When my brother was little and my family lived in Denver, my parents used to take me and my little brother camping. Like, almost every weekend during the summer. My earliest memory of camping was when I was six, two years before Sean was born. At the time, I was running around camp like an idiot and ended up tripping outside of my parents’ view. While I was on the ground, a snake came out of the brush.

  I didn’t freak out when it came right up to my face. It seemed harmless and kind of cute to me at that moment. My mom came looking for me and saw me lying on my stomach with a snake right in my face. I didn’t know any better, and my new friend was captivating. Her horror at seeing what she thought was a dangerous snake and the blood-curdling scream she let out startled both the snake and me. It pulled back, and my mom snatched me up with such violence that I thought she was going to throw me. I cried and screamed my little head off.

  Her reaction, and the way she pulled me away from the snake, instilled a fear of all legless reptiles in me by association. My dad tried to calm us down after the fact, since he knew what type of snake it was. But I could never look at a snake without irrational fear and hate after that point.

  So, when I heard that rasping, slithering noise there in the sewers, I was ready to bolt.

  What came into the light was not a snake. To my relief, it had legs it was using to pull its enormous bulk down the tunnel toward us. It looked like nothing other than an alligator. A massive, tunnel-filling alligator. Its eyes squinted, like the light there was more than it was used to.

  “Thank God!” I said, looking at the non-snake. “I thought it was going to be a snake.”

  “And how the fuck is this better, Finn?” Harper retorted, astounded.

  “I fucking hate snakes,” I muttered.

  Our exchange was apparently enough time for the gator to adjust its eyes to the light, and it roared a deep, throaty, raspy rumble that was too loud in the enclosed space. I grabbed my head, trying to protect my ears from the painful bellow. My hands were not enough to shield my eardrums, and the pressure caused my ears and nose to bleed. The silence that followed was weird. Hollow.

  It pulled itself toward us faster than anything that big should be able to move. I looked up, still stunned by the pain of the gator’s roar. I yelled soundlessly at it and started firing Poisonous Shot from both palms, casting about forty of them before I was out of mana. The tunnel swiftly tilted and I stumbled, only for someone to grab my arm, steadying me. I barely felt it, my entire body a tingly mass of sensations. As Harper spun me around, I noted wryly that a few missed the barn-sized beast. I hoped the ones that hit were enough to poison the monstrosity.

  I couldn’t hear Harper, who was apparently yelling at me, but the horses were all following GB, and we were about to be swallowed up by the dark. And the massive gator. I chuckled at the sight, still feeling wonderfully euphoric. Juan was backpedaling, firing arrow after arrow in quick succession. Harper gave up and grabbed me by my right hand, pulling my giggling ass down the tunnel at a run.

  The entire tunnel shook from the massive reptile’s charge, and we ran faster to keep in the light and ahead of the beast. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the monstrosity reminiscent of urban myth was gaining on us. Harper put on a burst of speed that was more than I could handle, and I stumbled as she pulled me along. The horses had gone down a side tunnel, where Juan stood at the opening, releasing a torrent of arrows, trying to slow the thing down. My dusky-skinned friend somehow sped up to an inhuman velocity, and I was pulled off my feet. Harper had pulled so hard, my arm pulled out of my shoulder socket. I screamed soundlessly while practically flying around the corner.

  Juan slipped into the side tunnel, and we all watched as the body of the beast continued farther down the tunnel at great speed. Juan asked something, but I couldn’t hear anything above a murmur. I gripped my dislocated shoulder with my left hand, only releasing it to point at my ears and shake my head. Harper rolled her eyes and handed me a health potion. I gulped it down gratefully. My right arm popped back into its socket as my inner ears exploded in pain, and a scream came out of nowhere, getting louder. The scream was mine, I realized belatedly.

  Once the pain subsided, I sat there recovering. Regrowing my eardrums was a sobering experience for me, more so than my shoulder, and I stared at my hands just thinking about whether it was possible I was becoming addicted to my magic. It was a fresh fear, but now a very poignant part of my new reality. Juan calmed the horses, glancing at the main tunnel. Harper pulled out a mana potion and handed it to me.

  “I can’t keep giving you potions like this, Finn. It’s your responsibility to get your own supply,” she admonished.

  I stared at the bottle in my hands, wondering if it was worth it. “You’re right. I forgot to get some while up there in the city. Harper I…” I stopped talking for a moment and considered telling her about what my magic was doing to me. But what good would that have done? I tried to cover my lapse by asking about the monster we narrowly escaped. “What was that thing? Are people flushing pet gators down the toilet?” I said, trying not to sound guilty.

  “That wasn’t an alligator, Finn,” Juan answered. “That was a shrindaba, a type of Wyrm. Like dragons, they grow over time. And like dragons, they live for centuries. But a shrindaba isn’t that bright. And they are always hungry. I doubt we’ll see it again, unless it realizes we got away and either finds a place to turn around or backs itself up.”

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  “Not a gator. Got it. Juan, if I poisoned it, how long would it take to die?” I inquired.

  “Oof, that’s a big if! Considering that it is constantly eating trash and waste and is that big, it has a higher-than-normal poison resistance for a shrindaba. Probably wandered in here young and is now too vast to get out. Gods know it will eventually get too big for the tunnels and either break through to the surface or get too stuck to catch food and starve to death,” Juan replied.

  “That sucks for this city. Is there anything we can do to help?” I asked. I knew we needed to get out of here, the sooner the better, but the idea of that thing rampaging freely on the surface horrified me. It looked like it bothered Juan too.

  “If we were more of a rounded group, maybe. I wouldn’t want to attempt it with anyone at as low a level as you. But I guarantee, as soon as we can get help to deal with the Steel Falcons, we or someone else will come back here and handle the shrindaba,” he answered.

  I smiled, though I was still shaking from being chased by that thing. My thoughts turned to its appearance. Its beady eyes, massive jaws full of thousands of teeth longer than my arm. Its glowing green tongue lolling as it shrugged off all of my wasted mana. “Thank you, Juan. I was so worthless in that fight. If it wasn’t for you guys, I’d never have made it,” I said gratefully.

  “Your reflexes are good, chico, I’ll give you that. But if you are going to use up your mana so fast, you need to stock up on mana potions,” Juan replied. His voice was that of a teacher giving me honest feedback. “Finn, in Christ’s name, you need to get into the habit of quickly checking the level of any potential enemy. When we leave this place, I want you to practice using this ability on everything moving until it’s second nature for you.”

  I nodded along with the suggestions. With my almost complete lack of knowledge about anything related to my new life, I needed to get better at this stuff.

  Our passage through the rest of the sewers was mostly uneventful. The path took us through a long tunnel devoid of waste or other monsters, likely cleared by the gluttonous shrindaba. With the curvature of the tunnel on the map, I was worried that the massive gator/dragon-wannabe moved in a circle. We left its most likely route an hour later, to my relief. There were strange noises down branching and side tunnels, but whatever the makers of the noises were, they didn’t bother us.

  Part of me wondered about the possibility of coming back here and clearing it out after I’d gone up a dozen levels, but the rest of me shut that line of thought down quickly. I was going to be gone from this world before that was even an option. Maybe a month, tops. It was a cheerful thought.

  When we were a few hundred yards from the exit, our boots wet and covered in offal from the constant stream around our ankles, we stopped and waited for Harper to scout out our path forward. While we waited for her to return, Juan happily gave me a lecture on different classes. Though I was interested, it was hard to see how it would help me.

  “… and because of her Infiltrator subclass, Harper’s stealth abilities are higher than mine, even with the level difference. I talked with several people over the years who played different versions of tabletop RPGs. Though similar, those games back home always had the Ranger class as being stealthier than the Rogue class. Both in those games and here, subclasses are a useful specialization that can make us more powerful. I get that it’s counterintuitive to only focus on just one or two skill trees, but damn it, the system here works,” Juan said.

  “Wait. You’re just a Ranger, right? Why didn’t you specialize?” I asked.

  “I didn’t see a reason. The option’s still available, but there wasn’t an obvious purpose as the subclasses didn’t seem useful to me. Taking a subclass is a choice, not a requirement. Think of that when the time comes, Finn,” the old bowman suggested.

  The thought was interesting, and it made me wonder what my choices would be. “Do you know what options I’ll have? And at what point does that opportunity happen?” I asked.

  He pondered that for longer than I thought necessary and pulled out his notebook, leafing through it. “That, mi chico, is a good question. I honestly don’t know. Subclasses show up at different points for each class, between levels 20 and 35. And unfortunately, I never talked to a Mage about subclasses, for obvious reasons,” Juan stated. He put his notebook away and started pulling mana potions out of his inventory.

  “But before I forget,” he declared, handing me the mana potions, one after another. “You are more effective, even at your low level, if you have mana. These are the mana potions I was going to give you during your training in Marea. Está bien!”

  He stopped at 20 of the potions, a veritable treasure in my hands and lap. “Just be careful. There is a price with potions that I haven’t gotten to yet. The more you consume in a short period, the worse it will be for you. Headaches and cramping, then weakness, poisoning, coma, and then death. Your endurance and stamina determine how many potions are too many, and with yours being… what are they now?” my mentor asked.

  “18 and 17,” I replied.

  “Right, so with your endurance and stamina at that level, you can drink about three of these potions before you get blinding headaches. Six will probably cause you to feel the worst cramps ever on top of that. Bear this in mind,” he cautioned.

  Juan seemed like he was going to explain further, but paused when Harper returned from her scouting mission. “We have a problem,” she said. “I scouted the camps, and there are more of them than we thought. If there are any members of the Steel Falcons in the city itself, I would be surprised. We won’t be able to go to these caverns of Finn’s directly—or anywhere, really—without sneaking through a gap in their lines,” Harper warned.

  “Where’s the gap?” the old man asked.

  “We’re south of the city, which would have worked nicely for us to head overland. But we can’t go through the swamp to the south or the north. The path I found leads north-westerly, and then we will have to deal with the roving scouts and the sentries. I might be able to get us through them during the night, but the timing is going to be tight if I’m reading things correctly. Sneaking past the camps will be easy in comparison. Finally, and this is the tricky part, we’ll have to deal with any outriders and sentries on the other side. I don’t know their patterns, as it would have taken me far longer to find that out. I think we need to move quickly if we are to get through,” Harper said.

  “How—” I started, being spoken over by Juan.

  “Harper, you know how I feel about cutting corners,” he said sternly. “But in this case, I agree. The stakes are too high for us not to take a gamble. How long will it take for us to get through the swamp?”

  “Maybe thirty minutes, but we need to have enough light to do it, in case the path changes,” she replied.

  “Then we leave in 15,” he said.

  What do ya'll think the Mage subclasses should be?

  I'm thinking maybe an elemental option at least, possibly something with domination, or maybe borrow from the sorcerer framework and go with something like wild magic. None of that is set in stone yet.

  Thanks for reading!