When my hand gripped the pearl hilt of my sword, the world seemed to slow down, a gray haze filled my vision, and all I could hear was my ragged breathing and my thundering heart.

Without even thinking, as if I’d done this a million times before, I whispered, “Healing Touch.”

A tiny part of my mind blinked and asked, What did I just say?

But I didn’t have time to analyze the strange words that had just come out of my mouth. A warm rush of energy and well-being flowed from the center of my chest and filled all my limbs. The world returned to full speed, the haze lifted from my sight, and I heard Sonja’s agonized shrieks at full volume.

My ribs no longer hurt. They weren’t a hundred percent, but I could breathe without them stabbing my lungs.

Also, my tongue. I touched the tip to the roof of my mouth, and it no longer felt like a ragged hunk of meat pumping a river of blood down my throat.

My fingernails had returned, and as I stared at them, I got a glimpse at the stats on my forearm:

Hit Points: 9/12

Another crunching of bone, and Sonja screamed.

I’d marvel at my healed body later. I leaped to my feet and tried to let my instincts take over like Sonja had told me to do before the monster burst through the doors. Hell, that advice had certainly helped with my healing, so why not?

I didn’t think, I acted. I had the feeling that I knew this creature, somehow, and that I knew exactly how to defeat it.

I raised my sword high and cried, “Ancestral Smite!”

Another warm rush of energy raced from my chest into my sword and encased the blade in an ethereal blue light. At first, I thought it was just an artifact of my vision, but when the blade connected with the monster, the blue light flashed brighter than the noonday sun. Yet somehow, I could look at it without blinding myself. When the light receded, I had cleaved about a third of the monster’s body from the central mass. Orange blood spurted in all directions and what looked like organs spilled out of the monster’s torso. The mouths all opened in a horrible shriek, and every eye focused on me.

“That hurt us, Mace!” came the whispers around my ears. “We thought you were our friend!”

Somehow the monster was still alive. It dropped Sonja, where she lay on the ground, stunned and missing half her right leg. I wanted to drop my sword and make sure she wouldn’t bleed out from the ragged stump, but my instincts thought, Don’t worry about her now. Destroy this abomination first.

So I raised my longsword high again and screamed, “Ancestral Smite!”

There was no rush of energy this time, and my instincts immediately told me why. I glanced at my forearm and saw in red, pulsating characters:

Magic Points: 0/3 (Magic Points regenerate in 1 hour)

Shit. I was out of Magic Points. Between the “Healing Touch” and “Ancestral Smite,” I had used them up.

While distracted by the stats on my forearm, limbs from the monster’s uninjured side simultaneously punched me in the chest and dug their talons into my leg. The punch knocked me backward, and the talons pulled my leg out from under me to fall flat on my back. The air burst from my lungs. I somehow still held onto my sword, so I swung at the arm digging its claws into my leg, and severed the limb with one slice. The talons let go, and the rest of the limb retreated to the monster.

“That’s it, Mace! No pie for you!”

The creature's gibbering laughter floated around my ears. My legs started to freeze up again, but I screamed my defiance and tried standing. Another limb came from outside my peripheral vision and hit me in the jaw. It stunned me so bad that I didn’t have the wits or strength to dodge the limbs that grabbed hold of both my legs and yanked me off my feet again. The taloned fingers started pulling me toward its numerous mouths that were oozing spittle and orange blood from the wound I’d inflicted.

“Now you’re going to become the pie,” the monster whispered with insane longing.

I swung my sword at the arms that clutched my legs, but another limb shot out from the monster and grabbed my wrist before I could complete the downward swing. I struggled to free myself, but it was no use. The beast was dragging me toward the same open mouths with jagged teeth that had taken half of Sonja’s leg.

Or at least I thought they had taken Sonja’s leg. As soon as the monster had restrained my sword arm, Sonja leaped from behind me with a feral battle cry and brought her ax down through the limbs holding my legs. She cut through all of them like Jello. The creature screamed, the limbs spurt orange blood everywhere, and I fell onto my back.

Sonja didn’t let up. She stood on two perfectly normal legs, swinging Mourner at every grotesque appendage that tried to reach for her, severing them with a barbarian scream that echoed off the room’s octagonal walls. Fireballs flew past my head from behind me and slammed into the monster. I glanced back to see Stephen walking toward the creature with fireball after fireball shooting from the oily black mist around his hands.

Between Sonja’s chopping and Stephen’s fire, the monster had had enough. It issued a frustrated, pained scream from all of its mouths and skittered back toward the door. But Sonja followed, taking bloody chunks from the monster the whole way, while Stephen’s fire gouged blackened holes in its slimy flesh.

That same righteous anger from before erupted in my heart, so I leaped to my feet and charged after the monster with my Ancestral Longsword held high. I didn’t have the Magic Points left for an Ancestral Smite, but damn it, I was going to get my pound of flesh out of that abomination. I instinctively moved to Sonja’s right, out of the way of her ax, and began slashing at anything on the monster that I could hit: eyes, mouths, skin that was not yet blackened or bleeding. Its limbs were mostly gone by then, and the ones it had left pulled its shredded body in retreat.

With only a few feet left to the dark hallway, I stabbed the monster in a rheumy eye that widened just before I punctured it. When I yanked my sword out, the aberration issued a strangled cry, “No…pie…for…you…”

And then it collapsed into a disgusting heap of skin, lidded eyes, and lolling tongues. As soon as it was still, little balls of white light slowly rose from out of the monster’s opened mouths. Somehow I could feel their joy and relief. I instinctively understood that the monster had trapped them for years, some for decades. At least a dozen of them swirled around me for a few moments and then floated up toward the domed ceiling and disappeared into the smooth stone.

I stood over the monster, my chest burning from my injured ribs. I couldn’t believe this was happening, that this had happened. My friends and I had transformed into RPG characters who looked nothing like their real selves. We had just been in an honest-to-God battle with an evil monster, using swords, axes, and magic. And now we had just released some trapped souls so they could move on to, what, heaven?

My forearm itched as though ants were crawling on it. I looked to see the following tattooed message glowing green in a pop-up that covered my stats:

Congratulations! You have made the killing blow on a blathering aberration! You have earned 500 XP toward your next Rank, and you get (3) Character Points to allocate. Do you want to allocate them now?

Yes, now / No, later

I’d been an RPG player most of my life, so I was pretty sure I knew what that meant. But I didn’t want to make such a momentous decision as Character Points allocation while my mind still couldn’t process what just happened. I pressed “No, later” on my skin, and the message faded like disappearing ink. There was now a green “3” next to the Character Stats header.

Just to confirm I could get back whenever I wanted, I pressed the “3,” and another pop-up appeared saying:

Do you wish to allocate your Character Points now?

Yes, now / No, later

I pressed “No, later” again, and the pop-up disappeared.

“Yeah!” Sonja screamed from right beside me. She dropped Mourner with a clang, grabbed me in a bear hug, and lifted me off my feet. “I knew you had it in you, Mace! I knew you wouldn’t lose it all!”

Then she loosed a “Xena warrior princess” cry not six inches from my ear.

Did I mention she was strong? While I appreciated her hug, given how, um, fit her body felt against mine, she got a little too exuberant and re-cracked a couple of my recently healed ribs.

I grunted in pain, then said, “Mel—er, Sonja. My ribs.”

“Oh, sorry!” She let me go but kept me steady as I staggered from the pain in my chest. “But, man, you were amazing. You re-spawned in the middle of a battle, and you still got the killing blow!”

I thought back to the moment that the monster blasted through the door and how I had tried to run. “I don’t feel amazing,” I muttered. I looked down at her right leg. “How are you…I mean, half your leg was gone.”

Sonja swung her chin in the dwarf’s direction. “Our cleric has some skills. Constantine healed me up while you were keeping it busy.”

“He gave you a brand new leg?”

“You sound surprised, brother,” said Constantine as he approached us while hooking his mace back onto his belt. “Look where we’re at. And Sonja’s right; you did well for your first fight. That monster’s special ability made you want to run, but you stuck in there.”

I stared at Constantine. “Tom? Why do you have a Scottish accent?”

“Aren’t all dwarves supposed to have a Scottish brogue?” Constantine asked, rolling his R’s longer than necessary, and then he winked.

Stephen came over and inspected the dead monster. Without saying anything or looking at me, he stooped next to it and used his dagger to pry an eye from its socket with a horrible sucking sound.

I looked at them one by one. The “Chris Able” half of my mind was quickly losing that half over all of this, but the Mace half felt like this was part of a day’s work.

I pointed at Stephen and said, “Alec.”

He grunted as he performed his gruesome and confusing dissection.

Then I pointed at Constantine. “Tom.”

The dwarvish fellow with the gray beard and thick gray hair grinned. “At your service, brother.”

Then Sonja. “Melony.”

Sonja grinned, her teeth incredibly white among the dirt and orange blood splattered on her face. “And you are Chris Able,” she said, “father of one son, recently divorced, and a cybersecurity consultant in suburban Atlanta. But here you are Mace, descended from a long line of Ancestral Paladins who seek to uphold the honor and justice once meted out by your forebears.”

She spread out her hands to encompass the room, the dead monster, and everyone. “Welcome to The Tomb of Angelus.”