Andy ran for four minutes before he let himself stop.

  Not because he was tired — although he was, the stamina bar in his vision had dropped to sixty-one and his lungs were reminding him that he wasn't twenty-three anymore.

  He stopped because the sounds behind him had changed. The heavy movement, the ground-shaking weight of whatever that thing was, had veered off to the east. Not chasing him specifically. Just moving.

  He pressed his back against a black tree trunk and listened.

  Silence. The normal silence, not the held-breath kind from before.

  "Okay," he said quietly. "Okay. It's not hunting me. It just lives here and I happened to be in the same area." He looked in the direction it had gone.

  "Good. That's fine. That's a tomorrow problem."

  The timer said 00:46:11.

  He had forty-six minutes left on a countdown he still didn't fully understand, a health bar sitting at eighty percent, a stamina bar bleeding down for no reason except that apparently this world billed him for breathing hard, and a rock.

  He looked at the rock.

  The rock did not offer any suggestions.

  A new screen flickered into existence at eye level, slow and deliberate, like the system had been waiting for him to stop running before it talked to him.

  QUEST UNLOCKED

  Culling Ground

  Objective: Kill 10 Crawl Fiends

  Time Limit: Before nightfall

  Reward: 200 XP, 1 Item Drop (Random)

  Current Progress: 1 / 10

  Andy read it twice.

  "Random," he said. "The reward is random." He paused. "What's nightfall? I don't have a clock for nightfall. I have this clock." He pointed at the timer.

  "Are these the same clock? Is this a nightfall clock? I need you to communicate better."

  The system did not communicate better.

  "Seven intelligence," he muttered. "Honestly, maybe it's accurate."

  He dismissed the screen and looked at the forest.

  Ten Crawl Fiends. He'd killed one with a branch that had broken doing it, and that had cost him twenty HP and most of a minute. If he did this the math

  worked out to nine more individual fights, nine more chances to take damage, nine more chances for something to go wrong — and that was assuming nothing else wandered into the area while he was busy.

  He'd cleared a three-story building in Mosul with four men and a plan held together with assumptions and profanity. He could figure out ten dog-sized

  mouth-creatures in a dead forest.

  He just needed to think about it like a problem instead of a fight.

  Crawl Fiends came out of the ground — that was the first one. The one that had attacked him had erupted from below, launched itself while he was still getting oriented. Ambush predators. Which meant they waited underground, detected movement or vibration on the surface, and came up fast.

  He thought about that for a moment.

  Movement. Vibration.

  He looked at the riverbed he'd crossed earlier, now visible through the trees to his left. Then he looked at the ash on the ground around him. Then he looked at a cluster of black trees maybe thirty meters ahead — close enough together

  that anything coming out of the ground between them would be funneled toward a single gap.

  A choke point.

  He needed bait.

  He needed something creating enough movement and vibration to pull them all up at once. Or close to it. Close enough.

  Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

  He looked at his rock again.

  Then he looked around the ground until he found what he needed — three more rocks, a longer branch that wasn't completely rotted through, and a section of the bank where the dry riverbed had left a natural raised edge about knee

  height. Good cover. Clean sightlines to the choke point.

  He spent six minutes setting it up.

  The rocks went into a pile near the choke point. The branch went across two tree stumps, propped at an angle. He tested the branch — it would hold weight, at least briefly. He scouted the ground inside the choke point until he found

  where the ash was thinnest, where the soil underneath was closest to the surface. Three spots. Maybe four.

  Then he walked back to the riverbed bank, crouched behind the raised edge, picked up the biggest loose stone he could find — about the size of a cantaloupe — and threw it as hard as he could into the center of the choke point.

  It hit the ground with a heavy thud.

  He picked up another rock. Threw it. Then another. He kept throwing, steady rhythm, creating continuous vibration in a concentrated area, and he watched

  the thin-ash spots while he did it.

  The first one came up on the third throw.

  Then two more on the fifth.

  Then another one, and Andy stopped throwing rocks and picked up his sharpened stone and stopped moving entirely.

  Four Crawl Fiends in the choke point, orientating themselves, heads swinging side to side. Looking for the thing that had been making the vibration. Finding nothing. Starting to mill.

  Andy had positioned himself downwind — or what passed for downwind in air that didn't move properly — and he was keeping completely still. Twelve years of

  training said still meant invisible to most things that hunted by movement.

  He waited.

  Two more came up. Six total in the choke point now, clicking softly at each other, confused.

  He picked up a small stone and threw it hard to the far side of the choke point, past them, deeper into the forest.

  All six heads snapped in that direction simultaneously.

  Andy vaulted the riverbank edge and closed the thirty meters at a dead sprint.

  The first one he hit from behind with the sharp edge of his stone, driving it down hard. It dropped. The second spun toward him and he pivoted, let

  it go past, brought the stone down on its spine the way he'd done to the first one in the clearing. The third one lunged and caught his forearm —

  those inward teeth grabbed through his jacket sleeve and held, and Andy felt the pull of it, the strength of it, and did not stop moving. He used the pull. Redirected his momentum into the thing instead of fighting it,

  slammed it sideways into the nearest tree trunk hard enough that it released and didn't get up.

  Three down. Three left in the choke point, all now fully aware he was there.

  The next thirty seconds were ugly.

  He took a hit on the shoulder — one of them got above him, launched from a tree root, and the weight of it drove him down to one knee. He rolled. Got

  back up. The stone felt slippery in his hand and he realized it was blood, his blood, the shoulder had been teeth not just weight.

  He killed the fourth one with the branch he'd set on the stumps — grabbed it as he came up from the roll, swung it backhand.

  Fifth one he stomped. Flat out stomped it while it was mid-lunge and redirected it into the ground. Felt bad for about a quarter of a second.

  Sixth one he chased for three meters before it tried to burrow back into the ground and he dropped on it with both knees.

  He stood up in the middle of the choke point, breathing very hard, holding a bloody rock.

  Six bodies around him.

  The system screen arrived like a polite knock.

  KILLS: 6

  Crawl Fiend x6

  XP Gained: 90

  Total XP: 105 / 500

  Quest Progress: 7 / 10

  HP: 61 / 100

  Andy noted the HP. Down to sixty-one. The shoulder was a real bite — he could feel it now that the adrenaline was starting to level off. Not deep enough to be dangerous immediately. Dangerous in an infected-wound-in-a-fantasy-world-with-no-antibiotics way eventually, but not right now.

  He needed to find three more Crawl Fiends and he needed to do it before whatever nightfall meant.

  He looked at the six dead ones around him.

  "Okay," he said. "That was better. That was significantly more efficient."

  He looked at the system screen. "See, I didn't wait for you to tell me to do that. I just did it. I want you to notice that. I want you to internalize it."

  The system displayed his quest progress and said nothing else.

  "Seven intelligence," Andy said. "I'm going to get that number up and I'm going to make you eat it."

  He found the next three in eight minutes.

  Not in a group — scattered through the forest individually, which was less elegant than the choke point play but also not complicated. One he heard before

  he saw it and got above it first, dropped from a low branch. One he flushed out of cover by throwing rocks at the ground around it until it panicked and

  surfaced. The third one actually found him, which he appreciated for the time

  it saved, and he dealt with it the way he'd dealt with the first one that

  morning except he had a better grip this time.

  When the last one dropped, the system screen came up immediately.

  QUEST COMPLETE

  Culling Ground

  Kills: 10 / 10

  XP Gained: 200

  Total XP: 290 / 500

  ITEM DROP

  Processing...

  Andy watched the "Processing" text for a moment.

  "Processing," he repeated. "You're processing the item drop. How long does that take? Is there a server somewhere? Is someone in a back room pulling something off a shelf?"

  The text changed.

  ITEM RECEIVED

  Cracked Health Vial (Minor)

  Effect: Restores 25 HP on use

  Quantity: 1

  Rarity: Common

  A small vial appeared in his hand. Physically appeared — materialized out of nothing, faint blue liquid sloshing inside cracked glass that had been badly repaired with something like wax.

  "Cracked," Andy said. "The health potion is cracked." He held it up and looked at the wax seal. "The random reward from killing ten monsters is a

  broken potion." He looked at the sky. "I have done nothing to deserve this."

  He used it anyway. Tipped it back, drank it in one go.

  It tasted like copper and cold water and something that might have been mint if mint had been through a very difficult experience. The shoulder wound went from hot and throbbing to warm and manageable in about fifteen seconds. Not

  healed. Better.

  HP: 86 / 100

  "Okay," he said. "Okay, that's actually pretty good. I take it back. Mostly."

  The timer said 00:31:44.

  Thirty-one minutes.

  He was at two-ninety XP out of five hundred for Level 1. He'd killed eleven things and was still Level 0. He'd set a trap that had worked, fought six

  monsters simultaneously, earned a cracked potion and a slightly improved opinion of the system's item drops, and he still didn't know what the

  countdown was counting down to.

  A new screen appeared.

  LEVEL THRESHOLD APPROACHING

  You are 210 XP from Level 1.

  At Level 1, Class Assignment will occur.

  WARNING: Class Assignment is based on current combat data.

  Current combat data suggests: LABORER

  Andy stared at that last word for a long time.

  "Laborer," he said.

  The screen confirmed: LABORER.

  "I just killed eleven things with a rock and a branch and a riverbank and military tactics." He gestured at the bodies around him. "Eleven things. I

  set a trap. I used a choke point. I flanked." He looked at the screen.

  "Laborer."

  The system offered no defense of its methodology.

  "I'm not going to be a Laborer," Andy said clearly, in the tone he usually reserved for EOD briefings and unreasonable commanding officers. "I want you to understand that right now. Whatever you think you're assigning me, I'm telling you in advance that I reject it."

  The system displayed his quest log and said nothing.

  Somewhere to the north, deeper in the forest, something screamed. Not a roar like the Apex thing from earlier — higher than that. More agitated. Like something in pain, or something that had found prey.

  Andy looked at his XP bar.

  Two-ten to Level 1. And he needed to figure out how to break a Class

  Assignment that a system had already decided on before it happened.

  The timer hit 00:30:00 and the numbers turned red.

  He hadn't noticed they could do that.

  "Oh, that's new," he said. "That's a new color. I don't love that."

  He started moving north.