James materialised in the grey void and counted them before the light finished fading.
Four strangers appeared around him in white flashes. He had their loadouts read before any of them opened their mouths. A long sword with a guild crest stamped into the scabbard guard. A short sword sitting too far forward on its owner's hip. A wooden staff held in both hands, white-knuckled. A bow already half-raised, pointing at nothing, the instinct to aim at a threat that wasn't there yet.
Hyun-Woo introduced himself first. Long sword, expensive leather armour that fit too well to have come off a shelf, a guild insignia on his pauldron in copper-coloured enamel. He stood with his arms crossed and his chin forward, and his whole posture said that someone had spent a long time and a great deal of money on his training and he was aware of that.
Lars was German, glasses, short sword, cheap armour. He spoke quickly and kept touching the hilt of his blade in a way that said he'd trained with it but hadn't drawn it recently enough for the grip to feel natural yet.
Sofia introduced herself without meeting anyone's eyes. Dark hair, brown skin, cloth robes, wooden staff. Her knuckles were still white around it. She was scared, but she was standing and talking through it, and James noted the difference.
Amara had a bow over her shoulder and a quiver at her hip and was already scanning the grey void for exits that weren't there. She was frightened but functioning, and functioning was what mattered.
James told them his name and his class when they asked. Two of them reacted to Necromancer. He didn't explain it.
Hyun-Woo looked at James's iron sword and wooden shield and his expression moved briefly before settling back to flat. Not contempt exactly. Assessment, and the conclusion that assessment had reached, kept to himself.
James kept his own conclusion to himself as well. No tank. No healer. One person who actually knew how to fight, one who probably could, two who were going to be a problem. And him, who needed everyone else to start dying before he was useful.
Hyun-Woo called them to attention. "I take point. Archer stays behind me and right. Both mages keep back." He glanced at James's sword. "That includes you."
James nodded.
The System chimed.
[FLOOR 1 — FOREST ZONE] [OBJECTIVE: ELIMINATE ALL HOSTILE ENTITIES] [PROGRESS: 0/50]
White light. Then forest. James stumbled on the landing, caught himself against a tree trunk, and looked around before anyone else finished standing up.
Dense trees in every direction. Grey sky with no sun, no clouds, just flat light that came from everywhere and cast no shadows. The air had the same quality as the Tutorial — no temperature, no smell, the suggestion of outdoors without any of the reality of it. He had stood in this logic before. Different location, same wrongness underneath.
He thought about Liam's HP bar dropping from 56 to 23 to 0 in three seconds. He thought about thirty-five goblins and how close that fight had been.
This floor had fifty.
The treeline moved. Goblins stepped out first and spread wide across the far edge of the clearing, and then the wolves came out behind them. Lower to the ground, slower to emerge, like they already knew they had the advantage and weren't in a rush to prove it.
[HOSTILE ENTITIES DETECTED] [35 GOBLINS — LEVEL 3] [15 DIRE WOLVES — LEVEL 4]
Lars made a sound. Amara stepped back and brought her bow up.
James did the maths before the notification finished rendering. No corpses meant no summons, which meant he was standing in a clearing with an iron sword and a wooden shield that had cost him thirty-five Tower Credits combined, facing fifty enemies, with a class that was completely useless until people started dying. He needed bodies on the ground before he could do anything, and that meant letting someone else make the bodies first and staying alive long enough to use them.
Hyun-Woo moved without waiting and James let him. Lars fell in to his left, already pale. Amara found cover behind a root and nocked an arrow. Hyun-Woo told James and Sofia they were dead weight and to keep out of the way.
James walked to the far edge of the clearing and sat down in the grass.
Sofia stared at him. "Are you serious."
"Yes."
She looked at Hyun-Woo already engaging the first goblins, and then she looked back at James, and then she sat beside him and rested her staff across her knees without saying anything else for a moment.
Metal sounds started from the far end of the clearing. Something shrieked.
Sofia said quietly: "What class are you?"
"Necromancer."
She looked at the bodies beginning to drop at the edge of the treeline. She didn't ask the follow-up question. She had already worked it out.
James watched Hyun-Woo work. The man was genuinely good — clean footwork, minimal wasted motion, each strike aimed at something specific rather than the nearest available thing. Goblins dropped in front of him and he stepped over them and moved to the next without breaking rhythm. Lars stayed close and contributed enough not to die immediately.
[PROGRESS: 5/50] [PROGRESS: 8/50] [PROGRESS: 11/50]
Amara put two arrows into goblins from distance and missed a third. Her hands had stopped shaking.
Eleven down. Thirty-nine left. But eleven was enough to work with.
James got to his feet and told Sofia to stay where she was.
She grabbed his sleeve. "Where are you going."
"Into it." He pulled free and walked toward the nearest corpse.
He was four metres from the body when he saw it.
Three wolves had been working the left edge of the fight for two minutes, circling wide and not committing. Hyun-Woo was pressing through a cluster of goblins at the front and had his back to the right, and two wolves had been sliding around that angle for thirty seconds already, taking their time, waiting for the right moment.
James had the distance to shout. He had the time.
He calculated: if he warned Hyun-Woo now, the wolves pulled back and the goblins kept falling and the floor got harder before he had enough summons to manage it properly. If he said nothing, the wolves hit in the next ten seconds and eleven bodies became thirteen or fourteen and his class became useful before the fight turned against the rest of them.
He was aware that he was standing there calculating this.
He said nothing.
The wolves hit Hyun-Woo from behind, one catching the back of his shoulder and driving him forward and one taking out the back of his thigh, and the goblins he'd been pressing closed around him before he could get his footing back. His sword arm went wide. His HP bar, visible at the edge of James's peripheral interface, dropped fast.
[HP — HYUN-WOO: 412 → 251 → 88 → 0]
[CHALLENGER ELIMINATED — PERMANENT DEATH]
The noise stopped where Hyun-Woo had been and picked up again louder as the enemies spread outward looking for the next target.
James stood still for a moment and looked at what was left. He had known it was going to happen and he had made a choice, and whether that choice was survival or something else that didn't have a clean name yet was a question he filed away without answering.
Thirteen bodies on the floor.
He pulled the first corpse into his storage ring, turned to face the clearing, and brought both hands forward.
"Summon Undead Skeleton."
The ground cracked at his feet. Black energy rose in two columns, thin and cold, pulling upward from the dirt. Two skeletons climbed out of the fissures with dark smoke trailing between their ribs and their eye sockets burning faint green. They straightened to full height and stood still, waiting.
James pointed them at the nearest goblins and they moved.
The first skeleton drove its arm through a goblin's chest before the goblin finished turning toward the sound. The second caught one mid-charge across the side of the skull and the goblin dropped without making a noise.
[PROGRESS: 14/50] [PROGRESS: 15/50]
James moved after them with his sword drawn. Lars was in the grass ten metres away, bleeding from the calf, not moving. Amara had her back against a tree with a knife in her hand and her bow on the ground three metres to her left, and a wolf was circling her with its head low and its eyes fixed on her throat.
No archer meant the wolves closed distance on his skeletons and overwhelmed them and then came for him in melee and he was not built for melee without a tank in front.
He moved between her and the wolf and pulled the shield off his back.
The wolf charged without hesitating. All its weight and all its speed, and there was no room to brace properly. The impact hit the shield full and drove him back two steps. His left arm went completely numb from the shoulder to the fingers and his boots carved parallel lines through the dirt, and then his knees locked and the backward movement stopped and the shield held.
The wolf fell back and shook its head, snarling.
[SKILL UNLOCKED: SHIELD PROFICIENCY (F)] [WOODEN SHIELD (F) — DURABILITY: 61/80]
James breathed through his nose. His arm was still half-dead below the shoulder. The wolf was already circling left, looking for the angle again, and there were thirty-five enemies left in the clearing and his skeletons were on the far side and Sofia was somewhere behind him and Amara still hadn't picked up her bow.
He raised the shield again.