Chapter 1: Sacrificed At One HP
VALERIA
"A Level 1 pack-mule has exactly one use inside a collapsing Red Gate, Valeria—buying the real S-Rank hunters thirty seconds to extract!"
The gilded warhammer came down across my left kneecap before I could even raise my appraisal lens.
Bone shattered with a sickening wet snap that whited out the edges of my vision.
I hit the jagged obsidian tiles of Floor 50 hard enough to split my chin, tasting hot copper as a flashing scarlet warning banner hijacked my retinas:
[CRITICAL TRAUMA DETECTED — PATELLA SHATTERED!]
[VALERIA THORNE // LV. 1 F-RANK RELIC APPRAISER]
[STATS: STR 4 · AGI 6 · END 4 · ARC 5 · PER 18 · SOV 1]
[HP: 1 / 100 — LETHAL BLEEDOUT IN 00:42 · MP: 100 / 100]
Towering above me in pristine white-and-gold paladin plate, my fiancé Marcus Vance casually shook a drop of my blood off the flanged head of his S-Rank warhammer, Solar Verdict.
Behind him, twelve elite raiders of the Apex Vanguard Guild were already tearing open Golden Recall Scrolls inside a shimmering extraction circle—and not a single one of them reached down to help me.
Not after I had spent the last fourteen hours guiding them unharmed through forty-nine lethal labyrinth traps down here in the Manhattan Abyssal Spire.
"Honestly, Marcus, did you have to splatter my cloak right before our press conference?" my twenty-three-year-old stepsister Serena Thorne pouted, stepping gingerly around the pool of crimson spreading beneath my torn scavenger jacket.
Above Serena's platinum curls hovered a stealth-cloaked SpireCast broadcast orb—currently blinking amber on [AUDIO MUTED // AUTO-EDIT BUFFER] so her eighty million adoring subscribers wouldn't hear a word of what she and Marcus were actually doing.
To the rest of New York Spire City, Serena was the Level 44 Starlight Saintess, a genius prodigy who miraculously decoded ancient dungeon runes on live television.
To me, she was the thief who had spent three straight years reading my handwritten cipher notebooks off a hidden teleprompter lens while my greedy stepfather, Vanguard Quartermaster Victor Thorne, kept a cursed black-iron Parasitic Leech-Cuff bolted around my right wrist.
"Give me the satchel, little sister," Serena purred, crouching just far enough out of my reach to rip my battered canvas relic bag off my shoulder. "Once Vanguard announces that our tragic Level 1 charity case heroically threw herself onto the Floor 50 Blood-Altar so I could escape with the Spire's mid-tier codex, my sympathy donations are going to clear ten million credits before midnight!"
My fingers clawed into the blood-slick stone, agony lancing up my ruined leg as I glared into Marcus's cold blue eyes.
"Three years, Marcus," I rasped, every breath scraping like ground glass in my lungs as my health bar flickered dangerously at [HP: 1 / 100].
"I decoded every boss pattern for your guild," I choked out. "I appraised every cursed blade so your strike teams wouldn't die. Why?"
Marcus crouched beside me, his expression bored—almost clinical—as he hooked two gauntleted fingers around the thin silver chain at my throat and yanked it until the clasp snapped.
Dangling from his glove was the dormant diagnostic tag Victor had sworn would unlock my wrist cuff once Vanguard cleared Floor 50.
"Because you're Dr. Helena Thorne's daughter, Val, and dead architects shouldn't leave heirs who know how to read root-code," Marcus murmured, leaning close enough that only Serena and I could hear him over the rising subterranean thunder of the cathedral.
"Oh, and since you won't live forty seconds anyway—that black-iron cuff Victor locked onto your wrist on your nineteenth birthday? It wasn't a 'mana stabilizer.'"
He tapped the glowing [LV. 48 GOLDEN PALADIN] badge hovering proudly above his gilded pauldron.
"It was an illegal Soul-Siphon Leech-Cuff forged by my father," Marcus smiled cruelly. "Every monster assist you logged, every S-Rank relic you appraised in the dark—ninety-nine percent of your earned XP and stat points piped straight into my core and Serena's!"
He leaned an inch lower, relishing the shock freezing my blood. "You didn't stay Level 1 because you were talentless, sweetheart. You stayed Level 1 because you made me an S-Rank god!"
White-hot rage detonated inside my chest—hotter than the shattered bone in my knee, hotter than the betrayal rotting three years of my life into ash.
Every sleepless night in the sub-basement appraisal cages.
Every mocked F-Rank physical exam where trainees laughed at my STR: 4 frame while Marcus soaked in stadium applause.
Those stats were mine.
"You're a parasite wearing stolen plate, Marcus!" I spat, lunging upward with my good leg and raking my nails straight across his unhelmeted cheek—drawing four bright ribbons of scarlet before his mailed boot slammed viciously into my ribs!
"Bitch!" Marcus snarled, touching his bleeding jaw in fury as Serena gasped and hurriedly angled her SpireCast camera away from his scratched face. "Enjoy feeding the monster my father chained down here!"
He seized the collar of my torn leather vest and hurled me backward across the twenty-foot chasm separating the extraction platform from the raised central dais of the cathedral.
I crashed spine-first onto a jagged slab of rune-carved black obsidian—the Floor 50 Sacrificial Blood-Altar.
Across the gap, twelve Golden Recall Scrolls flared in unison.
"Cue the tears in three, two—" Serena whispered, dabbing fake crystal eye-drops onto her lashes right before she and Marcus vanished in pillars of golden teleportation light!
Silence slammed down over the cavernous subterranean cathedral—broken only by the slow, ominous DRIP-DRIP-DRIP of my arterial blood spilling across the ancient channels of the obsidian altar.
[BLEEDOUT WARNING: 00:14 REMAINING — HP: 1 / 100]
[VITAL FUNCTIONS FAILING...]
"No," I whispered furiously to the vaulted ceiling, refusing to close my eyes—refusing to die as Marcus Vance's footstool while Serena spent my mother's legacy upstairs. "Not like this. Not for them."
Wait—Serena had stolen my canvas satchel full of decoy parchment charts, hadn't she?
She hadn't checked under my left leather bracer!
With trembling, blood-soaked fingers, I tore open the hidden inner clasp of my forearm guard, sliding out a wafer-thin, palm-sized tablet of iridescent star-metal etched with interlocking crimson circuits:
[MOTHER'S ASTRAL CODEX — UNIDENTIFIED PRIME RELIC].
Ten years ago—on the night the Ironblood System descended from fractured orbit and transformed Earth's capitals into hundred-floor Abyssal Spires—my mother, Grand Architect Dr. Helena Thorne, had pressed this cold star-metal plate into my twelve-year-old hands hours before High-Chancellor Damon Vance reported her "killed in a Floor 50 lab breach."
For ten years, the tablet had remained completely inert against my skin.
Until right now—when my blood flooded over both the obsidian altar runes and the star-metal circuits at the exact moment my life hit [HP: 1 / 100]!
KRA-KOOOOOOOM!
A blinding pillar of crimson-and-gold hexadecimal code erupted from the Blood-Altar, freezing the fourteen-second death timer at 00:01!
On my right wrist, Victor Thorne's black-iron Parasitic Leech-Cuff shrieked like a dying beast—cracking down the seam and exploding into harmless molten slag!
Instead of the standard blue hunter interface every guild citizen on Earth saw, a sovereign, razor-edged Crimson-Gold Admin Terminal unfolded across my entire field of vision in roaring stereophonic chimes:
[ROOT KERNEL DETECTED // GENETIC & BLOODLINE MATCH: 99.998% — DR. HELENA THORNE]
[ILLEGAL SOUL-SIPHON CUFF DESTROYED! CALCULATING 1,095 DAYS OF STOLEN XP & ATTRIBUTES...]
[EMERGENCY OVERRIDE ACCEPTED AT 1 HP!]
[F-RANK CLASS PURGED -> MYTHIC ADMIN CLASS UNLOCKED: IRONBLOOD ARCHON (LV. 1 -> LV. 3)!]
Golden fire poured straight into my veins, surging down my thigh to knit my shattered left patella back together in a violent, exhilarating rush of primeval blood-mana!
Before I could even gasp at my healed knee, two Mythic skill cards materialized in burning relief before my eyes:
[UNIQUE EX-SKILL ACQUIRED: BLOOD-LEDGER PLUNDER (MYTHIC)]
> Effect: Reveals a live Crimson Debt Counter above all entities holding your stolen XP, Stats, or Relics. Striking a debtor—or shattering their Guild Totem—reclaims 100% of stolen Levels + 200% Blood-Interest Penalty!
[INNATE SS-SKILL EVOLVED: TRUE ARCHON APPRAISAL (SS)]
> Effect: Exposes true System source-code, weak-spot nodes, boss phase timers, and counterfeit artifacts.
I pushed myself upright onto the blood-slick obsidian altar, my heart hammering like a war drum as my amethyst-crimson irises blazed with spinning golden hexadecimal rings.
Marcus Vance (DEBT LOGGED: +36 STOLEN LEVELS).
Serena Thorne (DEBT LOGGED: +32 STOLEN LEVELS).
Victor Thorne (DEBT LOGGED: +24 STOLEN LEVELS).
Every single level they wore was accruing two hundred percent compound interest on my ledger—and I was coming upstairs to collect every drop.
Except I wasn't alone in this cathedral.
CLANK—SHHHHHK—BOOM!
Fifty yards ahead in the pitch-black apse beyond the altar, five colossal Soul-Suppression Chains as thick as subway cables suddenly pulled taut between the vaulted ceiling pillars, raining sparks of molten magma across the dark stone!
My [TRUE ARCHON APPRAISAL] flashed automatically into the darkness—and froze.
Sitting chained upon a fractured throne of black basalt at the far end of the hall was no mindless dungeon beast.
It was a towering, six-foot-six titan of battle-scarred bronze muscle and cracked obsidian Sovereign plate, magma-blood conduits pulsing beneath his breastplate where five brutal rune-spikes pinned his chest toward the stone—and as his head lifted, two eyes of molten silver-ash ringed with burning ember gold locked straight onto mine:
[WARNING: MYTHIC CALAMITY ENTITY AWAKENED!]
[DESIGNATION: KAELEN VEX — "THE ASHEN SOVEREIGN" // LV. ??? (88.0% SOUL-SEALED)]
[BOSS AGGRO LOCKED ONTO: VALERIA THORNE!]
💬 COMMENT BAIT: MARCUS SHATTERED HER KNEECAP AT 1 HP AFTER SIPHONING 99% OF HER XP FOR THREE YEARS?! 😱🤬 Drop a ⚔️ if you cannot WAIT to watch Valeria rip every single stolen level back from Marcus, Serena, and Victor on live global TV!
💬 COMMENT BAIT: [UNIQUE EX-SKILL: BLOOD-LEDGER PLUNDER — RECLAIM 100% OF STOLEN LEVELS + 200% INTEREST!] 🔥🩸 Rate that Mythic Admin awakening from 1 to 10!
💬 COMMENT BAIT: Val is standing on the Blood-Altar face-to-face with the chained 6'6" Floor 50 Calamity Boss Kaelen Vex—and swipe straight to Chapter 2 (Kaelen's POV) to see what's actually going through his head right now! 👇⚡🐺
