The moment my foot touched the steps the winter's cold vanished and muggy tropical heat smothered itself onto me. It was bad enough that I had to peel off my scarf and coat by the time we were six steps down.

The staircase had never been built by human hands; the steps were slightly too low and the treads were much too shallow. My feet were normal size for a woman my height but even when I pressed my heel hard against the riser my toes were still unsupported back to the second joint. It was made worse by the fact that the tower of light that marked the stairs was blinding, glancing off the wrought-iron stairs like lens flare in a bad movie. The whole construction was Gatsby-esque in its ostentation—so wide that two football teams could have walked down side-by-side without jostling, every bit of it carved and filigreed and gilded.

The stairs seemed to go on forever. I watched the steps carefully as I went, constantly feeling like I was going to overbalance and fall. The patterns in the iron suggested Neoplasticism with a few naturalistic elements that might have been fish, or clouds, or perhaps demons. It was unsettling, a discord that itched at me all the way down.

The stairs ended at a marble floor, blacks and whites and pale greens melded together into patterns that threatened gnashing teeth or jagged flames. The double doors that squatted on the far side of the marble floor were calculated to make its supplicants feel inferior. Ten meters high, with a phalanx of snarling beringed door-knocker faces at head height and the remainder of the space taken up by...fish? That was my impression, although they were upright and two-armed, with bodies shaped like no Earthly fish I'd ever heard of.

"Eva," I whispered. "What is that?"

A tooltip popped into existence with a faint chime. The shape of it was familiar, right down to the little 'x' in the corner that one would use to close it. The font was inhuman and jagged.

This is a rendition of a Kua-Tin, the dominant species of the Borant System and principal owners of the Borant Corporation. Make sure you recognize these guys. There'll be a test later.

"Did you hear that?" I whispered to Eva.

"Quiet," she snapped. She reached out and grasped one of the doorknockers, raised the ring to knock, and then quickly let go when the door swung open so fast that the ring was yanked from her grasp.

A fanfare played, out loud this time instead of only in my head, as we looked across the threshold and into the stone hallway within. It was straight from Aeneas and the Sibyl in the Underworld—a rough-edged space that narrowed to a blunted triangle as it went up, a sludgy rill seeping along each side of the floor, their channels perhaps a meter down. The scent of the place was burnt plastic and the lighting was wrong. The air was cool, almost chill after the muggy oppressiveness of the stairwell.

I didn't move but suddenly we were both across the threshold and the doors were slamming shut behind us. The voice spoke in my brain once more: Welcome, Crawler. Welcome to Level One.

Eva jerked at the same time I did, so I knew we had both gotten the announcement. It was loud, but only in my mind and not in my ears. It itched in a way that made me want to scratch at my brain until it shredded if only it would make the itch stop.

A timer appeared in the upper right of my vision. It was at 4 days, 23 hours, 16 minutes and counting down. I poked at it; it didn't go away but it did shrink down. Watching it tick down made my stomach ache with the knowledge that it was literally the countdown to my death unless we found a staircase. A staircase that Lars had been sure would be nowhere nearby.

You have been designated Crawler Number 9,077,265. You have been assigned the crawler name "Katia Grim."

You are assigned the race of Human. You are currently level 1. You may choose a new race and class as soon as you descend to the third floor. Your stat points have been assigned based on your current physical and mental profile. See the stat menu for more details.

New achievement! Empty pockets.

You didn't bring any supplies. None. You know you still gotta eat, right?

Reward: You've received a Bronze Adventurer Box!

New achievement! Unarmed combat.

So. You just gonna waltz right into something called a "World Dungeon" and you're not even going to bring a weapon? You're either braver than you look, or you're just an idiot. Good luck with that, Van Damme.

Reward: You've received a Bronze Weapon Box!

The messages turned translucent and faded away as soon as I finished reading them.

"Did you see those...?"

"Of course I saw them," Eva snapped. "Look, we need to find one of those tutorial guilds and learn what's going on here, okay? Come on." She strode off down the hall and I trailed behind her.

"I just thought...maybe we didn't get the same ones?" I offered. "I got one for empty pockets and one for no weapons."

"Yes, I got the same ones, Katia." She glanced over at me and sighed. "Just try to be quiet and listen for anything around us, all right? We don't know what's in here with us."

I nodded, eyes wide at the thought. I looked around as though I might spot some monster leaping at us, but nothing moved. I was reminded once again of the wrongness of the light; there was no visible source but I could see five, perhaps six meters in every direction and then everything faded away much more quickly than it should. The colors were wrong, muted except for whatever I was looking directly at.

"Does it look wrong to you?" I whispered. "The light, I mean."

"Yes, Katia! It's wrong and strange. Now keep quiet and let's go."

I flinched at the anger in her voice and followed obediently along.

We had gone perhaps forty meters when something landed on the back of my head. Powder-dripping velvety wings folded around my face and clamped down tight as fangs pierced the back of my neck. My skin prickled and stung from the contact; I shrieked and batted at whatever it was, fingers scrabbling for purchase and not finding it. I ran, instinctively trying to get away from the thing that was riding me, and tripped. I hit the ground hard and rolled, flailing at my attacker. I couldn't breathe and my eyes, closed and covered as they were, started lighting up with sparkling spots.

Something heavy landed on me, straddling my hips; I thrashed, desperate not to let it get its fangs into me, but what was clearly a human hand slapped the side of my head and wrapped around my jaw, pinning my head in place. Fingernails dug into my scalp, scraping down and pulling the obstruction away from my face.

Micro-Mothra - Level 1

These guy just want to cuddle! (And suck your blood.) Is that so bad?

It was a moth the size of a bath towel, dark grey, with antennae a meter long. The wings were velvety and silent but had extruded tiny spikes that latched into my face, so when Eva pulled the creature away she took a couple layers of my skin with it. I was stippled from forehead to throat and ear to ear with tiny drops of blood where the hooks had been. My lips were bleeding freely but somehow the hooks had missed my eyes. On the other hand, Eva's nails had gashed me starting at the left temple and going down six centimeters in four parallel lines.

The moth monster wasn't very resilient; Eva ripped it in half and threw the pieces into one of the sludgy rills that ran alongside the hallway. I sobbed in pain and fear; she clucked her tongue and shoved herself to her feet.

"Come on," she said, holding her hand down to me. "We need to keep moving. And the next time one of those things gets you, stay calm. They aren't hard to scrape off."

o-o-o-o

The moth monsters attacked us six more times before we found a tutorial guild. They were ambush hunters, dropping off the ceiling as we passed and coming in from behind. Once we learned to keep looking up they weren't much of a threat, since they glided heavily instead of actually flying. When we dodged they would thump to the floor and then scuttle to and up the wall in an attempt to climb back to where they could attack again. They weren't fast enough to escape; Eva would jump on them and tear them apart.

The door to the tutorial guild was wooden with frosted glass that said 'Tutorial Guild' on it in a Gothic font. Eva knocked and then barged in without waiting for a reply.

Inside was a cozy den, perhaps ten meters on a side and nearly three meters tall. The floor was covered in a crazy quilt of overlapping Persian carpets. The corner in front of me and to my right was sectioned off with Japanese shoji screens, over top of which peeked a coatrack with a terrycloth robe hanging from it. Directly in front of me was a fireplace with a couch on one side and two armchairs opposite it, a table between them.

A man was seated in the armchair closest to the fire, his feet up on a small ottoman, a newspaper open in his hands, a pipe clenched between his teeth, wearing trousers and an Oxford shirt with a vest. He would have been straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting, except that he looked like a long-haired bipedal dog with three-centimeter talons on his paws.

His ears perked up and swiveled towards us. He looked over and smiled a tongue-lolling dog smile.

"Aha!" he said, folding up the paper and laying it on the side table. He took his feet off the ottoman and kicked it under his chair so he could sit up. "My first batch of adorable little students! Please, pull up a couch!" He gestured to the furniture in question.

I looked at Eva but she was fixated on the dogman.

"Eva...?"

She shook her head and moved inside, settling down on the couch as indicated. I followed her in, closing the door quietly behind myself and settling down on the end of the couch.

"What are you?" Eva demanded of the dogman.

The dogman's jaw dropped open and his tongue lolled in amusement. "Rude much? How about 'who are you', or even 'nice to meet you?'" He shook his head. "Honestly, crawlers."

"Look—"

He held up a hand to cut her off. "My name is Bannon and I'm your game guide. I'll help you through the tutorial, explain how everything works, and get you started. Once that's done I'll answer whatever other questions you might have. Understood? Good, let's begin."

He hadn't actually given us time to say that we understood. I looked at him intently, hoping to trigger the same tooltip that I'd gotten for the door. To my delight, it worked.

Bannon — Shih Tzooman Heavy Metal Guitarist. Level 53.

Guildmaster of this guild hall.

This is a Non-Combatant NPC.

Shih Tzoomans (yes, that's the proper plural) are one of the more support-oriented breeds of the Caniman race. They lack the bite force or physical power to be in the front lines of combat but they make up for it with a high Charisma and an innate aura that buffs their teammates. They also suck at music.

"Most important thing first," Bannon said. "This is a saferoom. You cannot injure or kill another being while in this room and they cannot injure or kill you. I am a Non-Combatant Non-Player Character, or NCC. You can attack regular NPCs but you can't attack NCCs anywhere in the dungeon."

I wondered if it was simply a misspeaking that he had said we couldn't attack NCCs, not that we couldn't injure them.

"Don't attack anyone in a saferoom, or an NCC anywhere," Bannon continued. "The first time you do it, you'll be frozen in place for about 100 seconds while you listen to an automated lecture on good manners. The second time you'll be frozen for an hour or so. The third time you'll be stripped naked and teleported into the middle of a mob nest. You will die."

I shifted uncomfortably at the words. Eva caught my motion out of the corner of your eye and frowned slightly; I forced myself not to shrink back.

"What if—" Eva began.

"This will go a lot smoother if you just let me talk. I'll take questions at the end."

Her jaw clicked shut and her eyes narrowed.

"Second most important thing: You are going to die in this dungeon unless you do exactly what I tell you. Got that?"

I nodded jerkily.

"Am I supposed to answer that?" Eva demanded. "Because before you told me to be quiet until the end."

"It was really just a rhetorical question. No, there's no need for you to talk."

Eva positively seethed.

"Here's the first thing I'm telling you to do if you want to survive: Focus. Don't waste time on anything you aren't going to need right now. Once you make it to the second floor you can start thinking about the future. Until then, your entire attention needs to be on surviving the next five minutes.

"Now, I'm sure you're bursting with a million questions and they're going to keep buzzing around in your pretty little heads preventing you from focusing, so let's get those out of the way.

"First, who am I, why am I here, and what am I to you? Like I said before, I'm Bannon, your game guide, and I'm here to help you get oriented. I was a crawler like you a very, very long time ago. My world was reclaimed, I made it to the eleventh floor, and now I'm indentured. After I serve as a game guide for enough seasons I get my freedom and a small pension. It's better for me if my crawlers survive to the fourth floor but it's not essential. I'm motivated to help you but I have restrictions on what I'm allowed to tell you so don't be surprised when I won't answer some things."

That didn't sound ominous at all.

"Moving on, what is the dungeon and why is it here? It's a reality TV show crossed with a snuff flick. You crawlers fight your way through level after level of deadly traps and monsters. The vast majority of you, if not all of you, are going to die. While that's happening, uncountable numbers of Syndicate citizens will be watching your struggles, betting on it, writing bad fiction about it, and making money off of it. Is it cruel, unfair, and unreasonable? Yes. Get over it.

"How do you survive the dungeon? Broadly, you kill things. Then you loot their bodies for stuff which lets you kill things better, and you keep doing that until you can exit the dungeon. There are two ways to exit: If you make it all the way through and out of the eighteenth floor then you become the owner of Earth and all the aliens have to leave. You won't make it."

"What?!" Eva said. "You don't know us! We could—"

"No. You will not. This show has been running longer than your species has existed on Earth and no one has ever made it past the thirteenth floor. One person made it to the thirteenth floor, one time. One. He died within half an hour. You two are not such special snowflakes that you're going to be the first."

I cringed as Eva's eyes narrowed even more.

"The only way you get out of this dungeon, the one that you're going to use if you're very, very lucky and you do everything I tell you, is to make it to the tenth floor and cut a deal."

"You said that you made it to eleven and that other people made it to twelve," Eva said through gritted teeth.

"You're not as good as I was." He raised a hand to cut her off. "You're a tiny little girl and you're weak. You're almost certainly going to die today, probably within the next couple of hours. I was a decathlete and a four-time martial arts champion."

My heart started pounding.

"Now, probably the stupidest question that we need to get past but one that I get every time: You may have heard something in the dungeon announcements that referenced your pop culture or some other aspect of your world. That's because the dungeon didn't spring up overnight. The advance teams for the dungeon started working back in your 1950s or '60s. They scouted locations, recorded your media, laid out construction and programming plans, lined up the media rights and so on.

"Finally, who is doing this? The Borant Corporation is the one running the show. The Syndicate is the overall galactic government. Don't use those names. Using either of those names causes that timestamp of your feed to be saved for evaluation by a moderator. If they find you were being disparaging to either of those entities then you can be accelerated, which means you will die. If you need to refer to those entities be respectful.

"Any other stupid questions or can I move on to teaching you how to use your interface?"

I shook my head a tiny bit. Eva glared at him silently.

"Cool." His right hand glowed for a moment and my brain itched. Eva jerked on the couch beside me.

You have been granted access to the Crawler Menu.

Information appeared in front of me, clearly visible but slightly translucent so it didn't obscure the background. There was a long green health bar in the top right. It pushed the timer down. A minimap appeared in the bottom right.

"You should have received a notification saying that you have access to the Crawler Menu. You should have a blinking folder at the top left of your vision. That contains—"

I half-raised one hand. "I don't have the folder?"

He looked surprised. "Huh. You must have made it here without getting into a fight or doing anything that deserved a notification."

I looked at Eva. I hadn't gotten in a fight. She had been the one to kill all the moths.

"I have it," she said.

"Right, okay. Those are game and status change notifications. We'll get to those in a minute. Look at the minimap in the bottom right. You're the green dot in the center. Other crawlers are shown in blue, hostile mobs are shown in red, non-hostile mobs are shown in white. If you focus on a dot it will tell you what it is. Try that."

I looked at the blue dot on my minimap.

Crawler #9,077,240. "Eva Sigrid."

Interesting. I was number 9,077,265. Assuming those were the order in which we entered the dungeon, that meant that 24 people had entered between the time Eva did and when I came in a few seconds later. The dungeon was open for an hour, we entered after 44 minutes. Nine million people in 44 minutes was...what, about 200,000 people per minute? A little more. That would mean about another three million-ish in the remaining sixteen minutes. Nearly eight billion people on Earth and only twelve million of us entered the dungeon? Well, the rate wouldn't have been steady throughout, but—

"Look at your map," Bannon said, unaware of my mental wanderings. "Mentally pinch in and out to resize it and try moving it around in your view so that you can customize your HUD."

I did as he instructed and found the interface easy to manipulate. When I expanded the minimap it showed more area around us, including a trio of red dots two corridors away. I focused on one of them.

Krazy Kitteh - Level 2

I blinked in surprise and my displays went away.

"Okay, let's talk menus," Bannon said, rubbing his paw-like hands together. "Eventually you'll be able to control them mentally, but for now just flick your eyes up twice to make them appear."

He walked us through it, showing us how to open and close things, customize the view, and generally getting us accustomed to it. Eva tried to ask questions at several points but he waved her off with a dismissive "There's a process" or "Unwad your panties, we'll get there." I was honestly worried she was going to have an aneurysm.

The most important menus were the Chat menu, which allowed us to mentally write texts back and forth, and the Party menu. Since we had come in together we were automatically in a party, meaning that we would share experience for kills. I had been chosen as the leader of the party but I happily passed it over to Eva at her insistence.

Partway through the introduction the room shook and the voice in my brain spoke again.

Hello, Crawlers! The dungeon is now sealed. We have a diverse group joining us this season, and we are very happy to have you here. We had just under 13 million human crawlers make it through the gates and into the dungeon. We are already down to under 10 million. A quick note, the entrances to the second floor will not open up until the introductory episode of Dungeon Crawler World tunnels, which will be in approximately 30 of your hours. Once that happens, the entrances to the second level will populate. There will be no lag time for the appearance of additional levels. On behalf of the Borant Corporation I wanted to thank you for volunteering, and I wish you all good luck and a happy crawl.

"Right, we're nearly done," Bannon said, blithely ignoring the announcement.

"Are you serious?" Eva asked. "You just murdered three million people! That's half of the Holocaust in under an hour!"

He shrugged. "Eh, that's about average. All of you chose to come down here."

"Because it was cold and you had destroyed all the buildings and food supplies!"

He rolled his eyes. "Look, I wasn't the one who did it. I'm indentured, I'm just along for the ride. Remember what I said before, about 'get over it'? Here's where that applies."

Eva's hands balled into fists and I could almost hear her teeth grinding together.

"Okay, moving on. Let's talk about stats. Quiet Girl, we'll do you first."

Eva started to say something angry but bit it back.

Bannon looked up at the ceiling, his eyes glowing for a moment as he fiddled with menus. Suddenly, information popped up in front of me.

Crawler #9,077,265. Katia Grim.

Level: 1

Race: Human

Class: None

Strength: 4

Intelligence: 5

Constitution: 4

Dexterity: 5

Charisma: 3

"Not bad," he said. "Most humans range between 3 and 5 on each stat with 4 being average, so yours are decent. You should look into a magic-focused style; spells cost mana points and everyone has MP equal to their Intelligence, so you're starting off ahead of most people.

"Yappy Chick, let's take a look at you." His eyes glowed again and he frowned. "Hm. Charisma 5...I guess that shouldn't be too surprising given how pushy you are. It denotes the ability to get people to do what you want and it doesn't care if you do that by convincing them or bullying them."

"I'm not a bully!"

"Whatever helps you sleep at night. Anyway. Strength 3, Int 4, Con 4, Dex 4, Charisma 5. Weak, like I expected, and otherwise dead average except for that Charisma." He saw her expression and shook his head. "Average stats aren't a bad thing. It means that your options are pretty open for the first couple floors—you could go tank or rogue or whatever. Don't go mage since Quiet Girl has that covered. You should be the one to talk to mobs; interactions are based on your Charisma and you've got the edge over Quiet Girl."

"I have a name," Eva said. "It's Eva, not 'Yappy Chick'."

"Sure, whatever. Let's see, where were we...? Oh, the inventory system. You'll like this. They're doing something different this season and it's going to make your lives a lot easier. You've got unlimited extradimensional storage. You can put anything in there as long as you can hold it up for about four seconds. If it's obviously within your capacity then the AI usually won't bother making you wait the full four seconds. Food and other items don't spoil while they're in the inventory—apparently last season there wasn't enough fresh food and a lot of crawlers ended up starving to death. Made for very boring TV.

"Flick your eyes down twice and your hotlist will appear. Practice with it and eventually you'll be able to activate the menus or the hotlist with just a thought and no need to move your eyes but it's easier like this. On the left is the Heal spell that everyone gets. It costs two mana points and heals you about 20%. It can fix broken bones but not amputations so don't let your bits get cut off. On the right you've got ten slots that you can fill with whatever you like and then activate mentally. You're going to put this potion in the first slot." He conjured a pair of small blue bottles out of thin air and leaned forward to hand them to us. I took it and did as directed. Eva studied her bottle for a moment before making it vanish.

"Go ahead and click it, both of you," Bannon said.

I pulled up my hot list. The first item was the blue bottle, labeled Minor Health Potion. I clicked on it and a wave of warmth went through me. The itching of my moth-inflicted injuries vanished and when I carefully touched my face I could tell that the wounds were gone.

Bannon nodded approvingly at the signs that we had followed directions. "You can drink potions manually but it's a lot easier to put them in your hot list, because a lot of them taste disgusting. You have a potion cooldown; for health potions it's initially based on your Constitution, for mana potions it's initially based on your Intelligence. If you drink a potion during your cooldown you'll be poisoned, so don't do that. Potions of a given type will stack up in your hotlist so you can put as many health potions as you like in one slot yadda yadda yadda.

"Okay, levels, skills, loot, kills, and then we're done.

"You earn XP—experience points—for killing stuff and various other things you do in the dungeon. Each time you kill enough stuff you level up. Each time you level up you get three stat points. You can't distribute your stat points until you get to the third floor so don't worry about it. Your stats will go up automatically as you use them, but slowly and not that much.

"Yappy Chick—"

"Eva."

"—you made it to level 2 already; good job. Quiet Girl, you need to kill some stuff and get some levels as well.

"More important than your level is your skills. Let's look at those now."

He helped us through reviewing our skills. There were a ridiculous number of them, mostly useless things like Breathing: 4 and Shoe-tying: 2. At Bannon's direction I filtered it down to skills that were higher than level 2, which left me with a disturbingly short list of skills, most of which I didn't think were going to help—things like Swimming: 4, Meditation: 3, and Art History: 7. The most dungeon-relevant skill I had was probably Running: 5—presumably due to my jogging regimen—and it was not going to help me level up.

"Wow," Bannon said after studying my list. "No combat skills whatsoever? Yeah, you're toast unless you get lucky and get some good loot."

Those words were the last straw; the fear and pain that I'd been feeling ever since leaving the university library what seemed like a lifetime ago all came crashing down on me and the tears started to well up, followed immediately by sobs.

"Hey, hey!" Bannon said. "Don't cry. There's no crying in the dungeon. Everything is easier if you just accept facts."

I struggled to get myself under control but couldn't do it. I leaned forward, elbows on my knees and face in my hands as the sobs wracked my body.

Bannon sighed. "Take these."

I looked up through watery vision to find that he was offering me another potion bottle and a small pack of tissues, the kind you might buy at a gas station.

"Drink the potion and blow your nose so we can get this finished."

I did as instructed, dropping the potion into my hotlist and clicking it. Immediately, my misery and fear went away.

You have received the 'Got My Shit Together' buff!

For the next 6 hours your mental state will be regulated to your normal set point. This does not protect against magical effects or other outside influences, it just keeps you from being a whiny little bitch.

I frowned as the notification faded away. Was it so unreasonable for me to be upset?

"C'mon, c'mon. Clean yourself up. I don't want to have to look at your face all covered in snot."

I hurried to wipe the tears and blow my nose, then tossed the used tissues into the fireplace. "Sorry."

He shrugged. "Whatever. You're not the first to lose your shit when you learn you're going to die. It's why us guides are given the potions. Let's see..." He ticked things off on his fingers. "We did stupid questions, interface, menus, stats, inventory, hotlist, levels, skills...ah, loot. Cool. Go into your menus and click 'Open Loot Boxes'."

I did as he ordered. Two bronze boxes, each about the size of a microwave, shimmered into existence in front of me. The nearest one flipped its top open and more information appeared in front of my eyes.

Bronze Adventurer Box

Crawler Biscuit x10

Torch x5

I picked the objects up and studied them carefully. The biscuits looked like tiny muffins, maybe two centimeters on a side. I nibbled one experimentally; it was dry, gritty, and thoroughly unpleasant.

"Ya can live on it, but it tastes loik shit," Bannon said in a bad Australian accent. He grinned. "You guys have great media. Anyway, one of those things contains all the nutrition you need for 24 hours. They won't fill you up but at least you won't starve."

I tossed the biscuits into my inventory and looked at the torches. They were wood, about 2 centimeters thick and 30 long, with a twist of oily cloth around the top.

Light? Y/N

I clicked on N; a wave of relief went through me that we weren't going to have to find a fire source.

"Don't lose those torches," Bannon said. "The dungeon gives you darksight until you open your first loot box but after that you're on your own. They last for thirty minutes but you can put them out early in the normal way—drown them, smother them, that kind of thing. You can use them as weapons but they suck."

Eva had gotten nine boxes and was already halfway through opening them, so I hurried to check my second one.

Bronze Weapon Box

Chain

The chain was a meter long with links a centimeter thick. It would function as a weapon, barely.

"And there you go," Bannon said once Eva finished opening her boxes. Her loot had been more extensive than mine and slightly better quality—in addition to torches, crawler biscuits, and bandages she had gotten a kitchen knife for a weapon and a steel garbage can lid for a shield. "Congratulations on your very first loot. Remember, you get more loot by killing things and the more loot you get the more likely you are to get to the tenth floor and therefore survive the dungeon.

"Now, listen up because this next part is some of the most important stuff: You can kill anything that isn't a non-combatant, which includes mobs, regular NPCs, and crawlers. If you kill something that has gear then you can loot the gear, which means crawler-killing can get you some good stuff. There's also achievements for doing it that will get you even more good stuff. Of course, you'll get a skull above your name for every crawler you kill and that can make it hard to find allies. Personally, I think anyone who kills their own is scum but it's up to you and your fellow humans. Watch out in case someone wants to kill you for your gear, crap as it is.

"There's a special class of mobs called bosses. They come in six types: Neighborhood, Borough, City, Province, Country, and Floor. Killing them gets you a Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Legendary, and Celestial loot box respectively. Don't go after a Neighborhood boss until you're at least level six, preferably eight. Don't go after Borough bosses on this floor at all because you'll die."

He clapped his hands and leaned back with a smile. "Okay, there you go. You've got your briefing, your gear, you're good to go. Now get out there and kill, kill, kill."

Eva jumped to her feet and went for the door without a word to Bannon. I offered an apologetic nod and a quick "Thank you" before hurrying after her.

I was glad that I had that mood-regulating potion. I couldn't stop thinking about Bannon confidently saying that my lack of combat skills meant that I was definitely going to die today.