Scarcity did not arrive all at once.
It crept.
He noticed it when the tunnel ahead smelled wrong—not rot, not blood, but emptiness. The air was too still. No distant screams. No movement layered beneath heat.
That corridor had fed him before.
Now it offered nothing.
He advanced anyway, every step measured, weight favoring the side where his ribs had healed thicker. The stone underfoot bore old signs of violence—gouges, fractures, stains—but no bodies. Not even fragments.
Cleaned.
Not scavenged.
Scavengers left waste. Bone dust. Scrape marks layered over older damage.
This place had been cleared.
He knelt and pressed his palm to the ground, letting a thin thread of cold slip outward. It traced hairline cracks in the stone and stopped abruptly, as if the heat ahead had already been siphoned away.
Absence.
Not his.
He withdrew the cold and rose.
The pattern repeated over the next cycle. Corridors that should have produced conflict didn't. Hunting grounds felt hollow. When prey did appear, it arrived early or late, never when expected. Fights collapsed into chaos—third parties intervening too quickly, pressure overlapping in ways that wasted effort.
He burned more energy than he gained.
That was unsustainable.
He adjusted routes, shortening travel distances, accepting smaller meals. Regeneration slowed. Microfractures lingered longer in his arms. Ice backlash became easier to trigger when fatigued.
The environment was pushing.
Not violently.
Deliberately.
He tracked it the only way he knew how—by mapping failure.
He memorized where feeding stopped being reliable. Where ambushes clustered. Where tunnel collapses forced reroutes that coincidentally increased exposure to stronger predators.
Too consistent to be chance.
Something was redistributing pressure.
He didn't name it yet.
Naming required certainty.
The first direct cost came three cycles later.
He engaged a pack of ember-skinned hunters near a heat vent—a risky choice, but hunger was becoming disruptive. The fight went poorly from the start.
A second pack arrived too fast.
Then a third.
Not drawn by noise.
Placed.
He lost a leg.
It was torn free at the knee when one of the hunters latched on and detonated its own internal furnace in a crude, desperate tactic. The blast shattered stone and hurled him into a wall hard enough to crack his spine.
He sealed the wound instantly—Cold Seal—and crawled into shadow before the rest could finish him.
He waited there, shuddering, core straining as the cold worked overtime to keep him alive without intake.
Hours passed.
No pursuit.
They didn't chase.
That was worse.
They assumed he would bleed out.
When regeneration began later, it was slow and incomplete. The new leg formed thicker than before, joints reinforced aggressively, but coordination lagged. Movement felt weighted, delayed.
A correction that cost speed.
He accepted it.
Speed had already been failing him.
He fed again only after relocating far from his usual routes, taking down a lone scavenger that wandered too deep without escort. The meal barely stabilized him.
As he worked the flesh, he noticed something else.
The scavenger's body bore burn-marks that weren't combat wounds—deliberate cauterization along the spine and shoulders. Someone had altered it before release.
Bait.
He crushed the remains thoroughly this time, freezing what he didn't consume until it shattered under pressure.
Removal denies reuse, he decided.
A rule added.
Later—much later—he witnessed the interference directly.
From concealment, he watched lesser demons being driven—not hunted—down a corridor by distant pressure. Heat flared at their backs. Not attacks. Just enough threat to keep them moving.
They fled straight into another group waiting ahead.
A massacre followed.
He didn't move.
He watched bodies pile up.
Then others arrived—not to fight, but to collect. Lean demons with markings burned into their hides dragged corpses away efficiently, sorting intact from ruined without hesitation.
No waste.
No feeding.
Transport.
That was when certainty clicked into place.
This was accounting.
This was allocation.
Someone was deciding where meat existed—and where it didn't.
He retreated before being noticed, carving a new path through underused tunnels, accepting longer travel for reduced exposure.
As he moved, something subtle happened.
The ice scars he left behind—cracked stone, frozen residue—began to disappear faster than before. Not melted. Covered. Broken. Buried under controlled collapse.
Erased.
He did not feel anger.
Anger assumed opposition.
He felt adjustment instead.
If scarcity could be engineered, then abundance could be denied or redirected.
He needed to stop thinking like prey.
He changed his behavior.
He stopped preserving corpses entirely.
He fed quickly and destroyed what remained—shattering bone, dispersing heat violently so nothing useful lingered. Where he fought, the ground became unusable afterward.
Scorched. Fractured. Frozen and broken.
He didn't claim territory.
He made it expensive.
The change had an effect.
Scavengers began arriving late again. Predator packs overlapped less frequently. The environment's pressure loosened—not removed, but blunted.
Whoever was pulling the strings adjusted.
That confirmed it.
There was a mind behind the scarcity.
A patient one.
By the end of the cycle, his body felt heavier than before.
Not from growth.
From accumulation.
Scars layered over scars. Corrections stacking on top of earlier fixes. Each injury made the next adaptation harder, more constrained.
He was approaching a ceiling.
Not of strength.
Of tolerance.
He sat in a narrow crevice and forced the cold inward, compressing it until his core ached. The ice obeyed longer now before rebelling, holding tight instead of flooding outward reflexively.
A small improvement.
But not enough.
He looked at his hands—one thicker than the other, claws uneven from repeated fractures. He flexed them slowly, feeling where movement resisted.
This form would survive.
For now.
But whoever was managing scarcity was not done.
And eventually, they would push hard enough to force a failure he couldn't correct with incremental fixes.
When that happened, he would either change—
Or be removed.
He closed his eyes and memorized the ache in his core, the drag in his limbs, the way ice strained under compression.
These were measurements.
And measured things could be prepared for.
He rose and moved again, deeper, quieter, less predictable.
Scarcity had found him.
Now he would begin finding its limits.