If he’s fake—which tracks because how would he even get on this floor with no ranking on the leaderboard—that’s bad for you. If he’s a User, it’s worse for you. Even if you knew with a hundred percent certainty he was a civilian with no ties to any of this, what would you even do? Run in there and play hero?

The image flashed in my mind, as it had thousands of times before: watching through a frame of dusty blinds as my father’s police cruiser pulled up in front of the house down the street. It always stopped there, with me, waiting endlessly for him to emerge. It never showed what happened after. My long walk barefoot down the asphalt. The many neighbors who emerged, dithering to each other as I drew closer to a door left wide-open.

Yeah. That really worked out for him.

There’s literally only one option here. Bide your time. Clip-ear’s bleeding heavily, and the longer you wait, the easier it’s going to be.

Ozzy—as I’d come to think of him—had no real definable characteristics besides the tattoo. His hair was short and dirtied, matted with sweat. I watched him run to the end of the yard, rubbing his wrists frantically, trying to get feeling back. He was looking back so much he ran into the dilapidated wall, impacting against it painfully.

“Shit, shit, shit.” His voice echoed across the yard.

The Clip-eared gnoll wasn’t moving quickly. More savoring the moment while closing distance, his massive stride bringing him ever closer, positioning himself, so he slowly drove his prey into a corner.

Audrey tugged on the tail of my hoody, sending a flash of irritation. “Taking… our… meat.”

“He’s not meat, he’s a person—“ I cut myself off, annoyed with the mistake. Humanizing the person I was trying to distance myself from was only going to make this difficult. The mistake I made with Daphne was judging the situation at face value. Even when you took the personal relationship out of it, the strong beating on the weak was always going to send one very specific image, despite the myriad of variables—the number of dead Users that likely responded to the bounty, how raging and angry Daphne was.

But the picture here was clear. Clip-ear—in a series of deductions so incompetent it was impossible to understand how he’d arrived at the conclusion besides blindly narrowing it down—clearly blamed Ozzy for the state of the Gnoll camp. Damage I caused.

A bright flash of light drew my attention. Clip-ear was reeling back, furred hand clasping his face as the man juked around him, evading his spot in the corner and making a break for it.

I frowned.

Flash bomb? His hands were bound. He’s wearing rags. There’s no way he had that on him.

“Jesus, fuck, that’s bright. Don’t know who killed your friends, Stompy, but it wasn’t me!” He had a vaguely Australian accent. Ozzy placed his hand out in front of him, and another flash illuminated every shadow in the courtyard. Orange embers seared Clip-ear’s fur as he held a hand over his face. My eyes watered from the strain of it, then narrowed.

User. No question.

The man’s expression was a mask of panic as he stared at his hand, then back at the recovering gnoll. “Okay. Okay. That’s not doing shit.”

I shadowed, parallel to Ozzy at my place on the second level, as he ran back towards the far-end, noting his gasping breaths.

The lack of familiarity with his abilities, the increased fatigue. Ozzy was definitely a User, but he was a new one.

Clip-ear followed at the same deliberate pace, orange embers accenting his already ruined dark-coat glowing ever brighter. Ozzy scooped up a short-sword from the ground and took the stairs two-at-a-time, nearly toppling over before he crested them, immediately spotting the chained lift. He bolted inside.

“—Buttons or a lever or something,” I caught the last half of what he was saying. “It’s coming! Can anyone hear me up there? If you can hear me, send the cage up.” A laugh echoed out of the elevator until it became a sob. “I don’t know what’s happening. This has to be a nightmare. I don’t belong here. Help me! Please!”

I didn’t have to ask if the system would do that. The price of a human life was a suit of armor, a crossbow, and a few weeks of groceries. Suffice it to say, it didn’t value us much.

Tears streamed down Ozzy’s face. Either he was the best acted NPC I’d ever seen, or he was real.

This changes nothing. whispered to me.

No.

I wasn’t going to rush in like an idiot. But if the system was going to keep playing these fucked up games with me, I wasn’t just going to take it. Clip-eared was XP. Ozzy was an obstacle. I wasn’t always going to be in a controlled environment like this. I would need to learn to work around people, many of whom would be Users.

Then what’s the solution?

“Audrey, go to the elevator. Say what I tell you.”

My oversized plant stared at me as if I’d lost my mind.

“All the Gnolls. All of them. Think of all that meat. Meat as far as the eye can see.”

That was all I needed to say.

/////

Ozzy had abandoned the elevator just as Clip-ear mounted the stairs when Audrey found him.

“What—“ Ozzy started, winded. I heard him both in my head and directly through Audrey’s

“I… am here… to save you…” Audrey, despite some attempt to translate my words, spoke with the same enthusiasm and cadence of a gas station attendant.

“Oh, I’ve really lost it now. And he’s still coming!” Ozzy threw out an empty hand towards Clip-ear.”

“Moving slowly… because he’s… wounded. Both of us… Faster than him. Can… kill him… if we work… together.”

“Wait. Wait.” He counted off his fingers. “Bad script, weird creepy sidekick, anthropomorphized bad guy? I’ve lost it. I’m in a children’s cartoon. So, why are you so fucking scary!” Ozzy yelled at Clip-ear, who had stopped a few yards away, and was studying Audrey.

I frowned. None of this would work if the mark was completely spineless. I hesitated, then reached out to him with a suggestion. A wave of resistance hit me and I gritted my teeth. The difference in level of effort between influencing a gnoll and influencing a human was significant. Like fighting my way through a wave of headache. It was doable, but I wasn’t certain if I could do anything significant.

”You saw the bodies and there’s no one else here. Some furred creatures attacked each other in the confusion, but the plant is the only one here. It must have killed most of them.” I attached the message with as much confidence as I could.

Ozzy glanced over at Audrey with a furrowed brow, overly concerned. I might have overdone it. Before I could react, Audrey responded of her own accord.

“Humans… not… meat.” Audrey flashed an overly sharp smile filled with seed teeth.

I put a hand to my forehead. And now he’s considering the possibility that you might eat him.

But my concerns were shockingly unwarranted. To my surprise, Ozzy broke out in a smile. “Well, that puts you one over on fur-roids, doesn’t it?”

No fucking way. No one with half a brain was that easy to convince.

Likely realizing the extent of his injuries was catching up with him, the lumbering gnoll abandoned his previous strategy of wearing his prey out and began to sprint directly towards Ozzy. Apparently, he’d made the mistake of dismissing Audrey as the least threatening of the two.

It was a mistake he’d pay for.

”Trip him up.”

Audrey flung herself to the side, wrapping two mobility vines around Clip-ear’s waist and leg. The thorns dug through his fur and into his skin. She snapped back from the transfer of momentum, swung around him, and slammed home her thousands of sharp teeth into his back and shoulder. Clip-ear roared, coming to a limping, staggered stop, to regain his balance.

I didn’t have to prompt Ozzy. His choice to charge forward, screaming at the top of his lungs, was entirely of his accord. He slashed downward with the short sword in a movement too practiced to be untrained. The blow was aimed carefully enough to draw blood and graze the gnoll, but not careful enough to do any lasting damage. Something pinged in the back of my mind, clueing me into the fact that Ozzy likely had a combat skill.

Clip-ear gave up on trying to dislodge Audrey and slammed Ozzy’s sword nearly hard enough to knock it out of his hands. He staggered forward.

I moved to a better vantage. I’d watched Clip-ear spar, understood how he fought. He was pressed, desperate, and outnumbered. He would try to end this quickly, and I needed to be in a position where I could do something about it. I found a small alcove and aimed a probability spiral at Clip-ear’s sword, just as it came down in a vicious diagonal blow. The blade missed, sinking an inch into the crumbled stone from force alone.

Audrey was still tearing into Clip-ear’s shoulder and must have hit a nerve. With another angry, spittle-flecked roar, the gnoll reached up and grabbed her, tearing Audrey and her vines free with the same force one might use to tear off a ripcord.

I went through the considerable effort of forcing through with a message to use his ability and blind the gnoll. Instead, Ozzy lowered his blade.

No you idiot, blind him from a distance, I wanted to scream. Clip-ear readied for the attack. The whole point of the Unsparing Fang was giving your opponent enough rope to hang themselves with, and if he ran in and attacked now that the gnoll was free of Audrey… Ozzy was about to swing.

I looked around for anything I could use, anything I could spiral in Ozzy’s favor. It was pointless. He was moving too quickly.

At the last possible moment, Ozzy changed stance from a low-aiming stab to a wide swing. His sword landed flush against the gnoll’s, slamming it aside. Clip-ear pivoted, his gauntlet slamming into Ozzy’s face—the same second the man’s glowing free-hand clasped onto the top-half of Clip-ear’s face.

Light consumed the battlefield. When my eyes readjusted, I saw Clip-ear, staggering backwards, his face burned black, two smoking craters where his eyes used to be.

It took me a second to understand why Ozzy had taken such a massive risk. When Clip-ear dislodged Audrey, he had thrown the unanchored Flowerfang behind him and to the left. She would have been blinded. By holding his hand directly onto the target, he limited the radius in using it the way he did.

I was slightly stunned.

Ozzy shook out his off-hand, then rubbed his jaw as he crossed the distance. “Sorry mate. Probably best to put you to pasture.”

With a careful, two-handed swing, the last of the gnolls died.

“What the hell is all this nonsense?” Ozzy—proper name Brett —was doing the typical eye-flicking, swiping-at-invisible-screens motion I knew all too well. If this was his first time exploring the various screens and, god-forbid, leveling, we were going to be here for a while. I moved back into the shadows, sticking my head into the lift to ensure the buttons had returned. They had, alongside a black metal panel that looked strangely out of place for an iron cage, showing numbers 1-4.”

“Actually, I just realized I don’t bloody care. How do we get out of here?” Brett’s voice rang across the clearing.

Audrey said something indistinguishable.

“Now that you mention it, I’m starving… What do you have?”

There was a ripping noise like tearing fur, followed by the sound of a grown man gagging and a muttered. “Never mind.”

Brett seemed normal—normal being a relative term. Who knew what he was actually like, but not enough time had passed for the system to screw with him.

I’d have Audrey guide him to the doors, and subsequently, well.

It was time to see exactly what kinds of treasures Tribal Gnolls hid away.