The wolf charged and Wren let Predator's Lunge fire.
His body moved before his brain caught up, the same wrong-angled shift from before, but this time he leaned into it instead of fighting it.
His back foot found solid ground and his weight dropped forward and low the way the skill wanted.
His hand came down on the back of the wolf's skull with the rock and something cracked, the wolf's legs folded under it, it hit the dirt face-first and skidded two feet and did not get up.
'Better.'
Still ugly, still landing left of where he'd meant to stand, but the wolf was down and he was on his feet.
The proficiency gap between the skill and his body had narrowed by a fraction, and he could feel the difference in the way his knee had not buckled this time.
His right hand was swelling along the outer edge where the bruise from the first wolf had deepened into something dark and tight under the skin.
The middle finger still would not close.
His left forearm was bleeding through the sleeve again, and the three claw-lines from the first fight had reopened with the movement.
He pressed the sleeve flat against the cuts and held it.
Down the cart track, the merchant's cart was gone.
The guard had watched and left, and Wren did not blame him.
He waited.
The treeline was quiet and nothing else moved.
Then the system text came.
[Combat Complete]
[Devour Available: Grauwolf Sensory Package (F)]
[Cost: 1% Soul Integrity]
[Current Soul Integrity: 98%]
[Accept / Decline]
'Ninety-eight.'
He had accepted the first Devour twenty minutes ago because something was already coming through the brush and he needed the edge or he was going to die in the grey dirt holding a rock.
Predator's Lunge had saved his life and cost him one percent, and the math on that trade was simple enough.
But two percent gone in less than an hour, the sun was barely down, and the Ashwilds were full of things worse than wolves.
He looked at the dead wolf.
The Devour pull was there again, that itch in his teeth and behind his eyes, the same pull he'd felt with the first wolf but stronger now, like a hand reaching through his chest toward the carcass.
His fingers were already drifting toward it before he caught himself and closed his fist around the rock instead.
Gerold had a rule about the forge that he repeated so often Wren could hear it in the exact pitch of the bellows room
"You don't run out of iron all at once. You run out one bad pour at a time, and by the time you notice, the stock's empty and the order's due."
One percent did not sound like much.
But Wren had watched Gerold count every nail and every ingot and every scrap of usable bar stock at the end of every single week, and he had learned that the numbers that killed you were the ones small enough to ignore.
He pressed Decline.
[Devour Declined.]
[Soul Integrity: 98%]
The itch faded, but not all the way.
It settled into the back of his jaw like a sound just below hearing, and he had a feeling it was going to stay there.
He tore a strip from his already ruined sleeve and wrapped it tight around the cuts on his forearm, then he picked up the rock and started walking east because standing still next to two dead wolves was a good way to attract something that ate wolves.
◆ ◆ ◆
He found the ruin about an hour before the last light gave out.
It had been a building once, maybe a waystation or a toll keep, though most of it had collapsed inward so the walls leaned against each other like drunks holding each other up.
The roof was gone but two walls still met at a corner with enough overhang to keep rain off, and the ground inside was dry and clear of brush.
Wren checked the perimeter twice, turning it over and looking for the cracks that would split under heat.
No tracks in the dirt around the walls, droppings or scratches on the stone at animal height.
He sat down with his back against the cold stone and pulled up his trousers to check his knee, which had started clicking again on the walk.
The joint was swollen but it moved, so he left it alone and rubbed the Brand on his palm instead.
The system text came as if it had been waiting for him to sit still.
[Class: Aschenschlund (SSS) — FORBIDDEN]
[Active Talents: 1]
[Predator's Lunge (F) — Proficiency: 52%]
[Devours Declined: 1]
[Soul Integrity: 98%]
'Fifty-two percent proficiency.'
Up from forty after the first fight and up again after the second.
Two fights and the skill had gained twelve points.
That meant using it in combat made it stronger, and the skill he'd almost broken his knee with an hour ago was already fitting his body better than it had at the start.
'So pick early, pick right and don't waste it on wolves.'
He had ninety-eight points of Soul Integrity and the number only went down.
Every Devour was permanent.
Every point spent was a point gone.
If F-Rank wolves cost one percent each, B-Rank creatures would cost more, and A-Rank more than that, and he had no data on the scaling yet.
The system had told him what happened at zero.
Ceases to be human.
He did not need to see zero to understand that the road to zero was the problem, not the destination.
He rubbed the Brand again and more text came.
[WARNING: Devour compulsion increases proportionally with proximity to viable targets.]
[Extended proximity to undevoured kills may result in involuntary acquisition.]
He read that twice.
Then he read it a third time, because the word involuntary changed everything.
The itch in his jaw was not going to stay polite.
The system was telling him that if he sat next to a dead wolf long enough, the Devour would happen whether he wanted it to or not.
He could feel it even now, an hour and a mile from the kills, the pull sitting at the base of his skull like a coal that would not cool.
The class had a leash, and the leash was around his neck.
'So I kill, I walk, I don't look back.'
You don't stand there staring at the mistake.
You put it down, you pick up the next blank, you keep the fire hot.
Gerold never wasted time on a piece that had already gone wrong.
His stomach cramped.
He had not eaten since before the Branding, which meant four days now, three of those dead.
The resurrection had fixed the hole in his chest but apparently had not thought to fill his stomach.
His hands had a fine shake in them that pressing against his thighs could not stop anymore.
He needed food.
He needed a weapon that was not a rock with his blood drying on it.
He needed to understand why the guards at Eisenwall had killed him on sight and whether they would do it again.
Four days now.
Four days of Gerold in that forge with the empty second stool and the goat stew that Wren never came home to eat.
The stew would be cold by now, or eaten, or thrown out, and the bowl Gerold would have set at Wren's place would be sitting on the shelf untouched.
Wren pressed his palms flat against the cold stone and breathed until the shake in his hands went from visible to something he could only feel.
◆ ◆ ◆
He could not sleep.
The cuts on his arm burned when he shifted against the stone, the itch from the declined Devour was still sitting in the back of his jaw, and every time the wind moved through the broken walls he heard wolves that were not there.
So he sat in the dark and made rules.
Gerold's forge had rules.
You bank the fire before you leave. You count the stock on Restday. You don't take a commission you can't fill.You don't pour when you're tired. You don't sell below cost even when the customer is standing in front of you with coin in his hand, because selling below cost once means selling below cost every time after that.
Rules were how Gerold kept a one-man forge running in a district where three others had closed in the last two years.
'Rule one: no Devours below B-Rank unless the trait fills a gap I can't cover any other way.'
The wolves were F-Rank.
Enhanced Scent and Pack Instinct were not worth one percent of his soul each.
Predator's Lunge had been worth it because he was about to die without it, but that was a crisis, not a strategy.
'Rule two: walk away from every kill, don't stand near it or look at it.'
The compulsion warning had been clear enough.
Distance was the only defense against involuntary Devour, distance meant discipline, and discipline meant leaving behind skills that his hands were already reaching for.
'Rule three...' He sat with that one for a while, rubbing the Brand on his palm with his thumb until the skin around it was warm.
He knew what the third rule should be.
'Rule three: find Gerold before the number gets low enough that he wouldn't recognize what came home.' He did not know what Soul Erosion looked like at fifty percent, or thirty, or twenty.
The system had said ceases to be human, and the word ceases did not leave room for a good version of that sentence.
Somewhere outside the walls, something called out in the dark, high and thin and far enough away that Wren could not tell what it was.
The sound cut off mid-note, which meant something else had caught it.
He tightened his grip on the rock and waited for his arm to stop bleeding.
◆ ◆ ◆
Something moved in the back of the ruin.
Wren had the rock in his hand and was on his feet before the sound finished.
It had come from behind a collapsed section of inner wall, where the rubble was piled thick and he had been sure nothing could fit through the gaps between the fallen stones.
But something was back there.
He could hear breathing now, uneven and ragged, and it was not the breathing of a wolf or anything on four legs.
The rhythm was wrong for an animal, too irregular, catching and stopping and starting again the way a person breathes when they are trying to be quiet and failing.
'Out here.'
Past the cart track, past the wolves, in the middle of the Ashwilds where the merchant's guard had said Grauwolves owned the territory.
No one should be here or even would choose to be here.
He took one step forward with the rock raised and the breathing on the other side of the rubble stopped.
Three seconds of dead silence.
Then a voice came through the gap in the stones.
Thin and cracked and so quiet he almost missed it.
"You're not supposed to be awake."
Wren's hand tightened on the rock.
The voice was a woman's, or a girl's, and it was not afraid of him.
It was afraid of something else.
And it had said awake, not alive, which meant the voice knew what had happened to him, or at least knew what was supposed to have happened.
'How long has she been back there?'
He had checked the perimeter twice.
He had looked for tracks and droppings and scratches. He had not checked behind the rubble because the gaps were too narrow for a wolf.
They were not too narrow for a person.
"Who told you that?" Wren said.
The silence on the other side of the rubble lasted long enough that he thought she had stopped breathing entirely.
Then the voice came again, quieter than before.
"The same people who put the spear in you."
[Soul Integrity: 98%]
[Active Talents: 1]
[Devours Declined: 1]