None of the other people in the fight leveled up.

  The thought hit me out of nowhere as I trudged upstream. My feet sloshed against slick stones, minnows scattering around my ankles. One darted right between my boots, and for some reason my stomach growled. I hadn’t eaten in a while, and even tiny fish in the stream were starting to look like snacks. I pushed the hunger down and kept moving.

  It had been about two hours since I slipped away from my overlook and started wading the stream. Two hours of soaking myself. I don’t know if you have ever tried it but walking “quietly” in a stream turns out to be impossible—every step makes a splash. But at least I wasn’t leaving tracks on the banks. I’d climbed up over little waterfalls instead of going around them, and I’d forced myself not to even go near any of the branches hanging low across the water. I had watched enough bad television to know enough.

  None of walking in this stream had been easy. Sometimes the water was shallow enough to barely cover my ankles. Other times it was waist deep, and I had to fight the current just to keep upright. My socks were chafing, my fingers were pruned, and every step felt heavier. Still, I figured I’d gone four or five miles. Long enough that when I glanced back, I couldn’t even see a hint of the glade anymore. Just twisting forest and stream.

  I was drenched, sore, and tired. My shoulders ached from carrying my bag, my boots squished with every step, and my skin had that itchy raw feeling like I’d been in a pool too long. But none of that mattered compared to the thought of those maniacs back there. Crazy screaming raiders tearing apart their own leader’s corpse. That image was enough to keep me moving.

  And that thought circled back again that none of the others leveled up. Only the raider who landed the killing blow. His number had jumped.

  At first, I blamed it on adrenaline wearing off, my brain just wandering to fill the silence. But the more I thought about it, the more it felt important.

  This world ran on levels and experience; that much was very clear to me at this point. So what did it mean that only the person who struck the final blow gained experience points? Did it mean experience was winner-take-all? Or maybe last hit got the biggest share, and everyone else just got scraps?

  I didn’t know.

  But hiking alone for hours gives your brain way too much space to chew on useless ideas. No matter how much I told myself to just focus on putting one foot in front of the other, my thoughts kept spiraling.

  Some people talk about hiking as a kind of zen thing. Clearing your mind, becoming one with the rhythm of your steps, no thoughts, just breathing and taking in nature. I’ve never been that guy. Whenever I tried, my brain wandered off almost immediately. I’d think about what was in my fridge. Or movies I wanted to see. Or how much my feet hurt. I never lasted more than ten minutes in “clear mind” mode before some random thought dragged me back.

  And wouldn’t you know it, here I was again letting my mind wander. Only this time my thoughts weren’t about dinner, they were about how murder math worked in the nightmare world.

  Anyways.

  A lot of games I’ve played had party systems. You kill something, the experience points get chopped up between you and your buddies, sometimes weighted by damage, sometimes just evenly spread. But here? I hadn’t seen anything like that. No mention in my status, no setting buried in the menus. Not that the status screens had been super helpful so far. They kind of just pop up, dump numbers on me, then vanish. No tutorial, no help section, no little paperclip mascot with googly eyes popping up to say, “It looks like you’re trying not to die in a murder forest, want some tips?”

  Still, the raider that landed the final blow back there didn’t just level up. He rocketed from level 8 to 11. Three levels in one go.

  That felt like a lot.

  I mean, when I wiped out the forest, it took me thousands of dead squirrels, raccoons, and bobcats to push to eighteen. Even the toughest animals in that soup lake had only been worth maybe ten experience points each. And this guy jumps three levels off one kill?

  Which left me with two possibilities.

  One, higher-level things—or you know people—must be worth way more experience points. Like exponential growth. A deer might be worth ten, but a human raider with two digits under his name? Maybe that’s a payday.

  Or two…

  Killing people just flat-out gives more experience points.

  That thought crawled into my head and sat there, scratching at the walls.

  I didn’t like it. At all.

  Because if that was true, then the fastest way to level wasn’t grinding squirrels or even bears. It was grinding people. Which would explain why five crazy guys were in the woods hunting new people here in the first place…

  I shook my head, forcing the thought away. Nope. Not tugging that thread. Not when I was already soaked, starving, and dragging my ass upstream just trying to stay alive.

  So I kept walking.

  The sun was starting to dip, shadows stretching long through the trees. I figured I had maybe three, four hours of daylight left, tops. I didn’t know if I was going to keep pushing through the night or try to find a halfway safe spot under a tree. The thought of lying in the dark out here with nothing around me didn’t exactly fill me with joy. But the idea of walking blind into whatever else this world had to offer wasn’t better either.

  Step after step. Water splashing. Clothes clinging. I kept scanning the trees, the banks, anywhere a set of glowing eyes might pop out. My nerves were shredded from the fight earlier, and I wasn’t sure I was up for another wave of demon squirrels.

  But nothing came.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  No rabbits. No deer. No raccoons. Not even the telltale twitch of a bush.

  Weird.

  My working theory was that the stone-splitting noise had pulled everything in a giant radius toward the lake, like ringing a dinner bell. And since I’d basically turned the lake into a mass grave, the area was still empty. Everything in that radius had already come running, and I’d already killed it.

  So now I was walking through silence.

  And silence in the woods is not normal. Even when things are calm, there should be rustles, little crunches of underbrush, maybe a chipmunk darting across the bank. The silence pressed on me like a heavy blanket. I found myself flinching at the sound of my own boots squishing against stones. I hated how loud I was being, like every splash screamed “I’m over here!”

  The only sounds were the stream and a few birds calling high in the canopy. A couple of insects were buzzing. None of them tried to kill me, which was nice. And thinking back, it was only mammals that had gone feral on me since I got here. Squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, foxes, even a damn deer.

  Strangely enough the only animals that had attacked me seemed to be mammals. To be fair though, this seems to be based on a place with a North American analog ecosystem, which is famously pretty short of reptiles or amphibians. I hadn't spotted any frogs along the streams or any snakes.

  I told myself maybe it was just the climate, that you needed hotter weather for reptiles and amphibians. But still, it gnawed at me. Like something was… curated. Like the world itself was picking what to throw at me.

  I went around another bend in the stream, slogging along with water soaking my boots, and that’s when I noticed something up ahead. At first, I figured it was just another ridge or hill, the kind I’d been weaving through all day, but the more I squinted through the trees, the more I realized it wasn’t. It looked like a cliff face, rising up out of the forest like someone had dropped a wall in the middle of nowhere. The stream led straight toward it, narrowing as it got closer, almost like it had been cut deliberately to funnel me right into it.

  From where I was standing, the thing looked sheer. Not Everest sheer, but still steep enough that it was basically a wall. I’d estimate maybe four hundred yards high, and I don’t know how I hadn’t noticed it earlier. The rolling hills and tree cover must have hidden it, which was unsettling all on its own.

  And of course, I was walking straight toward it. Which meant I had to figure out what the hell I was going to do once I got there. Hug the base and follow the stream until it curved? Hope to stumble across some kind of pass or natural trail? Maybe I’d get lucky and find a cave tucked into the side and have somewhere to crash for the night. Anything sounded better than sleeping in the open where every shadow looked like a squirrel waiting to bite my face off.

  But the closer I got, the less it looked like a cliff and the more it looked…wrong. At first glance, I thought the surface was jagged from erosion, the kind of sharp crags that form after centuries of water and wind carving the rock down. But when I looked harder, the details were off. The whole face wasn’t one piece. It was made of individual rocks, huge ones.

  The rocks looked like individual stones, each rounded like river rocks. Except these weren’t little pebbles you skip across a pond. They were massive, ranging in size from cars to small houses, jammed together at odd angles. The slope rose up at maybe a sixty-degree angle, the whole thing looking like a giant pile. There was no pattern, no sense of order, just rocks dumped together like some cosmic toddler had emptied a bag of blocks and walked away.

  The weirdest part? There was nothing between them. No dirt, no gravel, no smaller stones filling the cracks. Just big smooth boulders pressed against each other, clean and bare, like someone had taken time to scrub the gaps.

  That detail made my skin crawl.

  I’ve done a lot of hiking back home. I’ve been through deserts, forests, and mountain trails. I’ve seen red rock ridges that looked like melting ice cream and cliffs carved into layers like cake. Even the strangest formations still had a reason, some kind of natural process behind them.

  This though? This didn’t fit anything. It looked like a prop someone had placed into the world and forgot to blend in.

  My brain immediately started throwing out theories. Giants stacking boulders for fun. An ancient civilization using some massive machine to build walls. Maybe even magic—because hey, why not, everything else here was already insane.

  But every explanation just made me feel worse. This wasn’t just strange, it was wrong in a way that I couldn’t shake.

  The unease started chewing at me until I felt my chest tighten. That kind of spiraling panic where your thoughts circle faster and faster and all of them end in question marks. What if this wasn’t natural? What if it wasn’t even supposed to be here? What if I was walking toward something’s territory? I had to clamp down on it hard, forcing myself to take a breath and push the questions away.

  Weird cliffs were creepy, yeah, but they weren’t an immediate threat. Raiders on my trail? That was real and close. If I let myself get lost in the weirdness, I’d lose focus and probably get killed. So I forced my eyes back to the stream, pushed down the buzzing panic, and just kept walking.

  Finally I got close enough to see the cliff face clearly. The stream widened into a small pond at its base, dark and glassy under the shadow of the stone wall. As I waded through, boots sucking at the mud, I noticed something strange—the water wasn’t just collecting here. It was feeding out of the cliff itself, trickling down from a narrow gap a little above the water line.

  Up close, all my assumptions from a distance proved right. This wasn’t one solid slab of stone. It was a wall made of individual boulders, each rounded and smooth like river stones. None of it made sense. The only thing I could compare it to was the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland, but even that was neat hexagons of the same stone type, all fused together. This looked like something had stacked stones one by one into a vertical slope. There was no dirt, no filler, just rock pressed against rock. It didn’t look natural, and it didn’t look stable, yet somehow it held.

  The forest pressed right up to the base of this weird cliff, tight and tangled on both sides. I’d hoped there might be space to slip around the edges, but if I tried, I’d have to force my way through dense brush. That would leave a trail anyone could follow, even someone with zero tracking skills.

  So what then? Do I go back? Risk running into those maniacs again? Stay here? My brain spun on the question until I froze.

  A voice.

  It was faint, muffled by trees and water, but I heard it. Behind me.

  My stomach dropped. They tracked me.

  I forced myself not to panic. My eyes darted left, right, anywhere I could run. But the forest would trap me. The pond wasn’t an escape. Ahead of me was the cliff, a vertical wall of river stones that looked, against all logic, climbable. The gaps between the boulders created little shelves and cracks. It wasn’t a flat wall though, it would be surprisingly easy to pull myself up between the gaps.

  Could I climb it?

  The thought sounded insane, but I was stronger now. Higher stats, better stamina, better grip. At least, I hoped so. The cliff was the size of a small skyscraper, and if I slipped halfway up, that was it. But another mumbled voice drifted closer behind me, and I didn’t let myself think about it anymore. Decision made.

  I sloshed through the pond, swimming the last few feet until I reached the base. Before I started climbing, I pulled my dented metal water bottle off my belt. It was nearly empty, so I drained the last swig and refilled it with the stream pouring out of the cliff face.

  Yeah, drinking straight from a hole in a rock wall wasn’t exactly good survival practice. I knew better. Untreated water is how you end up with the sort of things that have you camped on a toilet for days. But I didn’t have the luxury of being picky. Emergency, beggars can’t be choosers.

  I clipped the bottle back on my belt, planted my palms against the first boulder, and sucked in a deep breath. My arms strained as I pulled myself up, wedging my foot into a crack and pressing my shoulder against the next stone. The rock was cold and slick against my fingers. Every nerve screamed this was a bad idea.

  But behind me, a mumbled voice echoed through the trees again.

  So up I went.