Dean scrolled past another dead link.
The forum banner stretched wrong, its text overlapping the header like a layer nobody had ever tested, and he filed the broken CSS in the back of his head out of habit. rom-archive.net/abandoned, last post four years ago.
He was twenty-nine and six weeks past the layoff. At three-oh-four in the morning, the monitor was the only light in the studio apartment, and the edges of the desk had dissolved into the dark. A half-empty mug sat by the keyboard, cold since sometime yesterday. The rent was due in nine days. He was not thinking about the rent.
The list of abandoned games ran on and on. Crown of the Hollow King. Sisters of the Second Moon. Project Yurei, build 0.9. Amaterra: Blossom of the Queendom, v2.0 plus fan patch.
Most of the links had gone red years ago. One of them still glowed blue.
He clicked it, because patch notes were where developers confessed. The download finished faster than it had any right to for a file that size.
A cherry-blossom title screen came up over a soft lute loop, with a Japanese-style logo and English that looked like it had been run through a bad translator twice: Blossom of the Queendom. He almost closed it. But the lute was clean, and the art was better than anything else on that list of dead titles.
The patch notes opened in a second window. Half of them were placeholders, and the rest were changelog lines that read like apologies. He skimmed them the way he used to skim internal build reports, hunting for the places where the code had lied.
QA got into the blood and stayed there.
Petals drifted across a painted sky. He moved the cursor to New Game and clicked.
A dialog box slid into the center of the screen, sharp-edged against the soft art.
No male player data found. Continue?
Y / N
Bug log, entry zero. Severity: weird. Reproducible: let's find out.
He pressed Y.
The monitor brightened until white swallowed the room, and the lute kept playing for half a second after the rest of the world went away.
Then the light kept climbing, and the apartment stopped existing.
He woke face-down in pine needles.
Resin and wet earth hit him first, and under them something sharper, like iron left out in the rain. A cold wind pushed through his hoodie and found the gaps at his wrists. His knees ached where they pressed into the slope.
A real body. On real ground.
He lay still and made himself check it properly. Ten fingers. Tongue against teeth. He pinched the back of his hand hard enough to leave a white crescent, and it hurt in the ordinary way, which was the worst answer available.
Okay. This is a stroke. I'm on the apartment floor having a stroke, and this is what the brain does with the last of the oxygen.
He reached for the escape key. His hand closed on a fistful of wet needles. He tried again anyway, twice, like a man patting his pockets for keys he knew were on the table at home.
The rent was due in nine days. It was an absurd thing to think, and he thought it, and his throat closed around it. Nobody would notice he was gone for a week at least.
"Bug log," he said aloud. His voice came out cracked and far too thin for the woods. "Entry zero. Severity—"
He couldn't finish. He laughed instead, once, an ugly sound, and the laugh frightened him more than the silence had. Then he did the only thing that had ever steadied his hands. He made it a list. Name the thing. Count the thing. Keep looking.
A translucent bar hung at the edge of his vision, pale green, labeled HP. Beside it, a name tag floated in the air.
Dean Walker — Lv 1 — Class: [ ]
He poked at the empty brackets with a thought that felt almost like a mouse-click. Nothing selected, and the field stayed blank.
The rest of the HUD was just as bare: a bar, a name, and a faint grey outline where a minimap might once have lived. Nobody had ever written the tutorial. His health read 105 over 105, which was at least a start.
Below the ridge, someone shouted.
Under the shout came a heavy tearing sound, something big running on cloven feet through brush and loose stone. Dean pushed up on his elbows, needles stuck to his cheek, and looked down into the gully.
Six figures in crimson armor were down there: four soldiers in lacquered plates that clicked when they moved, a tall woman with a glaive, and a leaner one with a longbow already drawn.
Thornback Boars were driving them against the far wall of the gully. When he focused on the animals, their nameplates flickered, level three for most of them. One was bigger than the rest, scarred across the shoulder, its tusks yellow and chipped.
The tall woman had broad shoulders, blunt black hair cut at the jaw, and a scar through her left eyebrow. She took a charge on the glaive and turned it, and the blade bit, twisted, and came free with a sound like wet cloth tearing.
The archer put an arrow into a boar's shoulder from a distance that should have been impossible. It only slowed the animal down.
The four soldiers held a tight line with their shields locked, but the gully was too narrow and the boars too many. One more clean charge would break them.
Dean watched the next charge with the part of his brain that had spent years timing combat loops.
The boar picked a line and committed to it. It hit the shield wall and stopped dead, and then it had to plant all four feet and re-aim before it could come again.
The one after it did exactly the same thing.
They can't turn mid-charge.
Past the patrol, the gully dropped away into a streambed. From down there the drop wasn't obvious, but from the ridge it was as plain as a line on a map.
Two of the smaller boars were circling wide, hunting a new angle on the left flank, and their path ran right past the foot of his slope. If they hit the line before the others were cleared, the formation would fold.
Dean stood, and the cold found him immediately.
He pulled the hoodie off, held it by the sleeves, and waved it over his head.
"Hey! Over here!"
Both heads swung toward him.
The bigger one locked on and came, straight and unbraking, and the second followed half a second later down the same line.
Dean held his ground until he could smell the musk and the iron in the first boar's breath.
Then he stepped hard to the left.
His new body answered faster than he expected on the uneven ground. The first boar went past at full speed and never found its brakes. It sailed off the edge in a spray of needles and dirt, and its squeal cut off when it hit the streambed twenty feet below.
The second tried to correct, front feet skidding, and failed, and followed the first one over.
After that there was only water over rocks, and the fading noise of the fight below.
Two kill notices flickered in the corner of his eye and vanished, and the XP landed like a quiet click somewhere behind his eyes.
The patrol finished the rest without ceremony. The tall woman's glaive took one through the throat on the backswing. The archer put an arrow through an eye from thirty yards. The soldiers closed ranks and cut down the last pair with short, practiced strokes.
When it was over, the gully smelled of wet iron and cooling blood, and lacquer plates clicked as the soldiers checked each other for wounds. One kicked a twitching carcass, then wiped her boot on the needles.
Dean stood on the ridge in his socks with the hoodie in one hand, and the wind found the sweat on his neck and turned it cold.
The level-up hit while the adrenaline was still loud in his ears.
```status [LEVEL UP] Lv 1 → 2 +5 free points (Unallocated: 5) ```
He didn't agonize. Perception had spotted the pattern, and Agility had kept him on the right side of the drop, so PER +3 and AGI +2.
The numbers settled with a soft internal chime. HP ticked up to 110, and his stamina followed it up.
Below, the soldiers were staring up at him. A man talking to the air was clearly a new kind of problem, and not one they had trained for.
The tall woman started up the slope.
The archer followed a few paces behind, copper braid bouncing against her back, three silver earrings catching the light. The four soldiers came after them, plates clicking on the needle-slick ground.
The woman stopped three paces away. She had a couple of inches on him and carried the armor as if it weighed nothing, the glaive resting across one shoulder. Her eyes were the color of wet slate.
She took him in with one long look: no grey sash, no weapon, and no business surviving the fight she'd just watched. She reached a conclusion that didn't require his input.
"Kneel. That wasn't a request."
Dean opened his mouth.
"You are outside the outpost without a handler. You have no sash. You interfered with a patrol engagement. Kneel."
He stayed on his feet a second longer than was wise. "I just—"
"Kneel."
He went down on one knee, because the alternative was four soldiers making the decision for him. Needles bit through the denim.
His mouth had gone dry. Five blades were within reach and none of them was pointed at a boar. The part of him that had been so clever on the ridge had gone small and quiet, and what was left was only a man on his knees in his socks, waiting to learn what he was.
Something flickered over her shoulder when he looked at her, a second tag under the nameplate, smaller than the first and pink, of all colors.
```status [AFFINITY] Hana Kurogane: Hostile (35) ```
Well. That's honest.
He had no idea what the number was for. He had a strong feeling he'd earned all thirty-five of those points by waving a hoodie.
The archer circled to his left, looking him over with open curiosity. She was lean and athletic, and her copper-dyed braid had come half-undone in the fight and hung over one shoulder like a messy rope. Her grin was crooked, with a gap between the front teeth.
The pink tag followed her too.
```status [AFFINITY] Sayo Minase: Curious (260) ```
She glanced at the streambed where the boars had gone, then back at him, and the grin widened.
"He made them jump, Captain. Boars don't jump."
The captain's face didn't change. "Men do not fight. Men do not plan. Men do not stand on ridges waving cloth at charging animals. Bind him."
Two soldiers stepped in with rope, not chain, thick and well used. They tied his wrists in front of him, tight enough to be a reminder and not yet tight enough to cut off the blood.
Dean tested the rope once and found it solid.
Either the world's most expensive VR had decided to include real rope burns, or he'd finally lost the plot in a studio apartment at three in the morning. Either way, the bar was still there, the level-up had stuck, and the class field was still empty.
Bug log, entry one: the tutorial just tried to arrest me. Severity: high. Reproducible: extremely.
The archer finished her circle and stopped in front of him, close enough that he could count the freckles across the bridge of her nose.
"What's your name, then?"
"Dean."
She tilted her head. "Stray. That'll do until someone decides otherwise."
"Sayo," the captain said. "We are not naming strays."
"Already did." Sayo crouched so her eyes were level with his. "He pulled two off the line and walked them over the edge. I want to know how. The drop I can see. Fine. How did you know they wouldn't turn?"
Dean glanced at the captain, who was watching the trees instead of him.
"They pick a line and they keep it," he said. "Once they start a charge, they don't steer. They run until they hit something. Only then do they choose a new direction. I watched two of them do it against your shields. Same thing both times."
"So they get stupid when they run."
"They can't change direction while they're moving." He almost said pathing. Almost said commit frames. Those words belonged to a dark room and a monitor, not a woman with a bow. He tried the language of bodies instead. "It's like a swing you have to finish, even if the other person already ducked. You get them pointed at the drop. You hold still until they lock. Then you step off, and they finish the swing into empty air."
Sayo looked at the streambed and then back at him, and she laughed out loud and rocked back on her heels.
"Captain. Did you hear? A man with no sash walked two boars off a cliff because they had to finish."
The captain still didn't look at him, and when she spoke, it was to the slope.
"Did the large one run the same line? Or only the small?"
Dean blinked. That was the better question.
"I didn't test the large one. Your glaive already had it. I only used the pair circling wide. Two charges, same pattern. I didn't have a third, so I didn't assume the scarred one would follow."
The captain's jaw moved, though it wasn't a nod.
Sayo had wanted the trick. The captain had wanted the limits of the sample: two small boars, and not the big one.
Her hand went to the strap under her pauldron and pulled it tight. It had already been tight.
Sayo saw the difference anyway. She stood, still grinning, and put herself half a step between Dean and the patrol.
"Hana. Let him talk."
Hana's eyes cut to her in one flat look and went back to the trees.
"He has talked. Two small charges is a sample, not a rule. A Watch scout should have seen it from the ridge."
"A Watch scout didn't see it from the ridge," Sayo said. "He did. So we walk, and he talks. If the outpost wants it written down, they can hear it twice."
Hana's mouth tightened, and she looked at neither of them.
She also didn't say no.
"He will answer at the outpost." The glaive shifted on her shoulder, metal on lacquer. "Move."
They walked with Dean in the middle of the column, the rope kept short enough that he had to match the soldiers' pace or get yanked forward.
Hana walked point and never looked back.
Sayo drifted left and right of the column like a scout who had never once been ordered into formation. Her eyes stayed mostly on the trees, but she glanced back often enough that he caught it every time.
The soldier holding his rope was one of the four whose lives he had just saved, and every time the path shifted, her grip tightened a little more than it needed to.
The thanks was already a leash.
His hands were tied, but his eyes weren't, so he poked at the HUD.
The green bar stayed a green bar reading 110 over 110. He tried to open an inventory and got nothing. He tried a menu, and then whatever passed for help in a build this unfinished, and both were dead.
He tried a long hold on the bar, and then dragging it sideways. Every control turned out to be painted on, something that looked like a button until you put a finger on it.
He poked his own name in case it unfolded into a character sheet. It didn't.
So he turned the experiment on people.
He picked a woman in the column and focused on her with the same small push he'd used in the gully. A tag bloomed over her shoulder with a name he didn't know, the rank of private, and a level of nine. She never looked up.
He let it fade and tried another private further up, who came back as level eight. Neither of them had a pink tag.
He tried a rock beside the path and got nothing at all. So nameplates were for people and animals, and not for scenery.
The pink tags were stranger. Six women on this ridge, and only two of them had one. He didn't know what that meant, so he filed it under things to reproduce.
He lifted his eyes to the front of the column and focused on Hana.
Hana Kurogane. Lv 28. Captain, Eastern Border Watch.
He kept his face still and let the tag drop.
The privates were eight and nine, and the captain was twenty-eight. That wasn't a gap a man in socks closed by being clever twice.
He didn't mention it. First rule of a good report: you don't show the client the crash until you've reproduced it.
"I'm not from here," he said, keeping his voice level. "I don't know what a sash means. I woke up on that ridge with a headache and a health bar."
Hana didn't slow. "Men who leave their posts without leave are recovered. Men who interfere with Watch business are recovered harder. You will be processed at Kurogane Outpost. Until then, you will walk. You will not speak unless spoken to."
Sayo's grin flickered and came back. "She means it. Most of them do."
"Most of who?"
"Captains." Sayo shrugged one shoulder. "The ones who think the law and the world are the same thing. Sometimes they're right. Sometimes the world has other ideas and the law hasn't caught up. That's when things get interesting."
"Sayo," Hana said, without turning. "Enough."
Sayo shut her mouth, but the curiosity stayed in her eyes.
A minute later she dropped back and fell in at his shoulder, close enough that her voice wouldn't carry to the front.
"Where are you from, Stray?"
"Far." He almost laughed. "You wouldn't know it. We have indoor plumbing and a severe shortage of boars. I'm currently reassessing the boars."
Sayo snorted. "Do all the men there talk this much?"
"Only the ones who get arrested for being useful."
"Useful." Her mouth tipped. "New word for it."
"Where is here, exactly?"
"Thornwood." She pointed her chin at the pines as if they'd introduced themselves. "Eastern Marches. The edge of the Queendom, if you're asking which edge. Past that ridge it's hill country and kappa streams. Past those, nothing anyone maps."
"The Queendom."
"Amaterra, Stray." She squinted at him. "Did you fall out of the sky?"
"Something like that. It was a very bright screen."
"I don't know what a screen is."
"It's a window that lies to you."
She thought about that for three full steps. "Then I've met a few."
The soldier on his rope snorted. She was young and square-jawed, and she'd been pretending not to listen since the gully.
"He talks like a clerk," the soldier said to nobody.
"He fights like a lunatic," Sayo said. "Which is better than a clerk. Chiyo, you're pulling his arm out of the socket."
Chiyo loosened her grip by exactly one finger's width. Dean decided to count it as progress.
She checked the column. Hana's back stayed turned and her pace stayed even, but Sayo kept her voice low anyway.
"What happens to me at the outpost?" he asked.
"Processing." She said it the way she might count arrows. "They put a sash on you. Grey. That's the mark. After that you're House property. Or you're sold, if the House has no use for you."
There was no cruelty in it, only the rule as she knew it.
"Captain will follow it," she said. "That's what she does."
"Any chance they skip the sash if I explain the ridge again?"
"No." Fast and flat. "Men don't get exceptions. That's the part she won't bend. Not even for me."
Dean flexed his tied fingers and thought about being sold like surplus, when all he owned was a dead phone and the clothes he had fallen asleep in.
"How long?"
"Before dark, if you keep your feet. Intake after that. They'll ask questions. Answer fewer than you want to."
"Comforting."
"You asked." She studied his face with a sharp, curious look. "I've never seen a man do what you did on that ridge. I want to see it again."
"I'll try to fit it in around the sash."
She opened her mouth to fire something back, and then she didn't.
Her thumb ran once along the string of her bow, slow, the way you'd check a thing you already knew was fine. For the first time since the gully she had no question ready, and she looked at the trees instead of him.
"Keep your feet, Stray," she said, and was gone, back out on the flank before Hana could turn her head.
The path narrowed between two stands of older pine, and the soldiers shortened the rope to keep him centered as the needles gave way to harder ground. Somewhere ahead, a bird called once and went quiet.
Dean walked on while the rope held and the HP bar stayed green.
He kept the bug log running, because it was the only familiar tool he had left.
Open issues. One: survive intake. Two: find out why my class field is empty. Three: find out why two women in this world come with a pink number, and why one of them hates me at thirty-five.
Sayo looked over her shoulder once more, the grin back in place.
"Welcome to Amaterra, Stray."
