Chương 13: The Vertical Culvert

The southern wall of Hazor was a massive, crumbling escarpment of sun-dried mud bricks built directly over a steep limestone cliff. Ethan dropped onto his stomach behind a tangled cluster of wild terebinth bushes, his coarse linen kilt scraping against the dry thistles. Directly below his position, a narrow stone channel cut through the foundation of the city wall—the southern drainage culvert where the palace kitchens dumped their stale grease, bone fragments, and offal into the ravine.

The stench was thick, but Ethan's eyes were locked onto his target. Three metres below the mouth of the brick channel, the limestone rock face dropped vertically into a deep, shadows-choked fissure before stepping out into a series of narrow, uneven limestone ledges. It was a structural blind spot. A low, guttural growl vibrated through the brush. Out from the shadow of the ravine drifted a Level 3 Scavenger Jackal.

The beast was nearly the size of a wolf, its gaunt, rib-lined torso covered in patchy, grey-brown fur, its yellow eyes scanning the base of the wall for food. [Target Identified: Scavenger Jackal (Level 3)] Health Points: 180 / 180 Status: Hungry (Aggro Radius Expanded +15%) Ethan didn't move a muscle. He pulled a smooth, heavy river pebble from his leather pouch and slotted it into the braided hemp pocket of his sling. He knew his cheap, refurbished 2035 haptic rig couldn't handle fluid combat tracking.

The wild miss in the canyon with the Pixel Rex scouts had proven that the game's automated aim-assist fought against his laggy hardware inputs, causing the projectile trajectory to warp. To hit anything, he had to eliminate the machine's variables entirely. He opened his system layout and switched his combat targeting from System Guided to Raw Manual Kinetic. No assists. Just pure, uncalibrated physics.

He reached into his tunic, pulled out a small piece of rancid sheep fat he had scraped off the widow's grinding mat for zero copper bits, and tossed it directly over the lip of the vertical stepped drop. The fat landed with a soft splat on the narrowest, highest limestone ledge. The jackal's head snapped up. It let out a sharp whine, its primal AI calculation instantly prioritizing the immediate food source over sensory caution.

It scrambled up the lower rocks, its front paws landing heavily on the narrow ledge as it snapped up the bait. Caught, Ethan thought. The ledge was less than half a metre wide, flanked by a sheer two-metre limestone drop on three sides. The jackal's quadrupedal turning radius required at least a metre of horizontal clearance to reverse its posture.

To get down, it had to manually back up step-by-step or drop blindly backward into the jagged fissure below—a manoeuvre the pathfinding algorithm avoided to prevent falling damage loops. The beast was physically locked in place by its own anatomy and the terrain geometry. Ethan stood up from the brush, exposing his position. The jackal spotted him instantly. It let out a fierce, snapping snarl, its front legs tensing to leap forward and clear the vertical gap to bite him.

But as its weight shifted to its hind paws, its claws slid uselessly against the smooth, sun-baked limestone face. It had zero traction. It was stuck in a permanent pathing reset loop, its front legs twitching as it tried to calculate a forward jump path that didn't exist. Ethan dropped his shoulder, swinging the hemp cords in a low, rapid horizontal circle beside his knee. The braided string whistled against the dry canyon air—a rising, deadly thrum-thrum-thrum. He released the free knot-end. Snap.

The limestone pebble struck the jackal directly between its yellow eyes with a sickening, solid crack. [Critical Strike! Fracture Status Effect Applied] Target Health: -42 HP Current Target HP: 138 / 180 The beast let out a high-pitched yelp, its head snapping backward from the kinetic impact, but the narrow stone walls kept it from falling off the ledge. It remained perfectly pinned, a stationary target.

No weapon maintenance fees, Ethan thought, his fingers already dipping back into his leather pouch for stone number two. No bronze file costs. No iron repair bills. He loaded the pocket, dropped his shoulder, and began the rotation again. Thrum-thrum-snap. Another stone caught the beast on its left shoulder blade, cracking the digital bone structure and reducing its physical dodge metric to zero. Thrum-thrum-snap.

The third stone struck its jaw, spraying grey dust and digital blood against the white mud-brick foundations of the city wall. The jackal's health bar was plummeting in clean, clinical increments of forty, while Ethan's stamina bar remained at ninety-four percent, recovering faster than he could swing his arm. With a final, hollow gurgle, the Level 3 Scavenger Jackal's front legs collapsed.

Its body slid off the narrow limestone ledge, tumbling down into the dry dirt of the ravine below before dissolving into a shower of white digital pixels. [System Alert: Enemy Defeated] Experience Gained: +45 XP Current Level Progress: 1 Novice (99. 2% toward Milestone) Loot Acquired: [Coarse Jackal Hide x1], [Cracked Beast Fang x2] Total Operational Cost: 0. 00 Silver Shekels. Ethan looked down at the physical items materializing in the dust of the ravine floor.

Coarse hide could be sold directly to the lower-city tanners for forty copper bits, and the fangs could be traded to the amulet-makers for silver scrap weight. He didn't climb down to harvest them yet. He looked back up at the drainage culvert mouth, where the scent of the palace grease was already drawing a second grey shadow out from the deeper thickets of the valley. He reached into his pouch, his fingers wrapping around another cold, free limestone pebble.

He was less than one percent away from Level 2, and his arsenal was literally lying all over the floor.