He traced it. Not the feeling of power, but the routes it took. The essence left his core and travelled along pathways that had been carved by the last month of fighting, cycling through muscle groups that were used constantly, tightening into lines along his forearms where claws manifested, splitting and rejoining near his shoulders where scales had grown. Some paths were clean and wide, almost comfortable. Others pinched, narrowing at old injuries or underdeveloped channels, forcing the flow to slow and grind. Every constriction added resistance. Every resistance added heat. Kaizer found those points and held his attention on them until the discomfort sharpened into information. The channels didn’t expand on their own anymore. Not at this density. He could feel where the limit was, the point where increased pressure stopped being growth and started being damage. Kaizer didn’t back away from it. He adjusted his posture, tightened his core, and forced the essence to move against the bottlenecks one at a time, expanding the pathways the same way he had expanded his tolerance in combat. Steady pressure. No panic. No surging. He widened each channel in small increments, letting tissue accept the new load, letting the flow stabilise before moving on.
Pain built gradually, then held. It started behind his sternum, spread through his back, and settled in his arms where his channels were most reinforced and most abused. Sweat formed along his spine and rolled down into the waistband of his trousers, but Kaizer didn’t shift. He kept the essence moving, kept the rhythm even, and watched the moment the flow changed. The pressure didn’t just move through the expanded paths. It began to use them naturally, choosing the wider routes, smoothing itself into something closer to true circulation. His body responded without hesitation. His breathing deepened. His heart slowed. His regeneration tightened into the background, not healing anything dramatic, but constantly correcting small micro-tears caused by the new load. Kaizer felt his fangs ache in his gums, then settle. The scales on his neck warmed, then cooled. It was all connected. The blessings weren’t separate perks. They were part of the same system now, integrated into a body that was being forced to carry more than it used to.
Time slipped. Kaizer refused to waste attention on counting minutes. The world outside the tent continued without him. People walked past. Someone argued loudly enough for the words to bleed through canvas. A child cried. A hammer struck wood in a steady rhythm for a while, then stopped. Kaizer kept circulating until the bottlenecks he’d identified were no longer bottlenecks, and then he went deeper. He pushed essence into pathways he hadn’t relied on in fights, routes that fed the core itself, subtle connections around the spine and through the organs where the scales now sat as living armour. The flow met resistance there, not because it was damaged, but because it was untested. Kaizer held the pressure carefully, wary of forcing something open too quickly and tearing what couldn’t be repaired mid-fight. Those routes had never needed to carry essence like this before, but Kaizer knew the truth of it. Stepping into a new realm required change, and change didn’t happen gently. He guided the flow where he could, pressed where he had to, and waited for the tremble in his channels to become stable strength.
A System message pressed at the edge of his awareness. Kaizer refused to acknowledge it. He refused to open his eyes. He didn’t break circulation. Even if the wave had started, he would be useless in this state. He needed the shift to complete, not half-form, not incomplete. If he stopped now, the pressure would settle into the old pattern. The channels would tighten again. Growth would stall, and he would walk out with the same limits he’d entered with. Kaizer kept the rhythm steady and pushed through, jaw set, focus narrowed to the flow and nothing else. People might die while he sat here. Kaizer understood that and kept circulating anyway.
Outside, the camp changed temperature. The sound did too. Shouting became coordinated for a short time, then broke into panic again. Someone ran past the tent hard enough that the canvas shook on its poles. Kaizer heard distant horns, then the deep impact of something heavy striking wood. The first hit was followed by a second and third, and each one carried the same message. The wave had begun. The outer walls were taking contact immediately. Kaizer’s jaw tightened, but his posture didn’t change. He kept the essence moving through his widened pathways and drove the pressure back into his core, forcing it to accept the new circulation without buckling. He felt the core respond, not with expansion, but with a shift in density and structure, a tightening that stopped feeling like brute compression and started feeling like organisation. The pressure stopped fighting his channels. It began to match them, flowing with intent rather than force.
The moment it locked into place, his core settled. The weight beneath his ribs became stable, like a stone set into a cut foundation. Kaizer held the circulation for one more full cycle, then another, testing for wobble, testing for strain. There was none. The flow was slower than it had been before, but it carried more force in every pass. He exhaled through his nose, ended the cycle with control, and opened his eyes.
[Core Advancement Complete. Core upgraded from: Initiate → Grade F]
Kaizer didn’t feel stronger in the simple way the System always promised. He felt denser. The same body, the same shape, but with more weight behind every movement. He flexed his fingers once, felt his claws sit ready beneath his nails without effort, and stood in a single smooth motion.
[Advancement Available. Please finalise your path.]
A set of windows unfolded across his vision.
====================================
Advancement Available
====================================
You have broken through a threshold and now must make a choice. Please choose one:
- Merge Class and Profession into a single path
- Keep Class and Profession separate
Note: If you merge your Class and Profession, you will no longer receive the benefits of levelling them separately. This is recommended for individuals who focus on a single discipline.
====================================
Kaizer didn’t hesitate. Merging was a shortcut with a cost. It made sense for Hugh, for crafters, for people who lived and died by a single lane of progression. Kaizer wasn’t that. He fought. He harvested. He adapted. He selected the second option and moved on.
[Path confirmed: Class and Profession remain separate.]
[Please choose your upgraded class]
====================================
Select Your Class
====================================
------------------------------------
Uncommon Classes
------------------------------------
Skirmisher
Bestial Fighter
Spear Adept
Vanguard
------------------------------------
Rare Classes
------------------------------------
Bestial Warlord
Feral Spear
Wardbreaker
Bloodstalker
------------------------------------
Epic Classes
------------------------------------
Apex Stalker
Chimeric Warrior
====================================
Kaizer’s attention snagged briefly on Bestial Fighter sitting in the Uncommon list. His current class. That confirmed what he already suspected. Breakthroughs didn’t just raise numbers. They changed the frame the System used to judge what he was. A class that had been Rare at the start of the tutorial could be Uncommon at Grade F.
The tent shuddered again, harder this time. A crack like splitting timber snapped through the air, followed by a roar of voices. Someone screamed a name. Someone else screamed and didn’t form words at all.
Kaizer forced himself to keep reading.
Wardbreaker felt out of place the moment he looked at it. Too specialised. Too tied to mechanics he didn’t understand yet. Bloodstalker was clearer, and worse for him. Stealth. Human targets. Humanoid targets. Killing people who couldn’t fight back. Kaizer didn’t pretend he was a good man, but he wasn’t building his future around that kind of work.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
That left four that mattered.
====================================
Class: Bestial Warlord (Rare)
====================================
A direct upgrade to the Bestial Fighter.
You retain your feral instincts and front-line dominance while gaining the capacity to exert pressure through lesser beasts and battlefield presence.
Primary Focus: Control (New Stat)
Secondary Focus: Instinct, Mind
Stat Growth per Level:
23 total (15 automatic, 8 manual)
====================================
The stat growth alone was a brutal jump. It also came with the one thing Kaizer didn’t want to rely on. Control. Beasts. Followers. A “presence” that sounded like leadership whether he wanted it or not. Kaizer could fight beside people. He could protect people when it made sense. He wasn’t interested in commanding a pack, not when he barely trusted the humans around him.
Onto the next.
====================================
Class: Feral Spear (Rare)
====================================
You drive instinct into your spear work, focusing on forward pressure and destructive engagement.
Primary Focus: Instinct
Secondary Focus: Strength
Stat Growth per Level:
24 total (15 automatic, 9 manual)
====================================
It read like a path built for a man who wanted to turn the spear into a battering ram. Kaizer liked his spear. He also liked control. When he wanted to tear something apart, he used claws and teeth. If he chose this, he’d be building his whole future around a single weapon and a single approach.
He flicked his gaze down to the Epic options, and the jump in potential was immediate.
====================================
Class: Apex Stalker (Epic)
====================================
A predator-class built to hunt targets above your weight through tracking, timing, and decisive strikes. Your skills in tracking and stealth are unparalleled, even to the point of invisibility. You make use of your new primary trait Perception, along with secondary traits of agility and mind, your growth will come from stalking your prey. Your claws, your weapon and your fangs the complement.
Stat Growth per Level:
29 total (20 automatic, 9 manual)
====================================
It was the same problem as Bloodstalker, dressed in a cleaner title. It would reward patience, ambush, and perfect opening strikes. Kaizer could do that. He already had. But it narrowed him into an assassin’s path, and Kaizer didn’t want to survive by being unseen. He wanted to survive by being impossible to put down.
His eyes moved to the last option.
====================================
Class: Chimeric Warrior (Epic)
====================================
You walk the path of integration.
Combining your bestial and human nature, you gain the strength of both but be careful, for balance is unstable at best. Using tooth, claw, or crafted weapons, you get up close to destroy your foe. You will make use of anything needed. Synchronisation is key.
Primary Focus: Synchronisation (New Stat)
Secondary Focus: Instinct, Strength
Stat Growth per Level:
33 total (23 automatic, 10 manual)
====================================
Kaizer stared at the word synchronisation until it stopped being a title and became a warning. Balance. Integration. Instability when divided. It fit the way his body had changed. Fur and scale. Claw and spear. Two divine blessings sitting in the same frame without tearing him apart. It also fit the way his Dao seeds had begun to form. Ferocity. Will. Drive and control. It wasn’t a comfortable path, but Kaizer hadn’t survived a month of the tutorial by choosing comfort.
A fresh impact boomed outside. This one didn’t sound like a hit. It sounded like something giving way.
Kaizer made the decision.
[Class Confirmed: Chimeric Warrior (Epic)]
Kaizer felt a glow come over him. He felt his core settle. There were no fireworks but it felt as though his core was linking. The flow through his channels became cleaner, and for the first time, he could feel his consciousness split. On one side, he felt human. On the other, an amalgamation of wolf and snake. Right now they seemed to be in balance, he would need to maintain that.
[New Stat Acquired: Synchronisation]
[New Trait Acquired: Dual Consciousness]
That didn’t feel like a lot, but Kaizer could tell it would be huge later. He needed to gain a level first before he could see where his stat points would be allocated. The system didn’t wait for him to think any longer though as new windows appeared in his vision.
[Please select your profession]
====================================
Select Your Profession
====================================
------------------------------------
Inferior Professions
------------------------------------
Salvager
Harvester
------------------------------------
Common Professions
------------------------------------
Herbalist
Butcher
Warden
------------------------------------
Uncommon Professions
------------------------------------
Field Butcher
Trophy Render
Core Harvester
====================================
Kaizer chose not to even look at inferior and common professions because…. Fuck that. one stat point from inferior was just ridiculous. Looking at the remaining three options, he pondered. Field Butcher was obvious. Faster harvesting under pressure, better yield on meat and hide, the kind of profession that turned corpses into supplies quickly. Trophy Render would push him toward rare parts, glands, fangs, venom sacs, things worth more than rations. It would make him richer, not safer.
Core Harvester sat there like a knife laid on a clean cloth. Practical. Precise. Built for what the next phase was going to become.
Kaizer selected it.
====================================
Core Harvester (Uncommon)
====================================
You have become even more adept at killing monsters. You now specialise in harvesting and preserving their cores. Whilst you still have an innate knowledge of herbs and monster parts, this is not your focus.
Passive Effects:
- Instinctive efficiency for extracting useful materials from beasts
- Slight affinity for identifying herbs
- Slight affinity when butchering
- Affinity for core harvesting
- Reduced chance of core fracture during extraction
- When coating your harvesting tool in essence, you slowly stabilise cores during removal
- Passive increase of materials during harvest
Active Effects: Seal Core (Limited): Temporarily bind a removed core in a stabilised state to prevent rapid decay.
Stat growth per level:
12 total (12 automatic)
====================================
Kaizer quickly flashed his character screen to confirm his upgrades.
====================================
STATUS WINDOW
====================================
Name: Kaizer Harth
Race: Human (Beast Touched)
Class: Chimeric Warrior (Epic – Level 25)
Profession: Core Harvester (Uncommon – Level 25)
Core Rank: F
Essence Capacity: Rank F
------------------------------------
ATTRIBUTES
------------------------------------
Strength: 37 (+15)
Endurance: 33 (+3)
Agility: 40 (+8)
Perception: 44
Mind: 30
Instinct: 70
Synchronisation: 1
Free Points: 4
------------------------------------
TRAITS
------------------------------------
Divine Blessing of Silver
Divine Blessing of Verdana
Instinctive Regeneration
Feral Insight
Dual Consciousness
------------------------------------
DAO
------------------------------------
Dao of Ferocity (Seed)
Dao of Will (Seed)
------------------------------------
SKILLS
------------------------------------
Claws of Silver (Epic)
Essence Siphon (Legendary)
Fangs of Verdana (Epic)
Silent Stalker (Uncommon)
Essence Coating (Common)
Triple Thrust (Inferior)
Beast Extraction (Inferior)
------------------------------------
Equipment
------------------------------------
Partizan Spear of Command (Rare – F)
Reinforced Hunter’s Vest (Rare – F)
Crude Leather Boots (Inferior – Initiate)
Crude Leather Wrappings (Inferior – Initiate)
Quickdraw Utility Belt (Uncommon – Initiate)
Throwing Daggers (Uncommon – Initiate)
Harvester’s Knife (Common)
Bracelet of Holding (Soulbound)
====================================
The moment he closed the window, Kaizer’s awareness expanded outward again, and the fight slammed into him. Sound. Smell. Heat. The tent was shaking now, not from footsteps, but from repeated impacts hitting the camp’s outer ring. The canvas poles creaked. Someone shouted Hugh’s name twice, then didn’t shout it a third time.
Kaizer didn’t waste another second. He grabbed his spear, stepped out of the tent, and the camp hit him like a wall.
The outer barricades were already failing.
It wasn’t subtle. Whole sections had been chewed down into broken timber and rope. Makeshift panels lay flat, crushed and splintered. People were scrambling over debris, trying to drag planks back into place while others fought over the top of it, weapons rising and falling in desperate rhythm. The first wave wasn’t probing. It was hitting hard and fast, aiming for collapse rather than attrition.
Kaizer saw Gareth near one of the damaged corridors, standing high enough to be visible, shouting orders that were being obeyed by some and ignored by most. He looked like he’d been waiting for this moment, but even he couldn’t sell structure over the sound of walls breaking. People ran past him with wide eyes and empty hands. Fighters pressed forward, then fell back when the line buckled. A woman stumbled over a fallen cart and didn’t get back up.
Elira’s section held.
It stood out immediately because it didn’t look like panic. It looked like work. Her wall was taking hits, but it wasn’t giving. People moved in a practiced rotation, spears thrusting through gaps, shields braced, two fighters stepping in when one stepped out. Aaron was there, watching angles, calling short instructions, not speeches. Elira herself was on the line, calm and brutal, and the monsters in front of her weren’t breaking through.
Kaizer’s gaze snapped back to the weak sections because that’s where the camp would die. A corridor between camps had collapsed entirely, turning into an open wound the horde was pouring through. The defenders there weren’t losing because they were weak. They were losing because the wall was gone.
Kaizer ran.
His new core didn’t make him faster in a flashy way. It made every step carry more force. The ground hit his boots and returned the energy cleanly. His breathing stayed steady even as he sprinted. He reached the breach as three people were dragged down at once, and the moment his spear entered the fight, the world narrowed the way it always did. Intent. Target. Motion.
He drove the spear through a creature’s throat, ripped it free, and followed with his claws, tearing down anything that got too close. The difference was immediate. Not because his stats had changed. Because his flow had. Essence followed his intent without lag, and his body didn’t protest the density it carried. He didn’t need to force it. He used it.
Somewhere beyond the treeline, the Centaur Strategist watched the settlement break. Its gaze moved along the outer ring, marking weak corridors and the points where ramshackle timber had already started to splinter. The horde followed its intent. Pressure shifted away from Elira’s reinforced section and hit the soft spots harder, widening gaps and turning corridors into open wounds. The fighting sounded different when walls failed. Less rhythm. More screaming.
Then Kaizer’s presence surfaced.
Not a shout. Not a flare. A dense, steady pressure cutting through the noise. Two divine weights carried in one body. The Strategist’s ears flicked once. It had expected him already past the wall, waiting for him, for the final fight. He wasn’t. That changed nothing. It drew an arrow and wrapped it in deep blue essence.
The shot was perfect.
The arrow struck the ground beside Kaizer’s foot hard enough to crack stone and spit grit up his shin. It didn’t touch him. It didn’t need to. Kaizer froze for a heartbeat, then lifted his eyes.
The beasts around him shifted.
Not fleeing. Not hesitating. They stepped aside in pairs, opening a corridor through the press. Claws lowered. Jaws turned away. The pressure of the wave became a path leading toward the treeline, straight and deliberate. Kaizer’s skin prickled. That wasn’t instinct. That was control.
Dalen’s camp saw it first. Their wall had already been breached, their line turned into a knot of bodies and panic, but they had sight lines into the clearing. Heads turned as the monsters parted. Then Kaizer’s aura washed over them… dense, layered, wrong in the way divinity always was. People who had been backing away planted their feet again. Spears came up. Shouts sharpened into something closer to anger. They pressed harder, not because it was safe, but because the sight of Kaizer being singled out made them believe there was still a point.
Elira caught the movement on the edge of her vision while she drove her spear down into a climbing beast. Her eyes met Kaizer’s for a fraction of a second across the chaos. Relief hit her hard and hot, then she crushed it down and turned back to the wall. Her people needed hands, not hesitation.
Gareth stood near the centre where he could be seen. He was still talking, still trying to shape panic into roles, but the sound of splintering timber swallowed him. Essence thickened in the air, spilled and wild. His core took it in without consent. The flow inside him surged, hot and uneven. Not enough to break. Enough to blur his control. Gareth’s voice cracked mid-order. People ran past him without looking. The only one who stayed close was Mira, eyes wide, waiting.
Gareth leaned toward her and spoke low, quick. Not a speech. A plan.
Kaizer watched the corridor the beasts had opened and measured it. He stepped forward once, spear low, claws half-extended. The path held. Two beasts on either side tracked him and did nothing. Another ahead turned its head away like it had been told not to look. Kaizer walked.
He moved through bodies that should have been fighting him. The roar of the clearing dulled behind him. The air cooled as the trees closed in. The path led straight to the treeline, and beyond it, to the Centaur.
It waited where the forest opened into a narrow line of sight. Tall. Armoured. Bow lowered, not out of mercy, but out of certainty. Its eyes moved over Kaizer. It noticed fur and scale, spear and claw, the way his stance held both human restraint and beast readiness without wobble.
The Centaur spoke, voice calm and close enough that Kaizer heard it clearly over the distant screaming.
“Ready?”