The golden light from the Cleric's palm sputtered like a candle drowning in its own wax. Catherine sat rigid against a tree trunk, breathing through her nose in sharp, controlled bursts while the magic crawled across what remained of the left side of her face.

  Luna kept her distance—six feet, arrow loosely nocked—and let the Cleric work. Burns, it turned out, were ugly business even for magic. Dead tissue had to be regenerated from the inside out, layer by layer, and Mike—as the man introduced himself—was only a level 4 Cleric. He couldn't do fine work. He could only push raw healing energy at the damage and hope biology met him halfway.

  It took nearly two minutes of repeated casting of the Heal Light. When the light finally guttered out—Mike's Mana spent to the dregs—Catherine's face was still a ruin, but a functional one. The worst blistering had smoothed into tight pink scarring that pulled when she moved her jaw. Her left eye opened fully now, though it watered constantly, and she squinted against even the dim moonlight. The hand was better—all five fingers moved, if stiffly, the locked claw replaced by something that could grip a knife hilt without screaming.

  "That's everything I have," Mike said. He sounded hollowed out. "I don't know if the scarring will disappear even if we repeat the healing again. A stronger Cleric might—"

  "It's enough," Catherine said. She didn't look at him when she said it.

  Luna lowered her bow. "Talk. From the beginning."

  He talked.

  The first kill hadn't been planned. Luna could see in Mike's face that this detail mattered to him—a distinction he clung to like a man gripping the edge of a cliff, desperate to prove the fall hadn't been entirely his choice.

  Eduardo Ramses had been a solo Wizard they'd stumbled across on the first day, or rather night, just when they decided to spend the night in the woods. He was already dying when they found him—propped against a tree trunk, his left leg ending in a cauterized stump just below the knee where a Maw Shrum had caught him. The creature's body lay nearby, killed by Eduardo's lightning, but the cost had been everything below his left shin and most of his Mana. He'd tourniquet the wound with his own belt and was burning through his last reserves trying to seal the vessels with tiny, precise bolts of electricity that made his whole body convulse each time he applied them.

  Craig had assessed the situation with a quick, practical eye. A crippled Wizard with no Mana, no mobility, and no chance of reaching a Safe Zone under his own power. Healing him would cost Mike most of his reserves and wouldn't return his leg. Carrying him would slow the group to a crawl in monster-infested territory. And the man was begging—not for death, but for help, which was somehow worse, because it forced Craig to choose between risk and convenience.

  "Craig said it was mercy," Mike whispered. "That we'd be doing him a favor. That even if we carried him to the Zone, he'd lost a leg—how would he survive? How would he hunt?" His hands knotted together in his lap. "And Eduardo was in so much pain. Screaming when the shocks hit the stump. So Craig said—he said, 'Let me end it quick. It's the kindest thing.' And I... I didn't argue. Part of me even believed him."

  The Firebolt had been quick, at least. Quicker than the Maw Shrum.

  What Craig hadn't anticipated was the notification that followed.

  [Human Wizard (Iron)—Level 3 defeated]

  [Random Sanctum Points received: 150]

  Enough experience for a level up. Sanctum Points—dropping from the dead man's reserves like coins from a shattered jar. The reward was more than for any monster they'd killed. And getting it was easier, too, since James hadn't been able to fight back.

  Luna frowned as Mike recounted the moment Craig's expression had changed. Not dramatically—not the theatrical villainy of someone embracing evil—but a subtle realization, a short moral conflict that was quickly resolved when weighing the profit against his conscience, if he had any.

  "He didn't say anything right away," Mike continued. "Just checked his points. Checked again. Then he looked at Karl and smiled, and Karl smiled back, and I knew—I knew right then what was going to happen next, what they'd become. And I told myself I'd leave. That I'd slip away at the first opportunity, find another group, start over." His voice collapsed into something barely audible. "I didn't. I was... I was too afraid that, if I bailed, I'd just become their next target."

  Nathan Crawford and Debrah Simmons had been the second and third. Craig's team encountered them on the morning of the second day—a couple in their forties, coworkers, both Adventurers who'd been wandering lost since the Trial began. They'd hunted together for a few hours, sharing water from the Adventurers' Water Spray, building the fragile camaraderie that keeps you sane in hostile territory.

  And then the Knight and Mercenary ambushed them to prove to Craig that they were "in" with his plan.

  The fourth was another solo participant—a Mercenary woman named Reiko, Half-Japanese, a solo MVP from the Second Trial, deadly competent with her paired short swords. She'd been harder. She'd fought back. Craig burned through half his Mana putting her down, and Karl had taken a slash across his forearm that Mike had to heal afterward. But the points and experience were worth it, Craig said. Always worth it.

  Luna listened to all of it from her position against the grass-stalk, the hunting knife balanced across her knee. She said nothing through the entire account—not because she didn't care, but because she had never been someone who filled silence with words that wouldn't change anything. And nothing she could say would change what had already happened to those four.

  What she felt, sitting in that dark clearing with Craig's cooling body draped across the grave he'd had them dig up, was not the clean fury that had powered her through the fight. That had burned itself out somewhere between the Mercenary's throat and the Knight's gorget. What replaced it was something quieter and vastly more uncomfortable—a kind of grief that had nothing to do with the dead murderers and everything to do with the shape of the world they were all being hammered into.

  She thought about Nathan Crawford's driver's license in her Space Pouch. The DMV photo, the Figueroa Street address. Twenty minutes from her apartment. He might have eaten at the same restaurants, ridden the same buses, walked past her on the street without either of them knowing the other existed. Now he was a name in a Cleric's confession and a rectangle of plastic in a magic pouch on an alien planet, and his family—if he had one—would wait by a door that would never open again.

  She thought about the Tutorial's design. The bounty board with its Humanoids Slain category. The points that dropped from murdered participants like loot from a video game enemy. The System hadn't forced Craig to kill anyone. It had simply built an incentive structure where killing was profitable and mercy was expensive, then stepped back to observe what crawled out of the resulting darkness.

  And it'll get worse, Luna realized. As people level up, as the power gap between hunters and prey widens, as the strong realize exactly how untouchable they've become—it may get so much worse.

  She pushed herself to her feet.

  "Here's what happens now," she said. "You'll come back to the Safe Zone. And then, you'll stand in front of every person there and tell them what you told me. Every name. Every detail. And when they look at you the way they're going to look at you, you will bear it."

  She gave him the rest of it—the conditions, the consequences, the leash she was fastening around his neck. Heal the weak, serve the vulnerable, confess everything without softening or deflection. And if he lied, if he twisted the story even slightly—

  "I will know," she said. "And I will finish what I started tonight."

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  He nodded. There was nothing left in him to argue with.

  The walk back was quiet.

  Safe Zone 4's barrier admitted them with its usual soap-bubble resistance. The plaza was quieter than when they'd left but far from empty—a handful of residents lingered near the food station or sat on the steps of residential buildings, their conversations dying one by one as Luna's group crossed the threshold. Four people had left the Zone. Four were returning, but two of them were visibly wrong—Catherine's burns and Mike's limp told a story before anyone opened their mouth—and the absence of Craig, and most of his team told the rest.

  "Where's Craig?" a woman near the barrier generator asked. "And his team? They were supposed to—"

  "Craig is dead," Luna said. "So are the rest of his team except for the Cleric."

  She didn't wait for the murmuring to resolve itself into questions. She turned to Diana, who had been walking in mechanical silence since the clearing, her eyes still carrying that particular glassiness of someone whose nervous system hadn't finished processing what it had witnessed.

  "Find Thomas and Garrett," Luna told her. "Tell them to come to the plaza. Tell anyone who's still awake."

  Diana nodded and moved toward the residential buildings with the automatic obedience of someone grateful to have a task that didn't involve thinking. Luna guided Mike to the center of the plaza, near the barrier generator where Cerfi stood connected to its power source, the automaton's blue eye flickering to life as if it had been monitoring the situation long before they'd arrived.

  People gathered. Not everyone—some had already retreated to their rooms for the night—but enough. Thomas arrived first, his expression shifting from curiosity to alarm as he took in Catherine's face and the conspicuous absence of three people he'd watched leave hours earlier. Garrett followed a minute later, in his Class Form for some reason, his hand already resting on his sword hilt with reflexive wariness.

  When a bit over a dozen people had assembled—most of the Zone's waking population, drawn by the commotion and the invisible social gravity that pulls humans toward the center of unfolding events—Luna spoke.

  She kept it brief. Her name. The expedition to the graves. Craig's ambush. Craig's death, and the deaths of his team. The words landed on the quiet plaza like stones dropped into still water, sending ripples through the faces of people who'd known Craig's easy smile and trusted the warmth behind it.

  Then she stepped aside, and Mike was exposed to every eye in the Zone with nowhere to hide.

  He told them.

  His voice started barely above a whisper. Someone called for him to speak up. He did, and the louder words were somehow worse—the details of the four people's deaths weren't pretty. He hesitated, sure, perhaps changed some of the events to look more innocent, like a victim to the fear rather than greed, Luna couldn't know if the details were off somehow. But at least he didn't try to disprove her words. If he were stupid enough, he could've tried to put the blame on her, saying that she'd slain his innocent friends, threatened him, or worse... thankfully, he seemed to value his life enough to stay truthful, at least for now.

  The audience's faces cycled through disbelief into horror into something harder and more personal—perhaps imagining themselves in the victims' place, doing the math on how easily it could have been them accepting Craig's friendly offer of companionship on a lonely forest path.

  She also watched Garrett.

  The Mercenary had been standing near the edge of the crowd when Mike began, his posture carrying its usual studied neutrality. But something shifted when the name of the lightning Wizard filled the air between them. A stillness that went beyond attention.

  "Repeat to me who was your first victim," Garrett said.

  Mike flinched. "E-Eduardo Ramses. He was the first—Craig found him injured, he'd lost his leg fighting a—"

  "I know who Eduardo Ramses is." Garrett's voice had gone flat in a way Luna hadn't heard from him before. "Eddie from Oakland. We were in the same graduating class at Berkeley. He couldn't cook to save his life, but he'd bring these awful homemade tamales to every study session like he was doing us a favor." His hand found the sword hilt without any apparent conscious instruction. "I haven't talked to him in a few years because life happens and you always think there'll be time to catch up, and now you're telling me he was lying in the dirt with his leg gone and you people—"

  He moved.

  The distance between Garrett and Mike vanished in a blur of Mercenary-class speed, his sword clearing its scabbard mid-stride, the blade already arcing toward a trajectory that would have opened the Cleric from shoulder to hip.

  Luna didn't move as she already saw someone—something—moving before her.

  Cerfi's mechanical arm materialized between the two men with instantaneous precision—not reacting to the violence but anticipating it, a shimmering barrier snapping into existence before Garrett's sword completed its arc. Metal rang against the localized shield, and the Mercenary staggered backward from the rebound, his momentum redirected into a graceless stumble that sent him to one knee on the stone.

  "Violence is forbidden within the Safe Zone." Cerfi's voice carried its usual conversational timbre, but something in the undertone had hardened. "I understand you've received distressing information. I process the emotional context, insofar as my architecture accommodates emotional modeling. But the rules apply to grief as readily as they apply to malice, and I will enforce them without exception."

  Garrett stood with his sword still raised, his chest heaving. His face revealed not the explosive fury she'd witnessed from Derek over Marcus's death, but something quieter and in some ways more dangerous.

  He turned to Luna. "Why." It came out strangled, barely qualifying as language. "You killed the others. Three dead, you said. So why is this one still breathing?"

  Luna met his eyes and found herself in unexpected territory—not observing his grief from the outside, but resonating with it. She thought about her father, about the questions she had carried ever since the Tutorial, about how the possibility of never getting answers made her chest feel like something was sitting on it. Garrett and Eduardo hadn't been close in years. Maybe they'd drifted the way old classmates do—the occasional social media like, the birthday text sent three days late, the vague intention to grab coffee that never quite materializes into a calendar entry. But the particular anguish of losing someone you'd meant to reconnect with—the theft of a future conversation you'd always assumed was waiting—that was something Luna understood in a place deeper than words.

  "Because he heals people," she said simply. "There are people in this Zone who can't fight, who are one bad hunt away from being thrown past the barrier to die in the forest. His hands keep them breathing. I stood in that clearing with my bow drawn and I wanted to put an arrow through his eye, sure. But I chose the people he can still help over the justice he deserves. With his Class, he can't hurt most Gifted, not directly at least."

  Garrett stared at her. The sword trembled in his grip—not from weakness, but from the effort of holding still when every impulse demanded motion.

  "That's not enough," he said.

  "I know." Luna held his gaze without flinching. "When the Trial is close to ending—I won't protect him. If you're still eager for revenge and think he didn't earn his repentance, you will have the chance."

  Something flickered behind Garrett's eyes. He looked at Mike—really looked, the way you study a face you intend to find again in a crowd—and then slid his sword back into its sheath without saying a word.

  He walked to the nearest wall and leaned against it, arms crossed, jaw locked, eyes fixed on the middle distance. Thomas moved to stand beside him in silence, which was probably the right call.

  Luna turned back to the small crowd. The faces watching her carried emotions broad enough that even she could read them without difficulty—horror, disgust, fear, and the anxiety over whether they might encounter their own Craig tomorrow.

  "One more thing," she said, her voice firm. "Craig's group treated other participants as prey. The System makes it easy—there's a bounty category for killing humanoids, and experience reward. The Tutorial was designed to permit this. Maybe even to encourage it." She let those words settle into the silence the way sparks settle into dry grass. "The System doesn't punish you for murdering fellow humans. It doesn't care."

  She scanned the gathered faces, letting each person feel the weight of her attention—and whatever they saw in those silver eyes, most of them looked away first.

  "But I care. If I find out that anyone—anyone—in this forest is hunting participants, treating people as a faster path to leveling than fighting the things that actually deserve killing, I won't wait for the Trial to end. I'll handle it the way I handled Craig."

  The silence that followed wasn't the productive kind, no. It was the uncomfortable silence of people confronting the fact that the most dangerous thing in the plaza wasn't the confessed accomplice to murder, but the silver-eyed beauty who'd killed the Gifted ambushing her, and who was now looking at each of them as if measuring the distance between her bow and their throats.

  "The forest has enough monsters in it already," Luna said. "We don't need to become more of them."

  She walked away before the mask could slip. The anger she'd been compressing since the clearing was testing every seal she'd built around it, pressing against the inside of her ribs with a heat that wanted out—wanted to become the trembling in her hands that she'd been suppressing since she'd watched Catherine's face melt under Craig's fire. Luna had never handled anger well. It was the one emotion that actually reached her expression, and what it produced there frightened people in ways she couldn't always control or predict. Better to retreat before the cracks became visible.

  She climbed the stairs to building three and locked the door behind her.