As the shadows lengthened and color bled from the world, Edge made his way back to his cave, stopping every few minutes to Conceal his tracks.
Today’s hunt had gone well. In addition to killing four monsters, stealing three skills, and earning three Mortium, he had picked up some valuable information along the way.
Two of his victims were survivors from the gorilla general’s army—one stage-one ape and one stage two. The monkeys were ideal prey. In part because their offensiv...
2025-04-29 17:00:06 +0000 UTC
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Edge awoke the next morning with a smile on his face, ready to face the day and the challenges it would bring.
Although he was trapped inside the Savage Garden—locked in a race against a superior force with the future of his home hanging in the balance—he felt genuinely optimistic for the first time since his ordeal began.
The deck was still stacked against him, but he didn’t let the danger discourage him. Not when he’d managed to scale the biggest obstacle that was standi...
2025-04-28 17:00:13 +0000 UTC
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The Guardian of Darkstone Tower—the final obstacle standing between humanity and their lost homeworld—staggered toward the rim of the rooftop.
Its once gleaming body was now battered and warped, covered in oil and ash. Springs and gears fell from the machine’s shorn hand as electricity discharged across its body and smoke boiled from its joints. It staggered and spun as the mechanisms animating its limbs went haywire, leaving it unable to halt its momentum.
The Guardian’s ...
2025-04-28 17:00:10 +0000 UTC
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Trapper crouched behind a stalagmite, hiding within the shadows cast by the convicts’ lanterns as they slowly approached her position.
Fortunately, the shadows in question were black as ink, since she was fighting for her life within a vast network of caverns. Beside her, Alice kept her Camouflage aura running at full blast—face pale as she mouthed a prayer that the jailbirds would trigger the hunters’ trap before Roth’s minions found them.
The man had summoned hundreds of...
2025-04-25 17:00:15 +0000 UTC
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As those words echoed across the smoke-filled air, Nick and Devin sprang into motion—desperate to stop the Guardian before the process was complete.
Before they could close half the distance, a thick dome of force wavered into existence, trapping them inside. The duo tried to cut their way out, but they couldn’t break through in time.
Over the next adrenaline-soaked minute, the lethal construct transformed.
Nick had thought the energy emanating from the Guardian was powe...
2025-04-25 17:00:15 +0000 UTC
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When Edge stepped through the black door with Foebinder at his side, a chill wind broke over him, carrying the tang of salt to his lips.
He continued walking down a narrow corridor, whose surfaces were formed from glistening tissue that pulsed in time with his footsteps. Since his inner world was located inside a massive, mysterious, creature, he tried not to ponder the implications of these details. Instead, he focused on making the most of this opportunity to speak with Skill-Eater at...
2025-04-24 17:00:09 +0000 UTC
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The living machine took its stance and bowed—clearly enjoying the moment.
While Devin cracked his neck and whirled his axe around his shoulders, Nick flourished Blightbane and gestured for the elite to come at them.
Artic Clarity flowed like ice in his veins, honing his thoughts to a feral lucidity as the most important moment of his life began. Everything that he had experienced until now—the struggles and growth and pain—all came down to the next handful of blood-soaked se...
2025-04-23 17:00:23 +0000 UTC
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The moment Edge uttered those words, his awareness was drawn inside his core.
By this point, each cell in his body—every fiber of his being—was quivering with the rapturous anticipation of what was coming. Evolving to stage one had been an incredible experience, granting him the power to survive what had been shaping up to be a hopeless situation during his battle with the shadowreavers.
Every aspect of Skill-Eater had been upgraded in the process, including his core’s trait...
2025-04-23 17:00:20 +0000 UTC
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When Edge stepped out of his shelter to figure out what was going on, he began to laugh. This is perfect. The dungeon was covered with a blanket of fog. It was thicker than ever and showed no sign of dissipating anytime soon.
By now, he was starting to suspect that killing the elite ape had triggered a change within the Savage Garden.
The mist had begun arriving earlier in the day and lingering for longer, and this was even more extreme. The fog was so thick that even wit...
2025-04-22 17:00:07 +0000 UTC
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The men came to a stop twenty feet in front of their foe, as the battle on the rooftop raged all around them.
For a final, fleeting moment, Nick, Devin, and the Guardian of Darkstone Tower simply stood there, taking the measure of each other.
It gave Nick a chance to run his gaze across the most dangerous opponent he had ever faced. Unlike the Janitor, this wasn’t an artificially-enhanced facsimile, but a true tier-2 elite. A battle-hardened warrior with a stable core and powerf...
2025-04-21 17:00:36 +0000 UTC
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When Edge poked his head outside the hollow an hour later, he broke into a broad grin.
The mist was rolling in from across the swamp—thicker than he’d ever seen it before. At this concentration, the fog would be blinding to anything that wasn’t packing Penetrate Mist. Although he was certain that every monster living in the Savage Garden had a strategy for enduring the dungeon’s environmental hazard, most would be at a severe disadvantage until it dissipated.
In short, it ...
2025-04-21 17:00:31 +0000 UTC
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After sharing a last, lingering look with Sophia, Nick activated Force Acceleration while readying himself for the fight of his life.
Bands of force-aspected mana wrapped around his muscles, coating his body in a pulsating mantle. Beside him, Devin kicked Flame Dash into high gear—twin plumes erupting behind his boots like an afterburner.
The men burst into motion and went streaking toward the titanic face rising from the rim of rooftop like rockets taking flight—poised to hit...
2025-04-18 17:00:18 +0000 UTC
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After observing the strider for hours, Edge had come up with a plan to defeat it that didn’t rely on the fog.
His strategy revolved around the fact that the monster preferred to stick to the shallows, remaining out of reach of the largest predators dwelling within the riverway. Since he could anticipate its route, it should be possible to hide further down the shoreline and wait for the strider to draw near. Once the monster was in range and focused on ambushing its next victim, he wo...
2025-04-18 17:00:17 +0000 UTC
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Fifteen minutes, two close calls, and one smashing face first into a tree trunk later, Edge was starting to get the hang of it.
He could never have pulled this off while manually controlling the chain, but Foebinder knew what it was doing. All he had to do was visualize where he wanted to go, and the black chain would reach for the next branch on its own, expanding and retracting at just the right moment to keep him swinging across the dungeon. It’s kind of like having an autopilo...
2025-04-17 17:00:10 +0000 UTC
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Edge cast his gaze across his inner world, filled with an exquisite sense of anticipation. Only one final task stood between him and climbing the next rung of the dungeon’s food chain, and this time he knew exactly what he had to do.
I need to defeat three stage-two monsters, and I can evolve. I have a chance of surviving this ordeal after all.
That being said, he had another pressing problem that he needed to tackle first. Edge only had a few minutes until the...
2025-04-16 17:00:13 +0000 UTC
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Kenji cursed as a fresh wave of clockwork soldiers poured through the portals ringing the battlefield.
Two of the quadrants were still holding strong, but one was wavering, and the other was only heartbeats away from being overrun. He was using every trick that he knew to keep their formation from collapsing, but Team Earth was hanging by a thread, and he was running out of time. If they couldn’t turn the tide within the next few minutes, there was a significant chance that they were ...
2025-04-16 17:00:06 +0000 UTC
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Now that the fight was over, it was time to hightail it back to his cave, nurse his wounds, then figure out what to do next. Before he moved on, Edge took a quick look around to make sure that nothing nasty had arrived while he was busy.
It was deeply unsettling to have half the world replaced with impenetrable blackness, but he tried not to let his fear get in the way. He could feel the tissue in his right eye squirming, tingling as Regeneration went to work healing the damaged organ. ...
2025-04-15 17:00:11 +0000 UTC
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Sophia raised her arm over her shoulder and sent her whip lashing out.
The elastic line wrapped around the forelimbs of a mechanical hound, bringing the brass beast crashing to the ground. She ordered a pair of warrior roaches to advance, along with a trio of spear-tongue frogs. Her summons charged in a tight formation, holding the constructs back long enough for her party to dismantle the bound canine.
In response to her mental command, her roaches skittered forward. They sank th...
2025-04-14 17:00:23 +0000 UTC
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Now that the decisive moment had arrived, Edge didn’t hesitate.
As the reverberations from his aural attack echoed across the marshlands, he charged down the narrow strip of soil with the point of his polearm leading the way. As he closed the final few feet, he ran his gaze over both monsters, judging the extent to which Intimidating Roar had affected them.
He could tell right away that while the frog was paralyzed, the flat monster wasn’t impeded at all. Understanding dawned ...
2025-04-14 17:00:23 +0000 UTC
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Hey everybody, I hope your week is going well. I just wanted to let you know that the bonus chapter event for Skill-Eater is coming to an end. I hope you enjoyed the extra chapters and thank you for the help in getting them edited.
While we won't have any chapters this weekend, I do have some good news. I've been writing fast enough that I can get out chapters 5 days a week going forward instead of 4, which means we get our Wednesday releases back. This means that the value of the Patr...
2025-04-11 17:02:02 +0000 UTC
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40 Minutes Earlier
Kenji cast his gaze across the defenders of humanity.
His senses were honed to a razor’s edge...
2025-04-11 17:00:10 +0000 UTC
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A few hours later, color had begun bleeding from the world, and Edge was growing desperate.
He still hadn’t found a skill that the black chains wanted, and he was running out of time. His odds of survival dwindled with every second that his advancement remained bottlenecked. Sooner or later, he was going to run into a monster that he couldn’t flee or hide from.
Even if he didn’t, the prisoners would eventually find a way to kill the remaining elites and then take a crack at ...
2025-04-11 17:00:06 +0000 UTC
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The resource in question was a cluster of purple crystals sticking out from the surface of a big black boulder. Edge didn’t recognize them, but given the minerals’ appearance and placement within the dungeon, the odds were good that they were a high-grade crafting material.
The outcropping wasn’t much bigger than both of his fists together, and he had plenty of room in his pack. Since he lacked the time and the tools to try anything fancy, he decided to remove them the only way he...
2025-04-10 17:00:05 +0000 UTC
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Devin rose to his feet, touching the wall with one hand to remain upright. He was wobbly as a newborn foal—still adjusting to the changes that had taken place across every aspect of his being.
When Nick turned to look at his friend, his eyes widened with surprise. The transformation had granted the warrior several inches of height and broadened his muscular frame. While Devin had been always been athletic, now he radiated vitality like a statue of a Greek god come to life.
Now t...
2025-04-09 17:00:05 +0000 UTC
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I hope this works. Edge gathered his concentration and cast his awareness into his core.
When he appeared inside his central chamber, he stopped to greet his skills, then walked over to the black door that led to Skill-Eater’s domain. He took a moment to collect his thoughts, then raised a fist and knocked as loud as he could—each impact resounding like the chime of a gong.
“Hey there, big guy. I’m sorry to bother you while you’re catching up on your beauty slee...
2025-04-09 17:00:04 +0000 UTC
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Although he had already charted a course, Edge needed to be careful now that he was operating within dungeon’s third zone. The most pressing threat was drawing too close to the water, since it was filled with aquatic and amphibious monsters that were a terrible match for his skillset.
Even still, it was safer than staying in the jungle. He had his wayfinder, which meant that after he discovered a viable route, he would always be able to find it again. Until they finished the painstaki...
2025-04-08 17:00:04 +0000 UTC
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The next thing Nick knew, he was back in his body. And this time, it was his body. His mind and will, and his alone.
He opened his eyes and let out a triumphant scream, giving voice to all the terror he had repressed while fighting for his life on the strangest battlefield he’d experienced to date—the Theater of his Mind’s Eye.
Then he took a deep, shuddering sigh and began to laugh.
He realized that he was back in the safe room, lying in a bed that w...
2025-04-07 17:00:06 +0000 UTC
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The next thing Edge knew, morning sunlight was warming his legs.
The buzzing of insects and chirping of birds filled the air, punctuated by the occasional roar of a monster in the distance. He was surprised to have slept straight through the night, and relieved that nothing had approached his shelter, although by this point, he trusted Skill-Eater or Chibime to wake him up in an emergency.
He needed to head deeper into the dungeon before the convicts entered the jungle in force, b...
2025-04-07 17:00:05 +0000 UTC
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You have extracted an unidentified skill (Rare, Rank 1).
It will take two days to digest it.
The instant that digestion began, Edge reached out and activated Extraction again.
He sent his intentions into the chains but didn’t come along for the ride. He had already pushed himself to the limit and had no desire to succumb to the corruption swirling inside the monster’s core. He trusted the living links to handle their business without him...
2025-04-06 17:00:04 +0000 UTC
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Edge reached out with both arms and then willed Extraction to activate.
The black chains burst from his wrists like they had been waiting all day for this moment, tearing through the air with zeal. When the living links plunged into the monkey’s chest and dove inside its core, Skill-Eater awoke, stopping his mind from following them.
He had known it was coming and was ready to plead his case. After all, this was the strongest monster he had defeated yet, and his core had stepped...
2025-04-05 17:00:03 +0000 UTC
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