Mason slept fitfully, fearing he’d fall off his uncomfortable branch. He’d seemed to wake at every growl and crack in the woods, never finding anything worth the concern. But at least he woke alive.

[Congratulations, you have survived your first night in New Earth! Experience earned. Congratulations, you have reached level four!]

New Earth, huh? Mason grinned, eager now for any advantage to complete his task and earn the reward. He accessed his profile. Again not much had changed except his powers.

[Level available. Please select your power and choose your power enhancement, or they will be selected by default in one hour.]

“Yeah, yeah, stop rushing me.”

He looked at the options and frowned. The new power wasn’t an ‘option’ at all. There was only one choice—a power called ‘Nature Affinity’, which just said ‘brings many associated benefits’. Great. How wonderfully descriptive. Also, what the hell was a power enhancement?

[Tutorial inquiry—enhancing a power typically not only gives it a boost in power, but also adds a specific function, such as adding a mana component to a physical strike.]

Interesting, Mason thought. Well, he was tempted to choose Predator’s Strike for the same reasons he’d taken the power in the first place. But as he started cleaning up his traps and make-shift bed, he decided it was time to think a little more long term.

You couldn’t always kill an opponent, but disabling him was often just as good, or better. And you likely didn’t need a good bow or arrows to do that. Plus Crippling Strike could be used in melee.

Trusting his instincts, he enhanced Crippling Strike. As soon as he did, it popped up with new text listing options: A) Enhance both the severity and duration of the cripple. B) Overcome nearly any form of resistance to the effect. C) add a disorienting pain effect to the cripple.

Hmm. They all sounded like good choices. But what he really wanted from his cripple was to really knock something out of the fight, or slow it as much as possible. So an overall bump seemed the best choice to him. With a slight cringe of early regret, he selected A) and watched the windows close.

He checked his weapons. He checked the arrows in his quiver—only five left, then the riser and limbs of his bow. So far so good. No cracks or warping, at least, and the same was true of his goblin dagger.

His wounds were totally healed, but he was hungry, and he’d have killed for a glass of water. He gave in and risked the creek he’d found on the East side of the clearing, drinking just enough to be able to stop thinking about his thirst.

Then he crept back to the clearing, hoping to make a little progress clearing out the gnolls. But it looked the same. Damn near exactly the same.

Goblins skittered around their tunnels, hurling ranged attacks and hissing curses. The gnolls wandered around looking for ambushes, occasionally leaping onto some doomed goblin and tearing him apart.

After a few minutes, a person materialized right where Mason had come up from his bunker. The young man looked around with wide eyes, lifting a sword as he clearly tried to decide where the hell to go.

Mason very nearly leapt out and told him to run over, but he knew a distraction wouldn’t much help what was about to probably…

A goblin ambusher leapt out from behind a rock, and jammed his knife straight through the young man’s chest.

So yeah. It was exactly the same.

Mason sighed and left the clearing to hunt for more lone gnolls. For all he knew, he may have been making no impact on the ‘tribal fight’, but at least he was doing one thing: he was getting stronger.

Practice alone was improving his aim and strength with the bow. His levels and therefore his powers were improving by leaps and bounds. And he was getting more and more familiar with the gnolls themselves, and how they thought, reacted, and fought.

He killed three more without getting touched, finishing all three with a final Predator’s Strike, which increased the strength and speed of his attack.

Using the power seemed to surge his body, particularly his knife-arm, with a burst of almost foreign power. It was like some magnetic force took his weapon and flung it faster than he could move. Though the result was disorienting, it was also undoubtedly effective, as it often drove his arm fist-deep into the gnolls. Mostly he worried he’d snap his knife. But so far so good.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

His new ‘nature affinity’ didn’t seem to do a damn thing, but other than that, all his powers were amazing. The new and improved Crippling Strike brought the gnolls to a staggering slink, and he’d sometimes gotten bored waiting for the thing to return to any semblance of its normal speed as he tested.

It was time for a harder challenge.

First he set a couple snare traps made of vines, just in case things got out of hand and he needed somewhere to run. Then he looked for two gnolls perfectly spaced without more of their kind in the area. Then with a deep breath, and another, he loosed a Power Shot at the first gnoll.

It struck dead center in the beast’s side, nearly bowling it over as it staggered and roared in rage before it turned straight for him. He Crippling Strike’d the second’s hamstring, then put away his bow.

Then he cracked his neck, and started counting. Five seconds, he told himself, five seconds to kill the first.

It came in fast and without concern for its own protection, swiping with a vicious claw straight at Mason’s face. He ducked and sidestepped, slashing at the creature’s side, then leaping at its back with his dagger before it could turn.

He plunged the knife into its shoulder and hung on as it spun like a dog chasing its tail. It would have thrown him, so he let go, slashing a Predator’s Strike in the tiny window before his enemy struck. His arm swung in a blur, his knife ramming like a cleaver into the gnoll’s chest, half snapping, half severing its collarbone and knocking it back. Its claws raked an inch from Mason’s face, then it collapsed.

Sharp pain lit Mason’s side, and he leapt away. The other gnoll had arrived.

It limped after him, and again he withdrew, judging the creature’s reach with a few practice swipes. Then he attacked.

With just enough space to strike and step away, he led the gnoll on a deadly chase before Predator’s Strike at last re-charged, and he moved in for the kill.

[Experience awarded (moderate)! You have killed two gnoll scouts. Congratulations, you have reached level five!]

[Title earned: Early lead. You are the first player in the world to reach level five. +2 to an appropriate statistic.]

Mason trembled with the joy and adrenaline of victory, and allowed himself a moment to enjoy it. The first player to reach level five? That was somewhat hard to believe, but he saw no reason for the system to lie. Then as usual he moved away from the bloody kills until he felt safe and alone enough to check his profile.

Mason Nimitz

Level: 5

Primary Class: Hunter

Strength: 6

Dexterity: 9

Vitality: 7

Intellect: 4

Will: 6

Presence: 2

Luck: 4

Titles: Killer, Early Lead

Powers: Power Shot, Crippling Strike, Regeneration

New Specialty Class Available. Please select your class, or one will be selected by default in one hour.]

Finally some stat changes. And specialty class? Well, that sounded awesome. And though this damn system overlord made everything a chore with its time limits, Mason was still excited and wouldn’t have his moment ruined. He pulled up the list, which again turned out to be fairly short.

[Druid. Nature affinity. Mana caster. Sages and keepers of the natural world. They are both friend and master of the wild. Applicability: low.]

[Ranger. Nature affinity. Hybrid melee/ranged. Both warden and predator. They cull the weak, and teach the strong to fear. Applicability: high.]

[Skirmisher. Martial affinity. Hybrid melee/ranged. A duelist and murderer of monsters and men. They strike fast and dance away. Applicability: medium.]

Mason blinked, a bit overwhelmed by all the information. What exactly did applicability mean?

[Tutorial inquiry: the applicability of a class is assessed based on an individual player’s innate talents, as well as their behavior in the great game. It is a suggestion, and can be ignored.]

Mason felt his fingers curl with an excited, nervous energy as he looked at the choices. They all appealed in different ways. Obviously Druid was a complete departure, but it made him a damn wizard and he saw no reason he couldn’t continue to develop hunter-like skills.

Skirmisher, too, sounded both effective and straight forward, which was usually what you wanted from a weapon. And Ranger? What, like a park ranger? But maybe he was being harsh. The robot god rated it as ‘highly applicable’, which Mason had to admit made him innately likely to avoid it.

But something about it caught his attention, and told him not to ruin himself with stubborn pride. The description gave an intuitive ping of rightness he couldn’t seem to end, and as usual, Mason wasn’t much for hesitation. He closed his eyes, and chose.

[Ranger specialty class selected. Merging with Hunter Powers. Please select an initial focus: melee, or ranged.]

Again Mason didn’t hesitate. He chose melee for the same reason he’d chosen Predator’s Strike. You could decide to play it safe all you liked and do damage from afar, but your enemy would make other plans, and you had to be ready.

Heat flowed down his body, and he felt an almost unstoppable urge to draw a weapon he didn’t have. He gave up resisting, and instead pulled the goblin blade, gripping it with white knuckles as heat focused and plunged into his arm, and into his fingers.

The blade glowed with light, then blurred, thickened, and stretched, pulsing finally with green light before it hardened, and reformed.

[Item gained. Ranger’s Claw: Sharp. Deadly. Innate.]

Mason inspected the now longer blade, swinging it back and forth to find a beautiful, somehow slightly end-heavy balance.

“Ranger’s Claw,” he repeated and grinned, though he wasn’t sure what the description meant by ‘innate’.

[Tutorial query: an innate item cannot be lost or stolen. A player can summon or unsummon the weapon at will from any distance.]

“Woah.” Mason stared at the vaguely green steel of his sword with a shit eating grin. “OK, but how do I unsummo…” the sword vanished from his hand into thin air. “Alright. That’s just cool.” He focused on the weapon and it reappeared in his grip as easily as it had vanished. “Yeah,” he muttered. “I don’t see that ever getting old.”

Once Mason stopped being quite so pleased with himself, he moved off to rest away from the corpses of the two dead gnolls until regeneration had closed his wounds. Then he crept deeper into the gnoll-infested territory of the woods.

He was getting stronger, better armed, and more confident. But he needed to change his tactics.

Killing random gnolls didn’t seem to do much of anything, and he couldn’t know how much time Blake had left. He needed to escalate and learn more about what was going on here—to find the gnoll ‘leadership’, or at least their lair, and put an end to this thing, one way or another.

But first he was going to kill a goblin, and get himself another knife.