Chapter 1

Brand hunkered down in the scrub at the edge of the copse of trees, keeping his hand loosely looped around the handle of his cooking knife. It wasn’t much of a weapon, just something he had scavenged from the ruins of the army camp before he joined in a hasty retreat with the rest of the remnants. He tried to be content with it. It had been a miracle he had survived the last of the fighting at all.

He heard some rustling near the snare he had set. To this day, he didn’t really know why freshly cut greenery drew in beasts. It would have made more sense if they avoided it, he thought, given that freshly cut piles of delicate branches and weeds didn’t appear naturally. Still, it hardly ever failed, given a well-tied snare and sufficient patience. He had eaten well enough all the way across the kingdom because of that, even if his diet hadn’t had much variety.

The rustling quieted for a moment, then grew louder. Whatever was approaching his snare was getting less careful now, drawn in by hunger or greed. Brand prepared to spring out and finish the job once the snare activated, since only the smallest and weakest of animals could be held by it permanently.

Steady now. You won’t have time to set the snare again before dark.

A sudden snapping sound rang through the trees and a loud, angry snarl of some kind followed just behind it. Brand shot out like an arrow from a bow, at least by unclassed standards. He had been a cook in the military, then had converted to Soldier in the last desperate minutes of the two-kingdom conflict. He hadn’t been expected to survive, least of all alone.

The problem with military classes was that they were tied to the existence of a military. You couldn’t get them without some sort of fighting force to report to. They weren’t all bad, but when both countries finally finished beating each other to a pulp, there wasn’t much of a military left on either side. Where normally his class would have accepted the authority of the winners of the war, there were no winners in this particular conflict.

It wasn’t just that all the bonuses he got from the army vanished. The class did as well, going poof with no fanfare and leaving him vulnerable and alone. Having put two classes behind him, he knew that the next class he took would bring him to his lifetime limit. The system provided some flexibility for people to find their way, but by the third class it expected them to either have it figured out or to live with the consequences.

Classless life wasn’t all bad, really, except for the fact that he was defenseless and physically inferior to almost all other forms of life. Luckily for him, he had some knowledge of snares and traps from his boyhood that had served him well here up until now.

Now, as he busted through the thick forest growth and into visual range of his catch, he realized it had finally failed him by working too well. Caught in the snare, fighting with all its might to get free, was a much larger animal than he had counted on. Even without a class, the system was more than pleased to tell him what it was.

The description was little comfort, as even the lowest level combat classes were miles ahead of what Brand could currently accomplish in battle. Worse, the Eberhund had seen him. A normal animal would run once it shook itself free, but a monster would behave like any monster would and pursue a human target as far and as fast as it could manage.

Worse, this was a monster that would do even more damage to a countryside that had been stripped clean by a series of passing armies. If he let this particular beast go, it would reproduce and eventually have the potential to unbalance nature for miles and miles around its domain. In better times, any nearby towns would notice this and send out a fighting force to eradicate the threat. Just now, he doubted any local settlements could do that. In the best case, that meant that the animals would build up their forces and a whole section of the wilderness would be wiped out and emptied of food, putting more strain on already struggling settlements.

In the worst case, the monsters would get a sense of where the humans were and attack in waves until every human they could find was dead. It was a story every child was taught, a lesson they were forced to learn as soon as they could walk. If you saw a monster, you escaped and told someone. The escape was for you. Reporting it was for everyone else, an important responsibility.

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That means running isn’t an option, in more ways than one. Great. I’m going to have to do the right thing here.

There were thousands of triggers that could have potentially given him a class during his journey. None of them had come through for him. The system was a fickle thing, he knew, but he had never expected the clock would run out on his safety before he got a chance at anything. Even a tailor class would have made fighting this boar child’s play, and he didn’t even have that.

He did have a knife, however. A good, sharp knife, and no choices at all but to stand and fight.

The Eberhund was close to pulling out of the snare now, either by breaking the rope or shaking it loose from its moorings. If there was a time to strike, it was now, before the animal regained its mobility. He set himself and charged, knife point forward to give himself the most reach possible. It wasn’t enough.

Brand failed to pivot as the Eberhund swung its long tusks around, scraping at the ground before bringing them up to gouge at Brand’s legs. He felt a fire-hot pain in his leg as he fell to a knee then scrambled backward out of the range of the boar, which grunted and went back to trying to wrench itself free.

The wound was jagged and long, and was bleeding more than he was comfortable with. It wasn’t particularly deep, though. Gritting his teeth, he made it back to his feet in just a second, limping and brandishing his knife. He couldn’t lunge in anymore, even if the boar hadn’t already proven itself his equal. He just didn’t have the mobility for it. Without that, his future seemed clear.