Dylan closed his eyes.

The last time he’d been teleported by the System, he’d been surrounded by mana patterns. It had been painful and disorienting.

Despite that, after what he’d just experienced, he knew that he felt an attraction from those patterns. He wanted to study them, understand them. Find a better way to tap into their power.

But he also knew that looking at them could be debilitating.

He was worried that if he left his eyes open, he wouldn’t be able to help himself. He’d be drawn into observing the patterns around him in the same way he’d been drawn into observing the one he’d based his newest card off of.

And that couldn’t happen.

When his mind had been pulled toward that pattern, he’d been injured and forced into mana exhaustion. He’d been lucky to be in the core room where the saturated air had bolstered his recovery.

He wouldn’t have that chance again. If he allowed himself to be absorbed with the patterns, he would almost inevitably be hurt, and he’d carry those wounds with him when he arrived back home. That would cripple his chances at survival.

The state of Fairbasin was still an unknown. Collapsing on the floor of his basement as soon as he arrived could prove fatal.

So, he squeezed his eyelids shut, choosing instead to focus his attention on the shifting pressures running across his body and the discordant sense of time distorting his mind.

He counted the seconds, knowing that however long he felt pass was significantly shorter than the truth.

When he reached five, a System message appeared before him.

[You have chosen to quit the Tutorial.]

[Your accumulated reward is as follows.]

[Deck Enhancement: Favored Card.]

[2 copies of Card: Wisps of Knowledge.]

[1 copy of Card: Assimilating Void.]

[10 copies of Card: Blank Card.]

He felt the card catalogue vibrate from within his consciousness as the rewards were added, but he pushed his speculations about what they were out of his mind; he needed to focus on the task immediately in front of him. Survival.

At eight seconds, his feet touched the ground.

Despite having kept his eyes closed, he was still a little dizzy and staggered a step before regaining his balance.

A noise came from above him. Movement.

He instinctively summoned his deck.

Dylan opened his eyes and looked around him. As expected, he was back in his basement.

He searched for the sword he’d dropped but couldn’t find it. He couldn’t find anything to use as a weapon. As his cards flashed around him, Dylan wished they would move faster. He’d been counting on that sword, but now all he could do was wait. Hoping for a good opening hand.

Rapid footsteps reached the top of the stairs. Dylan looked up, backing as far away as he could. Steps creaked, and then five cards were in front of him.

He didn’t have time to look at everything and grabbed the first playable card he saw. Giant Web.

The shadow of whatever was coming had reached the basement floor, and without thinking, Dylan acted.

A mass of white fibers blasted out from where the card disappeared, and as the web arrived at the bottom of the stairs, so did the figure descending them.

It was a man.

Before Dylan got a clear look at his face, the web wrapped around his body, shrouding his features and clogging the entrance to the basement.

“Dyl, what the hell?!”

“D-dad?” The image of the man just before being buried in white flashed across Dylan’s mind, and after thinking about it, he could see how it resembled his father. “Why? How are you here?”

“Get this shit off of me and we’ll talk.”

“Right,” Dylan said, “right.” The web was supposed to last for thirty seconds. Dylan tried to think of a way to unsummon it early but came up empty. The only thing he could do was let go of his deck. As the cards dissipated, so did the sticky threads clinging to his father.

Immediately after being freed, the man rushed forward and pulled Dylan into an almost suffocating hug.

“Do you know how worried I was?” his father asked, angry tone belied by the way his voice cracked at the end.

Dylan tried to hug back, but his father’s arms were trapping his own. “Sorry.” He didn’t know what, exactly, the apology was for, but he repeated it nonetheless, “Sorry. I’m okay.”

A huff of his father’s breath rushed over his hair. “You made it through. You did good.” After a few more seconds, the man released his hold and patted Dylan on the shoulder. “Let’s go upstairs to talk.”

As he passed through the room and began to climb the stairs, details Dylan felt he should have noticed earlier worked their way across his mind.

The sword wasn’t where he’d dropped it because the basement had been cleaned. The wreckage of the table, the splashes of blood, all of it was gone.

Cleaning up like that obviously wasn’t something a monster would do.

The footsteps he’d heard when he’d arrived should have also told him things weren’t quite the same as he’d expected. They hadn’t sounded like they’d come from a monster.

Dylan felt he still needed to work on his observational skills and decision making when under pressure. For the entire Tutorial, he’d been building up the idea that he could still be in a fight for his life when he came back, and he’d let his preconceived notions dictate his actions.

He didn’t think he was wrong to have summoned his deck when he’d heard movement. After all, despite not having sounded like they’d come from a monster, the footsteps he’d heard didn’t automatically mean that there’d been someone friendly in the house.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He just wished he’d waited to see who was coming down the stairs before activating his card. If he’d used a Mana Spike instead of Giant Web, things could have been dangerous.

Well, maybe not for his father; the man was at the peak of tier two, and his resilience had already crossed the threshold of tier three.

But the point was that he hadn’t known that it was his father. It could have easily been someone else. If it had been someone not yet initiated by the System, something like Mana Spike may well have killed them. And if it had been someone else who’d just returned from the Tutorial, depending on their class, the damage might not have been light.

Dylan felt he needed to take more care with his actions.

What if it had been someone he didn’t know? Someone who wouldn’t ask questions and would simply attack back? Then he might’ve brought unnecessary danger upon himself.

He was lucky that it’d been his father.

Caution was good, but being blinded by his own prejudgment and speculation was not.

Once he reached the top of the stairs, Dylan found that the living room was mostly empty. The furniture that he and Alyssa had used to make their barricade had presumably been destroyed by the welf and then removed by his father. All that was left were a few simple wooden chairs and the large, rough-looking wooden table they surrounded.

The windows were open, letting sunlight into the room, and looking at the angles of the shadows it cast, Dylan discovered that it was late afternoon.

As he walked toward the table, Dylan saw a pile of his father’s equipment leaning against the wall by the door. Sword, daggers, extra armor. It looked like everything they’d stored in the house was ready to go at a moment’s notice.

The two men each pulled out a chair and sat down facing one another.

“What’s going on?” Dylan couldn’t wait any longer and asked. “Why are you here and not in the capital? Where’s mom?”

“One question at a time, okay?” His father said. “Your mom’s still with Eric. I’m here because your brother wanted me to come back and give you something. One of his professors got it in his head that the Tutorial was gonna start early this year, and Eric wanted to make sure you got his gift before it began.” The man sighed, “Still, no one thought early would mean this early.”

Dylan waited for him to continue.

“I was already close to Fairbasin when the dungeon break happened.” The man looked out the window. “There was some fighting on the road, but I got back okay.”

Some fighting on the road is probably an understatement. “What happened next?”

“By the time I reached town, the majority of the monsters had been repelled.”

“What? How?”

“You remember the class you had the day it all happened?”

“Yeah.” Dylan wondered what that had to do with anything.

“There was some out-of-town Mage giving a guest lecture?”

Dylan nodded.

“Well, he didn’t come alone.” His father tapped his finger on the table. “Apparently, the lecture he gave was being evaluated by his mentor.”

“Who’s his mentor?”

“Guy named Hensly. Fire Mage. High tier three. He’s good at area of effect magic and was apparently able to cover nearly a quarter of the wall by himself after the protective cover broke. When the boss showed up, he teamed up with Cap to drive it back. Did a good number on it too, from what I hear, but it managed to escape.”

His father pounded his fist against the table, making Dylan jump a bit.

The man sighed again. “Sorry. It’s just that it’s still a mess out there. We lost a lot of people in the initial attack, and even though we’ve got things under control now, it feels like we’re constantly under siege. New waves of monsters coming every day. With the protective cover still down, the town’s too vulnerable for us to go out. We can’t hunt the boss, and we can’t fix the dungeon.” He paused. “We can’t end things. It’s taking everything we’ve got just to keep everyone safe.”

The room fell silent for a moment.

Dylan watched his father take a breath. “Sorry to just dump this all on you, but it’s something you should know.”

“It’s okay. You’re right.” He thought back to the worries he’d had while in the Tutorial. Although the town hadn’t become the ruins he’d imagined in the worst case scenario, the dungeon break was clearly still a problem. But thinking back to the Tutorial reminded him of something, “How did you know I’d be coming back here?”

“What?”

“When I got back, you seemed like you already knew that it was me. How?”

“Oh. The Caldwell girl. She got back three days ago,” his father said. “It was a surprise finding her in the basement, but after figuring out what was going on, she explained everything.” The man looked straight at Dylan. “Been waiting for you here ever since.”

So, Alyssa made it out alright.

“You’ve been waiting here for three days?” Dylan asked. “But what about your duties to the town? Especially now.”

“Me and a couple of the guys on the squad worked out a rotation that let us stagger our rest times. That way, someone could always be here. I just lucked out that it was my turn when you got back.”

“What about their families?”

“It’s been over a week since the dungeon break. Almost everyone that went missing in the attack has already been found. Good or bad. The only ones left are you kids that got taken by the Tutorial, and most are back by now.” The man leaned back in his chair. “Besides you, there was only Bannon’s son that we had to watch out for in our squad. He returned yesterday.”

“What about Decker’s brother? Sam. He’s in my class. He should also be part of the Tutorial this year.”

His father shook his head.

“What happened?” Dylan heard himself ask. He and Sam had never been close, but he’d also never mentally distanced himself from the boy like he’d done with many of his other peers. They were simply nodding acquaintances.

“For some reason, the kid was near one of the town gates when the protective cover shattered. He was one of the first to get caught up in it all. Never made it to the Tutorial.”

An uncomfortable silence settled across the room. Someone he’d known since he was a child had died. And Dylan knew that he wasn’t the only one. He hadn’t had time to get all the specifics from his father, but Fairbasin was relatively small, it was inevitable that more people he knew had been lost to the dungeon break.

“Squad Leader!” A quickly approaching voice broke the quiet. “New wave spotted! Cap wants you on the wall!”

The front door burst opened, and Dylan saw a bedraggled woman dash into the house.

“I know it’s not your watch yet, but Cap says this is one of the bigger ones. He doesn’t want anything slipping though into town.” Words rushed out like a flood. “I know you’re worried about Dyl, but I’m sure he’ll be fine. If he gets back—” The woman looked over to where Dylan was sitting. “Dyl! You’re back!”

Dylan nodded and smiled. “It’s good to see you too Risha.”

“I’m so glad you’re okay. You don’t know how worried everyone was. I mean, everyone was worried about everyone, but you kids who may or may not have been swept up in the Tutorial were something else. The not knowing of it all. And the state of your house when we got here—”

“Risha. Orders.” Dylan’s father interrupted.

“Right, sorry.” The woman face became more serious. “A couple hundred welves were spotted gathering near the town. Currently about a mile out. Cap thinks its more than one of the pack leaders working together. Wants everyone on the wall and ready to fight.”

“Shit,” the man cursed. “Sounds like the biggest attack since the break.” He looked over at Dylan. “Wait here. We’ll talk more when I get back.”

“Are you all gonna be okay?”

His father let out a sigh. “We’ll be fine. It doesn’t sound like something we can’t handle. It’s just gonna be tiring. Probably won’t be back ‘til late tonight.” After looking at the dimming afternoon sun coming through the windows, he muttered, “If then.” Then the man shook his head and turned to Risha. “Let’s go.”

The woman nodded and led the way out of the house. Dylan’s father grabbed some of equipment he’d left propped against the wall and began to put it on as he followed.

“There’s food in the kitchen,” he called back before going too far, “and Eric’s gift is on your bed.”

“Got it. Be safe.” Dylan watched as his father straightened his tired shoulders and marched forward.

However much he’d been through in the Tutorial, Fairbasin hadn’t had it easier.

After repelling the first wave of monsters that had erupted with the dungeon break, the people here hadn’t been given a chance to rest. They may not have had to deal with the same frequency and severity of fights that the Tutorial’s dungeon had thrown at Dylan, but they’d been living through the aftermath of everything for more than a week. His subjective experience with time only totaled about a day.

Fairbasin had been subjected to the shock of the initial attack, the grief and horror that must have followed, and now the continual harassment of the escaped monsters. With no end in sight, there was only constant fatigue and attrition

And based on what Risha and his father had said, the current wave of monsters was big. If this assault wasn’t unique, if the waves of monsters continued to grow, how much longer could Fairbasin last?

Dylan worried about his father, but he also trusted the man not to lie to him. If he said the guard could handle the situation, then Dylan believed him. But even still, he looked for something to distract his thoughts.

He remembered that because of his unexpected family reunion, he’d never had the chance to check his final rewards from the System, so he summoned his catalog and willed it to open.