The Ashfield Hollow smelled like wet stone and copper.
Riven stood at the dungeon entrance — a jagged tear in the earth roughly the shape of a collapsed doorway, cordoned off with yellow safety tape that two city maintenance workers had clearly stopped caring about months ago. The tape sagged in the middle, one end completely detached, fluttering against the dead grass like a surrendered flag.
No queue. No other Hunters.
It was barely past six in the morning and the reset had triggered at dawn. Most F and E-rank Hunters didn't arrive until mid-morning, after breakfast, after checking the System's public board for a party listings. The serious one — B-rank and above — wouldn't touch a Floor-1 dungeon on principle.
That left a clean two-hour window.
Riven ducked under the tape and dropped into the hollow.
The descent was a rough slope of packed dirt and exposed rock, maybe fifteen meters, opening into a low tunnel that widened after thirty steps into the dungeon's first chamber. The System recognized his Hunter's card the moment he crossed the threshold — he felt it, a faint pressure behind his eyes, like the air pressure changing on a plane — and his status window flickered to show his current location.
ASHFIELD HOLLOW — FLOOR 1
ACTIVE HUNTERS IN DUNGEON: 1
CURRENT MONSTER ACTIVE: RESET STATE (HIGH)
High density. Right. He'd forgotten how packed the first chamber got in the reset window. In his previous life, he'd learned about the hidden room from a survey report he'd read at 22. He'd never actually come here at sixteen.
He stopped walking and listened.
Scratching. Multiple sources, spread across the chamber ahead. The low, chittering sound that Hollow Crawlers made when they were feeding — mandibles against stone, legs tapping out uneven rhythms.
Riven pulled up his skill window and activated Pattern Recognition deliberately, something he'd learned to do consciously rather than wait for the passive trigger. The skill didn't transform his vision or overlay the world with glowing markers the way combat-oriented detection skills did. It was subtler than that. It was like adjusting the focus on a camera lens — suddenly the scratching resolved into distinct sources, and his mind began sorting them automatically.
Six Crawlers. Spread in a loose cluster left of center. Two outliers near the far wall, moving independently. One sound slightly off — heavier, slower — near the chamber's right passage.
That was a Hollow Brute. Juvenile, probably. Still twice his size.
Combat Power Rating of four. No attack skills. No armor. A borrowed hunting knife from the shelter's equipment loaner — technically for clearing vegetation, the liability waiver had specified, which he found genuinely funny — and eleven years of experience crammed into a 16 year old body that hadn't done a single push-up in recent memory.
He stood in the tunnel mouth and thought for seven seconds.
Then he picked up two rocks from the ground, weighed them in his palm, and threw the first one hard to the left.
It cracked against the far wall. The two outlier Crawlers spun toward the sound — he heard their legs scrape against stone in sharp unison — and the cluster left of center shifted, the chittering briefly spiking before settling.
He threw the second rock to the right, shorter distance, softer impact.
The Brute moved. Heavy footsteps, slow but definite, angling toward the right wall.
Riven walked into the chamber.
He stayed low, moved along the left wall where the shadow pooled deepest, and kept his breathing shallow. Hollow Crawlers had poor eyesight — they hunted through vibration and hear signature. Moving slowly reduced vibration. The dungeon's ambient cold helped with heat. Neither countermeasure was perfect, but perfect wasn't the goal.
Just good enough to reach the passage.
He counted his steps. Twelve. Fifteen. The nearest Crawler was four meters to his right, head down, feeding on something he chose not to look at closely. Its shell was mottled gray-brown, roughly the size of a large dog, six legs ending in a hooked claws that left shallow gouges in the stone floor with every step.
Twenty steps. The passage entrance was visible — a darker rectangle cut into the chamber's far wall, partially obscured by a collapsed section of ceiling.
The Crawler to his right stopped feeding.
Riven stopped moving.
The Crawler lifted its head. Mandibles worked silently. The two small eyes on its forward carapece were essentially decorative — vestigial, the survery reports said — but the heat-sensing pits along its jaw line were not.
Three seconds. Four.
Riven was close enough to smell it — something like ammonia and damp earth.
He didn't move. Didn't breathe. Ran the numbers instead. A Crawler's heat-sense had a reliable range of about two meters in ambient dungeon temperatures. He was at four meters. Borderline. The collapsed ceiling section between them was blocking partial line-of-sense.
The Crawler lowered its head and resumed feeding.
Riven exhaled through his nose and covered the remaining distance in eighteen careful steps.
The passage swallowed him whole.
The hidden room was exactly where he remembered it from the survey report — except, of course, he was remembering a document he wouldn't read for another six years. That distinction had stopped feeling strange somewhere around the third corridor turn.
Small chamber. Perfectly circular, which was unusual — dungeon architecture was almost never geometric, which was part of why this room appeared in the report at all. Stone walls, no Crawlers, and in the center of the floor, a chest the color of old charcoal with a System seal glowing faintly on the lid.
Riven crossed the room, knelt in front of the chest, and opened it.
ITEM ACQUIRED: SKILL SCROLL — TIER 2
SKILL: VOID STEP (ACTIVE)
"Move through a space as though you were never there. Short-range. Low cooldown. Scales with Cognition."
He read the description twice.
Void Step. He'd seen this skill exactly once in his previous life — on a B-rank Rogue who'd paid thirty thousand credits for it at auction and treated it like a state secret.
It scaled with Cognition.
His primary stat.
Riven sat back on his heels and looked at the scroll in his hands for a long moment. Then something crossed his face — not quite a smile, but the shape of one. Brief. Gone before it fully formed.
He tucked the scroll inside his jacket.
Alright.
Now we're starting.