The forest didn't make a sound for it. It didn't snap a twig. It didn't rustle a leaf. It didn't whisper.
It simply removed sound—as if the entire world forgot that noise existed for a single, held breath.
And then it was there.
The Primordial Watcher bled from the tree line like spilled ink, taller than any memory I had of it, its smooth white mask rotating slowly until it fixed on me. It didn't walk. It didn't float. It simply was, and reality rearranged itself around that fact.
The fragments in my pocket throbbed like a panicked heartbeat.
Good. The bait was working.
The pressure crushed my chest a second later. It wasn't a physical blow—just a raw, overwhelming weight, as if the air itself had decided I shouldn't be standing. My knees buckled. The sealed echo within me shrank, curling in on itself like a terrified animal.
I forced one breath. Then another.
"Plan A…" I gritted out through a clenched jaw. "Environmental abuse… suicidal education."
The Primordial moved—except it didn't actually move. The space between us simply shortened.
No attack animation. No warning. Just existence, pressing closer.
Its attention pinned me in place. Not like a predator studying prey. More like a system examining a faulty file slated for deletion.
The fragments buzzed violently in my hand; I fed more energy into them, keeping them apart, forcing their energies to clash. Their discordant resonance ripped through the air like a broken alarm.
Light. Echo. Instability. To the tutorial, I was a walking alert signal.
The Watcher tilted its mask toward the fragments. The suppression doubled. Black spots chewed at the edges of my vision.
"Come on…" I snarled. "A little closer…"
The ravine waited behind it. My masterpiece. A death trap built of rocks, fear, and stupidity.
I backed away slowly, letting the fear seem natural. Half of it wasn't an act.
The Primordial followed the resonance, drawn like a magnet to the unstable glow. The pressure made my head swim. My legs felt thin, unreal.
No time for fear. No time for dying. Just— One more step. And another.
My heel found the cliff's edge.
The ravine yawned behind me: jagged rocks, broken ledges, darkness thick as tar. To my right, the tilting pillar perched on an angle that gravity must have corrected long ago.
Perfect.
Terrible.
The Primordial was meters away. Its suppression field thrummed silently, applying a weight that sought to crush my sealed core. My fingers went numb. The buzzing fragments shuddered violently.
"Alright…" I whispered. "Now or never."
I cut the resonance.
The discordant screech died instantly. The ringing silence felt like the world exhaling.
In that same moment of relief, I threw myself sideways, rolling, and snatched up the sharp stone I'd hidden hours before.
The Primordial tilted its mask at the vanished signal, confused—a glitch in its programmed certainty.
That hesitation—that fraction of a second—was everything.
I scrambled to my knees and hurled the stone with all my might.
An awkward spin. A desperate arc.
It smashed into the base of the tilting pillar.
The ravine echoed with a deep, grating crack.
The pillar shuddered—shifted—and for one instant, it looked exactly like the memory. Exactly like the plan.
Then the world remembered it wasn't a game.
Instead of falling cleanly, the pillar exploded.
The top half sheared off and tumbled into the ravine. But a huge section—one I hadn't accounted for in my "brilliant strategy"—lurched forward.
Forward, toward us.
The cliff edge cracked and shattered under my boots as much as under the Primordial's presence.
"No—no—NO—!"
The enormous slab of stone dropped straight down, shearing through the ledge and spraying smaller rocks like shrapnel.
One hit my shoulder. Another cracked into my ribs. My breath fled in a silent gasp.
And beneath me, the ground simply disappeared.
I fell.
Sky, rock, shadow—all spinning too fast. A ledge slammed into my hip. Another cracked against my shin. Pain flared white-hot. My sword hilt struck a stone. The air was punched from my lungs in a silent scream.
Dust swallowed everything.
When the world finally stopped falling, I lay sprawled on a cold slab of rock, pain burning in every limb.
I blinked grit from my eyes.
The ravine was choked with debris—shattered stone, broken ledges, dust floating like ash. All my meticulous planning, annihilated in seconds.
And the Primordial Watcher… was still there.
Not intact—far from it. Its shadow-body flickered, pieces detaching and reforming. Its porcelain mask was cracked on one side.
Wounded. But alive.
Its attention found me immediately.
The mask clicked toward me with a sound a jointless face shouldn't make. The suppression poured into the ravine like a tidal wave.
I couldn't stand. I couldn't climb. I couldn't breathe properly.
Plan A: Catastrophic failure.
I pushed myself up—a spike of pain in my side, blinding. The fragments in my pocket vibrated weakly, torn between resonance and collapse.
The Watcher drew closer. Unhurried. No need to rush.
This was the part of the tutorial meant to teach players humility. Or despair.
For one second, the orphan inside me—the boy with the empty core, the one accustomed to losing—accepted it.
Maybe this is where I vanish. Maybe I wasn't supposed to get this far.
But the other part of me—the one that had spent nights hammering my head against unbeatable bosses—refused.
No boss is impossible. It just isn't what the system expects.
Repeating Plan A or forcing a Plan B would end with my death in a boring, predictable way.
I had to outplay more than the terrain. I had to outplay the Watcher's logic.
My eyes scanned the chaos: broken rocks, hanging vines, dust motes swirling in the air. The ravine was no longer what the tutorial had planned.
This was a new map.
One the system didn't know.
The Watcher extended its hand—not dramatically, simply executing the "terminate encounter" command.
My mind seized on a single idea:
Don't treat it like a boss. Treat it like a bug.
Plan C.
No time for diagrams, no time for calculations—only instinct, desperation, and the stubborn refusal to die.
With trembling fingers, I pulled out the fragments.
The Watcher reacted instantly. The suppression field contracted around me like a closing fist.
This time, I didn't cleanly desynchronize them. No clean beacon. No perfect flare.
Just a broken, unstable resonance—a glitch pretending to be an accident.
The ravine air was still thick with dust. Particles. Light. Shadow. Suppression.
Perfect chaos.
The Watcher moved—and for the first time, its silhouette lagged, reality taking a degraded fraction of a second to decide where to place it.
There. There it was.
Plan A had broken the rocks. Plan C would break the rules.
I clenched the fragments and forced a grin at the cracked mask.
"Fine," I whispered. "Let's see what happens when an extra stops playing the tutorial correctly."
The Watcher advanced.
And for an impossible moment—the world hesitated.