“How many does it have?” Jack asked.

  “It doesn’t matter!” Emma said, at the same time. “I promise you, this thing is too tough for us. We need to run.”

  “Three,” I answered Jack. “I’m thinking running sounds good.”

  Zelda gave a woof of agreement. It wasn’t a warning bark, it wasn’t excitement, it was agreement. I wondered why I knew that with such certainty and then I totally dismissed the thought, because a giant venom-spitting lizard was headed my way, and the fact that my dog was talking to me felt like less than crucial information at that exact moment.

  “Okay, okay.” Jack looked around our campsite with the mildly panicking expression of a school kid who can’t find their homework when the bus is due. “We’ve got to put the fire out.”

  “We don’t have time for that.” Emma turned away from him, but the wall of thorns behind us was keeping her in as much as it kept the monsters out. She waved at the vines. “Open it up.”

  “We can’t just leave the fire. If the wind picks up or if some monster kicks over the coals, the whole forest could burn.”

  “Well, that’d be one way to take out the stronghold.”

  “A bad way! I don’t want to die in a wild fire.”

  I let the two of them bicker while I watched the floating label above the lizard get closer. I still couldn’t see the lizard itself, nor did I really want to. I definitely didn’t want to try to fight it.

  But I wasn’t at Emma’s level of freaking out. I knew I had at least a chance of rebounding its venom attack with my shovel, plus as far as I could tell, the stalker was heading straight toward my pit trap. Would it fall in? It probably wouldn’t get hurt, but would it get trapped?

  Also, I was a little curious about how effective my sanctuary would be. Would the roses block the venom? Would the vines entangle the lizard’s legs? I doubted the sanctuary would be able to do much damage against a monster as tough as a Level ??? venom-spitting stalker, but it might slow it down.

  Okay, I admit, all that curiosity was a lot like the feeling I get when a hurricane is coming in. You hear the warnings, you see the sky, and you know there’s gonna be trouble, but at the same time, until the rain is pounding down and tree branches are cracking in the wind, it’s more theoretical than real.

  “Olivia, can you pour the water from your water bottle onto the fire?” Jack asked.

  “I could, but I’m not going to,” I replied flatly. “That’s the only safe drinking water we have. It replenishes, but not fast enough for three—” I glanced at Zelda and corrected myself, “—four people to survive comfortably. There’s probably not enough right now to put out the fire, anyway.”

  “We need to run,” Emma said. “Leave the damn fire.”

  “We need a little bit more of a plan than just running,” I said, staying calm. “It’s dark out there. My sunglasses might help me keep track of the two of you, but if we’re running, we’re likely to get separated. How are we going to find one another again if we do? And where are we running to? We can’t just run blindly through the darkness.”

  Well, we could, obviously. But it seemed like a stupid idea to me. We were sure to stumble across more monsters out there eventually.

  “We’ve got to put out this fire.” Jack grabbed the stick he’d been using to poke at it before and started breaking down the coals, spreading them out within the ring of rocks. “Wait, I know. Dirt. Can I borrow your shovel?”

  “Um…” I started, considering the idea. I wasn’t thrilled about the thought of letting Warden’s Edge out of my hands while a monster approached, but throwing some dirt on the fire would solve one problem.

  Before I could decide, though, the [Venom-Spitting Stalker–Level ???] label disappeared, and the sounds changed. The steady wheezing turned into a hissing rumble, like someone had turned the volume up several notches. Underneath that sound was a slithering noise, a soft cascade of sliding dirt, which ended in a heavy thump, followed by furious scrabbling and an even more furious hissing shriek.

  If the wheezing breathing had been unsettling, the shriek was soul-curdling.

  Not literally. I didn’t think it was magic or some kind of psychic attack. But it was the tone of one seriously pissed-off predator.

  Zelda recognized it, too, because she launched into the most extreme barking fit I’d ever heard from her. And if I really was understanding her words, she was following my own model of the sensible thing to scream when you’re outweighed, outgunned, out-meaned—and yes, that’s a word now.

  Get Bear. Where’s Bear? Bear! Bear! Get over here, Bear! You’re up! This is on you! Bear! Come kill this thing, Bear!

  “She’s not here, Z, that’s not gonna work,” I told her, even as a translucent floating window appeared in my line of vision. It said, Trap successful, 200 XP. And then another window: Congratulations! You have earned enough experience to advance to Level 6. Both vanished almost immediately. I felt a tiny spurt of pleasure at how convenient my interface now was, but I quickly forgot about it when the lizard’s scrabbling got louder.

  It was digging.

  “It fell in your pit. You trapped it.” Jack hefted the stick he’d been using on the fire as if it were a club he might be thinking about wielding on the lizard’s skull.

  “For the moment. Listen. It’s already digging its way out. Speaking of which…” I flipped Warden’s Edge over and, stepping on the blade to cut deep into the ground, tossed a few quick shovelfuls of dirt over the coals of the fire. Then I turned to the other side of the rose dome and gestured at it.

  The roses opened up, vines spreading apart like they were alive, creating a doorway.

  “Oh, thank God.” Emma didn’t wait. She headed off into the pitch-black forest as confidently as if she had night-vision goggles on. Come to think of it, maybe her class gave her some kind of dark vision? But Jack and I were not so lucky.

  Zelda was still barking, a non-stop diatribe that, if I was hearing her right, had shifted to complaining about Bear never being around when you wanted her, and only showing up to steal toys and treats.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “Zelda, leave it,” I ordered, snapping my fingers. “To me. Now.”

  Rude, Zelda told me, even as she immediately stopped barking and bounded over to my side.

  “You’re right. But stay close.”

  Jack was staring in the direction of the lizard, stick still raised.

  “Dude,” I said, following his gaze. “No. We can’t win. Not yet. Let’s go.”

  “Yeah.” He glanced at the remains of the fire.

  “It’s good enough. Let’s go.”

  I could have left without him, of course. It never even occurred to me. The System truly wasn’t wrong about my marginal viability rating. We were literally—in the modern, figurative sense of the word—rats staying on a sinking ship. And why? To make sure a simulated forest didn’t burn down, thus killing the goblins we were planning on killing tomorrow, anyway.

  Yeah, totally a marginal viability kinda move.

  Jack brought the stick. I thought it was a futile gesture—that stick was going to do squat if the lizard caught up to us—but within about thirty seconds, I’d realized that high intelligence stat of his had been hard at work.

  The forest was dark. Picture the darkest place you’ve ever been. Now imagine it twice as dark as that. Because nothing is really dark in the modern world. Everywhere has so much ambient light from light pollution that even if you can’t physically see an electric light, the night sky still reflects light from miles away. Even when you’re camping, darkness is rarely absolute.

  We, however, were not in the modern world.

  And it was incredibly dark.

  I was still wearing the sunglasses, so I had an odd sort of vision—floating texts everywhere letting me know when I was getting close to [Oak Tree–Crafting Component: Woodworking] or [Fallen Log] or [Virginia Creeper] or any of the myriad other forms of obstacle. I let Jack go ahead of me so I could see his tag floating in the void, too. Meanwhile, he used his stick to test the area ahead of him, doing a surprisingly good job of avoiding the trees.

  Zelda stayed with us, apparently with ease. I checked on her every few steps, but she stayed right by my side.

  Emma, though, was gone. Or at least far enough ahead of us that I couldn’t see her marker through the mass of plant life tags cluttering my vision.

  Jack stumbled and swore. “Ground’s uneven up here,” he warned me. “Tree roots, I think.”

  “I’ll step carefully. But where are we going?”

  “Uh…” Jack stopped moving. “Away?”

  I listened. I could still hear the lizard but the sound was getting fainter. It gave me a general sense of where we’d started from, but I had no idea which direction we were going in. Were we on Emma’s hamster wheel, headed nowhere?

  We’d left the wild sanctuary on the side directly opposite the lizard’s approach, so if we’d gone in a straight line, we ought to be running into another goblin spawn spot. Could goblins see in the dark? It would be like being attacked by a rabid racoon, I bet. Almost infinitely scarier in complete blackness than in the daylight. Still, that was assuming we’d managed to stay on a straight line, and that was as unrealistic as… well, as this forest was.

  I did a full scan of our surroundings, looking for any labels that were out of place. There were none.

  “Emma!” Jack called out. “Emma, where are you?”

  I kicked him. Lightly, but a definite kick, and hissed, “Hush! Are you insane? Do you want to let every goblin in the place know where we are?”

  “This way,” Emma yelled back from somewhere ahead of us. “I’m heading back to where I was camping before. I want to get my stuff, if it’s still there.”

  Okay, turned out someone did have a plan. That wasn’t exactly reassuring—had her plan accounted for the goblins likely to be between us and her campsite?—but it was better than nothing.

  “It’s almost goblin o’clock,” I called to her. “Is your map going to show you where they are?”

  A crunching sound, like leaves and twigs underfoot, came from her direction, and a moment later, her floating tag appeared between [Oak Tree–Crafting Component: Woodworking] markers.

  “Yeah, I think so. The lizard was a dark red dot, so I’m guessing that’s the danger sign. You guys are green dots. I wonder what Sam…” Her voice trailed off, and then resumed, with false heartiness. “Pretty dark out here, isn’t it? I went cave tubing in Belize one time, and our guide turned off his flashlight and told us stories about the Mayan underworld. I swear, this is almost as dark as that.”

  “Probably green up until the moment he stabbed your friend Matt,” Jack answered the words she hadn’t said.

  A flame flickered into life on his palm, making his shadowed face the only thing I could see apart from the everpresent floating texts. I lifted the sunglasses off my eyes, so I could see him without their interference. Emma was a few feet away from him, almost visible in the circle of light.

  “Danger Sense wouldn’t respond to an idea,” he said, his voice calm. “While he was just thinking of becoming a back-stabbing asshole, he was probably still green. Then when he became one, red.”

  Emma laughed. “God, Jack, you’re so… how old are you?”

  The corners of his lips twitched, like he wasn’t sure whether that was a compliment or not. In the shadows, it was impossible to tell, but I thought he might have turned a little pink.

  “Oh, wait.” Emma turned her head to look toward the left. “There it is, right on time.”

  “Goblin?” I stepped a little closer to the two of them. The Level 1 goblins weren’t frightening anymore. We’d killed just too many of them. But that didn’t mean I wanted one to come charging at me out of the darkness.

  “Yeah.” Emma frowned. “Farther that way than I would have expected. Maybe…”

  She huffed, almost a laugh. “Okay, this might be a little weird, but hear me out. My old campsite isn’t marked on my map, I was just heading in the general direction. But the goblins aim straight for the clearings, right? So maybe we could follow this one until we find the clearing?”

  I didn’t laugh, although I wanted to, but Jack snorted. “If it spots us, I call dibs.”

  “Okay, so let’s have it not spot us, at least not until it finds my stuff,” Emma replied.

  Jack closed his fingers around his flame, snuffing it out. The blackness felt even more absolute without that glimmer of light. “Lead the way.”

  “Wait.” I put a hand up to stop Emma before she could move away, not that she could see it. “I’ve got some rope here. It might be easier to stay together if we all hang on to it.”

  I fumbled for the pouch opening, and pulled the rope out. We spent a few minutes in the kind of coordination dance you'd expect—trying to space ourselves along the rope, figuring out who went where. Eventually, we settled into a line: Emma, then Jack, then me, with Zelda staying close by my side.

  And then, for the next stretch of time, we played a ridiculous game of follow-the-leader in the dark. A little stumbling here, a little swearing there, and an annoying amount of shushing from all human parties. If we were on some multiversal reality show, the audience was probably rolling in their seats. It would be on our highlight reel, the Earth’s Stupidest Home Videos version.

  Along the way, I got a weird notification. Goblin Level 1 killed, 15 XP floated into my view and then out of it. I paused for a moment when I saw it, nearly knocking Jack over when he kept moving and the rope went taut between us.

  “What?” he whispered.

  “Nothing. Keep going,” I hissed back.

  But it was odd. How had I killed a goblin? My first thought was that Zelda had killed it, but she was close by my heels, and besides, I hadn’t been getting the experience points for the other goblins she’d killed.

  My second thought was the pit trap, of course. That almost had to be how it died. But wouldn’t the lizard have destroyed the trap while escaping from it? How could it have dug free without collapsing the hole? Was it still stuck in there?

  It wasn’t like my two hours of digging had made a twenty-foot-deep pit. I’d meant it as a defense to use my Wild Sanctuary ability, not a deadly weapon. Sure, it had killed one goblin, but that seemed like bad luck on the goblin’s part.

  Frankly, I was confused. But since I didn’t think my confusion would ever get resolved, I let it go as we finally found the clearing, Emma’s stuff, and one irate little goblin.