The first thing Grant taught me about being a hunter was that a smile could be more dangerous than a monster. I was twenty years old, officially F-rank, and useful only because I could carry six packs without complaining. It was my first real raid. Grant had recruited me outside the association cafeteria after his usual porter cancelled, and I was so desperate to prove I belonged that I ignored how none of his party looked me in the eye.
Grant called me bag boy before we even entered the gate. The others laughed, because he was their leader and laughing was easier than disagreeing. Only Emma did not laugh. She was a support caster with a copper wand and a habit of checking everyone's pulse after a fight. When I cut my palm on a broken crate, she wrapped it without making a joke about F-rank skin.
That tiny kindness was the only reason I remembered her face after everything else began to fade.
The dungeon was supposed to be a simple C-rank ruin. We killed stone beetles, crossed a room full of sleepy lizards, and found enough blue ore to pay everyone well. Then I noticed a door where our map showed solid rock. It was narrow, black, and perfectly clean. Twelve silver marks circled its handle like the numbers on a clock, but there were no hinges.
Grant's eyes lit up. Unknown rooms meant rare loot. Unknown rooms also meant unknown death, so naturally he decided the weakest person should test it. He told me to open it.
I said, "We should report it."
He put one hand between my shoulder blades and joked that the association did not pay bonuses for caution. Emma told him to stop. I turned, expecting him to grin and back away.
Instead, he shoved.
I fell across the threshold. My pack struck the floor around me. Grant leaned through the doorway and told me I had twenty minutes to find something valuable. If I was not back by then, they would leave without me. The party laughed again, but this time it sounded nervous. Then he pulled the door shut.
I jumped up and grabbed the handle. It had vanished. Behind me stood a wall of black stone without a seam. I screamed Grant's name and hammered until my knuckles split. No one answered.
Something answered from the darkness instead. Three pairs of yellow eyes opened at knee height.
I had no sword. Grant had said weapons only slowed a porter down. I had rope, chalk, cooking salt, two tents, repair straps, spare boots, dried meat, and enough bad decisions to fill the rest of the pack. When the first goblin charged, I threw a pot at its face and ran. That was not heroic. It was survival.
The corridor split twice. I marked the left wall with chalk as I passed and loosened one pack strap. The goblins were faster than me, but they were hungry and stupid. I scattered dried meat over a patch of polished stone, looped the strap around a pillar, and waited around the corner. Two goblins hit the bait together. I pulled. Their ankles tangled, their skulls collided, and the third tripped over both of them.
One carried a rusted dagger.
I had never stabbed a living thing. My hands shook so hard that the point scraped stone. The first goblin rose. I remembered Grant laughing. I remembered the door disappearing. Then I drove the blade forward.
The fight lasted perhaps ten seconds. Inside my head, it lasted all night. When the last goblin stopped moving, pale symbols appeared above the bodies.
Strength increased. Agility increased.
The dungeon had rules, but it did not explain them. I was grateful for that. Explanations would not clean the blood off my hands.
I used salt to preserve the meat, goblin cloth to wrap my knuckles, and chalk to map every branch. Porter work saved me more often than the dagger. I knew exactly how much water I had. I knew which strap could hold my weight. I knew how to stack noisy metal behind me so nothing could approach unseen.
For nine days, I searched for the exit. For nine days, the corridors kept descending.
On the tenth night, wolves found me. They were hairless things with gray skin stretched over long bones. Their paws made no sound. The largest one had a blue crystal buried in its chest, pulsing once every twelve breaths.
I built a choke point between fallen pillars and covered the ground in broken pottery. That worked on the smaller wolves. The crystal wolf stepped over them. It moved in when I blinked. One moment it stood across the chamber. The next, its jaws closed on my shoulder.
The bite froze my blood. The world became a single bright point. Dust stopped in the air. The wolf's teeth stopped halfway through my coat. My own scream became a low note stretched so far that I could hear every tremor inside it.
Pale words burned across my vision. Dead Second.
I thought I had become fast. I was wrong. My mind could walk through that second as if it were a long hallway, but my body remained trapped at the entrance. I saw every muscle in the wolf's neck. I saw the angle of its bite. I saw the dagger falling from my fingers. Knowing everything did not mean I could move.
So I planned. I chose one motion, reduced it to its smallest parts, and forced my body to begin before the second ended. Heel down, hip turn, shoulder drop. My muscles tore as if hooks dragged through them, but I slipped beneath the bite by the width of a fingernail. The dagger fell into my left hand. I caught it and drove it through the blue crystal.
Time snapped back. The wolf crossed the chamber, bit empty air, and shattered around my blade in the same heartbeat.
I called that movement Interval Step. It looked like speed from the outside. From inside, it was pain with perfect timing.
Afterward, I lay on the floor for two days. Every second of pain expanded in my mind. That was the cruelty of Dead Second. It gave me more time to think, but it also gave me more time to hurt.
When I could stand, the black wall beside me opened. Beyond it hung a bronze bell. It rang once without being touched. A stone calendar beneath it changed from zero to one.
One year.
I laughed, because the other choice was screaming. Grant had promised twenty minutes. Maybe the calendar measured floors, or victories. Maybe it was another dungeon trick.