The room groaned with weight.
Kane’s body hovered just inches off the ground, arms trembling but locked—his back was a scaffold of muscle and fury. A bed balanced on his spine. Not just the mattress, but the entire steel frame, his bookcase folded on top, gear bags strapped across, and a few weights thrown in for spite.
Sweat ran in thin rivers down his face, splashing onto the cold floor. Every motion was calculated. Every breath: throttled. One shift too far left and the balance would break. One slip too fast and the mess would alert the neighbors, or worse—the sensors outside.
“Eighty-nine...”
“...Ninety.”
His voice barely broke above a whisper. His knuckles whitened against the tile.
“...Ninety-one.”
The bookshelf shifted. He tensed. Held.
“Ninety-two... Ninety—”
The log plate slid from the corner shelf and landed on his shoulder with a soft thud.
Kane flinched.
Everything wobbled.
He locked his jaw. Grit rethreaded through his limbs like a second skin.
“...One hundred.”
He didn’t collapse. He lowered himself slowly to the ground, laid the weight down like a ritual. Not even a sound from the floor. Then he exhaled.
“Now... how the hell am I getting all this down without making noise?”
—
Hours later, steam curled from the cracked mirror.
He stood in front of the mirror, shirtless. The hoodie was folded on the edge of the sink. His headphones lay beside it, charging faintly. Over time he had found out he fought better with music then invested in this kind of spelltech.
He reached into the drawer, pulled out a knife.
Not one of the ceremonial ones. Just a plain, serrated utility blade, sharpened to a fine edge. He turned it in his hand, caught a glimpse of himself.
Hair wild. Unruly.
He grabbed a fistful of it.
Shkk—
The blade bit into the strands, tugging, resisting. He growled. Pulled harder. Another chunk came loose.
Shk—shk—shkkk—
Then nothing. He stared at the half-cut, jagged mess.
The hair grew back.
Thicker.
“Fucking regeneration,” he muttered.
He tried again.
This time, he carved lower. Blood prickled where scalp met blade. The hair shrank back for a moment, panicked.
Then it returned.
Longer.
Kane let the knife fall into the sink.
Silence.
He stared at his reflection for a moment. His chest still heaved from the earlier workout. Runes flickered faintly across his collarbones—like tattoos born of breath and punishment.
“Fine.”
His pupils dilated as he focused inward.
Cells twisted.
Color drained from his roots.
His hair darkened—raven black. The strands shortened, curling slightly, stopping at his jaw.
He ran one hand through it. Nodded once.
He pulled the hoodie over his head. Slid the headphones on.
Volume: 68%.
NF again.
Of course.
He slipped his shoes on near the door. Didn’t tie them.
Not fully.
Just tight enough to move fast if he had to.
A blade sat beside the mat. Small. Concealable. Always oiled.
Just in case.
His hand hovered over it—then moved to the table.
A list he had written.
Scrawled in narrow script across coarse, yellow paper. Some words were blurred. But others stood out:
---
TARGET CONSUMPTION LOG
—Priorities, by order of need. Not want.
(Underline that, dumbass.)
Tier: Mid-Class Anomalies
- Wretchspine Wolves – [12]
? Paralyze venom
? Cry like lost kids. Don’t fall for it.
? Need for: memory shard mapping
- Mutated Master
? If caught. Dangerous. Adapts fast.
Tier: Disposable
- Orcs [29]
- Stonehowler (maybe eat tongue?)
- Whipshade
- Mosslurker
- Lantern Bug (again?)
Note: No Zone 4 mutations after dusk.
---
At the bottom, a simple phrase written in his own hand, underlined once:
Devour.
He folded the list, slipped it inside his coat, and pulled the hood low.
The door creaked open. Dust drifted past.
Kane stepped into the morning light like a soldier entering a war he’d already won, but never left.
[Location: Marengola Shack Hub | Main Hall – Gear Side Bazaar]
The stairs creaked under his boots.
Kane descended in silence, hoodie draped low, shadow swallowing the top half of his face. His breath formed a faint haze in the cool morning air, already thick with fried oil, sour leaves, and spice-smoked saltfish.
If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
Past the spice tables, past the bounty boards, past the woman still cleaning yesterday’s blood from the doorway with a bucket and muttered prayer—he turned left.
There he was.
The kid from yesterday.
Barely shoulder-height, jacket too big, beaded wrist-rings jangling as he leaned over a crate of rusted spelltech plates. Kane walked straight up.
The boy looked up, saw him—eyes lit.
He grinned so wide it nearly split his face, then nodded fast, like they’d agreed to meet here. Without a word, he hopped off the crate and waved Kane to follow.
The path narrowed into a dim alcove off the main hall—less market, more blacksite. Dust clung to the air like spores. Gear hung from beams overhead, belts buckled across warped mannequins, armor laid out across mismatched tables like corpses at rest.
Every piece tagged.
Kane’s fingers brushed a plate half-covered in solar mesh. The paper pinned to it fluttered slightly.
IMPACT RESISTANCE: 12kN
Coz Penetration: Minimal
Soul-tier Defense: NULL
Material: Cryo-Spun Alloy (Weak to fire affinity)
NOT RECOMMENDED FOR ZONE 4 OR HIGH-PULSE DUNGEONS
He moved on.
The kid ducked beneath a hanging coil of chainmail and slapped a chestplate onto a crate in front of Kane. Then another. Then three more. Every few seconds, he looked back, gauging Kane’s reaction—not eagerly, but with an edge of hope that didn't match the confident tilt of his shoulders.
The tags ranged wildly:
Spelltech Vest (Mk 3.7)
— Resists kinetic attacks up to 18kN
— Partial deflection of spiritual projections (Grade C or lower)
— Weak against bleeding-edge causality shifts
Enchanted Garment: Indigo Cloak (Veld-Woven)
— Absorbs memory-linked soul strikes up to Tier B
— Self-mending threadwork
— No impact resistance
Crimson Spineguard (Old Forge - Pre-Fraction Era)
— Designed to redirect Coz-heavy pressure flows
— Weight: High
— Spine-latch runes whisper in sleep. Mild side effects reported.
Kane’s eye lingered on the cloak but he could already achieve a great deal of that by devouring the thigns he killed not to talk about the fact that it was more of an effector kind of thing and since wasn't farmila with that causality well enough he woudn't be able to reap more than five percent of the benefits
Good soul defense. But no impact armor.
Then the spineguard.
Useful in Coz-dense tunnels. But the hum could interfere with listening fields.
Finally, he picked up a vest that didn’t look like much—grayish blue, nearly dull. But its tag was clean, newer than the rest:
Subduer Field Vest – Prototype (UNRANKED)
— Unknown material. Refines causality and boost causality.
— No signature. Cannot be detected by standard magical scans.
Kane lifted it, flexed the material between his fingers. It gave slightly—too soft to be metal, too firm to be cloth. What is Suspended doing in a Place like kenya.
“Old tech,” he muttered.
The kid nodded rapidly. Then tapped one ear twice, then twice again, and made a vague twisting motion with his hand.
Kane paused. Watched him.
The boy smiled—still big, still bright—but his head tilted just a little too sharply when Kane moved. He wasn't responding to sound.
He was watching lips.
Kane’s gaze dropped slightly. His fingers opened at the middle knuckle. The skin parted with a faint, red shimmer—no wound, just a slit.
One drop of blood slipped out.
Pft.
Before it touched the ground, it vanished—into the boy’s body.
He jerked. A sharp inhale. His chest tightened, fingers trembling like struck wire. The kid gritted his teeth—but didn’t cry out. Not once.
Kane waited.
His eyes glazed for half a heartbeat. Then they lit with layers of pale blue. Diagnostic information floated across Kane’s mind—not words, just sense. Muscle density. Bone microfractures, elasticity across organs just like the synthetic system he built—DNA-coded, hormone-layered, neuron-threaded. And there was one more thing—
Auditory distortion. Degeneration at about 78%. Inner cochlea degraded.
“Hmm.”
Kane raised one hand. Pointed two fingers toward the boy’s ears. The runes shimmered faintly under his sleeve. Then he flicked upward, as if lifting sound itself.
Flash.
The boy blinked hard.
Sound rushed back in. His shoulders jumped.
“...huh?”
Kane was already walking away.
The kid opened his mouth—words catching behind wonder.
But then—footsteps.
A man stood up from a nearby crate, walking over fast. Leather armor. Elbow holster. Looked like an old guild runner.
“Hey, kid. Everything alright?”
The boy turned to him, blinking fast, hands twitching like he wasn’t sure whether to gesture or speak.
Kane didn’t break stride.
The man reached out—hand angling for Kane’s arm.
The look Kane gave him stopped him mid-reach.
Blank.
Unbothered.
Like he was the least interesting thing Kane had seen that week.
He passed by them both, hoodie trailing behind him, headphones humming low.
Just before the door swung shut behind him, the boy’s voice called after him.
He blinked , eyes wide; the creak of Kane’s boots.
For the first time in years, he heard everything.
“Thank you, mister!”
Kane raised a hand.
Didn’t wave.
Didn’t stop.
The door shut quietly.
- - -
Kane adjusted the strap on his shoulder and kept moving, boots crunching over dry roots and discarded brass casings. The field had thinned out long before dawn—more than half the crew gone before the first blue hit the sky, before any of the three moons had pulled out. He didn’t blame them. Even out here, where Suspended didn’t paint the land in shadow like it did in Nigeria or the deeper South, people still moved like they had something chasing them.
As he passed a pair of adventurers crouched near a split cart axle—one fiddling with a jammed loader, the other adjusting his boot strap—he caught a fragment of their hushed conversation.
“Did you hear that an adventurer with a gold-plated log plate slept in our shack last night? I wonder how we didn't see him.”
Kane kept walking, pace steady.
It’s not like he’d hang it around his neck. But damn... I would’ve used my ability.
On the ridge ahead, a cluster of farmers and dustrunners were already elbow-deep in the broken crust, their layered vests fluttering in the wind. Coats patched with worn silk, belts stacked with tools, goggles strapped over bleary eyes. Not exactly graceful, but there was a sharpness to it. A kind of stitched-up pride.
“You’d think, with them being able to harvest solfare—their tech not choking on static, their microwaves actually spinning—they’d slow down a bit,” he muttered, half to himself.
He cut between two rusted survey pylons. The path narrowed, dissolving into low brush and twisted fence-wire. The cuffs of his coat snagged on thorns. Good. If the path fought back, it meant no one had come this way in a while.
He pulled out his log plate and flicked through the unclaimed sectors.
“Not that I give a damn about some plus on my plate,” he added, voice low.
He tucked it away and ducked under the leaning frame of a collapsed tower. Whatever sliver of the city walls he’d been glimpsing before had vanished now—swallowed by distance and terrain. The trees thickened. The air clung heavier, the Coz here heavy and yet calm, like oil running through a sieve.
Hormones flooded his body, DNA codes he had reprogrammed made the nerves in his body fire. He had entered the domain of something.
What was the causality?
He set the coffin down with a dull thud, fingers lingering on its lid. Then reached for the spear—long, split-tipped, humming faintly from within.
He was alone now.
Or maybe he wasn’t.
A scream cut through the trees—sharp, inhuman. Then another, closer. Something massive was pounding its limbs into the earth, launching itself forward. Behind the trees. Coming fast.
The roar split the cold air.
Black fur shimmered with steam, and crimson eyes locked on him from the dark.
Wretchspine Wolves.
One leapt. Kane moved. Spear flashed. The wolf split midair.
No pause. He lunged forward, out of the clearing. Four more. He could feel them.
His senses flicked wide open—sight, smell, spirit.
His soul blinked awake.
“They're coming,” he breathed.
The things that screamed weren’t human. It wasn’t just the sound—it was how it bent through the trees. The way the air vibrated, wrong and warping.
One lunged. A claw arced like a guillotine.
Kane sidestepped. Spear flashed. Steel met flesh—fur and bone split wide.
Still nothing. No feeling. No rush.
He bent lower, more behind him—but he didn’t care.
His teeth clenched. The hunger again.
It crawled up from inside, deeper this time.
He bit down.
Blood sprayed hot across his face, steam rising off it in the cold.
Wretchspine Wolf geneline adaptation: complete.
Cells erupted, shifting. Vocal cords tightened, spine twitching. New nerves wove into his flesh like hot thread.
His hand reshaped—claws now. Not quite wolf. Not quite human.
He leapt, caught one mid-air, and snapped its neck like wet wood.
No time to fight more. Not here.
If he stayed, someone would see.
Voice reconfiguration: patched.
His brain filed the mimicry.
Before, his ability had always failed at the voice—something had been wrong. But now?
Now it felt whole.
The blood hadn't even cooled before his body cracked, reshaped.
But this wasn’t just a transformation.
It was a rewrite.
Not mimicry.
Causality.
Entity. His main causality branch. The right to command every part of self: spirit soul and flesh. The control came from control the subunits and not merely the whole. Every breath, every cell, every echo in his soul sea, the rhythm of bone to blood, the will to die.
Wretchspine cells bloomed through his organs—clustering at pressure points, his throat, his back, spine lengthening in sharp, crawling bursts.
But it wasn't uniform. No beast-suit. No stolen shape.
His Entity made it custom.
Not figure-wise. Not just muscular or fast.
The shift folded through his soul, crafting something unique—something born from both the devouring and the grief still riding inside his bloodstream.
What emerged wasn’t a Wretchspine Wolf.
It was Kane—with a body engineered by evolution and horror.
Eyes now dual-slotted, seeing in heat and blood-echo. His tongue split once, then stitched itself back sharper. His shoulders leaned into an asymmetric crouch—off balance by design. His claws held memory, not just edge.
He ran.
Four left.
One to his left—he twisted, bounded off a tree trunk and split it in half.
Another pounced—he grabbed its throat midair and drove it through a jagged stump.
His new form knew where to strike. The Entity stored battle data in his nerves, predictive violence stitched into every tendon.
A third tried to run. Mistake.
Kane was above it, below it, inside it.
---
But then he stopped.
Not because the last one was dead.
Because something else was breathing.
Torn cloth.
A shallow groan.
A girl.
An adventurer—barely older than him. The wolves had chewed through her—her stomach was a hollow smear, her leg stripped to the bone. One arm clung to life by a tendon.
She looked at him like a god or a monster.
“Please,” she whimpered, “I—I can’t—I don’t—don’t kill me—”
Snot mixed with blood, pooling across her lips. Her mouth kept trembling, words lost between broken teeth. She tried to crawl. Her hand slipped on her own insides. “I don’t wanna die,” she sobbed.
Kane’s claw lifted.
It hovered above her.
Her eyes met his. Not with hope.
With history.
The kind of look someone gives when they’ve read about mercy, but never met it.
He burned that thought too.
Then—
Fur. Bone. Red mist.
She stopped moving.
The wind howled over the silence that followed.
He was already running again.
“She was going to die anyway. Fear made her irrational. She would’ve suffered more.”
---
Mid-run, his body flexed.
His form snapped, peeled, twisted.
He became her.
Screaming.
Writhing.
Her wounds replicated across his skin. Bone exposed. Voice sobbing.
And then he laughed—gurgling, wet, broken.The voice it was perfect.
---
From the tree line—something stepped forward.
Taller.
Heavier.
Its breath steamed like an engine. Its fur was jagged with bone-plating and spikes of hardened nerve.
The Master Wolf.
It didn't roar.
It stared.
Kane, still in the girl’s shape, smiled with blood in his teeth.
“These things,” he whispered, “they remember the voices of everyone they’ve ever killed.”
His eyes sharpened.
His tone dropped.
“And the more voices they carry… the better they get at mimicking.”
He laughed once—then his skin cracked, the girl’s shape fading.
“They call it Diffusion.”
The Master Wolf lowered its head. Kane’s claws twitched.
And for the first time, since this whole night began,
he felt something.
It wasn’t fear.
It was recognition—like two things born of the same mistake staring at each other across a void of blood and night.
He of course burnt the emotion. The deeper the emotion he burnt the stronger he became.
Everything blurred.
Not a roar. Not a scream.
Just shockwaves.
Explosions of pressure as claws struck claws, paws cracked stone, and two titans moved too fast for the eye to follow.
Boom. Boom. BOOM.
Trees shattered behind them. Earth peeled away. Sound broke into raw static. One breath—and Kane had vanished. One heartbeat—and the Master Wolf was hurtling backwards, blood trailing in the air like a silk ribbon ripped at the seams.
More flashes. More detonations. Each one a pulse of killing intent.
The forest cratered.
Then—
Silence.
Rubble settling.
From the center of the devastation, steam hissing from the crushed earth, something rose.
Fur soaked red. One arm torn, already regrowing. His mouth twisted into a half-smile, fangs glinting. The other wolves? Slain mid-blink.
Kane stood over the body of the Master Wolf, chest still faintly rising. His claw was buried deep into its skull, draining the last twitch of aura from it.
His presence widened—rippling out into the world like smoke laced with blood and code.
He exhaled once—let the breath stretch.
Then said it, voice like a rusted hymn:
"They don't call me the King of Slaughter for no reason."
