Adam found a river. It took him the whole night. The knowledge he had gained with his new class involved a lot of ecology and geography. It let him interpret things like animal trails and how trees grew to figure out where the nearest river was. It ended up being a big one, or what Adam considered a bigger river. It had to be a few hundred feet across. He came up to it on a bend that had a natural bank to it, so it wasn't flowing very fast, and he could walk right in.

Trying to step out into the water, he ended up standing on the surface.

"Wha?" Stamping his foot, Adam found the liquid felt like standing on stone. "I'm not Chiss Angel or Jesus; what the fuck?"

Water: Normal dihydrogen monoxide. Maybe a little fish pee, but that's normal.

"So, it's not special water. What could possibly…." Trying to think of anything that would make him able to pull a miracle out of his metaphorical ass, Adam played a hunch and willed Pass Without a Trace to end.

He immediately dropped two inches into the muddy bank. "Well, that seems like some kind of glitch. Whatever, time for a bath."

That's when Adam ran into his first problem. He couldn't take off his pants. All his clothes were pristine thanks to whatever magic they now had, but he was filthy underneath, and his hands were now impossibly sharp claw-things. After trying for a few minutes to unbuckle his belt without stabbing himself in the dick, Adam accidentally ripped right through it.

"Oh shit."

Then the belt automatically repaired itself.

"Oh shit!"

Inspired, Adam ripped a line down the legs of his jeans and even through his socks and boots, cleanly stepping out of his clothes.

"This better work. I'm not running naked through the woods with giant murder T-Rexes all over the place." Luckily, he was spared that indignity, as the rest of his clothing repaired just as quickly as his belt had.

"Yes!" He exclaimed in victory.

"Nooo!" Only to immediately realize his socks and underwear were being swept away in the river. Thinking quickly, Adam used Confined Chaos in the path of his drifting clothing. The portal rapidly expanded, and several gallons of water flowed inside, along with his clothes.

Adam let out a sigh of relief. "Thank God, I do not want to see the blisters and chafing I would get without those. Although, I think I'm more durable now. Maybe it wouldn't… You know what? I don't want to test that."

Adam proceeded to rip the shirt off his back, along with his jacket, though this time, he dumped them straight into Confined Chaos. For good measure, he opened a portal under his boots and jeans, which were heavy enough that they had settled onto the bottom of the river in the knee-high water instead of drifting away.

Then he dunked his whole body underwater. He couldn't exactly scrub himself with his arms as they were, so he just floated around on his back and hoped that the current would handle most of the cleaning. While he was drifting, Adam thought about his situation. He had been transported to another planet, probably another dimension, apparently by slipping through a gap in reality. Now he had magic powers that let him transform his body. He knew more about hunting than he had ever expected to know, and he had learned it in the span of a few minutes. Also, what passed for his interface was now sentient and more than a little rude.

"What am I going to do?" Adam stared blankly into the sky. He didn't miss Earth. He hadn't left behind anything worth mentioning. The only difference between here and there was the genuine threat to his life and wellbeing. Which, surprisingly, didn't bother him much. He wasn't going to sign up for being a Metarex chew toy any time soon, but the constant threat of imminent death he now felt in the back of his mind was almost familiar.

"I guess I always knew I was going to die. Everyone dies. That's not new information. At least getting eaten by some magical space lizard is cooler than getting cancer or falling out of the bathtub when I'm eighty. But what do I do?" Adam held his hands up in front of him. The slightly green, scaly hide of his arms glinted in the sunlight. He had decided to keep them in case he came across another Metarex. "I did say I was going to exterminate all of them." He had nothing better to do. "Yeah, sure. Why not?"

Adam got out of the river with a thoroughly stupid plan and nothing to lose. "Now, how do I get my clothes back?" He had never tried to get something out of his pocket dimension before. Opening it up, Adam tried thinking about what he wanted.

Nothing happened.

"Ok, how about…." Sticking his hand in, he tried again.

Nothing.

"Well shit." With a shrug, Adam stuck his head into the mystery tv-static portal to a pocket dimension. Inside was a landscape of shifting colors. Adam was expecting to feel nauseous just looking at it, but it was almost comforting. There was no visible ground or way to tell direction or distance. It was just a giant mass of ever-shifting, amorphous chaos, which seemed appropriate.

Because everything was moving and shifting, it made it very easy to see the stationary things. Looking around, Adam saw four things. Two he was expecting, two he was definitely not.

First was a large ball of water. It seemed Confined Chaos had taken everything that had flowed in with his clothes and put it all together. That was one of the things he was expecting to see.

The second was his clothes. All gathered in a pile and even neatly folded. Somehow.

The third was a giant glowing ball. Adam had no idea what it was or how it got in here, but it was roughly four times his size.

The Last was a pile of various prepackaged food and beverages. Bags of chips and mini-donuts. A variety of sodas. Sitting in the middle of it all, like the crown jewel in the hoard of a very depressing dragon, was a hot dog heater straight out of an American gas station. It was running, and had some hot dogs and taquitos on its little rollers, spinning away.

"This might be the weirdest thing I have ever seen. And that bar has risen by a huge margin." Shaking his head, Adam inspected both the food and the glowing ball, hoping for some insight into what they were doing here.

Gas-station food: Transfigured from a partially consumed Metarex corpse by Confined Chaos. All the calories a growing boy needs. Approximately the same nutritional value as a mouthful of cat pee. Some of it probably tastes the same too.

"Why is that your point of comparison? I did not need that mental image." Adam complained pointlessly. He had spent most of his walk to the river trying to get Know the Unknown to respond to him. All it did was insult his intelligence and question his sanity.

Quasi-real half-matter: A complete and perfectly intact Metarex corpse in the midst of being transformed by the effect of Confined Chaos. Now here's the good stuff. Be advised, touching it may cause severe bodily harm and/or death.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

"Well, at least that's helpful."

Adam tried to get the clothing to come to him, but he didn't seem to have any control over whatever force governed this space. Instead, he opened the portal up wider and walked in. Once his whole body was inside, he felt completely weightless. Before he could worry about being able to move, and as soon as he realized what an ill-advised idea entering a seemingly unstable pocket dimension was, he realized he could move himself around freely by willing it to happen.

Floating in a continuously oscillating void with nothing supporting him was less terrifying than it sounded. Though Adam did feel kind of vulnerable. That probably had something to do with being naked.

Getting his clothes back on was orders of magnitude harder than getting them off. Especially his socks. Everything else he ended up ripping apart and letting it reconstruct around him, but the socks always ended up wrapped around his feet wrong, and his claws had the dexterity of a partially paralyzed toddler. It took him several tries, but he managed to pinch the fabric without ripping it, and he was back to fully clothed.

Now that he wasn't encrusted in a solid inch of gore and other fluids or naked and wet, Adam realized he was actually hungry. He wasn't sure why that fact surprised him, seeing as he hadn't eaten in well over a day at this point. Without any better options, he took from his newly created stock of gar station odds and ends. Most of it he couldn't open properly, so he just had a couple of hotdogs. They weren't that bad. Most gas station food tasted like it had been sitting out for weeks, probably because it had, but these hotdogs were fresh.

In fact, after rifling through the pile of random junk food, Adam noticed that every item was at its perfect temperature. The drinks were cold, and the chips weren't crushed. Everything was in perfect condition.

"I feel like there's more going on with Concealed Chaos than the interface said." Which made sense. There was no way a few sentences could capture all the intricacies of a pocket dimension. Unfortunately, he had no way of knowing what the rules were, except through trial and error. Right now, all he knew was stuff that went in here was changed in seemingly random ways, and whatever remained seemed to be kept in optimal condition. There might be an organization feature, judging by how the ball of water was staying together, and his clothes had entered separately but ended up together.

Satisfied with what he had learned so far and resolving to test a few things, Adam floated over to the portal and stepped back out onto the bank of the river. He wondered if time moved the same inside. Maybe everything in the pocket dimension was in stasis. That was a pretty common element for storage magic in games and books.

He wasn't sure how much time had passed. It was still morning, but he had only been in Confined Chaos for an hour at most. He wasn't exactly an expert at telling the time based on the sun, and he hadn't been paying much attention to where it was when he entered.

With the whole day ahead of him and a risky, stupid plan to dive into, Adam activated Pass Without a Trace and walked back into the woods, leaning on his new hunting knowledge to try and find any animal tracks. Along the way, he started chucking random things into Confined Chaos to see what would happen.

He came across what he thought was a game trail in only a few minutes. Following it for several more minutes led him to what looked exactly like an average deer. It was walking along the path all alone, heading in the same direction he was.

Deerdritch: Basically, what happens when you put a deer, a changeling, and Cthulhu in a giant blender is they would die. But if they didn't, this is what would pop out. Their natural predator is the Metarex.

"Well, that's fucking ominous."

Congratulations! You have learned the skill: Tracking

"And that's useful."

Adam approached the deer confidently. He was intangible, after all. It's not like the thing could attack him. With a wet sucking sound, his Mantid arms unfolded into their full sythe forms.

"It's so weird that I can hear the sounds I make and see myself, but this thing is completely oblivious. I'm pretty sure that breaks basically all the laws of physics like a KitKat bar." Adam was walking along next to the Deerdritch, looking it dead in its big black eye. It looked exactly like a regular deer. No antlers, so not a buck.

"Well, here goes nothing." Adam whipped his arm around, the blade speeding right for the deer's neck before passing through it completely. Once more, the weight and momentum of his swing took him off his feet and put him face-first in the ground.

"Ugh." Adam rolled over after collapsing his arms, looking at the retreating tail of the Deerdritch. "Right, I'm intangible, so I can't hit it. Dumbass."

Jumping to his feet, Adam quickly caught up to his quarry. Being able to run at a dead sprint undetected was very useful. "Alright, let's try this again."

This time, as he swung, he turned off Pass Without a Trace. This was how Adam learned that, when he deactivated his intangibility, he was frozen in place for a solid second. He had never noticed before because it lasted for such a short period, and he hadn't been moving when he did it. This time, he did notice.

Unfortunately, so did the Deerdritch.

While Adam watched, frozen in place, the innocuous deer turned into a living nightmare straight out of Lovecraftian horror. The skin on its face peeled back and formed into a series of writhing tentacles that circled a fleshy cylinder with a hole in the middle. The hole was filled with teeth. So, so many teeth. Its hide rippled, the soft brown and white speckled fur transforming into more nauseating sickly green flesh that oozed a yellowish puss all over.

Then one of Deerdritch's face tentacles shot Adam with a laser. The red death beam hit him center mass but fizzled out harmlessly against his clothes.

Before it could do anything else, Adam's body unfroze. His swing carried through as if he had never stopped. Since the Deerdritch had moved, his scythe went wide. Having not connected, Adam was once again heading toward a faceplant. Desperately trying to avoid ending up on the ground in front of a horror monster, he stepped into the swing.

As his weight shifted, he went with it, bringing the scythe full circle. It bled off much of the momentum from the original swing, so it was much slower than the lightning-fast speed it had started with. So, despite being on target for the Deerdritch, it quickly kicked up on its hind legs, and his swing passed under it.

On the positive side, he had actually used his one weapon without ending up on his ass, so that was progress.

Lunging forward, hoping to finish the fight before the nightmare deer could pull out an attack his clothing couldn't block, Adam swung with both arms simultaneously. They blurred forward before the Deerdritch could even get its front legs back on the ground and neatly bisected the creature. The sideways momentum from both the arms canceled each other out, so instead of flinging him around in a circle, his arms pulled him forward.

Directly into a faceful of Deerdritch guts.

"Gahh!" Adam rolled to the side, his arms retracting. "Wooo! Holy shit, that was extremely terrifying. Ok, lessons were learned. Cannot use Pass Without a Trace for ambushes. Phlea!" He spat. He hadn't had his mouth open, but the gore and viscera and all that icky gunk were smeared all over his face. "I swear, I'm going to fight a monster one of these days and not come out covered in gore. Guess I'm going back to the river."

Congratulations! You have Leveled up (2)

Congratulations! You Have Leveled up (12)

A quick jaunt to the river to dunk his head in after he had dropped the remains of the Deerdritch into Confined Chaos was refreshing. It also went a lot faster than his previous dip since only his face was dirty this time. After he was done, Adam pulled up his stat sheet.

Name: Adam Mac Cuill (Unintentional Outsider*)

Mind: Apprentice Hunter

Tier: 1

Level: 13

Cognition: 14

Retention: 22

Inference: 35

Skills: 2/3

* Know the Unknown

* Advanced Stealth

* Tracking

Body: Outsider's Body

Tier: !@)I#(

Level: 9

Muscles: 65

Bones: 65

Organs: 65

Abilities: 2/10

* Unusual Attraction

* Form of Chaos

* Pass WIthout a Trace

Soul: N/A

Magics: 0/0

* Confined Chaos

"Damn, tier 1 levels a lot faster. It sucks that the stat gain isn't an even spread like with Outsider's Body, though. My cognition is going to end up way behind the other two. Not that I know what that means from a functional perspective. I really need more information on how classes work. I only have one open skill slot left. Also, what happened to accepting skills? I got Stealth, Pass Without a Trace, and Tracking without accepting anything. Was that just for Form of Chaos? I have so many questions!" Looking at his stat sheet was just making him increasingly frustrated, so Adam closed it.

"Whatever, I'm going to go kill some shit. At least that, I know how to do. Sort of."