Chương 2: First Blood

┌──────────────────────────────┐ Historical Summoner — Gold A summoner who creates bonds with people, objects, and remnants of historical significance. A greater understanding produces stronger, more accurate manifestations. Assigned Attributes: +1 Intellect, +1 Will, +1 Presence Skills: Bond, Summon Echo, Study └──────────────────────────────┘ The fourth option unfurled before him, but Thomas didn't have the time to really read into any of this.

The beast stood in the doorway, held back for now by the bright lights. He needed to decide now, before the lights failed to whatever was destroying the electronics. ┌──────────────────────────────┐ You have selected Historical Summoner — Gold. Your class has been integrated. You have gained the skills Bond, Summon Echo, and Study. Your assigned attributes have been increased. You have gained five unassigned attribute points.

└──────────────────────────────┘ The message appeared cleanly across Thomas's vision while his body reacted rather less gracefully. Heat spread from the centre of his chest in a sudden wave, passing through his ribs and down his limbs. It did not burn, but it brought an unpleasant awareness of everything beneath his skin: his heartbeat, the tension in his shoulders, the bruising ache where the basement door had struck him.

A second pressure gathered behind his eyes, sharper than the sensation caused by the diamond in the wall, and for one dizzying moment, the visitor centre seemed both too near and very far away. The barghest stepped over the fallen stairwell door. It kept its body low as it entered the visitor centre, placing each oversized paw between the brightest pools cast by the failing fluorescent lights, deliberately avoiding the bright white cast by the bulbs. Smoke spilt from its jaws and drifted across the floor.

The creature's attention had fixed on the rusted spearhead in Thomas's hand, although whether it understood what he had just done or simply recognised a potential weapon was impossible to tell. Chloe backed toward the front desk, her eyes darting from the monster's waiting form to the heavy iron fire extinguisher they had set back on the ground.

"Please tell me that class choice came with an instruction manual."

"I'm not exactly sure yet."

"Figure it out fast," she muttered, her hand already wrapping around the extinguisher's handle.

"Because 'wait and see' is going to get us digested." He had three skills, but none of them was called 'kill the enormous death dog.' The barghest took another step. Its weight made no sound against the tiled floor, but the creature's shoulders shifted beneath its black fur. Thomas remembered how it had launched itself down the corridor, covering several meters in almost an instant. If it moved like that again, he would not have time to experiment. He focused on Bond.

Understanding arrived as an impulse rather than an explanation. The skill helped him connect with something compatible. The spearhead was in his hand. It was historical, and his class focused on historical artefacts. There were moments when academic reasoning required weighing competing theories and carefully reviewing evidence. This was not one of them.

"System, bond the artefact." Something answered from deep inside him. A warm current gathered behind his sternum, crossed his shoulder, and poured down his arm. Golden light traced the lines of his palm where flesh met corroded iron. The barghest recoiled, and Thomas nearly did the same as the spearhead became far more than just an object he was holding. He felt its weight without needing to judge it through his fingers. He knew the chips along its edge and the uneven thickness of the socket.

He sensed the places where rust had eaten deepest into the iron and the faint distortions left by the hammer that had shaped it. Then he reached for Summon Echo. He became aware of the bond like a line stretching from his chest into the spearhead, and of something on the other side waiting to be drawn out. The impression of the missing weapon was incomplete. The iron head remembered its shape, perhaps, but not everything that had once surrounded it. Thomas did. He knew how medieval spearheads were mounted.

The shafts were usually ash, chosen for a natural resilience that stood up to tool handles, bowstaves, and hard strikes. Dimensions shifted across centuries, but this head was built for utility, not display. He did not know whether any of that was right, but Thomas pulled, and golden light spilt from the spearhead. It ran down from the empty socket in a narrow stream, lengthening as it went through the air.

The outline of a wooden shaft formed between Thomas's hands, at first no more substantial than sunlight caught in smoke. The grain glowed in faint, wavering lines. The reconstructed weapon was almost entirely translucent, but golden radiance gathered along its edges and burned brightest around the head. The old iron remained as the point, yet another version of the spearhead had settled over it: sharp, clean, and whole. Weight dropped suddenly into Thomas's hands, and he nearly lost his grip.

The spear shaft struck the broken display case with a sharp crack before he managed to bring it level. It felt solid despite its appearance, warm beneath his palms and slightly rough where the glowing suggestion of wood grain crossed his skin. Chloe stared in shock at it.

"Oh, that is way crazier than what I have. That looks like actual magic." The overhead lights snapped off. For a split second, the massive dog locked eyes with them. Then, its hind legs coiled and released in an explosion of speed. The barghest became a blur of teeth and shadow, launching across the gap. With no time to dodge, no time for anything clever, Thomas planted his boots and drove the glowing spear straight into its path. His stance was wrong, and his hands were too close together.

The point dipped as he drove it forward, and the creature twisted in the air with impossible speed. The spearhead missed its chest and tore along one foreleg instead. Golden light flared from the spear as it cut deep into the monster's flesh. The barghest recoiled, reared up, and let out a rending scream. The sound struck Thomas like a physical blow. It was too high and too human for the body producing it, a shriek of several voices dragged together.

Thomas staggered, and the spear shaft was ripped sideways as the creature's leg caught against it. The barghest landed badly but did not fall. Dark fluid sprayed from the wound and struck the tiles in thick drops that smoked on impact. Thomas tried to recover the spear, but the creature snapped at the shaft. Its teeth bit partly through the golden construction before catching on something solid inside. Light splintered around its jaws.

Thomas felt the impact through both arms and was dragged forward until his hip struck the broken display case. The spear held. Barely.

"Thomas!" Chloe hurled the fire extinguisher. It struck the barghest across the side of the head with a hollow clang. The creature released the spear and turned toward her, lips pulling back from teeth too long for its mouth. Chloe had already begun moving. She vaulted the low section of the front desk, clearing the counter with a messy but determined scramble, and tore open the maintenance panel beneath the counter. Most of the switches were dead, but she wasn't guessing.

Her eyes tracked the faint, ambient hum of the remaining live currents. The visitor centre lights continued to flicker irregularly, spending more and more time off.

"What are you doing?" Thomas shouted.

"Finding out which circuits are still alive." The barghest advanced toward her. Thomas pulled the spear back and aimed at its ribs. The creature's head turned, and Thomas froze. Chloe hit another switch, and two ceiling panels above the front desk flared to full brightness. The barghest recoiled so hard its hindquarters struck a display plinth. Darkness peeled from its fur in twisting strands.

Its skin was visible beneath for the first time; grey, stretched tightly over bone, and marked with lines that looked like cracks in old stone. Thomas charged. He had never charged anything with a spear before. His body approached the problem with all the accumulated expertise of someone who had once played rugby badly in secondary school and had since avoided organised physical activity whenever possible. He lowered the point and ran at the monster. The barghest tried to turn away from the light.

Its wounded foreleg slipped in its own black blood, and the spearhead pierced just behind the shoulder. Resistance travelled up the shaft with sickening force. Thomas felt hide split, then muscle, then metal scrape bone. The creature's momentum twisted the spear from its intended path and drove the butt against the floor. Thomas lost his footing, and the barghest fell with him. Its body struck his legs, sending him onto his back. The spear remained lodged in its side, angled upward between them.

Golden light streamed from the wound, mingling with black smoke. For one confused moment, Thomas and the creature lay almost face to face. The barghest opened its jaws, its breath smelling of wet graves. Thomas shoved both hands against the spear shaft, ripping the spearhead through the back of the monster and held the shaft crosswise between them. Its teeth snapped shut a few inches above his face. The impact travelled through his elbows and into his shoulders.

"Chloe!"

"I'm hurrying!" The barghest thrashed. Its claws scraped across Thomas's jacket, tearing the fabric from rib to hip. One hooked point caught flesh beneath. Pain arrived hot and immediate, flooding his mind with sensation. Thomas shouted and pushed harder. You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story. The spearhead shifted inside the creature, but did not go deep enough. He could feel the point pressing against something solid. A rib, perhaps. His angle was wrong again.

He had driven the weapon into its side, but not through anything immediately fatal. The barghest bore down. As the jaws forced the shaft back toward his throat, Thomas's arms began to give. The summon pulled violently on something behind his sternum; a cold, draining ache. Maintaining the glowing weapon took effort, and holding off three hundred kilos of thrashing monster took everything else. Chloe slid over and braced the spear alongside Thomas, and together they drove it into the dog slobbering above them.

The barghest screamed again, spraying black blood across Thomas's face and chest. Its jaws snapped wildly, and one tooth scraped his cheek, leaving a line of fire behind it. Thomas shifted his hands.

"Higher," he gasped.

"We need to angle it higher." Chloe adjusted her grip. The creature's hind legs kicked against the floor, claws gouging pale lines into the tiles and together, they forced the spear upward into the beast. The spearhead ground against bone and Thomas felt the exact instant it slipped between the ribs. The resistance vanished, and both of them lurched forward. The spear drove deeper into the barghest's chest. Golden light erupted beneath its skin.

For one terrible second, the creature's body became translucent enough for Thomas to see the spearhead inside it, buried amid a cage of blackened ribs. The barghest convulsed. Its jaws closed on empty air beside Thomas's ear, and its weight came down across him. Thomas remained pinned beneath the body, hands locked around the spear because he had forgotten how to release them. Black blood ran down the golden shaft and over his knuckles. It felt cold enough to numb his skin.

Chloe stood bent above him, breathing hard.

"Is it dead?" The barghest's hind leg twitched. Thomas looked toward its head. The darkness inside its eye sockets had begun to thin.

"I think so."

"That sounded very uncertain. Can they be killed at all?"

"I've never killed one before."

"Neither have I," she panted, "but you'd think a System would come with a tutorial." The body shuddered again. Thomas tightened his grip, but the barghest did not rise. Instead, its edges blurred. Black fur unravelled into strands of smoke that drifted upward rather than settling. Flesh followed. The creature's weight decreased so gradually that Thomas did not notice until he drew a full breath again.

Its body collapsed inward around the spear, breaking apart into dark vapour shot through with faint traces of blue light. Within seconds, nothing remained on top of him. The black blood staining his clothes dissolved with it. Thomas lay on the tiles, still holding the glowing spear above his chest. Chloe stared at the space where the creature had been. Something small struck the floor. A dark, irregular object rolled beneath the front desk and came to rest against Chloe's shoe. She crouched immediately.

"Whatever this is," she said slowly, "is going to require some investigation."

"Well, don't just touch it." Chloe stared right at him and picked it up. Thomas closed his eyes and let his head drop back against the floor tiles with a hollow thud. He didn't even have the energy to act surprised. Time had taught him that telling Chloe Brooks not to do something was functionally the same as issuing a direct challenge.

"Fascinating," he muttered to the ceiling.

"It's like my advice passes through your ears and instantly evaporates." The object was roughly the size of a walnut, faceted rather than cut, and almost black, except where dim blue light moved beneath its surface. She turned it between her fingers, studying the way the glow shifted. Thomas pushed himself upright and started walking over. His entire body objected. His shoulder throbbed where the door had struck him. The cut along his side burned.

His palms were raw from the summoned shaft, though the weapon itself had not felt abrasive in his hand. The spear remained intact, but Thomas still felt that pull beneath his sternum. Golden light filled the visitor centre in a soft radius. The weapon was not bright enough to overpower the ceiling panels, but it seemed more substantial now than when first summoned.

The translucent shaft revealed faint layers within it, ghostly traces of wood grain overlapping one another as though the skill had not settled on a single exact reconstruction. Chloe tucked the dark core into her pocket as Thomas looked toward the corridor beyond the visitor centre. The castle had gone quiet. Not peaceful. The silence felt occupied, as though something listened from within every room beyond their sight. The two gunshots they had heard earlier had come from deeper inside the site.

Someone had been alive enough to fire them. Whether that was still true remained uncertain. Thomas released his hold on Summon Echo, and the spear vanished. The golden construction folded inward along its length and streamed back toward the spearhead in Thomas's hand. Within a heartbeat, he was holding only the corroded piece of iron again. The sudden absence of weight threw off his balance. Chloe caught his arm.

"Can you summon it again?" Thomas looked down at the spearhead and summoned his status by instinct. ┌──────────────────────────────┐ Thomas Wren Level: 1 Class: Historical Summoner - Gold Physical Attributes: Strength: 8 Agility: 7 Vitality: 13 Mental Attributes: Intellect: 14 Will: 16 Presence: 12 Unassigned Attributes: 5 Skills: Bond, Summon Echo, Study Titles: None └──────────────────────────────┘ The bond remained. He could still feel the rusted spearhead with that strange secondary awareness.

It was not merely in his hand; it occupied a distinct place in his mind, accessible even when he closed his eyes.

"I think so."

"How many times? How long can you hold it?"

"I don't know."

"Can you summon other parts of the weapon? Different lengths? More than one?"

"I selected the class less than five minutes ago."

"That's plenty of time to establish basic operational limits."

"Did you do that with yours?" Chloe's mouth closed. She held his gaze for a beat longer than necessary before looking away.

"What did you choose?"" Improvised Artificer."

"That sounds useful."

"It gave me Analyse Device, Modify, and Mana Insulation." Thomas glanced toward the front desk.

"Did one of those help with the lights?"" Analyse Device," Chloe said, a sharp, vindicated spark in her eye. She looked back at the illuminated ceiling panels.

"It practically gave me a schematic overlay of the room's wiring. I could see exactly where the main breaker blew, and how to redirect the remaining current to the emergency backup. It's an information class, Thomas. I can read the information on how things were built—and how they can break."

"You could see inside it?"

"Not literally. I understood its condition. The damage. The connections." Her eyes moved to the spearhead.

"Probably something similar to what happened when you summoned the weapon." Thomas nodded. That was close enough to what he'd experienced. Chloe stepped nearer.

"You said you had four options."

"I did."

"Well, everyone is supposed to get three."

"How do you know that?"

"The System told me to select from three classes. It didn't suggest that more might appear."

"It also didn't say that four was impossible."

"Thomas."

"I know."

"What was the fourth?"

"I think it came from this thing from the wall." He reached into his pocket, pulled out the diamond-shaped relic, and held it for her to see.

"You think so? You're carrying a piece of ancient, glowing masonry in your pocket and you didn't mention it?"

"I had three classes. Then the stone reacted, I saw something that looked like a broken tapestry of space, and the extra class appeared." Chloe absorbed that in silence. Thomas had known her long enough to recognise that particular stillness. She wasn't frightened, although she had every right to be. It meant she had encountered a problem interesting enough to distract her from her fear, at least for a moment.

"May I see it?" she asked.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because the last thing you found interesting is currently in your pocket despite having come out of a corpse."

"Precisely. I have to establish a consistent research methodology." A crash echoed from the exhibition hall, and they turned towards the sound. A low growl followed. Not as close as the one beneath the stairs had been, but unmistakable now that Thomas knew it. Chloe's curiosity vanished beneath something more immediate.

"How many hounds did you say showed up in the stories?"

"They don't usually provide useful population surveys." The quip tasted sour in his mouth the moment it cleared his lips—an absurd, knee-jerk academic reflex to cover the sudden, icy knot tightening in his gut. A second growl answered the first from somewhere above them. Thomas looked toward the ceiling, his mind frantically mapping the sound against the building's layout. Two. No, at least two.

He retraced the noise sequence with growing dread: the scream from the upper floor, the body near the entrance, the desperate, metallic staccato of gunshots echoing deeper within the stone walls. None of it had been the work of the creature they had just killed. His barghest had been a solitary hunter chasing a single target up from the cellar. The others were systematically clearing the rooms above. They weren't dealing with an isolated monster. They were sitting right in the middle of their hunting territory.

Chloe moved behind the front desk and began opening cupboards.

"What are you looking for?"

"Torches. Batteries. Anything portable that can produce enough light to bother them."

"The phones have already failed."

"Phones are delicate. A torch is a battery attached to a bulb with delusions of sophistication." She found a plastic emergency torch in the second cupboard and clicked it on. The beam flickered, then steadied.

"See, it still works!" Thomas slid the rusted spearhead into his torn jacket pocket, keeping the diamond stone in his trouser pocket in case there was some reaction between the two items. His side hurt when he bent, but the claw had not cut deeply. The fabric beneath his hand was damp. Unfortunately, his blood did not dissolve upon removal from his body. Shouts carried through the castle. The words were impossible to make out, but the voice ended in a sudden crash, and Thomas's fear returned in full.

Killing one barghest hadn't made him brave; it had only made the danger precise. He had felt their speed, seen how close those fangs had come to his throat, and proven that the summoned spear could cut them. But he also remembered the reality of that first kill—falling backwards into the tiles, pinned beneath dead weight, relying on Chloe to help force the point home. There were people elsewhere in the castle. Some of them should still be alive, right?

Thomas wanted to stay in the visitor centre, with the lights on and the exterior doors locked. He wanted to wait for the police, the army, English Heritage management, or anyone older and more qualified to arrive and explain what should happen next. No city lights burned beyond the castle walls. His phone was dead. Blue fire moved over the battlements. No one would come soon enough. He gripped the spearhead again and reached out through the new bond connecting them.

Another wave of information flowed through the wrought iron as the tether between them thickened. A notification appeared. ┌──────────────────────────────┐ You have reached Level 2. Your assigned attributes have been increased. You have gained five unassigned attribute points. └──────────────────────────────┘ Thomas barely read it. The growl upstairs came again. He looked at Chloe as she tightened her grip on the torch.

Thomas reached for the bond inside him and summoned the spear once more as golden light unfolded into his hands.