Several days had passed with Leo, Ellie and Ashley travelling together. A week of walking, camping, and finding absolutely nothing worth the effort.

“I’m so sick of trees!” Ashley screamed into the foliage.

A few birds took off somewhere overhead. The trees, unbothered, kept being trees.

And there were a lot of them. Same bark, same green, same endless shade that never quite broke no matter how far they walked. Leo had started to suspect they were passing the same six trunks over and over, like a badly looped background.

“That’s the third time you’ve yelled at the forest,” Leo said. “It’s not listening.”

“It should be scared by now!” Ashley kicked a stick. It blasted into a trunk twenty feet away and buried itself an inch deep.

Leo looked at the stick. Then at Ashley. Then decided, as he had several times this week, to say nothing at all.

“When’s the last time anything even tried to fight us?” she groaned, dropping back to walk beside him. “I’d fight a squirrel. I’d fight a mean-looking rock.”

“There was that bat thing.”

“That fled.” She said it like a personal insult. Which, to be fair, it had been. A level fifty-five bat-shaped something that had taken one look at Leo, sensed whatever it sensed, and noped straight back into the canopy before he’d even set his feet.

“Did we level up too high in the tutorial?” she asked, sighing again.

“Might have just spawned in the boring part of the map,” he said, ignoring the odd look he got from Ashley. He pulled the compass from his inventory for the hundredth time that day.

It didn’t look like much. For something with a name like Compass of Fates—the kind of thing that ought to glow, or whisper, or at least come with ominous string music—it mostly just sat there, a needle pointing off through the trees at whoever it was they were locked on. No distance. No map. No how much further. Just: that way.

“Still pointing?” Ashley asked.

“Still pointing.”

“GPS from hell.” She peered over his arm at it. “We’re basically pirates. Except pirates got oceans, and gold, and a boat. We got trees and a magic stick that won't tell us how far the treasure is.”

“The treasure being our families.”

“The treasure being out of this forest.” But she bumped her shoulder into his when she said it, and the edge went out of it.

They walked. Somewhere in the last few days the world had ticked over quietly around them. Two more territories claimed, wherever they were, whoever’d claimed them, bringing the count to four. Sixteen more and the first unlock hit. At four in a week, they had maybe a fortnight before the world changed shape again unless it slowed down.

Leo tried not to think about it too hard. He had one shape of the world he cared about—apart from those who were with him currently—and it was a person.

That night they made camp—a small fire, more for the company than the warmth—and Leo lay back and looked up at a sky he couldn’t see much of through the branches. Somewhere under the same one, so was Natalie.

She’s strong. She’ll manage.

He’d been telling himself that a lot lately. It worked better in daylight. At night, with the fire low and nothing to do but wait for the compass to keep saying that way, the thought got thin, and underneath it were all the things he wasn’t letting himself picture. Where she was, who was with her, what a week in this new Earth did to someone who didn’t have all his advantages. Maybe she did.

They didn’t need sleep the way they used to. Once every few nights, enough to keep them from turning mean. Tonight it was mostly to kill the hours. Ashley was already out, one arm flung toward the fire, and Ellie was a warm weight against his ribs, breathing slow.

Tomorrow they’d push harder. Move faster. Find something worth killing. If only so Ashley would stop threatening the shrubbery.

Sleep took him easy anyway.

~

The city didn’t look like a city anymore.

Whatever the System had done when it dragged Earth into its rules, it had done here too. The roads buckled and split by roots that hadn’t been there a week ago, the glass towers were dark and dead. Streetlights bent like they’d wilted. Every car Natalie passed was the same: a husk, the guts torn out, every scrap of tech and metal that meant anything simply gone, harvested by something or someone in the two days since the world started over.

She and Jess had been running through it since the tutorial spat them back out. No plan, not really—the plan had only ever been run, whispered between slaves in the dark, a promise they’d bolt the second they got a chance. None of them had known the end of the tutorial would scatter everyone to where they’d first been taken. That had just been luck. And every last one of them had taken it, sprinting in every direction the moment their feet hit real ground.

Two days of luck. Natalie had started to think it might hold.

“Come on, Jess!” Natalie hissed, as loud as she dared.

“I’m stuck!” Jess yanked at her leg. It was caught to the shin in a snare of infused rope—some kind of crude trap, laid across the alley mouth by people who knew exactly what kind of prey came through here. The more she pulled, the tighter it bit.

Natalie dropped beside her and went at the knots, fingers almost numb in the cold, nails splitting. It wasn’t budging. Of course it wasn’t. Two days of luck and it ran out here, in a gutted alley, over a length of rope.

“Just leave me.” Jess sniffed, tears cutting through the grime on her face. She was older than Natalie by a good stretch of years. She’d been kind to her in the tutorial, back when kindness cost something.

“No way. We are not going back to those fucks.” Natalie kept her voice flat and sure, the way you did when someone needed to believe you more than you believed yourself.

“Get out of here, Nat!” Jess screamed it—too loud, far too loud, the sound flaring out into the dark.

“Shut up.” Natalie clamped a hand over her mouth. Noises came from a far away street. The people who’d owned her—owned them—were spread throughout the city, snatching up every dazed soul that the system had spat back here. Herding the cattle. She’d been cattle once. She wasn’t going to be it twice.

No time for magic knots.

Jess’s eyes went wide. She didn’t even know what for.

Natalie reached for it. The thing she kept buried in the back of herself, the thing not even Jess knew she had. Not the green. The other one. Mana coiled at her call, and pain lanced up her arm just from holding it; this Essence had never come easy, never come safe, which was half of why she’d hidden it and half of why she’d barely dared use it. She twisted her hand, and the world tore.

Space ripped along a line above the snare—a hand’s width of reality simply gone, like an invisible saw drawn clean through. Jess’s leg parted below it. Blood spurted in a bright arc, and Jess screamed into Natalie’s palm hard enough to leave the mark of her teeth.

Then Natalie let the green come. This one she could hold, her healing pouring warmth into the wound, dragging it shut before Jess could bleed out on the concrete. This was the magic they knew and let her have. The one that made her useful. The one that had kept her alive and kept her a slave.

“That’s all I can do right now.” She was already hauling Jess up. “I’ll grow it back later. I promise.”

She didn’t say she wasn’t sure she could.

Jess leaned into her without hesitation. She was older, taller, and still she trusted Natalie to carry them, because Natalie always sounded like she knew the way out.

“That shout,” Natalie muttered as they limped, “was dumb as fuck.”

Jess sobbed. “I’m sorry. You should just go.” She panted from the effort. “You have to find Leo. I don’t have anyone, I’ll tell them you died, I swear—”

“Give it a break, Jess.” It came out sharper than she meant. “I just took your leg off and sealed it with my bare hands. You think you’d have done that with a bow? Oh, right. You don’t have a bow anymore.”

Jess flinched, and Natalie hated herself a little. The stress was chewing her down to the bone. She didn’t want to be caught again. She’d sooner die than be caught again.

She was still telling herself that when the noise came.

A scuff of movement behind them, echoing off the dead high-rises that leaned over the street like they were listening. Both their heads whipped around. And low, from the dark, a growl. Barely a sound at all. It didn’t need to be loud to mean what it meant.

“Shit,” Natalie breathed. “It’s Simba.”

That was what Carlos called it. A killing thing the size of a car, and the man had named it after a cartoon lion, the way you’d name a housecat. His people thought it was hilarious. Natalie had never once laughed.

And already, hidden low behind Jess where no one could see her hands, she was reaching for the last trick she had. The deepest secret, the one she’d never shown a living soul. It answered slowly as it always did. This spell took an age to build and gave back more the longer she fed it, and she’d never once had the chance to practice it, to upgrade it clean and safe the way the tutorial had meant to let her. She’d unlocked it in secret, and buried it deep, because a slave who could only heal was a tool, and a slave who could do this was a threat, and Carlos put threats down.

Just give me time. A little time, she pleaded.

Glass cracked somewhere close, shards grinding under a heavy paw. She pulled Jess behind the husk of a car. Natalie held her breath, trying to be as quiet as possible.

A thump landed on the roof above them, bending the metal under its weight.

The tiger looked down as Natalie looked up. White fur, black stripes, fangs as long as her fingers, pale eyes fixed on her and patient.

White-fang Tiger - Level 58

Nineteen levels over her own miserable thirty-nine. They’d kept all of them low on purpose. A slave didn’t need to grow, and a strong slave was a dangerous one. She’d seen what this beast did to people in the tutorial. She’d earned levels stitching those same people back together, and the ledger of it still sat cold in her gut.

Simba wouldn’t kill them. That wasn’t his job. He was here to stop them running.

That was fine. She needed something to buy time.

“You found something, boy?” A voice called.

Jess quivered at the voice. Natalie just let out a slow breath. Of course. Of course he’d come himself.

He rounded the car unhurried, savouring it, a grin already climbing a face that would’ve been handsome on anyone else. Neat brown hair, good jaw, the kind of looks that had opened every door in his old life and taught him he could take whatever was behind them.

“If it isn’t my dirty-mouthed troublemaker,” he said, “and her useless guard dog.”

“Carlos.” She spat the name, put all the venom she couldn’t afford anywhere else into it.

“Good boy, Simba.” He didn’t even glance at them, yet praised the tiger like a golden retriever. “You did so well.”

Keep talking. Every word he wasted on himself was more mana in her pool. She knew this man loved his own voice; she just had to let him use it.

“I’m going to be taking what’s left of this city.” He swept an arm at the ruin like it was already a throne room. “You knew I’d find you. So why run? Why make me punish you both again?”

The word had weight it had earned. The chains. The cuts left to heal crooked because she wasn’t allowed to fix them right. Bruises on bruises. Her jaw locked, but her mouth always had its own ideas.

“Can’t you go play with some other toys, you impotent fuck?”

Jess gasped, eyes screwing shut.

Crack

The blow snapped her head sideways, so fast she almost lost the spell with her balance. Blood welled hot inside her cheek. She left it. She’d learned that lesson the worst way. Start healing before he was done, and he’d keep going until her mana ran dry and she’d nothing left to mend anything. You let Carlos finish. Always.

“You know how sensitive I am about that.” He rolled his neck, calm already. “System couldn’t even fix me. Not yet.” The grin came back, uglier. “But I’ll get there. And when I do…” He winked.

“Pig.”

“So rude.” He shook his head, almost fond. “Come on. I won’t hurt you again, not if you go back to being my good little healer. You just have to sign.”

A blank sheet of paper appeared in his hand. A notification bloomed across her vision.

You have been offered a Contract of Slavery under Carlos Hernandez
This contract has no maximum duration
Harming Carlos will result in punishment or death
Upon Carlos’ death, by any hand including his own, you will be freed.
Accept?
Yes/No

Her blood went cold in a way the blow hadn’t managed. The system helped him now. It would chain her to him with its own rules, forever, and strike her dead if she ever lifted a hand.

“Why in the fuck,” she spat, “would I sign that. I’m not being your slave again. Especially not now the System’s doing your dirty work.”

“Because if you don’t.” Carlos said it mildly, like a man remarking on the weather. “I hurt Jessica until she’s nearly gone. Then you heal her. And we do it again. And again. Until you change your mind.”

And there, at last, a soft ping at the back of her skull. Full.

Jess turned to her, and the bravery from the alley was gone, burned right out. Sign it, her eyes begged. Please just sign it. Natalie couldn’t even hate her for it. Carlos had a gift for dressing the cage up as mercy.

“You know what,” Natalie said, and grinned through the blood. “I think we’ll take option two.”

“Option tw—”

Her whole mana pool left her at once, in a single roaring pull. Space folded around the two of them, the world bending, reality dragging at their edges, their shapes coming apart toward somewhere, anywhere, else—

Jessica has refused your Translocation

Translocate has been cancelled

The fold collapsed. The world snapped back, whole and wrong and here.

Natalie stared at her, dumbfounded. “...What?”

“I’m sorry, Nat.” Jess wouldn’t meet her eyes. Her voice came out small and scraped-thin and tired, so terribly tired. “I can’t run anymore. I can’t. It’s easier to just… go with them. It’s easier.”

“You stupid—”

Something struck the back of her head, and the world went dark.