CHAPTER ONE

  The gym at the lodge was a generous term for it.

  Two adjustable dumbbells, a cable machine with a fraying attachment, and a pull-up bar mounted slightly crooked above the door. Rhys had catalogued it in thirty seconds on the first afternoon and spent that evening rebuilding the week's training around what was actually there.

  He was fifty minutes in when Marcus appeared — one of Sophie's university friends, wearing a shirt that said something ironic about running. Marcus surveyed the scene: Rhys mid-set, the notepad on the bench with the session mapped in columns, the methodical way he was cycling through movements.

  "Oh," Marcus said. "You're serious about this."

  Rhys set the dumbbell down. "Mm."

  Marcus got a glass of water from the tap, looked at the pull-up bar, decided against it, and left.

  Rhys picked up the dumbbell.

  He showered, opened his laptop, and put in four hours before anyone else was properly awake. A system he'd been refactoring for two weeks was finally behaving — the structural choice he'd been second-guessing turned out to be correct, he'd just been looking at it wrong. He documented it, pushed the changes, and sat back.

  His phone lit up on the desk beside him. Cal. He'd reply properly later, when he was done.

  The lodge was someone's idea of rustic. Heavy timber, stone fireplace, views across a valley that looked like a screensaver. Eight people on a group holiday that Rhys had been added to ten days before departure when the original booking fell through for someone else. He knew Sophie from university, distantly. He knew nobody else.

  This wasn't a problem.

  By midmorning they were in the common room — Marcus reading something on his phone, Sophie and Dani in the middle of a conversation that had apparently been running since yesterday, two others playing cards with the focused energy of people keeping score of something emotional. Rhys sat at the end of the long table with his laptop, adjacent to all of it.

  He read the menu like documentation. He wanted to understand what was available, in what quantities, at what cost, so he could make a decision and not think about it again. Sophie had laughed the first time she'd seen him do this. He'd looked up, not understood the laugh, and looked back down.

  Lunch. Afternoon run — elevation, varied terrain, his watch tracking metrics he glanced at the way he glanced at dashboards. The valley was genuinely beautiful. He noted it.

  Dinner was communal. Someone had made pasta, aggressively, and everyone was eating it with the exaggerated appreciation of people who understood that the social contract required this.

  "Rhys, do you have a type?" Dani asked. She had the energy of someone who found silence personally suspicious.

  "Competent," he said.

  A beat.

  "At what?" Marcus asked.

  "Things."

  Sophie laughed. The conversation moved on. Rhys ate pasta and half-listened to a story about someone's cousin that was apparently very funny given the table's reaction. He didn't track it closely enough to catch the punchline but he smiled at the general shape of it.

  After dinner he sat on the terrace with coffee while the others went back inside toward the fire.

  Cal had asked him something, the week before he'd left. They'd been in the kitchen at home — Cal making tea, not looking at him, which was usually how Cal got to things. He'd asked whether Rhys thought he was too passive. Whether waiting to feel ready for something was just another way of never doing it. He'd been calm about it, the way he sometimes was when he'd thought something through far enough to say it out loud. Not self-pity. A real question.

  Let me think about how to say it right, Rhys had said. We'll talk when I'm back.

  Cal had nodded. Made his tea.

  The valley was dark. Rhys finished the coffee. One week wasn't very long. He'd be home soon enough.

  Sophie leaned out from the terrace door. "We're doing a film. One of those ones where the twist is bad. You in?"

  "Give me a few minutes," he said.

  She went back inside. He sat a moment longer and then followed.

  The film was bad. The twist was bad. Marcus called it twenty minutes in and was extremely vocal about being right. Rhys watched two-thirds of it from an armchair at the room's edge before his attention drifted to his laptop. He worked quietly while the others argued about the ending, which was worse than either of the options Marcus had proposed.

  Around midnight the group dissolved toward beds. Rhys stayed up another hour finishing the refactor and closed the laptop with the particular satisfaction of a thing being done correctly.

  Morning.

  The gym. Earlier than yesterday. The fraying attachment held. He logged the session, reviewed it, made a note for tomorrow.

  The valley outside was doing something impressive with mist.

  Work. Coffee. He was mid-sentence in a comment block, cursor blinking, when the world stopped.

  Not stopped — that wasn't the right word for it. The air changed. Not the light, not the temperature — something underneath those things, something perception didn't have a clean category for. And then text appeared, not on any screen, just present, the way a thought is present except outside him entirely —

  [ ATTENTION: INHABITANTS OF UNINTEGRATED WORLD CLASS F. ]

  He stopped typing.

  [ YOU ARE RECEIVING THIS NOTIFICATION BECAUSE YOUR WORLD HAS BEEN SELECTED FOR INTEGRATION INTO THE UNIVERSAL SYSTEM. THIS IS NOT AN OPTIONAL PROCESS. INTEGRATION WILL PROCEED ACCORDING TO STANDARD PROTOCOL. ]

  Behind him Sophie said something. One of the others made a sound that wasn't a word.

  Rhys read every line before moving.

  [ EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY: TUTORIAL PHASE INITIATED. ALL INHABITANTS WILL UNDERGO MANDATORY SYSTEM ORIENTATION. COMPLIANCE IS NOT REQUIRED. ORIENTATION WILL OCCUR REGARDLESS. ]

  [ DO NOT BE ALARMED. ]

  He read that last line twice.

  [ INTEGRATION IS A STANDARD PROCEDURE. YOUR WORLD WILL BE ASSIGNED A RANK COMMENSURATE WITH ITS CURRENT RESOURCE PROFILE. ALL INHABITANTS WILL RECEIVE CLASS ASSIGNMENTS FOLLOWING INITIAL ASSESSMENT. ]

  [ TUTORIAL TRANSPORT WILL COMMENCE IN— ]

  Someone screamed. Marcus was saying what the fuck on repeat, each repetition slightly higher than the last. Dani had knocked her chair over getting up and was standing with her back to the wall. Sophie was at Rhys's elbow without him having heard her move.

  "Rhys," she said. "Rhys."

  "I'm reading it," he said.

  [ —FOUR MINUTES AND SEVENTEEN SECONDS. ]

  A countdown in the corner of his vision. Four minutes seventeen, now four twelve, running with the certainty of something that had no concept of whether he was ready.

  He closed the laptop.

  What he had on his person. What he could carry. What mattered.

  From the kitchen, the sound of someone being sick.

  "What does it mean," Sophie said. "What does tutorial mean, what does —"

  "It means what it says." He stood up. "It's orientation. We're being taught how to use a system."

  "What system."

  He looked at the countdown. Three minutes fifty-one seconds.

  "I don't know yet," he said. "But we're about to find out."

  CHAPTER TWO

  The countdown hit zero and the world came apart at the seams.

  Not violently. That was almost worse — the complete absence of drama. One moment the lodge, the smell of coffee, Sophie's hand on his arm. Then nothing. Not darkness. Nothing. The concept of location, briefly, not applying.

  He'd done a float tank once, deliberately, forty-five minutes that felt like six hours. That had still been a body in a space. This was something prior to both.

  Duration required a before and after. For a moment there was neither.

  Then: a floor. Not visible — just present, pressure under his feet. And the interface.

  [ ASSESSMENT IN PROGRESS. ]

  [ SCANNING: PHYSICAL METRICS. COGNITIVE PROFILE. AFFINITY INDICATORS. POTENTIAL CEILING. ]

  Around him, in the nothing, he could hear people. Someone crying quietly, the kind that had been going long enough to find a rhythm. Someone else reciting something under their breath — prayer or mantra. Further away, a child. He hadn't known there was a child in the batch.

  Marcus somewhere to his left saying okay okay okay with the focused repetition of someone trying to talk themselves into a particular state.

  Rhys stood still and read the interface.

  [ ASSESSMENT COMPLETE. ]

  [ RECOMMENDED CLASS: MAGE. ]

  [ ACCEPT / REVIEW ALTERNATIVES ]

  Fast. Whatever the system had scanned for, it had decided in seconds. He selected REVIEW ALTERNATIVES.

  [ ALTERNATIVE CLASSES AVAILABLE AT CURRENT PROFILE: ]

  [ SCHOLAR --- ARCANIST --- MAGE ]

  Three variations on the same read. The recommendation set had no width. Three different words for the same category decision.

  He thought about the gym at the lodge. The notepad. The fraying cable attachment and the sequence he'd rebuilt around it. Five years of structured physical investment and the system had apparently looked straight through it.

  He accepted Mage. It wasn't worth arguing with an automated system. He'd work with what he had.

  The interface updated:

  [ CLASS ASSIGNED: MAGE. ]

  [ STAT ALLOCATION: ]

  [ Strength: 8 | Agility: 9 | Endurance: 8 | Intelligence: 14 | Perception: 11 | Willpower: 16 | Essence: 20 ]

  He looked at the spread. Intelligence fourteen — the system had read him and filed him under thinks a lot, which wasn't wrong. But Willpower was the outlier. Higher than anything else on the sheet. He hadn't expected that.

  He looked at it for a moment, then moved on. Something to think about later.

  [ INITIAL SKILL SELECTION WILL BE AVAILABLE FOLLOWING TUTORIAL ORIENTATION. ]

  [ PREPARE FOR ARRIVAL. ]

  One more moment of nothing. Then light.

  The sky was the right colour.

  That was the first thing — the blue of it, the sun, light behaving the way light was supposed to behave. People around him made sounds they probably weren't aware of. Someone sat down immediately and put their face in their hands, not from distress, just from the sudden existence of ground to sit on.

  Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  Rhys looked at the environment.

  Hillside, grass underfoot, treeline below. The land fell into a valley and rose again into slopes that didn't quite match the grade of the hills they were part of. The forest shifted, maybe four hundred metres in, from dense to something drier and open without the terrain changing enough to explain it. The river at the valley floor caught the light at the wrong angle for its position relative to the sun, as though it had been placed for visibility rather than geography.

  He'd seen composite images — machine-generated landscapes stitched from multiple sources, almost right in every piece, slightly wrong as a whole. This had that quality. Not threatening. Just assembled.

  Around him: eight people. Sophie, arms wrapped around herself but eyes up and scanning. Marcus standing with his hands on his head, the posture of someone who'd just watched his team concede a goal. Dani crouching to touch the grass with one hand, apparently needing to confirm it was real.

  The interface reappeared.

  [ WELCOME TO TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT SEVEN. ]

  [ YOU ARE ONE OF 1,024 INDIVIDUALS ASSIGNED TO THIS ORIENTATION COHORT. YOUR GROUP HAS BEEN PLACED IN PROXIMITY TO FAMILIAR INDIVIDUALS WHERE POSSIBLE TO REDUCE INITIAL STRESS RESPONSE. ]

  [ THE TUTORIAL WILL CONCLUDE WHEN THE INTEGRATION PHASE IS COMPLETE. DURATION IS VARIABLE. ]

  [ OBJECTIVES: ]

  [ --- SURVIVE. ]

  [ --- ADVANCE. ]

  [ --- RETURN. ]

  [ GOOD LUCK. ]

  The interface blinked out. Three words and a landscape and nine people on a hillside.

  The silence lasted about four seconds.

  "Good luck," Marcus said. "It said — why would it say that if —"

  "Because it's dangerous," Dani said. Still crouching, still touching the grass, voice flat and clear. "Obviously it's dangerous. Survive is the first objective."

  "We need to find the others," said a man Rhys didn't know — thirties, practical voice, already looking down the hillside. Joel, it turned out. "There are a thousand people here. We should group up."

  Rhys was looking at the treeline.

  1,024 individuals, placed near familiar faces to reduce stress response. The wider batch was out there somewhere, spread across an environment calibrated to their collective profile. Whatever this place contained had been selected based on a scan of 1,024 humans and what the system thought they could handle.

  That meant this environment wasn't generic. It was theirs. Built around them specifically.

  He wanted to know what was in the trees.

  "We should stay together," Sophie said. She'd moved to his shoulder. "Until we understand what —"

  "Skill selection," Rhys said.

  She stopped.

  "The system said it opens after orientation." He looked at her. "Orientation just ended. Check your interface."

  She did. Her expression shifted — the specific look of someone encountering a menu much larger than expected. "There's a lot of —"

  "Read it carefully. All of it. Don't take the first thing that sounds good."

  He opened his own.

  The Mage skill list was longer than he'd expected and organised in ways that rewarded patience — obvious options near the top, stranger things further down. He read the whole list before touching anything. Twice.

  Near the bottom, almost an afterthought:

  [ SPATIAL AWARENESS — Passive. Enhanced perception of three-dimensional space and relative positioning. ]

  Not a combat skill. The system had clearly filed it as minor utility, a filler slot. The description was brief in the way descriptions were brief when the system didn't think much of something.

  He selected it.

  [ SPATIAL AWARENESS acquired. ]

  [ Title awarded: UNCONVENTIONAL — Grade 1. ]

  [ You have chosen a path outside standard class optimisation. ]

  [ Effect: +5 Willpower. Stacks with further titles of this type. ]

  He read the effect twice. Willpower again. His highest stat on arrival, and now the system was adding to it for being unconventional. He didn't know yet what that meant mechanically, but two data points pointing at the same thing was a pattern worth tracking.

  He closed the interface and looked at the treeline.

  "I'm going to scout," he said.

  "We just arrived," Sophie said. "We don't know what's out there."

  "That's why I'm going."

  "Rhys —"

  "Back before dark. Stay on the hillside, higher ground. Don't take the group into the trees until you know what's in them."

  He was already moving.

  The grass was springy and slightly too uniform — the way turf looked when it hadn't had time to develop the irregularities of weather and use. The system had assembled this place and had not considered, apparently, how long grass took to become real.

  The treeline swallowed him.

  He kept moving.

  CHAPTER THREE

  He came back from the trees two hours before dark with a working map of the treeline and nothing following him.

  The group had been busy. Water sourced from a stream down the hillside. Higher ground held. Dani had found berries and made a pile of them and not eaten any, which Rhys thought showed good judgement. Joel had walked a perimeter and was already sorting out the watch rota.

  "Anything out there?" Sophie asked.

  "Plenty. None of it came at me."

  "That's where we are now," Marcus said. "Nothing came at you. That's the good news."

  Rhys took the last watch. He preferred it — nobody needed anything from him, the valley was quiet, and he had the interface and four unallocated stat points to think about.

  [ Level 2. ]

  He hadn't killed anything. He looked at the experience and worked backward — orientation, class assignment, skill selection. A base allocation for showing up. Passive experience existed. Small, but not zero.

  He left the stat points alone. Too early to commit without knowing what he was building toward.

  The valley went from black to grey. He watched it happen and didn't need anything from it.

  The system called them Ridgeback Wolves.

  Named, catalogued, imported. Not designed for this tutorial — pulled from a library and filed under appropriate difficulty for E-rank arrivals. That was worth knowing. The tutorial wasn't custom. It was curated.

  Three of them at the valley floor. They didn't move like the name suggested — too deliberate, weight too far forward, the posture of something built for one specific kind of violence. He watched from tree cover on the high side while the group below clocked them and froze.

  Two were looking directly at the group. The third was angling wide, working around the outside of their attention.

  That one was deciding.

  Sophie had a branch held like a staff. Joel had a rock. Marcus had his hands slightly out from his sides like he was hoping the situation would resolve without requiring him personally.

  The deciding one moved and it pulled the others with it — all three going before anyone in the group had fully processed the first.

  Rhys came off the hillside.

  The Mage skill list wanted him at range. He'd read it twice and knew exactly what it wanted. What he saw was three animals with a reach advantage over everyone in that clearing, and range was going to make that worse. Close was a different problem. Smaller. More manageable.

  The Ridgeback going for Sophie turned at the sound of him and he was already closer than it had accounted for. He hit it in the throat with his elbow. The creature was denser than he'd expected and the impact ran all the way up into his shoulder — but the throat was wrong now and he was inside the radius where it couldn't use what it was designed to use, and he found the spot behind the ear and hit it until the problem stopped being a problem.

  He turned around.

  The third one — the deciding one — had repositioned while he was occupied. It had watched the first Ridgeback go down and adjusted. It was keeping him at exactly the distance it wanted, circling, patient.

  He walked toward it instead of waiting.

  That surprised it. Just for a moment — just long enough. The fight was worse than the first one. It was faster and it caught his side before he got the angle right, a hit that was going to be very present tomorrow. But he stayed inside its range and it couldn't reset and eventually he got his forearm across its neck and held on.

  The second one wasn't a problem anymore.

  The third had run while he was occupied with the second. He watched it disappear into the tree cover and let it go.

  His side hurt. His shoulder hurt. He was breathing harder than he'd like. He stood over the two on the ground and took stock.

  [ LEVEL UP. ] [ LEVEL UP. ] [ You have reached Level 4. ]

  Two levels from two kills. He'd expected one. The extra had to be something about the approach — the gap between standard Mage behaviour and what he'd actually done. The system was apparently paying attention to methodology, not just outcomes.

  He opened the skill list and read every entry before touching anything. Twice.

  Standard Mage skills sat near the top. Mana Bolt. Arcane Shield. Force Lance. Functional, all of them — the building blocks of a ranged magical combatant, designed to combine cleanly with each other. He kept reading.

  Three pages down, near the bottom, almost an afterthought:

  [ SPATIAL DISPLACEMENT — Active. Temporarily alter the effective distance between two points in space. Short duration. High Essence cost. ]

  Not a damage skill. The system probably filed it as utility. The description was almost apologetic — short duration, high cost, as if it was warning him off. For a Mage building toward a standard ranged profile it was essentially useless.

  He selected it.

  [ SPATIAL DISPLACEMENT acquired. ]

  [ Title update: UNCONVENTIONAL — Grade 2. ] [ Effect: +10 Willpower. ]

  He noted that. Grade 1 had been five Willpower. Grade 2 was ten. Doubled, not added. The tooltip said stacks with further titles of this type, and the behaviour at Grade 2 confirmed it.

  He allocated his stat points. Strength two, Agility three, Endurance three. Nothing into Intelligence. Nothing into what the system was expecting.

  "You're a Mage," Marcus said. He was staring at the two Ridgebacks on the ground with the expression of a man whose model of something had just failed completely.

  "Apparently," Rhys said.

  Days three, four, five.

  Out before the others were properly awake. Further each day, following the difficulty gradient until it started pushing back. The tutorial had a logic to it — easier content near the landing sites, harder content out toward the edges, the system assuming new arrivals would spread naturally as confidence built. Rhys spread faster than the assumption.

  He fought things and learned from them. He fought things he probably shouldn't have yet and learned more. Each level-up he read the full skill list before selecting anything and each time he selected from the bottom. UNCONVENTIONAL hit Grade 3 somewhere in the middle of Day 4.

  He used Spatial Displacement on moving targets, testing the range of it, finding the edges. It shortened the effective distance between him and whatever he was closing on — that was the mechanical description and it was accurate as far as it went. But the sensation of using it was not the sensation of moving quickly. Something happened in the interval that the description didn't cover. He couldn't hold the thought cleanly enough to examine it. It kept slipping.

  He noted it as an open problem and let it sit.

  He came back to camp each night and was present enough that the group didn't raise it. He ate communally when there was food. He answered direct questions. The group had learned fairly quickly that his skill selections were not a productive line of inquiry.

  Sophie had been working on the staff footwork, quietly, in the evenings. He watched her run a sequence against a tree on Day 4 and stopped.

  "Back foot's wrong," he said.

  She stopped. "Show me."

  He did. She ran it again. Got it on the second attempt.

  "How do you see that," she said.

  "I notice how things move."

  She looked at him sideways. "You're going to be good at this."

  "You are," he said. "Not me. I already know what I'm doing."

  She laughed. He hadn't been aiming for it but didn't mind.

  "Dungeon," Joel said. Day 5, valley floor.

  He'd found it — a stone formation where the system icon hung in the air above it without pretending to be anything other than what it was. A door. An invitation with teeth.

  "How hard?" Rhys asked.

  "It's not saying."

  "Good."

  Marcus looked between them. "Neither of you are concerned."

  "I'm a little concerned," Joel said honestly. "But I'm going anyway."

  Six of them. Sophie, Marcus, Dani, Joel, Rhys, and a quiet woman named Priya who'd said almost nothing in five days and had levelled fast and clean, which Rhys respected. The dungeon swallowed them.

  It didn't pretend to be a cave or a ruin. Stone corridors. Torchlight from no visible source. The system had stopped performing.

  First room: eight Tunnel Crawlers. Low and fast, built for enclosed spaces. The group handled them with the momentum of people who'd been building toward exactly this kind of test. Sophie caved in the skull of one that got through the line, efficient and without drama. Rhys revised his estimate of her upward.

  Second room was harder.

  Larger Crawlers, from the ceiling, before the group had fully entered. The formation broke. Everyone was in individual trouble simultaneously and Rhys stopped counting and just moved — to wherever the weight was worst, then the next worst, then the next. He took a hit across the shoulder in the process that split his jacket and would colour badly by morning.

  The room took four minutes.

  The boss chamber was past a door that made no attempt to be subtle about being a boss chamber.

  The Ironback Sentinel stood in the centre and the first thing Rhys registered was the weight of it. Two and a half metres. Dense overlapping armour plates grown directly out of its body — a second skeleton fused over the first, solid across the back and sides and shoulders. It moved like something that had made peace with being slow a very long time ago and had spent that time making slowness irrelevant.

  "Fire?" Dani said, looking at Marcus.

  Marcus threw a bolt at its chest. The fire went away. Not absorbed, not deflected — it simply ceased to exist in the Sentinel's vicinity, which then turned its attention to Marcus and began moving toward him with the patient weight of something that had never needed to hurry.

  Sophie hit it in the leg joint. Full rotation behind the strike, technically good. The Sentinel minded, a little.

  Rhys stayed back and watched it fight.

  It never overextended. Tight rotations, armoured surfaces always toward the threat. Every time it committed to a new target the method was the same — turn, find, close. Turn, find, close.

  And every time it turned, the armour at the throat separated.

  A gap. Maybe two inches. It opened at the end of each rotation and sealed again as the Sentinel found its new target and settled. He timed it. Watched it happen three times.

  The problem was distance. The moment he moved directly toward it the rotation would track him and he'd arrive at the front plate, which was the worst possible surface. He needed to be at the throat during the window, which meant crossing the distance faster than the rotation could account for.

  He watched the Sentinel turn toward Joel and tracked the rotation speed. Watched it happen again with Sophie. Getting the timing. Getting it right in his head before committing.

  Joel's turn. The Sentinel found him and began to rotate.

  Rhys moved.

  [ SPATIAL DISPLACEMENT — ACTIVATE. ]

  The distance crossed wrong. Not fast — the space between where he was and where he needed to be seemed to briefly disagree with itself about how much of it existed, and then he was inside the Sentinel's guard with his fist at the throat and the gap was still open and he hit it once and the second time the armour was already sealing and he hit it anyway and stepped clear before the rotation came back around to him.

  The Sentinel staggered.

  Not down. Staggered. It turned and found him and he was already moving laterally, keeping that motion going, and the weight of the thing was committed to where he'd been and it was slow to adjust. It kept chasing a point that kept not being there.

  Sophie hit the leg joint again. Same spot. This time it buckled — just a degree, not a fall, but the rotation slowed.

  His Essence was gone. He checked the bar and kept moving.

  Two legs. No skill. He crossed the distance and arrived at the throat with a smaller window and a worse tool but the spot was already damaged and he hit it three times and on the third one something gave.

  The Sentinel came down like a building deciding to lie down.

  The room was quiet.

  [ LEVEL UP. ] [ LEVEL UP. ] [ You have reached Level 7. ]

  Rhys stood over it and breathed. His knuckles felt wrong. His shoulder from the second room was very present. His Essence bar was a thin recovering line.

  A title notification appeared:

  [ WALKS UPHILL — Grade 1. ] [ You engage difficulty rather than route around it. ] [ Effect: +5 Willpower. ]

  He looked at it for a moment. The system had watched the fight and named something about it without wanting to be specific. The second approach — no skill, just legs, worse window, same spot — was apparently the part it had found interesting.

  He filed it as worth returning to.

  "How did you move," Marcus said. He was sitting on the floor. Most of them were. "The first time. You crossed the whole room."

  "Skill," Rhys said.

  "Show me."

  Rhys pulled up the description.

  Marcus read it. Was quiet for a moment. "You picked that on Day 1?"

  "Yes."

  "Over Mana Bolt."

  "Yes."

  Marcus looked at the Sentinel on the floor, then back at Rhys. "You're very strange," he said, in the tone of someone delivering a neutral observation.

  "I know," Rhys said.

  That night he sat on the hillside and went through everything carefully.

  [ Name: Rhys | Class: Mage | Tier: E | Level: 7 ]

  [ Strength: 14 | Agility: 16 | Endurance: 14 | Intelligence: 14 | Perception: 11 | Willpower: 36 | Essence: 20 ]

  Intelligence hadn't moved. He hadn't put a single point into it. His Willpower had been sixteen on Day 1. It was thirty-six now, and still climbing fastest.

  He looked at the gap between them for a while.

  The valley was dark below him. Stars doing what stars did when there was nothing competing with them.

  He thought briefly about Cal's question. Whether waiting to feel ready was just another way of never doing anything.

  He wasn't waiting for anything. That was the difference.

  He closed the screen and got some sleep.