John wanted to laugh, but coughed instead. Raw and burning at the back of his throat. The notification's aftertaste left him dizzy. He stood over the cooling corpses, the level-up prompt pulsing at the edge of his vision.

  Unspent Attribute Points: 60.

  He limped back a few paces and braced himself in an alcove, a wall segment that jutted out a little, half-submerged in the dirt.

  John Hale

  Race: Human - Rank 1

  Class: Empty

  Level: 14 → 17

  Strength: 6

  Dexterity: 19

  Endurance: 17

  Vitality: 3

  Intelligence: 9

  Spirit: 3

  Unassigned Points: 60

  Titles:

  Obsessive Swordsman

  Rank Defier

  Class Skills:

  Empty

  General Skills:

  Combat Intuition

  Elegant Swordsman

  He stared at the numbers. Unbalanced stats were the norm for him in-game, building a character for speedruns. Min-maxed to hell and back. Vitality was a joke. Never take a hit, never need to worry about dying. In real life, however, it suddenly felt more important.

  He thought of the monster's jaws, the way the teeth just missed his artery, the feel of his own sweat soaking the armpits of the borrowed tunic. He considered pumping his Vitality with everything he had. But if the rest of this dungeon's anything like the last five minutes, slow means dead.

  He closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath.

  Speed, then. Always speed. He might as well go all in. Already years behind the curve, with nothing but a one-of-a-kind sword and the reflexes of a mid-tier streamer.

  So many average classes, with dull, limited growth. So many safe, sensible options.

  Safe builds were for other people.

  His only chance to truly thrive is to go full meme.

  In the game, it took meticulous, punishing stat and skill allocation to access the most broken class: Mage Killer. Almost nobody ran it. Too many early deaths, no safety net. A class built around raw reflexes and anti-magic brutality.

  He cranked his Dexterity high, then split the remainder between Endurance and Spirit. The change was immediate. A slight jitter in his limbs, like he'd drunk three Red Bulls and was vibrating in place. The menu faded. The world's noise sharpened.

  He should have felt nervous, but instead it was a thrill. He laughed aloud at his own arrogance. But what else was there? He wasn't a hero or a tank. He was just a guy who'd gotten through life by smashing his head against the wall again and again and again.

  John walked over the bodies, picking a path through the sludge and carapace, and kept moving. The corridor pushed down, jagged and irregular. He felt the tunnel's layout before he saw it. A hairpin right, a blind curve, the floor dipping into a shallow trough.

  The next monster dropped from the ceiling in a flash.

  He saw everything.

  The angle of its descent, the spread of its limbs, the twitch that meant it was about to spit. He was already moving. One cut, horizontal, split the web packet midair, and he caught the return arc on the rim of the monster's thorax, shearing two legs. It tumbled, grossly uncoordinated, and he pivoted past, flicking Moonfang in a backhand slice that turned the thing's skull to pulp. The body thumped, skidded, and was forgotten before it stopped twitching.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  He wanted to whoop, to laugh, or just run until the entire floor was painted in blood. He couldn't remember the last time he felt this good. Maybe never.

  Midway through the next bend, he spotted a monster almost invisible in the haze, a lump of bug fused with the sticky membrane of a cocoon. It recoiled, mandibles flaring. He didn't give it the chance to attack. Moonfang carved through its face in a blur, steam erupting from the wound, and the thing died without even a shriek.

  That's when the air rippled with a screech behind him, and a needle of hardened resin hissed past his ear. The old John of minutes ago would have been nailed, but now he could follow the arc and see the hidden sniper crouched in an alcove above the tunnel junction.

  He squinted through the haze. The monster's perfect camouflage melted into sharp relief. Tucked into a honeycomb of rock overhead, its legs splayed, stuck to the curve of the tunnel like an ugly, armored limpet. He didn't stop to think. Moonfang left his hand, spinning like a discus, and the blade blurred up to the ledge. The edge took the beast just below the brows, splitting the whole head like a melon. The sword and the corpse hit the stone nearly together.

  Moonfang clattered to a stop, and John snapped it back up. His pulse hadn't slowed, but he felt like he could do this forever. The tunnel twisted, narrowed. The air grew thinner, spiked with ammonia.

  He almost didn't notice when the world changed.

  There was a shift. The ground went slick, and the temperature plummeted so fast his breath fogged. He looked down. The tunnel floor gleamed wet and glassy, no longer stone.

  His foot nearly skidded off the edge of a ledge, and he barely stopped before plunging into what waited below. A lake, viscous and dark, its surface scattered with the floating husks of dead spawn. In the middle of the cavern, an enormous warped shape heaved. Almost too big to process at first. Its body was a conglomerate of everything that had come before. Arachnid, crustacean, fungal, exuding from its back in sweating, undulating folds.

  It was ugly. Terrifying. And absolutely, utterly wrong. It wasn't idle, either. The thing pulsed. He felt it in his knees.

  The heap unfolded as it rose, dragging a bulbous mass that sloshed with some internal storm of fluid, and for a long, cold second, John froze. Even in the game, this had been a monster you never faced before Rank 2.

  The Gluttonous Brood.

  Its legs flexed and popped, each joint exuding a new limb, smaller and faster with every pulse. The mouth was a wet, circular lattice, the lips stained gray and yellow. It saw him. He knew it. The eyes were tiny pinpricks embedded in the folds of its bristled skullplate.

  It lunged.

  The shockwave knocked rocks from the walls. John vaulted left and dashed. He skidded off a jutting crystal of black stone and almost lost his grip, but the spike of panic barely registered before he was pushing off into a slide, knees bent, arms out, catching balance on the edge of rock.

  The creature's mass crashed behind him with a wet, shuddering slap, the spray of lake sludge burning the inside of his nose. He almost gagged, but he kept sliding. The Brood's second lunge obliterated a chunk of the ledge to his left, stone and pupae falling like brittle glass. Shards of obsidian scythed through his borrowed tunic, barely missing his ribs, but he was already skittering three feet forward, pulled by momentum and his own refusal to die like an idiot.

  The monster paused and shoved its face into the carnage it had just made, vacuuming up its smaller spawn in a grotesque, choking slurp.

  The Brood reared, hunching as something like a spasm rattled through its limbs. Hordes of tiny, chittering young erupted like bursting pustules from its flanks, filling the tunnel like a living carpet. The stench was nearly blinding. John sprinted along the ledge, footing treacherous with every step, sword held flat for balance as he leapt a gap that would once have broken both ankles.

  He heard the Brood skittering behind him and barreled around a blind corner, almost a dead end. Panic flashed, but then something caught his eye. A slight seam in the wall. Not a natural fissure either, too straight, too perfect. A hidden door, just like the secret walls in the game. There was only a fingertip's width of shadow, a barely-there shift in color, but it sang to every sense he had.

  He rolled the dice, gathered every shred of nerve, and drove his shoulder into the seam. It resisted for a heart-stopping millisecond, and he was sure he'd guessed wrong. That he was a dead man.

  But the wall gave. A vertical slice, barely big enough to crawl through, ripped open, and the pressure differential yanked him inside. He tumbled into a crawlspace, the edges raw and seeping.

  Behind him, the Brood smashed into the stone, shaking the passage so hard it nearly collapsed, but he was already scrambling forward on bloody knees, dragging himself deeper and deeper.

  He didn't look back. He couldn't. He crawled faster, Moonfang clattering as he shoved it ahead of him. Every breath burned. Every heartbeat hammered like a drum.

  The sound of the Brood's rage faded. First a pounding, then a distant rumble, then silence swallowed by the crawlspace.

  John collapsed onto his side, gasping in the dark. Cold fluid pooled around him, soaking through his clothes, chilling his skin, but he didn't care.

  He was alive.

  A laugh shuddered out of him, half-hysterical, half-relieved. He pressed his forehead against the damp stone, eyes closed tight, chest heaving.

  When he finally lifted his head, the crawlspace stretched onward, pulsing faintly with veins of blue light in the walls, guiding him further in.

  And on hands and knees, John dragged himself forward, swallowed by the dark.