The notification sat in the center of his vision, pulsing with that slow prismatic light.
[ Sigil Selection Successful. ]
[ Rarity: Prismatic ]
[ Lucky Dice ]
[ Effect: Each kill grants a 40% chance to generate one additional loot drop. When an additional drop fails to trigger, loot quality for the next additional drop increases by one tier. This escalation resets upon success. ]
Kael read it twice. Then a third time, slowly.
He understood the mechanic immediately — it wasn't complicated.
Every kill rolled the dice. If the dice landed wrong, the next roll got better. If it landed right, the counter reset. Standard escalating probability, the kind of loop designed to feel generous regardless of which way it fell.
The part that mattered was the baseline.
Forty percent. Nearly half of all kills would generate a bonus drop. He'd seen someone post a similar sigil in the chat — [Silver Dice], the silver version — a 2.5 % chance. One extra drop per forty kills, on average. Barely worth building around.
His version gave one extra drop per 2.5 kills.
Looking at his prismatic, rainbow-colored sigil, Kael couldn't help but smile. Could it be that fortune had finally decided to repay him for all the misfortune he'd endured throughout his pitiful life?
No.
It wasn't luck. He'd spent four minutes cycling through hundreds of draws, tracking probability, refusing to settle, holding his nerve when the clock hit single digits.
Luck was what happened to people who didn't think. What had happened to him was closer to the opposite of that.
Put in enough effort, and eventually even fate would begin to change.
He set the panel aside. Pulled his awareness back to the room.
The dorm still looked the same. The patterned curtain pulled shut over the window. The desk wedged at an angle under the door handle, which he had done less than ten minutes ago, though it felt like significantly longer.
Outside, the sounds had changed.
The screaming had thinned. That wasn't encouraging — it was the kind of thinning that happened not when people were safe but when they'd stopped moving. What replaced it was worse. Irregular percussion — the specific, dull rhythm of something being hit repeatedly against something that didn't want to break. It was coming from multiple directions at once, a floor below and somewhere beyond the corridor outside, and it had the quality of sound that was going to be there for a while.
Kael stood and moved to the window.
He shifted the curtain by two centimetres.
The courtyard had changed. The portal was still there — still vertical, still ragged at the edges, still leaking creatures through at irregular intervals — but the initial flood had dispersed. The goblins that had poured through were spread out now, moving in loose patterns through the campus grounds. Some were clustered around the bodies of students who hadn't made it inside. Others were pulling at the shared bikes along the pathway, apparently finding the aluminium frames interesting enough to destroy.
None of them were looking up.
He let the curtain fall.
His system panel floated in peripheral vision. He pulled it to the centre.
[Name: Kael Ruyi | Level: LV0 | EXP: 0/10 ] [ STR: 5 | CON: 5 | AGI: 5 | SPI: 6 ] [ HP: 50/50 | MP: 60/60 ] [ ATK: — | DEF: — ] [ Equipment: None | Skills: None ] [ Sigil: Lucky Dice (Prismatic) ]
Level zero. Zero experience. The system panel of someone who hadn't done anything yet.
Lucky Dice was worthless at zero kills. It didn't generate passive income. It didn't buff his stats. It gave him nothing until he started engaging — and then it compounded, every kill feeding the next, loot begetting better loot begetting better positioning. A snowball sigil. Which meant the first kill wasn't just practical.
It was the mechanism that unlocked everything else.
He turned away from the window and took inventory of the room.
His roommates were all out. He was alone, which simplified the next few minutes considerably.
The fruit knife was in the small basket beside the dormitory sink — ceramic-handled, blade roughly as long as his forearm. He'd bought it second-hand from a senior student who was graduating and selling everything, paid forty dollars for it, and thought he'd overpaid. He picked it up and held it. The blade was sharp. Not combat-sharp, but sharp enough to cut through rind without effort, which meant it would cut through other things too.
He set it on the desk, found the roll of fabric tape in his drawer, and wrapped the handle three times around the base. Then he threaded a loop of it around his wrist and secured it. If his grip slipped, the knife didn't go anywhere.
The metal clothes-drying rod leaned against the wardrobe — hollow tube, roughly a meter in length, aluminium. He picked it up and tested the weight. Light enough to swing quickly, sturdy enough for a few hits before the metal fatigues. Temporary. Better than nothing.
The wooden stool beside his desk was four-legged and heavy. He lifted it with one hand. Solid.
He spent forty seconds on the assessment and reached a conclusion: the knife was primary, the stool was a blunt instrument for close quarters, the rod was a reach weapon he'd drop the moment it became inconvenient.
Then he pressed his back against the door and looked through the peephole.
The corridor was empty.
He waited.
Thirty seconds. A full minute.
Then he heard them on the stairwell — a few creatures moving in that wrong, too-eager way, claws dragging fractionally against concrete with each step, accompanied by the low, excited chattering that seemed to be their resting state. Three or four of them. Moving upward.
Kael watched through the peephole as the first reached the third-floor corridor.
Then the second.
Then the third.
They paused at the top of the stairwell, heads swivelling, nostrils flaring. One was tracking something — a blood trail on the floor, dark and thin, leading upward from one of the lower floors. It pointed, and the others made sounds of agreement, and all three started climbing toward the fourth floor, their shuffling footsteps receding up the stairwell.
Kael kept watching.
Fifteen seconds after the three had gone, a fourth emerged from the stairwell.
It was noticeably different from the others.
Wider. Not taller — goblins were uniformly short, the tallest barely reaching his shoulder — but broader. The kind of breadth that looked less like muscle and more like it had simply accumulated more of itself over time. Its belly pushed against the scraps of cloth it wore. Its breathing was audible through the door — heavy, wet, each exhale slightly laboured. It was dragging a wooden club behind it, the head scraping the floor, which was why it had fallen behind. Too much weight, not enough stamina to keep pace.
It reached the corridor, stopped, and looked around with an expression Kael could only describe as inconvenienced.
Then it started moving toward the fourth floor at a pace that suggested it knew it was never going to catch up and had decided to stop pretending otherwise.
Kael watched it go.
His grip tightened on the stool.
The logical part of his mind was constructing the scenario methodically. One target, separated from its group. Slow. Occupied. Current distance: approximately four metres and closing toward the stairwell.
The less logical part of his mind was doing something it didn't usually do.
It was afraid.
Not the sharp fear of an immediate threat — nothing was threatening him directly. This was something lower and quieter, the kind of fear that came from understanding the gap between having done something and not having done it. He had never hit a living creature with intent to injure it. He had never stabbed anything. He had accumulated roughly ten thousand hours of simulated violence across every genre of game that offered it, and none of that had any sensible connection to the action of raising a stool over his head and bringing it down on a living skull.
He noticed the fear. Filed it. Noted that it was present but not relevant to the next thirty seconds.
The goblin was three metres from the stairwell now.
He took a breath, and then he made a deliberate noise.
The door handle. He grabbed it from the inside and rattled it — two sharp clicks, the way it always sounded when someone was coming in from outside, because the mechanism had been loose for two semesters and everyone on this floor knew the sound.
The goblin stopped.
It turned its head.
Its eyes — small, dark red around the iris, catching the corridor light in a way that didn't look like any animal Kael had ever seen — fixed on the door.
It stood very still for a moment, clearly processing. Then it turned away from the stairwell and started moving back toward room 312.
Step by slow step.
Kael stepped away from the door. He crossed to the wall beside the hinges in four quiet paces, positioned himself to the left where he'd have the widest swing on the right side of the opening. The stool was in both hands. He kept his weight on the balls of his feet and tried to control his breathing, which had gotten faster without his permission.
The footsteps stopped outside.
Very close. A metre away, maybe less. He could hear the breathing clearly now — heavy, ragged, carrying a smell he didn't have a word for, something damp and sour and wrong. The door handle rattled experimentally. Then stopped.
Silence.
Kael counted to three.
Then he drove his full bodyweight into the door.
The handle caught the goblin directly in the face.
BAMM!!!
The creature was down, the door swinging wide, and Kael was already moving. He crossed the threshold, raised the stool in both hands, and swung it downward.
BAMM!!
The impact sent a shock up through his palms and wrists, jarring his shoulders. The goblin hadn't had time to scream. It was on its back, one eye socket caved inward, arms moving in weak, uncoordinated patterns, completely disoriented.
Numbers materialised in his vision.
[ -6 HP ]
He adjusted the angle. Swung again.
[ -5 HP ] [ -6 HP ] [ -5 HP ]
The stool was already unstable — he could feel the leg wobbling with each impact, the joint giving, wood shearing. One more swing and it would come apart. The goblin's HP bar was a thin strip in the corner of his retinal display, dropping steadily, the creature no longer trying to get up or fight back. It had stopped being a threat. It was still alive, technically, but alive in the way that a phone with three percent battery is still technically on.
He let the stool go. Picked up the fruit knife.
His hand was not entirely steady.
He pressed the blade against the goblin's chest and pushed.
[ -9 HP ]
The HP bar emptied.
The goblin went completely still.
For a moment, Kael just stood there in the doorway of his own dorm room, holding a kitchen knife, looking at a creature that had stopped existing as a threat and become, instead, a problem of a different category — a corpse, leaking dark green fluid onto the corridor floor, flies already finding it from somewhere, the smell getting worse by the second.
Then the system chimed.
[ Goblin Eliminated. Contribution: 100% ]
[ EXP Gained: +4 ]
[ Item Dropped: Gray Mana Orb ×1 ]
[ Lucky Dice Triggered. Bonus Drop Generated. ]
[ Item Dropped: Gold Mana Orb ×1 ]
He read it twice.
First kill. Lucky Dice triggered on the first kill. The forty percent had landed immediately, and the bonus was a gold-tier orb against a common enemy — the exact gap between his sigil and any other version.
He picked up both orbs without touching the body.
[ Open Gray Mana Orb? ]
He confirmed.
[ Gray Mana Orb Opened. Received: 1 Gold Coin. ]
He confirmed the gold.
[ Gold Mana Orb Opened. Received: Goblin Chest Plate (Green-tier). ]
[ Goblin Chest Plate ]
[ Armor Type: Leather | Rarity: Green ]
[ DEF: +9 | Attribute Resistance: +4 ]
[ Durability: 20/20 | Level Requirement: LV0 ]
[ Bonus: STR +2, CON +2 ]
[ Set Effect: Goblin Set — equip 3/5 pieces to trigger set bonus. ]
[ Note: You don't want to know what this is made from. ]
He equipped it without hesitating.
The stat panel updated immediately. Defense climbed from zero to sixteen. His HP was still fifty, but the effective survivability behind it had changed — the same incoming hit that would have connected directly now had to punch through material and resistance first.
Green-tier armor.
First kill.
He stood in the dim corridor and allowed himself exactly three seconds of something that wasn't quite satisfaction but was close enough to serve the same function.
Then he heard footsteps on the stairs.
Coming down.
The three that had gone up were returning.