Eighteen levels.

  He held onto that number like it was the only solid thing in the world, because right now it basically was. Not: where am I. Not: how do I get home. Not: why the hell is any of this happening to me. Just the number. Eighteen levels. One thing at a time.

  Something moved to his left.

  He threw.

  The rock hit. The creature stumbled. He closed the distance and finished it before it could recover, and the grey dust was still drifting upward when the system chimed.

  Level 3.

  He exhaled slowly, picked up another rock, and kept moving.

  Okay. So rocks work. Good to know.

  He had questions. A lot of them.

  The problem was there was nobody to ask and the system window, helpful as it was with the level-up notifications, did not seem to have a FAQ section. So the questions just sat in the back of his head and accumulated while he walked and looked for the next creature to kill.

  Why him, for one. Out of every person on the planet — out of eight billion people going about their lives, eating dinner, sleeping in actual beds — the system or whatever ran it had landed on Cha Junho, twenty-one, Hanyang University, average grades, works at a convenience store. That made no sense. He wasn't special. He had never been special. He'd always been fine with that.

  Was he even on a planet? That was another one. The sky was the wrong colour. The silence was wrong. The gravity felt normal but he wasn't qualified to detect subtle differences in gravity. This could be another dimension. Another universe entirely. Or just some distant planet with a rust-coloured atmosphere and no visible life except these dog-things that dissolved when they died.

  Actually, the dissolving was interesting. He'd been too busy surviving the first fight to really clock it, but now that he thought about it — they just came apart. Grey particles drifting upward. No body left behind. Either this world had very different physics or the things weren't entirely real in the way he understood real.

  Or the system was cleaning up after itself.

  He didn't love that thought. He kept walking.

  The ruins ahead were getting clearer. Low walls of dark stone, broken at irregular heights. Something had built them. Something with enough intelligence to cut stone and stack it into a structure with corners and what might have been doorways. That something was gone, had been gone for long enough that the stone had worn smooth, and the only thing left of whatever civilization this had been was these walls and the creatures that now lived between them.

  Was this someone's world? Was he standing in the ruins of a place that had once had people in it?

  He pushed that one to the back of the pile too. Later.

  By Level 5 he stopped and actually read his status properly.

  [ STATUS ]

  Name: Cha Junho Origin: Earth Level: 5 Class: Unassigned

  HP: 340 / 340 MP: 20 / 20

  STR: 18 AGI: 16 END: 17 INT: 14 PER: 19 LCK: 11

  Skills: Basic Throwing Proficiency — F Danger Sense — F

  He stared at it for a while.

  MP: 20. Twenty. He had almost no mana. He didn't even know what mana felt like — couldn't feel it, couldn't access it, the bar was just sitting there being embarrassingly small. He'd worry about that later. Or never. Probably never.

  His Perception was his highest stat, which tracked — Danger Sense had already fired twice, that prickling at the base of his skull arriving half a second before something moved in his periphery. Half a second wasn't much. It was enough to not be dead, which was the current standard for good.

  "Better than nothing," he muttered.

  His own voice surprised him. Too loud in the silence. It sat wrong in the dead air and he realised he hadn't heard it since he'd woken up here. Talking to yourself was supposed to be a sign of something but right now it was either that or absolute silence and he'd take something over nothing.

  He closed the window. The ruins were close now. He needed something better than rocks.

  He found metal on the second day.

  A length of dark alloy half-buried in the rubble of a collapsed wall, one end worked into something close to an edge. Not a blade. Not quite. But it fit his grip, held its shape when he tested it against stone, and had the significant advantage of not being a rock.

  "Good enough."

  The system kept giving him skills as he fought — Improvised Weaponry, Footwork, Spatial Awareness — each one a name for something he'd already been doing out of desperation. He accepted them and moved on. It was nice that the system acknowledged his efforts. It would be nicer if it explained what was happening or why he was here or how long this was supposed to take, but apparently that wasn't on the menu.

  He found water on the third day. A thin seep from a crack in a rock face, tasting of metal and something older underneath that. He drank every drop with his hands cupped and sat back on his heels.

  If there's water here, this place isn't completely hostile to survival. Mostly hostile. That's an important distinction.

  Food was harder. A pale growth on the undersides of certain rock formations — dense, odourless, the colour of old bone. He broke a piece off and turned it over in his fingers.

  "You know what, I'm going to eat this," he told it. "And if I die from it, that's honestly fine because at least it'll be over."

  He ate it. His stomach accepted it without enthusiasm. His legs kept working.

  He ate it every day after that and tried very hard not to think about what it actually was.

  The thing about surviving, Junho was discovering, was that it kept your brain occupied in a way that didn't leave a lot of room for anything else.

  During the fights he wasn't thinking. He was just reacting, moving, putting himself where he needed to be. After the fights, while he was walking or looking for water or eating the cave fungus that he was absolutely not thinking about, the questions would drift back in.

  Had anyone else been brought here? The notification had said Summoned, plural in spirit if not in grammar. Were there other people in other parts of this wasteland right now, having exactly this experience? Or was it him alone?

  And if there were others — where were they supposed to end up? The window had said transported to a new world. A new world. Not this one, presumably, since this one was dead. Some fantasy-looking place with actual trees and people and presumably food that wasn't cave fungus.

  He was going to get there. He just had to hit Level 20 first.

  He could do that.

  Probably.

  At Level 12, the creatures changed.

  Not all at once — the accumulation of small differences. Faster. Their skin carried a faint iridescence now, like oil on water. And they came in pairs, coordinated in a way the early ones hadn't been — one pulling his attention from the front while the other circled wide.

  The first time it worked on him he took three lines of pain across his forearm, deep enough to bleed properly.

  He killed both, sat down against a rock, and wrapped the wound with a strip from his shirt. A status window appeared.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  [ STATUS EFFECT ]

  Minor Laceration applied. HP: 287 / 410

  Passive regeneration active. Estimated recovery: 4 hours.

  Passive regeneration. He flexed the arm carefully. The bleeding was already slowing. "Okay. That's genuinely useful, thank you."

  He wasn't sure who he was thanking. The system, maybe. Whatever had built it. Whatever had decided that Cha Junho, night-shift convenience store employee, was the right candidate for being dropped into a dead world alone with a Level 20 objective and no survival skills beyond a vague memory of watching Bear Grylls once in middle school.

  The pairing tactic wasn't complicated once he'd been on the wrong end of it. Commit to one fast before the second could react. Don't give either an angle. He adapted within two fights and didn't take another clean hit from the paired ones after that.

  Levels 13, 14, 15.

  He was getting better at this. He wasn't sure how he felt about getting better at this.

  Level 18 came with a sound he felt before he heard.

  Low and resonant, moving through the rock under his feet and up into his chest cavity. His Danger Sense didn't prickle. It screamed.

  He found cover immediately and went completely still.

  The smell reached him first — burnt air, something deeper beneath it, like ozone with weight to it. Then it stepped between two rock formations and he saw it and his brain produced two thoughts in rapid sequence:

  One: that is enormous.

  Two: I am going to have to fight that.

  Tall, bipedal, legs that bent the wrong way at the knee. A flat featureless head where a face should have been, sensory organs distributed across the surface. Near-black skin with a deep iridescent sheen. It moved slowly, not out of caution but because nothing in this environment had ever given it a reason to hurry.

  He pulled up the enemy info.

  [ ENEMY DETECTED ]

  Void Stalker — Elite Level: 19 Threat: HIGH

  Recommended: Party of 3+

  Party of three or more. He stared at that line for a moment.

  "So just to be clear," he said quietly, to nobody, "I'm one person. Level eighteen. And that thing is a recommended party of three. And it's between me and the next level."

  He looked at his makeshift blade. He looked at the Void Stalker.

  "Great. Fantastic. Love that for me."

  He stepped out from behind the rock.

  Three throws, fast, targeting the sensory cluster on its face. The first made it flinch. The second made it stumble sideways. He was already inside its reach before the third landed.

  Up close the resonant sound was less a sound and more a pressure — vibrating in his back teeth, his HP already ticking down from nothing he could point at, just the wrongness of being this close to something the system called elite. He drove the blade into the joint of its backward knee and felt it catch on something solid.

  He yanked it free and moved. Too slow — one arm caught his side and the force of it spun him. He rolled with it, kept his feet, circled back.

  "Okay. Okay, that hurt."

  Same knee. He went back in. Deeper this time, all his weight behind it. The leg buckled. The Stalker went down on one side with a crash that shook the ground under his feet and sent a spray of cracked stone into his shins.

  He climbed its back — which felt insane, objectively, climbing onto the back of a monster the size of a horse — and drove the blade into the base of the neck and stayed there, pushing, until the resonant sound cut off mid-note like a pulled plug.

  The Stalker dissolved.

  He dropped onto the cracked ground where it had been and just lay there, staring up at the rust-coloured sky, breathing like he'd just run a sprint.

  "Don't do that again," he told the empty air.

  The empty air did not respond, which was probably for the best.

  [ COMBAT RESULT ]

  Void Stalker (Elite) defeated. EXP: 890 | Solo Bonus: +40%

  LEVEL UP! LEVEL UP! Cha Junho → Level 20

  [ CLASS ASSIGNMENT AVAILABLE ]

  Level 20.

  He sat up slowly and stared at it. Twenty. He'd actually done it. Three days of cave fungus and scavenged metal and fighting things that the system itself admitted he shouldn't be fighting alone, and he was actually at Level 20.

  He let out a long breath. "Okay. Okay, yeah. Let's go home."

  The class selection appeared — Ranger, Warrior, Scout. He barely looked at it. Scout, for the stealth. Finding things before they found him was the only edge he'd had this whole time. He tapped it without hesitation.

  The system confirmed. A new notification appeared and something in his chest genuinely loosened for the first time since he'd woken up here.

  [ TUTORIAL OBJECTIVE COMPLETE ]

  Reach Level 20 ............. DONE

  All objectives satisfied. Preparing transfer to destination...

  [ OPENING EXIT PORTAL ]

  A portal opened thirty meters to his north.

  Warm gold light. A vertical oval hovering above the cracked earth, edges shimmering like heat haze. And through it — green. Just the colour. Trees, probably. Sky that was the right colour.

  "There it is." He was already moving. "Finally. Oh thank god, finally."

  Three days. Give or take. He was hungry and tired and his arm was still wrapped in a strip of his own shirt and he had about a hundred and fifty questions about what came next, but all of that was for the other side of that portal. Right now there was just the walking and the warmth of the light getting stronger as he got closer and the very real possibility that wherever he was going, there was food that wasn't cave fungus.

  He was maybe five meters away when the system window vanished.

  Not minimized. Not closed. Gone.

  The entire interface — status bar, skill notifications, everything — wiped from his vision in an instant. The portal flickered. He stopped dead.

  "Hey." Nothing. "Hey, what —"

  A second passed. Two. He looked around. The wasteland was the same. The portal was still open but the gold of it had shifted somehow, fractionally wrong, a shade he couldn't name. He stood with his hand half-outstretched toward it and tried to decide if he should still step through.

  Then the system came back.

  [ SYS // REROUTING ]

  .... destination recalculating ....                                                                                                                                                   [ TRANSFER INITIATING ]

  Rerouting.

  "Rerouting?" He stared at the word. "What does rerouting mean? Rerouting to where?"

  The system didn't answer. Transfer initiating was the last thing it had to say on the matter. The portal was still there. The objective was done. Everything had said he was leaving.

  Maybe rerouting was normal. Maybe this was just how the transfer worked and he was panicking over nothing. He didn't have enough information to know. He hadn't had enough information about anything since the moment he woke up here.

  One second of standing there.

  He stepped through.

  The warmth was gone.

  He landed on sand and almost lost his footing, the ground shifting under him in a way the cracked stone of the wasteland never had. He caught himself, looked down. Fine white sand, warm from a sun that was already pressing on the back of his neck.

  He looked up.

  Desert. In every direction — white sand, pale washed-out sky, dunes rising and falling in long slow shapes that were bigger than they looked from here. No rock formations. No ruins. No rust-coloured cloud cover. A sun sitting high and merciless with absolutely nowhere to hide from it.

  He turned around. The portal was gone.

  "Okay," he said slowly. "This is not — this isn't right. I saw green. I saw trees or — something green. Through the portal. This is not that."

  He turned in a full circle. Still desert. Still no portal.

  "Where am I?"

  No answer. He hadn't expected one.

  He pulled up his status window. It loaded perfectly clean — Level 20, Scout, all skills intact, no errors, no glitching. The system itself was working fine. It had just apparently decided to drop him somewhere completely different from where the portal had been pointing.

  Or something had. Or this was the destination and the green had been — what, a decoration? A mistake?

  He was going in circles. He stopped.

  A new window appeared. Large, centred in his vision, formatted the same way the very first tutorial notification had been back in the grey wasteland.

  [ TUTORIAL INITIALIZED ]

  Welcome, Summoned.

  TRIAL OF THE VOID [ experimental — scrapped — do not deploy ]

  Survive. Grow strong. There is no ceiling. There is no exit condition.

  He read the whole thing once. Then again, slower.

  Another tutorial. He'd just finished a tutorial. He'd just hit every objective and watched the system tell him he was done and walked through the exit portal. And now there was another tutorial.

  His eyes found the small text beside the name. The faded, half-size line of it sitting there like a footnote nobody was supposed to read.

  Experimental. Scrapped. Do not deploy.

  "What."

  He read it again. The words didn't change.

  "Scrapped," he said. "Scrapped means they got rid of it. Do not deploy means it was never supposed to be used. So why —"

  He stopped. Looked at the last two lines.

  There is no ceiling.

  There is no exit condition.

  The window floated there, patient and glowing, completely indifferent to the fact that it had just told him he was trapped in a tutorial that was never meant to exist with no way out.

  "No exit condition." He could hear how flat his own voice was. The specific flatness of a brain refusing to fully process something. "There's no exit condition. That's… that's what that says."

  He closed the window. Opened his status. Level 20, all skills intact, everything exactly as he'd left it. The system was working perfectly. It had just routed him into somewhere it was never supposed to go.

  A mistake. This was a mistake. Some kind of error in whatever system ran all of this, and he had landed in the wrong place, and —

  And there was no exit condition.

  He stood on the white sand for a long moment. The sun pressed down. In the distance, the dunes sat where they were, enormous and indifferent.

  "Okay," he said finally. Quiet. To himself. "Okay. So. That's the situation."

  He crouched and picked up a handful of sand. Let it run between his fingers, slow, grain by grain, warm from the sun. Real. All of this was real.

  Under the sand, something shifted. A low vibration, too steady for settling ground, moving toward him from the east.

  His Danger Sense flickered on.

  He let the last of the sand fall and stood.

  He could panic about the rest of it later. Right now something was coming.

  "All right."

  He picked up his blade.

  — End of Chapter 2 —