The moment she stepped into the lobby, the first thing that struck Lorelei was the overpowering smell of death.

Well, no.

That's not strictly accurate. The first thing that struck Lorelei was the business end of a shovel wielded by a Kobold that had sneakily hidden itself in the blind spot behind the doors. However, kicked in, and she was soon the proud owner of 20 more XP and another handful of copper coins.

Feeling somewhat of a sense of aggrievement and betrayal towards her Map function, Lorelei opened it up again and had a good look. There were now quite a number of red dots swimming around her near vicinity - including one larger than the others and with a dark red band around it. A smaller number of green dots - which seemed to be clustered together, away from the red dots - could be seen towards the back of the outline of the building.

None of those had been showing on the Map when she checked it before entering. To ensure she wasn't going insane, Lorelei quickly popped back outside the glass doors and checked again. Nope. It was as she thought. Her Map showed no dots on the inside of the building when she looked at it from the outside.

"Guide, this is more a comment than a direct question. But don't you think it's a bit unfair that you appear to have limited the Map function so that I can't see what sort of trouble I'm walking into until I walk into it?"

***Help Message***

Proudly taps a new sign which reads, "Suck it up, buttercup."

Rolling her shoulders, Lorelei went back through the doors.

*

The first body she found was that of Keith, one of the cleaners. He'd always hummed tunelessly as he mopped, a sound that Lorelei now realised she might actually miss. He worked the evening shift, and considering he was dressed in his own clothes rather than his uniform and was near the sign-in desk, he'd probably only just arrived at work when the integration began. At least, Lorelei thought it was Keith's body. As the corpse had no head, there was room for this to be one big comedy misunderstanding. Although, as there was a Kobold nearby, sucking the eyeballs out from his bearded face, it felt like two plus two probably did equal four in this case. For the first time since the integration, Lorelei felt a little burst of satisfaction when the XP came in. After that, her discovery of dead ex-colleagues came relatively thick and fast.

Next up was Greg from accounting, his final expression one of profound surprise: a protein bar in his one hand and a massive chest wound in the middle of his 'Boob Inspector' T-shirt. "Died as he lived, snack in hand," Lorelei remarked and then blushed at the comment. The apocalypse appeared to have turned her into someone who made quips.

As she continued through the lobby, stepping over bodies as she went, Lorelei was struck by how quickly things could change. This space, somewhere she had walked through daily for ten years, was almost wholly devastated. The sleek blend of glass and steel - and hadn't the Prick exulted in that? - was reduced to nothing more than shards and fragments. It was so bad that if a bewigged Tina Turner had stood in the middle of the hall, underneath the chandelier, belting out, "We don't need another hero, " it would have been entirely appropriate. Scuttling among the ruins of tables, chairs, monitors and signage, the Kobolds seemed peculiarly at home and distracted enough by all the things to destroy that they were relatively easy to pick off.

Lorelei did have one moment that caused a ripple across her emotional dampening. In the far corner near the expensive coffee machine - their natural habitat, she thought - the marketing team lay scattered, resembling less a group of professionals and more a collection of rag dolls discarded after a child's tantrum. Lorelei saw that Vanessa, their PA, was mixed in amongst the be-suited male corpses.

She'd always liked Vanessa. Not 'let's-be-friends-and-braid-each-other's-hair' liked. More a 'isn't-it-a-living-hell-working-so-closely-with-maladjusted-males' kinship. They'd formed a bit of an alliance whereby no girl's drink was left unattended at the office party.

It had been just over a week back that Vanessa had become the first person at Glyde and Glyde Lorelei confided in about her 'situation' - as she called it - with the Prick. And wouldn't you know it, it turned out he and Vanessa were having their own little 'situation' on the days he wasn't with her. It was funny, Lorelei thought, that he was getting all that practice and was still so shit at it.

And now Vanessa was dead.

She would have liked to have felt more about that than she appeared to. However, it would be fair to say that the Kobolds around that corner were particularly heavily smited.

Circling around towards the centre of the lobby, Lorelai saw that the staircase leading up to the floor on which she worked - and then to the executive offices above - lay in hundreds of pieces. It appeared like something very big, and very heavy had tried to climb up and the wood had given way. That wasn't an especially comforting thought.

In was the work of ten more minutes for Lorelei to quickly clear out the last of the Kobolds that were snacking on the bodies - the extra damage from her title compensating for several misfires and some odd status effects that suggested her Guide was taking the piss - all the time, keeping an eye on that large red dot.

It hadn't moved since she'd entered the building.

The catastrophic wounds that had killed the former Glyde and Glyde employees did not seem to have come from the Kobolds. The more she had to do with the little lizards, the more Lorelei realised they were almost entirely scavengers.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

She'd killed three hand-to-hand in the underpass before getting her Worst Nightmare title, so it seemed unlikely they could be held responsible for the carnage here. As well as a number of decapitations, several of the corpses had seemingly had their arms and legs casually ripped free. There was no way that was the work of a Kobold. Lorelei rubbed the spot on her nose, which seemed to be targeting with relentless accuracy.

Decisions, decisions.

On the one hand, some of her ex-colleagues were clearly still alive in here. Their little green dots - it looked to be around ten of them - were clustered behind the mail room door. Lorelei assumed they'd been able to barricade it in some way and thus avoided everyone else's grisly fate. As she had not seen hide nor hair of another human - Steve didn't count - since the integration, the rational choice was obviously to party up with that group, get the hell out of the city centre, complete a bonding training montage and then come back and slay the Big Bad.

But on the other . . .

Lorelei tossed her coin several times. She couldn't shake the feeling that, while it was all well and good to work together in a team and grind out the levels, the smart play would be to do something the System would view as 'noteworthy'.

Her title was awesome. She basically never had to worry about these dudes again. Hadn't she just casually John Mcclaned out the entire ground floor without even resorting to a ventilation shaft? But they were Kobolds. The chances were, if Lorelei levelled up a few more times, then they'd stop being an issue anyway. So, as cool as her title was right now, it was going to become redundant really fast.

Her eyes lingered on one of the motivational posters that had been ripped from the wall. 'Thrive not Survive,' it said. A casual nod towards the pretence Glyde and Glyde gave a shit about its employee's mental health. The Guide had made clear that if she wanted to do more than just survive, then part of that was going to be achieved by gaining titles.

And for that, she needed to catch the System's attention . . .

*

To be entirely fair to Lorelei, her plan to solo the massive Level 8 [Kobold Champion], was not wholly without merit. Indeed, while it lacked a bit of subtlety, it more than made up for that in pure chutzpah, ambition and balls to the wall craziness. If you were looking to devise a plan of action to defeat a foe significantly above your level and yet also to do it in style, you could do much worse than - what she termed in her head as - Operation You’re Going Down, Big Boy. On reflection, she could see why they’d never let her name the products.

Lorelei had been delighted - and, obviously, this is a very relative term - when having crept towards the area of the building that contained the large red dot, she'd discovered that the Big Bad was another Kobold. Sure, it was three times her height. And sure, it was currently pulling the heads off people she used to know, tossing them in their air like grapes and catching them in its mouth to chow down on them with great satisfaction.

But it was still a Kobold. And that meant her title would work against it.

She'd even checked with the Guide.

***Help Message***

I mean, sure. Although, let's be clear, cupcake, I doubt you are likely to be that particular Kobold's Worst Nightmare. At best, you may be the-need-a-man-of-a-certain-age-has-to-repeatedly-visit-the-bathroom-during-the-night. Inconvenient? Absolutely. Nightmare? Not so much.

Ignoring the snark, Lorelei thought through how she wanted this to play out. The creature was obviously massively strong and, presumably, would have the health points to match. If it ever got its hands on her, then - title or not - she would be joining the massive pile of Glyde and Glyde employees on its buffet table.

However, surely nothing that big could move especially quickly, and if it were anything like its smaller cousins, it was going to be as thick as pigshit. Lorelei spent a good few minutes observing the creature and - after it had missed catching Linda from Transport's head in its mouth for the third time in a row - she was confident in stating pigshit could take [Kobold's Champion] in a battle of wits.

***Help Message***

Sorry, you're not actually planning on taking this thing out on your own, are you?

Lorelei ignored the words that passed across her vision.

Not that I don't think it wouldn't be hilarious to watch, but there are far easier ways for you to kill yourself.

Lorelei looked over the small collection of projectiles she'd gathered together in preparation for her attack. She figured that both and would do what they would do to anything she threw, so it didn't matter how likely any of these things were to hurt the creature on their own. She was particularly interested in seeing whether the Glyde and Glyde branded complimentary biro would actually be mightier than the sword.

She was quipping again. It must be the nerves.

***Intervention Message***

Just so everyone is clear and so that there's no blowback or snide suggestion that I lured you into doing this without proper explanation. You are about to attempt to solo a Boss Encounter. This particular encounter has been carefully calibrated for five newbies - suggested Level 4s with designated roles of one tank, one healer, two damage dealers and a spare. It is intended as a teambuilding experience to show the importance of effective tactics and to help develop good habits before some of the more serious shit that will come down the mountain shortly. [Kobold Champion] has 750 HP, and each of his special attacks - and even some of his normal ones - will deliver more damage than you can receive and not, you know, become very dead.

Lorelei ignored her Guide. She already knew this was spectacularly unwise. Clearly, the only sensible play was to free those people from the mail room, band together into a nice tight unit, and return to mop this dude later.

But she was heartily fed up doing what she 'supposed' to.

Her eyes lingered on Vanessa's body for a few seconds. In another universe, it would be her lying there amongst all the wankers from Marketing, and Vanessa who broke it off with the Prick and instead ended up on the Middleway when the integration happened.

Tightening her grip around the coin, she drew her hand back to throw.

***Help Message***

Give it just a few seconds. I'm warming up some popcorn.

Ignoring the words, she made her toss. "Yippiekiyay, motherfucker"

And all hell broke loose.