Max’s heart rate shot up. He wasn’t rich, but he could pay them off. They could ransom him! He wouldn’t report them to the police!

“Wait, wait, hold on, don’t hurt me, please, I’ll stay still, I’ll do what you tell me, you can have my VR set, don’t — ”

Something slammed into the person pinning Max, and he was no longer restrained. Max flailed and scrambled backward, slipping on the couple inches of water on the floor — his nose protested calling it water. When he made it up to a standing position, he turned and ran for a dozen or so paces until a smaller pipe-tunnel forked off. He ducked into the smaller pipe and pressed his back against the wall, chest heaving.

Should he keep running? He gazed into the foul-smelling darkness. What if more muggers lay in wait down there? What if he got lost and couldn’t find a way out of these tunnels?

The sounds of heavy strikes echoed in the tunnel, a percussive melody accented by occasional yells and shouts.

Crouching, he leaned out just enough to see around the corner, hoping desperately that they wouldn’t notice him.

A blonde woman built like an Amazon with a short club in each hand was fighting all four of the muggers. Three, since the one who’d pinned Max was already lying motionless on the ground. The Club Woman wore a lot of leather. Not the sexy black motorcycle leather that Max associated with the word, but brown, weathered, and bulky leather. Leather armor. Dirty, but her leather armor looked unpatched and in much better condition than the muggers. On each hand she wore a scarlet glove.

Although they outnumbered Club Woman, the Muggers’ motions and shouts seemed frantic. In their defense, the Club Woman’s strikes seemed unnaturally fast. One knife-wielding mugger blocked a club with his arm and there was a resounding crack. That sounded like bone. Max cheered on Club Woman in his head.

The mugger with the broken arm ran the opposite way down the tunnel, clutching his arm and moaning. A club caught another knife-wielder on the head, and he went down, leaving only the robed man. The Club Woman rounded on him, swinging fast and hard, but every time Max thought she’d hit the robed man, the club went right through. Max blinked a few times. He was having trouble focusing on the robed man. The man’s form seemed to shimmer as if he were hidden behind frosted glass, dark and blending in with the shadows of the tunnel.

Holy fuck, is that magic?

A rational person’s instincts would have told them to run, Max knew, but he couldn’t look away. Kristoff would’ve killed to be here for this. Complete, total immersion. A live-action fight, one which he was a part of. Even the others — Izzie, Eddie, Ji-won — Max almost felt ashamed that the min-maxer in the group was experiencing this. Almost.

For the group, he would do his best to bear witness.

One club swing didn’t pass through the robed man’s form, striking true with a cracking sound, and the robed man, no longer difficult to see, collapsed. The club woman kicked the robed man, as if checking if he was down, then she spun around. Fierce eyes locked onto Max’s.

Max ducked back out of sight, terrified. The violent maniac Club-Woman, the muggers who wanted to kill him, the robed man who was doing something impossible. Max tried to breathe quietly, which was difficult because he was breathing so hard. Should he go greet his savior? She’d taken down the murderous muggers as easily as he turned on his VR headset. What if she also couldn’t speak English? She might reply with a club to his face. While he wouldn’t be fronting a boy band any time soon, he had a certain attachment to his currently intact face. He could run away, but where the hell was he? And if he ran into her later, she might mistake him for a mugger. Praying that she would go away, he remained frozen with indecision.

A voice that sounded like his thoughts but wasn’t him rang in his head.

Level up. Blessing granted: Sneaker.

Oh, shit! He recognized this! He was right! He’d been transported —

Error: User is disconnected. Connecting.

A stabbing headache paralyzed Max’s thoughts before he blacked out.

* * *

A circus troupe could sneak up on these numbskulls.

Mari bit back a yawn as she debated how to dispatch the four Crimson Tide thugs. The three Thieves and a Mage huddled about a hundred yards down the sewer tunnel, cracking jokes to each other to pass the time. They had a clear line of sight to Mari, but her dark leathers against the mottled sewer wall in the dim lighting would be difficult to make out at a distance. That, and Mari suspected that knocking the thugs out would make them no less alert.

It wasn’t fear that caused her hesitation. In all likelihood, she could rush them while unarmed and with one hand tied behind her back and emerge without a scratch. But Boss had instructed her to “avoid taking dumb risks by using your brain,” or as Mari thought of it, playing with her food. Or foreplay. Come to think of it, Boss probably had a lot of experience with foreplay. Maybe that was why Boss kept trying to teach Mari tactics.

She could throw a rock past them to try to get their attention, but, with the low ceiling and the distance, it would have to be a void of a throw. She’d have to avoid hitting the thugs, too. Although if she hit one hard enough with a rock, maybe that would count as tactics? Even if the rock made it past them, could she count on all four looking in the same direction? What if they were smart enough to check the tunnel in both directions? There was nowhere to hide her approach in the hundreds of yards of tunnel between her and the thugs.

Mari was a Brawler, but she wasn’t a dumb brute. She thought things through. It wasn’t her fault that most situations were easily resolved with the rapid application of her clubs to people’s heads.

As Mari gave up on tactics, the blurry form of a man appeared a little ways past the thugs. Mari took a step backward and raised her clubs in a defensive cross.

Some kind of spell by the Mage? Had she been seen? He’d been joking around with the thugs, showing no signs of spellcasting.

No, the Mage seemed as surprised as Mari. He was backing away from the unknown quantity, letting the Thieves line up to form a human barrier.

“Red Hander!” the Mage shouted.

Mari almost laughed. The misunderstanding was understandable. She was a Red Hander, but the blurry man wasn’t. Unless . . .

She cast suspicious glances at the walls around her. It would be typical for Scarlet to pull a prank like this. The inspection was pointless — Mari wouldn’t see Scarlet if Scarlet didn’t want to be seen — but Mari swore she’d give the prankster Illusionist a crack on the head if she were involved.

Her club swung out and swished through the empty air. Drat. One of these days, she’d hit the scheming Illusionist who thought herself invincible while invisible.

Down the tunnel, the blurry man unblurred into a young man in strange clothing. He seemed clean — too clean for a jaunt in the sewers. The clean young man promptly remedied his situation by bending over and vomiting, most of it hitting the floor, some landing on his pants.

One of the Thieves kicked the young man’s leg, toppling him, and pinned him to the ground. So he wasn’t an illusion. Not Scarlet.

“What should we do with him?”

“He’s a fuckin’ Mage. We can’t keep him.”

“Doesn’t seem like a very good one, appearing and puking like that.”

“Competent or not, he’s high Level. That was either invisibility or teleportation.”

Teleportation? That wasn’t high Level, that was unheard of. Scarlet loved to talk about the latest theories on teleportation. At length. If Mari could get such a Mage in her debt, Boss would be ecstatic. Not to mention, the unknown Mage served as the perfect distraction.

Free tactics!

She was already running at the thugs.

“Slit his — ”

A thick club swung down, cracking the Crimson Tide Mage on the head mid-sentence. It was rude, interrupting and attacking without warning, but the Crimson Tide Mage was preparing to kill what he thought was a Red Hander. That was rude.

And the club continued, passing through the Crimson Tide Mage.

Void-spawned coward!

She hated fighting Illusionists. Watching a club strike a surface, expecting an impact and a rebound, and then feeling it pass through felt so wrong. It screwed with her muscle memory, all of her built up fighting intuition. Made her doubt her eyes, her own body.

Snarling, Mari tackled the Thief whose surprise at Mari’s appearance had delayed him from slitting the unknown Mage’s throat. They fell in a tangle of limbs.

Common sense dictated that tackling a man holding a knife would be a one-way ticket to severe blood loss, but Mari was sure she’d be more accustomed to grappling than a Thief. She dropped a club and grabbed his wrist, keeping the knife pointed away from her, and then twisted until his shoulder popped.

The Thief screamed and dropped the knife. She extracted herself, picked up her fallen club, and knocked him out with a tap to the head.

Killing these poor mooks would cause more trouble than they were worth. Their deaths would anger the Crimson Tide leaders and potentially draw in the city guard. The Red Handers wanted to intimidate and steal, not start a no-holds-barred war. Thugs this unimportant would be left to heal naturally, so by the time they were back, the Red Handers would be gone.

At least, that’s what Boss said. As far as Mari was concerned, the Crimson Tide could waste as many healing potions on these Mooks as they wanted. She’d put them down as many times as was necessary.

See Boss? I can think tactically!

The strange Mage was hiding down the tunnel around the corner. Good. Running away from his savior would’ve been rude. Unless he thought she wouldn’t win, which would’ve been downright insulting.

Dodging weak Rock Bullets from the Illusionist, Mari exchanged blows with the two Thieves. One Thief lunged forward, hoping to catch her off guard from dodging the missiles. Grinning, she struck his knife hard enough to send it flying. The Thief panicked and tried to block her next blow with his arm. He succeeded, and as a reward he was granted a close-up view of a sliver of his arm bone.

Screaming, he ran away, clutching his arm. Definitely a mook.

The Crimson Tide Illusionist swore and the remaining Thief grasped his knife tightly. Too tightly.

The nervousness was justifiable, as they had no chance of winning, but, in a fight, nervousness was the mother of losing. With three quick swings, she easily dispatched the shaking Thief.

Leaving the Illusionist. Under a barrage of clubs, he no longer had the time or space to cast Rock Bullets, and drew a dagger similar to the Thieves’. Mari swung her clubs in a steady rhythm.

“You shall drown — ” The Mage huffed and puffed as if he’d neglected to exercise regularly as Mages were inclined. “ — in a wave of crimson!”

At least Scarlet was good about staying in shape.

“I could say the same to you, you know,” Mari replied between whiffed swings. “See my gloves?” They did call themselves the Red Handers.

Finally, a club struck home, and the Illusionist collapsed in a puddle of crimson robes. Mari kicked him a couple of times to check — you could never be too sure with Illusionists. When he didn’t move, she stretched her shoulders, wiped the blood off her clubs on the Illusionist’s robes, waggled her red-gloved fingers in front of his face, and turned around.

The strange Mage, who’d been peeking out from an offshoot tunnel, retreated like a frightened mouse.

The sound of a sack hitting the ground echoed in the tunnel.

Had she scared him to death?

Mari was good at reading people, and this Mage was not a fighter. Probably a loves-to-read type. But Boss would chew her out if she misread the situation and got jumped, so she held one club up lazily as she approached the offshoot tunnel.

He was unconscious, splayed on the dirty ground. His clothing was strange. Reaching down, she rubbed the shirt between her fingers. Thin, like a noble’s, but the style and cut were unlike anything she could recall. The dye on the front was textured as if it transformed the cloth underneath, and his pants were made of unusually fine canvas. His shoes and gloves baffled her. They were bulky and seemed to have functions beyond walking or punching as though they’d been built by a tinkering Mechamancer.

She slapped his face. A sure-fire strategy of waking up Mages. At least, the one Mage she knew.

He came to, blinking, widened his eyes in fright, tried to scramble backward, and hit his head on the wall behind him. Not a fighter.

“Ow — hi,” he said, “uh, thanks for saving me.”

“Blessings and Levels.”

“Sorry?” He looked confused.

“Blessings. And. Levels.” She spoke slowly, overenunciating, as if teaching a toddler how to speak.

“Wow, you speak English! Great! Levels? I don’t know — oh, it’s telling me I have a Level in . . . Sneaker?”

Trying to play dumb?

“And? What kind of Mage are you?”

“What?”

“Your Mage Blessing, what is it? Illusionist?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about — I just got a Level in Sneaker a minute ago!”

Mari raised a club, and he flinched back, raising his arms. “Tell the truth or I’ll tap you on the head.”

“I swear, I have a Level in Sneaker, that’s it! I got it when I was hiding!”

Incredibly, he wasn’t lying. Mari narrowed her eyes. He had to be at least in his late teens. A single Level? That meant he had refused Levels growing up. He’d taken his first Level during a life-or-death situation.

A Deathseeker. What a dumb cover story. Mari wasn’t the best Red Hander at acting in her cover stories, but he was far worse. He might as well have admitted it.

“You can’t fool me, Deathseeker.”

“What?”

A man with one Level. No fighting experience, so he wasn’t a threat. Wasn’t this exactly what Boss wanted? This man would be much more useful than that thieving little girl.

“Boss is gonna love this. Let’s go.”

“Where are we going?”

“To meet the others,” she explained patiently.

“The others?”

“Boss, Nerran, Scarlet. Oh, and we have a new member. You have to watch your stuff around her.”

She waved him to follow. The man sighed as if a great tension had left him, and touched his face in an absentminded manner.

Then Mari turned and placed a hand on his shoulder.

“I almost forgot,” she said, drawing a club. “I should knock you out.”

The man’s mouth formed a nervous smile, and his eyes slid toward Mari’s club. “There’s really no need. I promise I won’t be any trouble.”

“Sorry, Boss’ll yell at me if I let an outsider know where our hideout is.”

“Please, I’ll close my eyes. You can blindfold me! I’ll use my shirt!”

He reached under his shirt to pull it off.

“Easier to knock you out.”

Mari raised a club.

“Why — ”

The man’s question was cut off by a tap to the side of the head.

Mari slung him over her shoulder and shook her head apologetically.

“Tactics.”