I woke up to water being splashed straight into my face and jolted upright with a choking gasp, coughing and blinking as cold droplets ran down my nose and into my mouth while the smell of hay and old wood hit me all at once. As my vision cleared enough to focus, I realized I was inside a barn, the kind built for use rather than comfort, with rough beams, unpainted planks, and gaps in the boards where light filtered through in thin lines.

  The warrior stood over me holding an empty bucket, water still dripping from the rim, while the mage lingered behind him with her arms crossed and her expression locked somewhere between irritation and judgment. I tried to shift my legs under me and immediately discovered that my arms were bound behind my back, thick rope digging into my wrists and holding me tight against a wooden post with absolutely no slack. I tested it once and felt nothing move.

  Also, I was naked.

  That realization landed a moment late, like my mind had tried to shield me from it out of self-preservation before giving up. I looked down just long enough to confirm it and then very deliberately looked away, because if I was going to die in a barn I did not want my last memory to be making eye contact with my own misery.

  I forced myself to take in my surroundings instead. To one side were livestock stalls, empty for the moment, with packed dirt floors and scuffed boards that showed years of use. On the other side was storage, rough wooden boxes held together with pegs, bins filled with dried feed meant for animals larger than anything I had seen inside so far. There was no metal shelving, no clean edges, nothing that looked manufactured elsewhere. Everything here had been built by hand and repaired by hand, which somehow made the situation feel more real and more permanent.

  A polite cough pulled my attention back to the warrior.

  He set the bucket down slowly and straightened, his posture relaxed but controlled, the way someone stands when they know they are not the one in danger. When he spoke his voice was calm and deliberate, as if he was following a routine.

  “So,” he said in his gruff voice, “let’s get this off to a proper start. My name is Ephraim, and this lovely lady behind me is Mathilde.”

  I continued sitting there, tied to a post, dripping water, and very aware of my lack of clothing, staring up at him while my brain scrambled to figure out how I was supposed to respond. I felt like I should say something polite or reassuring or at least human, but believe it or not I had never been tied naked to a post in a barn before and had no prepared script for the occasion.

  A small, uncertain “Okay” slipped out before I could stop it.

  He nodded once, apparently satisfied.

  “This is what will happen next,” he said, beginning to pace slowly across the packed dirt floor. “Based on your outfit and what you had on you, you appear to be someone completely new to this world. That alone does not make you harmless. We will decide that. We will ask questions, and you will answer. Yes?”

  I stared at him with my mouth slightly open, the delayed realization finally settling in that this felt disturbingly close to a torture scene from a movie, except with farmers and magic and me as the unlucky extra tied to a post. When I did not respond, he reached behind his back and pulled out my dagger, holding it up where I could see it clearly.

  “Do you understand?” he asked.

  Before I could even manage a nod, he flicked his wrist.

  The dagger flew through the air and buried itself in the wooden post beside my head with a heavy impact that made the wood shudder. The blade vibrated for a moment before slowly settling, and I stared at it from inches away as my heart tried to escape my chest.

  “Yes,” I said quickly, nodding hard. “Yes, I understand.”

  “Good,” he replied.

  Behind him, Mathilde scoffed and turned away, moving toward a table I had not noticed before where all my belongings had been laid out in rough piles. She sat down and immediately began sorting through my things with quick, practiced movements, checking pockets and examining items like she was inventorying contraband.

  The warrior stopped pacing and faced me again.

  “First question,” he said. “Read us your status page. Leave nothing out.”

  “Okay,” I said, because apparently that was my only useful word today, and I pulled up my status screen and began reading.

  Abilities:

  · Musical Resonant Frequency (Level 19)

  · Influence Immunity (Level N/A)

  · Magic Mouth (Level 29)

  · Vicious Mockery (Level 1)

  · Magical Berry (Level 1)

  May you find your Fortune on Fortune!

  I read it line by line exactly as it appeared, starting with my name and class, then my level, experience, and stats, doing my best to keep my voice steady while hoping very hard that honesty was the correct answer here.

  When it came time to go through my abilities, I listed each one carefully and in order, choosing my words with more thought than I liked, because it was suddenly very clear that details mattered here. The only adjustment I made was leaving out Influence Immunity entirely, replacing it instead with the original [Adonis Quintessence] ability I had first received and explaining that it had been removed by what I described as the admin people, which felt like the safest way to phrase it without inviting follow-up questions I did not want to answer.

  As I spoke, the warrior’s face stayed completely neutral. No nodding. No reaction. Nothing at all until I reached [Magic Mouth] and mentioned that it was level twenty-nine, at which point one eyebrow lifted slightly before settling back into place like it had never moved. He did not interrupt. He did not comment. He just stared at me once I finished.

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  The silence stretched.

  Ten seconds passed. Then fifteen. By the time twenty rolled around I could feel my skin crawling and my nerves buzzing, the urge to fill the space building until I could not stand it anymore.

  “I’m sorry,” I started. “Was there more you—”

  SLAP

  He was in front of me faster than my eyes could track, his hand already pulling back from my face as the impact sent stars exploding across my vision. My head lolled forward and I felt drool spill from my mouth before I could stop it, my jaw ringing like it had been struck with a bell. I probed my teeth with my tongue in a flash of panic and was briefly shocked to find them all still there, which was when it clicked that [Magic Mouth] was quietly doing its job whether I liked it or not.

  “I ask the questions,” the warrior growled. “Not you.”

  He stepped back several feet like nothing had happened.

  “Tell me how you got here,” he said.

  So I did.

  I started with the wedding. With traveling. With killing time in an airport and playing a game that had no business doing what it did. I avoided mentioning airplanes or Las Vegas outright and stuck to vague terms like city and travel, watching his face closely as I spoke, but he gave me nothing in return beyond that same unreadable stare.

  I talked about waking up in the field and learning very quickly that the squirrels were not normal, about scrambling to figure out food and accidentally summoning twenty-seven thousand hostile animals before somehow managing to kill them all in a pond. I explained that I left after that and saw ne'er-do-wells arrive, then watched them kill their own leader, which was when I decided staying nearby was a bad idea.

  I told him about following the stream and climbing the cliff, and then about killing the warrior at the top. That part made my stomach twist, because I had no idea how killing someone of his class would land, but his face stayed completely blank. That massive beard hid everything.

  I talked about crossing the empty plains and entering the forest, about the quiet and then the chase.

  That finally got his attention.

  Mathilde stopped sorting through my belongings and picked up the chair she had been sitting on, dragging it closer before sitting down directly in front of me with her full focus locked on my face.

  I told them about the first forest nymph and how she tried to kill me, about both of us ending up on the ground screaming, and about how I fought through it and bashed her head in with my boot because I did not have another option.

  Then I told them about the two more forest nymphs that appeared and how the same feedback loop happened again, how it overwhelmed them the same way, and how I had killed them because there was no other way out. From there I moved on to being teleported away and my encounter with the admins, explaining that they had fixed something that was wrong with me even though I did not understand what it was at the time before sending me back.

  The mage let out a loud scoff at that, the sound sharp and dismissive, but the warrior raised a hand slightly and paused the moment.

  “Wait,” he said, then stood there thinking for a few seconds. “What were the classes and levels over their heads in that room?”

  That question caught me off guard and I had to actually dig through my memory, replaying the moment in my head while my pulse thudded in my ears. I came up empty.

  “I’m sorry,” I said carefully. “I don’t think there was anything above their names. If there was, I didn’t see it.”

  He nodded once, accepting the answer without comment.

  “Continue.”

  I went on, describing how I had been sent back and immediately encountered the nymph matriarch, how I was certain I was about to die, and how the same feedback that had saved me before never triggered. I explained how I started talking instead, how I somehow managed to get close enough to her to bite her, how she flung me away, and how I tore a massive chunk out of her throat before watching her die. I mentioned that afterward my [Magic Mouth] ability had jumped several levels all at once.

  The mage cut in sharply. “Describe the area where that happened.”

  I told her it was an open section of forest, maybe a hundred feet across, trampled and broken like it had been used for something important.

  “What did you do with the bodies?” she asked immediately.

  “The bodies?” I repeated before realizing my mistake and rushing on. “I left them there. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  The warrior grunted and glanced at the mage, who nodded slightly.

  “Go on.”

  I talked about following the trail the matriarch had left and finding the corpse piles. As I described them, the warrior’s face tightened just a little, and I guessed he knew exactly what that place smelled like. I explained how I searched the cave, how almost everything was rotten and useless, and how I found the dagger after hitting my head on it.

  “Anything else?” the warrior asked.

  I sighed. “Yes,” I said, then told them about the armor, how I used magic on it without understanding what I was doing, how it crumbled to dust, and how that somehow resulted in a mouth appearing on the dagger.

  At that, the warrior stepped closer and looked at the dagger still embedded in the post near my head. He pulled it free, examined it carefully, then placed it on the dirt between us.

  “Make the mouth appear,” he said.

  I swallowed. “Dagger,” I said. “Open your mouth.”

  The surface of the blade rippled and the mouth slowly formed along the side, lips emerging first and settling into place, closed but unmistakably human, moist and unsettling enough that an entirely unhelpful memory of The Rocky Horror Picture Show surfaced in my head at the worst possible time.

  Both the warrior and the mage stared down at the dagger lying in the dirt, then slowly lifted their eyes to each other, and in that brief exchange I could tell an entire conversation had just happened without a single word being spoken. Before I could even process what that meant, the warrior bent down, grabbed the dagger by the handle, and hurled it straight up into the rafters with a casual flick of his arm.

  I jerked my head back and looked up just in time to see the blade bury itself into one of the ceiling beams nearly twenty feet above us, the impact sending a dull thud through the barn as it stuck fast and quivered before going still.

  The warrior watched it for a moment, clearly satisfied it was not going anywhere, then looked back down at me and rolled one hand in a slow circular motion.

  “Keep talking,” he said.

  So I did.

  I explained how after the mouth appeared on the dagger I had looked around, noticed tracks, and followed them until I stumbled into the fight with the goblins, the bison, and him. I told him how I used sound to draw the goblins off and how everything after that was something he already knew firsthand. By the time I finished, there was nothing left to add.

  The warrior and the mage exchanged another look, and this one felt heavier somehow, like they were measuring something instead of just sharing information. Then they both turned their attention back to me.

  The mage stepped forward and locked eyes with me in a way that made it very clear she expected a real answer.

  “Why did you jump in to help,” she asked.

  I hesitated for a second, searching for something smarter or safer to say, but nothing came, so I told the truth.

  “Because it felt like the right thing to do.”

  They looked at each other again.

  SLAP

  Stars exploded across my vision as my head snapped to the side and my gaze dropped to the dirt. Before I could recover, a familiar arm slid around my neck and tightened with practiced control, cutting off my air as panic flared uselessly in my chest.

  Then everything went black. Again.

  When I woke again, it was night.

  Moonlight filtered faintly through the slats in the barn walls, thin pale lines cutting across the darkness, and it took me a few seconds to remember where I was and why my body felt like it had been filled with sand. I was still tied to the post and still very naked, and this time there was no one else in the barn with me.

  I tested the ropes slowly and carefully, finding them just as tight and unforgiving as before, then awkwardly worked my way up to standing so I could turn as much as the bindings allowed and get a better look around. There was nothing nearby. Just open space and packed dirt beneath my feet, which made it clear that leaving me here alone had been very intentional.

  After a while my shoulders started to burn and my arms went numb, and that was when I realized how thirsty and hungry I was. The idea of calling out for water crossed my mind briefly before I dismissed it as a terrible plan and another way to get slapped again.

  It took longer than I would like to admit for me to remember that I had a spell that could solve at least part of that problem.

  I cast Magical Berry and immediately realized the flaw in my plan when the berry appeared in my hand, which was still tied securely behind my back. What followed was a long, frustrating process of dropping it, nudging it across the dirt with my toes in the dark, and then lowering myself as far as I could until I finally managed to get it into my mouth.

  Once the hunger and thirst faded, I sat there in the quiet and thought about my options, which were not great. I was naked. My hands were tied. I had no instrument. Trying to chew through the support post seemed like a fast way to collapse the barn on myself, and yelling for help felt like it would only make things worse.

  I even tried calling out to the dagger stuck somewhere above me, asking if it could free itself, but all I heard were faint gumming noises in the darkness, and after an hour of that I told it to stop.

  Then I waited.

  God help me, I was exhausted.

  Whatever adrenaline had been keeping me upright finally ran out, and I did not have the energy left to plan an escape or even pretend I might manage one. After sitting there for a long time staring at nothing, I lowered myself down onto the hard-packed dirt as carefully as I could and tried to find a position that hurt the least, which was not saying much. Eventually my body made the decision for me, and despite everything, I drifted into sleep.

  I woke with a sharp inhale.

  Daylight streamed through the slats in the barn walls, brighter than before, and the heavy barn door that had been closed was suddenly slammed open with enough force to make the hinges groan. I froze where I stood as the warrior and the mage walked in together.

  They were dragging something behind them.

  It took a second for my brain to register what I was seeing, and when it did my stomach tightened. The bodies of the four nymphs I had killed scraped across the dirt floor, limbs limp and awkward. From this distance I could see their eyes clearly, black and empty now, the strange glow that once filled them completely gone.

  I did not move. I barely breathed.

  They stopped about twenty feet away and let the bodies drop. The sound was dull and final. Then the warrior walked toward me. My muscles locked as he passed behind me, every instinct screaming even though my body had nothing left to give.

  Instead of pain, I felt the rope loosen.

  The pressure vanished from my wrists as the bindings were cut away, and before I could even process that, the mage stepped up in front of me and thrust something into my hands. A blanket. Rough and heavy. She was still scowling, but there was something different there now, something less sharp.

  I wrapped it around myself without thinking.

  “I…” I started.

  The warrior raised a hand to stop me.

  “Sorry about that,” he said, his voice calm in a way that felt almost surreal after everything else.

  He looked at me for a moment, really looked at me, then tilted his head slightly.

  “Breakfast?”