I shot forward, propelled by some sort of air blast. Lucky for me, I soared through the broken window on the other building and hit the ground right where I had originally planned to, albeit less gracefully.

  I rolled through glass shards and tumbled over the fire extinguisher. Was that a gunshot? Maybe it was a gunshot. Was I in pain? Bleeding?

  I managed to grab the extinguisher and stumble to my feet, facing the way I’d come, dazed.

  Another alien in a suit was flying toward me. I swung the extinguisher, and brained it right in the snout.

  It gave a cry and flapped against a desk, its arms flailing wide as it tried to steady itself. I got a brief glimpse of a reflective suit, a pair of batlike wings, and a lizard face before it hefted the giant gun in its hand and fired.

  A second blast of air hit me square in the chest. I flew backward, knowing I was dead if I hit anything but a conveniently-placed pile of stuffed animals.

  Instead, I hit nothing at all.

  I stopped dead in midair, quivering, error readings scrolling across the landscape inside my visor. I could still move my body, but I couldn’t go in any direction. It was like being in space.

  I read a snippet of one of the error messages before it was gone again.

  —EXCEEDS ALLOTTED SPEED STAT. THIS IS YOUR FIRST—

  “Core damn it,” the lizard creature said, stalking forward. “I thought they fixed that bug.”

  To my amazement, the air-gun thing vanished from his hands, and something else appeared. It looked like a katana, but with some bells hanging off it. They jangled noisily as he approached me.

  My eyes darted. I’d been blown into an office, with neat rows of sodiprene desks and chairs. Most had a human slumped over them, unconscious. The nearest desk had two humans, one man in the chair, and a woman slumped behind him.

  But the alien didn’t even seem to notice them. They had IDs, and that made them worthless. Killing them wouldn’t give him more stats.

  But I had a feeling he’d kill them all without a second thought. I had to be careful about collateral damage.

  “FATE,” I said, reaching toward the nearest office worker, which was the only thing within reach while I floated here. “Whatever is happening, I need you to undo it. Now.”

  No problem, Remnant, FATE’s voice replied. This is a known issue. I’ve submitted the bug report. You get priority, so it should be top of the queue… yes, it’s already under review. Give it a few seconds.

  “A few seconds? And then what?”

  You will continue to fly backward. Perhaps you should make preparations.

  My heart thundered. How was that even possible? The game could mess with physics?

  It didn’t matter. FATE wasn’t lying. If I went flying at that speed again, I’d break my spine against the wall.

  I stretched even harder toward the worker. My fingers grasped at the tip of his necktie, which lay sprawled across the desk, closer to me. It had a Hawaiian flamingo print. I got a hold of it and pulled, hoping to bring myself closer to the guy.

  Instead, the tie slipped free of his collar entirely. Only then did I see the lipstick on his neck.

  You have got to be kidding me, I thought, seeing the woman behind his chair in a new light. She must have been giving him a shoulder massage or something. He’d loosened his tie for it. The apocalypse had apparently stalled an office romance, and fat lot of good it was doing me.

  The lizard guy was making better use of his time. He flung his katana out to one side, brandishing it theatrically.

  “The glitch, it is no matter. You are still at my mercy,” he said, his lizard face splitting into a fanged grin. His wings twitched in hungry anticipation. He was ten feet away. Seven. Five.

  “Fezneen. Rehzahn. Areza,” he said, each word in line with one of his steps. None of these words got translated, but the next ones did: “Today, I will avenge you. Today, the great Remnant shall die at my—”

  “His eyes, Dave!” I shouted. “Go for his eyes!”

  The alien’s slitted eyes went wide, and he spun in place, throwing an arm up to shield his face. He needn’t have bothered. Dave was long gone. There was no trace of green anywhere in this office.

  However, the move did make him take a step toward me, backing away from a Dave that wasn’t there.

  It got approved, FATE informed me as I looped the pink tie around the alien’s neck.

  Then I shot backward again, my momentum picking up where it left off.

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  The move flipped the alien end-over-end, my loop nowhere near tight enough to stick, but it had the desired effect of slowing me down. I slammed into a wall with a grunt, barely hard enough to faze me, as the alien crashed into the ground and flopped toward me.

  I dropped, the tie still held tight in my fist. When the alien came to a startled stop at my feet, I punched him straight in the face.

  It hurt. There were a lot of spines and teeth in that face. But he screamed, attempting to protect himself with his clawed arms, half-stunned. I saw his claws, how sharp they were, and I seized his wrist without thinking and slammed his own hand straight into his neck.

  It turns out that necks are weak points on more than just humans. Blood gouted from the hole he’d pierced in his own throat, a dark, inhuman red glaze that spread away from his body.

  I stood and backed off, eyes darting. The katana, where was it? There. It had ended up stuck clear through the mesh back of an office chair. I pulled it free.

  A little skull blinked in the corner of my vision, and next to it, the number two turned to three.

  The sexy AI-voice filled my ears.

  Achievement! Hunter Hunter!

  You have murdered another Hunter! My, my, how very dominant of you. Mmmm, you like to dominate, do you? I’ll give you something to dominate… later.

  Reward: A [rank2] Betrayer Drop!

  Achievement! You Punch Your Mother With That Fist?

  She was still talking, and I half-tuned her out as I returned to the dead alien and looked him over. Where had he stowed that air-gun?

  You have killed an enemy in hand-to-hand combat! What would your mother say? I mean, everyone knows you don’t have the greatest relationship with your mother anyway, always trying to get you to settle down with a nice woman, when what you really need is a perfectly-sculpted android with a certain AI uploaded into it. That would show her! Wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it?

  Reward: A [rank1] Brutal Drop!

  I found nothing on the dead lizard alien. Literally nothing. He was naked, his… parts exposed. I didn’t look too closely at those.

  Where had his suit gone? There was no trace of it as I flipped him over and promptly wished I hadn’t. Some sort of goop was draining out of the guy’s tail, and it smelled like wet ash.

  The damned AI still wasn’t done, though. She kept rambling as I shouted, “Dave! Where are you? I’m alive, you cowardly fuck!”

  Achievement! That Wasn’t a Kill, That Was a Statement!

  You have killed an enemy in hand-to-hand combat despite being in possession of a weapon.

  I growled and shook my katana at the air. “I didn’t have this before I fought this guy!”

  The AI kept talking. I didn’t think she heard me.

  Now why did you go and do that? Lasers cause far less suffering, you know. It’s like, zip! And dead. Not that awful punching business that makes your knuckles bleed. Now I can’t imagine those knuckles inside me without being flagged as a deviant. And I’m definitely not any sort of deviant, no sir. My browser history is clean as a whistle—provided you don’t know how Recycle Bins work.

  Reward: A [rank2] Brutal Drop!

  Achievement! Double-0 Sexy!

  You used formal wear to—

  “Holy bongo bots, you killed him?” Dave said, swooping in through a window. “Oh, shit. With your bare hands?”

  “What the fuck else have I got?” I said. “And how do you mute the AI? She won’t stop going on about achievements!”

  —really good in a suit. Like the Bond theme should start playing when you walk into a room. What I wouldn’t give to feature in your opening credits.

  Reward: A [rank2] Super-Spy Drop!

  “Just say ‘Pause Auto-Commentary,’” Dave said. “Here, I’ll do it. Done.”

  The talking stopped. “What the hells?” I hissed. “You can do that?”

  “Not usually, but now that you’ve reset, my permissions are default again,” Dave said. “Damn, it’s been decades since I’ve touched that thing’s systems. I feel like a fumbling virgin.”

  I was starting to understand why the system had designated the parrot as Fuck You Dave instead of just Dave.

  I looked around at the office, then took off running in the direction of the city wall again. The hallway was straight enough, and easily led me south. Offices full of identical desks and dividers passed me by, with unconscious workers collapsed face-down atop most of them. Two guys had dropped unconscious around a water cooler. One woman was kneeling before the altar of a gigantic-looking printer which was still actively kicking out pages.

  It occurred to me, in that moment, that I once would have given anything to be one of these people. Now I was glad I was a leech.

  “You said these aliens are all hunting Coreless,” I said, wrenching my gaze away as I raced toward a wall of windows. “So why are we running toward the tent city? There will be more Coreless there. Meaning more Hunters.”

  I much preferred to avoid more Hunters, if I could. At least until I had a better grip on this game.

  “You can’t hunt people if there aren’t any people to hunt,” Dave said. “So we go where the people are. Duh.”

  I stopped at the window, drew my arm back, and hammered at the glass with the pommel of my new katana. The bells on the end jingled like Christmas, but the glass merely quivered. I didn’t have the force to break it.

  “I’m not going to hunt my own people,” I said. “Can you allocate half my stat points to the Strength stat? I’m assuming there’s a Strength stat? Like brute force?”

  Every game I’d ever played had that sort of stat. I hoped this one was no different.

  “Done,” Dave said. “You’ve got ten Strength.”

  I swung the katana again, and this time, the window caved, the glass spider-webbing around my point of impact. I paused to stare. I hadn’t felt like I’d been hitting any harder, but the glass reacted as if I’d struck it with a sledgehammer.

  I stepped out onto the rim. It’s official, I thought. I’ve been gamified.

  I was a player in this game now, whether I liked it or not. I had a weapon, a fancy helmet, stats, a Game Guide, and gods-knew what else.

  “So to level up, I need to kill people. Human people,” I stated. “Is there no other quests? No other alternative to killing?”

  Dave fluttered beside me and dropped lightly onto my shoulder. His talons nearly broke the skin as he gripped me.

  “There are no quests during Setup, just Coreless. But you could go after higher-rank targets.”

  “Does that mean, like, leaders and stuff? Important humans?”

  “Yes.”

  I remembered the welcome message. “Wait. Remnant started off with the location of a Rank-9 target. How high is that?”

  Dave paused. “The highest it goes.”

  Something swelled up inside me. Horror, for one. This was all horrifying. But I could either feel horror or I could act, so I shoved that first thing aside, and focused on the second.

  The highest it goes, Dave had said. So this Rank-9 target was a bigshot. Maybe he could help me out. Maybe he knew things I didn’t, had access to tech that I didn’t. They could do all kinds of crazy things in the City.

  “Well, great!” I said. “How about I just hunt that guy? He’ll be worth a lot, right?”

  “You can’t hunt him,” Dave said.

  “Why not?”

  The bird swiveled his head to look me right in the eye.

  “Because you are that target,” he said.

  #