When Will came back to his senses, he could only think of one word.

Fuck.

This was a different kind of pain from last time. Will had recognized the broken bones in his body when the Earth Serpent had hit him, but now he couldn’t see even when he opened his burnt eyes. He could barely breathe, choked by dust.

Waylan: Holy shit, man. You alive?

At least the System appeared with perfect clarity.

Will: Fucking fantastic.

He put a hand down, making contact with a hard surface he was fairly sure was ground, then tried to push himself up.

Moving was torture. Rather than the brittle pain of broken bones, Will’s innards felt like jelly that had been left out in the sun too long. A sloshing sensation accompanied every step. He couldn’t feel his legs from the knee down

“Well, looks like you’re still in one piece,” the now-familiar voice of the crow came. It was awfully hard to hear Waylan against the ringing. How far away was he?

Will reached his hands out, scrabbling for purchase on something, anything. There were potions in his briefcase, he knew, but those could’ve been blown away by the raw force of the explosion.

His right hand closed around cool, smooth glass just as he dropped onto his knees, his jelly-like limbs unable to keep him upright anymore.

The weight and magic of the glass identified it as a health potion, and Will drank it greedily. Sensation started to return to his body, and with that came pain. A lot of pain.

Waylan gave him a second bottle, which cleared his vision and hearing up enough for Will to realize that the crow was almost on top of him. He’d fallen on top of his briefcase, protecting it.

It took him six full Basic Health Potions to return to a feeling approximating “normal.” The flavor changed a bit each time, Will realized—it started like cherry soda, but by the end, it tasted more like a refreshing tea with honey and lemon in it. He silently thanked whoever designed the System for its choice to give them potions that didn’t taste like complete garbage.

As soon as his vision was back to normal, Will picked up his remarkably unscathed briefcase before looking around for the baseball bat.

No sign of his weapon, unfortunately. He quickly realized why.

Their plan had worked perfectly. Too perfectly. The office was a crumbling ruin. Thanks to a combination of Will’s Resonance Wave and seven of Waylan’s magical dynamite charges, all targeting areas that looked load-bearing, they’d collapsed the building like a demolition team. Black dust choked the air. The once-proud prison that Will had wasted years at had been reduced to nothing but a twenty-foot tall pile of flaming rubble.

“That’s all your health potions plus one of mine,” Waylan said. “You better get your own if you want more.”

“Thanks, Way,” Will said, breathing hard. He hadn’t expected him to actually help out like that.

“It’s Waylan,” the crow snapped. “Humans are so weird, I swear.”

Will was about to think of a clever comeback when his mind finally caught up to the situation.

“The quest didn’t end,” he realized. “Way, the—“

“Waylan.”

“Waylan, the snake is alive,” Will completed.

As if on cue, the rubble started to shake. Boulders started to fall, and the entire pile shifted. Will had to jump back to avoid an errant flying rebar from smacking him upside the head.

“Shit!” Waylan shouted, flapping his wings and fluttering back. “Fly!”

“I can’t, asshole!” Will replied, starting to run.

Debris dropped down the side of the demolished building, kicking up so much dust that Will could barely see past the cloud.

But he did see the angry yellow eye peep out from the open space between two chunks of concrete.

The snake was about to break through.

Their plan had gone perfectly, but their enemy had simply survived an entire nine-story building being dropped on it.

Will was tempted to take Waylan’s advice and run, but the Hidden Event stayed flickering in the corner of his vision, reminding him that he had an hour and a half to live if he didn’t kill this snake.

“I’m fighting!” Will declared, thrusting out an open hand instinctively.

Surprisingly, the card he’d been holding when the building detonated returned to his hand, as pristine as they’d been when he got them.

Will had drawn to replenish his hand just before Waylan’s bombs had gone off, but he hadn’t seen the card.

It was a Web. That had been an alternate plan they could’ve gone with. It was a welcome sight.

“Waylan?” Will asked, realizing that he hadn’t heard the crow reply.

Nothing.

He sighed quietly. Had Waylan had turned out to be a total self-serving coward after all? Will’s estimation of him hadn’t been perfect, but he thought it was accurate enough.

Waylan: One minute. I need one minute. You can fight that long alone, right?

Will: Hurry it up.

Will let out a sigh of relief. He hadn’t been abandoned after all, though he had a few choice words to give the crow on the subject of communication.

“Draw,” he said.

The card slipped into his hand just as the Earth Serpent burst out through the rubble.

An image of an icicle—Chill. Got it. Will minimized the time he spent looking, keeping both eyes on the enemy.

Thankfully, it wasn’t unharmed—far from it, in fact. Will and Waylan’s combination demolition attack had taken a toll on the snake’s flesh. Every inch of it looked battered and bruised, and it was coated in the eerie black dust that clouded the entire demolition site. It was bleeding openly from multiple wounds, and it looked slower than it had been before.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

That didn’t mean it wasn’t deadly. Will had to watch his step here. One false step could still mean death, especially without backup.

He wasn’t sure exactly how much time had passed since the detonation, but it had to have been longer than a minute and a half. There was no longer a Hex on the creature, which meant the spell had run out.

“I can work with this,” Will muttered.

He had no bat, which sucked, but his offensive spells were decent. He had two cards remaining in his deck, and he knew the last one was Magic Missile, which meant the next draw would be Amplify.

Knowledge is power.

The snake slithered its way out, unveiling more and more of its body. They’d really messed it up with their attack, Will realized. When he used Identify on it again, a small indicator added itself to the display. A circle, nearly two-thirds of it greyed out. The remaining part of it flashed yellow.

A health bar, he realized. It wasn’t exactly what he’d been expecting from a System like this, but it was close enough. It was good to know that they’d made a lot of progress.

But they weren’t done yet, and the Earth Serpent confirmed that in spades. A second section of the rubble exploded outwards, kicking up a dust cloud the size of an elephant, and the snake’s tail punched out through it.

As Waylan had observed earlier, the tail was in fact barbed. He had, however, neglected to mention the sheer size of the thing. It had to be the size of a minivan, and it looked more like a porcupine’s favorite body pillow than a tail of any sort. Unlike the rest of its body, it barely looked touched.

The Earth Serpent swung its barbed weapon at Will. He had to squint to see through the dust. For some reason, his vision was clearer before. Will hadn’t put his contacts in this morning, so he shouldn’t be able to see this well. Had the tutorial changed his body?

All thought of his eyes disappeared as the tail fully emerged, soaring towards him like a wrecking ball on steroids.

Will activated his Web card just as it broke free of the rubble.

It was harder than he initially thought. During testing, he’d anchored the spell’s center point on fixed objects. Walls, ceilings, desks, the like. Then, it’d been easy. Targeting a living, moving entity was a different beast entirely. Calculating the location mentally now felt like trying to read a ripped-up paper map upside down and backwards. While juggling.

Except, he realized, it wasn’t actually that bad. Even with all the necessary pieces he had to put into place, Will was handling it fine. For the first time, he truly felt the effects of his increased Intelligence stat.

A white point appeared at the base of the barbs, right where the serpent’s body transitioned into a weapon, and it exploded outward. Sticky white fluid—wait, no, that was wrong. Long, off-white ropes of—nope. Not that either.

Will’s spiderweb exploded into existence, throwing itself over the tail like a fishing net. It tangled beautifully, webbing wrapping around long, bloody spikes and gluing them to chunks of concrete. The result: one stuck snake looking like it’d gotten into a blender with a roll of toilet paper.

It wouldn’t hold forever. In the most likely case, it wouldn’t even hold for a few minutes. The snake was more than strong enough to break free.

But that was fine. Will only needed to keep it busy for a minute.

Unfortunately, the rest of the snake was alive, if not well, and it continued slithering towards Will at speeds rivaling his beat-up Honda Accord’s. He knew from experience that its tongue hit as hard as that car did, and he was in no position to run. In under twenty seconds, the snake would be on him.

“Draw,” Will said, reaching into his briefcase for the tube-shaped potion bottles he knew were still there.

He activated the new card immediately, not even bothering to check the card art. This one felt different from the others—the magic persisted even after the card dissipated, and a new window appeared in front of his eyes.

Active Cards [1/5]:

> Amplify (Basic)

> 4 open slots

Will downed the test tube of neon blue potion in a single gulp. It was sour. Really sour.

But it restored at least fifteen mana points, which brought him back to his full 27.

He activated his other card immediately. Sure enough, a prompt appeared in his mind, asking him if he wanted to use extra mana for the casting.

Will put as much magic as he could into the Chill. With a base cost of 6 mana, that meant he spent 12. He wasn’t sure how he’d describe the sensation—it was sort of like the feeling you get when you get to the top of the stairs without realizing and trip over yourself trying to get to the next step up, except with his mana.

Weird feelings aside, the Amplify-Chill combo worked. The air cooled noticeably as Will once again targeted a dynamic, moving location on the fly.

Sadly, the snake’s face didn’t entirely freeze over, but it hissed in pain, recoiling so fast that it tore itself further against the sharp debris it was still halfway trapped in. Ice crystals formed over its eyes and scales, and it shook its head angrily, trying to break them off.

Chill’s area of effect was decently large, so it suffered for a fair few seconds before it recoiled all the way out, but Will couldn’t move the spell. It was a set-and-forget, not something he could shift.

“Okay,” he said, more for his own benefit than to communicate to anyone else. “This is probably the part where I run.”

Will took off the moment the snake fully freed itself from the Chill, bashing its face against the coarse, cracked pavement of the empty parking lot to smash the ice off. Chunks of its flesh had been flash-frozen, and chancing a glance backwards as he ran told Will that the snake was starting to tear its own skin off.

That would only last so long before it targeted him once more, and—okay. “So long” apparently meant “about three seconds,” because the moment he had that thought, the Earth Serpent looked at him with death in its bloodshot eyes.

Will turned back and sprinted.

“Draw,” he panted as he ran. The parking lot felt so much longer than it had in the morning. To be fair, he didn’t have his car this time, but still. Why was there so much damn pavement?

Thanks to his Peek card, he knew exactly what this last card was. He’d placed Magic Missile on the bottom of the deck, and that was all he had left.

“Shuffle,” Will added breathlessly. Better to start it now so there wasn’t a cooldown later.

Behind him, the thump-thump-thump of the snake’s irregular slither pattern grew louder and louder. Will prepared to duck and cover. He hoped he had the coins to buy up enough health potions to repair the damages that were sure to occur from this.

Oddly enough, he wasn’t scared of losing this. Maybe that was the defeated worker in him speaking, but despite the way his lungs were burning, despite the danger following him… Will felt completely, totally at peace.

Said peace broke into pieces when Will tripped over a raised tree root, tumbling onto the pavement ass over head. He rolled once, twice, then stopped himself with a hand.

Which gave him a perfect view of the Earth Serpent’s wide-open maw. Its tongue had been damaged by the frost, Will saw, and so it unhinged its jaw to swallow him whole. Sharp fangs the length of his arm dripped with venom.

Will may or may not have screamed just a little bit.

Waylan: Heads up. Get down. Huh. Heads up to get down? Your language is weird.

The faintest sound of wingbeats alongside the message was the only warning Will got before a small, dark shape flew past him, landing straight in the Earth Serpent’s gullet.

His eyes widened. Will had a pretty good guess what that object was, and he wasn’t keen on getting hit by it again.

The snake swallowed the object, ignoring Will as it refocused on the crow that’d just fed it something foreign. Will took the opportunity to get to his feet and run.

“Blow it!” he shouted as soon as he got more than ten feet away. “Do it now!”

Waylan cawed.

At what Will assumed was the crow’s signal, he activated his final card, using the last dregs of his Amplify to sharply increase the amount of mana he used. Ten of his fifteen remaining points disappeared in a flash, and a double-strength Magic Missile blitzed forward from his outstretched hand.

His timing couldn’t have been better.

Waylan’s bomb went off less than a quarter second before the twin spirals of light made contact.

The result was nothing short of spectacular.

Will had been looking forward to the July 4th fireworks next month, but this was an adequate replacement. The snake’s head simply exploded, annihilated in a single instant. Gore flew in every direction. The syrupy, gory blood rained down upon Will, soaking him from head to toe. The air smelled like a barbecue that had been going on for a little bit too long.

“Looks like you lived,” Waylan said, flying a circle around Will’s head. “You look gross.”

“Thanks,” Will sighed. “Where were you?”

“Getting coins,” Waylan admitted. “I needed to buy new dynamite, see.”

“Alright, then—“ Will started. The System cut him off.

[You have gained 412 coins!]

[You have defeated an unnamed Earth Serpent. As this was a Solo-level boss, you have gained 1 Solo credit.]

[Level up!]

[Level up!]

[2 skill points received. 200 coins received. Mana refilled.]

[New Achievement: Survivor] - You are part of the 25% of humanity that engaged with a boss monster during Main Event 0. Of that group, you are part of 4% that have survived. Reward: 1 skill point + new title.

[New Title: Solo Slayer] - You have killed a Solo-level boss. This title is visible to other Integrated and grants you a 10% bonus to damage against future Solo-level bosses.

[Hidden Event — “Tutorial Boss” completed! Reward: 1,000 coins.]

[Main Event 0 — “Tutorial”]

[Reward: 1,000 coins]

[Time remaining: 1 hour, 3 minutes, 27 seconds]