# Chapter One: 4%
The first thing he understood about being a ghost was that it came with documentation.
Not physical documentation — he had no hands to hold paper, no eyes in the conventional sense, no body at all beyond a faint luminescence that "Magic Perception" informed him was approximately the visual signature of a dying candle. But somewhere in the architecture of his new existence, a system was running. Quiet. Patient. Waiting for him to stop being confused and start reading.
"DREADNAUGHT" was the one that had spoken first, back in the water. He understood now what it had been doing — holding the shape of him together while the reincarnation process finished its work. Like keeping your hand pressed over a puzzle until the glue dried.
He was grateful for it in a distant, clinical way that was itself probably a function of the skill.
*Current status,* he thought, because listing things had always been how he handled situations that were otherwise intolerable.
Ghost. Base rank. Jura Forest, designation unknown, coordinates none, local geography entirely uncharted. Magicule capacity: 4%. No host body. No shelter. No allies. No information about this world beyond the general shape of "it has monsters and it is not Tokyo."
Something surfaced in his memory — an announcement that had arrived during the chaos of the reincarnation, buried under everything else and only now rising to the top of the filing stack.
＜＜Confirmed. Race: Ghost (Base Rank) established.
Intrinsic Skills registered: [Spiritual Lifeform], [Magic Perception], [Thought Communication], [Possession], [Magicule Absorption], [Spectral Flight].
Resistances registered: Pain Nullification, Abnormal Condition Nullification, Mental Attack Resistance.
Warning: Magicule Instability active. Locate host vessel within 72 hours.＞＞
*Right,* he thought. *That one was in there the whole time.*
He looked at his hands — the suggestion of hands, translucent, the particular blue-grey of a monitor in a dark room — and pushed one experimentally into the trunk of the tree beside him.
No resistance. No sensation of passage. He withdrew it and noted this in what was becoming a very long mental file.
*Intangible. Physical attacks cannot affect me. I also cannot affect physical objects.*
He paused on that second part.
*I am,* he realized, *entirely useless in a fight.*
This was deeply frustrating information for someone who had just acquired skills with names like 'The Sovereign of Souls.' He had the software and no hardware to run it on. He had, in the most technical sense, the ability to consume souls and store them in a sub-dimensional archive — but "Absolute Dominion" required a target whose soul was already *faint*. Weakened. On the verge of departure. A healthy, fully-souled creature would simply shrug him off like a bad dream.
He needed a body. "The Eternal Library", one of his sub-skills, could theoretically convert stored magicules into biological sustenance to keep a possessed host alive indefinitely — but he needed a host first. Specifically one weak enough to enter, with a soul unmoored enough that "Vessel Stabilization" could do its work.
He had 71 hours before he dissolved.
*Right,* he thought. *No pressure.*
---
The forest was enormous.
He drifted rather than walked — Spectral Flight meant gravity was a suggestion he could choose to ignore, which was the single unambiguously pleasant aspect of his current condition. He moved between the trees at roughly human height, calibrating his visibility instinctively. 4% magicule capacity meant he barely registered on the ambient magical field. To most creatures' perception, he was close to nothing — a distortion, a cold spot, the feeling of being watched that never resolves into a source.
*Keep it that way,* he reminded himself. *You are a ghost in a forest that has things much more dangerous than you in it. Invisible is the only advantage you have.*
"Magic Perception" painted the forest for him in wavelengths — the slow, deep pulse of old roots, the faster flicker of small animals in the undergrowth, the steady medium-frequency hum of something large moving to his northeast. He tracked the large thing automatically, the way you track a sound you haven't consciously decided to pay attention to.
Wolf. Big. Moving steadily, not hunting — just moving through its territory.
He kept his distance and kept drifting.
For approximately twenty minutes, nothing happened except forest. He was beginning to develop a tentative working relationship with the silence when "Magic Perception" registered something new — multiple large signatures, moving fast, from the southwest. Horses. And underneath the horses, the particular resonance of human souls: bright, warm, tightly wound with the specific tension of people who were alert and armed and expecting trouble.
He stopped drifting.
*Humans. Multiple. Mounted. Moving toward the wolf.*
He found a dense cluster of undergrowth — not that he needed concealment, at 4% he was barely visible even to magical senses, but twenty-nine years of analytical habit didn't stop just because you were dead — and he settled into it and watched.
They came through the treeline in tight formation: eight riders, then a gap, then a cluster of twelve more, with a single rider in the center of the second group surrounded by the kind of careful spacing that meant *protect this one.* The torchlight — no, daylight, it was afternoon, he was still calibrating — caught armor and blades, proper equipment, disciplined movement. Guards. Professional ones.
The central figure was young. Nineteen, maybe twenty, blond hair and a straight back and the particular quality of someone performing confidence for an audience. He sat his horse well. His hand was near his sword hilt in the way of someone who'd been taught to keep it there rather than someone whose instinct put it there.
*Rich kid. Military training but not military experience. Someone important enough to warrant twenty guards for a forest ride.*
The wolf's signature, to his northeast, had changed. It had stopped moving. It was now very still, in the particular way of an animal that had registered the approach of something and was making a decision about it.
*It's going to run,* Shinji predicted.
The wolf ran.
The guards' formation shifted immediately — smooth, practiced, the central figure moved backward in the group while the front riders spread to intercept. They were chasing it. Or the wolf was drawing them. Shinji wasn't sure yet which was true, and the difference mattered.
He followed.
---
Eavesdropping, it turned out, was one thing ghosts were exceptionally good at. He drifted in the wake of the column, close enough to catch words, invisible enough that not even the horses spooked at his proximity. He filed names, relationships, fragments of conversation:
*— told Father we didn't need this many —*
*— with respect, Young Master, the border has been unstable since —*
*— I'm not a child, Vane —*
Captain Vane. Grey beard, broad build, the solid undemonstrative authority of someone who had been doing this for a long time. The young man in the center of the formation. The way Vane's eyes moved: not watching the forest, watching his charge.
*Protective,* Shinji noted. *Genuinely, not performatively. He actually cares about the boy.*
*— Young Master Julius —*
There it was. A name.
Julius. He filed it alongside everything else and kept watching.
The wolf signature ahead had changed again. It was no longer running. It had stopped moving entirely, which meant one of two things: it had found a hiding spot, or it had found a reason to stop running.
"Magic Perception" registered the new signatures a fraction of a second before the sound hit.
Multiple. Fast. Coming from three directions simultaneously.
*Not one wolf,* Shinji realized. *A pack. And they weren't running from the guards — they were being used to lead the guards here.*
He had time to process this, and then he had no more time, because the Greater Direwolf came out of the treeline at a speed that didn't belong to anything that size, and the world became very loud and very red very quickly.
---
He retreated into the canopy.
Not from fear — fear was an interesting philosophical position that he was setting aside for the immediate future — but from cold tactical assessment. He was at 4% magicules. The Greater Direwolf was a massive, vital, fully-alive creature with an intact soul and no reason whatsoever to be weakened. "Absolute Dominion" would accomplish nothing against it. His only asset was invisibility, and invisibility required not being in the middle of the thing that was currently happening below him.
He watched from the branches.
He had the detached, observational stillness of someone watching a train derail from a window, helpless not because they lack care but because they lack the means. The guards were good. Against a wolf pack, they might have been adequate. Against the pack *and* the alpha, against the Greater Direwolf that moved through their formation like a thought through water — they were not adequate.
The ones at the perimeter went first.
He watched Captain Vane get Julius off his horse and put himself between the boy and the alpha with the unhesitating, furious competence of a man spending everything he had on a single transaction. The direwolf hit him like weather.
He watched Julius scramble backward and activate something — a flash of aura, golden and sharp, his hand on the Silvershard rapier — and it was genuinely good technique, clean and fast, the kind of form that came from years of dedicated practice. It didn't matter. The alpha's claw caught him across the chest and sent him into the tree line, and the boy hit the moss-covered oak and did not get up.
Shinji watched the alpha assess. The prey was down. The pack was feeding. The forest was full of the specific sounds he was cataloguing in the part of his mind that was not, apparently, capable of shock — only of documentation.
The alpha departed.
The pack finished and followed.
Silence settled back over the clearing the way snow settles: gradually, completely, covering everything it touched.
---
He drifted down from the canopy.
Twenty bodies. He'd counted them while it was happening, which he recognized was an unusual thing to have done and declined to examine too closely. Captain Vane near the center. The young guards at the perimeter. The horses gone, fled or taken.
And against the ancient oak at the clearing's edge — Julius von Muller, nineteen years old, the Silvershard rapier still in his fist, chest torn open and breathing in the specific shallow, erratic way of a body that was negotiating between continuing and stopping.
"Omniscient Analysis" activated before he consciously decided to use it.
*Soul wavelength: severely disrupted. Natural Soul Protect: collapsed from shock and blood loss. Consciousness: fading. Estimated time to full soul departure: variable, but reduced significantly by the cardiac damage. He is technically reachable.*
Shinji looked at Julius von Muller for a long time.
He looked at the clearing.
He looked at the guards.
He thought about equivalent exchange — not the abstract principle, but the specific arithmetic of his current situation. A body. A name. A social position in whatever this world was. Intelligence about the local political structure. An identity that people would accept, that came with relationships and resources and a reason to exist here.
All of it, right in front of him.
He also thought about the boy. Nineteen and afraid and performing bravery for a father who'd sent him into the forest as a test. The private terror underneath the formal drawl. The sword forms practiced until they were perfect because perfection was the only thing between Julius von Muller and his father's disappointment.
*You deserve better than this,* Shinji thought, with the particular honesty that came from having no audience to perform for.
*But you're going to die in about four minutes regardless of what I do. The wound is fatal. There are no healers within range. There is nothing and no one coming for you in time.*
He drifted closer.
*I can use this body to do something with your life that you didn't get to do. I can find out who sent the Direwolf pack to this clearing and I can make sure it costs them something. I can keep your name from ending here, in the mud, unavenged and unexplained.*
He floated at the edge of the boy's fading soul signature.
*That's a justification,* the honest part of him noted. *You're doing this because you need a body and this is the body available. The rest is narrative.*
*Yes,* he agreed. *But I'll make it true anyway.*
He looked once more at the clearing. At the twenty men who'd died here, by design, because someone had decided Julius von Muller was a problem that needed solving.
*Equivalent exchange,* he decided. *I'll clear the debt.*
He dove in.
---
*The body closed around him like a fist.*
*The heart stopped.*
*He pushed.*
*"Vessel Stabilization" — now.*
--- Chapter End.
*[Chapter Two: The First Night]*