Luke counted them as they came through.

  It was automatic. The same part of his brain that cataloged bystanders at an accident scene, that noted which exits were blocked before he'd consciously assessed the situation, that had once tracked eleven people in a burning apartment hallway and known, with a certainty he could not have explained, exactly which one was about to fall. He didn't decide to count. His brain decided, and he received the information.

  Four from the left archway. Three from the right. Moving in formation — not the mindless shamble of the tutorial skeletons, but coordinated, purposeful, the spacing between them consistent in a way that meant something or someone had taught them to move as a unit. They carried rusted blades. They wore the remains of armor that had stopped being functional several centuries ago but hadn't stopped being sharp at the edges.

  Seven new hostiles in a room that already had a boss in it. Four people with shortswords and no armor. One developer who was still processing the fact that his encounter had gone off-script.

  Luke had walked into worse rooms than this. Not many. But some.

  The first thing he did was wrong.

  He moved toward Sara, because Sara was hurt and the part of him that had been an EMT for eleven years responded to injury the way other people responded to their name being called. She was on her feet, sword up, still locked in with the Warden, and the shoulder she'd taken the shield bash on was moving differently than the other one — guarded, compensating, the specific restriction of motion that meant soft tissue damage even if the bone was intact. He could see it from fifteen feet away. He could see it the way he could see a patient favoring a rib before they told him it hurt.

  He took three steps toward her before the geometry of the room caught up with him.

  The Hollow Soldiers weren't heading for Sara. They were heading for the Warden — converging on its position from both sides, forming up around it, and suddenly the boss wasn't alone in the center of the chamber. It was the center of a formation. A command structure. The soldiers oriented around it the way units oriented around an officer, and the room that had been a one-on-one fight between Sara and a skeleton with a halberd was now something entirely different.

  Luke stopped.

  He looked at the room the way he looked at every room he'd ever entered professionally — not as a space but as a system. Distances. Angles. Choke points. Who was where, who was moving, who was about to be in trouble.

  Sara was in trouble. She didn't know it yet because she was focused on the Warden, still reading it as her fight, still operating in the competitive frame that had carried her through Phase One. But the soldiers were filling in around her, and in about four seconds she was going to be flanked by two of them while the Warden kept her attention forward. She was going to take a hit she didn't see coming, from a direction she wasn't watching, because she'd been fighting one enemy and now she was standing in the middle of seven.

  Raj was in trouble. He'd stopped circling when the soldiers arrived and was standing near the right archway — exactly where three of them had just entered. He'd moved aside to let them pass, which was the correct instinct for a person and the wrong instinct for a combatant. Now he was behind the formation with his back near a wall and no clear path to the rest of the party.

  Zane was — actually, Zane was fine. He'd moved the moment the soldiers appeared, quick and quiet, putting a stone column between himself and the formation. Not hiding. Repositioning. Luke revised his assessment of the wall-watcher slightly upward.

  Voss was standing in the middle of the chamber with his staff in one hand and an expression on his face that Luke recognized from the mirror on his worst days — the look of a person who had caused something and was now watching the consequences arrive.

  "Doc," Luke said. Low. Direct. The voice he used when a bystander was about to do something unhelpful. "I need you to move."

  Voss moved.

  Not immediately — there was a half-second where the developer in him and the participant in him had the same argument Luke had watched Sara and her shoulder have, the negotiation between what you knew you should do and what your body was willing to commit to. Then something resolved behind his eyes and he moved, and Luke noted two things simultaneously.

  First: Voss was fast. Faster than a man in wizard robes had any right to be, faster than his frame suggested, moving with a fluidity that looked less like athleticism and more like the game itself was helping him along. His feet found the uneven stone without stumbling. His weight shifted with a precision that suggested something other than natural coordination.

  Second: Voss was angry.

  Not at the situation. Not at MARA, whoever or whatever she was — that reckoning was coming but it wasn't here yet. He was angry at the encounter. Angry in the specific, technical way of someone who had designed something to work a certain way and was watching it deviate, and who had decided that the deviation was going to be addressed personally.

  He crossed the chamber in four strides, put himself between Raj and the nearest Hollow Soldier, and hit the soldier in the skull with his staff hard enough that Luke heard the impact from twenty feet away. The staff wasn't a weapon. Voss wasn't a fighter. But eleven years of emergency work had taught Luke that the most dangerous person in any room wasn't the one with the best training — it was the one who had just decided that the situation was unacceptable.

  The soldier staggered. Voss hit it again. His form was terrible. His commitment was absolute.

  "That," Voss said, through his teeth, to no one in particular, "was not in the design document."

  Luke stopped thinking about Sara's shoulder. He stopped thinking about the Warden. He started thinking about the room.

  The room was a system. The system had inputs: seven soldiers plus one boss, moving in coordinated patterns. The system had resources: four combatants with shortswords, one angry developer with a stick, and approximately nine hundred square feet of tutorial chamber with two archways, four stone columns, and a ceiling high enough that nothing was going to use it as a weapon. The system had a failure state: anyone going down in a space where the others couldn't reach them.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  His job was to prevent the failure state. Not win the fight — he wasn't sure winning was available right now. Keep everyone alive long enough for winning to become an option.

  "Sara!" He pitched it at the volume and register he used for partners across a noisy scene — clear, carrying, no wasted words. "You've got two coming up on your left. Don't turn — just step right. Step right and let them come to the Warden."

  She didn't turn. She stepped right. The two soldiers that had been flanking her closed the gap, but now they were between her and the Warden, which meant they were in the Warden's space, which meant —

  The Warden's halberd caught one of its own soldiers in the backswing.

  Luke watched the Warden register this. Watched it adjust — not seamlessly, not perfectly. There was a hitch. A processing delay. The Warden knew its soldiers were there, but it hadn't fully accounted for them in its attack patterns, because the attack patterns had been designed when it was alone. The reinforcements were new. The Warden was adapting to them in real time, the same way the party was.

  Luke filed this. Exploitable.

  "Raj!" Same voice. Same register. "Move along the wall toward Voss. Don't engage — just get clear of the archway. You're blocking their reinforcement line and they're going to notice."

  Raj moved. No hesitation, no argument. He heard the instruction and acted on it with the immediate trust of someone who recognized a voice that knew what it was talking about. Luke noted this. Raj didn't question the call because Raj had already assessed the room and arrived at the same conclusion — he'd just been waiting for someone to say it out loud.

  That was interesting. That was useful. Luke filed that too.

  "Zane — you see the column you're behind? Stay there. You're in the only blind spot in the room. If a soldier breaks formation, call it out."

  Zane didn't respond verbally. He shifted his weight into a lower stance behind the column and his eyes started tracking the soldiers' movement patterns with the focused attention of someone who had just been given a job that matched his skillset exactly.

  The next ninety seconds were the worst and the best of the tutorial.

  The worst because the Hollow Soldiers fought differently than the tutorial skeletons. They held formation. They supported each other. When Sara pressed an advantage against one, the nearest soldier stepped in to cover the gap. When Voss knocked one back from Raj's position, two more adjusted to fill the line. They weren't smart — their individual movements were predictable, mechanical, the routines of things that had been programmed to patrol and fight and nothing else. But they were coordinated in the way that a machine was coordinated, each piece doing exactly its part, and the cumulative effect was a wall of rusted steel and dead bone that gave ground reluctantly and retook it the moment pressure eased.

  The best because Luke could see it working.

  Not the fight. The room. The system he was managing, the one made of people instead of patients, the one where the treatment wasn't medication and the vitals weren't blood pressure but where the fundamental logic was the same: keep everyone stable, keep everyone positioned, keep the situation from deteriorating faster than you could manage it.

  Sara had adjusted. She was fighting the Warden and the soldiers simultaneously now, which shouldn't have been possible and was — she'd widened her radius, stopped trying to duel the Warden one-on-one, started using the soldiers' formation against them by forcing them into each other's lines of attack. She hadn't said anything about Luke's callout. She'd just used it. He suspected she'd have an opinion about being directed later. He also suspected she'd keep the tactical adjustment, because Sara was the kind of person who adopted useful information regardless of how she felt about the source.

  Voss had settled into something that Luke could only describe as furious competence. He wasn't skilled with the staff but he was fast — remarkably, disproportionately fast — and he'd figured out that he didn't need to kill the soldiers, just disrupt them. A sharp crack to a knee joint. A staff jammed between a soldier's legs mid-stride. He fought like a man dismantling something he'd built, precise about where the weak points were because he'd put them there.

  Raj was fighting. Actually fighting now, not circling, and something had changed in his posture — not aggression, not confidence exactly, but a kind of deliberate attention. He was watching the soldier in front of him with the same careful focus he'd given the Warden earlier, reading its patterns, timing his strikes to the recovery windows, and when he hit, he hit the same spot twice. Then three times. Testing. Confirming. Learning the system by interacting with it rather than observing it from outside.

  And Zane, from behind his column, called out every break in formation before it happened.

  "Left archway — one breaking toward Sara."

  "Voss, your right — it's trying to flank."

  "Two pulling back toward the Warden. Regrouping."

  He saw the patterns. Not combat patterns — movement patterns. The soldiers were machines and machines had routines and Zane had been watching routines since the moment he loaded into the tutorial, reading the dungeon like a dataset. He couldn't hit hard enough to matter from where he was. He didn't need to. He was the person who saw the whole board, and the information he provided was worth more than a sword.

  Sara might not agree with that assessment. Sara could discuss it with him later.

  Luke took three hits during Phase Two.

  The first was a soldier's blade across his forearm — shallow, stinging, the kind of cut that bled impressively and meant nothing structurally. He'd gotten worse from broken glass on a car extraction. He shifted his grip on the sword and kept moving.

  The second was a shield bash from a soldier he'd stepped in front of to protect Raj during a bad positioning moment. The impact was significant — his ribs compressed in a way the suit translated with unpleasant accuracy, and he lost a full second to the shock of it before his training kicked back in and moved him clear. The soldier hadn't been aiming for him. It had been aiming for Raj, and Luke had put himself in the way because that was what you did when someone was about to get hurt and you could prevent it.

  The third was the one that mattered.

  A soldier caught him across the back of the leg as he was repositioning, and the pain was bright and immediate and his knee buckled and for one terrible moment he was on the ground with a skeleton standing over him and the only thing between its blade and his neck was the flat of his own sword, raised on instinct, braced with both hands against a strike that drove him into the stone.

  He held.

  He held because Nicole's concert was tomorrow and Amber was recording it and he was going to watch that recording. He held because he hadn't called home yet and he needed to call home. He held because giving up required a decision and he hadn't made that decision and so the default was to keep holding.

  Raj appeared at the soldier's flank and hit it twice — the same spot, the one he'd been testing for the last thirty seconds — and the skeleton buckled sideways. Luke rolled clear. Voss cracked it across the skull from behind. It went down.

  Luke got to his feet. His leg was wrong but functional. He'd worked on worse legs than this.

  "Thanks," he said to Raj.

  Raj nodded. Brief. Warm. The nod of someone who had been watching and had moved at the right moment because the right moment was when Luke needed him, not before, not after.

  Then the sound came again.

  Low. Resonant. The Warden, planting its feet, tilting its skull toward the ceiling. The remaining soldiers — four of them now, the others scattered into blue motes across the chamber floor — pulled back toward it, tightening the formation, drawing closer.

  The Warden's damaged armor was showing new marks. Sara's work, mostly. But it was still standing, and the halberd was still ready, and the soldiers were still there, and the party was bleeding from a dozen small wounds and breathing hard and the tutorial chamber was starting to feel less like a test and more like a question the dungeon was asking about what they were made of.

  The Warden raised the halberd.

  The remaining soldiers raised their blades.

  Something was about to change. Luke could feel it the way he felt a patient's vitals shifting — not the specific thing, but the imminence of it, the particular quality of a system that was about to transition from one state to another.

  He looked at Sara. She was watching the Warden with the focused intensity of someone who had been fighting it for five minutes and understood it better than anyone else in the room.

  He looked at Raj. Raj was looking at all of them.

  Phase Two was over.