And then I turned back toward beauty and the birds.

  “Oh, Merlin-feather! Fine.” I drew Rook’s Revenge, ready to once again wield this OP rifle like a caveman’s club, all to save some chick who might end up stealing my hard-earned rickshaw. I stashed the rickshaw in my inventory just in case it would make a difference.

  I sprinted in and whipped the AMR around as if flourishing a sword. With my Strength now at 14, I could wield it much easier than before, yet it still felt hefty and substantial in my hands.

  I leaped up and did a flying swing at the nearest bird guy, walloping his feathered Kestrel head. Numbers burst from his noggin, and a familiar guitar riff accompanied the floating words in my HUD.

  | CRITICAL HIT |

  | The Sneak Attack skill is now available to unlock on your Skill Tree. |

  The bird guy groaned and crumpled to his hands and knees like last month when I fired my entire HR department all at the same time. His health bar was already in the red, so I clocked him again with the stock. His head exploded into feathers and sparkles, and he faded away.

  I might have just killed a man. Another man.

  But I couldn’t think about that now, nor could I focus on the new skill I could eventually, maybe access.

  The other three Godfeathers had noticed my ambuscade—a word which I guess I would continue to use now that it had lodged in my head, just like I’d lodged the AMR’s stock in the Kestrel’s.

  “You two, get the fennel seed. The girl is mine!” the Falcon squawked.

  The Osprey and the Vulture rushed toward me, and the Falcon continued pursuing the ashen-haired woman.

  Silas slingshotted off my shoulder, splatted against the side of the water treatment plant structure, and cloaked himself. He disappeared into the background almost perfectly; I had to strain to make out his eight-legged outline against the otherwise identical background.

  “If I’d known you were just gonna run and hide, I wouldn’t have picked that ability!” I hollered.

  The nearest bird guy swung his bat at my face, but I slipped and dove into a roll. Or, I thought it was going to be a roll. Instead of rolling, I face-planted, and words hovered in my vision.

  | The Dodge Roll skill has not been unlocked.

  Please unlock it on your Skill Tree to activate it. |

  Sharp pain ratcheted through my side as one of the bird guys kicked me in my otherwise perfect oblique. My own HP ticked down, and I winced. Couldn’t take too many more hits like that.

  “Nice move, chump!” he laughed.

  I groaned and rolled to the side to avoid more beatings, and one of the spiked bats sparked against the pavement where my head had just been. I leaped to my feet and used Rook’s Revenge to deflect the ensuing strikes coming in tandem from the bird guys.

  Overhead, Silas appeared on the wall above one of them. “Surprise, moray-fisher!”

  Then he leaped onto the head of the Osprey, covering his eyes with tentacles but carefully avoiding his hooked beak.

  The Osprey issued a surprised bird screech, dropped his bat, and attempted to pry Silas off his head with his ineffective feathered fingers, all while stumbling around on his dainty bird feet. His wings flapped behind him, ineffective and out-of-sync.

  I deflected a strike of the Vulture’s bat with the AMR, then I caught him under the beak with a heavy upward swing. Light flashed, sparkles and feathers flew into the air, and his health bar appeared as numbers tumbled out of his head.

  “Ah!” he squawked. “Son-of-a-bluejay!”

  I didn’t hesitate or savor the hit; instead, I went for another and another. Each time, the bird barely brought his bat up to block. Some of my blows landed, driving his health bar down farther.

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  Despite being a rifle, Rook’s Revenge made a great melee weapon. It was surprisingly durable, heavy, and about the only thing I had going for me in the AllVerse.

  I crouched under a horizontal counter-swing and took out his scrawny bird legs with a kick. He crashed to the cement, thunked his head back on the pavement, and received the “Bonked” debuff. Literal cartoon birds appeared and flitted around his head, and his health bar dropped into the red as numbers spilled out and disappeared.

  The Osprey bird guy, still struggling to free his face from Silas’s grasp, toppled into one of several basins outside the water treatment plant. His bird feet kicked harmlessly as he thrashed and splashed, trying to get free.

  With all my strength, I slammed Rook’s Revenge down on the bonked bird’s beak, and his Vulture head exploded into feathers and glitter. Then he disappeared just like the first bird.

  I ran over to where Silas had tumbled into the water with the Osprey, but as I did, he climbed out of the basin and waved a tentacle at me. “Whew, that was a bit dodgy, but we got there in the end. Once again, you’re welcome for saving your life.”

  I peered into the basin and found only a floating suit, enough feathers to choke a lion, and literal sparkling water. “Silas, did you… kill that guy? On your own?”

  I wasn’t appalled or anything; I just might’ve been slightly impressed with him for the first time.

  “Huh? Oh, no. Turns out birds don’t swim so well, and he drowned. Who’d have thought?” He gave me a confused stare. “Which is truly inconsistent because I’ve seen birds swim and float on this planet.”

  I scooped him back onto my shoulder. “Those are fowl.”

  “Agreed, he tasted terrible, but it doesn’t solve the mystery of which birds float and which don’t. We’ll have to look into that. Side mission for sure, but still a priority.”

  I hurried around the water basins, looking for the woman and the last bird guy. After less than a minute, I caught up to him creeping around a series of tanks between the basins. I hurried over and crouched to sneak up on him.

  | The Sneak Attack ability must be purchased on your Skill Tree. |

  | Once purchased, crouching activates your Sneak Attack. |

  “Of course I need to buy that skill, too,” I muttered. Still, if I’d caught the first one unawares, I could do it again, Sneak Attack skill or not, so I stayed low.

  [Crouch all you want. It doesn’t mean you’re sneaking.]

  Lucretia whispered that sentence. Now she was a comedian.

  The Falcon man clutched his bat and peeked carefully around the tanks. I skirted through the parallel row of tanks and prepared to jump him. When I darted out of cover, he turned and faced me.

  “Nice try, fennel seed!” He brandished his bat and charged me.

  “Why the flock do you keep calling me that?” I raised the AMR to defend myself.

  While I had the Falcon distracted, the ashen-haired woman darted out from the last row of tanks and charged from behind. She was still wounded, but the glitter leaking from her wounds had slowed to a trickle; she must’ve used a health pack.

  With one mighty leap, she clamped her legs around his Falcon neck, whipped her body around in a hurricanrana like a World Wildlife Fund pro, and flung the bird guy to the ground.

  She slammed him down hard, and he spouted numbers and also received the “Bonked” debuff. I finished the job with my AMR-turned-mace-of-Sauron—another nerdly partaking I was forced into by my parents at least once a year, though admittedly, I kinda liked that movie series. And the music was straight fire.

  As the Falcon’s body poofed away into glitter and feathers, I stepped back and held the rifle over my shoulders, ready to swing in case the neon punk princess got any funny ideas.

  “Touch me again, and you won’t get that hand back,” I warned.

  SMACK.

  Silas slapped me with a tentacle. “That is no way to talk to a lady!”

  “I will rip one of those off. I’m not even kidding,” I growled.

  “Then what will I heal you with, you bloody great git! Now we’re making a bad first impression, thanks to you.”

  “This is an abusive relationship!” I snapped.

  The neon punk princess huffed and held her hands up in a gesture of peace. “Relax… I suppose I owe you one. I’m surprised you intervened. I figured you’d just let them kill me. You didn’t seem to care about anyone else before. Maybe it’s different now that you’re stuck in here?”

  Her hair hung in her face from her over-the-top wrestling maneuver, but her voice seemed familiar somehow. I lowered my rifle-club. “Do we know each other? I mean, besides you stealing my class when the tournament began?”

  She scoffed. “Wait, you don’t know who I am?”

  I sighed. “Should I?”

  She adjusted her neon-orange patch of hair behind her ear, giving me a clearer look at her face and brilliant aquamarine eyes, which conveyed the spark of intellect behind them.

  I cheated and scanned her, but it didn’t give me as much info as I’d hoped:

  | Sync – Level 12 Player |

  | Game/Class: Sunshine Overdraft |

  I’d never heard of the game she was playing, but her being Level 12 while I was only partway through Level 5 grated on me. Maybe if she hadn’t stolen my power and knocked me unconscious, I could’ve kept pace.

  But even as I considered it, I had to readjust my thinking: I wasn’t here to play this stupid game in this stupid world that I’d not-so-stupidly created. I just needed to get out of here, and then my life could go back to normal… well, normal for me. Not everyone gets to be a painfully handsome billionaire with a god-tier physique.

  The girl held her arms out incredulously, and I finally figured it out. The first time we’d met, I’d quickly bypassed her face to scrutinize certain other features. Plus, her hair hung differently in the game and was ashen rather than a rich golden blonde. But she’d been babbling, and I got distracted at the prospect of making a ton of cash.

  Now I was stuck in my own creation with a rickshaw, an alien octopus, weird Cthulhu boxers, and not much else. The one time in my life I should’ve listened to her, I hadn’t, and it had gotten me—us—here.

  “Sydney,” I muttered.

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  In the desolate desert of the North American Sector, the government harvests the Soul Energy of siblings Eos and Maxima in secret.

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  Occam's Favor

  A grizzled ex-mech pilot is drawn back into the Everwar, a decades-long conflict raging across Jupiter’s moonscape.

  This time he refuses to fight alone, bringing a crew of misfits and a mech powerful enough to rewrite the war itself.

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  Dungeon Crawler Carl Audio Immersion Tunnel for Soundbooth Theater, and he's the lead writer for the Dungeon Crawler Carl Role Playing Game.