Levi Morrison, Secret Seeker Unassigned Levels: 0 Primary Class: Tamer Tamer Level: 6 Subclass: None Minions: 4/4 Strength: 1 Psyche: 2 Spirit: 3 Health

141/141 Mana

61/61 Stamina

111/111 Health Regen

2 /minute Mana Regen

3 /minute Stamina Regen

4 /minute Mana Ping Tier: 1 Cost: 10 mana Fire an unfocused burst of mana in all directions, returning location details about mana entities nearby. Tame Tier: 1 Cost: 5 mana

5 stamina Attempt to convert a creature into a minion. Can only be used on creatures with less than 5% health remaining. Mana Push Tier: 1 Cost: (variable) mana Fire a focused burst of mana at a targeted location. Revive Tier: 1 Cost: 50 mana Restore one [Dead] minion to life at 10% of its maximum health Pack Leader Tier: 2 Cost: None (Passive) Increases minion slots by 1 every 4th level.

“Is the treasure that important?” Gordon asked as he drove them out of the neighborhood.

Levi looked up from reviewing his stats. “Yes. Map treasures are the kind of thing that don’t get found often, and when they do they’re always something rare and valuable at the least, and potentially incomparably powerful. The two pieces I already have won’t be any use without the third, and theirs won’t be any good without mine. We need to work together. Either I can trade them my pieces and leave the search to them, or convince them to give me theirs.”

Levi also looked forward to being able to trade some of his useless items and potentially get some materials he’d need. He didn’t have any elixir water or the proper ingredients, but he knew how to create restoratives that would be much more powerful than those a level 1 dungeon could provide. Even if his elixir crafting skills would be considered weak to a level 70, they’d be enough to take a level 10 from the brink of death to full health in a moment.

Dungeons had started appearing a few months earlier, but all he knew from the first time around was that some had been taken over for research purposes by governments and their existence hushed up for as long as possible. The demon invasion had blown any attempts at secrecy, and the truth came out pretty quickly after that, but he’d not imagined that there would be whole online communities dedicated to dungeon delving.

Once they’d traveled a safe distance from the house so they wouldn’t be arrested for trespassing or loitering, Gordon pulled into a parking lot. He toyed with his phone for a few minutes, then retrieved his laptop and typed for a minute before handing it to Levi. His documents sat open waiting for him, but that wasn’t what he was after this time.

“You should have full internet access,” Gordon told him. “You mind if I find someplace to eat? I could really use a burger right about now.”

Levi glanced up. “Sure. Will this still work while you’re gone?”

“I’ll leave the phone.” He looked like he was about to say something more, then pressed his lips together instead and backed out of the parking lot.

Levi spent a few minutes re-familiarizing himself with internet functionality, his old instincts coming through clearly. Next he searched for ‘RL Game doom raiders triple x’ and after several pages of unrelated results eventually found a clearly homemade site with a badly photoshopped banner, depicting Tom Arlon and a dozen other people in various state of cosplay mixed with dungeon equipment Levi recognized immediately. He couldn’t help but smile. They’d been fighting dungeons already, and pretty seriously from the looks of it.

No wonder the dungeon in Tom’s yard had been level 2. With so many of them running through it, he was surprised it wasn’t higher. They’d probably been skipping bosses. He'd need to start circulating info about Essence prevention, now that he'd been so dramatically reminded of the necessity, but at least their decision showed wisdom in the short term. Maybe his recruitment attempts wouldn’t be as much of an uphill battle as he’d feared.

‘Doom Raiders XXX’, declared the banner, the professionalism of the font immediately spoiled by various gamer slang exclamations tilted and skewed, scattered haphazardly across the graphic as though scrawled by graffiti with strangely perfect lettering.

Apart from the header and several more pictures of the individuals in the group, the site contained very little in the way of content. There was nothing to indicate that it was anything but a group of cosplayers doing photo-shoots.

‘RL game forums’ brought up so many unrelated results that he couldn’t begin to guess where this particular subculture’s hangout was located. A group of gamers based around a normal game looked very similar to a group of gamers based around fighting dungeon creatures in their backyards.

But his internet searching instincts were coming back, and he reverse searched each of the images from the Doom Raiders XXX site. Two showed up various other places, including a small forum which, despite its name having nothing searchable for related keywords, was titled ‘RL GAME’ and included a few hundred people discussing the dungeons.

They even had their own wiki already started.

Levi smiled at the sparse and often inaccurate information they were sharing, but it was certainly more than he’d hoped for when he arrived in the past.

He created an account for both the forum and wiki. The forum application process was long and convoluted, but he was grudgingly impressed by their ability to weed out the people who hadn’t actually Awakened or encountered a dungeon. He answered those questions with ease, but some of the other requirements were more of a stretch. Fortunately, many were reliant on commonly available memes or game information which could be found by searching the internet.

Once he was finally allowed to actually post, he located the trade forum and made a request for a Seed Fragment in trade. In keeping with their formatting guide, he listed his available resources - Destruction tokens, basic wand, orb, staff, and weather stones. He kept the Beast token, since he suspected it might be necessary for the Summoner evolution, and retained ingredients that could be used for restoratives since he knew he could make use of them in future.

While Gordon parked at a diner Levi delved deeper into the maze of forum posts and wiki pages. The RL Game guilds each had their own private forum section, but he sent a request to Doom Raiders XXX to join their guild. There wasn’t a ‘request chat access’ option and he had no way of guessing their usernames to message them directly.

Then he set about transferring his documents to the wiki, converting it into their formatting taking the bulk of the time. He checked back on his forum post a few times, but apart from people asking if he'd accept anything else in trade instead of the Seed Fragment they'd never heard of, it was quiet and unhelpful.

He continued adding information to the pages they already had and creating new pages they didn't. He wrote an overview of each dungeon type, the environmental challenges and types of enemies he knew of.

Destruction dungeons he knew well enough to detail everything from the level 1 gremlins to the level 120 behemoths that would onehit even a well prepared fighter. Other dungeons, his knowledge was patchier. Between 60% and 80% of all dungeons were Destruction type, and the others were split between the alternative specialty varieties.

Levi's understanding of the remaining types could be important at high levels but not enough to predict them at this level. Especially after encountering a Soul-Seeker already in the level 1 Control dungeon, all his preconceptions about what would be normal at this level were clearly woefully inadequate. His understanding mostly came from general knowledge, not personal experience.

He'd run a handful of dungeons of most types over the years, but never at such a low level, and the vast bulk of his time fighting had been against demons, not dungeons. They were an occasional thing, when they had time and space to breathe between waves of demons, if they could get enough people together, and thought the risk and inevitable loss of life was worth the experience gained.

It may be near-suicidal to run a dungeon forty levels above you, but it certainly did more to increase their power than they could ever hope to manage on their own.

His phone rang, interrupting with music that filled his heart with an ache of longing, long-buried memories flooding back and bringing tears to his eyes. He should ignore it. He should stay focused on this, not get dragged back into everyday life, not forget his purpose and indulge in what he had until it was too late.

But he glanced down at the phone, and Irene's icon smiling at him broke his fragile resolve. He pressed accept.

"Hey, beautiful," he said, voice coming out hoarse. "How are you?"