Insomniac Player

"I want you to enter the town again."

Damien stopped walking away before he’d even really started. "...Again?"

"Two-day-old intel." Doctor Smoke didn’t look up from her cigarette. "Confirm it’s still good."

"I’ve already got enough. If the routes shifted once, they’ll shift again. Going back in alone doesn’t get us anything new."

"Wasn’t a request." Her eyes came up and locked onto his. "You’re the scout. Scouts scout. Go."

He held still. Every part of him was arguing against it, hundreds of disciplined soldiers down there, one wrong sound and the whole town would know exactly where he was standing.

"If you can’t handle recon," Doctor Smoke said, flat, "you shouldn’t have taken the job."

That landed harder than he wanted it to, mostly because she wasn’t wrong. He exhaled through his nose. "...Fine."

He turned without another word and started down toward Ironfall.

Behind him, the other four settled in to wait. Doctor Smoke leaned back against a tree trunk, cigarette between two fingers. Madam Marvel closed her eyes and started pulling mana back into herself, slow and steady. Naked Nun stretched out across the grass like she’d been waiting all day for an excuse to lie down.

DeluluGirl watched Damien vanish over the rise, a small crease forming between her eyebrows. "...Leader."

Doctor Smoke didn’t open her eyes. "What."

"Does Bestie have a Return Stone?"

"He’d better." She took another drag. "If he walked into an aggressive gate without one, that’s on him."

Delulu’s mouth pulled into a pout. "...That’s mean."

"No scout is stupid enough to walk into a gate like this one without a Return Stone."

Damien, several hundred meters ahead and moving fast, had no idea what a Return Stone even was.

His steps stayed light, his breathing even, eyes tracking every shift of movement ahead of him. He hadn’t gone far when a chime rang out inside his own skull.

Ding.

He flinched at the sound of it.

➤[Warning...]

➤[Host Behavioural Deviation Detected.]

➤[Nightwalker Fragment Synchronisation: 10%]

➤[Basic Class Benefits are hereby awarded.]

"...What?"

The pain hit before he could finish the thought. Heat exploded through every muscle at once, like something had lit a fuse under his skin.

"Agh!" He dropped to one knee.

LUBDUB

LUBDUB

LUBDUB

His pulse slammed against his ribs hard enough to hurt on its own. Blood moved like molten metal through his veins. His bones shook. Blue lightning crawled across his skin in thin bright lines and vanished again just as fast.

His muscles seized on their own. His breath came out ragged and short. "...What’s happening..."

The heat kept climbing instead of fading, nothing like ordinary pain, more like something buried deep inside him had finally cracked open and was clawing its way to the surface.

Then, all at once, it stopped.

He opened his eyes to a world that had gone sharp at the edges. Grass rustling hundreds of meters off reached him clean and clear. He could pick out individual footsteps somewhere inside Ironfall’s walls, could hear the fabric of a banner snapping in the wind well before he could see it move.

"...Impossible." He pulled up his profile.

➤[Player Profile]

Name: Damien

Alias: Sleepless

Level: 10

Class: Nightwalker (Uncommon)

Class Status: Synchronisation - 10%

Titles:

• Boss Killer 17th (Legendary)

• Player Killer 99th (Legendary)

Stats:

Strength: 17 | Physique: 20 | Perception: 15 | Intelligence: 23 Stamina: 22 | Agility: 29 | Speed: 37 | Mana: 20

Skills:

Active - Shadow Imitation (Lv. 1), Shadow Dash (Lv. 1)

Passive - Nocturnal Eyes

Available Stat Points: 09

He stared at it. "...What?" He read it again. Nothing changed on the second pass.

Strength. Physique. Perception. Speed, especially speed, sitting at thirty-seven now. His old total hadn’t been enough to reliably outrun a goblin. He started doing the math against what he remembered.

"...Seventy-seven." Seventy-seven points, gained out of nowhere, standing in a field.

Physique. Perception. Neither of those had existed on his sheet before, not under those names. Endurance had folded into Physique. Dexterity had turned into Perception. His class hadn’t just handed him bigger numbers, it had rebuilt the entire window around him.

His eyes dropped to the skills list. Three of them, where there’d been none before.

He tapped the passive first, mostly out of curiosity, and for a second nothing seemed to happen. Then the shadows under the nearest trees sharpened into something almost solid. Color drained out at the edges. Darkness stopped meaning much of anything.

"...Night vision." His pupils contracted against the sudden clarity.

He moved to the first active skill.

Shadow Imitation Lv. 1 Merge with surrounding shadows, greatly reducing presence and visibility. Movement speed reduced while active. Higher levels increase duration and effect, and reduce cooldown. Requires dim or dark surroundings.

"...Stealth." He felt his pulse pick up again, a different kind of racing this time.

The second skill loaded underneath it.

Shadow Dash Lv. 1 Instantly close the distance between nearby shadows at extreme speed within a 100-meter radius. Higher levels increase speed and range, and reduce cooldown. Requires dim or dark surroundings.

He read it once, then again, then a third time before the words actually landed. "...No way."

Whatever hesitation had been sitting in his chest a minute earlier had already burned off. In its place, something else took over, a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth that he didn’t consciously put there. His class hadn’t been built to fight head-on. It had been built for exactly this.

"So that’s what Nightwalker really is."

He looked toward Ironfall. The crimson sky had darkened another shade, long shadows stretching out across the fields like they were reaching for him.

He took one step forward, then another, and triggered Shadow Dash without deciding to.

WHOOSH

The ground dropped away beneath him. For one instant he was less a person than a streak of black moving faster than the wind could follow, the whole landscape smearing into a blur around him. Then it stopped.

He blinked. "...I’m already here?"

He glanced back. The hill where the others were waiting had shrunk to a speck.

"A hundred meters. In one step." His heart hammered, but it wasn’t fear driving it anymore.

He laughed, quiet, almost disbelieving. Whatever had been crawling under his skin a few minutes ago on that hillside was gone completely. This wasn’t a stat boost. This was a different way of moving through the world entirely, an infiltrator’s toolkit built into his bones.

He looked at Ironfall again. Knights still walking their perfect lines below. Watchtowers still scanning every angle. Trumpets still calling out shift changes across the valley.

None of it looked unbreakable anymore.

His mouth curved. "Let’s see if your discipline can keep up."

He moved, slipping shadow to shadow through the fields with a speed the town’s patrols had never been built to notice.

The silent scout Sleepless disappeared into the streets of Ironfall before a single knight realised an intruder had entered their town.