There was no particular demarcation at the edge of the town, no wall or moat or anything. The street simply ended. The town had been built on a small butte, so I was fifteen-ish meters above the land below and able to get a good look. There was a road a couple kilometers off to my right, probably coming out of the southeast corner of the town. Below me was the wreckage of a city.

More than a city. It must have been a megalopolis. There were ruined houses and structures as far as I could see, with occasional tall buildings jutting up from the destruction. There were a handful of unbuilt areas here and there that looked like parks gone wild, and I could see a large lake to the north-northeast.

I considered the road off to the right. Presumably travel on the roads was reasonably safe, so if I could get to it then I could probably get to the next town without getting eaten. That just left the question of how to get to the road. The direct route would be to climb down the butte and cut straight through the ruins. Of course, Hekla had said that there were monsters in the ruins, so it would be more direct but I would be risking my life. Alternatively, I could circle back through the town and around. That would be safe, but it would require spending more time having children cry at the sight of me.

I set off into the ruins, narwhal tusk in hand.

The rockface was rotten and chunks came off in my hands as soon as I put my weight on them. Fortunately, it wasn't completely vertical so I was able to slide down in a giant cloud of dust and debris without suffering more than some unpleasant road rash. I stood up, blushing as I knocked the dust off myself and looking around to see if anyone had noticed my clumsiness. No one had.

This area had been semi-urban—the houses were too close together to count as suburban but they were usually only one story tall so I couldn't really count them as urban either. They had been concrete, painted in a garish palette of reds and blues and browns, and packed into neat squares of eight houses with alleys between them and a communal backyard in the middle. The roads were shattered fields of ankle-breaking rubble. Whatever had destroyed the houses had come from the north, crushing walls and sending chunks flying. Some of the yards were wild fields with knee-high grass and bushes; the rest were overgrown and impassable masses of briars and brambles.

I had gone barely a hundred meters before the centipede dropped on me.

It was two meters long, its carapace dark blue and gleaming, and each of the too many legs ended in a stinger. Its pincers were each half a meter long and serrated on the inside. It landed on my back, bearing me to the ground.

I heard the skitter along the roof as it jumped and was already starting to move back out of the way; I wasn't fast enough to avoid being struck but I did manage to get landed on by a middle segment where the jaws couldn't reach me. The legs jabbed me, trying to pin me in place as the front part twined around to bring the pincers into play.

I had dropped my narwhal tusk when I went down and there was no space to use it regardless. There wasn't even enough room to swing a punch, so instead I shoved hard on the knee of the nearest leg; I was rewarded with a sharp crack and a keen of pain. I managed to push my bottom up enough to make room under the creature so that I could get to my hands and knees and push to the side, rolling the back half of the monster over and letting me jump up with a cry of fear and joy at my escape. I grabbed the narwhal tusk off the ground and stabbed it into the centipede's exposed belly. It barely cracked the shell but the monster shrieked and kipped up, the jaws clamping onto my left arm and biting deep. Freezing cold poured into me.

You have been poisoned!

I shrieked in my own turn and thrust my tusk into the thing again. This time it penetrated; I twisted it around to widen the wound, then pulled it out and stabbed again. It became a race to see if I could get its health bar to zero before it could finish chewing my arm off.

I won the race. It did more damage than I did but I had far more hit points and I simply outlasted it. I was at twenty percent health when it died, at which point I was able to lever the jaws open so that I could get my mangled arm out. Unfortunately, the fight wasn't completely over, since my health continued to decline as the poison did its work. Fearing that the dead centipede might score a posthumous kill, I took a health potion and was relieved when my health jumped up to half. It promptly started sliding down again and now I had to wait on the cooldown before I could take another potion.

I knelt in the alley, clutching my arm and waiting to see if I was going to die here, less than ten minutes after leaving the town without using the relatively safe road because I was too much of a coward to endure the horrified stares of ordinary people who would not have harmed me.

Fortunately, the poison effect expired before I did, leaving me at thirty percent health but no longer falling. I looked at the two health potions sitting in my hot list. My last two. Shaking my head, I decided to let the dungeon's passive regeneration have a chance. I would save the potions for when I needed them in combat.

I continued on, being more careful this time. I kept an eye out above me and I paused before entering open areas, checking carefully to make sure I knew what was out there so that I didn't get ambushed again.

The ruins were well-stocked with monsters, most of them two or three levels above my own level 9. Worse, they were so thick on the ground that I couldn't make it a kilometer without seeing something awful—two jaguar/rat hybrids, a trio of dogs with snakes for tails, another giant centipede, and a small house that I only realized was actually a beetle because it stood up and ambled off. Its carapace had looked like any other chunk of cement, and it hadn't showed up on my minimap until it moved.

After that, I moved even more slowly and took care not to touch any of the buildings as I passed them.

The sun climbed higher in the sky and it started getting hot. I drank sparingly of the lemonade that Ho had packed for me back on the first floor. My body was doing fine but my mind was getting more and more tired from the wear of constant hypervigilance mixed with the occasional surge of terror. I tried to ignore that and push on as quickly as possible since I really did not want to be outside at night.

When midafternoon rolled around I was sagging. In the last hour alone I had managed to escape from a pack of dog-sized rats, nearly stumbled into an open area at the center of which was a beehive surrounded by finger-length hornets, and I had been running, fighting, or sneaking for eight hours without a break. I started looking for a safe place to rest and eat something from my inventory, but I found something better: A saferoom.

That was where I met Juan and Marta.

o-o-o-o

The saferoom was a Hooters. In what was undoubtedly an intentional joke on Borant's part, the two waitresses were humanoid owls. Both of them visibly hated their job and they ignored me when I sat down at a booth. I had to go over to the bar and get a menu from the Bopca Protector before I could actually order. I was most of the way through my club sandwich and fries (heavenly, as all Bopca food appeared to be) when the door to the saferoom slammed open hard enough to bounce off the wall. The man walking through stiff-armed it back before it could smack him in the nose.

"Yo, barkeep! Let's have some brews and a stack of wings!"

The loud man was tall and swarthy with a Latin accent and bad acne. He wore a fur cloak with leather chest armor and carried a softly-glowing battleaxe in his left hand. His companion, probably his wife given the wedding rings on both of them, was a short plump woman with dark hair and a spear taller than she was. She had a set of metal armor for her legs and one pauldron with ten-centimeter spikes. Her hair was ragged, probably hacked off with a knife, and there was a big chunk missing; it looked like it had been torn out by the roots and the scalp was still raw.

Both of them had player-killer skulls, two for him and three for her.

They stopped dead when they saw me and went into a quick huddle, whispering back and forth while shooting glances at me. Finally, they came over.

"Hi, I'm Marta and this is my husband Juan," she said with a smile.

"Yo," Juan said. "Cool to see another crawler."

"Yes," I said, looking nervously at the skulls. "Hello."

"Cool," Juan said, sitting down opposite me without asking permission and then sliding in on the bench seat so Marta could sit as well. "Crazy place, huh?"

Marta sat silently, eyeing me across the booth table's faux-marble formica surface but not speaking.

"Yes? I guess. I...I don't really know how to handle it."

He chuckled and shrugged one shoulder. "Dunno what the issue is. Better than the outside, eh? No whiny relatives, no tax man stealing your shit, no bills to pay. Simple. Kill stuff, take their shit, move on."

Complaining about having the tax man take his stuff and then immediately being happy about taking other people's stuff? Was he aware of the irony?

"I guess," I said. "I think my family all died."

"Oh, honey," Marta said, reaching out to pat my hand but hesitating and then drawing back without touching me. "Were you close?"

"Hey, don't be dragging all that up, girl!" Juan said to his wife. "Focus on the positives, yeah?" He looked me up and down. "What kind of weird-ass thing are you?"

"Doppleganger," I said, struggling to keep my voice even. I decided not to go into the details.

"Damn, girl. They beat you with the ugly stick, didn't they?"

"Juan!"

"Hey, you gotta face reality, right? Better to hear the truth." He shook his head. "We stuck with human. Made in God's image, not going to give it up."

I couldn't figure out what to say so I simply nodded and took a bite of my sandwich.

"Maybe we could exchange information?" Marta suggested. "We've been traveling north. Which way are you headed and what monsters have you seen?"

I chewed and swallowed. "I came from the west. It's all animal derivatives—giant centipedes, dogs with snake tails, that kind of thing."

"Anything tough?" Juan asked.

I finally thought to check their properties.

Crawler #11,162,621. "Juan J."

Level 14.

Race: Human.

Class: Badass Motherf'er.

Crawler #11,162,629. "Marta E."

Level 12.

Race: Human.

Class: Fire Mage.

I gulped. They were both substantially stronger than I was and better armed and armored.

"Probably nothing that will be a danger to you guys," I said. "It's all level nine to twelve."

"Cool." He looked over at the bar. "Yo! Hurry it up with the food!"

Moments later, either prompted by the yell or because that was when the food was ready, the Bopca came out from the kitchen with a tray holding two frosted mugs of beer and a large bowl of bright orange hot wings. He shot an angry glare at the two waitresses, who continued studiously ignoring him while chatting together, and carried the food over himself. He set it down a little more forcefully than necessary.

"Thank you," I said, smiling at him. "This is really good." I gestured to my sandwich and fries.

He grunted, slightly mollified at the compliment. "Good. You want more?"

"I think this will be enough, but would it be all right if I asked for takeout? Not every saferoom has food this good."

The hairy little man drew himself up slightly. "Sure. Fedee can make takeout for you. What you want?"

"Two more of these, please? And some roasted garlic. The strongest you have."

He nodded. "Fedee has strong garlic. Is good."

"Get us something sweet, too," Juan demanded. "Chocolate cake. You want anything, my heart?"

"Do you happen to have rice pudding?" Marta asked the Bopca.

"Fedee has. Will bring." The once-again-grumpy gnome hustled off.

"So," Juan said, digging into the hot wings, "I guess we should team up. You got somewhere specific to be?"

"I'm meeting some friends," I said carefully.

"Cool. We're just hunting so direction doesn't matter. We'll travel along with you. Safer three than one, right?" He grinned, showing off a mouthful of half-chewed chicken.

My eyes flicked to the skulls above their heads. Marta caught me looking.

"Don't worry about those," she said. "A bunch of hunters attacked us for our gear and we defended ourselves. Besides, you're not high enough level to be out here on your own."

That was certainly true.

"That's very kind of you," I said, forcing myself to smile. "Thank you."

"Good, good," Juan said. "So, doppleganger. Tell us about that."

"My game guide talked me into being a doppleganger," I said. "It's supposed to let me shift shape but I haven't figured out how yet."

"And that Monster Truck Driver class?"

"It had some good stat bonuses and it lets me build vehicles if I can find the parts," I said. "I didn't have a great selection. How about you? That's an interesting class you have."

"Badass Mothereffer," he said, grinning. "Good stats and a damage bonus when using axes. Plus, how could I not choose it?"

Marta rolled her eyes. "Men," she said, with a 'just us girls' tone that I couldn't get behind. "Before you ask, Fire Mage gives me an Intelligence bonus and couple of good spells."

"I bet that—" I broke off as Fedee came back with my takeout order, along with some warm bread to spread the roasted garlic on. I thanked him and handed over the appropriate number of gold; the food was no longer free but it was so inexpensive that it might as well have been. It all went into my inventory.

"Speaking of food," I said, even though we hadn't been, "I need to use the ladies. Be right back." I slid out of the booth, stood up casually, and ran for the saferoom exit as fast as I could.

Behind me, Juan cursed and both of them jumped to their feet, the booth seating hampering them just enough to give me a few seconds head start as I burst out the door.

I turned right and ran, taking the first corner in order to be out of line of sight. I wasn't quick enough; they came out fast and saw me just as I made the turn. I could hear their feet pounding after me and much too close.

I pushed myself to go faster, trending west but turning left and right at every opportunity in a desperate attempt to lose them despite the soft ground that took footprints well. As I ran I pulled the roasted garlic out of my inventory and smeared it across myself, taking care to get plenty of it on my face, hair, and arms.

A ball of fire the size of my head splashed against the ground just to my left and Marta cursed.

I burst into an open area, probably some sort of park before the city had been destroyed. At the center of it was a beehive as tall as I was; hundreds of finger-length murder hornets buzzed to and fro sampling nectar from the various wildflowers that grew everywhere.

I pounded across the open space, leaving the hive only a few arm-lengths to my right, with Marta and Juan only a dozen meters behind me. The hornets buzzed in fury at my intrusion but the stench of the garlic kept them back for the few seconds that I needed to cross the field and get back into the ruins. Behind me I could hear an enormous thrumming as tens of thousands more angry hornets burst out of the hive to repel the intruders. Moments later I heard screams as the swarm descended on Marta and Juan.

I ducked into the ruins of a small house and hid, trying not to listen as two fellow humans died in agony.