As Sarah opened her eyes, she still couldn’t quite believe she was awake. She found herself on a dirt road in a clearing, a forest on either side of a path flanked by tall grass. She was not alone, and as she turned she saw flashes of light occurring all up and down the road. As they faded, confused people stood to their feet in their place.

  A flash of light went off just in front of Sarah, and a young man stumbled into her, knocking her to the ground and landing on top of her.

  “Shit, sorry!” he said, helping her up to her feet.

  Sarah was pissed, but didn’t respond for a moment, as he had knocked the wind out of her. It wasn’t his fault, none of this fever dream could be blamed on anyone but the aliens, but she wanted something to be mad at.

  Sarah opened her mouth to yell at the idiot who couldn’t keep his feet, but then stopped as the young man straightened. He had to be a foot and a half taller than her, and nearly twice as wide.

  “Big fucker aren’t you?” she muttered, dusting the dirt off her jeans.

  He opened his mouth to reply, but was interrupted when a small man no higher than Sarah’s ribs came puffing by. He looked like a cartoon, two tufts of tangled black hair streaked with grey bouncing on the back of his scalp, running like the devil himself was on his heels.

  “Run you stupid bitches! Run!” he yelled.

  The small man carried a pair of glasses with lenses thick enough to see Jupiter on a clear night. He was in a dead sprint, huffing and puffing like a steam engine, pit stains already evident after only a few seconds of running.

  “What the---” Sarah began, but she was interrupted by another of those fucking prompts.

  “World alert. A new integration has taken place. The native fauna has taken notice of fresh prey.

  For the prey: Run. Hide. Fight.

  For the predators: Feast

  Your Mission: survive the first hunt to find safety.

  Hint: You only need to outrun the one next to you.”

  There had to be two or three hundred people on the road next to them, all lined up along the sides. Sarah would later wonder how many more might have survived if they had all ran right then, as the little man bid.

  “What on earth,” Sarah whispered.

  Then she looked up at the tall young man again. He was staring at the tree line, all color drained from his face. He grabbed Sarah’s hand and began running. She felt like a child being dragged out of a Walmart by an angry parent.

  She resented it.

  Sarah had always been the smallest in her classes, treated like a fucking doll by her mother, her teachers, and even her friends as it felt like everyone in the world grew up except her. When she finally hit her growth spurt, her body had to go and stretch her all the way to the other end of the spectrum. She was taller than a lot of men now, but dragging along behind this behemoth she felt like that doll again.

  “Get your fucking hands off of me!” she shouted, ripping her hand out of the man’s grasp.

  “Suit yourself!” the tall guy said, continuing to run.

  Sarah looked back at what had spooked the guy, and froze a moment in confusion.

  “Chickens?” she said.

  They looked completely unremarkable, except for the size. They were twice the height of the men nearest them. Sarah watched, transfixed, as one of the larger hens ambled up to a man who was holding a cell phone, repeatedly ramming his fingers against the screen in a futile attempt to get service. Scanning across the line, she saw about twenty chickens walking out from the trees.

  Sarah had briefly raised chickens in her youth. Her mother had gotten a bunch of old English game hens, showing up at home with them one day when Sarah had just turned ten.

  Her mother kept saying something about saving money on eggs and giving Sarah something to take care of. The birds were noisy, smelly, and their coop had always been dark and poorly ventilated. It smelled of bird shit and rotting hay no matter how much time her mother made her spend in there.

  In retrospect, Sarah thought her mother didn’t have a clue what she was doing when she built the thing. Sarah had hated the birds, though she knew it wasn’t their fault for being there. It was her mother’s fault, for never thinking a thing through in her life. The birds had sensed her resentment though, and hated Sarah in return. At least, that was why Sarah thought they always pecked and scratched at her when she came by.

  Sarah remembered those birds well. They had stalked the yard like little dinosaurs, ripping at the ground and pouncing on anything from grasshoppers to mice. Nothing living had made it through their yard that summer. One day, after the rooster had grown up, her father had wandered by too close to the coop on his way in the house. Her father had gotten a good slash across the calf from the rooster’s spurs. It was the only time Sarah had ever felt affection for that fucking bird.

  Of course, that had been the day her father executed every last one of the chickens. She didn’t know if her father had done it with the shovel or the broken hoe she found later. There had been blood on both. She did know there had been nothing left of the birds worth eating. She had to bury them.

  Sarah found herself stirred from her recollection as she watched the tall, graceful white bird turning its head to the side, giving the man holding the phone a once over.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Sarah turned and ran, sprinting as fast as she could after the tall man and the short one.

  The man with the phone failed to so much as look up at the giant fowl next to him as it cocked its head to the side. Then, faster than the eye could follow, it pecked. Half the man’s neck disintegrated in a spray of blood. The white feathers turned red as the chicken’s head dove down again and again. One of the other birds slowly walked up and joined in on the feast.

  Sarah had known the moment she saw that head turn to the side, she remembered that look. She put everything she had into each stride, trying to pull herself further away from the screams rising along the path. She heard pounding feet on the path behind, but she paid them no mind, any more than the screams. Sarah just ran.

  She could see the tall man up ahead of her, clearly not much of a runner. He was lumbering along, bouncing with each step and wasting energy in a hundred little ways. The inefficiency bothered her.

  She steadily gained on the man, then began passing him on the right side. They were coming to a fork in the road. The man stumbled, and Sarah instinctively grabbed his left hand. He stabilized, and gave her a heaving

  “Thank you!”

  They had ran maybe a quarter of a mile, and she couldn’t help but shoot a glance back, as she had already turned halfway round to catch the man. There were people running towards them, with bodies scattered along the roadway with blood-covered chickens standing over them.

  As she watched, one of the roosters ran up behind a large sobbing woman in the back of the group. The rooster leapt the last fifteen feet, bearing her down to the ground easily as she wailed.

  Sarah turned back, and they kept running. She could see the little man still ahead of them, his tiny little legs a blur as he continued to recede further into the distance. She would never have thought he had it in him at first glance, but she supposed adrenaline was a hell of a drug. She saw the little man come up to where the road forked, and take the left fork without pausing.

  She and the tall man found themselves at the fork about ten seconds later, and Sarah saw writing appear in the air. The letters were foreign, but she understood them somehow anyway.

  “Village”

  “Forest”

  “Subterranean”

  The little man had run off towards the forest fork. The tall man looked inclined to follow.

  “Wait! Shouldn’t we go to the village? It’ll be safer!”

  He seemed conflicted:

  “He seems to know what’s going on though. Maybe we should follow him?”

  Sarah realized she had never let go of his hand, and she dropped it as she said,

  “The forest isn’t going to be any better than here, we’re in the fucking forest!”

  She wasn’t waiting any longer. She began running towards the village sign. Sarah was slightly winded, but she had been running distance since grade school, and this was nothing. You had to learn to run early in that house.

  Behind her, the tall man hesitated only a second before tearing after her. They continued to run for a minute, the screams getting more distant, when Sarah heard a squeal from her left. She just dodged to the side as a huge boar rushed past her. The boar was bearing down on the big man, and Sarah was expecting to see him trampled.

  The man cocked a fist back, then punched the boar right in the face, never breaking stride. The man looked almost as surprised as the boar when its head crumpled like a can of soda, the blow sending it crashing into the earth ten feet away. The man shook out his hand, which was now covered in blood and gore, then kept running.

  “I don’t think I can do that again, better move fast!” he called to Sarah.

  She had been staring open-mouthed at the scene, but quickly got her shit together to keep running. She didn’t understand what was happening. Nothing made any sense.

  She had gone to sleep in her own bed after a perfectly average day. She woke up in a strange room, and had been greeted by an alien. Naturally, she thought she was having a very convincing dream.

  Sarah had been told she had two class options, some sort of beast-master and a priestess of winter. She hadn’t paid too much attention. She had treated the whole process as a joke, and after reading about the ice magic had said,

  “Ok, I’ll be the snow queen!” without thinking much.

  That was enough of a statement for a choice apparently. Sarah regretted it now. The beast master class had mentioned something about animals listening to her will. Maybe she could have turned away the chickens, or convinced something like the hog to fight for them. What could she do with some ice bullshit?

  As the thought occurred to her, she felt a buzzing feeling at the base of her skull. She suddenly knew exactly what she could do with some ice bullshit. She rounded a curve on the roadway and slid to a stop, the young man almost bulling her over.

  Two chickens, a rooster and a hen, stood ahead. They were just standing on the roadway, casually preening. As Sarah and the man rounded the bend, the chickens began that slow, stilted walk towards them. Sarah knew there was nowhere to run, and she could hear the group behind them getting closer.

  Sarah could feel the heat all around her. She couldn’t control it, but she could move it away from certain spots. She concentrated, making a grasping motion, and pulled as much heat away as she could from four spots.

  The chickens’ eyes began bleeding, the rooster’s eyes actually falling from the sockets as the water within them froze and expanded.

  The hen gave a screech, its eyes frosted over but not seeming nearly as damaged. The rooster began squawking and slashing at the air blindly as the big man grabbed her hand again and tried to pull her past the chickens.

  The hen struck out with its beak towards Sarah, and the man punched it on the side of the head. Sarah hoped for the hen’s head to crumple like last time, but the big bird was only knocked it off its feet. It landed in a patch of mud, and the man stumbled.

  Sarah reached out again, pulling the heat from around the hen as it flailed in the mud. A rim of frost blasted out in all directions, and the hen struggled with its wings stuck at awkward angles in the now frozen surface.

  Sarah found herself stumbling too as the backlash came. A wave of exhaustion hit her.

  Despite the fatigue, she kept running down the path, the man catching up to her seconds later. They came to a circle of stones with the words "village here" spinning in the air over it, and Sarah hurried into it, the man at her side.

  “Now what?” the man asked.

  Then the circle emitted a blinding white light, and the two of them were swept away. When the world stopped spinning, Sarah found herself standing next to him in the center of a city street.

  The street was made from cobblestones, and they were surrounded by thatched log buildings. The street was empty, and as far as Sarah could tell, so were the buildings. There was no sign of the chickens, and the screams from down the path were gone entirely. Sarah took several deep, ragged breaths, sitting down in the middle of the street. She wasn’t sure she had ever been this tired in her life. It wasn’t just the running, making that ice had taken something out of her.

  The young man walked off to the side of the street and vomited, then sat down next to the vomit, leaning against the porch of the nearest building.

  A bright, cheery voice rang out through the square, startling them both:

  “Welcome! Congratulations on surviving your first quest, let’s get started on your tutorial!”