When the System teleported him away from the training room, Dylan found himself surrounded by mana patterns. Pain flashed behind his eyes, lasting even after closing his lids.

Why didn’t I see those when it took me here?

When he’d first entered the Tutorial, the teleportation had been instantaneous; it had made him feel nothing. But this time, he was able to mark the seconds as they passed him by. His practice with keeping track of his turns made it easy to estimate how long he carried the simultaneous sensations of weightlessness and of a pressure reminiscent of holding too much energy.

Six seconds.

The count made him feel wrong. He intuitively felt that it should have been longer, but he’d only marked six seconds.

He rubbed his temples, trying to soothe away the lingering pain swimming under his forehead, before opening his eyes to look at where he’d landed.

It was a simple room made with stone slabs. In front of him was a wooden gate flanked by a pair of large braziers that lit the surrounding space with a warm glow. Around him were nine other people. They all looked to be about his age. His group for the dungeon.

[Group Tutorial has begun.]

[From this moment forward, there is no more System protection from injury or death.]

[If you would like to quit, focus your will on the words Exit Tutorial, and you may leave at any time.]

[Should you choose to leave, your Tutorial will be over.]

[The longer you persist and the greater your task completion, the greater your accumulated reward.]

[The larger the remaining group, the greater your accumulated reward.]

[Your task is to clear the dungeon in front of you.]

[You will receive a small reward when you clear each section.]

[You will receive your accumulated reward when you either leave the Tutorial or clear the dungeon.]

[Good luck.]

“I’m out.” At almost the exact moment that the System’s instructions appeared, a short boy with curly brown hair vanished. He’d chosen to quit.

On the other side of the room, a lanky girl soon followed.

“Shit!” A tall young man with dark red hair shouted. He rested his hand on the hilt of a blade sheathed at his waist and swept a glare across the rest of the group. “Is anyone else leaving?”

“Calm down. It’s not like this is unexpected.” A boy with a shield on his back. He was about Dylan’s height but with a bulkier build.

“Calm down? It hasn’t even been a minute, and we’ve already lost a fifth of the group.”

“Statistically, one out of every ten Tutorial participants chooses to leave before entering the dungeon.” A petite girl with her hair in a bun joined the conversation. She wore a light-blue vest that hung down to her knees but carried no obvious equipment.

“We lost two.” The redhead turned an angry look at the girl.

The bulkier boy sighed. “Look, what’s done is done. Getting pissed about it won’t change anything.”

The redhead’s mouth twitched as if he were trying to hold something back. “Fine,” he once again swept his gaze across the group, “but there’d better not be any other cows here.”

Dylan thought the boy’s implied threat was funny. What could he do to anyone who left? They’d be gone. But he did share a bit of the sentiment.

Cow was a slang term commonly heard in the nations just west of Asheford. The insult a combination of both the animal “cow” and the word “coward,” it referred to the kind of person who lived behind the shelter of the strong and chose to purse an aggressively ordinary life.

Despite the dangers of the world around them, they refused to improve themselves. They refused to engage with their classes and skills. They worked mundane jobs, had mundane passions, and generally tried to ignore the world that was outside their immediate vision.

In the minds of many who protected them, they lived like livestock.

There’s nothing wrong with doing ordinary work, but it’s stupid and selfish to just act as if everything else doesn’t exist. What do they think will happen if they face a dungeon break or get pulled in by the System to make up the numbers of a Boon War?

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

For someone who lived in a remote town like Fairbasin, it was hard to understand the “cow” mentality. Even if a person’s focus was on other aspects of their life, if there wasn’t at least a token effort toward advancement, then when disaster struck…

Dylan’s mind drifted back to the helpless feeling he’d had during the dungeon break.

“—about you?” A question pulled him from his thoughts.

Dylan looked up to see the everyone else staring at him. “Sorry, what?”

“Name. Class.” The redhead said. “Were you even listening?”

“Sorry.” Dylan repeated.

“Fine.” The boy let out a huff, pointed to himself, and said, “Rowan, Blade Warden.” He motioned to the bulkier boy and the petite girl in turn. “Chester, Guardian. Sara, Runic Scribe. Now you.”

Dylan was impressed. Guardian was a fairly common class, but both Blade Warden and Runic Scribe were rare. The first was a melee combatant that used magic to enhance both the body and the blade. The second was a class that could decipher, depict, and empower the arcane runes used in manatech and complex enchantments; it was a Runic Scribe who had helped set up both the communication array in and the reverse-engineered protective cover around Fairbasin.

“Dylan, Deckmaster.” As he reported his class, he noted that it too was rare.

“What’s that?” Sara asked.

“I use a deck of cards.”

“Like a Fortune Teller?”

“No. It’s more like a mix between a Mage and a Summoner.”

“We’re about to run a dungeon together.” Rowan took over the questioning. “What, specifically, can you do?”

Dylan frowned. “I can cast a few damaging spells, and I can summon temporary phantoms to fight for me.” Dylan considered how to say the next part tactfully. “I have to warn you guys up front, though, my abilities aren’t the most…consistent. And I can only fight for about twenty minutes between each meditation.”

“Great, so I can look forward to you being dead weight half the time.”

“Not if we take the chance to rest between fights.”

“And do you think the dungeon’s just going to give us that chance?”

“Rowan, we’re doing introductions.” Chester interrupted. “He can’t control his class.” Before giving the redhead another chance to speak, he turned to a tall girl with a dusty blonde ponytail and a small hammer. “What about you?”

She took a quick glance at the rest of group and then said, “I’m Alice. I’m a Blacksmith.”

“Jaiden. I’m an Earth Mage.” A girl with shortly cropped brown hair took the initiative to step forward; she held a twisted wooden staff.

“And you two?” Chester nodded to the last members of the group.

“I’m, uh, Mark Spencer, and my class is Herbalist.” A skinny boy who, like Sara, carried no obvious equipment.

“Dena,” said the last girl. Tall, standing just an inch under Alice, she had dark skin and loosely braided hair. She was carrying a case of some kind strapped across her back. “I’m a Discordant Bard.”

“I’ve never heard of that variant.” Chester noted. “How’s it different from a regular Bard.”

“I mainly debuff with sound,” Dena said, patting the case on her back. Dylan assumed it was an instrument of some sort.

“Can you still do the usual Bard party support?”

“Sorry,” she shook her head.

“So, that means we’ve got no one who can heal, and no one who can do true support.” Rowan took stock of the group.

“We’ll be fine,” Chester said. “Just got to be a bit more careful.”

“Easy for you to say. Your class is designed to play defense.”

“But its also designed for me to be taking more of the hits.” Chester turned back to the rest of the group. “Now, it looks like we’ve got three noncombat and five combat classes.”

“More like four. Each of them counts for half.” Rowan point his chin at Dylan and Dena.

“Hey, I cleared my combat trial.” Dylan spoke. “Just because my class has some limitations doesn’t mean I can’t fight.”

“I can fight too,” Alice interjected, the Blacksmith lifting her hammer. “My physical power is high enough. I just don’t have a great weapon for it.”

“We’ll be on the lookout for something you can use in the dungeon.” Chester nodded to her. “And speaking of the combat trial, let’s compare notes.”

“Good idea,” said Sara. “It’ll be good for those of us who didn’t have one to know what we’re up against.”

Dylan and the rest briefly described their experiences with the combat trial. While much of what they’d faced had been similar, spiders and lizards, there had been a few important differences. Dena had fought spiders who could shoot viscous webbing. For Chester, there were spiders with venomous bites. Jaiden’s final wave had been a fight against a lizard who could use magic, and Rowan’s had been a slightly larger and more developed one of the lizards. It was very agile, had a whip-like tail, and in place of the vestigial pair of arms was a fully functional set that it would use for grappling and claw strikes. Finally, while no one had seen an armored spider that was quite the size of Dylan’s opponent, a few had faced smaller versions.

“So, it looks like we’re walking into a dungeon filled with a variety of spiders and these lizard creatures,” Sara analyzed. “I just don’t know if they’ll always be separate or if the System will throw them together.”

“Probably a mix of both,” Dylan guessed. “We’ll see separate groups at first and then combinations with increasing variety the deeper we get.”

Chester nodded. “I agree. Seems like a challenge dungeon thing to do.”

Different from wild dungeons like the one outside of Fairbasin, challenge dungeons were carefully curated by the System. For wild dungeons, the System would simply set down a core and put up a random reward for clearing the place. But for a challenge dungeon, each step was designed to test those who entered it, pushing their limits and then giving them a suitable reward. And the dungeon used in the Tutorial was most definitely a challenge dungeon.

“Does anyone have any other thoughts or concerns before we start?” Chester asked.

Each member of the group either shook their head or gave no response.

“Then I guess it’s time. Rowan and I will go first.” He began walking to the wooden gate. “We’ll decide on the rest after we see the first section of the dungeon.”

When Chester reached out to touch the gate, he paused for a moment, Dylan assumed responding to a prompt from the System. There was a clanking sound, and then the gate retracted into the floor, revealing damp earthen walls curving to the left.

A musty smell wafted over the room, reminding Dylan of a cave his mother had occasionally taken him to when she was gathering plants for her garden. It had been one of his and Eric’s favorite places to play when they were young. It was close enough to town to be considered safe, but as it was outside the protective cover, it’d carried enough of a sense of danger for the two children that every trip there seemed like an adventure. They’d even built a little fort inside. Dylan wondered, for a moment, if it was still there after the dungeon break.

He shook himself. Now wasn’t the time to think about that.

He had a task to complete. One that would help make him stronger, better preparing him for whatever challenges he’d face once he returned to Fairbasin.

Steeling himself, he followed the group into the dungeon.