The tide of green wasn't a disorganized rabble of starving creatures. It was a phalanx.

  In the first life, the first wave had been a chaotic mess of scavengers—uncoordinated, desperate, and easily frightened. This was different. These Goblins wore boiled leather reinforced with scrap iron, their skin mottled with the dark, pulsing veins of System-augmentation. They carried jagged short-swords etched with rudimentary sharpening runes. They didn't scream; they hissed in unison, a sound like a thousand dry leaves skittering over stone.

  Above, the sky shifted from a dull gray to a bruised, electric purple. The golden letters of the countdown pulsed with an angry, rhythmic light that seemed to throb in time with Andy's heartbeat.

  *System Correction.* Andy recognized the shift immediately. The System had sensed a variable—a soul that didn't belong in a Level 0 shell—and it was recalibrating. It was adjusting the difficulty curve to maintain the projected 90% mortality rate for the first hour. It was trying to kill the anomaly before he could stabilize.

  The recruits around him broke. The white safety circle, which had promised sanctuary, flickered and shrunk by half, physically pushing the terrified civilians into a tighter, more vulnerable knot. People stumbled over each other, their cries of "It's shrinking!" and "Move back!" creating a cacophony of panic that served as a dinner bell for the approaching horde.

  "Back to back!" Amito shouted. His voice was thin, cracking under the sudden weight of a leadership he wasn't yet ready for. "Marcus, help us! You're the Guide!"

  Marcus, the Level 15 veteran, was backed against the third wagon, his iron staff held in a white-knuckled grip. His face, usually a mask of professional indifference, was pale. "I... I can't intervene! The System has locked the Guide-Protocol! The difficulty has exceeded the standard Tutorial parameters! You're on your own!"

  Andy felt a sharp, stabbing pain in his chest. His Level 1 heart was hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He was a master-tier soul fighting a losing war against a novice-tier body. He had the mental blueprints for a thousand ways to kill, but his tools were made of glass and unconditioned meat.

  "Mom, get behind the wagon wheel," Andy commanded. He didn't look at her; he couldn't afford to lose sight of the treeline. "Stay low. Keep the iron gladius at a forty-five-degree angle. Only strike if they breach the perimeter. Use the spokes for cover. Do not—under any circumstance—try to be a hero."

  He stepped into a low defensive stance, his weight centered over his heels. He noticed his mother had already moved, bracing her shoulder against the wood before he’d even finished the sentence. A small, unnamed warmth blossomed in his chest—a recognition of her competence. In the future that never was, she had been a survivor. Here, she was a fortress of quiet resolve.

  The first line of Goblins reached the clearing. One lunged at Andy, its yellow eyes wide with a manufactured bloodlust. Andy’s mind saw the opening instantly—the slight drag of the creature's left foot, the over-extension of its swing, the way its center of gravity leaned too far forward. In his old life, he would have ended this with a flick of his wrist. But his Level 1 arm was too slow. The iron gladius felt like a lead weight, resisting the sudden acceleration his brain demanded.

  Steel rang. Wood splintered. He parried the blow, but the vibration traveled through his wrist and up his forearm with a sharpness that surprised him. In the 17th floor, his bones were reinforced with mana-threads, making them as hard as tempered steel. Here, the impact was purely physical, raw and brittle. He felt the fine bones of his hand ache under the stress. The mud beneath his boots felt deeper and colder than his memory suggested. It was a tactile reminder that his physical stats were back at the baseline—Strength 10, Agility 11. He was a normal human being in a world of monsters.

  The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  "Damn it," Andy hissed, sliding his rear foot back to regain balance.

  He adjusted his grip. As the second Goblin lunged, Andy didn't parry. He knew his wrist couldn't take another direct impact. Instead, he dropped his center of gravity, letting the creature’s own momentum carry its blade over his shoulder. He pivoted, driving his own blade into the Goblin’s kidney as it passed. It was a movement born of ten thousand repetitions, a ghost of his former self dancing in a cage of fresh meat.

  Blade bit. Kidney pierced. The Goblin hit the mud with a wet, heavy thud.

  "Andy, help Sarah!" someone yelled.

  To his left, the formation was collapsing. Amito was swinging his glowing sword wildly, his strikes powerful but inefficient, wasting energy on wide arcs that left his flanks open. He was trying to push the Goblins back; Andy was trying to end them.

  "Amito, lunge!" Andy barked, his voice carrying a frequency of command that the boy couldn't help but obey. "Now! Left-high!"

  Amito lunged. His blade pierced a Goblin’s chest. The boy looked surprised at his own success, but Andy didn't give him time to celebrate. He stepped into the gap, his eyes scanning the chaos for the primary threat.

  "Focus on breathing, not the blood," Andy said, stepping into the gap left by a fallen recruit. "Short breaths. Keep your eyes on their shoulders, not their eyes. Their shoulders tell you where the blade is going."

  Andy’s vision began to tunnel. Every breath felt like inhaling ground glass. A Goblin chieftain stepped forward from the brush, raising a rusted cleaver etched with jagged, glowing runes. This was the 'Correction'—an elite unit spawned specifically to wipe out the anomaly. The chieftain was Level 8, an impossible opponent for a group of Level 1s.

  The chieftain swung. Andy tried to Ghost-Step, the high-level evasive maneuver flickering in his mind like a corrupted file. His legs buckled. The skill failed to activate; he lacked the necessary mana-pool and the nervous system refinement.

  Steel bit. His shoulder flared with white-hot agony. Blood sprayed, hot and metallic, against the side of his face.

  "Andy!" his mother screamed.

  The pain was a flare that snapped his focus back into a sharp, lethal point. He didn't retreat. He rolled forward, coming up under the chieftain’s guard while the creature was recovering from the swing. He used a "Point-Release"—concentrating every bit of his meager, baseline mana into the very tip of the gladius.

  The mana-surge felt like forcing liquid fire through veins made of dry straw. It was agonizing, a sensation of his own blood boiling, but it worked. Steel shattered. Bone exploded. The chieftain’s chest cavity collapsed under the focused pressure of the mana-strike.

  The world slowed. A surge of raw power flooded Andy's veins as the System recognized the "impossible" kill. The heat of the reclaimed essence rushed through him, knitting the shallowest of his wounds and dampening the scream of his nervous system.

  He felt the heavy pulse of energy—a sensation he hadn't felt in what seemed like an eternity. Level 3.

  Andy stood over the corpse, blood dripping from his shoulder and soaking into the mud. He didn't look at the levels. He looked at the treeline. The ground began to vibrate—a rhythmic, heavy thumping that shook the broken wagons and sent ripples through the puddles of blood. The Goblins began to retreat, not in fear, but to make room for the centerpiece of the System’s correction.

  "That wasn't the wave," Andy realized, his voice a low, gravelly rasp. "That was the dinner bell."

  From the darkness of the forest, something much larger pulled itself into the light. It was a towering mass of stitched flesh, grave-mold, and rusted iron plates. A Grave-Goliath. Level 15. It was a creature that shouldn't appear until the third day of the Tutorial, yet here it was, summoned by the System's spite to correct the error of Andy's survival.

  Andy had spent ten years becoming the kind of man who could look at a Level 15 and calculate the angle of its knee plate without his hands shaking. He wasn't a hero. He wasn't a savior. He was the thing the System hadn't planned for—a man who had already lost everything it could threaten him with.

  Amito looked at Andy, his face pale, his golden sword trembling in a grip that had lost all its strength. "We're going to die, aren't we? It's too big."

  Andy spat a mouthful of blood into the mud and looked at his mother. She was holding the hilt of her sword with both hands, her knuckles white, her gaze fixed on him with a terrifying, absolute trust.

  "Not today," Andy said. He reached down and grabbed a fallen Goblin’s spear, testing the weight of the shaft. He needed the reach. "Amito, pick up your sword and stand tall. I’m going to open its throat. You’re going to make sure the others don't get trampled when it falls."

  The timer in the sky turned a dark, pulsing violet. Fifty-five minutes left. And the Goliath took its first step, its massive weight cracking the frozen earth of the clearing.