It felt sensible.

  I promise, it felt like a good choice.

  Honestly, I thought I was being clever.

  I turned Warden’s Edge upright, blade end on top, facing out, and took a couple of steps away from the woman, toward the edge of the clearing. Then I said loudly, “We don’t have any weapons. We’re defenseless.”

  It was an invitation.

  In my imagination, Sam—armed and dangerous—stepped out of the woods, saw me standing there, and attacked. Rebound kicked in with its damage multiplier, and our problem was solved.

  My imagination was not prescient.

  And possibly I should have gotten just a little more information from our new guest before trying to be clever.

  Because Sam was a rogue. And by rogue, I don’t mean charming, fun, flirtatious, handsome boy.

  Nope, Sam was a backstabbing son of a bitch.

  And Wild Sanctuary wasn’t perfect. “Resistant to intrusion” didn’t mean immune to sneak attacks.

  I stood there waiting for Sam to step out of the woods, staring into the darkness. Despite Warden’s Edge in my hand, it was creepy as hell. Our warm bubble of firelight and roses felt more like a beacon than a sanctuary.

  Zelda stood rigid at the edge of the rose dome, ears pricked forward. She’d glanced at the woman for all of half a second before immediately returning her attention to the forest.

  She knew where the danger was.

  “Gonna be another two and a half days before you can get to a hospital,” Jack said in a quiet murmur. “My t-shirt’s not exactly clean, but it’s cotton.”

  I didn’t look back at Jack and the woman. My eyes were searching the darkness, tracking shadows, hunting for signs of movement. I expected the bad guy to come from the same general direction as the woman he’d been chasing.

  But I was watching Zelda’s body language, too. She could hear better than me, she could smell better than me, and she had better instincts. Except—

  “Behind you!” the woman screamed.

  I spun just in time to see a man behind Jack, arm raised, dagger in hand, like a serial killer in a horror movie. Shadows clung to him, shifting unnaturally around his feet.

  The roses came alive. Brambles surged upward, thorned vines lashing toward his arms and legs. One wrapped around his wrist and yanked it upward. His strike went wide, the blade slicing air instead of flesh.

  Jack threw himself sideways, diving for the ground like a kindergartener doing stop, drop, and roll.

  Sam grunted in annoyance, pulling his wrist free, and ducking under another reaching bramble.

  Zelda went ballistic, launching at him from her spot on the edge of the clearing, barking furiously.

  Surprise sent him staggering away from her, toward the fire, and toward the woman.

  And the woman yanked the dagger out of her own shoulder and drove it up through Sam’s stomach and under his ribs with almost surgical precision.

  He had just long enough left to look like a human being.

  Just long enough to be a middle-aged dad type, receding hairline, pudgy belly, a few laugh lines around the eyes.

  And then he fell to his knees, almost landing on the woman. She screamed in pain and fury, an inarticulate wordless sound of soul-deep revulsion.

  He disappeared. Just like the goblins.

  Zelda skidded to a halt, spun in a circle like a puppy chasing her tail, then barked a few last times.

  I hadn’t moved. It was all so fast, so unexpected. He’d appeared out of nowhere. How had he gotten past the roses?

  The woman burst into tears.

  Not just tears. Sobbing, hysterical, messy tears. And then she toppled forward like a tree falling.

  My eyes met Jack’s. We probably had the exact same expression: a mix of horror, shock, startled surprise.

  “We should—” Jack started, his voice high-pitched, and then stopped, swallowing hard.

  I nodded.

  Yeah, we should do something. What was it exactly? The adrenaline rushed through my bloodstream, my heart racing, my legs wobbly. I wasn’t sure they were going to keep holding me up much longer.

  He’d looked so normal.

  He’d died so quickly.

  “We should try to stop her bleeding,” Jack finished.

  My eyes widened. Oh, right. While I was obsessing about the dead guy, the living woman was likely to join him. “Yes, of course.”

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  We both rushed over to the woman, and then, well, we flailed around with a level of mutual incompetence that was truly embarrassing. Unfortunately, the only person with any actual medical skill was unconscious.

  Jack pulled off his t-shirt, but then stood there holding it with a helpless expression on his face.

  I knelt next to the woman, with no idea what to do next. Find the wound, put pressure on it, stop the bleeding somehow? But if she’d been poisoned, maybe we should rinse out the injury first?

  The obvious next step seemed like it should be to get her top off, so we could see the wound. In the ideal world, we’d have a handy pair of scissors to cut through the fabric. Also, in the ideal world, we’d have something for her to wear afterward.

  In this actual world, though, if we cut her clothing off, she might have to spend the next two days topless. I didn’t want to do that to her if we could avoid it.

  “Help me get her clothes off,” I ordered Jack.

  “Uh…” He didn’t move, just twisted his t-shirt in his hands.

  “I know,” I said. Stripping an unconscious woman? It was a bad look. “I’m sure she’ll forgive us. If she lives.”

  “Right.” He let his shirt fall to the ground and came over to where I knelt. “How…”

  I shrugged, then hauled the fabric up from her waistline, trying to get it over her head in one fell swoop. That did not, of course, work, because she was lying on the front. But Jack gingerly lifted her shoulders and tugged from underneath.

  Between the two of us—with an uncomfortable amount of wiggling, twisting, and folding her arms in ways that would probably have had her screaming in pain if she’d been conscious—we got both her sweater and the underlying t-shirt off.

  The blood wasn’t spurting, so no arteries were involved, but it was flowing, with way more of it than I was comfortable with.

  “Put pressure on it,” I told Jack, reaching into my pouch. “I’m going to rinse it off with water from my water bottle.”

  I thought, water bottle, expecting the bottle to find its way into my hand. Nothing happened.

  I reached deeper, scrambling around the contents like I was digging for a wallet in an overstuffed handbag. No water bottle.

  But I did discover something soft—the socks I’d found on my first goblins. And then I remembered the first aid kit. I pulled out both of them with a little chirrup of triumph.

  “What is it?” Jack asked.

  I handed Jack the socks. “We can save your t-shirt.”

  Looking around, I spotted the water bottle next to the fire where I’d left it. Zelda spotted it, too. With a wag of her tail, she closed her teeth around the top and dragged it over to me.

  I blinked.

  She wagged harder. Yes? Good girl? Yes?

  “The very best girl,” I told her. “So good. More beef jerky for you just as soon as we fix this other girl up.”

  I rinsed the blood off. The wound wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t awful either—just a deep stab, about an inch wide. It didn’t look as if it should be life-threatening, assuming the poison wasn’t too deadly.

  Unsurprisingly, the first aid kid did not include an antidote for random rogue poisons.

  But I handed Jack the supplies and let him clean the wound with an antiseptic wipe, then smear antibiotic ointment on it. We taped her up with gauze against the wound and a single sock on top of it to absorb the bleeding.

  Finally, I leaned in close and checked to make sure she was still breathing, because it would have felt like the System’s kind of bad joke if she’d died while we were messing around with antibiotic ointment.

  She was.

  I sat back on my heels and looked at Jack. “Whew.”

  He gave a tired chuckle. His burns were looking much better, but he’d managed to smear his face with the woman’s blood somewhere along the way, so overall, not improving. Both of us probably looked like we’d been through the wringer.

  He went back and picked up his t-shirt. As he pulled it on, and his head emerged through the neck hole, he said, “Now what?”

  A familiar shrieking from the forest answered him.

  I raised my hands, crossing all my fingers, and chanted, “Shower wipes, shower wipes, shower wipes.”

  Jack laughed. “They’ll probably start getting tougher. A challenge scenario ought to get more challenging as time passes.”

  I stood and turned to face the sound of the goblin crashing through the trees. It didn’t even make it into our ring of light. It gave a sharp yelp, and then there was a wet crunching noise.

  Under most circumstances, that sound would have triggered alarm bells. It was a bad sound.

  Under these circumstances?

  I opened my messages window and jumped down to the very bottom.

  Goblin Level 1 killed, 15 XP.

  “It’s dead. I guess the fall was enough to kill it. But only 15 XP,” I told Jack.

  “Level 1?” Jack asked.

  “Yep.”

  “So you lose ten percent for every level lower than you are. That’s consistent with gaining ten percent for every level higher.”

  I didn’t pay much attention to Jack’s calculations, however, because my other messages were distracting me.

  Congratulations!

  You have successfully contributed to defeating an attacker (Sam Harper, Level 5) using your ability, Wild Sanctuary.

  XP Awarded: 100

  Congratulations!

  You have successfully contributed to saving the life of a fellow participant (Emma Chen, Level 4) using your ability, Wild Sanctuary, and your skill, First Aid.

  XP Awarded: 200

  +1 to First Aid

  “Emma,” I said, looking down at the injured woman. I crouched down again, picked up her sweater with my still bloody hands, folded it as neatly as I could, and tucked it under her head. “Her name’s Emma.”

  “How did you figure that out?”

  “I got XP for successfully contributing to saving her life.”

  Jack’s gaze unfocused as he looked at his own messages. “So did I.” He sounded surprised. “That’s not—I didn’t expect that.”

  “Did you get a little First Aid skill bonus, too?”

  “Yeah, three points.”

  “Ha. That’s ‘cause I made you do the antibiotic ointment, I bet.”

  I looked down at my completely disgusting hands. Between digging the hole and smashing goblins, they’d been biohazards even before they got covered in Emma’s blood. I could’ve used every antiseptic wipe in the first aid kit and still been classified as filthy. Letting Jack do the hands-on work seemed safer for Emma, so no regrets.

  “Do you feel more knowledgeable?” I asked him.

  He thought for a second, then shrugged. “I wouldn’t pull the knife out now, but maybe that’s just something I learned tonight.”

  By my side, Emma stirred, lifting her head off the sweater. “What—oh.” She let her head drop back down, eyes closing again.

  “In a sea of awful,” I said to her, “I have one tiny piece of good news. We have a first aid kit with ibuprofen in it, and if you want to try to sit up, I can give you some with a little water.”

  Her eyelids fluttered before she forced them open. “Give me a sec.”

  She stared up at the flowers above her, shook her head in mild disbelief, and then her eyes glazed over. Her lips moved, as if she was fighting back words, and then she sat up in one swift movement.

  Right hand reaching across her body, she touched her left shoulder, then ripped off the gauze and sock in a single jerk. “A sock?”

  “Hey, hey, don’t ruin our work,” I objected.

  She looked like she wanted to cry, but gave a shaky sigh, and said, “550 XP for killing Sam. I leveled up.”

  She pressed her hand against her mouth, and ducked her head, hiding her tears.

  “Oh. I… um… congratulations?” I said the word tentatively. It seemed like it should be good news. She was alive, he was dead, she wasn’t going to die of poison in the near future. It seemed like a win.

  But it was pretty obvious that it didn’t feel like a win to her.

  “I’ll just—ah—go check the loot on that goblin, okay?” Jack Francis gestured toward the pit.

  I nodded and gestured at the roses, telling them to let him out. Obviously, he’d rather climb down a giant hole and mess around with a dead body than deal with a crying woman, and I couldn’t say I blamed him.

  But, as the former client of at least seven different therapists, more than one psychiatrist, and plenty of group therapy sessions, I knew the right words to say.

  “Do you want to tell me about it?”