Professor Beck came in at the end of first period with a clipboard and the expression of a man about to send teenagers into a place where they could die.
"Class Z," he said. "Tier-one clearance, pair up. Central dungeon, east entrance, one hour."
Hansel Jay raised his hand. "Sir, we haven't had combat training."
"Then pair with someone who has."
Beck walked out and the door closed.
Eleven students looked around at each other.
Soren did not look around.
He already knew who he was pairing with, and he was already thinking about how to say it.
The dungeon in the book was in chapter fourteen, and this was chapter four.
The layout he had memorized from the wiki's promotional event coverage was probably still accurate, but probably was doing a lot of work now that the timeline had started breaking.
He needed Selah's combat ability to cover the gap between what he knew and what the dungeon might do differently now that he was in it.
He stood up and walked to the back row.
Selah watched him come with the same expression she'd had all morning, like she was waiting for him to waste her time.
"Partner with me," he said.
"No."
"I know what's in that dungeon."
"Everyone knows what's in the dungeon."
"I know the second sublevel. Specifically." He kept his voice low so the rest of the room couldn't track it. "Stone beetles, fourteen of them, one entrance, armor weak point under the throat. There's a cracked column at the north end you can use to funnel them. I know which one is the brood mother and what she drops."
Selah did not say anything.
He waited.
"How you know?" she said.
"Old survey in the archives. Subsection C, the lock's broken."
He watched her decide whether to verify that now or after.
"I'll show you the document when we get back. First let's go make enough coin that you don't have to care whether I'm telling the truth."
She looked at him for a moment longer than she had looked at anything else this morning.
Then she looked at Grimm.
Grimm yipped once.
Selah stood. "If you're lying I freeze both of you."
"Fair," he said.
◆◆◆◆
The dungeon entrance was a rip in the air the size of a cathedral door, held open by four iron spikes and a humming ward stone.
Reading about it and standing in front of it were, it turned out, very different experiences.
The wrongness of the air leaking through made Soren's teeth buzz.
Selah walked in first, which told him something about her the book had mentioned but hadn't really conveyed: she walked toward things that made other people stop.
Soren followed with Grimm on his shoulder.
The first floor was a low corridor with glowing moss.
The second sublevel was the beetles.
Soren moved on the memory of four wiki reads during a promotional event in his old life.
The column was where he said it would be, and he pointed at it.
Selah looked at the column, then at the tunnel mouth, and held out one hand.
Frost bloomed along her palm in a pattern no forum illustration had ever gotten right.
Every piece of fan art had made it look decorative.
The actual frost was something alive that had decided to cooperate with her, and there was nothing decorative about it.
"Bring them," she said.
Soren looked at Grimm. "Go bark at one beetle. Just one. Come straight back."
Grimm jumped off his shoulder and disappeared.
One second she was there, the next she wasn't.
Then the tunnel mouth erupted in chittering, and she trotted back out with her tail going and the whole nest behind her.
Selah exhaled and the air turned white.
The beetles hit the frost and slowed.
Soren put his shoulder into the cracked column and it didn't move.
He hit it again and it didn't move.
Then Grimm stepped through his shadow, came out the other side, put one paw on the base, and the column came down in a sheet of stone and dust that took eight beetles with it.
The other six came over the rubble.
Selah caught four.
Grimm stepped on one, which should not have worked, and it did.
The last one went for Soren's throat.
He pulled the knife from the training belt, the knife the real Soren Kane had never touched, and put it under the beetle's throat in the exact spot the wiki had described at two in the morning four months ago in a world that no longer existed.
The beetle dropped.
He stood in the settling dust with beetle fluid on his hand and looked at Selah.
She was looking back.
Her frost was still active on her palm and she hadn't dismissed it yet, which meant she hadn't fully relaxed, which meant she was still reading him.
"Soren Kane," she said. "How did you know about the column."
"Lucky guess."
"No."
[DING!] — First kill registered. Hidden Trait [Primordial Tamer's Heart] feedback loop initiated.]
[DING!] — Bonded beast [Grimm]: evolution eligibility threshold reached approximately 12 days ahead of projected timeline.]
[DING!] — WARNING: timeline deviation now at 34%. Author: still not located.]
The system confirmed what Soren had already figured out in the first thirty seconds of the fight.
Grimm was running ahead of schedule, and the time line deviation from the book's version was not random.
It was accelerating.
He looked at the puppy.
Grimm yipped once.
Then her small body started to glow.