What he said was cart.

  What he meant was… technically a cart, if you were being generous and squinting a little.

  The best way I could describe it was that someone had taken the shape of a truck bed, decided that was close enough to a plan, and then built around that idea without ever checking if it made sense. It had handles, which suggested it was meant to be pulled, and a general basket-shaped area that implied it was supposed to carry things. Beyond that, the definition started to get fuzzy.

  The frame itself looked like it was made out of long pieces of firewood. Not boards. Not planks. Firewood. Rough, uneven lengths of wood lashed together with rope in a way that suggested optimism rather than engineering. Everything about it looked temporary, like it had been assembled with the full expectation that it would fail eventually and that future Ephraim would deal with that problem.

  The only parts that didn’t look like they’d splinter if you looked at them wrong were the wheels and the handles. The wheels were smooth, almost polished, and clearly didn’t belong to the rest of the cart. They looked salvaged, pulled from something else entirely. The handles were worn smooth too, rounded by time and constant use, like this awful contraption had been dragged across half the countryside purely through stubbornness.

  I had no idea how the thing was still holding together. It looked like it would collapse into kindling at any moment.

  I glanced up at Ephraim.

  He smiled.

  Not a reassuring smile. More like the kind you give when you already know what the other person is thinking and are enjoying it.

  I started to say something polite. Something along the lines of asking if he was sure this was safe, or if I should be standing this close to it. Ephraim waved me off before I could start, his voice gruff and amused.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Knew you’d be like this. Watch.”

  He stepped to the front of the cart and took hold of the handles. The moment he started to pull, the whole thing came alive in the worst possible way. Wood clattered. Rope creaked. The cart jolted and shuddered like it was actively trying to disassemble itself out of spite.

  Ephraim looked back at me, grinning, and laughed.

  “Alright,” he said. “Enough foolin’. Watch.”

  As he moved forward again, the cart began to glow. Not bright. Not flashy. Just a dull, steady yellow that spread through the wood and rope like warmth sinking into cold hands.

  The clattering stopped.

  The cart didn’t just quiet down. It settled. The wood straightened. The rope tightened. Everything about it looked sturdier, more real, like it had finally decided what it was supposed to be.

  Ephraim kept walking, pulling the cart smoothly now, like it had never threatened to fall apart in the first place. He guided it out from beside the barn, where it had been half-hidden from view, and headed toward the gate with an ease that made it all seem perfectly normal.

  I followed, still staring at the glow, and tried not to think too hard about how much magic it apparently took just to make a cart behave like a cart.

  “It’s a skill,” Ephraim said, cutting in while I was still processing the glowing cart. “[Power Attack]. Just about every [Warrior] you meet round here has it.”

  “Really?” I said. “That seems kind of cool. I guess I just didn’t expect it to work on a cart. I figured it only applied to something you’d actually attack with.”

  “And you ain’t wrong,” he said. “Remember when I told you there’s a lot they don’t bother to explain in skill descriptions?”

  I nodded.

  “[Power Attack],” he continued, “says in the description that it imbues the weapon you’re attacking with full of power. That’s it. No clarification on what counts as a weapon. No explanation of what "power" actually means.”

  He gave the cart an affectionate tug as we walked.

  “Sure, your standard stuff works with it. Swords, clubs, axes, whatever. You can channel it through those just fine. You can also use your hands and feet, which most folks don’t think of as weapons, but they count.”

  I frowned. “Wait,” I said slowly. “You threw a goblin. And it glowed yellow.”

  He barked out a laugh. “Yeah. That’s right.”

  I stared at him.

  “The thing you learn,” he went on, clearly enjoying himself now, “is that the definition of weapon is mostly limited by imagination. And how much mana you’ve got. When I picked that goblin up and threw him, I was usin’ him as a weapon. Charged him up and all.”

  I opened my mouth, then closed it again.

  “Another thing you find out,” Ephraim said, “is that [Power Attack] reinforces whatever you’re usin’ so it don’t just explode. Once you actually attack with it, the effect discharges and makes the impact harder. Roughly speaking, you get maybe a five to fifty percent increase, depending on how much mana you put into it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “And you’re using the cart as a weapon.”

  “That’s right,” he said, smiling as we walked.

  Dude sure did like to smile a lot for someone who I believed was well practiced at killing.

  We were getting close to the front gate now. Silas was there, with Bibi trotting near him. Silas was working a rope mechanism I hadn’t noticed before, loosening it and pulling the gate open with practiced motions.

  “Technically,” Ephraim continued, “I’m using [Power Attack] on the cart at the lowest mana cost I can manage. I’m also technically planning to attack the ground with it at some point.”

  I stopped walking for half a step. “You’re what.”

  “The size and shape of it means it draws more mana than, say, a sword,” he said calmly. “But while it’s charged, the skill reinforces the cart. Keeps it from fallin’ apart. Lets me pull it without it turning into a pile of loose parts.”

  As we passed through the gate, I asked, “So you’re going to have to release it eventually. What happens then?”

  “Well,” he said, “it’ll attack the ground a little. The whole thing’ll shake and sputter. If it falls apart, we tie it back together and fix it as best we can.”

  “Oh,” I said. Then another thought hit me. “Wait. This uses mana. Aren’t you worried about running out?”

  He snorted. “Once you get to my level, you’ve got a decent enough pool. I could keep this up for hours with what I’ve got in the bank.”

  He glanced sideways at me. “But enough about me showing off. You said you had questions. Looked like you were makin’ a list on that metal plate of yours.”

  “Oh. Yeah,” I said.

  I reached for my phone out of habit, then thought better of it and let my hand drop. Instead, I started pulling the questions from memory.

  Ephraim steered us along the inside of the fence line until it opened onto what looked like a well-traveled road. Worn. Packed down. Used enough that it felt permanent.

  I kept walking beside him.

  “So,” I said, “I can’t believe I didn’t ask this sooner. We got teleported to this world. Is there a way back?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  I blinked. “What?”

  That was not the answer I was expecting. I’d assumed this was one of those situations where you get stuck in another world and that’s just it. You adapt, you survive. Roll credits on an eighties TV show or a bad anime.

  “Yeah,” Ephraim said. “There are quite a few ways.”

  I waited.

  “The problem,” he added, “is that they’re all incredibly hard.”

  Ah. There it is.

  “The one everyone fixates on,” he said, “is getting’ access to a [Wish] spell. Only issue is it usually doesn’t even show up on a caster’s sheet as an option until after level 100. And the requirements are insane.”

  Of course they are.

  “You need rare materials,” he continued. “Parts from powerful beasts. Specific components. And even then, I think you can only cast it once a year.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That figures.”

  “There are other methods,” he said. “High-end [Teleportation] spells and things like that. Same problem. Extremely high level. Extremely resource intensive. Most of them also need some kind of anchor, typically.”

  “Anchor?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Something that allows a reference point. You don’t usually find something like a location stone keyed to your home planet just lyin’ around.”

  I sighed. “Right. Of course.”

  “It’s interesting,” Ephraim said, “because you do hear stories. Folks who made it back. You start asking around towns, talking to travelers, and you’ll hear ’em.”

  I looked over at him. “But?”

  “But,” he agreed, “you don’t really hear stories about people coming’ back again.”

  That thought settled in my chest heavier than I expected.

  “Yeah,” Ephraim said. “The people who supposedly made it back. Some of them went prepared to return.”

  I glanced over at him.

  “They went home with a plan,” he continued. “Get technology. Knowledge. Maybe even other people. Then come back here better equipped. You’d be surprised how many people are happy here and make a life, or those that see any opportunity if they had just that one thing from home.”

  That made a depressing amount of sense.

  “Most people,” he said, “don’t exactly plan on getting’ teleported to another world. So you get a lot of folks who arrive wearing whatever they had on for your normal day. No books. No reference material. Just vague regret that they didn’t grab something’ useful.”

  I snorted softly. “I would have killed for a survival handbook.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “So some of ’em go back carrying a magic scroll, or a statue, or some enchanted trinket. Something they think will help ’em bridge the gap. And then they don’t come back.”

  I felt my stomach tighten. “You’d hear about it.”

  Ephraim nodded. “You definitely would. Folks are always on the lookout for new stuff like that. New knowledge. New techniques. New anything.”

  He was quiet for a few steps.

  “Makes you wonder,” he said finally, “whether we can even survive back on our home Earths anymore.”

  He lifted one hand and made a vague gesture behind him, like he was waving at the air itself.

  “Here, my body’s been built around doing’ whatever this yellow energy is,” he said. “It flows through me. Feeds into everything I do.”

  I didn’t like where this was going.

  “I don’t know if I’m built to survive without it anymore,” he went on. “I don’t know if whatever keeps me moving like this here even exists back there. And I worry that if I ever went home, I’d be like a fish out of water. Just struggling’ to breathe till I stop movin’.”

  I stared ahead at the road.

  “Well,” I said after a moment, “shit. That’s a thought.”

  “Yep,” he said, nodding. “A thought.”

  He shook himself, like he’d wandered too far down a path he didn’t want to keep walking.

  “Alright,” he said after a quiet moment. “You said you had more questions.”

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  I did. And now that I stopped to think about them, most of them were really about me. Oh well.

  “So,” I said, “I’ve got a language jammed into my head. Common, you said.”

  He nodded.

  “Is there a question comin’?” he asked.

  I frowned, trying to put it into words. “I tried thinking in my home language. English. And it was harder than I expected. Like I had to push for it. But I was able to read and write in my home language Did my brain break or something?”

  He snorted. “Not exactly. I don’t have all the details, but the way it seems to work is this like I said before. The new language gets shoved in like it’s always been there. Like you grew up with it.”

  “And the old one?”

  “Gets harder,” he said. “You got to work to keep it. Practice it. And that’s hard when you’re probably never gonna meet someone who speaks anything’ close to it.”

  I frowned again.

  “Everyone here comes from a parallel Earth,” he said, “but there are a lot of parallels. A lot of languages. Even what you call Eng-lish. You’ll hear folks complain all the time that they can’t quite remember a poem, or a song, or a play. Or even a joke that just doesn’t work in this language.”

  That hit closer than I liked.

  “Having something written down like you do,” he added, “or something physical tied to it, hang onto it. That helps.”

  “Okay,” I said quietly.

  I filed that note away for later, right next to the growing list of things I wished I’d thought to bring with me.

  We kept walking as I worked through the rest of my questions. By now, the farm was well behind us, reduced to a smudge of buildings in the distance. We were out in rolling fields, the kind that looked gentle until you remembered how much effort it took to cross them on foot.

  To my left, I could still see the edge of the forest. The same one where we’d fought goblins not that long ago. Ahead of us, the road sloped toward rocky hills, darker stone breaking through the earth like the land was getting tired of pretending to be soft.

  There was a sharp chitter from the grass.

  I barely had time to turn my head before a blur of brown shot toward us, low and fast, teeth bared in a way no squirrel should ever look. I froze for half a second out of sheer disbelief.

  Ephraim made that sound.

  It was short and sharp and wrong, like a noise meant for animals not people. The squirrel skidded mid-charge and snapped its attention toward him instead.

  He stepped forward and slapped it out of the air.

  The body hit the ground and did not move again.

  Ephraim kept walking.

  I hurried to catch up, glancing back once just to make sure it was really over.

  “So,” I said after a moment, “that just happens.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Gets worse closer to dungeons.”

  I nodded and decided not to dwell on it.

  “So,” I said, “can we talk again what’s actually near us. Location-wise.”

  Ephraim nodded. “Closest place is New Town. It’s north of here.”

  “New Town,” I repeated.

  “We’ll probably head there tomorrow,” he said. “Fair warning though. It’s rough. The place is basically built around new arrivals. You’ll find army recruiters everywhere. Scouts. People looking to scoop up talent before someone else does.”

  That didn’t sound comforting.

  “Keep your head on a swivel,” he added. “But it’s decent enough. It’s called New Town because that’s where most new people end up. There’re about a dozen of them scattered around. They tend to pop up near wherever people get dropped into this world.”

  “Okay,” I said. “And beyond that.”

  “There are several bigger cities farther north.”

  “Gearhaven,” he said. “Honestly, I like that place. Mathilde preferred the country though. And sometimes it really is safer living out on your own.”

  He said that last part casually, considering what I suspected he meant.

  “You’re gonna have people trying to kill you whenever they can,” he continued. “It sucks waking up in the middle of the night to find an [Assassin] standing over you.”

  Yup, it was what I thought, being near more people meant more people trying to kill you. I stared straight ahead. “Good to know.”

  “Gearhaven’s run by tech-leaning folks,” he said. “That’s one way to put it. They’ve got a real police force. Systems. Rules. It’s safer. Calmer.”

  He glanced at me. “Honestly, that’s probably where you’d want to end up. There are places there where a [Bard] like you could actually make a living. Taverns. Performance halls. That kind of thing.”

  I nodded. I liked the sound of that. “How far,” I asked.

  “Two or three weeks on foot if you don’t rush.”

  I immediately liked the sound of that less.

  “Okay,” I said. “And the other city. Toward the mainland. We’re on a peninsula, right?”

  “Yep,” he said, then sighed. “That one’s called Raven City.”

  I grimaced. “Ruled by… the Raven Bitch.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s her.”

  I hesitated. “Is that something I shouldn’t say out loud?”

  “No,” he said flatly. “Everyone calls her that. To her face, even. She doesn’t flinch. Pain in the ass she is.”

  “Right,” I said. “But she’s powerful.”

  He slowed a little. “Yeah. Very.”

  We walked in silence for a few steps before he spoke again.

  “You mentioned the people who showed up at the lake,” he said. “The ones hunting you. They said something about a re-roller, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “What is that?”

  “Well,” he said, “you know how every Earth supposedly has some kind of entry ticket. Something that pulls whoever finds it into this world.”

  “Yes,” I said, already not liking where this was going.

  “There’s one here too.”

  I almost tripped. “What.”

  “Yeah,” he said, like this was completely normal. “There’s an entry point on this world. If you find it, it sends you to the white room and you roll for a class again.”

  “That makes zero sense,” I said as I hurried to catch up.

  “It does once you get used to it,” he said. “You can’t roll the same class twice. You get sent back to a starting zone, forest, desert, whatever, and you come back with a new class.”

  “And the old one?” I asked.

  “You keep it.”

  I blinked. “So… multiclassing.”

  He tilted his head. “I guess you could call it that. Never heard it called that before.”

  “But,” he continued, “you come back at level one. All your stats reset to ten. You’re basically as strong as the day you first arrived.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s not great.”

  He chuckled. “Here’s the trick. As you level, you regain your old stats at the same levels you earned them before. And you get new stats from the new class on top of that.”

  My brain finally caught up. “Oh.”

  “You also get your old starting skills back too,” he said. “At the same levels. Come back at the same mastery. Some are harder to use until your stats catch back up, but they’re still there. And when you hit level ten, twenty, and so on, you unlock the same abilities again. Old class abilities plus new ones from the new class.”

  “So,” I said slowly, “you end up being what. Twice as strong.”

  He snorted. “At least.”

  Then his tone shifted just a little.

  “But the only people who tend to find that entry point,” he said, “are already monsters. Level one hundred and up.”

  My stomach tightened.

  “And if they die after re-rolling,” he said, “whoever kills them gets the experience for whatever level they were.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “And now they’re weaker,” I continued, the thought turning sour in my mouth, “and missing abilities.”

  “Yep.”

  He kept his eyes on the road. “That’s why places like your spawning field attract hunters. They’re hoping to catch someone fresh off a re-roll, at least while the are looking for new spawns to try to recruit to whoever is sponsoring them. One kill can mean fifty or sixty levels instantly for a low-level person.”

  I swallowed. Damn.

  Then the last piece slid into place.

  “Wait,” I said. “So the Raven… bitch. She’s re-rolled.”

  He didn’t answer right away. He must have noticed how tight my shoulders were getting while talking about the name because he glanced over and sighed.

  “You don’t have to call her that,” he said. “You can call her Margaret Atwood. Or [Lord] Atwood, if you want to be formal.”

  “[Lord]?” I said. “As in… a class?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “One of them.”

  I frowned. “One of them,” I repeated. “As in more than two.”

  He nodded. “More than two.”

  I stumbled again. “How many?”

  Instead of answering directly, he said, “The story goes like this. She came here like everyone else. Rolled a [Rogue]. Nothing special. Survived. Leveled. Didn’t stand out much.”

  That somehow made it worse in my head.

  “At a high enough level,” he continued, “she picked up a skill called [Adventurer’s Nose].”

  “That sounds… cute,” I said carefully.

  “It’s not,” he said. “It’s rare. Really rare. Let's you smell things that matter. Treasure. Secrets. Mysteries. Stuff that shouldn’t be easy to find.”

  My stomach dropped. “She used it to find the entry point.”

  “Yep.”

  He let out a laugh that had absolutely no humor in it.

  “She used it more than once just for that.”

  I stared at him. “How many times?”

  He looked at me sideways. “You remember how I said this world is built around 10s.”

  “Oh,” I said quietly, understanding.

  “She has ten classes,” he confirmed. “And now she’s level 123.”

  My brain locked up for a second while I tried to make the math behave.

  “So stat-wise,” I said slowly, “she’s what. Equivalent to two hundred to three hundred normal people.”

  “At least,” he said.

  “And she’s got over a hundred skills—”

  “Abilities,” he corrected.

  I swallowed. “Right. Abilities.”

  “Like I said,” Ephraim went on, “one of the most powerful people on this planet. And one of the scariest.”

  I exhaled slowly. “So why the ‘Raven’ nickname?”

  He glanced ahead, then back at me.

  “One of her classes is a [Druid],” he said. “She picked up an ability that ties her to ravens. Real ones.”

  “Oh.”

  “And it scales with stats,” he added. “So her city is basically a massive roost. Ravens everywhere.”

  I hesitated. “Does she… see through them?”

  He shook his head. “From what I hear, not really. She barely pays attention to them. She’s got that [Lord] class, so really doesn’t need to. Territory authority. Ruler-type stuff.”

  I waited for more.

  “She got her last class about 90 years ago,” he said. “Planted herself in that city and more or less stopped caring about the rest of the world.”

  “Huh. Do you know why?” I asked.

  “Rumor is,” he said, “once she hit her 10th class, she just got bored.”

  That landed harder than anything else he’d said so far.

  “She keeps the Empire and the Necro Kingdom from pushing too hard,” he continued. “They mostly leave her alone. Her city basically is a free-for-all.”

  “That sounds… bad.”

  “It is,” he said. “It’s lawless. The only real rule is don’t mess with the ravens. Everything else is fair game.”

  I grimaced. “And if someone does? Mess with the ravens, I mean.”

  His expression darkened.

  “Then you have to worry about [Lord] Atwood’s right hand.”

  He walked a few steps in silence, then spoke again like he’d been weighing whether to say this at all.

  “Remember when I told you there are a lot of classes out there.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And most of them are straightforward. [Warrior]s hit things. [Mage]s throw magic. [Rogue]s steal. The name usually tells you what you’re dealing with.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well,” he said, “some classes are… out there.”

  I waited.

  “Rule of thumb,” he went on. “The weirder the class, the more dangerous it tends to be.”

  That did nothing for my mood.

  “You’ve got the [Twinmind] class,” he said. “People with it think like there are two minds running at once. Twice the thinking speed. Twice the options.”

  “Combat focused?” I asked.

  “Everything focused actually,” he said. “Entirely mental. Every ability boosts cognition. Prediction. Pattern recognition. If you run into one, odds are they already know your next five moves.”

  I grimaced. “That’s terrifying.”

  “Incredibly dangerous,” he agreed. “Then there are the [Clown]s.”

  I blinked. “I’m sorry. What.”

  “Yeah,” he said flatly. “Face paint and nightmares. Logic stops working around them. As long as what they’re doing is a ‘joke’ to them, reality bends to make it work.”

  I pictured a Bugs Bunny cartoon. “Immortal?” I asked carefully.

  “Functionally,” he said. “Also creepy as hell.”

  I opened my mouth, then closed it again.

  At some point during the conversation, the farm had vanished from view. I hadn’t noticed when it happened. One moment it had been there behind us, familiar and solid, and now it was gone, swallowed by a rise in the land.

  Another squirrel jumped from the grass only to encounter the backhand of death.

  “But the scariest one,” Ephraim said, “is [Hivebound].”

  I frowned. “Okay. That’s the first class you’ve mentioned that I don’t even have a guess for.”

  “Not surprised,” he said. “Most Earths have at least some cultural hint for the common classes for some reason. [Hivebound] isn’t one of those. Even people who have heard of it usually only know it from stories meant to scare children or new arrivals.”

  I slowed my steps. “What makes it different?”

  “When someone rolls [Hivebound],” he said, “the white room you were in doesn’t stop at one wheel.”

  I gave him a questioning look.

  “Some classes do that,” he explained. “[Mage]s roll an element. [Priest]s get assigned a god.”

  “And [Hivebound]?”

  “You get assigned a hive.”

  I looked at him. “What does that mean?”

  “Well,” he said, “you get something that lives in a hive. What that is can vary. The idea is loose in a way that makes it worse.”

  He paused. “Most common is bees.”

  I didn’t like the direction this was going. If this conversation had a road signs, here there would one with just be the word “NOPE” in giant letters with “next exit” under it.

  “So,” he continued, “you roll bees. You get dropped into your starting area. And then—”

  He gestured at his torso.

  “—you get hollowed out.”

  I stopped walking entirely.

  “And then,” he finished, stopping too, “you have bees in you.”

  The road stretched ahead toward the hills, empty and quiet like it was giving me space to process that.

  I realized I had to ask. “So. Do they have open wounds or something? Bees like going in and out?”

  “No,” Ephraim said right away. “It’s worse than that.”

  I frowned.

  “There’s some magic reality nonsense involved,” he said. “No wounds. No holes. Not really. Think of it like access points. The hive exists in a pocket that fits between everything else.”

  “That isn't very cool...,” I said for some reason.

  “They can control them,” he went on. “Send them out to attack. Scout. Defend. Gather. The hive moves through those spaces and comes back the same way.”

  “And they don’t feel it, the bees are whatever in them,” I said.

  “Oh, they feel it,” he replied.

  I stopped again, don’t know why I bothered to keep walking. “What.”

  “They feel everything,” he said. “The movement. The pressure. The way it shifts when they breathe or walk. When the hive rearranges itself inside them. Its ridiculously painful”

  My stomach lurched. “Jesus.”

  “Most of them scream at first,” he said. “For days. Longer. A few never stop.”

  I didn’t have anything to say.

  “The hive takes care of them too, even if they try to stop it,” he continued. “Feeds them. Protects them. Heals them. Whatever’s inside goes out, brings things back, and somehow keeps the host alive.”

  I swallowed. “So even if they want to die…”

  “It won’t let them,” he said. “Not easily. Starving doesn’t work. Bleeding doesn’t work. Other creatures get driven off.”

  He looked ahead at the road.

  “People try to kill them when they find them,” he said quietly. “Usually out of mercy. It’s one of the few times you’ll see that here.”

  We walked in silence for a few steps.

  “That’s really messed up,” I said.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “It is.”

  I forced myself to keep going, mostly because stopping felt worse. “You said bees were just one option. What else?”

  He shrugged, and the motion sent a small shudder through the cart like it was reacting on instinct.

  “Bees are the most common,” he said. “Wasps too. Ants. Termites. Flies.”

  “Ugh,” I muttered before I could stop myself.

  “Crabs and spiders too” he added. “Like I said, the definition of a hive in the system is… flexible.”

  That word again. Flexible. I didn’t like it the first time, and I liked it even less now.

  “Anyway,” he continued, like he hadn’t just ruined insects for me forever, “If you haven’t guessed, [Lord] Atwood’s right hand is [Hivebound].”

  “One of the rare ones who didn’t break,” he went on. “Fought through the pain. Stayed sane. That alone makes them dangerous.”

  “I can imagine,” I said. “Anyone who can just send creatures at you like that—”

  “And the hive scales,” he cut in. “As you level, it grows stronger. Tougher. Bigger. More creatures. From what I understand, it roughly doubles every few levels.”

  I let out a slow breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “So who’s her right hand?”

  “Goes by the name Yellow,” Ephraim said.

  I blinked.

  “He’s got butterflies.”

  I laughed before my brain caught up. “Seriously?”

  Ephraim didn’t smile.

  “Don’t.”

  The laughter died in my throat.

  “As you level the [Hivebound] class,” he said, “the creatures change. Stronger. Faster. Sharper. Yellow’s butterflies have razor-edged wings.”

  I pictured it despite myself. Bright colors. Soft shapes. Cutting flesh apart like paper.

  “I’ve seen the aftermath,” he said. “Bodies just… covered. Thousands of cuts on cuts. Like someone ran them through a storm of razor blades.”

  I stared ahead at the road, my steps a little slower now.

  This is a really messed-up world, I thought, and the thought didn’t feel dramatic so much as deeply practical.

  After a moment, Ephraim spoke again, quieter. “Mind if we walk in silence for a bit? That one brought up some bad memories.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s fine. I think I need a moment too.”

  We walked without talking. The hills rolled on around us, low and uneven, the wind carrying the smell of dirt and stone. The forest slowly pulled farther away until it felt distant, like something we’d left behind on purpose rather than escaped.

  After about an hour, the road split. Ephraim didn’t hesitate before taking the narrower fork. Another half hour passed as the land grew rougher, the path thinning until it was barely more than packed dirt between stones.

  Then we rounded a bend.

  The cave mouth yawned open in the hillside, dark and jagged, like the land itself had been bitten and never healed. The air around it felt wrong, cooler somehow, carrying a faint smell that reminded me of wet fur and old metal.

  I looked over at Ephraim. “That’s the dungeon, isn’t it?”

  “Yep,” he said, and there was something like relief in his voice, like we’d finally reached the part of the day he understood.

  A goblin burst out of the cave, shrieking.

  Then another.

  Then several more spilled out behind it, tripping over each other as they charged.

  Ephraim grinned, the earlier heaviness gone in an instant. He shifted his grip, then let go of the cart entirely. It hit the ground with a solid bang that made dust jump.

  “Oh yeah,” he said, rolling his shoulders like this was a warm-up.

  “Time to have some fun.”