Chapter 1: The Boy With No Luck

Chapter 1: The Boy With No Luck

Forten had nine coins, one dying mother, and no good reason to keep moving—except Ferria didn’t care.

Neither did the rattleboar rampaging two streets over.

He’d only read about them—Rattleboars were floor seventeen monsters, rarely caught, nearly never tamed. You didn’t see them this low—not unless someone dragged it down on purpose. Meat fetches coin, sure, but even seasoned Trailblazers avoided bringing one back alive.

The boar roared and tore through the stew cart. Wood cracked. Heatstones burst. Smoke bloomed like a bad omen.

People screamed.

Forten backed into the stone wall, stew parcel clutched in his hands. His first thought was for Sylvia. His second was that this wasn’t supposed to happen.

Not here. Not in Ferria. This city was a fortress, not a hunting ground.

A passing Trailblazer skidded into view, cloak half-frozen and breath sharp in the air. Forten caught the gleam of official glyphs on his sleeve—mid-rank, maybe. Enough to look impressive. Enough to draw attention.

“Get down!” he barked. “It’s charging!”

The rattleboar lurched.

People scattered. One of the chains snapped with a whip-crack of metal.

The Trailblazer raised his hand. “Alright, come on, then—”

He carved a suppression glyph mid-air—fast, practiced, blue light flaring from his palm like a whip—

And lashed it forward.

It struck the boar dead-on.

Nothing.

The creature didn’t recoil. It fed.

Its back arched. Spines flared. The glyph’s light vanished into the beast’s hide like water on hot stone.

Then something shimmered—just for a blink. Not because the glyph failed. Not because the boar resisted.

Because something else had already marked it.

Not stronger. Just older.

And the glyph, sensing it, didn’t fail. It flinched.

The Trailblazer’s expression shifted. Not confusion—fear.

“What the hell—?”

The rattleboar roared and charged.

He scrambled to cast again—fingers jerking through another glyph, this one messier, faster, panicked—

Too late.

The boar hit him like a battering ram. His body flew backward, cracked off the far wall, and crumpled in a heap.

He didn’t get back up.

The sound of his body hitting the wall was still echoing when the screaming started.

People didn’t scatter—they ran like the city itself was about to collapse. Stalls overturned. Steam vents burst. Someone fell. No one stopped to help.

Even the ones in uniform backed away.

Forten froze. He had never seen a Trailblazer die before. Let alone like that.

He needed to get back to Sylvia for dinner. His lukewarm stew was still pressed under his arm.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

He turned to run—

And then, somehow, the rattleboar looked at him.

Not a scan. Not a glance. A decision.

Out of everyone in the crowd. Out of every direction it could’ve gone.

Its gaze locked like a compass finding true north.

Of course. Of all the damned luck in Ferria—and this was his. Just like the collapse. Just like the fire. Bad things found him. It was almost like it was designed to be that way.

“No way,” Forten muttered.

Forten bolted. Hard.

His boots smacked stone—left, right, fast—shoulders hunched, parcel clutched under one arm like a prized egg. He could hear the beast snorting behind him, tusks gouging into walls, hooves hammering like judgment day.

“I don’t even taste good!” Forten shouted over his shoulder.

He dove—caught the edge of a broken pipe, swung sideways, nearly dislocated a shoulder, but rolled clear. His coat ripped. His boot caught a nail.

His stew—barely enough for one, but meant for two—burst open in the air like a sad firework. Sylvia’s half gone with it. That was the night’s dinner. The next day’s maybe too.

“No—oh come on!” he yelled, watching dinner splatter across the bricks.

He turned a corner. Wrong one. Alley ended in a brick wall.

He spun around, frantically scanning. A window? No. Too high. A pipe? Cracked and hissing. Great. Trash? Useless. Unless—

He grabbed a dented bucket and flung it with all his might.

It hit the boar square in the head.

Bong.

The boar blinked. Then roared.

Forten’s stomach dropped.

“I’m dead.”

No clever trick left. No miracle dodge. Just one kid, cornered, with stew in his hair and failure in his blood.

He closed his eyes and braced for impact—

Then… silence. Too loud to be safe.

A second passed.

Then another.

He cracked one eye open.

The rattleboar’s body was still there.

Kind of.

Most of it.

Its head wasn’t.

It lay a distance away, rolled up against the alley wall like a dropped helmet. Clean slice—no splatter, no ragged tear. Just severed. A little steam curled up from the stump, like it didn’t realise it was dead yet.

The rest of the boar twitched twice. Then didn’t.

Forten blinked.

Then again.

And there it was.

Sitting in front of the corpse, legs tucked neatly beneath it—

A bear.

Maybe even a stitched one.

Forten’s brain didn’t register it at first. Not really. It was just… there. Amid blood and smoke and ruin.

Then something in his chest pulled tight.

The soot-dark stitching. The lopsided ear.

The clumsy thread on the paw—he’d sewn that himself. Years ago.

His throat closed.

“No,” he whispered.

It couldn’t be.

That bear was gone. He gave it to Father. The night he left. It should’ve been ash, buried with the others, or rotted away in some forgotten crevice somewhere in Igniaria.

But it was here. Sitting like it never left. Like it remembered the way home.

And something was wrong with it.

Its shadow didn’t flicker. It clung to the stone like it had been inked in.

Its paws were wet.

The stitches weren’t his anymore. Someone else had touched them. Rewound them. With thread that wasn’t cotton.

The claws poking through were massive. Too massive. Just barely visible beneath the seams, like blades tucked behind a child’s smile.

The bear tilted its head. Slowly. Like it, too, was surprised to be here.

Forten couldn’t speak. His heart was hammering behind his ribs like it wanted out.

The bear lifted a paw. Waved.

His body went rigid. Not from fear. From recognition. That wave—it was practiced. Familiar. It shouldn’t have been.

Forten didn’t move. Couldn’t. His knees gave.

Because for one second—just one—he thought it was Byrin waving back.

And that broke something.

“Nope,” he said. “Nope. Not happening. You are not—”

The bear tilted its head the other way. Innocent. Blank. Adorably unhelpful.

“You’re not real,” Forten muttered.

The bear stood. Or rather—hopped upright. Wobbled a bit. Then dusted itself off with one stubby paw like it had just finished grocery shopping.

Forten gawked at it. “You—what are you?”

The bear waddled a step forward. Then stopped. Sat again. Waited.

Forten backed up.

“You… don’t eat people, right?”

The bear tilted its head. Again.

Then, from a pouch that Forten was very sure hadn’t existed a moment ago, it pulled out… a single heatstone.

It was small. Simple. But it meant survival.

Something clenched behind his ribs.

Stay warm.

That shouldn’t have mattered.

But his fingers still moved toward the stone like they were reaching for a hand he’d lost years ago.

It waddled forward. Gently placed the stone by his foot. Then looked up.

Forten stared at the heatstone. Then at the bear. Then at the still-warm corpse of a floor-seventeen rattleboar, headless and steaming behind it.

“…I have so many questions,” he whispered.

The bear raised its paw.

A simple, human-like thumbs up.

Practiced. Too practiced. Like it had done this before—for someone else.

He didn’t understand it. Any of it.

But his hands were still shaking. And his heart was still beating.

Because for once, the disaster hadn’t followed through. For once, something else had caught it first.

Because of the bear.

“If you’re the same one… if you’re what’s left of him…”

He didn’t know what he believed.

Only that he wasn’t ready to let it go.

“Then yeah. You win.”

He scooped up the heatstone.

“You’re coming with me.”

The bear gave a delighted nod—calm, certain, like this had always been the plan.

And just like that, Forten turned, limped home—

—with a stitched, bloodstained plushie trailing behind him like the beginning of a very bad story.