Chapter 1

The dungeon smelled like wet stone and other people's confidence.

Nit Callow stood at the back of the group and counted exits. Two corridors, one collapsed arch that might clear with effort, and the main door behind them which the party leader had ceremonially locked because he said it "built commitment." Nit had noted the lock was a standard three-pin mechanism and he had, technically, a hairpin. He filed this away under contingencies and returned his attention to the room.

Twelve adventurers. Colors ranging from yellow to red, with one orange outlier named Brek who had eaten Nit's lunch during the descent without asking and laughed when Nit mentioned it. They were arguing about door assignments with the focused intensity of people who had confused enthusiasm for competence.

Three doors. The boss door — obvious, dramatic, something large scraping rhythmically against the other side of it. A secondary door the party scout had marked as a combat corridor. And door three, which had deep scratch marks on the outside and a smell coming through the gap that Nit's hindbrain was filing under do not open.

His own marker floated above him, white and dim. Nobody had spoken to him since Brek's lunch. White markers were furniture. White markers were something you stepped around on your way to the interesting parts of a room.

This was, in most circumstances, enormously useful.

"White-rank."

Brek was pointing at him. The orange marker above Brek's head pulsed with the dim self-satisfaction of someone who had never once worried about being eaten.

"Door three," Brek said. "Bait corridor. You go in, make noise, draw whatever's in there toward the main hall."

Nit looked at door three.

He looked at the scratch marks. Recent. Deep. Made by something with strong feelings about the door's existence.

"I'm actually on supply inventory," Nit said. He reached into his coat with the calm confidence of a man producing documentation.

Brek watched his hand. "There's no supply inventory."

"Clerical error. Very common at this classification level. If I could just—"

"Door three," Brek said, and his hand settled on his sword hilt in a way that wasn't quite a threat and wasn't quite not one.

Nit looked at the group. None of them were watching. Yellow and orange markers drifted toward the boss door like moths. He was furniture. He was a minor administrative problem Brek was handling.

He thought about being sick. He was reasonably good at being sick on short notice. His stomach, he could say. His leg. Some kind of dungeon sensitivity. He opened his mouth.

Brek's sword cleared its hilt by two inches.

Nit closed his mouth.

He opened door three.

Seven Tunnel Scrapers looked back at him.

Pale, eyeless, roughly dog-sized, with too many legs arranged in a way that suggested whatever had designed them had been working from a description rather than a picture. They made a clicking sound with their mouthparts. Then they all made the same clicking sound together, which the part of Nit's brain responsible for not dying correctly interpreted as coordination.

He stepped back. The door, weighted, swung shut behind him with a soft and final sound.

He looked at the handle. Stiff. Both hands, three seconds minimum.

The nearest Scraper tilted its pale head and clicked once.

Nit ran.

Not at the door. The door was three seconds he didn't have. He ran for the far wall where a maintenance shelf sat eight feet up — the kind of ledge dungeon architects built into older constructions for reasons that had been forgotten and that served now as the only reason Nit Callow was alive forty seconds later.

He climbed it badly. He climbed it with his coat catching on the stone and one boot scraping for purchase and a sound coming out of him that he would not be describing to anyone later. He got up. He pulled his legs clear of the nearest jump by approximately the width of his palm.

Seven Scrapers clicked below him. One tried jumping. Fell short by two feet. Tried again. Same result. Settled into patient circling, which was worse in some ways because it implied they had done this before.

Nit sat on the ledge with his knees up and breathed.

He checked his pockets with the systematic calm of a man who had talked himself out of panic through sheer accounting.

One short knife. A length of cord. A small jar of lamp oil from the junction four cache he'd pocketed on the descent. Three dried figs. A piece of chalk. One lucky coin that had a mixed record.

He looked at the oil.

He looked at the ancient wooden support beam running along the base of the wall below him. Cracked. Grey with age. Bone dry.

He looked at the Scrapers. Patient. Eyeless. Waiting with the comfort of creatures who had never lost a waiting contest.

He uncorked the oil. He leaned down as far as he could and poured it slowly along the beam's length, which took longer than he wanted and required him to be closer to the circling things below than he wanted, and when one of them jumped again it came close enough that he heard the click of its mouthparts clearly and pulled back up with a speed that surprised even him.

He sat for a moment.

He took out the lucky coin and held it over the edge.

"Alright," he said, very quietly, to nobody. "Be lucky."

He dropped it.

Coin struck wood. Nothing. Scrapers clicked.

He took out his knife. He leaned down and scraped the blade hard against the stone wall. First stroke, nothing. Second stroke, a small shower of sparks that caught nothing. On the third stroke a spark landed in the oil trail and the beam caught with the sudden roaring enthusiasm of something that had been waiting decades for exactly this.

Two Scrapers screamed — a high, thin sound he hadn't known they could make — and bolted from the heat. The other five pressed back against the door in blind panic, the collective weight of them pushing against the weight mechanism, and the door swung open inward.

On the other side: Brek, and eight of his companions, in formation, waiting.

What came through was five panicking Tunnel Scrapers, a wall of heat, and a lot of smoke.

Nit listened to the corridor from his shelf.

It was loud for a while.

Then it wasn't.

He waited a little longer. He had learned, empirically, that waiting a little longer was almost always correct. He dropped down from the ledge, patted an ember off his sleeve, stepped over two Scraper corpses, and walked through the door.

The corridor looked like something had happened to it. Several adventurers were bleeding in the focused way of people cataloguing injuries. Brek sat against the wall with his arm held at an angle it wasn't designed for. The Scrapers were dead. Smoke poured through door three and everyone was staring at it except for one woman with a yellow marker who was staring at Nit with an expression he couldn't immediately classify.

He was composing something neutral to say when the system chimed.

⬛ SYSTEM NOTIFICATION

Combat participation recorded. Tunnel Scraper nest (×7) — indirect contribution confirmed. Threat diversion: successful. Environmental kill assist: 4. Kill assist: 3. Experience absorbed.

[WHITE → WHITE+] Threshold progress: 31%

Efficiency bonus applied. Qualifier: kills completed by third party following candidate-initiated environmental cascade. Qualifier: candidate not identified as primary threat by any participant. Qualifier: candidate survival probability at engagement start — 6%.

Thirty-one percent. From one nest. From a ledge and a jar of oil and a coin that had finally done something useful.

Nit read the notification twice with the careful attention of a man inspecting a contract for tricks. The language was plain. The numbers were real. He looked at his hand — marker still white, barely a shade changed, the kind of difference you'd miss unless you were searching for it.

He read the word efficiency again.

He thought about what it would mean to build around that word. To make it the whole foundation. To treat every engagement in this world the way he had just treated that nest — not as a fight, but as a problem with a room full of pieces in it, and him as the piece nobody was watching.

The woman with the yellow marker was still looking at him.

"You set the fire," she said. It wasn't a question.

"The beam was structurally compromised," Nit said. "Spark risk in older dungeons is actually very well documented. Probably should have been flagged at the entrance briefing."

She looked at him for a long moment. She had steady eyes and a scar along her jaw and the look of someone who had developed a finely calibrated sense for when she was being lied to.

"You're white-rank," she said.

"Yes."

"You've been white-rank how long."

"Some time," Nit said.

She looked at his marker. She looked at the door. She looked back at him.

"Hm," she said, which was not agreement and not accusation, just the sound of a person filing something away.

Brek made a noise from the wall. "Someone set my arm."

The moment broke. The woman moved toward Brek. Nit drifted back toward the supply corridor, where the healing moss at junction four was still quietly growing in the wall cracks, unharvested, unwatched.

He picked it methodically, filling his coat pocket. Good moss. Three silvers a bunch at the lower market, more if you knew which apothecary didn't ask where things came from. He knew which apothecary.

He could hear the group behind him, the sound of an injury being dealt with, someone arguing about the smoke, someone else asking whether the boss room was still viable. Normal dungeon sounds. The sounds of people who had just survived something and were already reorganizing around the next objective.

None of them were thinking about him.

He stood in the junction four corridor with his pockets full of moss and thought about thirty-one percent. Thought about efficiency bonus. Thought about the system's complete indifference to how a kill happened, to whether it was glorious or documented or acknowledged by anyone in the room. The system had watched him pour oil on a beam from a shelf while hiding from monsters and it had said: yes, that counts.

He had spent three years being told, in various explicit and implicit ways, that his approach to things did not count. That white-rank meant capped. That Scavenger-class was a humiliation, a joke classification the system handed to people who didn't qualify for anything real. That there was a correct way to grow and he was not doing it.

The system, apparently, had not gotten that message.

Nit put the last of the moss in his pocket and walked toward the dungeon exit, falling in at the back of the group as they reorganized and moved. His marker bobbed above his head, white and dim and utterly forgettable.

Nobody looked at him once.

Outside, in the grey afternoon, he counted his moss, calculated his silvers, and thought: thirty-one percent from a jar of oil and a coin.

He thought about what forty percent would take.

He smiled, which was not a comfortable thing to see, though nobody was looking.