It was very quiet in the wild sanctuary as the sun rose.

  Jack opened his mouth like he wanted to say something, then closed it again without speaking.

  Emma sighed and tried to get more comfortable against the duct tape wall. (Surprise, surprise: walls made out of duct tape, branches, and thorns are actually miserable to lean against.)

  Zelda turned her back to all of us. I’m pretty sure she was sulking.

  I folded my arms. Crossed my legs. Tried leaning against the wall, then lying down on the ground. Sat up again, leaned forward, pulled my knees up, rested my chin on them. Lay my legs flat on the ground again.

  Okay, I wiggled. That’s what I was doing. I’m sure some kindergarten teacher would have asked if I had ants in my pants. I didn’t. The scenario, kindly, didn’t seem to include bugs. But the ground was hard, and the duct walls were sticky, and it just wasn’t comfortable to be sitting there for minute after long minute.

  “All right,” I finally said. “Who wants to kill some goblins?”

  Zelda turned around. Squeaky balls, yes.

  I reached into my pouch, pulled out her ball, and tossed it to her. “You have a squeaky ball.”

  She grabbed it, planted it between her paws, and began making it squeak, her back end wiggling in a way that said, More squeaky balls, all the squeaky balls, yes, squeaky balls, good to me.

  “I would love to kill some goblins,” Jack said fervently. “But—”

  “We are so outnumbered.” Emma leaned forward. “There’s no way. It would just be suicide to try to attack that stronghold. Or, okay, maybe a hard quit of the ‘scenario,’ but even if the dying isn’t permanent, I bet it still hurts. In fact, I know it hurts.” She reached up and rubbed her shoulder where Sam had stabbed her.

  “Yeah, we definitely can’t attack them directly.” I opened up the pouch again and started pulling stuff out. The roll of wire. The duct tape. The folding knife. Then I gestured to the picnic basket. “Let’s see what we’ve got to work with.”

  Emma lifted it off the ground. “You want to kill goblins with paper napkins and lip balm?”

  “The napkins might make good kindling. The lip balm… well, hey, if it’s petroleum-based, it might make good kindling too. Spread it on the napkins, maybe? Make some fire bombs?”

  Jack snorted a laugh. “Not sure that’s gonna work.”

  “Yeah, probably not. But I’m not going to spend the next fifty-some hours huddled in a corner hoping the lizard doesn’t find me.” I glanced at Zelda and corrected myself. “Find us. We can’t attack the stronghold head-on, but that doesn’t mean we can’t lure a few out and take them on in smaller numbers. My pit trap worked pretty well, so maybe I need to build a few more of them.”

  My eyes narrowed as I remembered that last mysterious goblin death. “Actually…” I laughed, a little sheepishly, “… I forgot that I leveled up again.”

  “Again?” Jack protested. “What, level six now? I’m still stuck at two.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t take the level. I thought I might want to save it in case I was injured and needed that insta-heal effect. But I got credit for killing a goblin and I’m not sure how.”

  Jack frowned. “You think another one fell in the pit?”

  “I think the lizard was in that pit and was doing a pretty solid job of destroying it. I don’t know why the goblin wouldn’t have noticed that. Falling in a nice quiet pit, sure, that can happen. But falling on top of an angry lizard? You’d think it would have stopped walking. But it died somehow and I got points for it, so…” I shrugged. “Traps. We build traps. We build a lot of traps. And then we lure goblins into them and, well, kill them. We get points, we level up, we get tougher and maybe, maybe, fifty hours from now, we’re tough enough to walk into that stronghold and kick some ass.”

  Did I believe my words? Nope, not at all. It was just the thing to say so as not to spend the next fifty hours sitting on our butts feeling sorry for ourselves and panicking about the state of the world.

  Jack believed me, though. He gazed at me in wide-eyed wonder. “That is brilliant.”

  I had known Jack for approximately twenty hours, and I liked him, despite the fireball to the face on first meeting. (He attacked my dog! What an idiot!)

  I didn’t actually know what generation he was a part of — Z? Alpha? Omega? The Covid Kids? Did they even have a name? — but he felt like the kind of young adult that made you think the kids were all right, that his generation was going to be okay. He was respectful without being fake, honest without being cruel, smart without being smug. He seemed like a genuinely decent human being.

  But I was pretty sure that anything he thought was brilliant was probably suicidally stupid. And yet… fifty hours sitting in a lean-to, hoping a lizard didn’t find us, versus fifty hours trying to get stronger so that we could go home and kick some mana-crazed squirrel butt? No brainer, to be real.

  Jack didn’t notice my skepticism. He was quivering like Bear when she caught sight of wildlife in the yard. “We can do more pit traps, but this time with stakes, the kind with sharpened points. They’ll be more dangerous. Maybe some deadfall traps? Snares are good, except they probably won’t kill the goblins, so we’ll have to follow up. We’ll figure out how to lure them, maybe funnel them into a kill zone? With barriers, so they don’t scatter. Or distractions to pull a few away at a time. Kite ‘em, trap ‘em, kill ‘em.”

  I blinked. “I believe a kite is a diamond-shaped toy the kids in Mary Poppins play with on a windy day. Or maybe, if you’re a serious ornithologist, a black-and-white bird with a really cool tail. What are you talking about?”

  “Constantly-moving ranged attacks,” Emma answered for him. “Dragging the bad guy around while you peck away at it from a distance. Classic boss kill move. And going to totally fuck us over if we wind up with a dozen goblins attacking at once. You can kite a boss, but you can’t kite a crowd.”

  “Okay, so we need crowd control tactics. Some area-of-effect strategies.” Jack’s hands wove patterns in the air, as if he was diagramming football plays.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  “Like what, exactly?” Emma asked. “You got a nice lightning storm spell that you haven’t mentioned?”

  “No, but…”

  “We plan,” I interrupted. “Traps again. Pits, tripwires, snares. We can fill this forest with crap to slow goblins down. Maybe not to kill them, but we slow down a few, we kill the rest, then we go back and kill the ones we slowed down.”

  Yes, I said that. Me, the person who almost had a heart attack about killing a squirrel a few hours ago.

  Emma rubbed her forehead. “I think this is crazy,” she muttered.

  A little smile tugged at my lips. She wasn’t wrong, but I didn’t feel the need to mention how right she was. On a downswing, I’d probably be perfectly capable of spending fifty hours huddled in a hut, waiting for life to be different. But apparently I was not in a downswing.

  It turned out that the combination of tracking from my ring, trapping from my book, my high perception—and, just possibly, a bit of a manic episode—made ambushing goblins easy for me.

  Not as easy as it was for Jack, though. I wanted to believe he had some special System-granted ability that made him really good at fighting goblins, but I think it was just practice. Not, obviously, real-world practice—I didn’t think he’d been making a habit of killing monsters back in North Carolina. But he had a strategic way of thinking and an almost intuitive sense of tactics. Also, excellent aim and a good sense of timing.

  Emma found it harder. She had trouble figuring out the range of her bow, either shooting too early or waiting too long. And she absolutely could not bring herself to kill a trapped goblin. That caramel macchiato was a puddle of vomit after the first time Verdant Reprisal triggered.

  Zelda, meanwhile, took way too many risks. She was absolutely fearless. She seemed to believe she was invulnerable, even after the rest of us had all taken damage one way or another.

  Fortunately, leveling up healed us. I wish it worked like a shower, too. By the time it started to get dark again, I’d made it to level eight, Emma was level six, almost seven, and Zelda was level nine. Yeah, okay, the dog was doing better than the rest of us. Fearless, remember?

  I was also completely grossed out by the condition of my clothing, my hair, my skin. I smelled. No, really, I smelled disgusting. Sweat, blood—some of it mine, more of it belonging to a multitude of goblins—and a touch of that caramel macchiato flavored vomit added up to the worst cologne ever. Years ago, I’d gone on a wilderness backpacking trip and at the end of it, I swore that I’d never be that dirty again.

  But that was clean dirt, in comparison. Dirt from hiking in a beautiful setting, appreciating the outdoors, celebrating life. This dirt on the other hand… well, maybe the killing was getting to me.

  “I think we should tackle the stronghold while it’s dark,” Jack said.

  I closed my eyes and kept my sigh internal, but Emma groaned. “You can’t be serious.”

  We were sitting in the lean-to we’d created hours ago. Currently, it was just a lean-to, sorta ridiculous. Duct tape and branches made for a shelter as shoddy as anything any goblin would build. The Wild Sanctuary effect had worn off about an hour ago, but we’d been too busy eating dinner and making our leveling up decisions to care.

  Mine had mostly been boring. I got two free points per level, which meant I’d had six points to distribute. I understood what Jack had been telling me about min-maxing, but the fact was, strength made me hit harder, endurance made me tougher to kill. It turned out that my class was giving me points in perception, resilience and will, too, so at Level 8, my attributes were:

  Physical

  Strength - 5

  Agility - 5

  Endurance - 5

  Mental

  Intelligence - 4

  Perception - 18

  Resilience - 14

  X-Factor

  Presence - 3

  Serendipity - 10

  Will - 18

  Okay, yeah, I’d thrown the last couple points into agility, because 5/5/5 was more aesthetically pleasing to me than 6/3/6. I’d debated whether hitting 20 in will or perception would be worthwhile, because it might give me another trait. But I’d get there on my next level, anyway, so I’d find out soon.

  At least I assumed it would be soon. About twelve hours of extremely aggressive goblin hunting had been worth over 3000 points. I was currently sitting at 5995/7500. But I was starting to out-level most of the goblins we could lure into the forest, so my numbers were starting to go down.

  And did I despise the fact that I could calculate a value for every living being I killed?

  Why, yes.

  Yes, I did.

  Maybe if I’d been a rancher or something, used to looking at an animal and calculating the profit I would make on their slaughter, this would be easier. As it was, there was a part of me that was living in screaming misery and I kept stuffing it down, forcing it to shut up.

  It was just a game, right? These goblins were simulated, too.

  “The goblins will be sleeping. It’s the best possible time to try to do some damage in there,” Jack said.

  “Level 2, dude,” Emma snapped at him.

  I pressed my lips closed, not sure whether I wanted to snap at him or at her.

  “I know, I know,” he said, resigned to her annoyance. “You guys would be carrying me. It’s still the right thing to do.”

  Emma opened her mouth and I put a hand up, in the universal symbol for stop.

  Well, was it universal? Was it multiversal? Hell, maybe it was just the American symbol for stop, but that was fine, because all of us knew what I meant.

  “Let him explain,” I said wearily.

  Zelda, sitting next to me, thumped her tail against the ground in agreement.

  “We’ve all leveled up,” Jack started.

  “Ha!” Emma’s exclamation was filled with fury. If she’d been a fire mage, she would have inevitably breathed fire at him.

  But she wasn’t a fire mage. And neither was he, not anymore.

  At Level 5, Jack had taken the reset option. Without consulting with us. That was fine by me. His life, his choices. But Emma was still pissed.

  She might have been less so if he’d chosen to be a warrior. We could use a real tank. I was the one in the forefront when the goblins broke free from our traps and that had led to more than one precarious moment. We’d all survived, so hey, a win is a win, right? But we’d had some close calls. We’d all be toast by now if it weren’t for my dog. Fortunately, the goblins underestimated my cute little girl just as much as Emma did.

  She also wouldn’t have minded if he’d chosen to be a cleric. Some healing power would have come in real handy a few times. We’d always managed to level up in time, but once I’d actually held a goblin down while Jack carried a dying—but almost level 6—Emma over to get her stab in. That… yeah. Not an experience I’d recommend, really.

  Not an experience that had been easy for the woman who puked when Verdant Reprisal triggered, either.

  But no. Jack had chosen to be a rogue.

  “We’ve all leveled up,” Jack repeated. “Which means we’ve got plenty of energy and full health. The goblins aren’t going to be moving around much at night. At least, they didn’t last night. So we’ve got to hit them where they are, and that’s the stronghold.”

  “Right.” Emma made a scoffing noise. “And tell me you’re not using us to level now, so later you can backstab us, stealth your way into the Control Center, and take the win?”