The thing that came out of the undergrowth was not interested in introductions.
Ironmaw Wolf. Tier 2. Roughly the size of a horse that had decided legs were for amateurs and chosen violence instead. Metallic jaw glinting dull silver. Eyes like frozen amber. Frost curling off its fur in thin ribbons where Aether-cooled breath met warm air.
It was faster than something that size had any right to be.
"MOVE," Mordren said. Not shouted. Said. Like a man ordering dinner.
I moved. The wolf's jaws closed on the space my chest had occupied half a second earlier. The snap echoed through the clearing like a bear trap made of swords.
"It's Tier 2," I gasped, scrambling behind a tree that suddenly felt very thin. "I've had ONE inscription for ninety seconds—"
"Then you'd better learn fast."
The wolf circled. Head low. Frost pooling from its nostrils. It wasn't charging blindly anymore — it was reading me. Calculating distance, angle, the exact moment to lunge so I couldn't dodge again.
Smart. Great. A smart murder-wolf. Exactly what this day needed.
"Mordren, if you have any secret broken-grimoire emergency moves, now would be—"
"I don't."
"Wonderful."
The wolf lunged.
I activated Iron Skin on instinct — didn't think about it, didn't plan it, just clenched the inscription like a fist closing. My forearms hardened. Not visibly — I felt it beneath the skin. Density shifting. Bone and muscle and something deeper compacting into a structure that wasn't quite human anymore.
The wolf's shoulder hit me like a battering ram. I flew backward into a pine trunk hard enough to crack bark.
But nothing broke.
My back screamed. My lungs emptied. Stars detonated across my vision. But my ribs held. My spine held. Iron Skin, Rank 1 — barely functional, bottom of the barrel, the equivalent of strapping a cutting board to your chest and calling it armor — held.
The wolf seemed surprised by this. That made two of us.
I hit the ground rolling, got my feet under me, and did the only thing my body understood in that moment.
I watched.
Not the wolf's body. Its movement. The way it gathered force in its haunches before a lunge — a compression, like a spring, Aether flowing from its core to its legs in a visible pulse beneath the frost-laced fur. The way its head tracked me — not my center mass, my feet. It was predicting my dodge direction by watching my weight shift.
Pattern recognition. My past-life instinct kicking in. I'd spent twenty-two years consuming stories about fights I'd never been in. Analyzing combat from the safety of a screen. Useless knowledge for a man at a desk.
Extremely useful knowledge for a boy being hunted by a wolf.
It lunged again. This time I didn't dodge sideways. I stepped forward — inside its attack arc, close enough to smell frozen meat on its breath. Its jaws snapped shut behind my shoulder.
I slammed my Iron Skin forearm into the side of its neck.
It felt like punching a truck made of muscle. The impact rang up my arm and rattled my teeth loose. But the wolf stumbled. Off-balance. Confused. Nothing it hunted had ever moved toward it before.
And in that half-second of contact — my forearm against its frost-slicked fur, its Aether pulsing visibly beneath the surface — I felt something.
My grimoire reaching.
The cold thing in my chest extended, just slightly, like a hand pressing against glass. It touched the wolf's Aether flow. Read it. Tasted the inscription logic encoded in its biology — the way it channeled energy to reinforce its jaw, the way it compressed power into explosive bursts of speed.
I can learn this.
The thought arrived fully formed and absolutely certain. Not arrogance. Recognition. My grimoire recognized what the wolf was doing and understood it the way a musician understands a melody played in a different key.
Same language. Different instrument.
The wolf recovered. Snarled. The temperature around us dropped five degrees as frost Aether flooded from its core. It was done being cautious.
It came at me with everything. Full speed. Jaws wide. The air between us crystallizing into razor-thin ice fragments.
I couldn't dodge this. Too fast. Too committed. Too much mass behind too many teeth.
So I planted my feet. Activated Iron Skin. Raised both arms.
And studied.
The impact was apocalyptic. My boots carved furrows in the dirt. My forearms screamed against the pressure of jaws designed to shear through iron-reinforced bone. Frost Aether burned my skin through the reinforcement — cold so intense it felt like fire.
But I held. For two seconds. Three. Long enough to feel the wolf's ability from the inside — the compression, the burst, the Aether-to-motion conversion that made it so impossibly fast.
I understand you.
The inscription carved itself into existence between one heartbeat and the next.
Burst Step. Rank 1.
New. Raw. An ability copied from the thing trying to eat me, inscribed in real-time by a grimoire that had no rules against it.
I activated it before I fully understood what it did.
The world blurred.
Aether compressed in my legs — the same way it compressed in the wolf's haunches, that spring-loaded explosion of force — and I launched sideways so fast the wolf's jaws snapped shut on empty air. I covered fifteen feet in a blink. Hit a tree. Bounced off it. Landed in a heap.
The wolf turned toward me. Frost dripping from its jaws. Eyes recalculating.
Then it paused.
Something shifted in its expression — if you could call it an expression. The predator confidence dimmed. Its nostrils flared, catching my scent again, the way the Venom Drake had yesterday.
It smelled something it didn't like.
Two seconds of frozen stillness. The wolf stared at me. I stared back, half-crumpled against a tree with a brand-new inscription buzzing through my legs and blood running from a dozen frost-cuts I hadn't noticed receiving.
The wolf turned and disappeared into the undergrowth. No snarl. No parting threat. Just gone. Like I'd been reclassified from prey to not worth the risk.
The forest went quiet.
I lay against the tree, breathing in sharp gasps, my arms shaking, my legs humming with stolen speed, my grimoire warm against my chest for the first time since I'd been born.
Two inscriptions. Earned in blood and adrenaline and the desperate clarity of almost dying.
Two pages filled in a book with no end.
Mordren stood at the clearing's edge. He hadn't moved. Hadn't helped. Hadn't interfered. He'd watched me almost die with the clinical patience of a man who needed to see exactly what I'd do when the teeth came out.
"You inscribed mid-combat," he said. Not a question.
"Yeah."
"From the beast itself."
"Yeah."
"Without a core. Without a translator. Directly from observation."
"Is that... not normal?"
Mordren stared at me for a very long time. The forest breathed around us. Aether mist curled between the trees.
"No," he said quietly. "That is the furthest thing from normal that has ever existed."
He turned and walked deeper into the forest.
"Rest for five minutes. Then we're finding something bigger."
"Bigger?"
"You have an infinite grimoire, boy. And every beast in this forest is a page waiting to be written." He glanced back. The ghost of something fierce lived in his expression. "Time to start filling it."