Jamie had figured out the loot system in the first twelve minutes.

  Not completely — he didn't have the formula, didn't know the drop rates, couldn't have written the algorithm. But he'd been watching what fell and when and from which skeletons, and the pattern was clear enough if you were looking for patterns, which Jamie always was. The first three skeletons dropped nothing. The fourth dropped a copper coin. The fifth and sixth dropped nothing. The seventh dropped two copper coins and a minor health potion, and the eighth, the one Dani had killed with a furious overhead swing that looked nothing like swordsmanship and everything like a woman who had recently been hit by a mace and taken it personally, dropped a shortsword with slightly better stats than the starter weapons.

  The drops weren't random. They were paced. Spaced out to create a specific emotional rhythm — nothing, nothing, something small, nothing, nothing, something better — that kept you pushing forward because the next kill might be the one that paid off. Jamie recognized this because he'd spent the last year studying exactly this kind of design in his marketing courses. It was an engagement curve. A retention mechanic. Someone had thought very carefully about the psychology of intermittent reinforcement, and they'd implemented it well enough that even knowing what they were doing, Jamie still felt the little spike of satisfaction when the shortsword appeared.

  He respected that. He respected anyone who understood how people worked and used it with craft rather than contempt.

  He respected it even more because the person who'd designed it wasn't a person.

  The class selection at the start of the tutorial had been interesting.

  Not the classes themselves — those were standard enough. A list of archetypes presented on a translucent panel during avatar creation, each with a brief description and a starter loadout. Knight, Rogue, Ranger, Healer, Mage. The interesting part was watching who chose what and what it said about them.

  Dani had chosen Knight, which Jamie suspected had less to do with a desire to be on the front line and more to do with the fact that the Knight got the most armor. A practical choice from a practical person. She had been less practical about the chainmail miniskirt, which she had expressed opinions about at a volume the party chat was not designed to contain.

  Gregory had chosen Mage. Jamie had expected this — the teacher, the analytical mind, the person who would want the class that rewarded intelligence and pattern recognition. Gregory had spent the first ten minutes of the tutorial examining his spell list with the methodical attention of someone reading a syllabus, and Jamie suspected he already knew the interactions better than the system expected a first-time player to know them.

  Voss had defaulted to Healer. The support role. The person who stood at the back and kept everyone functional. Jamie noted this without judgment — it was consistent with everything he'd observed about the developer. Voss wanted to watch. Wanted to facilitate. Wanted to see his creation working through other people's hands rather than his own. When Dani had marched up to him mid-battle with her bruise, he'd healed it with the automatic competence of someone performing a function he'd designed himself to perform.

  Jamie had chosen Rogue.

  Not because he identified with the archetype — he wasn't the stealthy backstabber type, wasn't the loner, wasn't the edgy dual-wielder. He'd chosen it because the Rogue's starter kit included a set of lockpicks, a hooded cloak, and a dagger that did less damage than the Knight's sword but could be thrown. Options. The Rogue was the class that gave you the most options per decision point, and Jamie had been choosing options over power since the first time he'd realized that the kid with the most answers wasn't always the kid who controlled the conversation.

  The dagger sat comfortably in his hand now. Light. Quick. The kind of weapon that rewarded precision over force, which suited him fine because force was not what Jamie brought to a room.

  The Hollow Warden entered with ceremony.

  The torches shifted. The ground resonated. The archway at the far end of the chamber filled with cold blue-white light, and the thing that emerged from it was exactly what the loading screen had promised — a skeleton in damaged armor with a halberd, barely larger than a man, moving with the mechanical patience of something built to be the final obstacle between the player and the victory screen.

  Jamie assessed the situation in three seconds. Not the Warden's combat capabilities — he had no real framework for that. What he assessed was the geometry.

  Three fighters. One support. The chamber was wide enough to spread out. The Warden's halberd had significant reach, which meant bunching up was the worst thing they could do. Its skull was tracking — not all of them, just one of them. Dani. The knight in the chainmail miniskirt who had spent the last twenty minutes hitting skeletons with an intensity that apparently registered on whatever threat-assessment algorithm the boss was running.

  "Gregory," Jamie said, moving wide as he spoke. Not away from the Warden — lateral, opening the angle between himself and the rest of the party. "Spread out. If it's watching Dani, it's not watching us. Every angle it can't cover is an angle we can use."

  Gregory was already moving. He'd arrived at the same conclusion independently — Jamie could see it in the positioning, the deliberate spacing, the way the teacher treated the chamber floor like a problem with a spatial solution. His staff was up, a faint luminescence at its tip suggesting he was preparing something from the spell list he'd been studying for the last half hour.

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  Voss stayed back. Jamie noted this without surprise — the developer had stationed himself near the rear wall with his healing staff oriented toward the party, and his attention was split between the fight and something in his HUD. Data, probably. Metrics. The developer watching his encounter perform with the specific focus of a person who was mentally taking notes. Fine. Let him take notes. As long as the healing kept coming.

  "Dani — it's locked on you," Jamie called. "Don't fight it alone. Keep moving, keep it turning, and give us openings."

  "I wasn't planning on fighting it alone!" Dani shouted back, which was fair.

  Jamie's first contribution to the Warden fight was not a hit. It was a throw.

  The dagger left his hand forty seconds into the engagement, aimed not at the Warden's body but at the stone floor two feet in front of it. The blade struck the flagstone with a sharp, bright clang that echoed off the chamber walls, and the Warden's skull twitched — just slightly, just for a fraction of a second, the autonomous response of a system that tracked sound as well as movement.

  In that fraction, Dani hit it in the side.

  Her sword connected with the gap between the chestplate and the pauldron, and the impact was harder than anything she'd landed on a tutorial skeleton. The Warden staggered. Not much — it caught itself, corrected, began its halberd sweep — but the stagger was real, and Jamie had caused it without touching the boss.

  He retrieved the dagger. It was the only weapon he had and he was going to need it back.

  "That works," Gregory observed from the opposite flank. "Sound distraction. The targeting has an audio interrupt."

  "For about half a second," Jamie confirmed. "Maybe less."

  "Half a second is enough for a spell."

  Gregory's staff pulsed. Something bright and sharp left the tip and struck the Warden in the shoulder, and the boss turned toward this new source of damage with the mechanical precision of something reassessing its threat table. For one second — one full second — its back was to Dani.

  She didn't waste it.

  The fight developed a rhythm that Jamie hadn't planned but recognized the moment it emerged. Dani held the Warden's attention through aggression — she was the loudest, the most physical, the person the boss couldn't ignore because ignoring her meant getting hit. Gregory and Jamie worked the flanks, trading disruptions — a thrown dagger clang, a spell from an unexpected angle, anything that caused the targeting to stutter for the fraction of a second that let Dani or the other flanker land a clean shot. Voss healed from the back, his staff pulsing with green light each time Dani took a hit that made the rest of them wince.

  It was working. Slowly, expensively, but working. The Warden's armor was showing new marks. Its movements had a hitch they hadn't had at the start — something in the leg joint, the knee, where Dani had been targeting after Jamie pointed out that the plate covered the torso but not the legs.

  "The armor is the part someone designed to protect it," he'd told her between exchanges. "The legs are the part someone forgot."

  "Or left open on purpose," Gregory had added, from the other side.

  "Either way, it's a better target than the part that's built to be hit."

  Jamie was sweating. Not from exertion — from focus. The sustained concentration of tracking every angle simultaneously, of watching the Warden's position and Dani's position and Gregory's position and the cooldown on his dagger throws and the rhythm of Voss's healing pulses and the dozen small variables that determined, at any given second, whether the next exchange would go well or badly. He was managing information. He was doing what he did in every group project he'd ever been part of — seeing the whole board, moving the pieces, making sure the people with the skills were in the position to use them.

  He was also, he realized, enjoying himself.

  Not the appropriate emotion for a boss fight in a game he was theoretically just playtesting. But there it was. The specific pleasure of working a system, of finding the angles, of watching a strategy he'd improvised in real time produce results he could measure.

  He wondered, briefly, if this was how MARA felt. Watching systems. Finding patterns. The satisfaction of seeing a design work.

  He filed the thought away. It would be useful later.

  The Warden was hurt.

  Jamie could see it in the movement — the hitch in the knee had become a limp, the halberd sweeps had lost their mechanical consistency, the damaged plate was cracked in three new places. Dani had blood on her avatar's arm from a slash she'd taken across the forearm, which Voss had healed but which had left her fighting more carefully, more aware of the cost. Gregory had taken a shield bash that knocked him flat and left him casting from one knee until his breath came back. Jamie had a bruise across his ribs from a backswing he'd misjudged — his own fault, too slow on the retreat, the dagger's short range demanding closer positioning than he liked.

  But the Warden was worse off than any of them. It was on one good leg. Its halberd arm was slower. The skull still tracked Dani with the same relentless focus, but the body beneath it was failing.

  "We're close," Jamie said. "One more push. Gregory, can you hit the knee again?"

  "I've been saving something," Gregory said, and the tone in his voice — the quiet satisfaction of a teacher who had been reading ahead — made Jamie suddenly very curious about what the Mage spell list contained at tutorial level.

  Then the Warden planted its feet.

  Both boots flat on the stone. Weight centered. Halberd drawn back to full reach. The skull tilted upward — not at Dani, not at any of them. At the ceiling. At something only it could see.

  A sound rolled through the chamber. Low. Resonant. Not a voice — a vibration, a frequency Jamie felt in his teeth before he heard it with his ears. It was the sound of something calling. Something summoning.

  The torches flickered.

  Voss went white.

  "No," he said. The word was barely audible. "That's not — that can't—"

  From the archways on both sides of the chamber, a sound. Bone on stone. Footsteps. Multiple. The dry, rhythmic scrape of things moving in formation.

  Jamie looked at the archways. He looked at the Warden. He looked at Voss, whose face had lost every trace of the careful developer composure he'd been maintaining since the fight began and was now showing something raw and unfiltered and afraid.

  "Doc," Jamie said. "What is that."

  Voss didn't answer. He was staring at the Warden with the expression of a man watching something impossible happen in a system he built.

  The footsteps grew louder.

  Dani backed away from the Warden, sword up, eyes on the archways. "Guys? What's happening?"

  Gregory had lowered his staff. He was looking at Voss. Reading his face the way a teacher reads a classroom — not the words, the atmosphere. Whatever he found there made him take a step backward.

  The Warden held its pose. Halberd raised. Skull tilted toward the ceiling. The resonance continued — deep, insistent, the sound of a command being issued in a frequency below speech.

  Jamie stood in the middle of the chamber and felt, for the first time since loading into the tutorial, genuinely uncertain about what was going to happen next.

  He didn't like the feeling. He also recognized, in the part of himself that was always calculating, that not knowing was the first honest thing this game had offered him.

  The archways darkened with movement.