The 17th floor ended with the sound of a polymer wire snapping taut against Andy's throat.

  "It's nothing personal, Andy," Amito had whispered, his face as kind as a summer morning. "The world needs a savior, and a savior needs essence. Yours is... significant."

  Then, the cold. The absolute, crushing weight of the Void.

  Andy opened his eyes. Mud in his mouth. Ozone in the air. Above him, massive golden letters burned through the gray clouds: TUTORIAL COMMENCE. SURVIVE THE FIRST HOUR.

  Andy stood. He didn't check his stats. He didn't wait for a prompt. He looked at his hands—soft, unscarred, and trembling. He looked at the woman sitting three feet away, clutching a thin shawl.

  "Mom?" Andy’s voice was a dry rasp.

  She looked up. Terror. Confusion. "Andy? Where are we?"

  In the first life, she had died in the first ten minutes. A scavenger-goblin. A slit throat. While Andy was busy reading his interface, trying to understand his Strength stat, she had become a corpse.

  Andy reached out. His hand was steady. He gripped her shoulder.

  "Stay behind me," Andy said. "Look at my back."

  A screech tore the air. Green skin. Yellow teeth. A Scavenger Goblin lunged from the shadow of a wagon. It didn't wait. It went for her.

  Andy’s body moved. Level 0 muscles. 17th-floor memory. He lunged. Shoulder hit chest. Mud sprayed. Andy gripped a jagged stone.

  Stone bit. Bone cracked. The Goblin went limp.

  A sharp jolt snapped through Andy’s spine. Electric. Raw. His muscles tightened. His vision cleared. He didn't need a blue box; his body felt the reclaim. He was Level 1.

  ---

  Andy stood over the twitching remains of the goblin, the jagged stone still slick in his palm. He didn't look at the monster. He looked at his mother.

  She was staring at him, her chest heaving, the thin shawl fallen to the mud. This was the woman who had worked two jobs to buy him his first practice sword. The woman who had cried when he was drafted into the System’s meat-grinder. In his memory, she was a ghost, a faded image of warmth he used to keep himself sane in the dark trenches of the 15th floor.

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  Now, she was breathing. He could see the pulse in her neck. He could see the way the wind caught a stray lock of her hair.

  The weight of a decade of grief hit him all at once. It was a physical blow, more painful than the polymer wire. He had spent three thousand days wishing for one more second with her, and now that he had it, he found he was terrified to speak. If he spoke, the illusion might shatter.

  "Andy," she whispered.

  Just his name. It was the same inflection she used when she woke him for school. It was laced with a mother's instinctual worry, an anchor in a world that had just drifted off its axis. Relief loosened something in his chest he hadn't realized was clenched.

  He forced a rusted iron gladius from the wagon’s debris into her hand. He overlapped his fingers with hers, ensuring she gripped the hilt.

  "Hold this," he said. His voice was a rasp, a stranger’s voice. "Don't let go. No matter what you see, no matter how much blood there is, do not let go of this sword."

  She looked at the blade, then back at him. "You’re... you’re different. Your eyes, Andy. What happened to you?"

  He had to look away. He snapped his gaze toward the treeline. If he didn't, she would see that he already knew the exact sound of her final breath. He would see the thousand-yard stare of a man who had watched the world burn.

  He felt her hand tremble against his. He wanted to pull her into a hug, to tell her it was okay, but he couldn't. Not yet. A hug was a luxury for people who weren't in the middle of a slaughterhouse.

  "I'm just protecting you, Mom," he said.

  A memory of her kitchen—salty stew and woodsmoke—flickered briefly against the smell of the burning wagons. He let out a small, satisfied huff, a single human breath, before his face hardened back into a mask of flat indifference.

  "I’m just doing what I have to."

  ---

  "Hey, you okay?"

  A hand reached down. Amito.

  The sixteen-year-old version of the man who would eventually murder the world. He looked like a saint. He smelled like woodsmoke and false hope.

  "I'm Amito," the boy said, offering a warm smile. "Looks like we’re in this together, brother. We need to organize. People are panicking."

  Andy didn't take the hand. He rolled to his feet, his muscles screaming with phantom pains. He reached into his pocket and felt the cold, black stone—the Traitor’s Compass.

  Andy looked at Amito’s face, searching for the lines of the man who had choked him, but the boy’s skin was impossibly smooth, lacking even the faint scar on the jaw Amito had earned during the third wave. The difference was jarring; his memory insisted on a predator, but his eyes were seeing a child who hadn't even learned how to lie convincingly yet.

  "I can stand," Andy said.

  Marcus, the Level 15 Guide, stepped forward. He smashed his iron staff against the ground. "Listen up, maggots! Sixty minutes! If you’re inside the white circle when the timer hits zero, you live. The Goblins are already moving in the brush. If you die, you’re just fertilizer."

  "Wait!" a girl named Sarah cried out. "We don't have weapons! You can't just leave us here!"

  Marcus laughed, a dry, bitter sound. "The System doesn't give handouts. Find a rock. Find a stick. Or find a grave."

  "The weapon cache is under the third wagon," Andy said.

  The clearing went silent. Marcus froze. He looked at Andy—a Level 1 recruit with mud in his hair and eyes that looked like they had seen the end of time.

  "What did you say, kid?"

  "Under the third wagon," Andy repeated. He walked right up to Marcus. "The latch is stuck on the left side. Strike it twice, Marcus. Now. Or we lose twenty recruits in the first wave and the System docks your pay for incompetence. Do your job."

  Marcus’s face turned pale. He raised his staff, but the boy’s gaze didn't waver. The Level 15 veteran didn't move.

  "Take the steel!" Marcus roared, smashing the wagon floor exactly where Andy had pointed.

  As the recruits scrambled for the blades, Amito leaned in close to Andy. "That was aggressive, Andy. We shouldn't make enemies of the Guides."

  "The rules were written by the people who want you dead, Amito," Andy said. "Decide which side you're on before the first wave hits."

  The rivalry was born in the mud. Amito didn't speak, but his grip on his sword was white-knuckled.

  Andy looked at his mother’s hand around her own hilt. She was shaking, her eyes fixed on the darkening woods.

  The timer in the sky turned a dark, pulsing violet. Fifty-nine minutes left. Andy realized that in sixty minutes the forest would scream, and he could not be in two places at once. He was a specialist in a failing machine, and the meat-grinder was just starting to turn.