As soon as the announcement cleared off his screen, Will drew two cards, dropping his briefcase onto one of the restaurant’s hard plastic booths and opening it just enough to grab the knife he’d purchased less than an hour ago. There weren’t any immediate threats to them right now, but Will was familiar with how this kind of thing was supposed to go.

Most people were going to be unsure of their choices, he was sure. Most… but not all. There were a scant few people just like him who’d been waiting their whole lives for a chance just like this, and those people weren’t guaranteed to be normal. As a matter of fact, being excited for the apocalypse was probably a pretty big red flag that someone wasn’t normal.

Will didn’t bother thinking about what that said about him. The important part of his reasoning was that there were going to be murderhobos out there, and the reward for killing other players—Integrated, the System called them all—was definitely enough to inspire them to start going at it.

Once the first killings started, they weren’t going to stop. Few people wanted to commit murder, but self-defense? That was a different story entirely.

After a full five-count passed and nobody smashed into the McDonald’s, Will relaxed ever so slightly, feeling a little silly about how he was holding the knife. He’d never trained to fight with one, so he was just imitating what he’d seen in movies, which was almost definitely wrong.

“The fuck’s your problem?” Waylan squawked. “We get rewards for killing people! That’s good, isn’t it? Let’s get out there!”

Oh. That entire mental rant Will delivered to himself, about the murderhobos? He had failed to consider that he might be working with one.

“I’m ready to go,” Will said. “I do want more coins. If you want to commit murder, go for it. I’m not gonna bother if they don’t bother me.”

“Seriously?” Waylan complained. “You just want to throw away coins?”

“Look,” Will said. “There’s bound to be killers out there. I’ll kill them if they try things. I’m not gonna bother wasting energy on someone who won’t even fight back.”

As if to contradict his statement, a blood-curdling scream rose from outside the building, long and high, and then abruptly cut off with a wet-sounding thunk.

“That guy’s definitely fair game, right?” Waylan asked.

“Oh, a hundred percent,” Will replied. The idea of taking a human life honestly didn’t affect him much, but he was reasonably sure he was supposed to be against it. Office work really changes a person, huh?

The windows in this place were so grimy and covered with posters that the only outside light came in through holes where the glass had been broken. Will walked over to one of those holes in the direction the scream had come from, checking his cards as he did.

Hex and Peek. Will used the Peek immediately, finding an Amplify and a Magic Missile. Since Hex wasn’t directly offensive, he chose Magic Missile to add to his hand, stacking the Amplify on the bottom of the deck.

Waylan joined him in looking out through the gaping holes in the glass.

“Oh, damn,” Waylan said. “This looks like the nests when someone gets a really nice rat and won’t share.”

Will did not glorify the crow’s statement with a response.

He had to admit, though—despite the metaphor being stupidly flawed, Waylan wasn’t wrong. The McDonald’s was across the street from what had once been a shopping mall. From the somehow still-intact street signs, Will was pretty sure they were still somewhere in suburban California, but he wouldn’t have guessed it from the sight he saw now.

Half of the mall had collapsed, and monsters overran the ruins. From this distance, he couldn’t make their figures out clearly enough to Identify them, but the glimpses he caught here and there, these weren’t the same types of monsters that he’d seen back at the office.

Off in the distance, something roared, low and deep. The sheer force of the noise permeated Will’s bones, shaking him to the core.

“If that’s not a boss,” Waylan said, “I’ll eat my hat.”

“You don’t have a hat,” Will pointed out.

“I’ll buy one and eat one.”

This did present a bit of a dilemma. Will had hastily assumed that the only threats to the Integrated would be each other, but that clearly wasn’t the case. With that in mind, should they clear out of this place and look for monsters so they could grind and level up, keeping them powerful enough to avoid death-by-murderhobo? Or should they bunker down here and be ready to fight when necessary?

Waylan made the decision for the pair of him.

“I want coins,” he said simply. “Keep up.”

The crow flew straight out the window, squawking in pain when a broken piece of glass scratched him on the way out.

Will shrugged, found the automatic doors (broken, but already open), and followed.

His teachers had always told him that he was great at going with the flow. Back in middle and high school, that’d helped him adapt to living in new countries, but in college, his tendency to just move with the prevailing winds had hurt his ability to stand out, ultimately landing him a degree with no notable awards. In the workforce, he’d been forced to stand up for himself, but he still prided himself on being able to deal with shifting circumstances no matter how drastic. Last-second personnel hirings and firings, deadline changes, and even entire ground-up redesigns of what a client wanted—he’d learned to deal with those just fine.

In the present, he knew that the choices he and Waylan made could be a matter of life and death, but he didn’t let it bother him. If the crow wanted to go fuck shit up, then Will was just going to have to deal, and that was that. Besides, Will wasn’t opposed to flexing his magic some more.

Waylan flew faster than Will could run, but Will soon found that he was running faster and longer than he should’ve been able to. That was thanks to the System’s increases to his stats, no doubt.

To his surprise, he didn’t encounter any resistance crossing the street. It looked like anyone else that had spawned into this Main Event within a few hundred feet of him and Waylan was still considering their options.

Will followed Waylan into a half-collapsed shoe store, where he found the bird chucking Molotovs at a pair ten-foot-long centipedes. A solid third of the place was already engulfed in flames.

[Mutant Centipede [F] - lvl 6]

[Mutant Centipede [F] - lvl 7]

Oh, interesting. These monsters were stronger than the ones in the tutorial had been. That made sense.

Will finished them both off with a single use of his level 4 Magic Missile, obliterating both of their weakened heads in an instant. The force of his spell was so great that the centipedes bounced. Their corpses rolled straight into the burgeoning fire that Waylan had created.

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[You have gained 46 coins!]

“I had that,” Waylan complained. “Kill-stealer.”

“Keep up,” Will fired back, grinning.

Waylan kept grumbling as Will inched his way around the parts of the room where the ceiling had caved in. Other than the part of the room that Waylan had turned into a funeral pyre and the damage to the ceiling, the merchandise here was surprisingly intact.

“Hey, let me know if I need to duck or something,” Will told his partner. “I have something important to do.”

“Hurry it up,” Waylan replied, already irritated. “This better be something good.”

Five minutes later, Will stood triumphantly. He’d secured a brand-new pair of sneakers—far more comfortable than the leather shoes that workplace dress code mandated. On top of that, there were enough in his size that he could fit a spare pair into his briefcase.

“Shoes?” Waylan cried. “Fuckin’ shoes? Just fly!”

“If you can find me a pair of wings that fit, sure,” Will replied. “C’mon, let’s keep on moving. If we’re going to commit to this, we can grind and find a safe place to rest once we’re done.”

He heard the screaming before he was even out of the shoe store.

Someone was having a very, very bad day in the mall.

The inside was surprisingly intact—yeah, there were a few shops here and there with their roof collapsed in, but the larger structure itself was mostly fine. It looked like a bunch of biker gangs had gone through it with Molotovs, of course, but all in all? Not the end of the world.

Not that you’d think that from the way some dude was shrieking his head off.

They tracked his voice down to a food court. Will and Waylan had to kill a bunch more centipedes along the way, along with some hardier giant cockroaches that they hadn’t managed to kill. Chill kept them in place long enough for the duo to avoid them, at least.

When they got to the food court, they found a surprise ready for them.

The atrium was fairly standard for its type, embodying the dying tradition of the shitty local mall. The ceiling was higher than most of the rest of the mall, high enough that Will could throw a baseball upwards with all his might and not come close to hitting it.

It was somewhat circular, with four entrances leading into it, and apart from the now-closed “restaurant” counters, there was nothing except an endless assortment of cheap plastic tables and chairs hidden behind an assortment of wooden barriers that did their best to hide the minimum-budget feel of the food court behind a veneer of class.

Will had loved frequenting places like this as an irritating teenaged kid, at least until he got his first job at a Starbucks at a mall much like this one. Before he’d entered retail hell, he and his friends had gone around making noise, loudly contemplating shoplifting, and just generally being a nuisance at his local mall back in the days when he actually had friends to go out with.

Now, that same hooliganism was being replicated to deadly effect by a crowd of neon red-skinned humanoids three-quarters Will’s height, except this time, every last one of them had a weapon.

Will and Waylan both paused, using their Identify skill.

[Pyro Gremlin [F] - lvl 5]

That wasn’t enough information. That was just a name!

Will pushed harder on the skill, focusing more intensely on it. Surely a universal skill that didn’t even have the option to increase in power would have more utility, right?

[New Achievement: First Contact] - You have found your first monster with no Earth analogue. Congratulations! You now have physical proof that aliens are real! Well, you really should’ve had proof enough of that already, but seeing is believing. Reward: Upgrades the Identify skill.

There it was. Will tried again.

[Pyro Gremlin [F] - lvl 5]

The Pyro Gremlin is a naturally occurring species on most planets with at least three of the following: magic, easily disrupted gatherings, pyrocite, and/or volcanoes. These creatures of the flame are group predators, and are drawn to sources of light and sound. They revel in causing chaos of any kind; it is often said that just three of them can ruin a concert in under seven seconds. Also, they breath fire. Just a little.

The source of the screams, Will found, was at the center of the court, ineffectually waving a sword atop a plastic statue of a fast-food mascot that he was pretty sure was supposed to be a horse. Underneath him, six of the Pyro Gremlins breathed flame, each of their efforts stopping only a few feet from their mouths. Around them, the rest of the group—ten or so, maybe—egged them on.

“I should kill him,” Waylan whispered. “That gets us coins, right?”

“If you want to, I guess,” Will said, walking forward. He was much more focused on the gremlins, which presented a unique opportunity for practicing his magic on something new.

“Hey!” the man said, nearly toppling off the red-and-blue statue. “HEY! Hey you! Help me!”

“Someone didn’t get the memo,” Waylan muttered. “I’m going in.”

“HELP ME!”

Waylan flew in faster than Will could run, going fast and low in a manner that Will recognized as the first part of his signature “throw bricks at them until they stop moving” tactic.

And then the crow turned around, not having thrown a brick.

Waylan: Damn it. Feels like I’m kicking a newborn chick.

Huh. So either he was all bluster, just like Will had suspected, or Waylan had more depth to him beyond “murderhobo bird”.

Whatever. Will wasn’t here to judge or to kill the terrified man on a horse.

He drew two cards. Hex and Shield. Neither useful; Hex was single-target, and Shield wasn’t useful offensively without a wall to squish something against. He discarded Hex, drawing again.

Oil Spill.

Will watched as one of the gremlins, cheered on by the others, blew a stream of smoking red fire upwards.

“Okay,” he said. “I can work with this.”

The card had an image of a tar-black lake of gooey oil on it. Fifteen-foot radius? That’d encompass all of them, easily.

He activated the card, and dark, oily grease spread under their feets. There were sixteen of them, each of them jumping up and down as they cheered the six attackers on. Said attackers were vying to be the one who actually took the poor sap on the plastic statue down, pushing and shoving and elbowing. All in all, it was a perfect environment.

Sixteen ugly gremlins tumbled to the ground at once. One of them had just been about to breathe fire, and it did so as it faceplanted straight into Will’s Oil Spill.

The entire floor went up in flames in an instant. Will was used to using oil to amp up a campfire or a barbeque grill, but this was something else entirely. Sudden heat brushed against his face as the oil ignited with a surprisingly quiet whump. Even from a hundred feet away, he could feel the flame.

Which, he realized a second later, was definitely the wrong way to save someone in the center of the spell.

“You dumbass!” Waylan laughed from behind him.

Will sighed and started sprinting even as the stranger’s screaming redoubled. He must’ve had some enhanced agility or something, because the burning form of the sword-wielding man emerged from the flames on his hands and knees before any of the Pyro Gremlins did.

As he ran, Will wondered what it said about him that he wasn’t even bothered by the screaming. He was going to save a man’s life, a life that he himself had put into danger, and all he could think was I’m wasting time on this. It was the right thing to do, and it felt right, but wow. Was his mind really in the right place?

And then he was right next to the burning, screaming man, and he had more important things to worry about.

[Charles Harris [F] - lvl 5]

Human. As his level is lower than yours, you gain detailed knowledge of his class. Charles is a Warrior with the Sword Combat specialization selected at level 3. His most used skill is Passive Skill: Swordfighter.

Prior to the Integration, Charles was an up-and-coming investment banker with a passing interest in fencing. His net worth of roughly 5 million USD equates exactly zero coins!

This is an intelligent Integrated being. To view more information, gain more levels in Identify or add Waylan to your party.

Jesus christ, that’s a lot of information. Does the System spill the beans on my private life, too?

“Charles,” Will said nonchalantly, raising his voice just loudly enough to be heard over the man’s panicked screams. “Stop, drop, and roll. They teach you that, right?”

Now that he was closer up, Will could see that this guy wasn’t actually burning alive. Not completely, at least. Charles was wearing armor. A thin black carbon-fiber mesh that looked like no clothing Will had ever seen stretched across Charles’ body like a jumpsuit, and none of it was burning. The man had, however, collected a fair amount of grease on his clothes, and that was definitely burning.

Despite his panic, Charles was, in fact, able to follow Will’s instructions, which he was infinitely grateful for. He supposed anyone that had survived the tutorial wouldn’t be totally pathetic, though this guy’s level was definitely a little low.

“You have a healing potion on you?” Will asked. When Charles nodded, he relaxed.

“H-how can you be so calm?” Charles asked, nearly jumping out of his skin when he realized his shoulder was still burning. “In this, this fucked-up world?”

Great. Now he owed Waylan a hundred coins and he had to talk to another person. Will really didn’t want to be part of this conversation.

“Look, man,” Will said. “Don’t worry about it. Just be glad I didn’t kill you for coins, get yourself situated to survive, and—“

He didn’t see the burst of flame coming until his skin started burning.

Will triggered Shield reflexively, guzzling a health potion at the same time. The heat dissipated instantly.

Thunk. Even behind the solid layer of protection, he could hear

Waylan: hahahaha you fucking idiot why did you try to kill fire monsters with MORE FIRE?

With an exaggerated sigh, Will turned to face the slowly-rising horde.

Draw, he commanded, a now familiar thrum of excitement running through him.

“I’ll handle this,” he told Charles. “Try not to get in my way.”