Michael looked over the scene and saw only carnage. He had been sent to retrieve a single girl, who had acquired a restricted class. Druids weren’t the worst, they were actually quite nice people, most of the time, once you got to know them. But they could be, well, they were strong willed, and they didn’t always see things the way they should.

He didn’t always enjoy his job, but it was important, and it was for the good of the people. Plus he got to travel, see things, meet people. He liked people, maybe that was why he was so good at his job, he understood, it wasn’t

Usually their fault, and they didn’t mean to hurt anyone, but the system pushed, and things moved, and one day the world made the wrong type of sense. A [Butcher] looked at his family and saw meat, it wasn’t that he didn’t love them, he just knew the best ways to cut them up. Thankfully the shifts were incremental, and usually slow, so he could pick who was going to start having trouble before they did, so he could help. But then people gained a class, and you could leave a [Farmer] alone for a hundred levels and nothing would happen, but you never knew with some others.

Kids who got [Herbalist] as their first class had to be watched, just in case, some got [Alchemist] and got rich, some got [Poisoner] and there were some hard questions that had to be asked. Most people only got a single level each year, so there was time, but others, like this girl, levelled faster. To get a class change that young meant she was unprepared for the change, her instincts changed almost overnight, and she didn’t know how to deal with it all. She hadn’t had years to grow into [Tamer], so the change was volatile, and she ended up with new instincts, new senses, and she lost herself, unable to resist the changes. If he had had any doubts, they were firmly laid to rest now, along with an entire village.

A part of him knew it was at least partly his fault. He chased her, probably forced her to lean into the class, and had sent her into the wild. Most of the time he could guide them, teach them to live with the class, but not let it control them. But he hadn’t known it would go this far, mostly he caught them in the first few days, if they ran at all, most simply waited, or their family kept them safe until he could arrive.

But she had slipped away, out of the valley, and across the plains. He hadn’t expected that, he thought she would try to hide, they always chose to hide at first, then he found them. But he hadn’t found her, she slipped into the woods, where her class gave her the advantage, something she probably hadn’t even known, and disappeared. His men had been so distracted by the starfall they had lost her, and after they looped around the other side of the woods hoping to cut her off, she had already slipped away. After that it was just a matter of casting the net and hoping to catch her before she was hurt, or worse. His skills would lead him to her, even if that didn’t mean he would find her alive. He had had to cast a wide net, but he heard about a young girl traveling alone, with no supplies, and followed, from one town to the next, sometimes losing her, always afraid she would double back, or change course, but she never did. That made the decision easier to send people to head her off at the next village, waiting in a tavern. But she never appeared, seemingly ignoring the road and passing through farmland and wooded areas, despite visiting villages in her path before. He found her again before this, of course, and he wished he had moved to grab her then, but she was healthy, and he was curious. She wasn’t just running, at least not from him. And she obviously was adapting to her class, so where was she going, where would she end up?

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He followed, and then this. He heard the cries, but never thought he would see her slaughter an entire village. Nothing he knew about her predicted this, nothing about the [Druids] he had met over the years said the class made people violent, and then he saw her, and he didn’t recognise her. She was standing in the middle of a village square, surrounded by corpses, and wolves. They savaged everyone they came across, not just those out in the open but in the houses as well. She kicked down a door and he watched in horror as she dragged a girl no older than she was out into the street, throwing her down, throwing her quite literally to the wolves. The first arrow that struck drew their attention, all of them, Her and the wolves moving out of sight, still killing. Then, unable to pepper them from a distance, his men moved into the village, and the wolves tore into them too.

They had fought wolves before. The trick was to always assume there was another one out of sight, but never like this. Wolves leapt from rooftops, from behind walls, even taking a spear if it meant another could tear into one of his men, there wasn’t anyone else left by this point. And then the wolf pack broke, and they were left in a village surrounded by death, and she was gone.

In the end they only killed three wolves, injured perhaps twice that. They lost five men. The village was a total loss. He knew where she had gone, the same direction she had always gone, he no longer cared what awaited her at the end, if there was one. He had heard stories about this once, when a class got so strong it overwhelmed the person. She had to have been at least his own level, perhaps higher. She would be coming up on her second class advancement, she probably still had a second class slot open, soon to get a third. There was no doubt in his mind she was lost. He couldn’t even begin to guess how he would guide her to living in peace, if she even could. There was also the worrying concern that she may no longer be human. Humanity had been the only civilised race on the continent for centuries, since the now collapsed empire had conquered it. There was a rumour that you could tell how much non-human blood someone had by how fast they levelled. Whatever remnants of other races integrated into humanity long ago. But sinking too deep into a class could awaken those traits, and just like a class could grow the more it was embodied, a race could begin to shift too, if it was embraced.

Classes themselves were products of interbreeding, the original humans no part of the system.