I did not run.

  It was getting light enough that I probably could have jogged, at least a little, but I was trying to strategize as I went and, probably unsurprisingly, no great ideas were occurring to me.

  Our plan had never been particularly complex: lure the lizard to the goblins, then get the hell out of its way.

  Nothing had changed because I’d fallen behind the others, but we hadn’t factored daylight into our equation. I think we’d gotten so used to fighting in the dark we’d almost forgotten the sun would rise again. The whole “get the hell out of its way” part would’ve been easier in the dark.

  Fortunately, even without Emma’s handy map, I didn’t have to worry about getting lost. No need to mark trees or blaze a trail. The lizard had done a fine job of that for me, leaving trampled brush and broken branches in its wake.

  Once I got close enough, I could also just follow the sounds of battle. Screeching goblins, yelling in that chittering language of theirs, loud enough to burst eardrums. The shriek of the lizard, familiar from when it fell in my pit. Crashing noises, probably made by some of those lean-tos toppling.

  So our plan had worked. But where were Jack and Emma?

  When I neared the tree line, I slowed. I gave Zelda the hand signal that meant stay close, and crept forward quietly, crouching as I reached the edge of the trees.

  Wow.

  And also, shit.

  The stalker was wreaking havoc in the goblin stronghold. Picture mini-Godzilla marching through a Tokyo made of trash and temporary construction. The place had been a cesspit to begin with, even before the stalker started spitting at it, but the acid was eating away at the organic materials—including the goblins themselves—and leaving behind blackened, shredded wreckage. It was like a surreal junkyard, half nightmare skeleton graveyard, half still the music festival run by hoarders.

  But it was also just boiling with goblins. We’d been killing them steadily for the past twenty-four hours and we obviously hadn’t even made a dent in their population, because they were pouring out of their shacks and hurling themselves at the stalker with reckless abandon.

  It was like fire ants storming out of their nest when you unknowingly stepped on it and likely just as unpleasant to anyone caught in the midst.

  Like, oh, you know, for example, Jack and Emma. They were huddled by one of the sturdier shacks, obviously trying to hide. It was… mostly working? Most of the goblins were too busy to notice them, but the little pile of dead goblin bodies near their feet suggested “most” wasn’t the same as “all.”

  I could see what they were trying to do. They were headed for the stone building in the midst of the camp. We’d all agreed that it had to be the Rift Control Chamber, even if I felt like it was just too obvious. Okay, I didn’t play video games, but I did read books. Wasn’t it a given that the spot that looked so much like the goal had to be a death trap?

  And yet, where else could the control chamber be? It wasn’t like there were a ton of other options. I mean maybe, just maybe, we were being a little too linear in our thinking. We’d looked at the numbered items of the quest and assumed that number one, ‘defeat the goblin faction at the stronghold,’ would lead inevitably to number two, ‘breach the Rift Control Chamber.’ But maybe those weren’t steps, just tasks on a to-do list, no more related than ‘do the laundry and ‘mow the lawn.’

  God, I wished I was doing laundry right now. I would never complain about it again.

  I looked down at Zelda. If we entered the madness—as I reluctantly suspected we were about to do—it was going to be hard to keep track of one another. Between the screaming goblins and the spitting lizard and the splintering shelters, it was a mess over there.

  Our goal was to get to our friends.

  No, to get to the control chamber. That was the end goal. That was the ultimate destination.

  I reached into my companion pouch and thought, Primer, and the goblin primer obediently popped into my hand. I didn’t know how long it lasted, or even why I was carrying it, but I was glad to have it. I smeared a generous streak across Zelda’s fur and then wiped a line along my own cheekbones. Stealth +4 might be absolutely meaningless. Or it might be that little bit extra we needed to make it.

  “Okay,” I said to Zelda, not bothering to keep my voice down. No one was going to hear me over the goblins shrieking, not even if they were three feet away. “Our goal is that stone building. Do you see it?”

  I waited for her response.

  Yeah, yeah, I know, you think I’m anthropomorphizing my dog. Dogs don’t understand complex verbal instructions, blah-blah-blah. For all I know, you’re one of those people who think dogs don’t experience love. But I knew what I knew: Zelda understood exactly what I was telling her.

  She glanced at the building, glanced back at me, and tipped her head half an inch to the side. That was a yes. Got it.

  “You go there,” I told her firmly. “You understand me? Straight there.”

  I’d never had a kid. Lucky, unlucky, who knows.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  But my best friend Jules once said, about her five-year-old son Toby, “You want them to know the difference between ‘Fire! Drop everything and save your life,’ and ‘Mom would prefer you to make a different choice.’ Most parents never figure out you’d best use different voices for those two things.”

  I spent half a second hoping Jules was okay, then focused on Zelda, trying to mentally transmit that Fire voice urgency.

  “Straight there,” I told her, reinforcing the mental emergency mode with my best Fire voice. “To the stone building. Straight there.”

  I knew she understood me.

  Would she obey me? Well, that was a different question.

  She waited while I took one deep breath, then surged ahead of me as we joined the chaos.

  The smell hit me first—acrid and chemical, like someone had spilled industrial cleaner over a bonfire. The stalker's acid wasn't just melting goblins; it was dissolving everything organic it touched, leaving behind a toxic haze that made my eyes water and my throat burn. I followed its path of destruction, stepping over puddles of what might have been wood or might have been goblin, trying not to breathe too deeply.

  The sounds were even worse than the smell: not just the goblins shrieking, but the wet sizzling noise the acid made as it ate through whatever it landed on. My boots squelched on ground that was half mud, half liquefied camp.

  Somewhere ahead of me, Zelda was a white blur weaving between the chaos, and I lost sight of her almost immediately. Now the plan was just survival and forward momentum, because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant acknowledging what a really stupid idea this was. We were all going to die, and I could only hope that Jack was right and it wasn’t permanent.

  Meanwhile, though, I swung Warden’s Edge around me like it was a baseball bat and I was a World Series-level batter. I tried not to notice that the blade was, you know, a literal blade, and I was slicing off goblin heads like they were flowers I was dead-heading in a garden.

  And yes, you’re right, I’d never dead-headed flowers in a garden, gardening not being my thing. But I’d seen it done. Theoretically, I knew how it was done. And believe me, I was killing goblins just like they were poor pathetic sunflowers in some garden I’d never had. Swing, smash, pop. One after another, they just… died.

  For the goblins, I must have been some nightmare creation out of a horror movie, because I came after the lizard. Like, first the lizard, boiling the skin off your friends with its acid spit, and then just when you think you’re safe, some psycho human, swinging a shovel around like it’s a battle axe.

  A strange thing was happening to time while I fought. It stretched like a bungee cord, seeming endless and then snapping back with a bite like an aggro turtle. I wasn’t sure if it was something the System was doing or just what fighting for your life felt like, but I’d have these stretches of absolute clarity, everything around me as detailed as an IMAX, and then they’d drown in a wave of goblin blood.

  It wasn’t all one-sided, though. I was taking some hits. One of them had caught my leg before I smashed it, and I could feel the warmth of the blood seeping into my sock, along with the sharp-edged pain every time I moved. I should probably do something to stop the bleeding, but instead I opened my HUD, specifically that hit point indicator, and killed more goblins as my hit points trickled down.

  If I got too low, I’d level up. I might even be able to level up more than once, because those little XP notices were racking up like mosquito bites during a Florida summer.

  I was heading toward where I’d last seen Jack and Emma. I didn’t want to pull a horde of goblins to them, so I was doing my best to take out the goblins along the way, but I couldn’t help noticing that I was following the lizard. It seemed to be heading for Jack and Emma, too.

  That felt like bad news.

  I tried to move faster. I didn’t want to catch up to the stalker, obviously. Warden’s Edge was magic, not miraculous. In Olivia v. Acid-Spitting Stalker, the odds against me were astronomical, and the outcome wasn’t really in doubt.

  But I did want to find Jack and Emma. And Zelda, wherever she’d gone. And I wanted to get to that blatant honey pot of a stone building and see if it could save us all.

  Alas.

  I found the lizard first.

  And it had found Emma.

  Why the hell wasn’t she running?

  I wanted to scream at her, but I didn’t have the breath as I limped in her direction, slashing at goblins along the way.

  She looked frozen, petrified with fear, eyes wide, mouth slightly open, as if she wanted to scream, too, but couldn’t find the oxygen, either. Fight or flight or freeze, remember? I flashed back to my first moments in the scenario, when my body felt like it was made of stone. That must be what her body felt like right now.

  But the lizard was right there, standing before her, and if she didn’t break out of that stone, she was going to be burning.

  I stopped moving and screamed, “Run! Run!”

  But it was too late.

  And then it wasn’t, because Jack appeared in front of her.

  He had his arms flung wide, like a human barrier.

  Illusion, I thought, with a heartbeat of relief. Good job, Jack. He could pull the lizard off her, give her time to get away.

  And then the lizard spit its horrible acid.

  And Jack’s illusion…

  Jack’s illusion became a masterpiece of CGI editing, a brilliant example of sophisticated light-bending, a bravura showpiece of skillful imagery and…

  Yeah, no.

  Almost against my will, my eyes flickered to the participant count in my HUD, visible since I’d opened my hit point display.

  The number dropped from 4 to 3, as Jack’s body fell, face forward, and then began dissolving into black goo, like the goblins, like the shanties, like all the rest of the organic material the lizard had spit upon.

  Emma ran.

  But she ran in absolutely the wrong direction.

  She ran to Jack.

  He was gone. There was no point. But she fell to her knees beside the bones that had once been a boy—a sweet boy, a smart boy, a kind boy—and screamed.

  I was half blinded by tears, and the sobs choking my throat were coming close to interfering with my ability to slaughter goblins.

  Close, but not quite there, because I was mad. I was so deeply, furiously angry at this stupid fucking System that I had new energy, new strength in my arms, new enthusiasm for ripping the stupid goblins’ heads off.

  I was so busy killing goblins that I almost missed the moment when the lizard, casually, almost lacksadaisically, bent over, bit Emma in two pieces, and swallowed the top half of her.

  Almost.

  I guess it was hungry after all.