Mira opened her eyes to an unfamiliar terrain. Her apartment lay behind her in ruins. People had begun popping up in flashes in front of destroyed buildings. It was the noise that got to her first. A voice she recognised… A voice she had followed and swooned over, that was until that person had tried to kill her.

  She could hear Gareth’s voice carrying across an open oval like he was a rockstar with a microphone. He was using a multitude of skills to gather the attention of the people around him. Mira had remembered that the previous mayor and some staffers had lived in nice houses that shared the same block as her apartment. She found something to cover her head and moved into the crowd. Gareth’s crew looked outward, looking for threats with guns in their hands and confidence in their shoulders now that some semblance of Earth. How had he instantly found people with guns? This was Australia, not the USA.

  She had no true plans, she wouldn’t allow this man to suck her in again. That was a new thing for her, the quiet admission that she’d never actually had a plan during the tutorial either. She’d followed Gareth from one decision to the next and told herself it was loyalty. She’d repeated his lines and told herself she was helping. She’d kept close to him because being near certainty felt better than being alone with fear.

  At the end, when things went wrong, certainty hadn’t saved anyone.

  Moving closer, she could see Gareth standing near the centre of the oval, somehow standing above the others around him. She could see now. Those guns were police weapons. Pistols, tazers… Nothing that would really be of consequence in his new world. Hell, even the inferior skill she had gained while playing with her mana would do more. The crowd in front of him was bigger than it should’ve been this early, pulled in by the same instinct that had always guided frightened people to open spaces and loud voices. They’d gathered in clumps that pretended to be families or friends, faces turned toward Gareth as if he was a screen telling them what to do next. Mira recognised a few of them. People who’d eaten at the same campfires. People who’d nodded along when Gareth spoke. People who’d clapped when she’d spoken for him, people probably still brainwashed by Gareth's charisma.

  Gareth lifted his hands slightly, palms out, and the sound dipped as if he’d physically pressed it down. He didn’t shout. He never needed to. He spoke like he was explaining something sensible to adults who were having a hard day, and somehow that tone made people stop acting like adults and start acting like children waiting to be reassured.

  “Alright,” Gareth said, smiling faintly. “We’re back. We’re alive. We’re healed. That’s a bloody miracle on its own, so don’t waste it. We’ve got a chance here to do this properly. No more running around like headless chooks. No more everyone for themselves.”

  Mira’s stomach tightened. He made it sound like the tutorial hadn’t been exactly that, a screaming mess where everyone for themselves was the only way most people had survived. He made it sound like the violence had been an accident, like it was something that had happened to them rather than something he’d directed when it suited him.

  He paced slowly as he talked, just a few steps at a time, keeping the crowd’s eyes moving with him. “The old government’s gone, but remnants of it remain” he continued, as if stating a weather forecast. “I’m here… No we elected officials will gather to help. We’ll rebuild the society of the past. Councils will be reformed and soon enough we will all have homes again… safety.” He turned and motioned to the people standing behind him. “As I promised, the government hasn’t abandoned us. These people were police, firefighters, protectors of our society. Whether you came from my tutorial or another, a place will be found for you. We will find a use for all of you.”

  Mira swallowed. She’d been useful to him. She hadn’t been strong, she hadn’t been brave, she hadn’t been competent, but she’d been loud when he’d needed loud, and she’d smiled when he’d needed a friendly face beside him. She’d done it because she’d wanted to be important. She’d wanted someone to look at her and think she mattered in a world that suddenly treated most people like numbers.

  She looked at the faces in the crowd, saw them being dragged into his pace. This was no different to how she had felt. There was a tug on her mind, something that told her to obey. “That asshole” she murmured under her breath. She felt it for what it was now.

  Her hands dug into the grass without her noticing, nails catching in dirt.

  A pressure washed across the oval so cleanly that even the birds seemed to pause. It didn’t feel local, it didn’t feel like a beast nearby, it felt like the world itself had taken a slow breath and decided everyone would listen.

  [GLOBAL ANNOUNCEMENT: WORLD POPULATION QUEST INITIATED.]

  Heads tilted up as if people expected to see the words in the sky. Some flinched like they’d been slapped.

  [Earth is now under Population Continuity Parameters. Population loss will impact world stability and future System thresholds. The Leader has claimed his Territory.]

  That single word hit the crowd harder than the rest. Leader. The whispering started immediately, like a fire catching dry grass. Mira heard the name twice before Gareth even reacted.

  “Kaizer Harth.”

  “He was top of the boards.”

  “Leader, that’s him, has to be.”

  Gareth let the noise happen for a beat, long enough for people to say the name out loud and make it real. Then he smiled, slow and controlled, like he’d just been handed proof that his speech was correct.

  “See?” he said, voice warm. “This is what I’m talking about. The System’s trying to throw us in its pace. telling us what matters. People. Stability. Territory. We done need to go against that, but we should do things our way. We should pool our resources together and fight together. We need to build something that lasts. We need leadership that’s organised, not just some bloke who lucked out in a tutorial.”

  Mira’s throat tightened. There it was. He didn’t say Kaizer’s name directly, but he didn’t have to. The implication spread through the crowd like poison, turning admiration into suspicion and suspicion into something sharper.

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  The announcements continued, the System clinical and cold, the words landing like rules nailed to a door.

  [Territory Tokens and Dominion Expansion Tokens may be acquired through Dungeon Clears and “Home” Beasts.]

  [“Home” Beasts: Dominion-linked elites.]

  The pressure lifted. The crowd didn’t relax. Gareth stepped straight into the gap before anyone else could take control of what those lines meant.

  “Home beasts,” he repeated, like he was tasting the phrase. “Dominion-linked elites. That means there are things out there holding resources and land… our land. The System expects us to take it. That’s fine. We can do that. We just do it properly, together, with a chain of command, with planning. No hero nonsense.”

  Mira watched the men behind him shift, the way they angled their bodies, the way they scanned the oval’s edges. They weren’t just guards. They were a message. Stand with us, and you’re under protection. Stand away from us, and you’re on your own.

  A woman near the front raised her hand, tentative. “What about leaving?” she asked. “What about going to find family?”

  Gareth’s smile stayed in place. His eyes didn’t. “Of course,” he said, tone gentle. “If you’ve got someone to find, we’ll help you. We’ll put it on the board, we’ll organise search teams. But no one goes wandering off alone, alright? We’ve already seen what happens when people think they can do it solo. It’s dangerous. It’s irresponsible. For the good of everyone, we stay together until we’ve established a proper base.”

  For the good of everyone.

  Mira had heard that phrase her whole life, usually right before someone got pressured into doing something they didn’t want. She’d never noticed how sharp it was until now.

  She kept her head down and listened as Gareth talked about “routes” and “resource collection” and “security shifts”. He made it sound like a community meeting. He didn’t say the word rules like it was a threat, but every sentence built a fence. When he spoke about moving suburb to suburb to gather people, he didn’t use the word recruit. He didn’t use the word take. He said bring them in. Give them structure. Keep them safe.

  Mira knew what it looked like when Gareth decided someone was a problem. She’d seen it in the tutorial. It never started with shouting. It started with the group around him making a person feel alone.

  When the crowd began to break into smaller clusters, Mira stayed where she was. She watched Gareth’s people fan out and position themselves in a loose ring. They didn’t block the roads openly. They didn’t need to. They stood in the places that made you hesitate, and hesitation was all it took.

  A couple near the far edge tried to slip away early, moving with that stiff urgency that meant they’d already decided Gareth wasn’t safe to follow. One of the riflemen stepped into their path, not aggressive, just present.

  “Oi,” he called, friendly as anything. “Where you off to?”

  The man stopped. “We’re going home,” he said. “We’ve got kids, we’ve got family.”

  “Yeah, fair,” the rifleman replied, still smiling. “Just check in with Gareth first, mate. We’re sorting routes. No point getting yourselves killed, hey.”

  It wasn’t a command. It might as well have been.

  The couple hesitated, looked at each other, then turned back toward the centre of the oval. Mira felt something cold sit in her stomach. Gareth didn’t need bars and chains. He had people doing the work for him, people who believed they were being good.

  Mira blended with the crowd and moved to the edge. She slipped through a gap in the security, keeping distance and using the broken edges of the suburb as cover. Gareth’s group didn’t march like an army. They wandered like a community relocating, and that was what made it worse, because it looked voluntary. They took roads that still existed in pieces, cracked bitumen half-swallowed by scrub, old street signs twisted at wrong angles. The day was warm the way an Aussie day was warm, sun sitting overhead with that familiar bite on the back of your neck, and the breeze smelled like salt and eucalyptus. It should’ve felt like home.

  It didn’t.

  Mira noticed subtle issues. The world was close to being the same, like a copy made from memory, and the errors were subtle enough to crawl under your skin. A house sitting a metre too far from the curb. A street that bent slightly where it shouldn’t. A line of trees that looked like gums until you saw the bark and realised the texture was wrong, too smooth in places, too patterned in others, like something had tried to mimic nature. Mira didn’t have the words for it. She just had the feeling that Earth had been stitched back together.

  They moved into the next suburb by mid-afternoon, and Gareth did the same thing again. He found open space, pulled people in, talked about structure and safety. People appeared from houses and streets, drawn by noise. Some recognised faces from the tutorial. Some didn’t. Plenty looked lost, and lost people clung to whatever sounded like a plan.

  Mira kept to the edges, always behind a fence line or a ruined wall, careful not to be seen. She wasn’t competent, and she knew it. If a beast came out of the scrub she couldn’t fight like the ones who’d actually trained. She could run, maybe hide, maybe get lucky. The thought of luck made her jaw clench. She’d lived on luck the whole tutorial, and luck had still left her with that final moment she couldn’t stop replaying.

  Kaizer, saying he didn’t trust Gareth.

  Gareth, smiling like Kaizer was overreacting.

  Mira, nodding along, because she’d expected Kaizer to protect her. When he didn’t and Gareth pointed it out, she instead wanted Gareth’s approval more than she’d wanted truth.

  By the third suburb, the pattern had become obvious even to people who didn’t want to see it. A few tried to leave. A few got turned around. Gareth didn’t shout at anyone. He didn’t need to. He let his people do it, and he wrapped it in language that sounded reasonable. He’d started picking up other people of similar mind to him. Other politicians who had survived their respective tutorials. The group started looking a lot like old government, except Gareth was sitting at the top.

  “We can’t afford to splinter,” he said at one point, speaking to a gathered crowd outside a half-collapsed community hall. “Population continuity parameters. That’s the System telling us people matter. If you wander off and die, that hurts all of us. We keep people together, we keep people alive. It’s simple.”

  Simple.

  Mira watched a man in the crowd nod as if he’d been given permission to ignore his own discomfort. She watched a woman clutch her backpack tighter and stop glancing toward the street she’d clearly wanted to take. Gareth’s group was becoming a moving settlement, and the worst part was that it felt like the old world. A neighbourhood watch with guns. A council meeting with consequences. The illusion of free will, as long as your choices were the ones Gareth approved of.

  They made camp on the edge of a shopping strip that had been torn open and partially swallowed by scrub. Someone found a carpark that still had enough flat ground to set up a perimeter. Gareth’s people set watches. They set rules about where people could sleep. They set rules about fires. They set rules about talking to “outsiders”. Mira heard the word outsider and almost laughed, because everyone was an outsider now.

  She didn’t laugh. She stayed quiet and watched.

  It was the next day that they found the home beast.

  Mira saw the shift before she saw the creature. Gareth’s crew changed posture, the easy confidence tightening into alert movement. A couple of them jogged back toward Gareth, speaking fast, and Gareth’s expression sharpened into something that looked like excitement.

  They were near a drainage reserve, the kind of strip of scrub and shallow creek bed that ran behind houses, except the houses here were smashed open and half-buried, as if the land had shrugged and decided it didn’t want them anymore. The air felt thicker as they approached, a pressure that sat on the skin and made Mira’s mouth taste faintly metallic. People at the back of the group started whispering. A few tried to step away, and Mira saw one of Gareth’s men gesture them back with a casual sweep of his hand.

  “Stay with the group,” he said, voice friendly. “We’ve got it handled.”

  Handled.

  Mira crouched behind the remains of a brick fence and watched Gareth stand at the front like he was about to cut a ribbon. He pointed ahead, toward a pocket of scrub where the grass lay flattened as if something heavy had been pacing.

  “Alright,” Gareth said, loud enough for the front line to hear. “That’s a home beast. Dominion-linked. Means token drops. Means real territory growth. Means we stop mucking around and start building something that lasts.”

  Someone near him, one of the men with an eager face and a brand-new rifle, raised his hand. “I’ve got a strong Identify skill,” he said.

  Gareth nodded. “Do it.”

  The man’s eyes unfocused for a second, then his face went pale. He swallowed, hard, and spoke anyway.

  “Uh… it’s… it’s a boar,” he said. “Massive one. Rank F. Level thirty… two.”

  A low murmur rolled through the front line. Aside from Gareth, there wasn’t a single person even in their twenties, let alone their thirties.

  Gareth didn’t step back. He didn’t reconsider. He grinned.

  “Good,” he said. “We’ve got pistols and even a few rifles. We’ve got numbers. We’ve got people who actually know how to fight.”

  Mira felt something twist inside her at that, because she’d seen who Gareth called “people who know how to fight”. It was always the ones who did what he said.

  He pointed at three men, then five, then eight. “You lot, forward line. Spread out. Put rounds into it. Keep it off the crowd.”

  The men moved, guns coming up, confidence doing most of the work. Mira watched them step into the scrub like they expected a normal animal to break and run. She watched Gareth hang back just enough that he’d never be first into danger. She knew this wouldn’t work. She saw guns become useless in the tutorial. Clearly these people either didn’t have their guns on them when they were teleported, or thought things would be different now.

  The scrub exploded.