The dungeon entrance had appeared in the parking lot of a Walmart.
Andrew thought that was appropriate. The end of the old world rising up through cracked asphalt between a shopping cart return and a handicapped parking space. Very on-brand for civilization.
The government had cordoned it off, technically. There were barriers and officials in hastily assembled uniforms and a broadcast system urging civilians to await official Awakened response teams. What there wasn't was any actual enforcement, because the officials were also reading their own status screens and trying to figure out what a Skill: [ BUREAUCRATIC PROCESSING IV ] meant in a world that now had dungeons in it.
So people just walked in.
Andrew and Marcus joined the crowd filtering through the entrance — a vertical tear in the air about eight feet tall that shimmered like a heat mirage and smelled, inexplicably, of pine needles and something Andrew could only describe as *wrongness.* The kind of wrongness that lived in the back of your throat.
"You feel that?" Marcus murmured.
"The wrongness?"
"The mana. It's thick in there. Like walking through water."
Andrew filed that away. He didn't feel the mana. He felt the wrongness, but he was starting to think that might just be him.
The dungeon was a forest. Or something shaped like one — trees that were almost right, the proportions slightly off, the bark too uniform, the shadows falling at angles that didn't match the light source, which was a gray diffuse glow with no apparent origin. The floor was soft earth. The air was cold and tasted clean in a way outdoor air hadn't in years.
"Goblin-type dungeon," Marcus said, reading something on his status screen. "The system auto-classifies them. F-rank. Should be manageable."
"For you."
"For us."
"You have thirty percent passive strength boost and two active combat skills." Andrew looked at the trees. "I have a kitchen knife I sharpened this morning and a lot of unresolved anger."
"That's not nothing."
"Marcus. Buddy. That's nothing."
Something moved between the trees. Small, fast, green-gray — and then it was in the clearing and Andrew got his first look at a goblin.
It was about four feet tall. Thin, almost fragile-looking, with limbs that were slightly too long and a head that was slightly too large and eyes the color of old moss. It held a crude stone blade in one hand. It looked at Andrew. Andrew looked at it.
Then it screamed and charged.
Marcus was already moving — a blur of motion, faster than Andrew had ever seen him, the combat skill activating with a faint blue light around his fists — and the goblin went down in two hits, crumpling against the tree roots.
Andrew stood exactly where he had been standing.
"You okay?" Marcus said.
"Perfectly fine. Very useful. Definitely contributing."
"You didn't run."
"I panicked so hard I went all the way through fear and out the other side into dissociation." Andrew looked at the goblin. It was dissolving — slowly, like smoke, leaving behind a small glowing orb and a handful of copper coins. "Is that normal?"
"Loot drops," Marcus said, picking up the orb. His expression changed. "Oh. Oh, that's—"
"What."
"Skill Shard. Rare drop. It's a—" He read from his screen. "Skill: [ IRON BODY I]. Passive. Reduces physical damage by eight percent."
Andrew stared at the orb. "That came from a goblin."
"Yeah."
"A goblin I didn't kill."
"Yeah."
"Great," Andrew said. "Love that for me."
They went deeper.
Andrew learned things about himself in the next hour. He learned that he was slow — slower than Marcus by a factor that stopped being funny after the third time he nearly got a blade in the ribs. He learned that his Perception stat, his highest at 6, actually did something: he could read the goblins' movements a half-second before they committed to an attack. Just a flicker of awareness, like the world whispering *there, right there, pay attention* — not enough to make him dangerous. Enough to make him not quite dead.
He learned that goblins made noise before they attacked. A specific kind of noise. Once he'd heard it twice, he started predicting it.
He learned that the kitchen knife, while inadequate, was still a knife, and a knife in the right place was worth something.
What he didn't learn was how to kill anything. Marcus handled that. Andrew was three kills behind by the time they hit the dungeon's inner chamber.
The chamber was a wider clearing, the trees drawing back in a rough circle, the gray light concentrating overhead. In the center: a goblin twice the size of the others, sitting on a throne made of bones and hubcaps and what appeared to be a child's bicycle, painted red.
**[DUNGEON BOSS: GOBLIN WARCHIEF — RANK F]**
"Fun," Andrew said.
The Warchief stood. It had a spear. The spear was taller than Andrew. The Warchief looked at him with the specific intelligence of something that had been bred to kill and had gotten good at it.
"Distract it," Marcus said.
"With what?"
"Yourself."
Andrew turned to look at his best friend. "So your plan is to use the guy with no skills and no mana as bait."
"You're fast at dodging."
"I am not fast at dodging."
"You're better than you think."
"That is genuinely one of the worst things you've ever said to me and you once told me my painting looked like 'a sad accident.'"
"Go," Marcus said, and the Warchief charged.
Andrew ran.
This, at least, he was adequate at. He'd been running from things his whole life — responsibilities, conversations, the particular hollow feeling that lived in his chest at 2 AM — and he found that running from a nine-foot goblin with a spear activated some very old part of his brain that wanted very badly to keep existing.
The spear came down. He threw himself sideways. Felt the wind of it on his neck.
*Perception:* the weight shift, the hips turning, the next strike already committed before the arms moved.
He rolled. Came up. Dodged again — this time actually reading it, actually anticipating, the Warchief's momentum carrying it two steps past him.
Marcus hit it from behind. The combat skills lit up blue-white and the Warchief staggered. Andrew did not think. He had the knife in his hand and the Warchief's back was turned and there was a gap at the base of its neck that his Perception was screaming about —
He stabbed it.
The blade went in. Not deep — not enough — but the Warchief screamed, and the sound of a thing in pain when you're the one who caused it was different from every other sound Andrew had ever heard. Louder, somehow, even when it was quiet.
Marcus finished it.
The Warchief dissolved. The chamber filled with light. Loot rained down — more orbs, more coins, a crude weapon, and one item that glowed differently from the rest. Brighter. A deeper blue.
And then the notification came.
> ***DUNGEON CLEAR.***
>
> ***EXPERIENCE DISTRIBUTED.***
>
> ***ANDREW COLE — DAMAGE CONTRIBUTION: 4%***
>
> ***LEVEL UP: 1 → 2***
>
> ***STAT POINTS EARNED: 2***
>
> ***SKILL ACQUISITION: NONE***
Four percent. He'd contributed four percent of the damage to a goblin dungeon's boss fight.
He stared at the notification. Beside him, Marcus was quietly reading his own — level three, new skill, stat points, all of it.
"Four percent," Andrew said.
"It's more than zero."
"Four. Percent."
"Andrew—"
"Do you know what four percent of a dungeon is? That's, like." He did the math. "That's being in the same room as the dungeon. That's ambient presence."
"You hit the boss."
"I gave the boss a very strongly-worded note." He put the knife away. His hands were shaking — only a little, and he was glad of the dim light. "I'm going to need to figure this out."
"Yeah," Marcus said. He wasn't dismissive when he said it. He said it like a fact, like something they were going to work on together, and Andrew, who had been waiting for the *but you're Null* and the *maybe this isn't for you* — found that it didn't come.
He stood in the dissolving dungeon chamber and breathed.
Four percent.
More than zero.