When Tav woke up, by reflex he reached out to his system for help. Tav was used to both the overenthusiastic exclamation points of the natural system and the dry floridity of the Academy's integrated notices. Instead he got an unreadable tangle that barely looked like text. It wouldn't stop moving, all twitching spikes and snarls that made his eyes hurt. Not that his eyes were what he worried about most: everything Tav could feel hurt.
On further reflection, Tav decided to take that as a good sign. If his arm hurt, for instance, it probably meant that he still had an arm. When Tav closed his eyes, he remembered the classmates he'd seen who weren't so lucky. He rolled over and threw up onto the ground.
Tav slowly hoisted himself to all fours. Two legs, two arms. Lucky. His system was an illegible mess, so maybe he had brain damage of some sort. Less lucky. He could feel hard stone beneath his hands, the solid mass of an attercope corpse behind his foot. Solid and spiky, but not moving, so probably dead. The area was lit by a faint glow that Tav couldn't place.
Tav heard a scrape of stone on stone. He tried to look up despite his nausea, but something pressed against the back of his head, keeping him staring at cold stone and fresh sick. "What are you doing here?" a voice said, creaky with age.
Tav tried to respond, but his throat was raw like he'd been screaming.
"No, that was rhetorical," said the voice. "Thought you were one of mine, but obviously I'm confused. But I'm not the only one, ha!"
Tav tried to plead for help, or mercy.
"Might be interesting," the voice said. "Still, this is my space and I don't like trespassers. I'll forgive you this once."
There was a sharp crack of pain as something slammed into Tav, and then he was unconscious again.
Tav had the worst headache of his life, and that included the time his oldest sister had given him a full bottle of Northrun whiskey to see how much he could drink before throwing up. He'd gotten through the entire bottle, which turned out to be worse than throwing up halfway would have.
"Ugh," he said out loud, not bothering with the extra effort of mental system interaction. "My name is Octavian Septimaris. I know that much."
His vision was dull. He was lying on grass, not in his bed. Had he gotten drunk before graduation? It would have been terribly irresponsible, but everyone always said Tav was terribly irresponsible, so. It didn't seem right, but maybe?
"Oh depths, what?" Tav tried to get up, but none of his muscles worked right. "Human? I'm human? What's going on?"
"What the—what?" Tav knew he wasn't the sharpest blade in the armory, but even he could tell something was horribly wrong. "System, display recent achievements."
Tav waved his hands, flailing at the system popups. It was a bad habit, but the physical interface was easier when he was panicked, and right now Tav was definitely panicking. At least he was a little more coordinated than he'd been on waking up. "No," he said. "No, system, what? What? Display status."
"Class is… oh man, something's really wrong. Class set to Swordsman? Class specialty set to Agility?"
Tav paused and prodded the system display. "That's—even with whatever happened, I'm still only level 17, right? I don't get my next Class advancement until level 20, but—Class evolution, set to Dual Wielder?"
The system's exclamation points had never bothered Tav before; as a chronic underachiever, the system's notifications had always been an occasional surprise. Now they grated, as Tav found himself working through his stats more exhaustively than he had since pre-graduation Build Counseling. He went through every prompt piece by piece, trying to stave off panic by burying himself in Systematic minutiae. He was seeing details he didn't think users could usually access.
"Uh, is there a penalty for doing so? Do I have to lower another stat to compensate or something?"
"Uh, I guess reset?"
"That's—I don't think I was really that bad."
The system kept asking him questions he'd never thought about.
"Umm… wow, there was that one cake Suz made for my sixteenth birthday. Better even than Dad's. I guess that'd be it."
All in all Tav spent what felt like hours crawling through submenus, trying to fix every ERROR he could find. It was mind-numbing. It was better than the dull memories of graduation ceremony trickling back. When Tav finally thought he had found all the ERRORS, he called up an abbreviated stat breakdown.
These stats were good. They were better than they'd been before graduation, in fact, aided by the ERROR compensation upgrading him in unexpected ways for whatever it was that had gone wrong. He hadn't expected to pick up a Special Skill for several more levels, although he wasn't sure what "Extensible Weapon Reach" did.
Well, that was simple enough, and potentially quite powerful, but there was something more important to deal with. Tav braced himself. "System, bring up recent kill list."
Tav remembered Emery, although he hadn't known her well. He thought he'd seen her crushed under a bench or something, so why was he being credited with her death? He hadn't even been armed.
"Bring up Recent Achievement list, simplified?"
"Search achievements for 'Keystone of Learning'?"
Tav laughed. "I really didn't get the academy graduation achievement, did I. Hey, Rick! You were right! Ha! One last—" Then he rolled over and threw up into the grass.
After he'd wiped his mouth, Tav made one more System call. "Hey, System, where am I?"
"Unknown Dungeon" was a revelation in its own right. There were only three stable dungeons in the world. Two were controlled by the Delving Nations of Perrigen and Bozara, while the last was located in the fallen kingdom now called Nadir. An unknown and presumably unstable dungeon—though the System labeled this the exit, the clearing was empty and the turf unbroken—was a problem on the scale of kingdoms and countries.And on a personal level, that unstable dungeon had spit Octavian out in Karmere, a notoriously anti-delving kingdom that didn't even share a border with Perrigen. Tav was a long, long way from home.
