Level 7. His.

  He thought about the village beast, which was Level 25 minimum, Level 35 under the blood moon. He was Level 7. He had a week and a handful of forest kills standing between those two numbers and he was not naive enough to think training could close that gap in the time he had. He needed a different approach. He needed the cult weakened before the confrontation — he'd understood this in outline since Loop 3, and the last two loops had sharpened it into something specific. The cultists in the forest fed the beast's level. The altar amplified everything. The blood moon was a condition he couldn't control.

  What he could control was the sequencing.

  He had pieces. He needed more.

  The light was going.

  He found a tree with a broad fork about fifteen feet up and climbed it and settled in and watched the forest go dark around him. This was new — the tree. He had not stayed in the forest overnight before. The loops had given him enough of the night forest's reputation through camp gossip and Kaelen's memories to treat darkness out here as a categorical hazard, and he'd always returned to camp before the light fully left.

  But he was Level 7 now. He had skills. He had, and this was new and felt important, enough experience of his own death to have developed some genuine curiosity about the specific mechanism of it — not morbidity but the analytical interest of a person who has learned to mine the failures. He wanted to see what came out at night. He wanted to file it.

  He settled in the fork of the tree and wrapped an arm around the upper branch and told himself he would stay alert.

  He was asleep within twenty minutes.

  — ? —

  He dreamed about the deer skull.

  Not the altar — not the forest clearing and the particular cold and his legs walking him forward without permission. Just the skull itself, floating in the way things float in dreams, the antlers spreading out and out, past the edges of the dream's available space, and behind the eye sockets something looking at him with a patience that was not malevolent but was enormous, the patience of geological time applied to the problem of him.

  Then the dream went white.

  Then he was very awake.

  — ? —

  He didn't see it.

  That was the thing — he was awake, fully awake, his eyes open and the forest dark around him, the tree bark under his hands, every skill he had firing at once with the specific alert quality of a system that has detected something it cannot locate — and he didn't see it.

  Forest Sense told him something was below and to the left. He looked left. Pine needles. Dark. The orange-lit suggestion of the blood moon somewhere through the canopy.

  He looked down.

  The rabbit was on the branch below him.

  It was facing away, hunched, its corrupted body larger than a rabbit had any business being, the fur along its spine standing in a ridge. The blood moon lit one side of it a dull burnt orange. It was very still. It had found him in the tree in the dark and it had climbed, somehow, and it was below him on the branch below his, its back to him, waiting.

  He thought: it's waiting for me to move.

  He thought: if I can get one clean—

  It turned.

  Not the whole body. Just the head, rotating on the neck in a slow, deliberate arc until it was facing him — directly facing him, the eyes reflecting the blood moon with a flat luminescence that had no depth behind it, the mouth slightly open, the teeth not rabbit teeth, not even close — and in the moment before it moved he had time to think, quite clearly, that nothing about what he was looking at made sense, that rabbits were not this, that this particular sequence of facts could not be true —

  — ? —

  ——————————————————————————————————

  ◆ SYSTEM NOTIFICATION ◆

  ——————————————————————————————————

  Level 7

  Death count: 9

  Way of death: Killed by a Corrupted Night Rabbit.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  [Forest Sense: Level 1 → Level 2]

  [Reflex Step: Level 1 → Level 2]

  Would you like to learn the skill [Night Awareness]?

  ——————————————————————————————————

  He woke up.

  Ten seconds.

  He lay on the boards and felt it — not the death itself, which had been fast enough to be over before he registered it, but the thing before it. The moment when the rabbit's head had turned. The teeth. The flat orange luminescence. The absolute certainty that none of it was possible sitting right next to the equally absolute certainty that it had happened.

  He also felt, and this was the part he stayed with for the full ten seconds, a specific quality of embarrassment.

  He had gotten comfortable.

  He had climbed a tree in the night forest and gone to sleep, as if Level 7 was a thing that entitled him to inattention, as if the skills were armour against his own complacency and not just against the things trying to kill him. He had done the thing he'd been watching other people do since Loop 1 — the thing soldiers did when they'd survived long enough to believe survival was a quality they possessed rather than a condition that required constant maintenance.

  He had relaxed.

  And a rabbit had climbed a tree in the dark and killed him.

  The tenth second ended. He sat up.

  He accepted [Night Awareness] without hesitation. Felt it install — a peripheral sharpening, the dark going from opaque to granular, full of shapes he could now read as benign or not. He thought about what it would have shown him an hour ago and set the thought aside. It was information. He had it now.

  Skill acquired: [Night Awareness — Level 0]

  [???] — Locked.

  ——————————————————————————————————

  Aldric was at his post. The chain was loose. The sky was the colour of old pewter.

  Josh climbed down from the platform and stood in the cold morning air and looked at the camp — the tents, the mud, the pennant, the pine trees pressing in from every direction — and did something he hadn't done since Loop 2.

  He took stock of himself.

  Not his skills and levels, which he tracked automatically now, but himself. The person inside the skills. He tried to locate the Josh who had woken up chained to a board and thought it was a frat prank. He tried to find the version who had been sick off the edge of the platform and could not decide which set of hands were his. He went looking for the person who had lain in the mud after Gilmour's boot and believed, genuinely believed, that getting the words out would change what happened next.

  He couldn't quite find him.

  He was still there in pieces — he could identify him by his outlines, the shape of the absence. The part of Josh that had needed thirty seconds. The part that had thought about Derek and the banana and the laundromat smell with an intensity that was almost grief. That part was smaller now. Not gone. Smaller.

  The part that had watched the boar die and felt nothing — that part was larger.

  He stood with this for a moment that was not the ten-second rule and was not the thirty-second rule and had no rule, just a person standing in the cold morning looking at the camp.

  Then Aldric's voice, quiet and without judgment: "You look like something chewed on you."

  "Something did," Josh said.

  A pause. Then: "Rabbit?"

  Josh turned to look at him. Aldric had the expression of a man trying very hard not to have an expression.

  "The ones that come out at night," Aldric said, by way of explanation. "They get in the camp sometimes. The lads have learned not to — " He stopped. Started again, more carefully. "You were in the forest last night."

  It was not a question.

  "Yes," Josh said.

  "At night."

  "Yes."

  Aldric looked at him for a long moment with the specific expression of a man who has something to say and is deciding whether saying it falls within his responsibilities.

  "The Baron calls for you," he said finally.

  "I know."

  Josh started for the Baron's tent. Stopped. Turned back.

  "Aldric. Do you know anything about the rune the cult uses? The one they mark their — " He searched for the right word. " — their followers with?"

  Aldric went still in a way that was different from his usual stillness. This was not the stillness of patience. This was the stillness of a person who has heard something they were not expecting to hear and is deciding very quickly how to respond.

  "Where did you see a cult rune?" he said. Quietly.

  "The village," Josh said. He held Aldric's gaze. "The thing in the village has one on its back. I got close enough to see it before I—" He paused. "Before I had to fall back."

  Another silence. Aldric's jaw shifted.

  "There's a man in camp," he said, eventually. "Former church scholar. He drinks too much and the Baron has him doing supply inventory because he's not fit for anything else. His name is Pereth." He said the name as though it tasted of something complicated. "He would know what the rune means. If anyone here would."

  "Thank you," Josh said.

  "Don't thank me," Aldric said. "He's unpleasant and he'll want something for the information."

  Josh almost smiled.

  "Everything here wants something," he said.

  Aldric looked at him with an expression that moved through its rooms more slowly than usual, spending longer in each one.

  "You were not like this when you came," Aldric said. Not an accusation. An observation. The kind a person makes out loud because they need to hear whether it sounds the way it does inside their head.

  Josh held his gaze.

  "No," he said. "I wasn't."

  He turned and walked toward the Baron's tent, and he did not look back, and he did not think about whether what Aldric had just said was a compliment.

  The camp was waking up around him. Cookfire smoke. A horse complaining. The distant ring of the farrier's hammer. An ordinary morning in an unordinary place, and Josh moved through it and thought about runes and sequencing and what a former church scholar might want in exchange for knowledge, and did not think about Derek, or the laundromat smell, or the person he'd been when those things had felt like the real world.

  He was working.

  He was always working now.

  He filed that too.