He stood there for what might have been a long time and might have been a few seconds. It was hard to say. His hand was still in the position it had been in when it was on the goblin's throat. He lowered it slowly and looked at the palm. The skin was streaked dark with blood that was not his.

His shoulder hurt.

His arms were shaking.

His stomach was in his throat.

He looked down at the goblin.

It was, somehow, smaller than it had been a minute ago. Crumpled on the moss. The yellow eyes were still open and still hating him from somewhere very far away that they couldn't reach anymore. Blood pooled black under the body. Already the dark green skin was beginning to lose its color, going gray.

(*I killed it.*)

Something crashed in his chest. A thing he hadn't known was holding upright went down.

(*I held it. I held it by the throat and I — I did that. Like — like it was a thing I did. Like it was normal. Like it was just a problem to solve.*)

He stumbled three steps to a tree and was sick.

Not much came up. There was nothing to come up. Bile, mostly, hot and acid and burning his throat and his nose. His body convulsed around it the way bodies did when they were trying to expel something more than the contents of the stomach. He braced one hand against the bark and shook for what felt like a long time.

[It's normal, Dante,] said ALICE in his head, gently. [It's your first kill, and even though it was self-defense, the body reacts this way. The mind reacts this way. It doesn't make you weak. It makes you human.]

(*I don't feel human. I feel like a thing.*)

[It was him or you. He attacked first. Without provocation. You defended your life. There is no shame in this, no guilt.]

(*I know. I* know*. But that's not what's bothering me.*)

A pause.

[Then what is.]

He breathed.

(*How fast it became normal. The first dagger going in, I — I almost threw up right there. The second one — I mean the one I cut his hand with — I didn't even think about it. I just did it. And then I had my hand on his throat and I — I didn't hesitate. Not for a second. I —*)

[The competences took over.]

(*Yeah. They did. But the* choice *to fight — you said it yourself — that was mine. And the second time I cut him, the third time, the* hand on the throat *— those were also mine. The system didn't choose those. I did.*)

A silence. ALICE was not, it seemed, going to lie to him about it.

[Yes,] she said finally. [Those were yours.]

He sat with that.

After a while he wiped his mouth with the inside of his sleeve and pushed himself off the tree and turned, slowly, to look at the body again.

He walked back to it.

He crouched down. His knees screamed but he ignored them. The goblin's face was turned half toward the moss now, one yellow eye open and looking at nothing, the wide mouth slightly parted around its yellow teeth.

Dante looked at it for a long time.

(*I don't know what your name was.*)

(*If you had one.*)

(*If your kind has names.*)

He took a breath. It came out shakier than he wanted it to.

"I'm sorry," he said.

The word sounded very small in the forest.

The goblin did not respond.

He hadn't expected it to.

He stayed there a few more seconds, then made himself look away.

---

In the corner of his sight, the menu offered him two new options he hadn't seen before.

[ANALYZE] [LOOT]

He selected ANALYZE. Information unfolded in his head — silent this time, no ALICE narration, just the data settling into place the way knowledge settled when you read it carefully.

[Competence: Monsters → Lv.2.]
[Wild Goblin: low-rank creature. Often used as fodder by greater forces. Considerable agility, low resistance — soft flesh, brittle bones. Limited intelligence but developed predatory instinct.]
[CRITICAL POINT: BACK — vulnerable.]
[RESISTANCE: Bludgeoning.]
[WEAKNESSES: Slashing, Piercing.]

(*So the back is the critical point.*)

(*I got lucky. I hit it there because it had its back to me, not because I knew.*)

(*Slashing and piercing both work. Blunt doesn't. If I ever fight one of these and don't have a blade, I am — well, I am dead, basically.*)

He selected LOOT.

The world *changed*.

White lines of light overlaid themselves on the goblin's body. Glowing seams. They circled the ears in clean precise arcs — *cut here.* They picked out three of the teeth in soft halos — *take these.* They drew a vertical line down the center of the goblin's chest that pulsed gently, and inside the line, a brighter point of light glowed under where the heart would have been.

[Mana Core — Rank: LOW.]

He stared at it for a few seconds.

(*This is — this is too efficient. They built me a butcher's manual.*)

[The system makes use of what is given,] ALICE said. [The world here is harsh. People who do not learn to use what they kill often die hungry next to bodies they could have eaten.]

(*That's bleak.*)

[That is the world.]

He took a breath, set his jaw, and went to work.

He started with the ears. The first cut was the worst — the skin was rubbery and resistant and the dagger had to *saw* through it, producing a wet uneven sound that made his stomach lurch all over again. The second ear came faster because by the second ear his body had figured out the angle and the pressure and the muscle memory of *where to press*.

That was when it hit him.

He was halfway through the second tooth — leveraging the dagger under the canine the way the LOOT overlay had shown him, twisting carefully so the root popped clean instead of breaking — when he realized that his hands were not shaking anymore. That he was not breathing wrong. That he was working with the brisk efficient calm of someone doing a chore.

He stopped.

Looked at his hands.

The right one was wrist-deep in the goblin's mouth, two fingers steadying the lower jaw, the dagger gripped underhand for leverage. There was blood up to the second knuckle. The blood was already starting to dry tacky between his fingers.

(*Oh.*)

(*Oh, no.*)

(*That was fast.*)

He sat very still.

The horror of the kill itself, he had been ready for. The horror that came now was something else, something he hadn't been ready for at all — *how quickly he had stopped being horrified.* How much faster than he would have predicted his body had decided that this was just a thing to do. *Cut here. Twist here. Pull. Set down. Move on.*

He had been gentle with his food his whole life. He had cried about a fish his mother brought home from the market when he was eight. He had not been able to look at a roast chicken once he understood what a chicken was. And here, three minutes after his first kill, he was reaching into a mouth and prying out teeth like he was unscrewing bolts.

[Dante.]

(*Yeah.*)

[Breathe.]

(*I am.*)

[Then keep working. The horror you are feeling is not at the work. It is at how easy the work is becoming. That is a different thing. You are right to feel it. You are wrong to stop in the middle of it.]

He breathed.

He kept working.

He pulled the third tooth. Set it with the others. Then he made the long vertical cut down the center of the chest the way the overlay had shown him, parted the rib bones with a careful pressure that made them snap with small dry cracks, and reached in between the lungs to where the small bright thing was waiting.

It was about the size of a marble. Warm in his palm. Pulsing faintly, like something alive — though the body around it was very dead.

He cradled it for a second before he put it away.

[LOOT ACQUIRED:]
[ — Goblin Ears (2)]
[ — Goblin Canines (3)]
[ — Mana Core LOW (1)]

The items vanished from his hand. Not dissolved — *absorbed*, into a place that was not here, somewhere the inventory lived. Inside his head he could feel them now, tagged and stored, ready to be called back.

(*Convenient.*)

He stood up. His knees, which he had been ignoring, ignored back. He swayed for a second, found his balance, and looked down at what he'd done.

The goblin looked smaller still. The chest was open. The blood had stopped pooling. The yellow eyes were finally beginning to dull.

He looked at it for a long second.

Then, very deliberately, he scuffed some moss over the worst of the mess. Not to hide it. Just so the next thing that came along the path didn't immediately understand what had happened here. A small piece of decency he could afford. He thought the cat would have approved.

(*Sorry,* he thought again, at the goblin. Not aloud this time. *I'll try not to get used to this.*)

(*I don't think I'll keep that promise.*)

(*But I'll try.*)

He turned and walked away from the cave.