The Gravecaller Who Levels While Sleeping

Chapter 6: The First Harvest

The goblin snarled and rushed him.

It moved with the frantic confidence of a creature that had killed unprepared newcomers before. Its cleaver was little more than a jagged strip of metal, but it was sharp enough to split an unarmored wrist. Adrian saw all of that in an instant. He also saw something the goblin could not understand.

He was not the same level-one Gravecaller who had entered the forest a moment ago.

Adrian opened his status window and selected Advance.

Power flooded his body.

Level two came first. His stored experience dropped, but there was still more than enough left. Level three followed. Then level four. Each successful advance sent a quiet pulse through his bones and sharpened the world around him. His muscles warmed. His breathing steadied. The trees seemed less distant, their trunks clearer, the sound of the goblin's feet easier to follow.

He stopped at level six.

The choice was deliberate. At level six, he could handle anything Briarwood normally produced. Going higher before the academy trip ended would invite questions, paperwork, and possibly an investigation into how a supposedly worthless class had exploded through five levels in a single morning.

His updated status was still not impressive by elite standards, but it no longer looked helpless.

Level: 6.

Power: 6.

Agility: 12.

Focus: 6.

Vitality: 6.

Unassigned Attribute Points: 30.

Adrian placed every new point into Agility.

The change was immediate. His legs felt lighter, his balance more precise. The incoming goblin seemed slow enough that he could see each step it took across the wet leaves.

"Forty-two," Adrian murmured. "That should do."

The goblin swung its cleaver.

Adrian moved.

He stepped aside without needing to retreat. The blade cut empty air. Adrian drew, aimed, and released. His first arrow struck the goblin high in the shoulder. The creature screamed and spun toward the trees.

It had sensed the difference between them. Instead of pressing the attack, it ran.

"Wrong choice."

Adrian chased it through the undergrowth. At level six and with his new Agility, he moved faster than the goblin could. He loosed a second arrow, then a third. The training arrows were weak, and Adrian had spent nothing on Power, so neither shot brought the creature down. The fourth arrow struck its thigh. The goblin stumbled. The fifth went through the base of its neck.

It fell face first into the mud.

A small notification confirmed the kill and awarded five experience points.

Adrian barely looked at it. Five points were nothing beside the reservoir sitting inside the Continuum. He knelt by the body, pulled his arrows free, and examined the goblin with a colder interest.

In a normal hunter's mind, the corpse was a task completed. You checked it for materials, recovered your weapon, and moved on. Adrian had watched hundreds of hunters do exactly that. He had done the same thing for years because no one had told him to do anything else.

But he remembered the feeling from the quarry on the day he died. He remembered a faint presence beneath the body of a carrion hound, as though something inside the dead creature had been waiting for him to notice it.

He placed one hand on the goblin's chest and closed his eyes.

For the first ten seconds, nothing happened.

At twenty seconds, a chill ran through his palm.

At thirty, he heard the distant scrape of bone over stone.

At forty-five, a picture flashed behind his eyes. It was not a memory. It was an imprint: hunger, fear, a crude cleaver, and the instinct to obey a stronger creature.

At sixty seconds, the status window changed.

Death Echo Recorded.

Available bound form: Goblin Boneguard.

Adrian's breath caught.

That was it. The secret.

The first Gravecaller on record had died because they fought their way through a Rift with no skill and no allies. Every historian had decided the class was defective. Nobody had thought to leave a hand on a corpse for a full minute. It was too long in combat, too strange, too easy to dismiss.

Adrian opened his Bound Dead section. Where it had once shown zero of sixty, it now showed one of sixty.

He whispered, "Come out."

A black circle opened on the forest floor. Pale fingers pushed through it. A small skeleton climbed into the daylight, carrying a chipped bone cleaver. Its skull was shaped like the goblin's head had been, but its empty sockets contained two dim blue sparks.

The Goblin Boneguard waited without moving.

Adrian laughed once, quietly. The sound surprised him. It had been a long time since anything in his life felt like an answer.

He checked the skeleton's status. It was level one, with better Power and Vitality than Adrian had possessed at level one. It had no skills, no intelligence worth speaking of, and no independent will. But it did not cost Focus to summon. More importantly, if it was destroyed, Adrian could call it again as long as the Death Echo remained recorded.

There was no permanent loss.

He looked at the small figure standing before him. "You are not much to look at."

The Boneguard did not respond.

"That is all right. Neither am I yet."

Adrian reached into the goblin's chest cavity with a wince and found a cloudy white crystal no larger than a marble. A Grade One Ether Core. The energy inside could power home appliances, patch cheap enchantments, or be sold to a Rift market for about forty dollars.

Forty dollars was not enough to impress a Voss.

It was enough to buy food for the apartment.

Adrian slid the core into a pouch, nocked another arrow, and looked deeper into Briarwood. Somewhere in those trees were more goblins, more Echoes, and a future no one else could see.

"Let's go find your brothers," he told the skeleton.

The Boneguard turned toward the deeper forest at once. It had no expression, but Adrian imagined eagerness in the blue sparks inside its skull. Maybe that was foolish. Maybe it was only his own hope reflected in empty bones.

Either way, he felt less alone than he had ten minutes earlier.

He spent the next few minutes testing simple commands. Stay. Follow. Guard. Attack that tree. The skeleton obeyed each order with literal, clumsy precision. When Adrian told it to guard, it stood between him and the forest without shifting. When he told it to follow, it walked at his left shoulder and stepped over every root in the same dull rhythm. It had no personality, but it had perfect loyalty.

That loyalty was dangerous in its own way. Adrian could already see the temptation to treat the dead as disposable tools. He would need to remember that their Echoes were the last trace of something that had lived, even if that something had been a goblin with a cleaver.

Then a distant goblin cry broke the stillness.

Adrian raised the bow. The Boneguard lifted its chipped weapon.

The first harvest had begun.