“First, let us agree to never mention what happened down by the road,” Bob said, and everyone nodded, even Roland, the party responsible for what happened down by the road.

  “I just wish I could forget,” Barton whispered.

  Roland grimaced. As it turned out, the destroyed crane hadn’t quite provided enough concealment from the sights and sounds that resulted from multiple sickness stacks nearly killing him before they expired.

  It got so bad that Roland drank down a Health potion to see if it helped. All he earned for it were a few measly hit points that quickly vacated the premises, along with what felt like ten percent of his body mass.

  “If anyone picks a healing class, learn some kind of cure disease Skill, or we’re not going to survive this Dungeon,” Barton said.

  “Good idea,” Roland agreed. “All right, I guess I need to accept the official end of quest notification, so you all get your rewards.”

  Bob’s eyes all but gleamed with gamer’s greed. “Loot and XP!”

  “The good things in life,” Barton added.

  “When you get free Attribute points, assign them one point at a time,” Roland reminded them. “Also, sit down before you accept your class. You’re going to get hit by anywhere between ten and thirty stat power-ups all at once, if not more, and it’s going to hurt for a bit.”

  A lot, probably. I was lucky I was disconnected from my body when it happened.

  “I don’t know if I can do something knowing it’s going to hurt,” Barton said.

  “Pain is weakness leaving the body,” Josh told him. “Man up.”

  “Life is pain, Donnie Dorko,” was Dahlia’s version of a pep talk. “Woman up.”

  Roland shrugged and clicked on the biggest notification:

  You have completed the Challenge: Battle of Trash Hill (Wave Challenge)

  Rewards:

  For surviving the Challenge: 180 Unbound Essence, 25 gold, Roach-Stomper Boots (Rare).

  For your Personal Contributions: 120 Unbound Essence, 20 gold, Ring of the Bodyguard (Rare), one Skill Token, 26 Monster Cores (F-Grade, assorted Affinities and Essence values).

  Access to the Second Level of the Halls of Refuse has been granted!

  “Did you all see that?” Roland asked before realizing everyone was staring at their own floating glowing scroll; lots of wide eyes and dropped jaws were in evidence.

  Roland turned to Bob. “Character creation?”

  “Yes. I got three Titles and four Achievements, but before I can read them, I have to pick my Class.”

  “All right, take your time, and if you have any questions, let me know.”

  While everyone else sat down and scrolled through their System messages, Roland checked his other notifications:

  Congratulations! You have improved your Title (Red-Handed) from Uncommon to Epic. Rare and Epic benefits are cumulative! You have gained a new Title: Vermin Slayer (Uncommon).

  Congratulations! You have learned a new Skill: Disease Resistance (Rare, Beginner 1; reduces damage, duration and effects of System-inducted diseases by 10% per Skill level)!

  Cleanse has improved to Beginner 4. Disease Resistance has improved to Beginner 3. Gun Proficiency Skill has improved to Beginner 7. Reaper’s Dance has improved to Beginner 4! Toxin Resistance has improved to Beginner 6!

  He checked the new and the improved Titles. Maybe he would change his Active Titles if the new additions were better than his standard loadout.

  * Red-Handed (Rare): You have taken more than 10 sapient lives before System Induction or more than 25 lives after.

  Automatic Rewards: +1 to Strength and +1 free Attribute point per level/stage.

  Active Rewards: +25% damage to all attacks against living beings.

  * Red-Handed (Epic): You have taken more than 25 sapient lives before System Induction or more than 100 lives afterwards, making you stand out among your species.

  Automatic Rewards: +1 to all Attributes (1-time bonus), +3 free Attribute points per level.

  Active Rewards: +50% damage to all attacks against living beings. Once per day, can activate a Feat: Killing Blow (Increases the damage of a single attack or Skill use by 500%).

  * Vermin Slayer (Uncommon): You have killed a wide assortment of Vermin-affiliated creatures. They now instinctively hate you, and you give them more reasons to hate you by dealing extra damage to their kind.

  Automatic Rewards: +3 free Attribute points (one-time reward). Attacks against any entity with a Vermin Affinity inflict +25% damage.

  Active Rewards: Attacks against Vermin-affinity entities inflict +50% damage (replaces the automatic reward).

  Roland decided to swap his Death Defier active Title with Red Handed (Epic). Killing monsters quicker seemed like a better deal, considering he hadn’t been in danger of dying even once in this dungeon crawl so far. He added the freebie points to his reserve, bringing it up to thirty.

  The per-level or -stage bennies didn’t apply retroactively, unfortunately, but would be added to his new ones, which of course he still couldn’t purchase, not until he fixed his Dantian and Pattern.

  His Attributes gained one point apiece from the new Red-Handed Title, which was nice: he checked his new Attribute spread:

  Strength 50

  Dexterity 63

  Constitution: 50

  Perception 46

  Intelligence 51

  Willpower 61

  Charisma 41/35

  Free Points: 30

  Okay, let’s spend some freebies, he decided. He should get everything to fifty, which would put him firmly into superhuman territory. Thirteen points got him there. His Charisma’s penalty still put it a little behind for when he wanted to make a good impression, but at forty-two it was already beyond superhuman. It should be good enough until everyone on Earth routinely transcended human limits.

  Strength 50

  Dexterity 63

  Constitution: 50

  Perception 50

  Intelligence 51

  Willpower 61

  Charisma 50/42

  Free Points: 17

  Next, he examined his new items. Rares weren’t quite as impressive as Epics, of course, but they were a huge improvement over nothing.

  The boots looked like a pair of Timberlands work brogans that had seen heavy use; the heavy leather surface was cracked in places and had assorted stains of dubious origin.

  Roach-Stomper Boots (Rare, F-Grade).

  Damage: 16 (Strength/3) Physical (increased to 25 (34 versus insects) by Title and item bonuses).

  Durability: 300/300

  Significance: 0

  Inherent Traits:

  * Damage Bonus: While wearing the boots, all attacks gain a 30% bonus against insects or insectoid creatures.

  * Damage Resistance: 15 versus Physical attacks, 25 versus Toxic damage.

  Extra damage against bugs was perfect for the Dungeon, although Roland didn’t know how common insectoids would be outside this situation. But they also resisted Toxic damage, unlike his work boots, whose soles had lost half their thickness just from walking around the muddy ground past the tree line.

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  The ring was a copper band with runic inscriptions running down its surface:

  Ring of the Bodyguard (Rare, F-Grade).

  Durability: 500/500

  Significance: 0

  Inherent Traits:

  * Defend Principal: To select a principal (the person you are guarding), have the ring touch a drop of their blood, which activates the effect. Any damage the principal receives is reduced by 20% and shifted to you instead. You must be within 300 feet of each other for the effect to function.

  The ring was a great tank accessory, although tank classes probably had similar abilities. It would allow Roland to protect a party member. He figured that whoever turned out to be the squishiest after character creation would become his ‘principal’. Or the party’s designated healer, since keeping healers alive helped the entire party.

  Speaking of the party... Roland could tell the moment each of them accepted a Class: they all went limp for a moment and then began to thrash around as the System reassembled their bodies from the inside out.

  Dahlia took a bit longer than most; she started shouting and laughing before the pain hit her and she joined the rest in doing the Watusi on the dirt.

  I sympathize. The muscle spasms, the pain, the itching inside your bones, the pain, the noise as your vertebrae stretch, and who can forget the pain?

  Seeing it from the outside showed him things he had missed when he accepted dozens of stat increases at once because of, well, all the pain. Each of them was glowing brightly: that was their auras reacting to the infusion of Mana, Essence and whatever other System juice was being pumped into their bodies and minds.

  The Matrix-style multi-Skill upload was also going to hurt like a bish. Roland had been spared that part because he’d been having an out-of-body experience when he claimed his first level.

  He felt bad for the party; they were going through a full body transformation without anesthesia. On the other hand, they all should get a much better Class than if they waited for Integration like the rest of the world.

  They would be grateful. Right? Or maybe he’d have to deal with five pissed-off Classers screaming for his blood.

  I’ll find out soon enough. Meanwhile, let me look at that Skill Token.

  Skill Token (Epic, Consumable): Using this token will unlock a new Skill slot. Any Affinity or Class Skills can be selected. New Affinity or Class Skills may be available. A list of available Skills is available.

  He knew that gaining new Skills from leveling would slow down after the first few levels, so he was tempted to hold off using the token until then. But considering he wasn’t going to level up before he fixed his cultivation, he might as well see if any of his Skills could compensate for his locked Art and Techniques.

  Available Skills:

  * Battle Cry (Rare, Action, Beginner): Unleash a powerful shout that weakens and damages your enemies and bolsters you and your friends. Battle Cry inflicts (Arcane Rating/10) points of Death damage on hostiles within 5 feet per Skill level. Allies will recover (Arcane Rating/10) points of Health, Mana, and Endurance. Cost: 10 Endurance. Cooldown: 10 seconds.

  * Call of the Reaper – NEW - (Epic, Action, Beginner): Reaper Lords don’t shout insults at their foes like common Tanks. Instead, they offer a simple choice: flee and live another day – or face Death and accept your final reward.

  Activating the power releases a reverberant keening that instills dread, a sense of inevitability, and an overpowering urge to either flee or fight the source of the call. The chance to resist is modified by the targets’ Willpower in opposition to your Charisma and Willpower. Mental defenses, and level/rank differences will also alter the Skill’s effects.

  Targets will be either overcome with fear (frozen, fleeing or partially impaired) or driven to attack you. Range: Aura Rating in yards. Duration: Effects will last 2-3 seconds before losing 50% of their power; the lesser effect will remain for an additional 3-6 seconds.

  Range: Hearing distance, weakening by 10% per (Aura Rating in feet) from your position.

  Cost: 10 Mana. Cooldown: 5 seconds.

  * Deadly Armaments (Rare, Toggle, Beginner): Imbues weapon with Death-attuned Mana that will inflict 2 points of Death-attuned damage per Skill level. Death-attuned damage is unaffected by mundane or Common armor. Cost: 10 Mana per hand weapon. Missiles such as arrows and bullets can be imbued at the cost of 3 Mana per missile. This Mana cannot be regained while the Skill is active. Hand weapons remain imbued until the Skill is dismissed. Missiles will lose their power after striking any solid surface.

  * Death Smite (Epic, Action, Beginner): Send a pulse of Death energy that can travel a short distance to strike a foe, inflicting Death damage equal to your Arcane and Attack Ratings. Range is 1 foot per Skill level. The accuracy of the pulse is determined by Dexterity, Perception and Skill level. Cost: 6 Mana. Cooldown: 2 seconds.

  * Dread Aura (Epic, Toggle, Beginner): Reduce all Concept-attuned damage by (Arcane Rating/2) points. This aura has a radius equal to 1 inch per Skill level plus Aura Rating. Enemies who enter the Aura must pass a Willpower check or be affected by Afraid or Terrified debuffs, depending on their relative power. Cost: 5 Mana and 5 Endurance, which cannot be regained while the Shield is active. Duration: Until dispelled.

  * Iron Skin (Common, Toggle, Beginner): reduces physical damage by (Constitution/2) + Skill level and Concept-attuned damage by (Willpower/3) + Skill level. Cost: 5 Endurance, which cannot be regained until the Skill is turned off.

  * Spirit Shield (Rare, Toggle, Beginner): Creates a skin-tight energy field that reduces Concept-attuned damage by (Arcane Rating/2) + Skill level. Cost: 5 Endurance that cannot be regained while the Shield is active. Duration: Until dispelled.

  * Spirit Walk (Rare, Toggle, Beginner): Enter a state between the physical and immaterial, becoming hard to see in the physical world and also granting the ability to see spirit entities that are normally undetectable by physical senses. While spirit-walking, you become translucent and noiseless, gaining a 60% bonus to any attempt to remain undetected; this bonus increases to 80% when remaining still. Movement speed is decreased by 50% while spirit-walking. Cost: 15 Mana that cannot be regained while the Shield is active. Duration: Until dispelled.

  * Taunt (Common, Action, Beginner): Shout a challenge at a single target. If it fails to resist the effect (modified by both sides’ respective Willpower, your Skill level, and any mental defenses), the target will attack you and only you for 2-6 seconds. Cost: 3 Endurance. Cooldown: 5 seconds.

  Once again, there were a lot of good options for his single choice. Battle Cry and Taunt were easy to dismiss, since Call of the Reaper was superior in every way. They would have come in handy during the previous challenge, but they were available a little too late.

  The new offering was both a group taunt and crowd control. Definitely his first choice, but he wanted to make sure first.

  Spirit Walk was a stealth ability that didn’t do much on its own but if he could eventually combine it with Reaper’s Dance and turn it into a cheaper toggle, it would be very useful.

  Getting a Skill in the hopes of using it to improve another wasn’t a good idea, though. Maybe if he got a new superpower at every level, but Trixie had told him new Skill offerings happened less often after the first few levels.

  Since Trixie was not available, he asked Raven.

  According to the System, you will get new Skills at level two, five, eight, twelve, and twenty. After that, every five levels you will be offered a new Skill or the chance to upgrade an existing one. You may gain Skills spontaneously, but that only happens during extreme situations.

  What normal people call extreme I call Tuesday, so I’m sure there’ll be more spontaneous Skills popping up.

  With the bird’s guidance, Roland looked through all the tabs on his interface and found the progression stats for his Class, and there it was, outlined just as Raven said.

  Thanks.

  Anytime, grasshopper.

  Grasshopper?

  Ah. It’s a cultural reference you are too young to understand.

  No worries. I need to spend some time working on my interface.

  That would be smart. Even with a Guide, the System isn’t easy to fully grasp.

  That’s because the System believes in the ‘throw kids into the deep end of the swimming pool’ teaching method.

  Every System I have encountered does so, to varying degrees. Consider yourself lucky that your introduction to a System didn’t involve having sixty seconds to pick a Class before a horde of monsters descended on you – and if you failed to choose a Class before the time expired, you would be killed outright.

  “Okay, that System is a Grade-A a-hole,” Roland said absently, going over his options.

  It would be nice to have some damage mitigation on top of his armor. His head was protected, his upper torso had decent defenses, but below the belt all he had were ten points of damage reduction. That would be pretty good against normal humans and some guns, but it didn’t do much in a dungeon. Iron Skin might add some protection.

  On the other hand, I’ll eventually find better leg armor, if not in this crawl, in the next or the one after the next. Nah, my first choice is the only choice.

  “I’m going to take Reaper’s Call,” he told Raven. “Any thoughts?”

  A fine Skill. It resonates with you. I would look closely at any Skills named after the Reaper; they will most often be the ones you want.

  “I guess that makes sense,” Roland said. “So, while you weren’t helping us, were you able to make any headway into fixing my Dantian problem?

  As a matter of fact, I have. On the next Dungeon level, you and I will take a small detour.

  “A detour where?”

  A place with someone who may be able to help restore your cultivation.

  “You know, some people find the whole ‘cryptic and mysterious’ routine entertaining. I’m not one of them.”

  Well, grasshopper, maybe there are things that shouldn’t be said out loud or even telepathically while inside a System construct, where everything said, done and even thought may be recorded for posterity.

  “We are being recorded?”

  The System records everything. Some Factions can access those records, although there are privacy locks, and even visual access is very expensive. Still, do not expect privacy to be sacrosanct.

  The idea that his world was like an ant farm somebody was watching bothered him. Sadly, there was such a long list of System stuff that bothered him that he couldn’t muster as much indignation as he should.

  More crap to deal with until I’m strong enough to make my opinion matter.

  The promise that a fix was as close as one level down was the important thing. He doubted that it would be something as easy as pressing a button, but he was willing to do almost anything to get his mojo back.

  “As soon they are ready, we’re doing this.”

  Roland turned toward his friends. They were all still having convulsions; if it wasn’t for the Party interface, he’d be a little worried.

  “Looks like it’s going to take them a while.”

  * * *

  “Did you get all that?” Horacio Tell, provisional Lesser Pilot Co-Producer for Unnamed Ongoing Project, told his henchman.

  The crystal viewer operator shrugged. His name was Pablo or Paco or something; Horacio had forgotten it thirty seconds after being introduced and couldn’t be bothered to look at his System tag.

  Pablo-Paco was a measly Staff pleb, below even a PA like Horacio before his rise to provisional LPCP. All he knew about Paco-Pablo was that he shrugged a lot and more or less did as he was told.

  “I got the audiovisuals, LPC,” Pablo-Paco said. “A few surface thoughts. But nothing the bird says via telepathy is getting recorded. Looks like it’s got more protection than our recording contract covers, or the System doesn’t want to share its thoughts.”

  “Bah. We still don’t have a good handle on that bird. We’ll give it some lines in post-production, whatever fits the narrative.”

  “Got it. Add some bird lines in post,” Paco – he looked like a Paco – jotted down on his tablet. “Want me to tag a screenwriter for the job?”

  “Nope. Writers are cheap, but not that cheap. I burned fifty percent of the budget just to get access to the Dungeon feed. Not even live, post-action.”

  Not to mention, writers are overrated anyway. I bet I can write the bird’s lines myself.

  Kaynimi Noctos claimed that the bird masquerading as an F-Grade pet was at the very least an Ascended-equivalent Entity. With a Significance of over nine thousand!

  If we go into production, we gotta make the bird look good, Horacio decided. An Ascended-tier entity isn’t something the Eye of Ptah Corporation wants to offend.

  Dealing with supra-godlike entities wasn’t something even Crossworld Factions did lightly, but the value of documenting their activities made it worth the – carefully managed – risk.

  We’ll make the bird look good even if all it wants is to have his proto-Primal buddy for a snack. It’ll give us a nice horror angle, maybe enough for a miniseries.

  That wouldn’t be ideal for him – the big Essence was in ongoing live shows – but he’d get more production credits, maybe enough to parlay it into a bigger gig down the line.

  When climbing the corporate ladder, you grabbed whatever rung life handed you. Even if the rung was made from the entrails of friends and family.

  “Stay on him,” Horacio told Paco (definitely Paco). “But keep recordings of all his buddies. He’s probably going to lose one or two of them, and we’ll get a nice grief scene out of it. Everyone loves pathos.”

  Paco shrugged. “Got it.”

  Horacio finally deigned to access Paco’s System tag to see what his name really was. Darn, I could have sworn I was right.

  “Keep it up, Pedro,” he told the guy. Treating the little people right was good for morale. “If we get a budget bump, I’m promoting you to Assistant to the Production Assistant. Not too shabby, uh?”

  Pedro shrugged again.