Death, it turned out, didn't smell like brimstone or clouds. It smelled like wet dirt, copper, and rotting meat.

  Dr. Arthur Vance’s first conscious sensation was not the phantom echo of the terrorist leader’s bullet shattering his skull, nor the fading memory of the little girl’s blood on his surgical gloves. It was pain. A white-hot, agonizing tearing sensation localized entirely in his right calf.

  He gasped, his eyes snapping open to pitch blackness. The air was thick, heavy with the damp chill of a subterranean cave. He tried to move his leg, but the flare of agony was so intense it stole the breath from his lungs.

  Something wet and jagged tore at his flesh again.

  Arthur’s vision slowly adjusted to the gloom, aided by a faint, bioluminescent moss clinging to the cavern walls. Huddled over his right leg were two figures. They were the size of human toddlers, but their proportions were entirely wrong. Gnarled, sickly green skin stretched tight over distended bellies and wiry limbs. Pointed ears twitched. One of them raised its head, its maw dripping with dark blood. His blood.

  Goblins.

  The analytical, surgical side of Arthur’s brain—the side that had kept him calm while operating in a collapsing bunker under heavy artillery fire—detached from the sheer impossibility of the creatures in front of him. Survival instinct overrode logic.

  Arthur filled his lungs with the stale cave air and unleashed a roar. It wasn't a shout; it was a primal, guttural scream fueled by sheer adrenaline and the terror of being eaten alive. He thrashed his upper body, hurling a loose stone from the cave floor at the nearest creature.

  The rock caught the goblin in the shoulder. It shrieked—a high, grating sound like metal on glass—and scrambled backward. The second goblin dropped the chunk of flesh it had torn loose, its yellow eyes wide with sudden fear. Without waiting to see if the prey would rise, the two scavengers turned and scurried into the deeper darkness of the tunnels, their bare feet slapping against the wet stone.

  Arthur collapsed back onto the rocky floor, his chest heaving. He was alive. He wasn't on Earth anymore—that much was glaringly obvious—but he was breathing.

  He forced himself to sit up, suppressing a wave of nausea. "Triage," he muttered, his voice raspy and foreign in his own ears. "Assess the damage."

  He looked down at his right leg. It was a massacre. The goblins had chewed through the soleus muscle, exposing the fibula. Blood was pooling rapidly. He needed a tourniquet, but his clothes were little more than bloody rags.

  But as he shifted his weight to inspect his left leg, a deeper, more profound dread set in. The flesh around his left ankle, where one of the creatures had sunk its teeth in before moving to the meatier right calf, was turning a violent, sickly shade of purple. The veins crawling up his shin were black.

  Necrosis, his mind supplied. Fast-acting venom or aggressive bacterial infection. The tissue was dying by the minute. Without broad-spectrum antibiotics and immediate debridement, sepsis would take him in hours, if the blood loss from the right leg didn't kill him first.

  He needed to move. He needed to find an exit, water, anything.

  Gritting his teeth, Arthur dragged himself forward, his hands scraping against the rough stone. His fingers brushed against a thick, smooth piece of driftwood—a washed-up branch from whatever subterranean river flowed nearby. Using it as a makeshift crutch, he forced himself upward.

  One. Two. Three.

  He planted his left foot. The deadened limb gave way instantly.

  Arthur pitched forward, crashing hard into the dirt. But he didn't hit flat ground. He collided with something cold, scaly, and solid.

  Wheezing, Arthur pushed himself up and stared at the obstacle. It was a humanoid corpse, but distinctly reptilian, covered in rust-red scales. It had a canine-like snout and a thick, muscular tail.

  A Kobold.

  The body was fresh. The blood pooling beneath its crushed chest—likely the victim of a cave-in or a larger predator—was still warm.

  Arthur stared at the Kobold’s legs. They were digitigrade, built for speed and power, heavily muscled beneath the tough scales. Intact. Perfect.

  A hysterical, manic thought pierced his fading consciousness. If I were back in my OR, I'd amputate my legs and prep for prosthetics.

  Suddenly, the air in front of him shimmered. A translucent, pale blue rectangle projected itself directly into his retinas, casting an eerie glow in the dim cave.

  [Notice: Viable biological material detected.]

  [Host lower extremities compromised. Fatal threshold approaching.]

  [Would you like to perform: Xenotransplantation (Lower Extremities)?]

  [ Y / N ]

  Arthur stared at the floating text. A System. He was dying, bleeding out in a cave alongside monsters, and reality was offering him a surgical prompt.

  He didn't hesitate. With a trembling, blood-stained finger, he pressed the glowing [ Y ].

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

  [Acknowledged. Initializing Surgeon’s Domain.]

  A secondary chime echoed in his head. A small, pristine silver box materialized on the cave floor beside the Kobold. The lid flipped open, revealing an array of surgical instruments that gleamed with an unnatural, sterile light. Scalpels, bone saws, retractors, and a spool of faintly glowing blue suture thread.

  [Quest: Complete the Graft. Time Limit: 45 Minutes.]

  [Penalty for Failure: Death.]

  Arthur Vance picked up the glowing scalpel. The pain in his legs was momentarily muted by the cold, familiar focus of the operating room. He dragged himself closer to the reptilian corpse, his eyes scanning the anatomy. The musculoskeletal structure was different, the joints inverted, but flesh was flesh. Bone was bone.

  He started with the donor. The System’s scalpel parted the Kobold’s tough scales as easily as warm butter. The blade cauterized the blood vessels instantly, emitting a faint hiss and the smell of ozone. Arthur worked with frantic precision, severing the muscle tissue, uncoupling the tendons, and finally using the serrated bone saw to slice through the femurs just above the knee.

  In under ten minutes, he had two pristine, heavily muscled reptilian legs detached and prepped.

  Now came the nightmare.

  Arthur wrapped a torn strip of his shirt tightly around his upper right thigh, creating a makeshift tourniquet. He looked down at his own ruined, bitten, venom-laced flesh. If he hesitated, the necrosis would spread past his knees, making a graft impossible.

  He placed the glowing bone saw against his own right leg.

  Don't think. Just cut.

  He engaged the blade. Agony, absolute and blinding, erupted in his brain, but a secondary pulse of cold System energy flooded his veins, forcefully keeping him conscious. He screamed through clenched teeth, the sound echoing off the damp walls as he severed his own ruined limb.

  He repeated the process on the left, discarding his necrotic, poisoned flesh onto the cavern floor like biomedical waste.

  Breathing heavily, his vision swimming with dark spots, Arthur aligned the Kobold's right leg with his own severed stump. He picked up the glowing blue suture thread. It didn't have a needle; the moment the thread touched human flesh and reptilian scale, it fused them together, sinking deep into the tissue to bind the muscle fibers and nerves autonomously.

  He stitched. He tied off the femoral arteries, wrapping the blue light around the disparate blood vessels until they pulsed as one. He connected the sciatic nerves, feeling a phantom jolt of electricity shoot down to digitigrade toes that had belonged to a monster only twenty minutes ago.

  Thirty-five minutes.

  He moved to the left leg, his hands slick with a mixture of red and dark, almost black, reptilian blood. Suture, bind, connect. The System's magic acted as the ultimate immunosuppressant, violently forcing his human biology to accept the foreign cells without rejection.

  As he tied the final glowing knot on his left thigh, the surgical tools vanished into thin air. The blue screens shattered and reformed.

  [Quest Complete: The Graft.]

  [Xenotransplantation Successful. Integration Rate: 100%.]

  [Host Race Updated: Human (Chimera Variant).]

  [Reward: 10 Stat Points.]

  Arthur dropped his head back onto the cold stone, a hysterical, breathless laugh escaping his lips as feeling flooded into his new limbs.

  For a long minute, the only sound in the cavern was Arthur’s ragged breathing. He stared down at his lower half. Pale, blood-smeared human thighs abruptly transitioned into thick, rust-red scales just above the knee. The suture line was a jagged ring of angry pink tissue, completely sealed but violently raw.

  He flexed his mind, sending a command down his spinal cord to toes that shouldn't exist.

  Four thick, clawed digits twitched.

  The sensation was dizzying. His brain was receiving sensory input from an alien biology—the cold dampness of the stone against tough, leathery footpads, the heavy, dense muscle fibers of the reptilian calves, and the bizarre, high-angled pivot of the digitigrade ankles.

  A soft chime pulled his attention back to the floating blue rectangle.

  [Status Screen Unlocked.]

  [Name: Arthur Vance]

  [Race: Human (Chimera Variant - Stage 1)]

  [Class: Surgeon]

  [Level: 1]

  [Unallocated Stat Points: 10]

  [Available Attributes:]

  [Strength: 8]

  [Dexterity: 12]

  [Defense: 6]

  [Intelligence: 15]

  [Senses: 9]

  Arthur dragged his hand across his sweat-slicked forehead, his analytical mind booting up despite the trauma. Ten points. In a video game, you min-maxed for your build. In reality—in this brutal, subterranean nightmare—these numbers were the only things standing between him and the digestive tract of a goblin.

  Strength would help him fight, but he wasn't a brawler. Defense might let him take a hit, but avoiding the hit entirely was a better strategy.

  He was a surgeon. His life, and the lives of his patients, had always relied on his hands, his precision, and his mind. If this System allowed him to graft monster parts onto himself, he needed absolute, unwavering control over his tools and an expanded mental capacity to understand the alien anatomies he would be butchering.

  He mentally tapped the floating screen.

  Allocate 4 points to Dexterity.

  Allocate 4 points to Intelligence.

  The interface shimmered. A sudden, sharp cooling sensation washed over his brain, like a blast of pure oxygen. The lingering brain fog from the gunshot wound on Earth vanished. His thoughts crystallized, moving with a rapid, terrifying clarity. Simultaneously, a subtle warmth spread through his forearms and hands. When he flexed his fingers, the micro-tremors born from adrenaline and fear were entirely gone. His hands were perfectly, unnaturally steady.

  Allocate 2 points to Senses.

  His vision snapped into focus. The dim bioluminescence of the cave didn't just provide faint light anymore; his eyes now rapidly distinguished the varying shades of darkness, mapping the contours of the cavern walls. He could smell the metallic tang of the fresh blood, the ozone smell of the System's magic, and a faint, stale draft of moving air coming from deeper within the tunnel.

  An exit.

  Arthur grabbed the driftwood branch he had found earlier, using it to push himself upright.

  Standing was a completely different nightmare than suturing. Human legs were plantigrade; the heels bore the weight. The Kobold legs were digitigrade. He was essentially standing on his tiptoes, his heels permanently elevated and acting as a secondary joint.

  He swayed violently as his center of gravity shifted. He overcompensated, nearly pitching backward before the thick, reptilian footpads splayed out, the heavy claws scraping against the stone to anchor him. The leg muscles were incredibly dense, practically humming with coiled, kinetic energy.

  "Okay," Arthur hissed through his teeth, leaning heavily on the branch. "Walk before you run. Or, in this case, hobble before you get eaten."

  He took a step. The reversed joint felt bizarre, but the sheer power in the step was undeniable. The Kobold legs carried his human torso with effortless ease.

  Leaving the ruined remains of his original legs and the mutilated Kobold corpse behind, Arthur moved toward the draft. The journey was agonizing, not because of the graft—the System had seamlessly integrated the nerves—but because his human core had to violently adapt to the shifting momentum of the reptilian stride.

  After twenty minutes of navigating the winding, ascending tunnel, the bioluminescence gave way to natural light.

  Arthur burst through a jagged fissure in the rock face, stumbling out into the open air. He fell to his hands and scaly knees, coughing as his lungs dragged in crisp, pine-scented wind.

  He looked up. He was at the bottom of a massive, heavily forested ravine. The sky above was a vibrant, twilight purple, split by the rings of a shattered moon.

  He didn't have time to marvel at the alien sky. His enhanced Senses picked up a chorus of low, rattling coughs and the scraping of metal against stone just a few dozen yards away.

  Arthur pulled himself up behind a massive, moss-covered boulder and peered around the edge.

  Nestled against the cliff base was a crude settlement. Tents made from patchy animal hides and structures built of lashed timber formed a loose ring around a dead fire pit. But it was the inhabitants that made Arthur tighten his grip on his makeshift crutch.

  There were perhaps forty of them. Kobolds.

  Unlike the muscular, rust-red specimen he had scavenged in the cave, these creatures were in a horrific state of decay. Their scales were dull, graying, and flaking off. Their ribs jutted sharply against their leathery skin, and their canine snouts drooped with lethargy. Several pups lay listlessly in the dirt, too weak to even whimper.

  It was a textbook presentation of severe malnutrition. Famine.

  As Arthur observed them, a shift in the wind carried his scent directly into the camp.

  Three of the largest Kobolds—though "large" was relative given their emaciated state—snapped their heads in his direction. They grabbed crude, rusted spears and advanced toward the boulder, their golden eyes wide with a mixture of fear and predatory desperation.

  Arthur stepped out from behind the rock. He didn't raise his hands in surrender, nor did he brandish his stick as a weapon. He just stood tall on his new, heavily muscled, rust-red legs.

  The three Kobolds stopped dead in their tracks. Their snouts twitched frantically, pulling in his scent. They smelled the human blood, yes. But overpowering that was the unmistakable, dominant pheromone signature radiating from the incredibly powerful legs grafted to his body. Legs that clearly belonged to a superior, alpha-caste hunter of their own kind.

  The lead Kobold lowered its spear. Its eyes darted from Arthur’s human face to the imposing reptilian limbs holding him up. Slowly, with a rattling whine in its throat, the creature dropped to one knee, bowing its head in submission. The other two immediately followed suit.

  Arthur lowered his drift

  wood crutch. A cold, calculating smile crept onto his face. They weren't looking at a meal. They were looking at a lifeline.

  "Well," the surgeon murmured. "It seems I have a practice."