The first thing Andy tasted was dirt.

  Not metaphorical dirt. Not "life has humbled me" dirt. Actual dirt. Gritty,

  ashy, tasted like someone had swept a fireplace into his mouth while he was unconscious.

  He spat it out, pushed himself up, and took stock.

  Forest. Dead trees, black like someone had forgotten to pay the color bill.

  Ground made of ash. Sky the color of a headache. Air that smelled like copper

  and something older than copper — something that had been rotting since before copper was invented.

  Andy had woken up in bad places before. A ditch outside Kandahar. A safehouse in Mosul that turned out to be neither safe nor a house. A Denny's parking lot in Reno, but that was a personal matter and not relevant right now.

  This was worse than all of them.

  He checked himself. Jacket, boots, BDU pants — all present. Weapons — all absent. Every holster empty. Every pocket stripped. Whoever had brought him here had taken his rifle, his sidearm, his knife, and apparently his granola bar, which felt unnecessarily personal.

  He stood up slowly, turned in a circle, read the terrain the way twelve years of military service had trained him to. Dead forest in every direction. No paths. No water sounds. No birds. No wind.No wind was wrong. You always had wind.

  "Okay," Andy said to nobody. "Okay."

  Then he saw the numbers.

  Floating. Top right corner of his vision. Not on a surface, not projected anywhere — just hanging there like his eyeball had downloaded an app without asking him.

  00:59:47

  00:59:46

  00:59:45

  A countdown timer.

  Andy pressed two fingers hard against his temple. The numbers kept counting.He tried blinking aggressively. Still there.

  He tried the thing where you cross your eyes. Still there, now just blurry.

  "Great," he said. "Great, great, great."

  He'd been dead — he was pretty sure he'd been dead, the convoy, the IED, the

  heat and pressure and then nothing — and whatever afterlife this was had

  apparently decided to give him a timer instead of a white light and a

  welcoming committee.

  Story of his life.

  The ground behind him exploded.

  Andy was already moving before he consciously registered what was happening — twelve years of muscle memory throwing him sideways, hitting the ash rolling,

  coming up in a crouch with his fists raised. His brain caught up a half-second later and got a look at what had come out of the ground.

  Six legs. Crab-jointed but furry. Head that was entirely mouth — split sideways, ringed with inward-curving teeth designed to grab and hold. About the size of a Labrador, if the Labrador had been designed by someone who genuinely hated

  dogs.

  It clicked at him.

  "You're ugly," Andy told it. "I want you to know that. Objectively."

  It lunged.

  He grabbed the nearest branch — black, dense, wrist-thick — and swung it like he was going for a home run. Connected hard with the side of its head. The

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  creature skidded sideways through the ash, stunned.

  It shook itself and turned back toward him. Slower. Angrier.

  "Yeah," Andy said. "I'd be mad too."

  It lunged again. This time he sidestepped, let it sail past him, and brought the branch down on the back of its skull with everything he had.

  The branch snapped in half.

  The creature dropped and didn't get up.

  Andy stood over it, holding half a stick, breathing harder than he wanted to admit. His hands were steady. His heart was doing something that would concern

  a cardiologist.

  Then the air lit up.

  A screen. Floating at eye level, like someone had paused reality and pulled up

  a menu. White text on dark background. Andy stared at it.

  ENEMY DEFEATED

  Crawl Fiend — Level 1

  XP Gained: 15

  Total XP: 15 / 500

  SYSTEM NOTICE

  You have entered the Fractured Lands.

  Survival Mode: ACTIVE

  Current Level: 0

  Skills: NONE

  Status: UNMARKED

  And then, at the bottom, one more line. Slower than the rest.

  You are being hunted.

  Move.

  Andy looked at the screen for a long moment.

  Then he looked at the dead creature.

  Then back at the screen.

  "Fifteen XP," he said. "I need five hundred. That thing was Level one and I'm

  Level zero." He did the math. "I need to kill thirty-three of those to level

  up once. Thirty-three." He paused. "I'm going to need a better branch."

  He waved his hand through the screen experimentally. It rippled like water.

  He poked it. Same thing. He tried grabbing it. Nothing.

  "Okay, you're decorative. Got it."

  He looked at the timer. 00:57:02. He'd burned three minutes on one fight and a staring contest with a floating menu.

  He pulled his attention back to the screen and read it properly. The way you read a mission brief — strip out the noise, absorb the information, figure out

  what it's actually telling you versus what it wants you to think it's telling you.

  System. Levels. XP. Skills he didn't have. A status called UNMARKED which sounded ominous in a way the system probably thought was mysterious but mostly just told him he wasn't registered anywhere yet. That was actually useful.

  Unmarked meant unknown. Unknown meant unpredictable.

  He'd worked with less.

  He dismissed the screen with a wave and immediately got another one.

  ACTIVE QUEST RECEIVED

  The God Hunt

  Objective: Survive until the God descends.

  Secondary Objective: Do not let the Darkness consume you.

  Time Remaining: 00:56:58

  Reward: Unknown

  Failure Condition: Death / Consumption

  "Reward unknown," Andy read aloud. "So you want me to survive a God and avoid being consumed by Darkness and in exchange you'll give me — maybe something. Could be great. Could be a coupon." He nodded slowly. "I've signed worse

  contracts."

  He dismissed that screen too and pulled up his stats deliberately, the way you'd open a personnel file. Tapped the health bar. A window expanded.

  CURRENT STATUS

  Name: Andy Vane

  Class: UNASSIGNED

  Level: 0

  HP: 80 / 100

  Stamina: 74 / 100

  Strength: 8

  Agility: 9

  Endurance: 10

  Intelligence: 7

  Skills: —

  Inventory: —

  Currency: 0

  He looked at the numbers.

  "Intelligence seven," he said. "Rude."

  Everything else was low — he understood that without needing context. The scale went higher, probably a lot higher, and he was sitting at the bottom of it with

  no class, no skills, no weapons, and an intelligence score that a floating system apparently thought was a seven out of whatever the maximum was.

  He'd been underestimated before. It had never worked out well for the people doing the underestimating.

  He closed the screen and looked at the terrain properly for the first time since the fight. The system wanted him to move — had literally told him to move

  — which meant he was going to move, but he was going to pick the direction

  himself. There was a difference between doing what made sense and doing what he was told, and Andy had spent twelve years learning to tell those two things apart.

  He looked at the tree lines. One direction had more visual depth before the forest closed in — more distance, more options, more room to maneuver. He

  picked that one.

  He jogged. Low and quiet. The way you moved through hostile terrain when you

  had no weapon and no backup and the only thing between you and whatever was out there was the fact that you hadn't been found yet.

  The system flickered at the edge of his vision as he ran. Health bar, stamina bar, the timer in the corner. He ignored all of it for now. You don't read a map while crossing open ground.

  He found a dry riverbed after four minutes. Dropped into it, pressed his back against the far wall, listened.The forest wasn't quiet anymore.

  Clicking. Skittering. The wet sound of things moving through ash. More Crawl Fiends, probably. Maybe other things. The system had said he was being hunted, which was either a dramatic way of saying "there are predators here" or a literal statement about something specifically tracking him.

  He was going to assume literal until proven otherwise. Safer that way.

  He looked at the riverbed floor. Stones. Some of them cracked and sharp-edged

  where they'd split — one about the length of his forearm with a flaked edge that could cut if you put weight behind it.

  He picked it up, tested the grip, tested the edge against his thumb.

  "Congratulations," he told himself. "You've been issued a rock. Truly the

  pinnacle of military equipment."

  He came back up out of the riverbed slow and low, checked the tree line, and started moving again.

  He was already thinking about the quest. Kill ten Crawl Fiends — that was probably coming, the system seemed like the type to give him a kill quest early.

  The obvious play was to hunt them one at a time, grind through it, collect the XP. That was the obvious play, which meant it was the slow play, which meant it was the wrong play.

  Ten of them in one location. One trap. Use the terrain.

  He'd cleared rooms with less.

  The timer in the corner read 00:51:19.

  And then the roar hit him.

  Not close — half a mile, maybe less. But it didn't need to be close to be felt. It came up through the ground, through the soles of his boots, through his sternum. Deep and wet and enormous. The sound of something that had never once in its life worried about being eaten.

  The clicking in the forest stopped instantly.

  Then he heard the Crawl Fiends moving — fast, frantic, fleeing through the ash in every direction. The small ugly predators with the fishhook teeth were running from something.

  Andy looked in the direction the roar had come from.

  One shape between the trees. Just one. But wide. Very wide. Moving toward him at a pace that suggested it wasn't in a hurry because it didn't need to be.

  A new screen appeared in his vision, uninvited.

  WARNING

  Apex Predator detected.

  Current Level: UNKNOWN

  Recommended Action: Retreat immediately.

  Andy looked at the warning.

  He looked at the shape.

  He looked at his rock.

  "Retreat immediately," he read. "Yeah, I was going to do that anyway. I don't need a system to tell me to run from the giant thing." He was already moving.

  "Seven intelligence. Unbelievable."

  He ran.

  Behind him, the shape kept coming, unhurried, like it already knew where he was going to end up.

  The timer read 0

  0:50:44.

  And somewhere above the dead forest, behind the grey sky, something that might have been a god was watching a Level 0 human run through its hunting ground

  with a rock and a bad attitude.

  It had been a long time since anything interesting had come through the Fractured Lands.