The horns sounded from the mountain pass.

  Cade watched the beetles emerge—not one group this time, but two. They split as they crested the ridge, each pack angling sharply toward the city walls rather than heading straight for him. A pincer movement, designed to hit the fortifications from multiple directions at once.

  Smart. Adaptive. Learning from the last wave's failure.

  Behind him, alarms rose from within the city—that same settlement with walls barely enclosing more space than his house back in Ohio. The defenders scrambled to their positions, flames already flickering around their identical hands.

  Cade sighed and pushed himself painfully to his feet.

  His leg muscles cramped as he stood, the recently-closed wounds protesting the movement. His cheek throbbed. His whole body felt like one continuous ache, held together by spite and whatever accelerated healing this world provided.

  Rhys and Zyrian rose with him, positioning themselves to either side.

  Here goes nothing—again.

  Then he threw himself backward.

  The wall wasn't expecting it. Neither were the defenders on top of it.

  Cade drove his elbow behind him like a spearhead, his full weight and momentum concentrated into that single point. The stone was barely two inches thick—gray rock held together with crumbling mortar, nothing like the seamless metal that composed most of this world. It caved on impact.

  He fell backward through the breach, landing hard on his side, debris raining around him. Fire soldiers tumbled from the collapsing section, their tiny bodies landing on top of him in a confused heap. Seven-inch figures, scrambling, trying to understand what had just happened.

  Cade didn't give them time to figure it out.

  He surged upward, the fire people sliding off him, falling again as they lost their perch on his rising form. One grabbed at his arm—he shook it off without looking, already charging toward the next section of wall.

  The city's interior was chaos. Wooden buildings, maybe three feet tall, cluttered the space between the outer wall and whatever passed for a central district. Cade crashed through them without slowing, the structures splintering against his shins, sending him stumbling but not stopping.

  He hit the wall ten feet from his original breach.

  This time he didn't have the momentum. The impact dented the stone, cracked the mortar, but didn't break through. He bounced off, staggered, caught himself.

  Behind him, he could hear the defenders recovering. Shouts in those identical voices. The crackle of gathering fire.

  Cade braced himself against the damaged wall, found the indent he'd made, and pushed. Like flipping a tire at the gym—legs driving, back straining, all his tier-one strength focused on that single point.

  The wall groaned. Tilted. Fell.

  This breach was wider than the first, a whole section of fortification collapsing outward onto the grass beyond. Through the gap, Cade could see the beetles approaching—closer now, their pincers catching the light of the faux sun.

  Then the flamethrowers hit his back.

  The pain was extraordinary.

  Not like the beetle wounds—sharp and tearing and localized. This was everywhere at once, a wall of agony that consumed his entire back, his shoulders, the base of his skull. He could feel his skin blistering, charring, the heat penetrating deeper than it had any right to go.

  Cade screamed.

  The sound that came out wasn't his practiced soul voice. It was physical—raw and loud and forceful, carrying actual acoustic power that made the air shudder. The defenders behind him flinched, their flamethrowers stuttering, the streams of fire cutting off for just a moment.

  A moment was enough.

  Cade threw himself through the gap he'd created, out of the city, behind what remained of the wall. The stone blocked the direct line of fire. He pressed his charred back against the cool surface and gasped, tears streaming from eyes that felt like they'd been boiled.

  He couldn't stop. Stopping meant dying. Stopping meant letting the fire people regroup, letting them cook him the way they cooked the beetles.

  He started running.

  Along the wall, clockwise, his massive strides eating up the distance. The defenders tracked him from above, flames gathering in their hands, but he was faster than they expected. Every few steps, he reached up.

  Grabbed.

  Crushed in his fist, eliciting gasps and yelps from the small people.

  Winced. God, that feels awful.

  Threw.

  The bodies were so small in his hands. So fragile. His fingers closed around them and squeezed, feeling bones crack, feeling the brief flare of their fire guttering out as life left them. He tossed the broken forms behind him without looking, already reaching for the next.

  More flamethrowers found him. His chest this time, his arms, his face. The pain layered on top of pain, his vision blurring in one eye as something critical burned away. His skin—more resilient than he'd expected, tier-one flesh tougher than Earth flesh had ever been—still blistered and blackened under the sustained assault.

  But they couldn't maintain the streams and dodge him at the same time.

  Grab. Crush. Throw. Keep moving.

  Fifty. He killed maybe fifty of them, clearing the walls section by section, leaving gaps in the defense for the beetles to exploit. The fire people started abandoning their positions, retreating toward the interior, toward whatever central point they planned to make their stand.

  Two-thirds of the way around the city, Cade's legs gave out.

  He collapsed behind the wall, his back—what was left of it—pressing against the stone. His breath came in ragged gasps. One eye was completely dark now, the other swimming with tears and afterimages. His hands were burned. His chest was burned. Everything was burned.

  He couldn't take any more.

  Please, he thought, not sure who he was pleading with. Please don't let the beetles find me now.

  Rhys watched the giant throw himself through the wall and felt something shift in her understanding.

  "He's attacking them," Zyrian said, stating the obvious. "The city. He's attacking the city."

  "I noticed."

  The beetles had noticed too. Both packs adjusted their approach, angling toward the breaches Cade was creating rather than their original targets. They flowed around him as he ran along the wall—around him, not toward him. Not attacking. Not treating him as a threat.

  They recognized an ally.

  "Interesting," Zyrian murmured.

  Cade disappeared around the bend of the wall, his massive form trailing smoke from a dozen burns. The screams of dying fire people marked his progress. The beetles poured through the gaps he'd left, chitinous bodies flooding into the city's interior.

  Rhys glanced at Zyrian. He glanced back.

  "Let's help," she said.

  The moment she made the decision, something appeared in her peripheral vision. A gauge—a progress tracker, hovering at the edge of her awareness, currently showing about one-fifth full.

  Cade's work. His betrayal of the fire people, his clearing of the walls, had already pushed the scenario toward completion.

  But it wasn't done yet.

  Rhys moved toward the wall, Zyrian matching her stride. The stone was maybe five feet tall from this side—trivial for their ten-inch bodies to scale. She dug her fingers into the mortar, finding easy handholds in the crumbling material, and pulled herself up.

  From the top, the battle spread below her in every direction.

  Beetles swarmed through the breaches, their pincers making short work of any defender who tried to stand against them. The tier-one fire people had abandoned the walls entirely now, clustering in the city's center, forming a defensive ring around... something. Their leader, maybe. Or just each other.

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  They were focused entirely on the beetles. On the obvious threat.

  They weren't watching their flanks.

  Rhys dropped down inside the wall, Zyrian landing silently beside her. They moved together through the ruined streets, skirting the edges of the battle, working their way toward the cluster of defenders.

  The first fire person didn't even see her coming.

  Rhys's hands closed around its neck from behind. A quick twist, a soft crack, and it crumpled. Zyrian took the next one the same way—grab, twist, drop. Their tier-two bodies completely overpowered the small defenders. It wasn't even a contest.

  They worked through the survivors systematically. The fire people were too focused on the beetles streaming through the gaps, too busy throwing flames at the chitinous tide, to notice the two Kindred moving behind them. Grab. Twist. Drop. Grab. Twist. Drop.

  The gauge in Rhys's vision climbed steadily. Thirty percent. Forty. Fifty.

  The beetles were efficient too. Their pincers found the gaps in that painted carapace armor, severing limbs and heads with mechanical precision. The fire people's flames cooked some of them—that sustained flamethrower technique was brutally effective when it landed—but there were too many beetles, coming from too many directions.

  Sixty percent. Seventy.

  The leader was the last to fall.

  Rhys found it in the center of the defensive ring, surrounded by the bodies of its identical followers. It turned at her approach, flames already gathering in its hands, that unsettling smile finally cracking into fear.

  "You were supposed to help us," it said.

  "We are helping," Rhys replied. "Just not you."

  She snapped its neck before it could respond.

  The gauge filled completely.

  The city vanished.

  One moment the walls were there—the buildings, the streets, the bodies of the fallen. The next, they simply... weren't. The entire settlement dissolved into mist, leaving behind only the empty plain and the painted dome overhead.

  And in the center of where the city had been, two plants.

  Simple green stalks, growing from the bare ground, each topped with a single fruit. One was round, its surface swirling with gray and violet and blue, like a marble made of captured storms. The other was spiky, radiating shades of red and orange that seemed to pulse with inner heat.

  Rewards. For completing the scenario.

  Rhys turned to find Cade.

  He was lying on his side where the wall had been, his back—charred and ruined—pressed against nothing now. As she watched, he rolled over onto his back, and the sound that escaped him was barely human. A whimper. A moan. The noise of something in too much pain to scream properly.

  He'd grown. Even through the burns and the damage, she could see it—his frame was larger now, almost seven feet tall. The anima released by the battle's completion had flooded into him automatically.

  The beetles were dissolving too, she noticed. Slower than the city had, their chitinous forms fading gradually into mist rather than vanishing all at once. Their scenario was over. Their purpose was fulfilled. They had no reason to remain.

  Rhys ran toward Cade, Zyrian keeping pace beside her. They'd grown too—she could feel the difference in her stride, the new length of her limbs. Two feet tall now, maybe a little more. Still small compared to the giant, but large enough to be useful.

  They reached his head and stopped, looking down at the ruin of his face. One eye was a mess of burned tissue. His cheek—already torn from the earlier battle—had been seared further, the edges of the wound now blackened and crisp. His lips were cracked and bleeding, scalp an angry red.

  "Cade," Zyrian said. "Cade, can you hear us?"

  The remaining eye—filmed with pain, barely focused—rolled toward them.

  "Advance," Rhys said urgently. "You have to advance. The compression will heal you—your body gets remade. Do it now."

  Cade made a sound—acknowledgment, maybe, or just another moan of pain.

  The world was fire.

  Cade couldn't think. Couldn't focus. Every nerve ending was screaming, every inch of his skin either burned or burning, every breath an exercise in agony. He was vaguely aware of voices near his head—Rhys and Zyrian, telling him something, something important—but the words kept slipping away, consumed by the roar of pain that filled his skull.

  Advance.

  The word cut through. Not because it was loud, but because it was a lifeline. Something to focus on. Something other than the fire that had eaten him alive.

  Advance. Body gets remade. Do it now.

  Right. Yes. He had to compress his anima. Had to trigger the advancement that would rebuild him, heal him, make this stop.

  He reached for the warm pressure in his chest and found it immediately. The anima was there—more than before, swollen with the rewards of the completed scenario. All he had to do was move it. Compress it. The spiral and knot. The same process he'd used for tier-one.

  Except his hands were burned.

  His arms were burned.

  Everything was burned, and the pain made it impossible to focus, impossible to trace the pathways he'd practiced, impossible to do anything except lie there and suffer.

  Move it anyway.

  Cade pushed through the agony. Found the anima. Started coaxing it toward his shoulder, his arm, his hand. The progress was agonizing—not metaphorically, literally agonizing, every shift of internal energy seeming to scrape against raw nerves. But he kept pushing.

  Minutes passed. Maybe five. Maybe fifty. Time had lost all meaning.

  The anima reached his palm. He compressed it there, squeezing it down, smaller and smaller, tighter and tighter, forming the pattern—

  Something gave way.

  The pain vanished.

  Cade found himself standing in an empty landscape.

  The ground beneath his feet was gray—not the gray of stone or metal, but the gray of absence, of a surface that existed only because something had to exist. The sky above was white, a solid blank expanse that provided light without any visible source.

  In front of him stood a figure.

  It was his size—roughly his size, anyway. Seven feet tall, matching the bloated form he'd grown to after the scenario. But the proportions were wrong. It had four arms, extending from shoulders that seemed too wide. And its head...

  Horns curved around the sides of its skull, sweeping backward and then up, like a great ram's horns with an alien twist. The whole form was solid black, not shadowed but black—an outline of darkness in the shape of a person.

  It stood languidly, weight shifted to one hip, those four arms hanging loose at its sides. Waiting.

  Between them, a white line crossed the gray ground, extending infinitely in both directions. A boundary. A demarcation.

  The advancement trial.

  Cade remembered what the Kindred had told him. Tier-five was when it got dangerous. Tier-two was supposed to be easy.

  He hoped they were right.

  The shadow didn't move as he assessed it. Just stood there, patient, those horns catching light that shouldn't exist in this blank space. It didn't speak. Didn't threaten. Didn't do anything except wait for him to make the first move.

  Cade thought about punching it.

  Something in him recoiled from the idea. He'd never been a fighter—not like that. Even in dreams, when he'd tried to throw punches, his fists would slow before impact, some deep reluctance preventing the blow from landing. He couldn't explain it. It was just part of who he was. An odd thought, given that he'd just crushed people, but there it is.

  But grappling? Grappling he could do.

  Cade charged across the white line.

  The shadow welcomed him. Those four arms reached out, trying to find purchase, trying to use the extra limbs as an advantage. But the moment they made contact, Cade knew he had it.

  The shadow was weak.

  Not just weaker than him—genuinely weak, like it had been designed to lose. Its arms had no real strength behind them. Its stance had no foundation. When Cade drove into it with his full weight, it crumpled backward without resistance.

  He took it to the ground, used his mass to pin it, got one arm around its neck. The shadow thrashed—those extra arms batting uselessly at his back, its horns scraping against his shoulder—but it couldn't escape. Couldn't break his grip. Couldn't do anything except struggle as he tightened his hold.

  Cade pulled.

  The shadow's head came off.

  It wasn't violent, exactly. More like removing a piece from a puzzle that had been designed to come apart. The black form dissolved beneath him, fading into the gray ground, leaving nothing behind but empty space.

  The mindscape began to collapse.

  Cade felt it happening—the white sky folding inward, the gray ground losing coherence, everything compressing down toward a single point. And at the center of that compression was him.

  His body shrank.

  The bloated near-seven-foot frame collapsed, condensing, the anima that had been diffused through his expanded form pulling tight and dense. He felt his muscles compact, gaining density rather than size, his bones hardening, his entire being solidifying into something new.

  The burns vanished.

  The pain vanished.

  The torn cheek, the blinded eye, the charred skin and ruined nerves—all of it remade, reformed, rebuilt from the inside out.

  When the compression finished, Cade opened his eyes and found himself lying on the plain where the city had been.

  He was five-foot-seven again. His original height, restored. But everything else was different—denser, stronger, more compact. Tier-two.

  And completely, perfectly healed.

  Rhys and Zyrian were right beside him—looking down at his prone form, then craning up as he sat.

  They'd grown while he was in the mindscape—significantly, their bodies now over two feet tall, large enough that details he'd been able to ignore before were suddenly, uncomfortably apparent. Zyrian's masculine frame was more apparent at this size, broad-shouldered and solid. Rhys's figure curved differently, narrower at the waist, wider at the hips, unmistakably feminine in silhouette.

  Both still naked.

  Cade's gaze started to drift downward automatically—a natural consequence of sitting up and finding people at a new eye level—and he caught himself, jerking his eyes back up to their faces. But not before he'd seen enough to confirm what he'd been deliberately not thinking about for weeks.

  Rhys had curves. Rhys had hips. Rhys had a figure that read as feminine in every way his Earth-trained brain understood the concept.

  Rhys also had something dangling between her legs that didn't match any of those other signals.

  Don't think about it. Don't think about what that means. Don't think about what's under your own loincloth.

  Cade focused very intently on their faces.

  Both of them were watching him with guarded interest.

  "You did it," Zyrian said. "The advancement."

  Cade touched his face. Smooth skin. No torn cheek. No burns. He blinked, and both eyes responded—the one that had been cooked by the fire people's flames now clear and functional.

  No stubble, either. He'd almost forgotten—this world had stripped him of all his hair when he'd arrived, and the advancement had rebuilt him the same way. No more shaving. One small silver lining in a very strange cloud.

  "I did it," he agreed.

  "Your first trial?" Rhys asked. "What was it?"

  "A shadow. Extra arms, horns." Cade shrugged. "Weak. Went down easy."

  "Tier-two trials usually are. It's the later ones that..." Rhys trailed off, her expression flickering with something that might have been memory. Or might have been the absence of memory—the locked experiences of higher tiers she couldn't yet access. "In any case, what you experienced was the primary trial type, so at least that isn't weird about you."

  Cade pushed himself to his feet. His body felt right in a way it hadn't since arriving in this world. Not just healed—optimized. Every muscle fiber in its proper place, every tendon tensioned correctly, every joint moving with perfect smoothness.

  This was what advancement meant. Not just growth, but reconstruction. A complete rebuild from the cellular level up.

  He looked toward the center of the plain, where the two fruits still grew on their simple green stalks. One gray and violet and blue, swirling like captured storms. The other red and orange and spiky, pulsing with inner heat.

  Devil fruits, some part of his brain supplied, the old otaku instincts surfacing unbidden. Eat one and gain mysterious powers, probably at some terrible cost.

  He was still a few hundred episodes behind on One Piece—he only caught up when nothing else was on, more out of loyalty to the genre than any burning need to know what happened next—but the comparison felt apt. Mysterious fruits granting supernatural abilities to whoever consumed them. It had seemed like such a ridiculous premise when he'd first encountered the series.

  Somehow, standing in a labyrinth dome after fighting fire-wielding genocidal expansionists and grappling a horned shadow in a mindscape, the comparison felt less absurd than it should have.

  The fruits waited, patient and strange, growing from nothing in the center of a vanished city.

  Rewards for completing the scenario.