It’s been weeks, at least. Two? Three? I’m not sure; there is no sun here. My waking and sleeping hours have turned into a blur; any time I’m not hiding, I’m running. The world is stained in blood, every inch of it tinted a dark red by an omnipresent light. How long has it been since I came here? How long since I last ate? Today was different; I wasn’t running or hiding. I was hunting.

I’m staring down at a monster. It's sort of like a chicken- no, more like a turkey. It’s covered in that gross, gooey red flesh that's on a turkey's neck, several feet tall, and I saw it kill someone with just its claws. I would wretch at the thought if there was anything left in my stomach.

I stared down at the monster from where I was in the dead, leafless tree above it. It clucked as it moved in circles around the makeshift camp below me. Its body was undulating rolls of fat, misshapen and lumpy, like a potato of meat. It was easily the most delicious thing I had ever seen. I didn’t know if that was some kind of hunger induced delirium or if I was just going mad from being trapped here alone.

The monster’s gigantic, serrated beak was tearing through what remained of my bag. There was no longer any food in it, but it still presumably smelled of it to the monster's enhanced senses. Perfect bait. I adjusted the dagger in my hands, waiting. The monster stopped suddenly, going perfectly still. I held my breath as it craned its neck around, scanning the horizon. For several dangerous seconds I waited.

Then I dropped out of the tree, landing on top of it. I screamed.

It squawked.

I stabbed.

It screamed.

The gigantic bird bucked wildly, and my knife failed to find purchase in its flesh. My knife cut again and again, slicing across its skin like boiled leather. Each slash left new shallow cuts, but failed to kill it as I held on for dear life, digging my fingers into the flaps of flesh on its side. Finally, my knife found purchase, digging deep into its neck. I inspected it.

Hell Chicken

189/200

Bleeding

Drowning

Good. It would choke on the blood in its neck… any second now. I clung to it perilously as it screamed in its death throes, continuously bringing my knife down into its scrawny neck.

Then it slammed into the tree. I felt my HP drain away.

Hell Chicken

94/200

Bleeding

Drowning

I brought my knife into its neck with renewed frenzy. My muscles were sore when it finally collapsed, dozens of feet away from my makeshift camp. I was covered in sweat and blood, more so than usual, and ravenously hungry. I unceremoniously dragged it back to the camp. It was only feet away, but each step was inordinately long.

“Finally,” I spoke to myself, nearly drooling. “But first…” I opened my notifications.

You’ve earned 392 XP! Congrats!

Level up! Error- Conditions not met. Reverting changes.

“Fuck!” I cursed aloud, kicking the corpse of the chicken. “Still!?” I had explicitly paid to join the party of this raid, levels above my own, in hopes that I would finally be able to level up. I had been raiding since I was 18 without ever gaining the levels to show for it. And no levels meant no class.

No class meant no skills.

No skills meant no one would let me join their party.

I took out my anger on the hell chickens corpse, cutting roughly into its flesh. The mana that had enhanced its flesh was quickly dissipating, allowing me to tear into it. I wasn’t sure which parts were meant to be edible, not being much of a hunter, but the smell of blood awakened something almost… primal in me as I thought about what I was about to do.

I had rationed the food I had brought with me carefully. There's always a chance that a gate will destabilize, so the party always comes with weeks of food and water. Unfortunately, my party took most of the food with them when they realized what happened. I haven’t seen them in weeks. And today, I felt hungry. In a way that I have never felt before. It was all I had thought about for more than a day. Two days? I don’t know. It all blurred together.

So here I was. Trapped beyond a gate, alone, party-less, and probably starving, holding up a lump of raw, uncooked meat like I had found a brick of solid gold. Dark, viscous blood flowed over my hands. I’d like to say that I used some local dry twigs to start a fire, skewered the roughly cut meat that I hoped equated to a chicken breast, and slowly roasted it blood free, but I am a proponent of the truth.

And the truth is that I did what I needed to, to survive. I couldn’t start a fire. I wasn’t a boy scout. I couldn’t start a fire with sticks and drive. I was trapped, in a dangerous, alien world, with no telling how long until rescue would come, if at all. And there was viscous, monster blood running down my face.

Honestly, I didn’t know if eating monsters would kill me. I wasn’t even thinking about it at the time. The only thing on my mind was an instinctive, all consuming compulsion, a directive that was the very base of my human nature: Eat.

The taste of monster meat was odd. I expected something rancid, like rotting flesh. Instead, it was sweet. Infact, it might have been one of the best things I ever tasted.

Then something really unexpected happened.

Condition met. You have leveled up.

Class unlocked: Devourer

Select skill:

or