I made it up the stairs only because I’d lived there long enough to do it blind.

  Most of my left hand looked like a raw hamburger, my shirt clung to my skin with a half-dried mixture of sweat and blood, and my legs felt ready to file in their resignation.

  The apartment smelled like piss and takeout, though neither my piss nor my takeout.

  My flatmates rotated with such frequency that I no longer remembered names, only species. Last month, it was a pair of exchange students who microwaved nothing but broccoli, and they once left an entire pineapple on the stovetop for a week.

  Before them, a philosophy major who smoked in the shower and maintained a sourdough starter that I’m pretty sure became sentient, then left for Portland to find himself.

  Current set, a gamer couple who spoke exclusively in League callouts and referred to me as a mid-tier NPC.

  They paid rent on time, though, and never asked questions, so they were the best flatmates I’ve had in a long time.

  The main hallway deserved a biohazard sign. Empty LaCroix cans crunched under my shoe. The overhead bulb flickered in time with the screaming from the walls. I ducked past the kitchen, where someone had left a half-melted bag of ice directly on the linoleum, walked into my shoebox of a room, locked the door, and collapsed onto my mattress. I dripped red all the way from the elbow down, so my mattress was going to smell great tomorrow.

  I gritted my teeth and peeled off the jacket. The suit shirt beneath it was ruined, the left sleeve torn open and dyed dark maroon, with bits of steel monster fragments mashed into the fibers. I balled it up and chucked it at the garbage, missed, and left it there.

  The wound itself wasn’t as bad as I’d imagined, but it still wasn’t great. Four inches of ragged, mashed-up meat, mostly on the outside of my forearm. Some of it was shallow, a lot of it was deep, and most of it was already swelling.

  I sat for a while, contemplating the logistics of not dying. There was a CVS down the block, but that would mean public exposure, and the night-shift guy was nosy.

  There was always duct tape, or the high school chem lab approach of superglue, bandages, and delusions.

  I fished the sewing kit out from the milk crate under my desk. It had been my mom’s, a real old-fashioned one with bone-handled scissors and spools of weird off-white thread. There were a few curved needles inside, not suture-grade, but close enough.

  I found a bottle of cheap vodka behind my monitor, unscrewed the cap, and poured a slug directly onto the wound. The burn felt biblical.

  For a minute, I just sat and watched the drops of vodka-blood patter onto my desk, panting, my vocabulary reduced to the word fuck, which I muttered through clenched teeth in every variation I could think of.

  Eventually, I went to the bathroom, rinsed my arm under a stream of cold tap water, and dried it with toilet paper. It hurt less when I wasn’t looking at it, so I did most of the work by touch.

  I threaded the needle, forced it through skin and out again, pulled the halves of myself together until they met with ugly resistance.

  I did five stitches before my vision started spinning, which forced me to stop. The needle kept slipping from my bloody fingers, and I jabbed myself twice in the process. It didn't look good, but it held.

  I wrapped it in gauze, taped it down, and washed my hands three times before I finally convinced myself the bleeding was under control.

  The room was spinning, and the sweat on my skin made the air feel about ten degrees hotter. I staggered back to my room, sank into the chair at my desk, and powered up the laptop with my good hand.

  The Lucielle Legal portal was still open, the last thing I’d looked at before going to the depot. Now, I had a notification, a little red circle hovering over the mail icon.

  I ignored it.

  Actually, I didn’t need the laptop for anything.

  I slammed the damn thing shut, focused, and the skill trees and attribute trees popped into my field of vision.

  I had to allocate my attributes, pick a class, a specialization, and plan a build that I was going to spend literally the rest of my life completing.

  Thirty-seven classes, most of which were supposedly shit, as far as I could trust Shadow.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  How was I going to tell which ones were useful?

  At a quick look, they covered every type of magic I could think of, and then a whole lot more.

  Some were obviously a safe choice, like a fire-based elementalist. That couldn’t be too bad.

  Although I just fought a steel-based monster, which probably didn’t care about fire all that much.

  I could make a case like that for every element. And even weirder stuff, like blood magic, was obviously weaker against enemies that lacked blood.

  Then there were the physical classes, different specializations of a warrior or a rogue.

  Those were accompanied by a big question of how useful they were in the world with modern weaponry.

  Throwing knives didn’t feel like a useful specialization when one could use an assault rifle instead.

  And even if the thrown knives would eventually overpower any conventional weaponry, that would happen deeper into the skill tree, so I would effectively be wasting the fifty-something skill points to get to that level.

  Then there was also the nagging pressure of stat points. Five per level, times the number of levels, but the higher-tier perks all needed massive investment, a hundred or more, which would take forever to get to unless I started power-leveling like a lunatic.

  The speed of leveling was the biggest question, actually.

  I got my first level, great, but it took me years of self-learning magic, and I almost died in the process.

  If I were to level slowly, then high-end perks and skills wouldn’t matter at all.

  Shadow’s advice rattled around in my head: focus on a few, ignore the rest. Pick endurance, or willpower, and put something into speed. Don’t split. Don’t be mediocre at everything.

  Which was ironic, given that mediocrity was my only consistent trait.

  I could see the logic behind the approach. Being mediocre at everything would be great in comparison to people without magic, as I would be better at everything.

  But the moment I fought a specialized mage, I would die in an instant.

  I rubbed my eyes. The blood had started to dry around the stitches, pulling the skin taut. It was ugly, but the pain was duller now, almost a background noise. With my right hand, I navigated to the stat screen and hovered over the points, thinking about what kind of person I wanted to become.

  A knock at the door jerked me out of it. I sat very still, listening to the thud of my own pulse. The knock came again, softer this time. I realized I hadn’t turned off the overhead light, and my shadow was clear as day under the crack of the door.

  It was the League Couple. The guy, maybe named Steve or Zach, or possibly both, stuck his head in, holding a half-eaten Pop-Tart and a Monster can. “Hey, you good?” he asked, squinting at the mess on my desk.

  I tried to smile, but I think it came out as a grimace. “Yeah, just cut myself cooking. Don’t worry about it.”

  He stared for a long second. “Cool. You got a microwave in here? Ours crapped out again.”

  I nodded toward the corner, where a twelve-dollar Target microwave perched on a stack of textbooks. “Don’t blow it up. I use that for actual food.”

  He grinned, shut the door, and I could hear him explaining to his girlfriend that I was hardcore as hell.

  Well, not quite.

  I went back to the stat screen.

  The decision had to be made in parts.

  First, endurance or willpower.

  From the stat descriptions, I got that endurance would help me sustain getting hit, and had perks like stopping bleeding, resistance to status effects, and wound recovery.

  So, it did nothing for as long as I didn’t get hit.

  Willpower, on the other hand, helped sustain magical shielding, which meant I wasn’t getting hit at all. The problem obviously was not getting hit before the shields became strong enough.

  I scrolled through the perks and found the constant shields perk at thirty points.

  That required me to only reach level six, which wasn’t far.

  Okay, willpower clearly beat endurance.

  But… what if I needed another stat before I got to level six?

  I could hoard the points until I did and then allocate them all at once.

  Yeah, I was going to do that.

  No sense in making life-altering decisions at one in the morning, especially when I was bleeding and sleep-deprived. The System would wait. There were still ten points to spend, and I had no clue what I wanted to be even in the medium run.

  My phone buzzed. A real phone call, not a text, which meant something was on fire at work. I didn’t want to answer, but the screen flashed Director Jackson in all caps, which meant there was no escape.

  I let it ring three times before picking up. “Director?”

  “Peter,” said the voice, rich and polished and ten times more alive than anyone deserved to be at this hour. “Tomorrow, eight sharp, you’re to report to my office. It’s urgent.”

  I considered faking laryngitis, or pretending the number was wrong, but the way he said my name made it clear that he would not accept anything short of an act of God. “Got it,” I said. “Anything I need to bring?”

  “Just yourself. Oh, and dress appropriately. And by that, I mean in your best suit. No jeans, please. Also, try to not be hungover, although it might be a little late for that.” He laughed for a bit and then added, “Sorry for bothering you this late at night, but this is crucial. See you in the morning.”

  The call cut out. Not a hint of what was coming, just a corporate fist to the face.

  I stared at the phone for a minute, then set it down gently. The urge to scream into a pillow was overwhelming. I already bled more than enough on it, though. Instead, I opened the fridge, found three cans of Yuengling, and lined them up on the edge of the desk. I popped one, raised it in mock salute, and drank until the taste of copper faded from my mouth.

  Tomorrow, I was going to walk into that office and tell them I quit. Not because I had a plan, but because the idea of doing another day as a cog in the Lucielle machine made me want to hurl myself into oncoming traffic.

  I could level up by myself. Now that I knew I could progress solo, I just had to work on my own and find some contracts to do, and level up.

  And I could return to the secret societies later, at around level fifty, at the least.

  My arm throbbed, but I liked the pain now. It felt like a test, like maybe I could tough my way through it. The second beer went down faster than the first. By the time I opened the third, my eyelids were heavy and the room had gone a warm, blurry yellow.

  I passed out on the mattress with the window open, listening to the city groan and wheeze through the darkness. Tomorrow will be worse. But that was tomorrow’s problem.

  The last thing I remembered was the taste of blood and beer, and the sweet, fleeting certainty that if I died in my sleep, at least I wouldn’t have to deal with the morning.