Dickhead had been right. The mismatched city ruins only stretched about twenty-five miles. Most of the paths snaking through the buildings were spotless, except for those next to skyscrapers. Collapsed rubble from the failing architecture spilled out and blocked those accessways completely. Still, none of the paths were streets. It just felt off, walking along a dirt path next to the last remnants of human engineering. To think, unless the pyramids had a tourist in them at the beginning of the Tutorial, they were gone. Lost forever.

  So much for my damn bucket list.

  For a second there, I almost asked Dickhead if I could put everything back like it was before. But then I’d have to participate in this dumb galactic dick-measuring contest. And I didn’t do that shit anymore. I’d learned that painful lesson a long time ago. Hope was for schmucks.

  I was here to get my franking word back, nothing more.

  I couldn’t just blitz on through at Mach frank like before. But once I figured out to avoid the tallest of the buildings, I breezed through at a decent clip.

  “So, all these buildings were filled with people?”

  “Each structure would’ve had at least one native player.”

  “Where is everybody?”

  The whole place felt like a ghost town. I half-expected to hear the heartbeat of a city. I missed the blaring horns from gridlocked traffic and the constant jackhammering of underpaid, overworked tradesmen. Not even the bickering of quarreling lovers came from the broken windows.

  It was just… silent, save for the occasional echo of another brick giving way.

  The crumbling patchwork city was devoid of life and humanity. Even my own footfalls didn’t count among the living anymore. It felt wrong.

  Dickhead answered, “Hopefully all gathered in the Player town up ahead. Currently, those are the only locations to buy, sell, or repair. Eventually, you’ll be able to replicate some, if not all, of those services in your Lair, but that’ll take some time to set up. A few expansions, at least.”

  Dickhead made it sound like my Lair could become a town of its own.

  All the patchwork city’s paths converged into one. I noticed signs of odd foot traffic. Giant feet, claw marks, drag marks, quarter-sized holes, and even a trail of what looked like snot. But I guess that made sense; not every monster could wear shoes. I was lucky to have picked one with a humanoid form.

  A drawn-out roar split the sky directly overhead, loud and sudden, like a clash of thunder. I caught sight of the dark shadow gliding over the rubble first. It resembled a sharp cross, and I saw why after glancing up. A golden dragon flew overhead. Smaller than its entrance suggested, but every inch a mythical monster: a long neck, a slender arrow-headed muzzle crowned with sweeping dual horns for a crest, and thick obsidian claws. Its golden coat caught the sunlight, practically glinting as it glided overhead.

  “Are those… sparkles?” I asked.

  My brain took a moment to register that magnificent bastard as a player and not just another monster.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “That’s the asshole who stole my class.”

  He or she, I couldn’t tell from the ground, was already out of earshot, heading in the same direction I’d been.

  “Great,” I muttered and picked up the pace. It was getting late, and I just wanted to get this shit over with.

  A hand-painted wooden sign that read “Welcome to Player Town 111” greeted me as I approached.

  “Dick, how many player towns are there?”

  “Solid question. It says… just over two and a half million.”

  “Jesus. That’s a lot of towns. How many players per town?”

  “Let’s see. DungeonCore tallied about eight point one billion natives… minus one point seven billion minors… shave off a percent for accidental disintegration.”

  “Is that what happened to everyone who stayed outside?”

  Dickhead ignored my question and said, “My best guess is two to three thousand players per town.”

  “Got it. What was that about minus the minors?”

  “Intergalactic gambling law prevents minors from participating in World Dungeons. For Earth, the council voted that meant twelve and under.”

  I squinted, trying to wrap my head around their logic.

  “Gambling laws?” I asked, still unsure how the hell that was the answer.

  “It’s the treasure chests.”

  Sure, I’d heard horror stories: parents bankrupted because they couldn’t figure out how to use a damn passcode. Mostly from Reddit, as I didn’t have any kids—thank God—or friends who were parents, or friends at all, really.

  What I did have was my own detached arm, tucked away in my digital storage. God knows where it actually went—probably a black hole or some shit. Not to mention the severed head I’d picked up on my little apple-picking adventure for serial killers. Saying the world was really franked up right now would’ve been underselling it by a metric frankton.

  But even I couldn’t grasp the logic of these imbeciles.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  I rephrased my question for clarity. “Are you telling me their biggest concern wasn’t about ethics, or morals, or child labor, or even health and safety? But—”

  It was almost too stupid to say. “… Gambling?”

  Dickhead sighed. “Yeah…”

  Jesus franking Christ, I couldn’t believe it was a goddamn gacha mechanic that saved our kids.

  Then a dark thought reminded me, Not all of them.

  I saw the white beacon that marked the town dead ahead. Only there wasn’t any town. There hadn’t been anything for miles. Just a dirt path surrounded by cracked earth and scattered stones. Not a roof, not a wall, not so much as a damn outhouse broke the horizon. Admittedly, I couldn’t see very far in the dark, but if there was supposed to be a town, it looked like somebody had already nuked it off the map.

  “Hey Dick. You sure you marked the right spot?”

  “Yep. Weird. This is definitely where the town should be. Have a look around.”

  I wanted to argue with Dickhead, but the day was catching up to me. He’d get more than an earful if I’d run all the way out here for nothing. But I wasn’t ready to accept defeat yet, so I stumbled around in the dark like a jackass.

  The white beacon went out the moment I got too close. Without it, I was blind until my eyes adjusted.

  “Oh, shit!” I cried out as my foot found something sturdier than me. A metallic twang sounded as I kicked it. My foot snagged. Then Newton’s First Law of Motion and gravity tag-teamed my ass into the ground. I landed hard on my chest, sending up a cloud of dust. One arm wasn’t enough to break my fall.

  I sat up, looking for the son of a bitch that got in my way. What I found was a very large hatch. There was a handle on one side and a hinge on the other. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how it opened.

  Something caught my eye as I was trying to stand up. I stopped and scooted closer to the center of the hatch. I brushed off the dirt to reveal three numbers: 111.

  I started laughing as I got to my feet.

  “What’s so funny?” Dickhead asked.

  I bent down, gripped the handle, and gave it a yank, still chuckling.

  “Looks like I just found Vault One—”

  A blast of warm air interrupted me as the underground chamber decompressed. Grayish-white spores swirled around me as I coughed.

  “Why are you coughing, Frank? You don’t need to breathe.”

  “Some habits,” I got out between fits. “Are hard to break.”

  I tried holding my breath, but the spores had already gotten in and wouldn’t stop tickling my lungs. I might have even been worried, but I was already undead. What the hell was cancer going to do to me?

  Then I frowned and asked, “Cancer’s not a parasite, is it?”

  I coughed again. Jesus, that’d be the last thing I needed—super cancer.

  “No, it’s a mutation.”

  Shit, I hated how that sounded exactly like the type of crap they’d turn into a game mechanic.

  “Is that something I’ve got to worry about?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  I sighed, which forced out another cough.

  I peered into the tunnel. It was plenty wide, but it looked infested. Blue, purple, and yellow fungus coated the walls. I was positive I had just seen it pulse.

  “There’s gotta be another way. I don’t want to use the sewer entrance.”

  “I don’t think it’s just an entrance…”

  Closing my eyes didn’t stop me from imagining a whole sewer city down there. I didn’t do manholes, septic tanks, or eldritch sewer systems. But I wasn’t getting any younger, so I leaned closer over the tunnel and gave it a tiny sniff.

  Nothing, not even an excuse.

  I descended, using the steel rungs to lower myself into Limbo, the first level of Hell. A faint yellow glow bled up from below, only visible once halfway down.

  It took what felt like forever to get to the bottom. First, I only had one arm, and second, it just went on and on. Seriously, it must have been half a mile down, at least. I turned around in the little alcove to find they’d stuck an entire goddamn bioluminescent city down here.

  I stepped off onto spongy ground that squished beneath my boots. A carpet of white mycelia spread in every direction, glowing faintly like mold under a blacklight. The air down here was thick with the grayish spores. They drifted along with the undercurrent breeze.

  The cavern stretched wider than a city stadium, maybe half a mile across, with clusters of mushroom-buildings packed into neighborhoods.

  Stalks thicker than telephone poles jutted from the ground, climbing toward the ceiling high above, each tipped with a bulging yellow orb. They hummed and pulsed to an undetectable beat, bathing everything in a sickly glow.

  Fungi clung to the walls and ceiling in patches. Blue. Purple. Sickly yellow. It spread like mold in a fridge no one had cleaned in centuries.

  Beyond the glowing stalk-poles, rows of mushroom huts spread in every direction, stacked in clusters and tiers. Some sprouted right out of the cavern walls; others crowded around giant stems like parasites clinging to a host.

  They weren’t buildings in the normal sense—more like the city had sprouted each one. Dome-shaped huts rose out of the mycelia, their walls ribbed and glistening like the undersides of mushrooms. Taller growths loomed farther back. I couldn’t really tell one mushroom building from the next. A row of hollowed-out stalks suggested that might be a marketplace. Each one looked like a tiny shopfront stall to me. This city felt alive as every spore-laden wall breathed with the same rhythm as the lights overhead.

  I made my way across the sponge road; it reminded me of the track at my old high school. The closer I got, the louder and more alive the town became. It started looking like the world’s biggest mycelial convention center.

  Monsters were everywhere. Sure, they were just players, but it was a lot easier to stomach them as beasts. At least animals didn’t pretend to be something they weren’t. People were supposed to know better. People sucked.

  A wraith drifted across the mycelia, its robes tattered and trailing spores in its wake. A second later, some jackass shoved past me, his nosferatu face stretched into a bat snout with tall, oversized ears.

  To my left, a banshee drifted across the street, her translucent frame flickering in and out of focus. She stopped at a vendor, who appeared to have melted or otherwise fused into the wall. Or maybe he grew out of the wall? Either way, it was franking bizarre.

  A ghoul shuffled past me with a hunched spine, its skin tight and gray like wax paper over bones. The player gnawed on a haunch of meat that looked suspiciously like a human thigh. Few things were more disgusting than open-mouth chewing.

  I hurried past him further into town.

  Two bugbears were chatting with each other. Just a couple of big, hairy slabs of muscle with arms like actual cannons. I pitied any poor bastard who got clobbered by one of them. They loitered near one of the hollowed-out stalk shops, chuckling at me as I walked past them. They acted like they’d never seen a one-armed zombie before. Jackasses.

  Another vampire slipped by on the other side, bat-like ears jutting from his bald scalp, eyes glowing faintly red in the fungal light. He didn’t hiss or bare fangs; he only adjusted his pack straps like anyone else trying to get comfortable. I knew vampires would be popular; I was just glad they weren’t all franking Hollywood movie stars with perfect hair and eternal youth.

  The crowd thickened as I got closer. A drider lurched past on spindly legs, carrying a satchel across his bare human chest. That wasn’t a half-bad idea, getting a satchel, I meant. I wasn’t a fan of eight-legged anything.

  A dryad’s barklike skin caught the glow of the yellow bulbs as she leaned against a lamp stalk, scrolling through a floating menu only she could see. If she hadn’t moved, I’d have easily mistaken her for an exotic carving.

  Everywhere I looked, warped silhouettes crowded the cavern—orc tusks, medusa hair, basilisk claws, spines, fur, hooves, and horns. Cubed slimes, round slimes, formless slimes, red slimes, green slimes, and purple slimes. Holy shit, how many players picked slime? No, better yet, why?!

  It wasn’t all chaos. In the glow of the fungal lamps, I caught sight of little clusters forming, players huddled together in conversation, but that wouldn’t be me.

  “Dick, where’s the damn doctor?”