“A practical answer,” Vexat said.

  Maren looked as if he wanted to strike him, heal him, or demand a proper confession in the style of a civilized inquiry, and the worst part was that all three impulses made sense. The Crystal Forest gave no room for any of them. Wind moved through the black-veined canopy above and filled the channel with a fine relentless chiming, while the coalition stood among corpses, shattered constructs, and the fresh ruin of another ambush that had only failed because Vexat had done something none of them had yet found words for.

  Teral ended the moment before it could become an argument.

  “We move,” he said. “Questions later. Lysa, forward sweep. Khem, left rear. Nobody drifts. Nobody speculates out loud.”

  That last part was aimed at everyone and no one, which was why it worked. The coalition obeyed not because their fear had settled, but because Teral still sounded like the nearest available version of order, and fear preferred orders to philosophy. Maren gave Vexat one last hard look, then bent to Pell again, his pale-gold healing light returning in controlled pulses around torn flesh and cracked bone. Khem checked the fallen shooter for anything useful with the quick thoroughness of a man who had accepted long ago that usefulness was its own virtue.

  Vexat moved when the line moved.

  He felt the corpses now whether he wanted to or not. The dead in the channel, the one he had twitched upright, the two sprawled beneath the shelf, even the shattered remains of the construct Sirel had broken open—none of them pulled at him in a dramatic, whispering fashion. It was worse than that. They had become present in the same clear way crystal shelves, ledges, and fault lines were present. Not alive. Not calling. Simply readable. Mana recognized them differently now and offered possibilities with the same cold composure it once reserved for clean angles and conductive seams.

  The coalition put the ambush behind them by distance only. No one relaxed. Pell kept glancing over his shoulder as if he expected the corpse in the channel to stand up again and follow. Sirel had gone quiet enough to make her silence feel sharpened. Even Lysa, whose whole usefulness rested on controlled observation, was overcorrecting, turning her head too often and spending attention faster than she knew. Teral noticed all of it and said nothing, which was usually how he reserved his own energy for the moment it mattered most.

  They crossed a broad run of pale crystal shelves and entered a grove where the trunks grew thicker and whiter, their surfaces clouded from within like milk glass holding buried weather. The ground between them was uneven but less treacherous, a scatter of plates and root-swells that broke sightlines without fully closing them. It was the sort of place that might have served as a camp on another world. Here it served only as a place to stop standing in the open long enough to take inventory.

  Teral gave them five minutes.

  Not rest. Rest implied surrendering guard to time, and time in this tutorial no longer offered the ordinary bargains. Five minutes simply meant that no one moved out of sight, no one raised their voice, and everyone used the interval for something practical. Maren finished Pell’s face as neatly as anyone could finish a face that had recently met a hook-blade. Khem checked straps and weapon edges. Lysa knelt near a white root and breathed through her nose in a methodical pattern that looked suspiciously like her version of panic management.

  Vexat stepped behind a trunk only broad enough to break direct lines from the others and opened the new class pane.

  The System responded at once, as if it had merely been waiting for his attention to stop being occupied by active attempts on his life.

  [Class: Necromancer]

  Rarity: Epic

  Level: 4

  Status: Active

  Core Functions Unlocked:

  Raise Servant

  Bone String

  Corpse Sense

  Grave Channel

  Another pane unfolded beneath it, cleaner, more specific, and somehow more obscene for the precision.

  [Skill Details]

  Raise Servant (G, Rare, Active)

  Animate one suitable corpse as a fragile undead servant.

  Servant quality depends on corpse integrity, available mana, and class growth.

  Current limit: 1

  Bone String (G, Uncommon, Active)

  Extend necromantic control through remains.

  Enables sharper manipulation of dead limbs, joints, and skeletal leverage than standard mana control.

  Grave Channel (G, Uncomon, Active)

  Use a corpse or remains as a conduit to replenish your mana reservoir.

  Corpse Sense (G, Uncommon, Passive)

  Detect nearby corpses and death-saturated remains.

  He read the lines twice, then a third time, because understanding them the first time had been unpleasantly easy.

  Raise Servant.

  The words should have sounded grand or terrible or at least theatrically dark. They did not. They sounded procedural, like a work order for a very particular kind of blasphemy. A fragile undead servant. One. Suitable corpse required. Mana and integrity as limiting factors. The System had taken one of the oldest moral taboos any sane civilization would have invented around bodies and translated it into a function list with caps and efficiency rules.

  Vexat dismissed the panes the moment he heard steps on the far side of the trunk.

  Teral stopped there without fully rounding the crystal, giving him privacy and denying him the comfort of pretending he had not noticed. “Can I still use you second line?” he asked.

  It was exactly the question Vexat would have asked in his place.

  “Yes.”

  “Does your new class change anything I need to know immediately?”

  Vexat considered lying, rejected it, and chose the narrowest useful truth. “It changes how I can interact with corpses.”

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Teral was silent for a beat. The chiming above them filled the gap like thin struck glass.

  “Is that likely to cause a problem,” Teral asked, “or solve one?”

  “In this place?” Vexat said. “Probably both.”

  That almost earned a smile, though Teral’s face remained as controlled as ever. “Then keep it in the first category as little as possible.”

  He turned away before the conversation could acquire confession, judgment, or anything else either man lacked the time to process honestly. Vexat watched him go and found, uncomfortably, that the exchange had helped. Teral did not need his soul inspected. He needed his capabilities mapped.

  That was a kind of mercy.

  The coalition moved again.

  They descended through a region where the crystal roots rose in long interlocking arches, making low corridors beneath the trunks. The light here was stranger, broken into soft bands by the white crystal above and reflected upward from the ground below, so that every face carried three different highlights and none of them agreed. Corpse Sense made itself known gradually rather than dramatically. At first it felt like the memory of pressure at the edge of his skull. Then it resolved into orientation. Something dead there. Something older that way. Something mostly bones beneath the shelf ahead. The awareness lacked emotion. It was not hunger, not fascination. More like a second topography overlaid on the forest, mapping the tutorial’s dead as reliably as Lysa mapped tracks.

  He hated how quickly he began to use it.

  “Left ridge,” he said quietly once, before he consciously knew why.

  Lysa looked where he had tilted his chin and frowned. “I don’t have anything.”

  “Not living,” Vexat said.

  That made Maren look at him in a way Vexat would rather not have earned. But when they skirted the left ridge instead of crossing directly, they found a half-hidden corpse tucked into the lee of a crystal plate and a scatter of dried blood that suggested the route had once seen violence worth avoiding. Teral did not comment. He simply adjusted the line and moved on.

  The first real test came when the forest tightened again.

  They had entered a stretch of low white growth and broken shelves, all of it veined through with thin channels of pale blue luminescence that made the ground look lit from underneath. Visibility had improved, but so had the number of false surfaces. Every broad plate held at least one reflection deep enough to read as a body at first glance. Everyone in the coalition was wound too tight to laugh at the false starts anymore.

  Lysa raised a fist.

  This time the threat was not bolts. It was movement on both flanks at once—three Prism Hounds sweeping low through the shelves on the right while something heavier shifted on the left with the dragging scrape of crystal plates against crystal plates. Monsters, likely, but not random. Too simultaneous. Either drawn by their passage, or by a second intelligence willing to use local fauna as pressure.

  Khem stepped forward before Teral could tell him to. Maren cursed softly and hauled Pell back toward a root arch that offered partial cover. Sirel moved left to meet the heavier sound. Vexat felt, more than saw, two corpses close by: one under the right shelf where the hounds were coming fast, another deeper left behind a milky trunk.

  The right-side corpse was recent, intact enough, and very close.

  The logic arrived with the same cold speed it had used in the channel. Hounds tracked disturbance. A moving body in the wrong place would redirect them. A servant did not need to kill. It only needed to occupy attention that would otherwise attach to the living.

  He did not announce what he was about to do because hearing the words aloud would have slowed his hands.

  Mana ran cold and dark through the new channels of the class. Grave Channel found the corpse first, anchoring through dead flesh with a sickening ease that made his stomach tighten. Raise Servant followed—not like Spark Bolt, which built and leapt, nor like Mana Thread, which extended cleanly. Raise Servant felt like persuading absence to imitate function for a little longer. The corpse answered by degrees.

  At first nothing happened.

  Then one shoulder twitched. One hand scraped against the floor. The body dragged itself forward in a wet, stiff jerk that made every instinct in Vexat’s mind recoil. It had once belonged to some narrow-framed candidate from a world where people had six fingers and elongated joints. Death had collapsed whatever grace those proportions once carried. What rose under the shelf now was clumsy, slack-jawed, one leg lagging, head tilted too far to one side as if the neck had given up before the rest of it. Not a warrior returned from legend. A ruin with orders.

  Weak. Disturbing. Useful.

  The Prism Hounds saw movement and committed.

  Two broke toward the thing at once, teeth clicking as they hit the shelf line where Vexat had raised it. The servant lurched into them with appalling incompetence, more falling than attacking, one dead arm swinging wide under Bone String’s crude correction. It caught nothing cleanly. It did not need to. The right flank’s first charge spent itself on dead meat and rigid limbs instead of Pell’s exposed side.

  Khem killed the first hound by driving his spear down through its spine.

  Lysa’s arrow took the second through the eye while it worried at the servant’s shoulder.

  The third veered late and fast toward Vexat himself, but Spark Bolt met it halfway and blew out its core in a burst of white-blue light and spinning crystal fragments. On the left, Sirel’s mace answered the heavier movement with one brutal crack, followed by Teral’s shield impact and the dry snap of a Shard Beast losing a leg at the wrong joint.

  The whole fight lasted seconds.

  The servant lasted less.

  One hound’s bite tore open the raised corpse’s upper chest and whatever poor thread of false functionality Vexat had imposed on it failed at once. The body folded in on itself, limbs losing coherence, head thumping against the luminous shelf with a sound too small for the enormity of what had just occurred. It did not explode. It did not dissolve. It simply became a corpse again, which somehow made it worse.

  No one had been looking directly at Vexat when he raised it.

  That was the only reason the secret held.

  Khem had been on the charge. Lysa had been drawing. Maren had been half crouched behind Pell. Teral, occupied with the left flank, saw only the aftermath: two hounds out of line, one dead body where no live candidate should have been moving, and Vexat positioned far enough back that a conventional explanation remained possible if one wanted it badly enough. Sirel looked at the fallen servant for half a beat too long, then said nothing.

  Vexat realized two things in the same cold breath.

  First, he could hide this for now.

  Second, hiding it made it more powerful.

  That insight felt uglier than the spell itself.

  The coalition regrouped around the small skirmish site with the efficiency of a team that had been doing too much regrouping and no longer found the act remarkable. Khem wiped crystal dust from his shield. Lysa recovered arrows and stared once at the corpse under the shelf, frowning as if some detail of the hounds’ approach still failed to add up. Maren checked Pell and declared, in the tone of a man who had given up on optimism but not on standards, that nobody was immediately dying and therefore everyone should stop behaving as if they were.

  Teral approached Vexat last.

  “You saw the right flank early,” he said.

  Vexat did not bother pretending ignorance. “Corpse Sense,” he said quietly. “One of the new functions.”

  Teral absorbed that without visible reaction. “Only sense?”

  There it was. The narrowest possible invitation to lie.

  Vexat looked past him at the body under the shelf, now still again, one six-fingered hand half extended into the light. “Not only,” he said.

  Teral’s eyes followed his line, then returned. Whatever conclusion he reached, he kept it to himself. “Then be precise,” he said. “If this coalition survives, it survives on precision.”

  He moved on.

  Vexat stood very still for a moment after that and listened to the Crystal Forest sing around them. Three suns burned overhead with no promise of closure. The ground glowed faintly under his boots. Nearby, the dead remained part of the landscape in every sense that mattered. And somewhere inside the boundaries of his new class, the idea of a servant had shifted from theoretical obscenity to demonstrated method.

  He had raised one corpse and used it to steal seconds from the living world.

  It had been weak, clumsy, fragile, and ugly enough to offend every instinct he still owned.

  It had also worked.

  That was the point at which survival stopped being merely reactive. Not because he had become stronger in some simple numerical sense, though the class would surely do that in time. The real change was structural. Vexat now possessed a kind of force that did not require willing allies, shared trust, or a living body to carry it. In a tutorial where trust thinned by the hour and corpses accumulated faster than graves, that was not just another skill.

  It was leverage.

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