Fantasy

Dane Rook was counting coins after a cheap dinner with his wife when the rain-lit street went wrong.
    He dies reaching for June and wakes in Brackenvault Dungeon as an F-Rank mimic chest. No hands. No voice. No way to stop the lid from opening when someone gets too close.
    The first delver who opens him dies while Dane is still trying to scream.
    His starting stats are pathetic: Control 0.03%, Cognition 4, and an SSS Mimic Skill sealed so tightly it might as well be a bad joke. The dungeon calls him property. His body calls people food. Dane calls both of those facts a problem he has to survive long enough to fix.
    Progress begins with humiliating little miracles: a delayed hinge, a coin pushed out of place, a bite held back for half a breath, a dead man's ring spat out instead of digested. Every mercy makes him stronger, hungrier, and more suspicious to the dungeon that owns him.
    Then Vera Pike enters Brackenvault.
    She is a mage with debts, sharp eyes, and a life of her own. She is not June. But something in her soul answers to June's memory, and Dane's sealed SSS Mimic Skill reacts like she is the most important pattern in the world.
    His mind wants to protect her.
    His mimic body wants to eat her.
    To escape Brackenvault, Dane will need stats, coins, allies who barely trust him, and enough control to become more than a trap with a dead man's grief.
    First a broken chest.
    Then a travel trunk.
    Then a door, a coffin, a wagon, a market stall, and eventually anything.