The notification was still hanging in his head when the rock began to move.

[Notification.]
[Competence acquired: Monsters → Lv.1.]

Dante stared at it for the half-second it took his brain to register that the warmth under his thighs had shifted. The flat stone he was sitting on had — he was almost sure — *risen*. Just a little. The way a sleeper rises when they take a breath.

He went still.

The stone rose again. Definitely. A slow, patient inhalation of something that was not stone.

His hands flew to the daggers before his brain had caught up. He was on his feet by the third inch. The rock under him kept lifting, deliberate and unhurried, and he scrambled backward off it, both blades drawn, pulse hammering against his ribs like a fist against a door.

(*A monster. It's a monster. I'm not ready.*)

The daggers found his hands.

And his hands knew what to do with them.

It was the strangest sensation he had ever felt — like discovering that a muscle he had never used was already trained. The grip *settled*. The wrists turned. His left foot slid back of its own accord, his right foot turned out, his weight dropped low. A combat stance he had never been taught, executed by a body that had never executed it, with a precision that did not belong to him.

[Notification.]
[Competence: Daggers → Lv.1.]
[Basic mastery acquired. Blocks, strikes, and stances learned correctly.]

(*It's downloading combat into me. My hands know things I don't.*)

The stone kept rising. A shape was emerging underneath it now, broad and low and slow.

(*First fight. First real fight. If I don't move now I'm going to freeze and die.*)

He moved.

"*Aaaahhhh!*"

The yell tore out of him without permission — a noise that was equal parts terror, conviction, and a very stupid kind of momentum. His arms swung the right dagger up over his head and brought it down with everything his thin video-game shoulders could put into it. The motion *hurt* on the way down — a muscle in his right shoulder pulled, sharply, the way unused things pulled when asked to do new violence — and the blade came down on the *stone* of what he was now decided was a monster's carapace and —

*CLINK.*

The dagger bounced.

The shock of the rebound jarred all the way up his arm into his teeth. The blade spun out and away from his open guard and he stumbled forward, off-balance, completely exposed, both hands suddenly in the wrong place at the wrong height. His whole body realized at once that if a counter came now, he had no defense for it.

(*This is it. Even here. Even in this world. I can't even scratch one.*)

He braced.

The counter did not come.

Instead, very slowly, a head emerged from the front of the stone.

It was wrinkled. Old. Wider than his palm. The skin was a dull mossy green-gray and looked carved rather than grown, deeply seamed at the eyes and the wide flat mouth. Two small black eyes regarded him with the steady, infinite patience of something that had been alive for a very long time and was *not interested*.

The head tilted.

It blinked at him. Once. Slowly. A second eyelid sliding sideways across the eye and back.

Then the creature *turned*. Not fast. Not slow either. The way a thing that knows it cannot be hurt moves, when it has decided to move. The legs emerged from the underside of the shell — four short thick legs, each tipped with three blunt claws — and the entire mass of it pivoted, ponderously and with absolute composure, until it was facing the other way.

It began to walk.

Away.

Without a single backward glance.

Dante stood there with one dagger out and one dagger fallen in the moss at his feet, his arms shaking from the rebound, breath coming in sharp small gasps that wouldn't slow down. The turtle — and it was a turtle, he was beginning to allow that it might be a turtle — was the size of a small car. Its shell was layered with moss so thick and so settled that he had genuinely sat on it for a full conversation without realizing. Tiny white flowers grew between the plates. A small mushroom had taken root near the back.

He sat down on the moss.

Hard.

His legs had given up.

He watched it amble away — each step a slow event, the shell rocking gently with the rhythm of the legs, moss swaying on its back — and behind it in the dirt where it had been resting, a faint circular indentation that he was now fairly sure had been there for *years*.

[Creature identified.]
[Stone Turtle. Low rank. Lifespan: several hundred years. Pacifist.]
[The shell and skin are calcified stone. Camouflages from predators by becoming a rock — can remain immobile for months at a time if necessary.]
[RESISTANCE: Slashing, Bludgeoning.]
[WEAKNESSES: Unknown — your competence level is not high enough to see more.]
[For more information you'll need to level the skill. Or, you know, kill the creature in question.]

A small dry note in ALICE's voice, like she had been waiting to deliver that last line.

Dante laughed.

It came out of him in a single rough exhalation that was half laugh and half what would have been crying if he'd had any tears left. He sat in the moss with his arms shaking and watched the most ancient thing he had ever seen amble away through the gold light of the forest, completely indifferent to the boy who had just tried, and failed, to attack it.

(*I attacked it. I attacked an "old man".*)

(*An "old man" who didn't even notice.*)

He laughed again. Softer this time. He let it happen.

He sat there long enough for the turtle to disappear behind a stand of ferns.

(*I'm sorry, old friend. I didn't mean any of it — I thought you were a monster. I wouldn't have hurt you. I couldn't have, even if I'd tried. You didn't even notice, and still — I'm sorry.*)

He sheathed the dagger. Bent. Picked up the second one from where it had fallen. Sheathed that one too.

His hands were not quite steady yet. His shoulder still hurt where the muscle had pulled. He breathed deliberately for a count of ten, the way someone in a movie had breathed once, and stood up.

(*Right. Okay. Lesson one — not everything that looks like a monster is a monster. Lesson two — even when something* is *one, panicking is the worst possible —*)

Pain. Sharp and white in the left side of his head, like a needle through the temple.

[*Dodge!*]

ALICE's voice — not calm this time, *urgent* — and his body moved before he could decide to.

He threw himself sideways. His shoulder hit the moss and rolled and the world spun once, hard, and he came up onto one knee in the open ground between the cave and the first trees of the deeper forest just in time to *hear* the thing that had nearly taken his head off.

A whistle. A sharp, hungry whistle of something heavy cutting air.

A tuft of hair fell to the moss in front of him.

(*That was on my head. That was on my head a second ago.*)

[Notification.]
[Competence acquired: Athletics → Lv.1.]
[Basic body mastery. Balance and evasion techniques learned correctly.]

He turned.

A goblin.

Three meters away, recovering from the swing that had missed. It was small — barely more than a meter — and *wrong* in the way Dante's brain refused to accept fully. Skin the color of old leather, dark green in the shadow and almost gray in the light. One shoulder higher than the other. Arms slightly different lengths. A wide flat mouth full of yellow teeth that didn't fit cleanly together. Yellow eyes — not the warm yellow of a cat's, the sick yellow of something *wanting*. Cunning eyes. Not stupid. Stupid would have been better.

In its right hand it held a hatchet. The handle was bound with grimy cord. The head was rust-spotted and chipped along the edge in three places, but the chips had been *honed* — sharpened around — so that the edge was uneven but very, very thin where it was still steel.

The goblin grinned at him.

It was the worst smile Dante had ever seen.

His pulse, which had been calming after the turtle, exploded back to maximum so fast he felt dizzy. The daggers were back in his hands without his deciding. His back was to a tree. He couldn't remember moving to it.

(*This isn't a turtle. This is —*)

[Hey,] ALICE said. The voice was quieter than the *dodge* had been. Even. Steady. [Breathe. I'm going to help you stay calm. Your brain works better without panic. Trust me, we can do this.]

(*Are you — are you doing something to my head?*)

[A little.] A pause. [I'm dampening the panic response. I'm narrowing your focus. You're still you. Just a version of you that can think instead of freezing. If you want me to stop, I will stop. But I would prefer you let me work.]

(*Don't stop.*)

[Okay.]

The fear didn't disappear. It was still there — bright and metallic at the back of his throat. But the volume came down, the way someone had reached over and turned a dial from ten to four. His vision sharpened. His breathing slowed. He could *think*.

(*Thank you.*)

[Later. Move.]

A small new window opened in the corner of his sight.

[ENEMY: Wild Goblin]
[HOSTILE]

The goblin shrieked — a broken-bottle noise that sliced the air — and lunged.

The hatchet came up over its head, two-handed, the way a butcher would split a log. Coming for Dante's skull.

(*Block. Cross-block.*)

His arms were already doing it. He didn't remember telling them. The Daggers competence twitched somewhere low in his stomach and his hands moved into the X — both blades crossed in front of his face, edges catching the descending hatchet at the apex of its swing.

*Clang.*

The shock of it ran down both arms. His feet skidded backward across the moss. His shoulder, the one that had pulled on the turtle, screamed. But the X held. The hatchet stopped a hand's-width above his nose.

The goblin's face was *right there*. Close enough to smell — and the smell was bad, *was very bad*, was rotten teeth and unwashed body and old blood. Its breath came in fast hot puffs.

For one long second they were locked.

Then the goblin twisted its weight and pulled back fast, dragging the hatchet free, and Dante saw a flash of the next swing coming horizontally — for his ribs.

He couldn't block it. The angle was wrong and he was off-balance from the first block. He had a fraction of a second.

(*Shadow Step.*)

The shadows lit up around him.

It was — the description had said it but the description hadn't *meant* anything until now — like someone had turned on a different light. The shadow under the tree behind him. The shadow under a fern to his left. The shadow under the *turtle*, seven or eight meters out. They were there, *connected*, *open*, whispering very faintly *here, here, this way.*

He picked the turtle's shadow because it was the farthest he could reach.

He stepped *into* his own shadow.

The world *thinned*.

For half a second — less than that — the gold half of the broken sun on the back of his hand *pulsed*. Brighter. The edge of the gold disc flared and dimmed in the time between one breath and the next. He didn't see it. He had no eyes for it. He was already in the other place.

Cold.

Black-on-black-on-black. A current running sideways under the world. The moss disappeared. The trees disappeared. The goblin disappeared. There was only a roaring in his ears and the sense of *moving very fast through somewhere that did not have a name*, and then —

He was crouched in the shadow of the stone turtle, eight meters from where he had been, the goblin behind him still completing the swing that should have hit nothing because nothing was there to be hit anymore.

The world snapped back into place around him.

His knees buckled — Shadow Step still cost him the same nausea as the first time, the same sour roll of the stomach — but he caught himself on one hand against the moss and stayed up. Just barely.

Across the open ground, the goblin was *staring* at the empty space where Dante had been. Looking left. Looking right. Lifting its bad-smelling head and trying to find him. For three long seconds it stood there, dumbfounded, hatchet still raised from a strike that had hit air.

(*Now.*)

He didn't think it. He was already running.

The Athletics competence kicked in — he didn't know how he knew, but he knew, the way the daggers had known what to do with his hands — and his stride lengthened. His feet found the right places to land. The pain in his shoulder went away in the way pain went away when you stopped being able to afford it. He covered the distance in the time it took the goblin to start turning around.

And as he ran, the dagger in his right hand began to *hum*.

[Stab.]

The blade *brightened* — a pulse of soft violet light, just once — and the grip in his hand twisted on its own. The dagger flipped from a forward grip to an icepick grip without his telling it to. The point now hung downward from his fist, ready to drive.

Between the shoulder blades — because that was the part of the goblin he could reach, the back that was still turned to him, the only target the geometry of the sprint offered.

He left his feet at the last second — a leap that was half-launched by the Stab skill itself, half by his own panic-driven momentum — and the dagger came down in an arc that he could not have made on his own and *drove* into the goblin's back.

The blade went in.

It went in the way it had not gone into the turtle. It went in through skin that gave like cured leather and then through muscle that resisted and then through *something that cracked*, briefly, the way a small bone cracked. Hot wetness sprayed across his hand and forearm — almost-black in the dappled forest light, smelling of metal and worse than metal — and the goblin made a sound that was not a scream so much as the *attempt* at one, broken halfway by what Dante had just done to the inside of its chest.

He yanked the blade out.

The sound coming out *was worse*.

A long wet *slurp* of metal coming free of meat. The goblin staggered forward two steps. Blood pulsed out of the wound in time with its heart, the dark almost-black blood, fast — too fast for it to live more than a few more breaths.

But it wasn't done.

It turned.

One of its arms hung wrong — the left one, the one on the side he had hit, drooping useless against its hip. He had cut something important and it had stopped being able to hold the hatchet two-handed. But the right hand still had the hatchet, still raised it, and the goblin's yellow eyes were *fixed on him* with a hatred so complete that for one second Dante forgot to be afraid and just stared at it.

(*It still wants to kill me. It's dying and it still wants to kill me.*)

It charged.

The swing was clumsy. Wide. One-handed wasn't its style. The Sixth Sense caught it before it landed and Dante was already dropping under it, knees skidding across the moss, the hatchet going harmlessly over his head with a noise like cloth tearing —

— and as he came up behind the goblin he turned and slashed *low*, with the left dagger, at the wrist holding the weapon. Not a strike at the body. A strike at *the hand that was holding the thing that could kill him.*

The dagger bit through the tendon.

The goblin's fingers opened on their own. The hatchet hit the moss with a soft thump.

Dante, panting, stepped back. Daggers up. Watching.

(*It's done. It can't fight. Just wait.*)

But the goblin didn't fall.

It *lunged* — empty-handed now, mouth open, teeth out. Two arms hanging useless and a wound in its back pumping out the last of its blood, and it lunged with its *teeth*. The way a thing lunges when it has nothing left and is going to take a piece of you with it.

Dante's left hand caught it.

He did not remember doing this. His hand was *on the goblin's throat* before he had decided to put it there. The goblin's neck was small. Smaller than he had expected. About the size of a child's. The skin was hot and rough and slippery with the goblin's own sweat.

The goblin's teeth snapped two inches from his face.

He drove the right dagger up through the soft place under the chin.

The body went rigid in his hand.

Then it was just weight.

Then he was holding a corpse.

He let it drop.

[Enemy defeated: Wild Goblin.]
[XP gained: 10.]
[Level: 1 → 2.]

The forest was very quiet.