He woke up on the ground.
Not gradually all at once, the way you do when your body has catalogued every injury overnight and is ready to present its findings. Wrists. Jaw. Two specific points along his left ribs where the chains had caught him wrong. Wolf lay still for a moment and let the full inventory arrive before he tried to move.
The street was empty. The festival was gone like it had never happened just cold morning air and the distant clatter of the city waking up and the academy wall at his back, same as it had been when he closed his eyes.
He looked up.
The cards were still there.
Six of them. Floating at the edge of his vision, translucent and gold-edged and patient in a way that felt almost deliberate. He had half expected them to be gone a fever dream, a head injury, one silver coin and a bad day making him see things. But they were there, turning slowly in no wind, waiting.
Wolf sat up. Put his back against the wall properly and looked at them.
He reached out and touched the nearest one. The system supplied the name immediately, text appearing beneath his fingers like he was reading something that had always been written there.
Void Strike. Hollow Step. Smoke Veil. Iron Skin. Copycat. Null Wall.
He went through all six. Read each description twice. He didn't understand everything Copycat in particular raised more questions than it answered but he understood the shape of what he was holding. Tools. Strange ones. Tools he had no idea how to use yet but tools nonetheless.
He looked at his bruised wrists. Looked at the cards. Looked at the academy wall.
Yesterday he had stood in a circle and let twenty students use him as target practice for one silver coin. He had walked out with bruised wrists and a split lip and exactly one silver coin to show for it and then fallen asleep against the wall of the building that had just done that to him.
He got up. That was the whole of it. He just got up.
He was three steps from the wall when the system spoke.
Not out loud inside, the same space where the cards lived, gold text assembling itself with the calm efficiency of something that had been waiting for him to start moving.
QUEST ISSUED
TRIAL OF NOTHING
Condition: Survive a dungeon encounter with no weapons and no magic.
Restrictions: Cards LOCKED for duration. External equipment: PROHIBITED. Mana usage: N/A (Host has none. Noted.)
Reward: KING'S GAMBIT your first card.
Time limit: Complete before sundown.
"You have nothing. Good. Let's see what that makes you."
Wolf read it once. Read the last line again.
Mana usage: N/A. Host has none. Noted.
The system was making jokes. He filed this information somewhere in the back of his mind and looked at the cards all six of them locked now, dimmed slightly, untouchable. Then he looked at the dungeon district two streets away, the faint haze of mana discharge already rising over it in the morning air.
He had been running loot through Sub-Level One for two years. He knew that floor the way you know a place you've moved through invisibly for a long time the patrol patterns of the creatures, the safe corridors, the alcoves that were deep enough to matter and the ones that weren't. He knew it because nobody had ever thought to guard their patterns around a runner. Runners were furniture. Furniture noticed things.
No weapons. No magic. Fine.
He pocketed the silver coin and started walking.
The dungeon entrance was guild-managed a reinforced gate at the edge of the district with a registration desk and a requirement to show your guild card before entering alone. Wolf didn't have a guild card. He went around to the runners' access gate on the south side, showed the pass he hadn't gotten around to returning after his last job, and walked through.
Sub-Level One opened up around him.
Low ceilings, wide corridors, the blue glow of mana-reactive moss along the lower walls. It smelled like stone and old lightning. Wolf had been here hundreds of times and it had never felt like anything in particular background, infrastructure, the place you walked through to get to where the real adventurers were doing real work.
It felt different alone.
Not terrifying. Just honest. Without a team ahead of him and the passive safety of being the least important person in the group, Sub-Level One was exactly what it was a dungeon floor with things in it that would hurt him if they got the chance. He was seventeen years old with bruised ribs and no mana reinforcement, which put him somewhere below the floor's minimum recommended combat rating.
He knew which corridor had the lightest creature traffic at this hour. He headed there.
He heard it before he saw it.
Grinding. Stone against stone, rhythmic and slow, coming from the alcove at the corridor's bend. Wolf stopped walking. Pressed himself flat against the wall. Breathed shallow.
The Stone Sprite came around the corner.
Roughly the size of a large dog, built from compacted dungeon rock, moving on four legs that looked like they'd been broken and reset wrong. No eyes. No nose. It hunted through vibration footsteps, heartbeats, anything that disturbed the air and floor around it. Normally Bronze-ranked mages handled Sprites without breaking stride. One clean mana strike to the core and it was done.
Wolf had no mana strike. Wolf had no mana. Wolf had the specific knowledge that Sprites couldn't track a target that stayed completely still because their vibration sense reset after approximately four seconds of silence.
He stopped breathing.
The Sprite paused at the corridor entrance. Its head swung left, then right, the grinding sound of it filling the passage. Four seconds felt considerably longer from the inside. Wolf counted them anyway, slow and deliberate, watching the Sprite's head movements, waiting for the reset.
It came. The Sprite's posture changed fractionally, just a slight loosening of the tension in its forelegs and Wolf moved.
Not toward it. Away. Controlled, heel-to-toe, as close to silent as he could manage on dungeon stone. The Sprite's head snapped back immediately, locked onto the new vibration, and started after him.
So that was happening.
He ran.
Not fast enough the Sprite was built for dungeon terrain in a way his body wasn't, low-slung and stable where he was upright and bruised and had to think about every footfall. It closed the distance faster than he wanted. He could hear it behind him, the grinding rhythm accelerating, and he stopped thinking about anything except the section of corridor twenty meters ahead where the walls narrowed.
He'd clocked it on the way in. Old habit. Runners learned the geometry of dungeon floors because geometry was free and safe corridors weren't always.
He hit the narrow section and didn't slow down went straight at the left wall, got his back against it, both feet against the right wall, and climbed. Hands and legs, no elegance, the kind of movement that works because it has to and looks terrible. His ribs made their opinions known. He ignored them. Three meters up, four, until his shoulders were against the ceiling and there was nothing below him but corridor floor and the Sprite arriving into the narrow section at speed.
It couldn't fit right. The walls pressed its legs in at the wrong angles and it thrashed grinding, scraping, the sound enormous in the tight space and couldn't get traction, couldn't reach Wolf above it, couldn't do anything except be a very angry rock creature in a corridor that was slightly too small for it.
Wolf held position.
Arms shaking. Left ribs a specific sustained complaint. The Sprite thrashed for what felt like significantly longer than it probably was, and then nothing to track, vibration source gone still it lost the thread. The grinding slowed. Stopped. Started again in a different direction.
It went back the way it came.
Wolf waited sixty seconds. Counted them properly this time. Then he dropped back to the corridor floor, caught himself on the wall, and stood there breathing.
His hands were shaking. Not from fear exactly from the specific adrenaline of having been in genuine danger with genuinely nothing between him and it and having come through anyway. He looked at his hands until they steadied. It took a moment.
He thought: that was the worst that's ever worked.
The notification arrived before he reached the exit.
QUEST COMPLETE
TRIAL OF NOTHING
Condition met: Survived dungeon encounter with no weapons and no magic.
Method: Unorthodox. Noted with interest.
Reward unlocked:
KING'S GAMBIT — EPIC TIER
Effect: Grants one random ability for exactly 10 seconds. Ability unknown until activation. Cannot be predicted. Cannot be controlled. Use accordingly.
VE Cost: 35
"A king who fears uncertainty has already lost."
The card arrived differently from the others.
Not a slow materialization it was just there suddenly, the way a decision is there when you've stopped arguing with yourself about it. Darker edged than the rest, the gold on its border moving in slow irregular patterns, restless. Wolf reached out and touched it.
It didn't hum. It shifted the faintest sense of something becoming, mid-process, not yet settled. Like it was already turning into something and hadn't decided what.
He looked at it for a long time.
Random ability. Ten seconds. No prediction, no control. He thought about what kind of system hands someone a card like this as their first reward and what that said about the system's read on its host. He thought about standing in a narrow corridor with his back to the ceiling and making it work.
He thought: yeah. That tracks.
He slotted it into his hand. Seven cards now. The locked ones brightened again, returning to their normal glow, available.
Wolf looked at the dungeon corridor around him one more time. Looked at where the Sprite had gone. Looked at his hands steady now, mostly.
He had a card. One card he'd gone into a dungeon with nothing to earn. He had no guild registration, no rank, no legal right to be here alone. His wrists were purple and his ribs had at least two more days of complaints in them and the system had called his method unorthodox in a tone he couldn't quite read.
He had momentum. Small. Stubborn.
He walked toward the exit. Not fast. Not slow. Just forward, the way he always moved, the way he'd been moving since he was eight years old with his hands in his pockets walking home through a festival that wasn't for him.
Except now something walked with him.
Seven cards. One earned.