After a long and brutal fight that had pushed them to the limits of their training, Staff Sergeant Scott Lewis and his team finally stood victorious over the ruined kobold fort.

  They hadn’t eaten enough before starting the dungeon run.

  Now, freshly levelled to six, hunger clawed at them like an animal.

  So they ate.

  Anything.

  Everything.

  Inside the burning remains of the fort, Scott wore a manic grin as he tried to order Barry to eat half-cooked dog meat. Hutch and the rest of the team had already obeyed both Scott’s orders and their own desperate hunger, tearing into what Barry suspected were the kobolds’ pets.

  Barry, fortunately, had found a small garden patch and was shoveling raw vegetables into his mouth as fast as he could chew. One of his hands was badly injured from the fight, but Scott—the only healer—refused to fix it until Barry ate some of the meat.

  After a string of threats and a bit of physical intimidation, Scott finally gave up and left him to the vegetables, laughing that Barry being such a wuss meant more real food for the rest of them.

  As Scott’s hunger dulled, his thoughts sharpened.

  He gathered his original squad—Hutch, Deev, and Maya—deliberately leaving Barry out of it. From what Barry overheard, he was grateful not to be included.

  Scott’s manic grin never faded as he laid out his plan.

  “With the right prep and equipment,” he said, “this dungeon stuff will be easy. Those civs tried to make it sound hard and scary. The way that Tarni bloke talked, you’d think this place was hell.”

  Hutch nodded eagerly.

  “Yeah. Boot camp was harder than this.”

  Scott’s grin widened.

  “When we finish clearing this floor, we head out. Grab proper gear. Load up on food. Then we come straight back and hit the second floor.”

  Maya hesitated.

  “Shouldn’t we get some sleep while we’re out?”

  “No.” Scott shook his head immediately. “With the levels we’ve gained, I can feel it—we need less sleep now. We’ll nap on the next floor. Barry can stay on watch.”

  Maya didn’t like that. Not entirely. But she didn’t argue with her commanding officer. She just nodded.

  Scott continued, voice tightening with excitement.

  “After we clear the next floor and level again, we’ll be strong enough to take command of that ragtag survivor group. We’ll put Zane and his lot in their place. Then I’ll order everyone to move out and make a beeline for the city.”

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

  That part won them over.

  Getting home—to friends, to family—was all any of them really wanted.

  Scott kept eating as the idea grew in his mind, swelling into certainty.

  It wouldn’t be long now.

  Finish this floor.

  Grow stronger.

  Take command.

  He had the training.

  He had the skill.

  He had the experience.

  It would be best for everyone.

  _____________________________________

  Max, Kaitlyn, Mia, Hayden, Sam, and Skippy sat in a loose semicircle, listening while Tarni and Lily told their story. The teenagers — and one very attentive young marsupial — barely blinked.

  It had been Lily’s idea. After Max announced they’d come to help, everyone had just stood there near the dungeon entrance, unsure what to do with their hands or their questions. So Lily had taken charge, her voice calm and steady as she herded the newcomers into sitting positions like a teacher settling a class before a lesson. Then she began explaining the mechanics of the System.

  She’d barely reached her third point when Skippy cracked.

  The little creature began poking Max in the back with one sharp nail — poke, poke, poke — then instantly looked away whenever Max glanced over his shoulder. The performance was so deliberate it was almost dignified.

  Max lasted a full minute before sighing.

  Luckily for everyone, that was when Tarni took over.

  Where Lily’s explanation had been neat and precise, Tarni’s version exploded into motion. He sprang to his feet, arms windmilling, voice rising and falling as he acted out events, leaping from place to place as if the ground itself were part of the story.

  Within half an hour, most of the kids who had escaped the birthday party and made it safely to the zone were sitting cross-legged, eyes wide, completely absorbed. Tarni’s reenactment of the past week unfolded like live theatre: arriving at the house they now camped around, finding Zane covered in blood, the desperate road trip to Sydney to save Bell.

  Laughter burst from the group when Tarni mimed Zane’s expression of stubborn defiance. Tears followed not long after, when he described the cost.

  At one point, a parent near the back cupped his hands and called out,

  “See, Timmy? I told you McDonald’s was poison!”

  Timmy groaned and slapped his hand over his face. “Dad!”

  The crowd laughed harder, tension dissolving for a few precious seconds.

  Tarni grinned, encouraged, and launched into an especially dramatic retelling of one of the fights, adding flourishes that involved at least twice as many enemies as there had actually been.

  Lily cleared her throat.

  Tarni kept going.

  She cleared it louder.

  He stopped mid-swing.

  Lily didn’t glare — she didn’t have to.

  “Let’s not give everyone the impression this is easy,” she said mildly.

  A few of the older kids straightened at that.

  Tarni nodded sheepishly and adjusted course. He behaved himself for almost three full minutes before drifting toward the subject of Skills and the options they’d been offered during the selection level.

  “I think,” Lily cut in smoothly, “we don’t need to share everybody’s Skills and stats, Uncle Tarni. That’s something we can save for later.”

  Tarni raised both hands in surrender. “Later,” he agreed.

  The stories continued.

  When he described the other world — the village, the people, the smell of unfamiliar cooking fires drifting through alien air — something changed in the crowd. Faces leaned forward. Eyes sharpened. The looks they wore weren’t wonder.

  They were hunger.

  Tarni faltered for half a second.

  Then he kept talking.

  By the time he reached the last quest and told them about the police arriving — about the shouting, the gunshots, Lily falling, Zane getting shot at — the mood had shifted completely.

  Gasps rippled outward.

  Anger followed.

  Questions came fast, overlapping.

  “Are they the same ones who helped yesterday?”

  “You mean the guys in the dungeon right now?”

  Tarni and Lily nodded to most of it, still catching up to the temperature change in the air.

  Then a voice from the back — adult, sharp, cutting clean through the noise —

  “Could we have started at level five if they hadn’t interfered?”

  Silence fell.