Work is going well. A few monsters have shown up, but they were handled easily. I mentioned the record I am making to Titus and he wants me to do it full time.

  He said, “Someone needs to remember those who have fallen.”

  This would not normally be in my journal, but today I got my second sigil, it was from a bird monster. The sigil ability was Visionary Chronicler. Its am identification ability, which isn’t important. The significance comes from my desire to record. I think these sigils are more tied to us than the creatures we slay to get them. It will take time, but over the next few months I intend to find out.

  Day 4, Owen Landers

  Silas quickly moved back to the normal interface. Sure enough, vitality had gone from two to three. He was not entirely sure what that meant, but it was at three now. What did it mean to have more vitality? He bounced on the balls of his feet, he had plenty of energy, but Flesh Lord had him functioning at peak efficiency at all times.

  It was a good assumption that most people would get tired more slowly, but for Silas it would simply extend the time he could move at full throttle. At least that’s what he assumed, it was not like he could do anything about it if he was wrong. There were two new titles, which seemed useless, they only took up space on his interface.

  Maybe titles were like getting knighted by the queen of England. As far as Silas was aware, the knighted weren’t granted anything but a bit of prestige. He could be wrong, there could be monetary awards as well, but the people who received them were already so wealthy that the money did little to change their lives. At least he knew what a knight was, he didn’t have any idea what First Discord meant.

  “Why would an ultra invasive tech company make their product easy to navigate?” Silas groaned. He had weapons and armor to make.

  It was much easier to make than he had initially assumed. Where other people had to carve the bone or hammer metal, he could plaster it to his body to get the correct size. He really looked forward to figuring out the method to create flexible bone, as while the plates were easy to work with, no straps were available. He could tear apart his clothing, but he was hesitant to strip down, even if there was no one to watch him undress. Also, bone plates would probably chafe. Arming doublets were a thing for a reason.

  Silas poked his clothes. They made a crackling noise, he had tried to clean them, but it was a losing battle. He looked back at the black fur of the sphinx. If he could harvest some tannin from the local trees, he would be able to make leather within the next few months. Silas had both a lack of trees and a lack of time. He didn’t want to be here when the skin finally cured. It looked like he would be using rawhide from now on.

  He went about his work pulling the body apart. It took quite some time, as he lacked the specialized tools needed to make use of the body. He started with the head, it looked far too human to be comfortable with. Silas knew it wasn’t human, but having the glassy eyes stare at him while he extracted its skeleton, skin, and as much meat as he could feasibly eat was unsettling. Survival came before comfort.

  While he worked, he thought about how to make a useable set of armor. It didn’t need to be fancy, just enough to stop him from getting sliced open. Thankfully, Flesh Lord increased healing speed, Silas would also bet that three vitality was good for healing as well. It took him the better part of what he presumed to be a day to create the armor.

  Strips of rawhide were used as straps. This gave Silas the material he needed to create a helmet from a bone, two pauldrons from skulls, grieves, and a chest plate. He felt like a villain from one of those nineteen-eighties comics he had seen in museums. The chest plate was the most difficult to make, to the point that he ended up plastering bone over the sphinx’s rib cage to create a solid sheet. It was uncomfortable, but Silas had zero experience making armor, all he knew was that if he was clawed in the same location it would not be a problem.

  There was a temptation to work until he received another rank up from Flesh Lord. However, he had no idea how long that would take. Assuming, Flesh Lord had taken the burden for two days of sleep, Silas was looking at staying awake for a minimum of one hundred forty hours. It was nice to think that he was capable of that, but it simply was not feasible to do over and over again. Exhaustion was simply too dangerous to attempt on a regular basis, maybe if he was able to entrench himself.

  He spent a few hours reinforcing his shelter with the excess bone. Bone worked passably as a mortar to hold the stones in a more vertical manner. The interior did not get any larger, but the exterior was thickened to the point Silas could stand on the roof without falling through. He reinforced the entryway with by disguising it with a piece of carapace covered in a thin layer of gravel. It wouldn’t fool a human, but it would fool anything that was not sure what it was looking for.

  Now lying on a bed of soft fur, Silas had a few moments to examine what happened to his interface. He moved over to the military handbook, as it was called. It was composed of promotion requirements, physical exercises to meet employment standards, tasks and duties, and decorations. He had already looked through tasks and duties, being that it had been converted into a record of messages.

  Silas was most interested in the promotion requirements. He flicked over to it and was both disappointed and relieved. It simply said pending, waiting for spirit to develop, gain a total capacity of ten or more to survive spiritual manifestation. So he needed a cumulation of ten or more, whatever that was. He was inclined to believe that it was either total stats or sigil level, as those were the only numbers on the interface.

  “Either way I need to familiarize myself with the sigils, so we will find out when I get to ten,” Silas muttered. Was the fact he used ‘we’ an issue? He doubted it was, moving on.

  Lacking any actionable information in the promotion requirements, he turned his attention to the physical employment standards. Silas was surprised this was available, as it was linked to his health and wellness interface. It was simple, it would use a primitive AI to determine the exercises needed to reach or maintain the fitness goal. This had been broken up into three sections, just like before.

  Best day records for things like his bench, deadlift, accuracy, mile, and dozens of other requirements were replaced with a section titled Techniques. Of course, it was empty. Silas sighed, wishing this thing came with an instruction manual. Would a straight punch count as a technique? Probably not.

  Daily exercises had been replaced by Objectives. This time it wasn’t blank, it had a simple line.

  Practice with your talent and sigils: Reward: experience with utilizing the acquired skills.

  “No duh, that’s how practice works,” Silas muttered, supposing he had that one covered. Objectives was a bit over the top as the entire thing simply described cause and effect. Work hard, get results, shocker.

  The final heading was the most interesting. Employment Standards had been replaced by a section called oaths. Silas blinked in surprise when he saw what was in the section.

  Oath: Survive, Get Home, Find Abby: Reward for keeping: Abby/ Punishment for failure: Death

  Silas teared up when he saw this. The punishment was irrelevant, he would be dead if he didn’t manage to survive. However, the reward meant that Abby was alive! He hadn’t made any intentional oath, but he had asked God for help. This was not a helping hand, it wasn’t even a push in the right direction, but it was a sign that any hardship would be worth it. He might even be imagining it, but Silas would cling to any lifeline he could find.

  It took a few minutes to calm down from the emotional equivalent of taking an inhaler. The weight on his shoulders had been suffocating, now that it was gone, Silas felt like he could breathe once again. He took a few deep breaths, clenching the crystalized sigil tightly, before moving on to decorations.

  This was not a particularly exciting section. It simply listed the new promotions, high ranking officers in the chain of command, and the rising stars or propaganda pigs as the soldiers in Silas’s division called them. The new promotions were largely ignored unless a friend’s name was going to be on the list, while the chain of command was static and mostly uninteresting. This part of the addition was largely pointless outside of some vanity on the part of the higher ups.

  That had changed. The three lists were still present, but they were for different things. There was a leadership list taking the place of the chain of command. It was completely blank. Much more interesting was the second land third list. One was labeled physical the other was mental. Silas had no idea what either list stood for, but he was number one on both.

  That didn’t mean much. There were one hundred slots and his was the only name. He had been cut off from Earth, so he probably wouldn’t even be on this list back there. He wasn’t sure what the point of this list was, at least he wasn’t until two more names showed up on it.

  Amina Danjuma

  Olusola Danjuma

  They held the second and third positions on both lists. Silas stared at the names for a few minutes, not entirely sure what to make of them. Then the import of what he was looking at struck, both of them had just wandered into this hell hole. The only way they would be worse than him in both lists was if their interface was still pending.

  For a moment he considered rushing to go find them. However, finding two people in an alien world was borderline impossible. Especially before… Silas watched as Olusola’s name vanished then a few minutes later Amina’s did as well. Silas sighed, flopping back on his makeshift bed. How many people had wandered or been dragged into that death trap without him ever noticing? Probably only a few, but it did mean that he might see people here someday.

  He had been lucky to arrive here with a crippled beast that had already killed all the others in the area. Had there been even one other functioning monster, Silas would be dead. It felt odd to consider himself comparatively fortunate while sleeping in a hole made of bone, stone, and fur.

  He decided to take a nap before continuing with his work. It was harder to get to sleep than he had expected. Silas was wary of dreams, and watching two people presumably die was upsetting. As there was no timer, he had no idea how long he slept, just that he did.

  The last thing he needed to make before starting his exploration was a few water bottles and markers. If he left, he wanted to be able to find his way back. Logically, anywhere with water was just as good as any other, but this was the first place he felt even a little control.

  Bottles were more difficult than Silas had expected. He had nothing on him that would assist with the screw pattern needed for a tight seal. What he eventually decided upon was ugly, he made buckets, but as he didn’t have lids, Silas pinched the lip of the bottle. It made his bottles look more like cones than the cylinders that he had intended, but it would work.

  He placed a bottle in each of his pockets and grabbed his hammer. Placing any marker down would be pointless. He had thought about using bone steaks to mark his passage, however, the wall was crawling with bone squirrels. They would eat any bone he put down. That was when his spearheads of all things gave him an idea.

  Without rain or wind, erosion should be intermittent at best. He could mark his pathway by simply scratching an arrow on the formations that he walked past with the butt of his cleaver. The metal was harder than the stone, he scraped a circle into the large rock, then made a dash through it in the direction of his camp.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  An arrow would be easy for other humans to understand. While he would be happy to meet some people, he wanted to meet them on his own terms. He did the same thing on the next formation he reached and the following one as well.

  It did not take long for him to come across his first monster. This one was human sized, giving Silas the confidence he needed to initiate. It was a large cockroach eating the remains of a much larger creature. Several bone squirrels were gnawing away at the exposed bones. The deceased creature was big, but only rhino big. Silas shook his head at that thought. He was in a world where rhinos were somewhere in the middle of the food chain and humans competed with cockroaches for resources.

  Silas moved quietly toward the giant bug. Saying it was human sized was a bit deceptive. Its head only rose to mid-thigh, with an oval shaped body that had exposed wings, not dissimilar to a grasshopper. He intended to finish the insect in a single spear strike.

  The bone squirrels started chittering at Silas. He didn’t think anything of the reaction at first, at least not until the cockroach looked up at them. Silas did not have a high opinion of the intelligence of insects, so it came as a shock when he jumped forward to skewer the creature. It skittered forward right into the ribcage of the carcass.

  Silas glared at the squirrels, but couldn’t do much as the roach charged right back out of the cadaver. Its armored face deflected the hasty stab allowing it to slam into Silas’s knees. Mandibles bit down on his shin, stopping him from stepping back to keep his balance. He crashed to the ground in a pile of bone armor. The lack of effort put into the armor’s design became apparent when he landed on the lumpy surface that was the inside of his chest plate.

  “Stupid bug,” Silas complained. Then he brained it with his club. The large rock did what the spear couldn’t, cracking the facial carapace.

  The bug recoiled, as the exoskeleton equivalent of its skull was broken. Silas followed up the clubbing with a kick to the broken plate. The cockroach made a breathy hissing noise. He prepared for the creature to manically charge at him when it opened its wings and started chirping. Crickets were technically a subspecies of cockroach, so why couldn’t it also make a noise like one?

  The logic was ridiculous, humans and monkeys were related, but a monkey would never build an air plain. Also, the noise was loud, like a concert speaker with the volume turned to one hundred, loud. As far as Silas could tell, it lacked the debilitating impact of the sphinx’s noises. He didn’t wait to see if that would change.

  Rolling to his feet he grabbed his spear and shoved it through the cracked face plate. With no bone inside the bug, the bone shaft was pushed in until Silas’s hand made contact. The wings twitched and the noise stuttered, but didn’t quite stop. Ripping the spear out shut the disgusting thing up. Seriously, bugs had no right being this large.

  He reached out to purify the insect when something slammed into him from behind. Staggering forward, Silas tripped over the dead roach and face planted into the decaying flesh. Something heavy scrabbled at Silas’s back, he felt something clamp down on his helmet hard enough that he could hear it creak.

  Grabbing ahold of two ribs, Silas hauled himself to his feet, throwing his attacker off. At least that was his intent, the creature stayed clinging to his back even while it was tipped vertically.

  Notice: Flesh Lord has resisted several parasites and diseases from Corniger Ursi.

  He knew what that was, ursi meant bear. The realization was overshadowed by having it in his mouth, he gagged as he spit it out while attempting to dislodge what he could only assume was a second cockroach. His flailing was interrupted when another body slammed into his shins.

  This time Silas kept his feet and was able to see that he was indeed being attacked by more cockroaches. These ones were smaller, only about two-thirds the size. He kicked the newcomer in the mandibles with his steel toed boot. His strike did not generate the necessary force to push the bug away, but he did break one of its jaws. Silas could do this, at least that was what he thought until he noticed that two or three dozen more bug monsters were climbing over the rock formation he had just come from.

  “I’m out,” Silas said. He turned and sprinted away from the small horde.

  So far he had been lucky to not take any injuries, his armor had done its job. It did not have full coverage, which he intended to fix, but it had let him flee a life threatening situation. Silas could be satisfied with that. After passing several rock formations, he reached up and grabbed the bug chewing on his helmet.

  He started by grabbing the wings to stop it from calling for help. Then he drew his cleaver and finished it off. When he got back home, he would need to find the pub’s owner and thank him. This piece of kitchenware had been so useful, that Silas wondered if it were possible to scale it up. The first bug wouldn’t have been able to call for help if his first strike had cut it in half.

  The moment he took to imagine what that would look like produced an image of a guillotine blade strapped to a handle, he chuckled, “Now that is some anime nonsense.”

  After tossing the body aside he reoriented himself, made another mark, and continued on his way. His first impression of this place was of dense monster infestation, and while that wasn’t untrue, it was not the shoulder to shoulder free for all that he had first experienced. In the last few days, he had seen no kaiju and nothing more than predators of opportunity.

  He met several other creatures, many were engaged in hunting or were dragging off kills. They likely had homes or camps that they returned to. The cockroach was foolish to eat its food out in the open, more intelligent creatures required guards or a private area to eat. Silas was stalking a group of antlered werewolves when their ears perked up and all of them focused in a specific direction like pointer hounds.

  They abandoned their prey, one of the winged reptiles, and loped off to wherever their senses took them. Silas hesitated, following them would likely lead to another monster mashup. However, wandering around empty ravines until his watering hole evaporated was foolish. They should lead him to some resource or even a portal.

  It wasn’t really a choice, he couldn’t handle five werewolves at the same time, but if there was some conflict he might be able to tip the scales in his favor. Silas moved as silently as he could, which was not that great considering he had an extra sixty pounds of bone weighing him down. Still, he managed to avoid detection.

  The chase only took a few miles. Silas frowned as he took in the state of his body. He was far more hale than he should have been. Despite running a ten minute mile for the last four miles, in armor no less, he had not perspired at all. Looking down at his hands, he wondered how much of this was having three points in vitality and how much was the effect of Flesh Lord. Either way, he could now crush the Boston Marathon.

  Following the werewolves turned out to be a good idea. A crackling line of purple energy hovered in the air. Silas saw a fistful of other monsters arrive to challenge the werewolves, but it was not the full blown war that Silas had witnessed before. Two dragonkin loped in alongside a large bear with horns, scaled paws, and fire dripping from its jaws.

  Silas had to do a double take. The dragonkin were leading the bear monster with a mucous filled rope. It was disgusting, but worked to keep the bear on track. Two large mantis like insects rushed from a different direction, not noticing or not caring that they were going to get destroyed. Both parties of monsters would have zero issues taking out the bugs. They were tall and able to look Silas in the eyes, but they were skinny and didn’t look to be fireproof.

  The goal was to pick off the survivors, not enter the conflict himself. Silas had no confidence in handling any of these creatures. His spears could poke holes in them, but most of these animals could tank an entire magazine of nine millimeter bullets and ask for more. The werewolves and bear fell into the bigger than human category.

  There was a brief stalemate where all three parties stared each other down. The werewolves stalked back and forth in irritation, growling at the dragonkin. For their part, the dragonkin made a coughing noise that Silas assumed was laughter. Despite possessing the general features of a human face, the eyes, nose, mouth, and a ridge like eyebrow, the dragonkin’s expressions were inhuman.

  Their horned bear twitched like it was having a micro seizure. Was that madness or barely contained bloodlust? Was there a difference between the two? Silas didn’t know.

  He waited patiently for the action to start. The mantises started things off, skittering forward at the smaller dragonkin. They had an odd loping run that had their center of gravity constantly shifting around. The dragonkin holding the mucous covered tether whipped giving instructions to the bear.

  With a savage roar, the bear blew fire on the mantises. To Silas’s surprise, one of the insects parted the fireball with a swipe of its blade like arms. Both halves sailed harmlessly by burning twin furrows into the dirt. Silas was glad he was able to watch these things fight before confronting them himself.

  The bear was surprised that the glob of flaming spit did little to even slow down the insects. It received a clean slice to the gut and one to the arm as it tried to slap the bug away. If it had been alone, the mantises would have diced the horned bear. Both dragonkin stepped around their pet and brought bone clubs down on the insect's back, right where the thorax met the abdomen.

  A gong sounded out as thick bone smashed into metallic carapace. That noise alone was enough to pique Silas’s interest. A metal exoskeleton was still an exoskeleton, right? If he could scavenge a body he would feel much safer armored in metal.

  After taking the blow, the mantises whirled on each of their dragonkin. They failed to notice the deep inhale all three of their opponents took. Silas had to avert his eyes as gouts of flame engulfed the mantises. They made no noise as their exoskeletons became an oven that cooked them alive.

  Silas was pleased to see strain on the dragonkin’s faces. Evidently, they couldn’t breathe fire all day. That was good news if he ever came into conflict with them. He was not pleased at how the werewolves coordinated their strike with the burst of flame. In the split second between white hot fire and the eyes readjusting, they lowered their heads and charged.

  The club might have been incapable of breaking the mantis’s carapace, but a quarter ton monster with razor claws punched through with no issue. The dragonkin reeled back in shock as the blade wielding foes became shields for the werewolves. The bear was in the same weight class, but injured, only surviving impact because the antlers had the bugs carapace attached to them. It did not survive getting trampled.

  Both dragonkin were light enough and intelligent enough to scramble out of the way while being shoved backward. The clubs came down with little effect on the werewolves’s flanks.

  Silas had gone camping with his father and brothers during the summer. His father would bring his .44 Magnum revolver for bears, on the the off chance an aggressive one showed up. They were lucky that he did, a half starved grizzly showed up one year. Silas got to watch his father dump half the bullets in that gun directly into that bear’s center mass before the creature decided they weren’t worth the trouble.

  If three fairly high caliber bullets were little more than a deterrent, the clubs were worse than useless. The dragonkin seemed shocked that their blows had done nothing and even more surprised when the werewolves slapped them to the ground with their forepaws. With the exception of how well the mantises did, the situation had gone nearly exactly how Silas predicted it would go. That begged the question, why were the dragonkin so confident in the beginning?

  As it was, they were making pitiful mulling noises as they scrambled away from the werewolves. Silas’s opinions of the dragonkin fell, he had assumed that they would be a threat to humanity. What he was watching was the threat level an average teenager with a pickup truck could solve.

  A coughing laugh echoed through the ravines. Silas flinched, looking around for its source. He had been too lax, anything could have snuck up on him. Luckily, the source of the noise was on top of the rock formations and focused on the werewolves. Two of the werewolves looked around trying to find the source of the noise, but the rest focused on the two dragonkin.

  Silas took a step back into the shadow of the formation. The creature at the top made a series of growls and hisses, that sounded exactly how Silas would have expected a dragon to speak. A dark shape dropped to the ground, more lightly than Silas would have expected from a seven story drop.

  The werewolves turned to the new threat, another dragonkin, though this one had wings of fire on its back. Silas would have compared it to something from Middle Earth if it had been bigger. The new dragonkin looked similar to the two crawling pitifully on the ground, with red scales, dirty-white bone plates on the chest, shoulders, shins, and forearms, and two forward curving horns. The difference was in its bearing, it was confident without being cocky.

  Recognition of the situation arrived with concerning clarity. Silas had been in a similar situation with his father the first time he had gone doe hunting. He was watching a barbaric version of hunting lessens. The older dragonkin was letting the children learn their lesson through experience, and maybe the mutilation of a family pet.

  With a guttural roar, three of the five werewolves lowered their antlers and charred at the dragonkin. He in turn sucked in a deep breath and blew out a fireball at the center beast. It tried to dodge, but its fellows were in the way. Like napalm, the fire splashed over the werewolve’s fur lighting it ablaze.

  The two on either side jerked away from their now flaming comrade. Silas thought that would be the end of the fight, the dragonkin had a staff with a knob on the top, but that was not enough to hurt something as big as the wolves. He was wrong. Spinning the staff, the dragonkin brought the heavy end down on a werewolf’s skull.

  The beast was slammed muzzle first into the dirt. Before the second one could arrive, he cocked the staff back like a batter before whipping the weapon around into the werewolf’s muzzle. It was not a decisive blow, but a strike to a sensitive area was bound to stop most predators, at least for a moment. A moment was all the dragonkin needed.

  He drove the pointed end of the staff through the downed wolf’s brain stem before spitting another fireball at the one he had struck on the nose. Leaving the two burning ones, the dragonkin went to save his students. One had been mauled pretty bad, rents ran down his chest, cutting through his bone plate and parting scale. The other was fine proving to be better at running. Silas grimaced, it looked like daddy dragonkin was going to decimate the werewolves with minimal exertion.

  First, the one who had a juvenile on the ground and one arm in its jaws was put down with a clean stab through the heart. Silas knew that it was not so easy to punch through that much muscle, but the dragonkin made it look easy. He was the same size as his students, making Silas skeptical of the difference being purely biological. Could he do the same thing with an increase in his body stat? He knew it was possible for humans to kill lions with their bare hands, but it took the elite of elites to do so.

  Watching the dragonkin tearing apart an entire pack crystallized something in his mind. He could do this, no human was better than him, and he had sigils now. Why couldn’t he do exactly what this dragonkin was accomplishing given time? He had nothing better to do than practice after all. If surviving meant fighting a whole nest of dragonkin he would do it.

  New Objective: Exterminate a nest of dragonkin/ Reward: Capacity raised to ten