You have purchased a Random F-Tier Card.

“Ten new cards,” Will said to himself. “Probably good to start from here.”

He’d used up the entirety of his level-up bonus coins to buy F-Tier cards, bringing him back down to 1175. Just for shits and giggles (and also in case he had missed something useful earlier), he also spent five coins buying G-Tier cards.

Waylan squawked. “You have more than a thousand coins. Use them!”

“I’m not going all-in on anything,” Will said. “You never know if you’ll need to suddenly buy a bunch of health or mana potions mid-fight.”

“Well, I am going to buy everything I need.”

Will squinted at his new companion suspiciously. “How many coins do you have left?”

“Mind your own business.”

He snorted, returning to the stack of cards waiting for him. While Waylan’s purchases all went straight into his Inventory skill, Will’s just manifested on convenient surfaces nearby. He hadn’t checked any of them until now, wanting to save them up so he could get the dopamine rush of essentially doing ten gacha rolls at once.

Here we go. Hopefully, there would be something that could defeat the Earth Serpent in here. However this turned out, he was going to have a lot of cards going into his nonmagical deckboxes. Everything was up to RNG and his plans now. He hoped he’d get some good ones.

“First card,” he said, humming to himself. This was basically a pack opening!

[Blur (Basic) - lvl 1]

Cost: 4 mana

Creates a shimmering haze around you, making it difficult for enemies to accurately target you. Lasts for 30 seconds + 30 seconds per level of spell. Perfect at parties where you want everyone in your immediate vicinity to vomit.

That description wasn’t very helpful, though the spell itself seemed pretty interesting. Would it be able to stop Will from being hit by one of those devastating tongue attacks that the serpent had been dishing out?

He added it to his deck, swapping out Resonance Wave.

“Hey, Waylan,” he said. “Got a moment?”

“I’m busy,” the crow snapped.

“You wanna throw a brick at me?”

Waylan stopped short, then slowly turned his head to look at Will. “You serious?”

“Deadly. I want to test a couple of things.”

“Well, if you’re asking for it, I won’t say no.”

“On my count, then.”

He drew and discarded Magic Missile. Will’s second card was Shield, which he held ready in hand.

Will prepared to tell his companion that he was ready, but the brick was already flying before the first word left his half-open mouth.

“Think fast!” Waylan shouted.

Will thought fast. A familiar blue forcefield popped into existence as he activated the card, threads of magic shifting through his body. Just in time, too—the brick smacked against the spell and fell to the ground. The azure disc flickered upon the impact, but it held easily.

Huh. Had his reaction time been that fast before the apocalypse? Since he didn’t feel much smarter, was the increase to his Intelligence stat benefiting less visible parts of his mind? That should be impossible, but Will was in a real-life MMO party with a talking crow, so impossible was a word that he planned on eliminating from his vocabulary.

“Sick,” Will said, trying to manipulate the spell with his mind. Sure enough, it didn’t budge, just like the last time. “This should hold against its attacks, but it stays still after I activate it.”

Forty-five seconds later, the level 1 Shield spell disappeared, dissolving into the air like sugar in water.

Draw.

The Blur card’s art was, well, blurry. It depicted a hazy figure slipping in and out of focus inside low-hanging fog. Will could feel a headache coming on just looking at it.

He cast the spell.

“Alright, try another brick or two,” he called. “Thanks!”

Waylan acquiesced, flying to get a better angle. “Whoa, looking at you is annoying. Am I drunk?”

The first brick sailed straight past Will, missing him entirely, and Will started moving. “Is the effect still up?”

“It is,” Waylan replied, chucking another brick. “Ugh. Can I stop?”

The second one came much closer, grazing his shoulder. It wasn’t serious, but it did scrape his skin, drawing blood.

“Yeah,” Will said, wincing. “Stop. Ow.”

He found a mostly-undamaged notebook lying around in the remains of a cubicle, then wrote down his observations. Will had a lot of cards—he wanted to have a good idea of what he was working with.

Blur. Usable to dodge, but isn’t perfect. The protection is still on when I move, so it’s better than Shield in that respect, but the amount of damage I can no-sell is less. Dodge more tongue-strikes in exchange for taking hits every now and then?

For the time being, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to add it to his main deck, especially without knowing what else he had. Will took it out of the box, slotting it into one of his non-magical deckboxes.

Onto the next card.

[Oil Spill (Basic) - lvl 1]

Cost: 3 mana

Designate a grounded point within 60 feet of you. For 1 minute + 30 seconds per level of spell, slick grease covers the surface in a 15-foot radius, making it nigh-impossible to tread those grounds.

He spent a grand total of one attempt testing Oil Spill before coming to his conclusion.

Works really well at fucking me up—fell twice in two steps. Waylan completely unaffected. I doubt a snake will care.

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

This could be useful if he had to fight more creatures like the spiders or the monkeys, but against the snake? Probably not.

[Hex (Basic) - lvl 1]

Cost: 4 mana

Designate a creature. For the next 1 minute + 1 minute per level of spell, attacks deal 50% more damage to that enemy.

He didn’t even need to test this one out to know he was going to add it to his final serpent-killing deck. Against a single boss, this card would be incredible. With his Deck Box skill at level two, he had a single free slot, so he added Hex.

[Peek (Basic) - Meta]

Cost: 1 mana

Look at the next card in the deck. You may choose to add it to your hand, discard it, or place it on the bottom of your deck. Does not ignore hand size maximum. You may immediately Draw after using this card.

“Whoa,” Will said out loud.

“You get something good?” Waylan shouted, far too loudly. “You want more bricks in your face?”

“No, no bricks,” Will replied. “I just got something that changes how my class works. Give me some time, okay?”

“Well, I got a stick of dynamite,” the crow crowed smugly. “I have a ton of good shit now. I think I’m gonna hunt.”

“Sure, sure,” Will said absent-mindedly. “Do what you will. Just don’t die.”

The crow seemed to have a pretty good handle of his ability to stay alive, so Will didn’t bother worrying about Waylan when he heard wings flapping.

Peek was a completely different type of card—a Meta card, according to the System. This was the first card he’d seen that differentiated his class from a mage that simply cast random spells, and it lent credence to the idea he had that he’d been selected for Tarot Mage because he had experience with competitive card games.

Also, it was cheap. 1 mana was pretty solid for an effect that, on paper, would allow him to pick the better of the next two cards for a given situation. Since he was still two skill points short of increasing Draw’s level, drawing this was a nice pseudo-draw two.

There was a drawback, of course. It didn’t look like he would be able to increase the power of Peek—there was no level indicator other than “Meta.” Maybe he’d be able to advance it from Basic to the next tier up?

Oh well. Still worth an inclusion.

He couldn’t think of anything he wanted to replace from the five cards in his deck, so he used one of his skill points.

Deck Box advanced to level 3.

Your maximum deck size has increased to 7.

Will placed Peek into one of the two new open slots.

He wasn’t sure what he wanted in the last slot, but he decided on Blur for now. That made seven cards in his deck, two cards outside, and six unknown F-Tier cards alongside five unknown G-Tiers to examine.

The fifth Basic card was called Heat Metal and cost five mana, but it only targeted a small amount. Since the Earth Serpent had no metal on its body and the card wasn’t strong enough to make the entire office building burning hot, Will tabled it for now. At least the art was badass.

After that came Unlock, which was capable of opening anything sealed by nonmagical means for three mana. It had a line of flavor text that read: Useful for thieves, assassins, and those who can’t remember where they left their keys, which Will let out the faintest whisper of a chuckle at. It did have some promise, but it wasn’t going to help in the fight, which was going to have to happen in under fourteen hours.

Make that less than twelve hours to be safe. Will didn’t know how long they’d be fighting, but he really didn’t want to be halfway through killing the serpent only to find out that Main Event 0 was over and he was being condemned to death.

He pushed the thoughts aside, flipping over the next card as squawking and indignant hisses came from above him.

Waylan: The fifth floor has geese. Who the fuck has geese in an office?

Will: Pretty sure those are new. Last I checked, keeping monkeys here was against company policy too.

[Jump (Basic) - lvl 1]

Cost: 3 mana

For the next 1 minute + 30 seconds per level of spell, your maximum jump height is increased by 200%. The amount of distance you can fall before taking damage also increases by 200%. Recommended uses: hasty getaways, bypassing tall gates, basketball games.

That was an interesting one, actually. Will marked down some notes for a potential strategy they could utilize to get the jump on the snake, which—yep. It was still there, smacking its head around the first floor. If he squinted, Will could see a handful of bloody half-eaten corpses. At least they didn’t look human.

Unfortunately, it looked like Jump only worked on his vertical. Will tried to use it to push himself off the ground really fast, but he couldn’t go forward any faster than usual.

Into the free cards it went for now.

Three more.

Card number eight was a relative dud. It was called Jaunt, and it looked like a toned-down version of what Will would expect from something named Haste. Five mana, lasted for a minute, boosted his movement speed by twenty percent. Experimenting with it revealed that that was the only thing it increased, and while it might be nice for an escape, Will definitely didn’t want to draw it mid-fight. Out of the deck it went!

Card number nine, however, was a fair sight better.

[Web (Basic) - lvl 1]

Cost: 5 mana

Creates a web with similar tensile strength to the F-Tier Weaver Spider’s in a 10 foot + 2 feet per level of spell radius centered on a point within 60 feet for 1 minute + 30 seconds per level of spell. Traps small enemies, hinders large ones. Flammable. Gives arachnophobes nightmares.

Since the sound upstairs was beginning to die down, Will decided to go check up on Waylan and test the skill in the process, exchanging Chill for a moment.

Waylan: You fucking dickhead!

Will: lol. My bad, didn’t realize the range on the spell.

He managed to get a handful of coins out of killing the three geese that got caught up in the web, though it took a while. He only used Chill to kill them—they were too hard to reach with his bat and Will was worried that Magic Missile would light the entire thing on fire, which would burn Waylan in the process.

The crow did manage to get out of the web with a great deal of effort in a couple of minutes, which Will also noted down.

Potentially useful against the snake, but not a fight-ending spell.

One last Basic card. Will hoped it’d be a good one.

[Amplify (Basic) - Meta]

Cost: 1 mana

This is a continuous backrow card. This card will remain active for 1 minute + 1 minute per level of spell. While active, you can add mana to the cost of any spell you trigger to increase its power by an amount proportional to the mana used. You cannot use more than double a card’s base mana cost.

A… backrow card? He knew the terminology, but what did that mean in this context?

After managing to successfully draw the card—harder than it sounded when Will couldn’t physically stack the deck—he figured out that when he used it, it went into the lower row of the Active Cards menu. Sure enough, when he used a Magic Missile with twice the usual power, it blasted an angry goose away like an eighteen-wheeler, leaving only a single bloody feather behind.

This was going to be critical, he could already tell. With the current profile of cards he had, the best way to take down a large boss was by debuffing it with Hex, Amplifying his own magic, and then putting everything he had into a few big attacks.

Not that it would be enough. Will needed Waylan to fight with him

As for the optimal deck loadout…

For now, he swapped Amplify with Shield. That might not be the most optimal way to run it, but Will still had half a day left. There would be time to fix his deck later.

“Waylan, we should talk,” he called once he was reasonably sure there was no immediate danger from the geese. He hadn’t actually been hit by any of them, but he was pretty sure they weren’t any tougher than the spiders or the monkeys on the floors below. They definitely weren’t as strong as the snake.

“Yep,” the crow replied, flying into view with startling speed. He perched on a cracked monitor, which promptly fell over under his weight. For once, he sounded serious. “Let’s talk strategy. We’re gonna fuck that boss up.”

“We are,” Will said.

“Right, so, uh, where do we start?” Waylan asked. “The only plans I’ve executed before mostly involved stealing some dude’s lunch.”

“Tell me your capabilities,” Will said, twirling a pen in his hand. He’d been theorycrafting potential combinations of his cards to attack the snake depending on the order he drew them in. Compared to managing three teams’ finances, it was a cakewalk. Adding Waylan’s abilities on top of that was nothing.

Over the next few minutes, they hashed out the basics of a plan.

“Can you store living beings in your inventory?” Will asked.

“Dunno. Let me try,” Waylan replied.

He flew around the room until he found a goose.

“Nope. Says they’re hostile,” Waylan said.

“What if they weren’t hostile?” Will asked. “What then?”

The crow flew upwards and dropped a brick on the goose’s head. It crumpled to the floor, unconscious.

A second later, the goose vanished.

“Works!” Waylan said. “It’s still alive. System says I’ve got thirty seconds before I gotta spit it out.”

Their experimentation basically went like that. Will would ask a question, Waylan wouldn’t know the answer, and they would commit acts of gratuitous violence until they figured out something close to an answer.

One thing steadily grew clear: they were putting a lot onto chance. They didn’t know enough about the snake to tell what was going to affect it, and Will’s draws were too random to rely on any single plan.

Though they were able to come up with multiple plans, there was only one real way to work around that element.

And that was to get stronger.

“Twelve hours,” Will said, yawning. “With six hours of sleep, that’s just six remaining. We have that much time to make ourselves ready to take on the snake. Or die. We could do that, too.”

“Let’s not die,” Waylan said.