white bandages to keep everything from bouncing uselessly—something she had learned very quickly was a problem in combat. A spiked shoulder guard clung to her right arm, rusted bolts and dried blood giving it the look of a trophy more than a defense. Her left arm was bare except for a blood-smeared gauntlet lined with inward-facing spikes meant to catch crude blades.
Her legs were wrapped in a strange mix of torn cloth and plated leather. Both thighs were bare—smooth, unmarked, almost defiant. Shinguards were lashed on with frayed ties and studded with spikes that looked as likely to injure the wearer as the enemy. Her boots didn't match—assembled from the remains of other warriors, scavenged and forced to cooperate.
Most striking of all was the mask.
A horned thing of twisted metal and bone covered her mouth and nose, painted with war symbols and tribal filth. Only her eyes were visible through the narrow slits—bright, sharp, unmistakably alive.
She also bought a new weapon.
A two-handed great axe.
Heavy. Brutal. Perfectly balanced. The moment she lifted it, her old axe felt like a kitchen tool by comparison.
Now she had more than scraps of defense against claws and crude blades.
More importantly, she had mobility.
Speed.
Killing power.
This was not armor built to endure.
This was a butcher's uniform—designed for intimidation, spectacle, and audacity. A challenge to fate itself:
Strike me if you dare. I'll be the last thing you ever touch.
And to her own surprise, she loved it.
The camp seemed to approve as well. Men and boys stared openly, not bothering to hide it. No one said anything, but the looks followed her as she moved.
The difference was immediate.
The great axe settled into her hands like it had always belonged there. The leather hugged her body without restricting movement. Everything felt faster. Cleaner. Deadlier.
She stocked up on supplies next: minor healing potions, four more Town Portal Scrolls, three Identify Scrolls.
When she finished, her inventory was organized, her gear upgraded, and the tight edge of panic in her chest eased—just a fraction.
It felt like trading a rusted knife for a weapon meant for war.
Only then did Aleria return to the portal she had left open in the center of the camp.
The blue light hummed softly, patient, waiting like a mouth.
She stepped through.
The Blood Moor welcomed her back with cold wind and the stink of death.
She checked the mini-map in her mind, confirmed the direction, and tightened her grip on the great axe.
Then she started walking.
Aleria battled her way through the Blood Moor until it stood quiet.
Her boots squelched through wet moss as she stalked across the open moor, wind curling against bare thighs and the exposed ridges of her midriff. The great axe—an ugly, rust-crusted slab of iron notched by skulls—hung heavy in her grip, its weight familiar now, almost comforting. Her breath came slow and measured beneath the horned mask, already warm with sweat and the stench of old blood.
Then she saw it.
Half-swallowed by earth and shadow, a cave mouth yawned in the ground—the Den of Evil. Symbols cut into stone around the entrance looked less like warnings and more like trophies. The ground was marked with tracks and scuffs, a constant in-and-out churn that said things live here and they don't leave politely.
Twisted roots curled over the lip like skeletal fingers trying to claw their way back into daylight. Jagged stones framed the opening like teeth, slick with mildew and stained with old red-brown smears that didn't belong to any animal Aleria wanted to imagine.
A foul breeze rose from below—dank, hot, fetid—carrying rot, copper, and something older. Something that didn't feel like an odor so much as a memory embedded in the air.
No birds sang here.
No beasts moved.
Only wind—and beneath it, faint, choked breathing from somewhere in the dark.
Aleria stepped closer. Loose pebbles skittered from under her boot and clicked down into the black. The Den waited, unmoving, uncaring. Inside, things watched. Things listened. Things didn't have to hurry.
Aleria paused at the edge and grinned beneath her mask.
Her armor was still a joke—thin leather straps over pale skin, more spectacle than defense—but that was the point. Let the monsters see her and think easy. Let them stare at the half-naked girl with the wicked axe and decide she was prey.
She'd feed them steel.
With a low exhale, she descended.
The air tightened as she moved into the throat of the earth. The rain-sound faded, swallowed by stone. The passage narrowed, lit only by sickly green mold clinging to the walls like infected bruises. Each step echoed off rock, a steady drumbeat that felt less like walking and more like announcing herself to whatever lived deeper in.
The ceiling dipped low enough to brush her blonde hair. Her axe scraped stone once—loud, metallic, a promise.
Then came the first snarl.
It rolled out of the dark ahead—bestial, low, hungry—echoing off the tunnel walls until it sounded like the cave itself was growling.
Aleria's knuckles tightened around the haft.
Her smile widened.
To her relief, the rain was gone. Replaced by dripping water and distant skittering. The air tasted like old blood and wet fur.
Then the trouble found her.
The early resistance was familiar—Quill Rats and shambling corpses, red-skinned Fallen warriors shrieking in packs, their knives flashing as they rushed. And behind them—always behind them—Shamans hiding in the rear, hurling fireballs from angles that made her want to scream.
The cave made everything worse.
Tight spaces turned every fight into a scramble. Every corner could hide teeth. Every bend could become a trap. But it also meant the packs couldn't fully swarm her all at once—only a few could reach her at a time, choking themselves into the mouth of her axe.
Aleria worked in ugly rhythm.
Step. Swing. Hack.
Quills clattered off stone. Rotten hands clawed and missed. Fallen shrieked and died. Fireballs hissed past her shoulder close enough to heat the air under her mask. She caught blades on her shield, ate the impacts through her arms, then answered with steel.
And when her inventory filled, she did what she'd learned to do—back to camp, dump the junk, buy space, return. Like a butcher taking breaks between carcasses.
Deeper.
Deeper still.
And then the cave started offering bigger answers.
Massive hunched shapes lurked where the tunnel widened—thick-skinned, muscular, built wrong in the way nightmares were built wrong. Like gorillas made out of hate and bad anatomy. Brute Beasts—dark fur, knotted muscle, eyes empty of anything but charge-and-kill.
Their fists could shatter bone.
Aleria didn't let them touch her.
She danced away from swings that would've ended her in one hit, using the cave walls as cover, forcing them to commit, forcing them to turn, forcing them to waste their brute strength on stone. She was a barbarian by class, but out here class meant nothing—only survival did. So she cut corners, used angles, slipped behind them when she could and buried her axe into soft places that weren't meant to be cut.
Again and again the axe fell.
Again and again monsters died.
Blood splashed the cave walls and ran down in dark rivulets. Howls echoed and overlapped until screams dissolved into wet, choking silence.
And Aleria kept moving forward—small, filthy, relentless—like the cave had made a mistake letting her in.
---
Deeper in, the cave changed.
Not because the fighting worsened—
but because the truth did.
The tunnel opened into something that wasn't a lair or a nest, but a structure. Rows of crude cells carved directly into the stone. Iron bars bent out of shape. Doors ripped open and left hanging. Chains bolted into walls. Hooks. Racks. Devices whose purpose was unmistakable even without understanding how they worked.
A dungeon.
A torture chamber.
Bodies filled it.
Some were nothing but bones, stripped clean and arranged where they'd been left. Others were still… recent. Slumped against stone with heads lolled forward, jaws frozen open as if caught mid-scream. A few hung at angles that made Aleria's shoulders ache just looking at them—nailed up on spikes driven through ribs and backs, weight dragging them into grotesque lines.
The floor was slick.
Not just with blood.
With what had once been people.
Intestines spilled from torn bellies, glistening in the dim green light like butchered rope. Eyes had been gouged out. Faces smashed beyond recognition. Fingers bent wrong, broken where someone had tried—too late—to fight back.
And then Aleria's stomach tightened.
Because she recognized the clothing.
These weren't just villagers.
These were adventurers.
Amazon mail split open across the chest. Barbarian leathers torn apart like cloth. Assassin wraps shredded and soaked through. Sorceress robes scorched and then ripped. A Paladin's breastplate cracked, its holy symbol smeared with filth. A Druid's charms scattered across the floor, his staff snapped like a joke.
Even a necromancer—impaled, robes hanging loose, skull charms shattered at his feet.
Every class was here.
Every path.
As if one by one they'd entered this place—confident, prepared, believing themselves chosen—only to be hunted, broken, and left behind. Some looked ill-equipped, too weak to have come willingly. Dragged down from above, perhaps. Turned into entertainment. Into meat.
But what froze her wasn't just the deaths.
It was the deliberateness.
Armor torn away not for convenience, but for cruelty. Bodies bound in ways that had nothing to do with battle. Marks left where no weapon would ever be needed. None of them had died quickly.
The cave buzzed with flies.
The sound was constant.
Mocking.
Aleria's grip on the axe tightened until the leather creaked.
This wasn't in the game.
Not like this.
The last comfort she'd been clinging to—that somewhere underneath it all, this was still rules and code and distance—died right there. In the stink of human ruin. In the dripping stone. In the silence of people who would never speak again.
Something hot snapped up her spine.
Not fear.
Not shock.
Rage.
Bright. Violent. Absolute.
The monsters weren't enemies anymore.
They were filth.
And filth didn't deserve mercy.
Aleria moved.
She became a butcher.
She swung until her arms burned. She hacked until her breath tore at her lungs. Steel met flesh and bone again and again, her axe answering every scream, every snarl, every sound that echoed through the Den.
The cave rang with dying voices.
And Aleria answered all of them with her blade.
Not because she was brave.
Not because she was heroic.
But because something inside her had decided—
Nothing that did this deserved to keep breathing.
Time stopped being a thing Aleria could measure.
There was only the next sound.
The next shadow.
The next knife-hand reaching.
Her axe rose and fell like a machine.
At some point she didn't even notice she'd started moving differently—more direct, more ruthless, less human. Less thought between impulse and action. Like the cave had reached into her and rewritten the way she made decisions.
Finally—after an indeterminate stretch of time that felt both eternal and nonexistent—the last monster fell.
It wailed weakly, twitched once, and collapsed into a spreading pool of dark blood.
And then she came to Corpsefire.
The undead mage stood amid rot and bone like a bad idea given shape, flanked by shambling companions that lurched forward in dutiful stupidity. Aleria didn't pause. She didn't consider strategy. She just went—charged, dodged, attacked—ripping through the guards first, chopping them down before they could turn into a wall between her and the thing she wanted dead.
Corpsefire tried to retreat. Tried to spit something foul from the back of its throat.
Aleria didn't let it.
The axe came down.
Again.
Again.
And then there was nothing left to fight.
The cave went strangely still.
And in that stillness, the sound arrived—not from the air, not from the stone—
inside her skull.
"Congratulations, Player Aleria Pendragon."
"You have successfully passed the First Trial of the Nightmare World."
"Quest Complete: Den of Evil."
"Return to the Survivor's Encampment and seek Sister Akara to claim your reward."
Aleria stood there breathing like she'd been running for her life.
Sweat ran into her eyes. Her arms trembled—not with fear, but with delayed exhaustion finally landing now that the killing had stopped.
She turned slowly in place.
Only then did she see the truth.
At some point—she didn't know when—everything had died.
The floor was littered with bodies. Fallen twisted in unnatural poses. Zombies split open. Quill Rats gutted. The larger beasts carved into chunks that barely looked like they had ever been creatures at all.
And deeper within, near a mound of bones and rot, lay Corpsefire.
Not "defeated."
Destroyed.
Hacked into parts so thoroughly it was barely recognizable as a single thing. Blackened blood soaked the ground beneath it.
Coins and items glittered around the wreckage in the cave's dim, sick light.
Aleria swallowed.
"…Was I in a frenzy just now?"
She searched her memory.
There were gaps.
Rage. Movement. Screaming. Impact.
She remembered charging.
She remembered howling until her throat hurt.
She remembered the axe rising and falling.
But the details?
Gone.
Aleria exhaled slowly. After a long minute, she forced herself to move.
She started cleaning the battlefield. She'd learned that if she focused, she could pull loot toward herself—autoloot, like the world was sick enough to make convenience out of slaughter. Gold, at least, didn't take up space.
As she worked, notifications flickered across her mind.
Two items glowed faintly blue.
Rare drops.
Aleria's heart jumped.
"These have to be from Corpsefire…"
She actually bounced on her toes—pure, stupid, gamer joy—and it lasted exactly two seconds.
The items were a staff and a fist weapon.
Neither usable by a Barbarian.
Aleria stared at them.
"…You've got to be kidding me."
The cave air felt thick around her, warm and foul. She had finally gotten good drops and they were useless.
The disappointment hit in a way only gamers truly understood—like the universe had waited until the exact moment she got hopeful just to slap her personally.
Aleria let out a long, defeated breath.
"…Dude," she muttered. "What kind of cursed luck is this?"
She kept them anyway. Gold was gold, and Akara would buy anything.
When she was sure nothing else valuable remained, Aleria activated a Town Portal Scroll.
Blue light blossomed beside her, humming softly.
She planned to return to camp—turn in the quest—claim the reward—and finally ask Akara the question that had been gnawing at her since the beginning:
Why am I here?
She stepped toward the portal.
And then the voice returned.
But this time it wasn't smug.
It wasn't pleased.
It was administrative.
"Attention, Player Aleria Pendragon. The core of light within you is running out of power. You have reached the daily game time limit."
Aleria went rigid.
"What…?" she rasped. "Now?"
Her vision blurred. The edges of the cave warped like heat haze. The portal stretched, its surface rippling too hard, like it was being pulled away from her.
"Forced logout sequence initiated."
"Exiting nightmare world in…"
Panic shot through her—sharp, instant, humiliating.
"Wait—hold on—NO—"
"3…"
The cave bent inward.
"2…"
Aleria lunged for the portal, but her limbs felt heavy, delayed—like her signal was lagging, her body a second behind her mind.
"1."
"Game shutting down."
The world collapsed inward like a fist closing.
Sound cut.
Light cut.
Even smell vanished.
Aleria's last thought wasn't heroic.
It was raw, modern, terrified:
If I log out… where the hell do I wake up?
And then there was only darkness.