Standing barefoot in boxer shorts and a too-tight T-Shirt that read Kiss the Cook that for some reason Jasmine had bought him at a gas station outside Merida, Wyatt surveyed the tour group.

Don’t stare too long. Just long enough to make sure they’re all paying attention.

When everyone was finally looking at him, be began. “Right. We’ve been transported somewhere, and we all have a kind of interface in our heads. We can also see our stats. How many people already knew that?”

Several people began speaking.

“Show of hands,” Wyatt interrupted.

The high-schoolers’ hands immediately shot up, as well as a few of the college students, while the adults were more hesitant.

The tour guide Camila looked at him with crossed arms, while Emma stared at him mysteriously.

What is wrong with her?

Wyatt nodded, making himself smile. “Good. We’re going to explore all our skills and see what they can do. If these skills can help us, we need to understand them as soon as possible. We don’t know what’s going on, or how much time we have before something else happens.”

Blank stares in response.

“If things go like I expect them to,” he clarified, “we’re going to encounter monsters.”

Several eyes went wide, though Brandon and Tyler looked excited.

“Bro!” Tyler exclaimed.

Wyatt scanned the crowd, then pointed at Emma. “Let’s start with you.”

🞠

Unsurprisingly, Emma’s skill was just as mysterious as she was. It was called [Willbreaker] and had no obvious effect when used. Other than making her hands glow.

She was also the only one who was able to use her assigned skill.

Seeing as how she was the only one who had an Energy stat that wasn’t zero—another mystery about her—this pretty much confirmed to Wyatt that Energy was something like a magic or mana stat.

When he tried to use [Debuffer], he felt a jolt in his spine, and a sensation like dry heaving.

That was what everyone besides Emma experienced as well.

They all were level zero, but had varying stats, which did seem to represent their inherent baseline. The males had lower immune system on average than the females, and the weakest guy—David (forties, history teacher, weird feud with our professor)—still had higher Hard and Soft Tissue than the strongest girl—Lena (nineteen, German backpacker, looks dirty but smells like cinnamon cookies, flirty with guys but says she doesn’t swing that way, inconsistent; possibly bipolar).

Nervous System was the outlier, as there wasn’t any trend Wyatt could notice. At thirteen, his was the highest, but not by much. Both Tyler and Akira had tens, and most everyone else was between seven and nine. The guys did have a slightly higher average, but the difference was small and with only twenty people might be due to chance.

Weirdly, other than Energy, Emma was completely average.

Like her, it was a mystery as to why she was the only one who had an Energy stat not at zero.

He wanted to try arm-wrestling to test how much difference one point in Soft Tissue made, or find a heavy stone to see who could lift the most. Though that might be influenced by Nervous System as well, since strength wasn’t just the size and density of muscles, but how well your brain could make them contract.

His working hypothesis for the stats was that Soft Tissue would be muscles and maybe organs, while Hard Tissue seemed like it had to be bones, possibly teeth and nails as well. He was almost certain Immune System was exactly what it sounded like, though he couldn’t rule out it having other effects he wasn’t aware of. For Nervous System, he wanted to test out reaction time. Maria even had a ruler they could use to test it in her giant purse, and plenty of people had phones that still worked. Not to make calls—no one had any signal, whether cell or GPS—but the timers worked.

But that could wait.

While they all had been assigned a starting skill after acclimation, only Emma could use hers, and if it had any effect other than making her glow, it wasn’t obvious.

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Which meant they would need mundane weapons for the time being, so that’s what they were trying to piece together now. That and going over the supplies they had.

It was in the middle of going through all the items they’d been transported here with—so far a small pair of tweezers being the only thing that even remotely resembled a weapon—that the first assault came.

Kneeling next to Maria as she dug through the contents of her gigantic purse, refusing to just dump it all out and instead going through items one by one—often grabbing the same item for a second or third time—Wyatt sensed a monster.

It wasn’t a sound or even a motion that alerted him to the attacker’s presence, but rather a scent.

As soon as the scent hit his nose, new text appeared in his vision, flashing red.

He whipped his head around in the direction of the scent and spotted… something.

The text floating in his vision changed.

He absently made note of the fact that his sense of smell now seemed capable of determining something’s level and that it was hostile.

He’d have to try it on the others in the group.

Once they dealt with this monster.

The ahuitzotl was the size of a small bear and looked like a cross between a rat and a hyena with no fur, rubbery skin, and a too long neck. It was slowly stalking in their direction.

Seeing as how they’d all had to cross the border into Mexico except for Camila, no one had any weapons per se. But Maria did have her gigantic purse filled with mostly—in Wyatt’s estimation—junk.

So before anyone else could react he grabbed the purse just as she pulled out a tampon for the third time and began whirling it as the ahuitzotl stalked toward them.

It wasn’t a good weapon, but it was literally the best they had.

“Hey!” Maria complained.

“Monster,” Wyatt called, since no one else had seemed to notice it yet.

He would have to be extra careful to make sure he was saying his thoughts aloud. It wasn’t just social awkwardness at risk now, but life and death.

And he would also have to work on his delivery: Jasmine screamed, Carlos panicked and began backpedaling away from the approaching monster, while Maria yelled at Wyatt for taking her purse.

She’s more worried about her purse than the monster. She’s definitely not going to survive long.

“Calm down everyone. It’s only level one,” he assured them. “It shouldn’t be too hard if we work togeth—”

The monster’s crawl turned to a charge.

It was fast.

It was on Wyatt in an instant.

But he had very fast reflexes, and he slammed the spinning purse down onto its head before it could take a bite out of him.

He wasn’t quite fast enough to avoid being hit, but he did avoid getting bit.

The two of them went to the ground, and a hand grabbed him.

It was the monster’s.

At the end of its tail.

Its tail has a hand, he noted as he considered his options. That’s weird. Did Dave ever mention that in class?

It was choking him with that tail-hand, but most of its attention was on Akira—who was stabbing it with a pocketknife he’d produced from somewhere.

The ahuitzotl raked gouges into the man’s arm, though he didn’t seem to notice.

Wyatt’s vision was beginning to spot.

It’s cutting off blood flow to my brain.

He reached up and pried at the fingers around his neck. They were strong, boney, and ended in claws.

He wasn’t strong enough to peel them free, and now one of the claws was poking into his carotid artery. If it pierced it, he was dead.

He turned his attention to the monster itself. The creature’s backside was facing him, and he noticed it had an anus.

Something people did to break up dog fights came to him, and he reached out, hoping his arm was long enough.

It was.

Vision darkening, he shoved three fingers as hard as he could against the chocolate starfish, and was rewarded with all three slurping in.

The monster let out a horrible shriek and its tail-hand unwrapped from his neck as it jerked away, Wyatt’s fingers popping out.

The tail-hand opened wide, covering the anus from further violation.

Then it spun to him, blood leaking from the small wounds Akira had inflicted on it.

It didn’t seem to mind those, but the way it was glaring at him said it hadn’t at all liked what he had done.

Just as it moved to attack, Emma raised her hand in the direction of the monster. A faint purplish shimmer appeared around her hand, and a subtle wave of spectral light rippled through the air towards the monster.

For an instant, the ahuitzotl froze.

Then it snapped its attention to Emma, who appeared to be still channeling the skill.

Wyatt didn’t miss the opportunity.

He lunged forward, slid under the thing’s legs feet-first, wrapped his own legs and one arm around its torso, pried its tail-hand away, and shoved his entire fist in.

He didn’t stop until he was in up to his shoulder, then he began moving his arm violently around inside, hoping to feel something rip.

The monster tried to get away, but he had his own body wrapped around it, and it wasn’t going anywhere without him.

It clawed and scratched at him with its rat-like hands, but even with its weirdly long neck, its muzzle couldn’t reach him, so the only wounds it could inflict were superficial scrapes.

He felt around inside, pushing against the walls of its colon.

There.

A heartbeat.

He pushed with all his might.

The colon stretched. He felt something firm and round, then ribs.

The monster screeched and vomited at the same time.

His hand broke through and was suddenly covered in a viscous liquid.

He wiggled his fingers around and latched onto something rapidly beating.

He seized it, then squeezed with all his might.

The monster let out another screech, then jerked violently before spasming and going still.

Wyatt kept squeezing for a few more seconds just to make sure it was truly dead.

Then he unwrapped himself from the monster, pushing the corpse off as he pulled his arm free.

It was covered in blood and feces and other things he didn’t recognize.

He got to his feet, shaking the gunk from his arm.

He looked down at himself. His boxers were stained red and brown.

I guess I didn’t avoid getting them dirty after all.

He looked up to find everyone gaping at him.

“What?” he asked.