Nate slept.

  He didn't mean to. One moment he was leaning against the arch, telling himself he'd rest for a few minutes. The next, he was waking up on cold stone with no idea how much time had passed.

  His body ached. Everything ached. But when he moved—slowly, carefully—the bones that had been broken were no longer grinding against each other. The level-ups had done their work while he slept. Not healed, exactly. More like stabilized. Held together with something that wasn't quite flesh and wasn't quite magic.

  He sat up and took stock.

  His left arm worked again, mostly. The ribs still hurt when he breathed too deep, but they weren't shifting anymore. The wounds from the hounds and the crawlers had closed into angry red scars, tender to the touch but no longer bleeding.

  Sixty percent. Maybe sixty-five.

  Better than he'd been before he slept.

  The chamber was quiet. The queen's body had fully dissolved while he was out—nothing left but a dark stain on the stone where the ichor had pooled. The bioluminescent moss still glowed, casting the space in that pale blue light. The two arches waited on the far wall.

  Exit. Or Floor 3.

  Nate stood, wincing at the pull in his ribs, and walked to the arches. The exit darkness was still, calm. The Floor 3 darkness swirled like something alive.

  He thought about the outside. The cracked sky, the dead cars, the survivors huddled in grocery stores. Tyler and Mira, hopefully safe. The world trying to figure out what came next.

  He thought about the queen. The moment when something had ignited in his chest. [Heavy Hands]. The weight behind his final strike.

  That had come from desperation. From the edge of death. But it was his now. A skill. Something he could learn to control, to use intentionally.

  What else was waiting for him in this tower?

  Nate stepped through the Floor 3 arch.

  The ruins stretched in every direction.

  Not caves this time. A city—or what was left of one. Crumbling buildings rose from cracked streets, their windows dark, their walls covered in creeping vines that glowed faintly purple. The sky overhead was wrong again: a deep crimson shot through with veins of black, like infected blood.

  The air smelled like dust and decay and something sweet underneath. Rotting flowers, maybe. Or rotting something else.

  A notification appeared:

  FLOOR 3

  Objective: Reach the exit.

  Recommended Level: 10-15

  Note: This floor contains environmental hazards. Caution is advised.

  Environmental hazards. That was new.

  Nate moved into the ruins, staying close to the buildings, keeping his eyes open. The streets were too exposed. Too many windows, too many rooftops, too many places for something to watch from.

  He found the first hazard ten minutes in.

  A patch of those glowing vines had spread across the street, covering the pavement in a thick purple mat. Nate stopped at the edge, studying it. The vines pulsed faintly, like they were breathing.

  He picked up a chunk of rubble and tossed it into the patch.

  The vines erupted.

  Tendrils whipped up from the mat, wrapping around the rubble, pulling it down. In seconds, the stone was gone—dissolved or absorbed or something worse. The vines settled back into their slow pulse, waiting.

  Okay. Don't step on the purple.

  He found a way around, climbing through a collapsed building and dropping down on the other side. The vines were everywhere, but they weren't uniform. Patches of clear ground existed between them, and the vines didn't seem to extend into the buildings themselves.

  He could work with that.

  The monsters on Floor 3 were different again.

  They moved in the shadows between buildings—fast, low shapes that darted from cover to cover. He caught glimpses of them: lean bodies, too many limbs, heads that split open to reveal rings of teeth.

  [Ruin Stalker — Level 8]

  Pack hunters. Like the hounds, but smarter. They didn't charge blindly. They circled. Probed. Tested his reactions before committing.

  The first pack hit him an hour into the floor.

  Three of them, coming from different angles. Nate put his back to a wall and waited. The first one came in fast, going for his legs. He sprawled, letting it slide past, and drove a knee into its spine as it went. Not enough to kill, but enough to slow it down.

  The second one was already on him. He caught its jaws on his forearm—the armor of scar tissue from the hounds took the worst of it—and hammered his fist into the joint where its head met its neck.

  [Impact].

  The stalker's neck snapped. It went limp.

  The third one had circled behind him. He felt it coming more than saw it—that sharpened awareness he'd been developing since the tutorial—and spun, throwing an elbow into its face as it leaped.

  The first stalker was getting back up, limping but functional. Nate closed the distance and finished it with two more strikes.

  [Ruin Stalker] defeated.

  [Ruin Stalker] defeated.

  [Ruin Stalker] defeated.

  Experience gained.

  He leaned against the wall, breathing hard. Three stalkers and he was already winded. These things were faster than the crawlers, more coordinated than the hounds. And this was the easy part of the floor.

  Recommended Level 10-15. He was Level 9.

  This was going to take a while.

  The first day was about learning.

  He learned the stalkers' patterns. They hunted in packs of three to five, communicated with clicks and whistles, and retreated if they took casualties. Killing one or two would often scatter the rest—for a while. They'd regroup and come back later, more cautious.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  He learned the ruins' layout. The buildings were arranged in rough blocks, with main streets running between them. The vines were thickest on the streets, thinnest in the buildings themselves. Some structures were intact enough to serve as shelter. Others were death traps, their floors ready to collapse at the slightest weight.

  He learned where to find water. A few of the buildings had pipes that still ran—not clean water, but not poison either. It tasted like rust and age, but it kept him alive.

  Food was harder. The stalkers dissolved when they died, just like the hounds and crawlers. Nothing left to eat. But he found something else in the ruins: a plant growing in the cracks of certain buildings. Small, pale, with leaves that tasted like nothing. He ate a little, waited to see if he'd get sick. He didn't.

  It wasn't enough. His stomach ached constantly. But it was something.

  When night fell—or what passed for night, the red sky darkening to a deep maroon—Nate found a defensible room on the third floor of a mostly-intact building. He blocked the stairwell with rubble, wedged himself into a corner, and slept with his fists clenched.

  The second day was about survival.

  The stalkers had learned from the first day. They came in larger packs now—five, six, sometimes seven at a time. They didn't test him anymore. They committed.

  Nate nearly died twice.

  The first time, a pack caught him in the open, halfway across a plaza. No walls to put his back against, no buildings to funnel them. Just him and six stalkers in a ring of purple vines.

  He fought his way out. Killed three, scattered the rest. But he took a claw across his back that laid him open to the bone, and by the time he found shelter he was leaving a trail of blood on the stone.

  He spent hours in a collapsed basement, pressing his torn shirt against the wound, waiting for the bleeding to stop. The level-up from the day before had made him tougher, but not tough enough. Not yet.

  The second time was worse.

  He'd found what looked like a safe building—intact walls, solid floors, only one entrance. He was settling in for the night when the ceiling collapsed.

  Not an accident. A trap.

  Stalkers had been waiting on the floor above, and they'd broken through deliberately. Three of them dropped into the room with him, and two more blocked the door.

  Nate fought in the dark, in the dust, in a space too small to move properly. He couldn't slip punches, couldn't circle, couldn't do anything but stand and trade. His fists found flesh and chitin and teeth. Claws found his arms, his chest, his face.

  [Impact]. [Impact]. [Impact].

  He burned through everything he had. When the last stalker fell, he was on his knees, barely conscious, bleeding from a dozen wounds.

  He didn't sleep that night. He couldn't. Every sound made him flinch. Every shadow looked like teeth.

  The third day, he didn't fight at all.

  He hid.

  His body needed time. The wounds from the ambush were bad—not fatal, but close. He found a drainage tunnel beneath one of the buildings, too small for the stalkers to enter in numbers, and he crawled inside and stayed there.

  He drank rust-water. He ate the tasteless leaves. He slept in fits and starts, waking at every distant click and whistle.

  And he thought.

  This wasn't working. He was Level 9, fighting Level 8-10 monsters, and he was barely surviving. The floor wanted him to reach the exit, but at this rate he'd die before he got there.

  He needed to be smarter. Fight less, think more. Use the environment instead of just enduring it.

  The vines.

  He'd been avoiding them, treating them as obstacles. But he'd seen what they could do to a chunk of rubble. What would they do to a stalker?

  The fourth day, he tested his theory.

  He found a pack of stalkers prowling near a large vine patch and let them see him. Let them chase. Led them on a winding path through the ruins, staying just ahead, until he reached the spot he'd prepared.

  A narrow alley. Vines on both sides. One way in, one way out.

  He stopped running and turned to face them.

  The stalkers poured into the alley. Five of them, hungry, confident. They'd been chasing wounded prey for three days. They thought they had him.

  Nate grabbed the rope he'd made from torn cloth and pulled.

  The rubble he'd stacked on the rooftop came down, not on the stalkers, but on the vines beside them. The impact woke the tendrils, and they erupted outward, grasping for anything they could reach.

  Two stalkers went down immediately, wrapped in purple and dragged screaming into the mass. A third tried to flee and ran straight into the vines on the other side.

  The last two made it through, coming at Nate in a fury.

  He killed them the old-fashioned way.

  [Ruin Stalker] defeated.

  [Ruin Stalker] defeated.

  [Ruin Stalker] defeated.

  [Ruin Stalker] defeated.

  [Ruin Stalker] defeated.

  Experience gained.

  Five kills. One trap. Barely any energy spent.

  Nate smiled for the first time in days.

  The fifth day was better.

  He'd figured out the rhythm now. Scout during the day. Set traps. Lure stalkers into hazards. Conserve [Impact] for emergencies. Fight only when he had to.

  It was slow. Methodical. Nothing like the frantic brawling of the first two days.

  But it was working.

  He moved deeper into the ruins, clearing sections as he went. The stalkers learned to fear the places he'd trapped, and they started avoiding him instead of hunting him. That gave him room to breathe. Room to heal.

  By the end of the fifth day, he could see something in the distance—a massive structure rising above the other buildings. A cathedral, maybe, or what was left of one. Its spire had collapsed, but the main hall still stood, and even from here he could see the pale stone arch set into its entrance.

  The exit.

  He was still Level 9. The experience from the stalkers came slowly, and he hadn't killed enough to push over the threshold. But he was getting closer. He could feel it.

  The sixth day, he found other survivors.

  Or what was left of them.

  Three bodies in a collapsed building, arranged in a circle like they'd been trying to defend each other. Two men, one woman. They'd had weapons—a bat, a length of pipe, a knife—but it hadn't been enough.

  The stalkers had gotten them. Days ago, from the look of it.

  Nate stood over the bodies for a long moment. He didn't know them. Didn't know their names, their stories, why they'd entered the tower. They'd made the same choice he had, and they'd died for it.

  He could have died the same way. Almost had, twice.

  He searched the bodies—not for sentiment, but for survival. Found a bottle of water, half-full. A packet of crackers, stale but edible. A lighter that still worked.

  He took everything and kept moving.

  The seventh day, he made his push for the cathedral.

  The stalkers had thinned out in this section of the ruins. Whether he'd killed enough to matter or they'd simply learned to avoid him, he didn't know. Either way, the path was clearer than it had been.

  He moved fast, staying alert, using the buildings for cover. The cathedral grew larger as he approached—a hulking structure of gray stone, its windows shattered, its walls covered in those purple vines. But the arch at its entrance glowed faintly, unmistakably an exit.

  But between him and the cathedral, in a plaza choked with vines, something waited.

  It was a stalker, but wrong. Bigger. The size of a horse, maybe larger. Its chitin was darker, thicker, and its head didn't split open like the others—instead, it had a face. Almost human, if humans had too many eyes and mouths full of needle teeth.

  [Ruin Stalker Broodmother — Level 12]

  Level 12. Three levels above him.

  His stomach dropped.

  Those too-many eyes fixed on his position, and it let out a sound—not a click or a whistle, but something like a word. A summons.

  Stalkers emerged from the ruins behind it. Five. Ten. More.

  He couldn't fight that. Not a broodmother and an army. He needed to fall back, regroup, find another way—

  The broodmother moved.

  It was fast. Faster than something that size had any right to be. One moment it was across the plaza, the next it was airborne, leaping over the vine patches, coming straight at him.

  Nate dove left. The broodmother crashed into the building behind him, stone exploding outward, and he was already running—not toward the exit, just away, anywhere that wasn't here.

  The stalkers poured after him. He could hear them, dozens of legs clicking on stone, that horrible chittering rising into a frenzy. The broodmother screamed again, and the sound shook something loose in his chest.

  He rounded a corner and skidded to a stop.

  Dead end. A collapsed building had blocked the street, rubble piled two stories high. Vines covered every surface, pulsing hungrily.

  He spun. The stalkers were already there, flooding into the street, cutting off his escape. And behind them, shoving through the pack like they were nothing, came the broodmother.

  It stopped twenty feet away. Those too-human eyes studied him, and its needle-filled mouth twisted into something that might have been a smile.

  Nate put his back to the rubble and raised his fists.

  No traps. No tricks. No way out.

  Just him and the horde.

  The broodmother screamed, and the stalkers charged.