In the wake of Benji’s death, it was as if somebody had cut the strings that held Drew up. He didn’t physically collapse - not completely - but all resistance and fire went out of him.

Even Voril and Oleg, incensed at his role in murdering their god, could not bring themselves to feed the mewling coward to the Terroctid. Indeed, each of them grimaced and flinched whenever they heard the snapping of a bone or the satisfied slurping of marrow coming from below. The rage that had prompted them to feed Benji to the aberration had been thoroughly quelled by the reality of the man’s death.

Even Damien, whose list of grievances with the bully went back more than a decade, could not take any joy from the nature of the man’s death. It had been mercifully quick, but lingering to hear the aftermath only made him feel sick.

They led Drew back to the Goose & Child, as tractable as a half-asleep toddler. Even after they cut the ropes binding his wrists, he made no move to escape. He simply slumped into the chair they’d guided him to and stared off into space.

“What’s the plan now?” Oleg asked.

Damien shrugged. “No idea. Sam’s dead, the man he sought to stop is somewhere out in my world, and we’re at a dead end. I could spend a few days going over his notes, see if there is anything in there, but I don’t know what his plan was, and I don’t know where to find the other pieces of your village - let alone the world at large. Has he just scattered models of every building in this world all over the place? Is my job to just find them all and reconstruct the world? If so, why did he break it all apart in the first place? His plan makes no fucking sense.”

Voril, Magda, Layla, and Oleg did not interrupt his train of thought, nor did they correct him on what must surely have been blasphemy in their eyes. In truth, they looked confused by his ramblings, unsure of what he meant with his talk of ‘models’.

“The first model was hand-delivered, and the second was hidden here. Where would a third be?” he mused aloud.

It was Drew who spoke first, although he offered no insight into Damien’s predicament.

“Uh, what the fuck is that?” he said, kicking his feet to push his chair away from some threat only he perceived. There was naught before him but well-worn floorboards, a few unoccupied tables, and a wall decorated with a stuffed ram’s head.

“Quiet!” barked Oleg, the ember of his anger momentarily flaring, “Else I’ll put you outside for the gibbersnatch to take.”

Damien did not know what a gibbersnatch was. It sounded nasty.

“What does this mean?” Drew continued, ignorning or not hearing Oleg’s threat.

“What does what mean?” Damien relented.

“These words!”

None of them could see any words before the frightened thug, but Damien had a sneaking suspicion he knew what was going on.

“What do they say?” he asked.

“Choose your class,” Drew answered. “Is that like a subject? Why is it asking me that?”

Interesting. I guess he’s part of it now.

“What options do you see?”

“Options? What the fuck do you mean?”

Drew was on the verge of panic, which was a considerable downgrade on the shocked catatonia he’d spent most of the last half-hour in.

“Calm down, mate,” Damien soothed. “Just tell me what words you see under Choose Your Class.”

“There are no fuckin’ words, you arsehole!” snapped Drew. “There’s just fucking pictures!”

Damien sighed with long-suffering patience. He had never had to onboard somebody into a campaign. That was Sam’s area of expertise.

Like so much else.

“Alright,” he eventually said. “Tell me what images you see.”

This seemed to calm Drew down. He stopped flinching and shifting in his chair like a kid with worms.

“There’s six of them.”

“Right. What are they?”

“Uh, there’s a sword and shield, a cross, two knives, a harp or something, a book, and a spiky tail thing.”

Fighter, priest, rogue, minstrel, wizard, and… what the hell was the spiky tail?

“Hey!” Drew exclaimed. “They get bigger when I move my hand near them. It’s like a 3D movie.”

He chuckled nervously, waving his hands around in front of him. With nothing for the others to see, he looked mad.

Or like somebody fucking around in VR.

“Is the boy touched?” Magda asked Damien. He shook his head.

“Not quite. He’s just, uh…”

How do I explain game mechanics to somebody who lives in the world as if it were real? They treated Sam like a god and his notes like holy texts, so maybe that’s the angle I need.

“He’s been, uh, chosen, I guess.”

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“Chosen for what?” Voril growled. The contempt and hatred he felt for Drew was painted across his face.

“I think he’s been chosen to help me.”

Oleg barked a harsh laugh. “Like Hell,” he snarled. “Why would Samman chose this coward to save our world?”

Damien shrugged, reciting an old Catholic catechism his mother had been fond of. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

This platitude seemed to temporarily placate them. There was no more grumbling as he turned his attention back to Drew.

“Okay. I want you to listen very carefully. Have you ever played Hand of Fate?”

Drew recoiled as if struck. “That fuckin’ fairy game you and your friends played? Fuck no.”

Stay calm, Damien reminded himself. He’s an idiot, but telling him that isn’t going to help.

“Okay. Have you ever played Gates of Freelance? Or Tears of Tyr?”

These names seemed to strike home. Drew nodded.

The two video games had been modestly popular while they were in high school, and Gates of Freelance had two or three sequels that were on xBox and Playstation.

“So, you know what a class is, right?”

It’s like talking to a child.

“Oh, you mean like fighter or wizard? Yeah, I know what those are.”

“What did you play in those games?”

“I was always a fighter, and Benji was…”

He trailed off then, his eyes taking on a far-off look as he was reminded of his twin’s recent death. Like any good country boy, he’d been raised under the lie that crying was weak, so he swallowed the emotion and stared off into space with a tightly clenched jaw.

The last thing we need is for him to choose fighter too. If he’s in this for the long haul, I don’t want to be fighting over cards with him. He’s a big enough asshole as it is.

There was also the realities of party balance. Hand of Fate was designed around the assumption that a group of four to six heroes with different, complementary abilities would work together to solve problems. Having two fighters was like having only hammers in your toolbox - great if you needed to hammer in some nails, but as useless as tits on a bull if you needed to screw something in or measure something.

In the end, Damien wouldn’t need to do much convincing. Perhaps still in a mournful fugue, Drew made his choice. He gave a startled shout when he did. “Ah shit, I accidentally touched one of them.”

“Which one?”

“The spiky one,” Drew began, only to let out a shout of pain on par with his brother’s last horrified cry. Layla bolted to her feet, only for her father to haul her back.

“Fuuuuuck…” Drew moaned, doubling over as if he’d been stabbed. “Fuckin’ help, you arseholes!”

“What’s happening?” Damien asked, but Drew had fallen to his knees and was curled up in the fetal position, his face red and his face contorted in agony and rage.

What the hell does the spiky one do? Damien thought, trying to picture the dog-eared Hand of Fate core rulebook that Sam had brought everywhere with him. He couldn’t think of a single class that might have an icon like a spiky tail.

The cards!

He hurriedly took his meager collection of cards, a paltry thing in comparison to the shoeboxes full of cards he’d once owned.

Each card would have an icon in the top right-hand corner, indicating which class could use it: a sword and shield for a fighter, for example, or a ship’s wheel for a universal ability.

He found the symbol soon enough - the spiked tail adorning a card he’d drawn earlier and disregarded as useless: Bone Blade.

Fleshcrafter.

He did not know anything about the class beyond its name and the gruesome art on the card, depicting a screaming, shirtless man looking on in horror as a massive, blood-streaked blade grew in place of his forearm and hand.

Veins bulged at the man’s temples, muscles strained in his neck, and perspiration soaked his clothes. On the ground, Drew seemed to be undergoing a similar transformation, his outflung right arm twisting and contorting in wholly unnatural ways.

“Help!” he was shrieking. “Fuckin’ help me, you dogs!”

But there was nothing any of them could do. Magda shrugged off Oleg’s attempts to keep her from the writhing figure on the ground, stopping to manoeuvre him onto his side.

“Help me out here, would you?” she asked Damien. “If it’s a seizure, I need to make sure he doesn’t swallow his tongue.”

It’s not a seizure, Damien thought, but he went to her aid all the same. Together, they managed to wrestle Drew onto his side, allowing her to force a strap of leather she’d taken from Oleg between his teeth.

All the while, Drew’s body continued to buck and writhe as if electricity was being passed through it. His boots skidded across the floor, his good hand clenched and unclenched, and his back arched up and away from the floor like something out of a horror movie.

The transforming arm was not - thankfully - completely emulating the card in Damien’s possession. Why would it? You needed to have the card in order to play it, as far as he knew. Still, it was clear that a violent transformation had transfixed the poor bastard, and even Damien could feel pity as he watched on helplessly.

And then it was over, the movement ending abruptly with a shuddering sigh from Drew. The shorter man lapsed into something like a coma then, drenched in sweat and as pale as a ghost.

He looked largely unchanged save for his right arm, which had become so thickly corded with muscle and so covered in ruddy red scales that it seemed as if it belonged to another creature entirely. The hand at its end no longer resembled a human hand, its fingers curling up and away from not the palm - but the back of the hand - a hideous reversal reminiscent of a dead spider.

Seeing it, Layla paled in revulsion, while even Voril and Oleg seemed ill at ease.

“What on earth…” the blacksmith breathed.

As if in response to his question, an eye opened in the midst of all those fingers. It was larger than a human eye, but otherwise looked the part, but the whites were near-yellow and criss-crossed with an orderly tangle of bloodshot red. It blinked audibly, an obscene, wet sound that made Damien’s stomach roil in disgust.

Only Magda seemed fully cognisant of what had happened, and the look of horror and revulsion on her face said ti all.

“Fleshcrafter!” She intoned the word almost like it held religious significance. “A divine abomination. A hellish curse.”

Voril hefted his hammer, a great earthbreaker large and heavy enough to crush a cow’s skull in a single strike. “Alright, step aside. I’ll do it.”

To his dismay and horror, Damien found himself interposing himself between the blacksmith and his old enemy.

“Step aside, lad,” the bigger man growled. “I’ll not have an abomination in Fairhill. I’ll not allow it.”

“Easy,” Damien soothed, his palms held out before him. “I need him. Sam - Samman - obviously has a purpose for him. If you kill him, we can’t hope to finish what he started.”

Damien only believed about 30% of what he said, but he couldn’t have another gruesome death on his conscience. Not today.

Voril relented. “If ye saw so,” he muttered, returning to his perch by the bar. “Just keep him away from my Sofia.”

I was always planning to, Damien thought to himself. I wouldn’t trust this prick alone with any woman.

He looked down at his unconscious, malformed tormentor, feeling more pity than disgust.

One thing was certain, however, he was going to need a party if he was going to find the next of Sam’s models.

The only place it could be was the Terroctid’s lair.