Chương 1: Where am I?

After months of discussions, we've decided to adopt a universal tier system, from Tier 1 to Tier 10. Anyone who has achieved an average attribute score of 17 (for a total of 68), will be considered to be in Tier 2. Post that, an average attribute increase of 1 (total 4) will signify the next tier.

- From the memoirs of Tali, Second Head of the First Brain's Faction Khatarnak Arafel - Kara, to anyone who had ever looked at his full name, attempted to use it, and quietly given up - went down hard in the dirt for the third time in the last three minutes. There was no bush. That was the whole problem. He was looking straight at the patch of ground that had just put him on his back, and it was empty. Clear air between two trees. Open dirt.

His eyes swore he could stand and walk through it, and his eyes had sworn that three times now, and three times the gap had turned out to be packed with something woody and thorned that he could feel and bleed on and could not, for the life of him, see. He stayed down a little longer this time before getting up. He studied the empty air that was apparently not empty. He put out a hand, found the edge of the invisible thing by touch, and worked around it the way you feel along a wall in a dark room.

The room, in this case, was a bright afternoon. None of this was supposed to be happening. Three weeks ago he had been on a training raft in the middle of open water with a flat horizon in every direction, because his brother had looked at him one evening and stated, plainly, that a Tier 2 with Kara's build and Kara's reflexes had no business still being a Tier 2. His brother delivered assessments like weather reports. Accurate, calm, impossible to argue with.

Kara had tried anyway, because no self-respecting person would simply agree with someone delivering a judgement about themselves, especially if that someone knew them very well and was most definitely right. So Kara had gone to the ocean to train alone, where the water had always agreed with him in a way he had stopped trying to explain, and for three weeks it had been him and the sun and the salt and nothing else. Then the storm came. It came with no warning at all.

Storms had a before - the pressure dropping, the wind finding a direction. This one skipped straight to the middle. One moment the sea was glass. The next it stood up vertical and the raft was somewhere else and the sky had rearranged itself for reasons it declined to share. He had lived through it by doing nothing clever, keeping his face up and his airways clear and letting the suit take what it could, and when the water dropped flat again just as suddenly, the island was simply there. Close enough to swim to.

Islands, in his experience, did not tend to do that. He swam to it, hauled himself onto the shore, and spent the better part of half an hour reintroducing himself to the concept of breathing. Then he passed out. He had woken to trees taller than any building he had stood under, their roots dropping from the branches and driving back into the ground, and no leaves he could see even though he could hear them rustling somewhere overhead. So. Not a normal island.

He kept moving, because moving was the only plan he had, and a plan needed to know where it was, and he did not know where he was. What he had was forward momentum, and a sports suit that had cost three months of savings, and a growing suspicion that this island did not much want him on it. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation. He came out of the invisible undergrowth into open ground and stopped, because the ground was already occupied.

A dozen or so of them, heavy through the shoulder, each one broad as a wine barrel and built for driving straight through whatever stood in front of it. Their tusks were iron, dark and dense, each the length of his forearm, and their coats had the deep red-brown sheen of rust on good steel. Martian boars. The name surfaced from some school chapter on off-world fauna he had read once and never expected to need. F-grade. Bred in the Martian settlements for meat, known for their tempers.

There were no Martian boars on Earth. One of them lifted its head and found him. Kara ran. He hit the nearest trunk at full speed, got hands and feet onto the bark, and climbed with a desperation that skipped past every technique he had. Below him the boar struck the tree like a battering ram and the whole thing shuddered. He climbed higher until the shuddering stopped, then looked down. The boar was staring up at him. Then its face changed.

The anger drained out of its eyes and something like fear replaced it, and it wheeled and bolted, and the rest of the group went with it in a cascade of hammering iron. He knew his heroic visage would save him one day. He looked up. The constrictor was three metres above him and coming down like it had all the time in the world. It was enormous, and it was unlike anything he had ever seen - the coil of it too thick, the patterning strange. A Jupine constrictor. E-grade.

He had seen a picture of one once and had not kept enough of the picture to be ready for the real thing. He let go of the tree and dropped. He hit the ground, stumbled, caught himself, and ran, his legs making the decision a half-step ahead of the rest of him. The porcupine came out from behind a root column and he was past it before his eyes caught up, which meant his eyes also missed the quill until it was through his arm. He stopped running. His body performed the audit on its own.

The spike had gone in through the back of his left forearm, just above the elbow, iron and about the length of his hand, the point of it showing clean through the skin on the far side. The wound had closed around the shaft and was barely bleeding, held in a grim balance by the thing that had made it. The pain hit a beat later and then it took the whole arm.

It climbed from the elbow to the shoulder in a hot wave and pooled in his fingertips and turned the hand into a slab of someone else's meat hanging off his wrist. His vision narrowed at the edges. He breathed through his teeth and made himself stay upright, because down was where the porcupine wanted him. He pressed his good hand over it. The porcupine was somewhere behind him. He knew the shape of this. High Strength, low speed, iron spines. He had distance and he needed to keep it.

So he ran again, and the arm swung with every stride, and every swing filed a complaint he noted and ignored. A vine hung from a branch ahead, thick and fibrous, the kind you could trust with your weight, and he reached for it. At the top of his reach the spine still buried in his arm caught the vine and dragged it sideways against a trunk.

The movement pinned something he had not seen against the bark - a lizard, banded orange and black, the length of his forearm, and a smell came off it that went straight past his thoughts and into the older part of his brain that told him to move away, fast. Jupine newt. The word landed a half-second late, from the same zoology chapter he was starting to resent. The most poisonous thing below D-grade. He was thirty centimetres from it, holding it there with his own spike. The vine touched the newt.

That was when he discovered the vine was not a vine. It went rigid the length of his arm, then slack, then it simply came away from the tree and fell, and a long ropey body dropped with it into the dirt, patterned in greens and browns and entirely still. A Jupine vinesnake. Dead. Killed by the newt it had been draped over, in the time it took him to blink. The newt, freed, poured off the bark and moved away, slow and untroubled, like something with no natural predators.

Kara knelt in the dirt with a spike through his arm and a dead snake at his feet and held very still, on the theory that any movement might produce a third creature, and he had reached his limit for creatures. Then the notification arrived.