Fire ants. Mark must have been injected with fire ants. Not just their venom, but the actual ants themselves. Either that or sulphuric acid. Was that sufficiently low-tech to work in this world? If so, that could definitely be what was coursing through his veins, because it felt like they were burning from the inside out.

At least the rain was cool. He could tell because he was no longer underground, somehow sent back to the surface where he was now lying on his back, raindrops smacking him in the face despite the piece of paper hovering insistently in front of him.

Too disoriented to read, Mark waved the paper aside, only to have swoop back in front of him. He tried again to wave it away, but again it flitted into his vision. Now completely annoyed, Mark grabbed the paper out of midair and crumpled it in his fist, revealing a gray sky so dreary that it practically sucked the colours out of the surrounding forest.

Forest?

Mark bolted up and looked around in shock. The solid wall of fog loomed only 5 metres away, but against all reason, he had somehow been deposited outside of it.

Or had he? The ground he was lying on was the same kind of scorched earth that was everywhere inside that cursed place—there were even some old weapons scattered nearby—making it feel more like he had been moved to the very edge of the fog, and then it had receded, leaving him outside its boundaries.

The moment Mark’s mind closed on that idea, he scrambled to his feet and grabbed his staff from the ground, sprinting away from the gray mists as fast as his feet would carry him. When he hit the woods, he didn’t even slow down, barreling through the underbrush without a care for the sound he was making, continuing until he ran out of energy and eventually collapsed onto his knees.

Even though Mark’s lungs were heaving for oxygen, his mind continued to race at full tilt.

What was that place? What was that thing?

Just thinking of that spasming sphere of power sent a shudder through Mark, an echo of that strange warping sensation that wouldn’t let go, leaving an uncomfortable sense of association in its wake. As though the memory had sunk into him and didn’t want to be forgotten.

A growl rumbled Mark’s stomach, and he remembered just how hungry he was. It had been days since he had eaten, not to mention however long he’d been unconscious. Still… he felt like he should be hungrier than he was. His mouth was tacky too, a product of his thirst, but not as overwhelming as it should have been.

Weird, but no weirder than anything else that had happened inside that fog.

“Okay, Mark. You’re out,” he said to himself. “That’s all that matters. You’re outside the fog. Just get your shit together and make a plan.”

After a moment’s consideration, he decided that despite everything, his goals were fundamentally unchanged. He was still lost in the woods, and he still needed to get to Palmyre. With that in mind, he stuck the butt of his staff into the ground and used it to push himself to his feet.

That was when Mark discovered two more things that had been changed by the fog. Considering the nature of those changes, he couldn’t comprehend how they had escaped his notice.

One, his leg was healed. Completely. Taking off the bandage revealed a patchwork of scars but no injury.

Two, his staff had changed. Where before it had been nothing but a broken branch picked up from the ground to use as a makeshift crutch, now it was the faded yellow of aged ivory and covered in hair-width whorls that crawled all over it in a seemingly random fashion, the thin lines a shimmering prism colour akin to the look of oil on water. Literally crawled, as Mark realized upon closer inspection. It was hard to see, but the lines were slowly drawing themselves in some spots and erasing in others. It left the staff with a vaguely unsettling feeling that reminded Mark a bit too much of the spectre he had fought in the fog. Still, it wasn’t unsettling enough to throw away. Mark had played enough games to know that you didn’t throw away unique items out of hand. Plus, the splintered end had hardened into something like obsidian and was now razor-sharp, so he wasn’t going to get rid of an actual, viable weapon while he was still lost in the forest.

Mark’s eyes tracked the length of the staff, starting with the obsidian edge and travelling down as he absorbed every detail of the strangely altered weapon. When his eyes reached the point where he was holding the staff, he caught sight of his own hand, and his eyes widened.

All across his hand, where it had been burned by the spectre’s collapsing energies, were the same moving lines that traced the length of his staff. Mark pulled back his sleeve and discovered that the lines stretched halfway up his forearm, their bizarre shifting pattern tapering off right at the spot where his arms had been free of the spectre’s twisting form, leaving no doubt as to their origins.

“What the hell?” Mark said. He shoved the notification page he’d been ignoring into his pocket and switched his staff to the other hand so he could better inspect the one with the marks. Oddly, when he let go of the staff, the lines disappeared abruptly, leaving clean flesh that looked perfectly normal. Even his fingernails were no different than when he entered the fog, despite his distinct memory of them being torn off in that cave. In contrast, the hand that Mark had switched the staff to now boasted its own swirling lines, the markings blooming forth the moment his flesh touched the wood.

Mark grabbed the staff with both hands. Sure enough, the lines were now visible on both hands. A quick tap on his leg where the pants were torn off showed that the effect was limited to the hands that had been inside the spectre when it was destroyed, which matched Mark’s expectations.

Out of curiosity, Mark placed the staff on the ground and let go. Sure enough, as soon as his skin was no longer in contact with the wood, the marks vanished from both his hands and the staff.

“Okay then,” Mark muttered. Then he grinned. For better or for worse, he was bonded to a mysterious magical weapon of his own making, and damn if that wasn’t pretty cool.

With everything else settled, Mark was ready to cope with whatever was written on the note that had appeared following his emergence from the fog.

Come to think of it, Mark couldn’t recall seeing any notifications whatsoever when he was in there.

Now full of curiosity, Mark pulled the crumpled paper out of his pocket and flattened it out so he could read it.

It was immediately clear that this wasn’t like the other notes he had received.

EMERGENCY NOTIFICATION:

What were you thinking? What were you THINKING, going into that fog? And then you got out? Are you some kind of lunatic savant? And then there’s your Tome… what the hells happened in there? I’ve been doing this job for a long time, and that is some serious stat movement. What’s worse is that I didn’t even get to mock you as it happened! Now I’m stuck with no idea what went on in there, and your Tome doesn’t even have events properly logged!

Aw, crap. You probably don’t even know what stats changed. Fine, I’ll give you a summary:

Sense Danger Skill Increased to Level 4 (Tier-0)

Constitution +1

Endurance +2

Willpower +3

Luck +4 1

Combat, Opponent Undefined (no XP awarded) 2

100 XP Earned (cumulative)

1 Don’t get too excited about that Luck score. Yes, it went up an insane amount, but there’s something weird about it. Verna made me tell you it’s a bit funky, so don’t get cocky about risk-taking.

2 I have no idea what this line means. I guess you fought something and might have won? Congratulations?

Yeah, and there’s one more surprise you should know about. Hint: It’s not a puppy. Check your stat sheet.

Mark looked up from the piece of paper in shock. The fog had been bad, but if the seemingly all-powerful people who had sent him here were worried? That was trouble.

Opening his Tome, Mark looked up his stat sheet.

MARK SULLIVAN

Renown: Level 6 – மாற்றம்

Species: Human

Age: 20

Experience: 5,400

Experience to Next Level: 2,000

Base Attributes

Strength – 19

Constitution – 19

Endurance – 18

Dexterity – 18

Willpower – 19

Intelligence – 16

Charisma – 14

Luck – 13

AVERAGE: 17.0

The changes represented a huge improvement over when Mark first arrived, but one difference stood out from the rest.

“மாற்றம்?” Mark said. “What the hell kind of class is that?”

A new page appeared in front of Mark’s face.

New Class Alert: மாற்றம்!

Look, half the fun of this job is trash-talking you mortals, but this isn’t the time. You just had a class imposed on you by one of the primal forces. That is very much not okay. Unfortunately, there is only one primal force in existence that is immune to punishment from the Eternals, which is exactly why everyone has stayed the hell away from that fog for a thousand years. But not you! No, you decided to run straight for it like the brilliant asshat you are. We have no idea why you ended up with a class instead of a horrible death, but since you did, you’re pretty much stuck with it. Enjoy Arenia.

- You are now capable of gods only know what.

- Special abilities have probably been granted? Seriously, we have no idea. This primal is a real jerk and we never know what it’s going to do. Which makes sense, I guess.

- You’ll be getting some—and I really hate doing this—compensation down the road. You got seriously jobbed here, and if we can’t punish the one who did it, we can at least give you a little something for your troubles. Ugh.

Class Quest Assigned: “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU?” Part 1

Here, have a quest. Let us know what you find out.

Reward for success: XP, Knowledge of your class.

Penalty for failure: Live an ignominious life and then die in obscurity.

ACCEPT? YES/NO

In all his years playing fantasy games, Mark had never heard of a class called a மாற்றம். Was it a spellcaster? That seemed pretty likely, considering that he’d just been pulled backwards into a glowing ball of rainbow energy. Except that his Tome didn’t show mana, or even spells for that matter. How was he supposed to interact with a system when he didn’t know anything about how it worked?

Mark ran a hand over his face and massaged his temples.

What the hell was going on? Was anything going to go right on this god-forsaken planet? And now that this had happened, what could he do about it?

The answer, as had universally been the case since Mark arrived, was nothing. Not a damn thing. Here he was, living the greatest adventure of his life, and he was a passenger. The only choice he had was to walk forward or lay down and die.

Mark burst into a chuckle and shook his head. That was the way of it, wasn’t it? In a way, it made everything easier. Two options. Which made it an easy choice.

Mark accepted the quest, got up, brushed himself off, and headed deeper into the forest.

Unlike when Mark first landed on Arenia, this time he was able to get a feel for the deep green, loamy forest around him. It smelled fresh, full of oxygen, and it occurred to Mark that maybe Arenia wasn’t full of wall-to-wall enemies after all. He had landed with a Luck score of 8—no wonder he had been attacked non-stop. With his Luck nearly doubling to 14, perhaps he would actually be able to hike unmolested for a while.

One more undeniable observation was just how amazing it felt to have two functioning legs. In light of the changes to Mark’s staff and his weird new class, Mark’s mysteriously healed leg had seemed almost a footnote. In reality, it had a far more immediate impact. Without that healed leg, Mark would be struggling his way through the forest instead of walking deliberately, analyzing his surroundings for enemies and information with every step.

That led to the observation that this stretch of the forest looked different from where he had spawned. It was younger, with more gaps in the canopy. New growth after logging, perhaps?

Mark stopped and looked around. Of course! He was so used to seeing stumps in forests that it hadn’t even occurred to him that they wouldn’t occur in a natural growth forest. But there were stumps here, ones which were many times the diameter of the current crop of trees. There was no question: This forest had been logged. Not recently, maybe not even in the last hundred years, but it had happened.

That welcome thought wrapped itself around Mark and comforted him as he resumed his trek. Logging meant civilization, and he could use a dose of that right now. If he had to guess—and based on the sun, he felt confident he was right—he’d come out of the fog on the opposite side of where he’d entered. Given how the inhabitants of this world felt about the fog, himself now included, it was likely that the loggers had started somewhere ahead of him and worked their way inward, stopping when they got too close for comfort. Hopefully, that meant a road of some sort was nearby. Or even a logging camp. If he could find either of those, he just might survive after all.

As nice as it was that the younger forest implied nearby civilization, the big downside to smaller trees was that it meant less canopy, and that extra access to light translated into more ground cover for Mark to push through. It was all ferns and mossy old logs, too—nothing like the gnarled California oak and eucalyptus forests he was used to back on Earth, where the groundcover burned away every few years. The going didn’t get any easier when it started raining in a steady beat that drenched everything and turned the ground into thick mud that sucked at Mark’s shoes with every step. Still, even with the mud slowing down his travel, it was nothing compared to when he had his mangled leg. By his reckoning, he was still making good time.

The bigger issue was hunger. All that hard work was creating a knot of pain in Mark’s belly where food was supposed to go. Even worse, it was also making him sweat profusely, causing his thirst to swell to overwhelming proportions—rather annoying considering he was in the middle of a rainstorm.

After another hour of hiking and another point in that Skill, Mark was thinking about how he’d murder a hobo for half a can of Fresca when he noticed a plant whose broad, bowl-shaped leaves were curved in such a way that water collected in small pools at the base of the stem. Mark immediately raced over and planted his face in one of the leaves, sucking every drop of water from the leaf and letting the cool moisture pour over his parched tongue. Then he went to the next leaf and repeated himself, moving from leaf to leaf until they were all drained. He briefly considered the possibility of a toxic element in the plant’s leaves, but he quickly abandoned that train of thought. If the leaf-water was going to kill him, it had to be more pleasant than dying of thirst.

Mark resumed his trek, keeping his eye out for more of those plants, eventually able to slake his thirst completely. It didn’t do anything for his painful hunger, but after the last few days, he considered himself something of a connoisseur of misery, and it was clear that thirst was way worse than hunger. Still… how long was it since he’d last eaten? Three days? Five? Could hunger even get worse after a couple of days, or did it simply blur into the same gnawing pain every day until you keeled over dead?

If only Mark had taken after his father’s side of the family—he sure wouldn’t mind a few extra pounds on his frame to pull energy from. Instead, Mark took after his mother. As a result, he hadn’t exactly shown up in Arenia with a surplus of fatty energy stores. Now he was stuck wishing he’d plowed back more pie and ice cream when he had the chance.

Mmm… pie and ice cream…

“No, no, no!” Mark said, slapping himself on the side of the face. “Not helping!”

Mark plunked down on a log and rested his head against his staff. He was just so frigging hungry.

For the first time since his arrival on Arenia, Mark wasn’t actively fleeing for his life. It brought on a crushing feeling of loneliness. Here he was, lost in the forest with only the vaguest sense of direction, on a planet he didn’t understand, with a class that even the beings who ran the place hadn’t seen before. And he had no idea where his family was. Were his parents still alive? Grandpa Jack? Angela?

Man, what he wouldn’t give to have Angie with him right now. She had to be loving this. Probably already had that druid class and was out there casting badass spells or turning into a bird and flying to Palmyre. She might even be able to tell him what the deal was with spells in this place.

For what felt like the ten-thousandth time since his arrival, Mark heard a rustle in the trees. The sound of feet slapping against dirt emanated from the brush, as well as some sort of hiccoughing noise that sounded familiar but which Mark couldn’t quite place.

Screw this, he thought. For the first time since his arrival, Mark was armed, and he wasn’t going to get pushed around anymore.

Gripping his staff, Mark stared down the forest in front of him, prepared to face whatever was coming for him.

Then the ferns burst aside to reveal not a creature, but a 10-year-old boy.