By the time the youngest guild members started leaving for home, they’d finally moved on from basic leveling and classes - with a few detours to specifics about his minions, particularly Becca - to dungeon mechanics.

“It’s important to know your strength before you go into a boss room, since it’ll seal you in and it’s easy to lose a whole group if you’re not ready. But it’s also important to not let bosses build up too much, or they’ll be almost unstoppable. If you leave a dungeon for an entire threshold without clearing its boss, its Essence will be strong enough to escape the dungeon entirely, and that’s a recipe for disaster.”

“How can we tell if we’re ready?”

“How about this: You guys go ahead and clear the rest of this one, and I’ll observe. I should be able to give you some pointers.”

Levi observed the group as they made their way slowly through the dungeon, and he couldn’t help but frown at the ineffectiveness of their fighting. They made Gordon’s wild flailing look purposeful and precise.

None of them was using their mana-empowered weapons properly, activating them at strange times and not for long enough, flickering unsteadily as they fought, almost as though the power were an aesthetic effect rather than a damaging one.

Here as with system manipulation, he had vastly underestimated the advantage he possessed. He’d been going about all this time as though he were trying to catch up to the people who’d Awakened months before him, but… there was a reason their dungeons were spawning Essences, yet the whole guild was still lower level in months than Levi was in a week.

They had no idea what they were doing. Yes, they killed the gremlins. Yes, they cleared the dungeon - most of it, anyway, and had the intelligence to not trap their unprepared selves in the boss room - but if left to their own devices they would be no better prepared for the invasion than they were for fighting a boss.

They were clearly used to fighting as a group, even if their individual skill was... well, about what you'd expect from a group of gamers playing around in dungeons for a month or so. The coordination of their attack patterns and the clear communication they shouted across the room, with codes and well-defined movements, was a clear artifact of their years of prior experience working together.

But for a group this large with that level of coordination to take this long against gremlins and scarabs? It was embarrassing.

Levi found himself liking them, appreciating the casual banter they threw about as they fought once they got over the initial nervousness of having someone observing.

They could be an excellent unit. He wished he could stay here, set up shop and build a core of capable fighters around this hapless group.

They were still low enough level to use the internet, and probably vastly better connected with the places people like this congregated. He could teach them, and they could get the word out wide, spread his information far faster and better than he himself ever could. He didn’t know where to start; they would know all the best forums or chatrooms by instinct.

They could help each other.

But he knew that every excuse he made to put off the meeting with Irene, the longer he stayed away, the harder it would be to actually follow through. And now he couldn’t even call her to reassure her. Not to mention that if he got too far ahead of his family, by the time they met his presence would cripple their own leveling, rather than buoying it.

If he kept letting fear control him, if he refused to face the past, sooner or later the future would be set in stone.

When at last they reached the door to the boss room, the group turned to Levi questioningly. He almost laughed when he thought of how they'd expected the day to go - under normal circumstances, this would be where they stood in judgment over him, assessing his progress and judging whether he deserved to join their guild. Instead, he'd become the teacher and they the students looking for his approval.

"Good coordination, I like it. You look like you've been learning fighting from bad movies, but I can't fault your enthusiasm. But one thing I noticed… do any of you have control over your mana and stamina flow?"

Shrugs, uncertain looks, and head shakes were all he got in response, showing yet another basic he'd taken for granted that he had to figure out how to teach from the ground up.

Teaching control over mana, stamina (and health, though he wasn't going to touch that topic yet, it was way too easy to misuse and cripple yourself) wasn't as simple as he'd assumed. For Levi, he'd been doing it for so long it felt natural. Like forming a fist, or turning his head. It was just a thing he did. But how did you explain to someone who didn't even know they had a hand how to form it into a fist?

He ended up channeling his own drill instructor, who had brutally demanded results - and got them. He half wished Gordon were here so he could run them all through the training exercises at the same time, but he also thought it a good idea to keep Gordon a bit aloof from the others. Just to maintain his mystique.

"There are five of us, plus the minions. We're going into the boss room, all of us. I'll stay back and observe until you manage to activate your manablades. Or manabow, in the case of the rangers."

"You want us to go into a level 2 boss room?” Laurence asked anxiously. “With only half our team?"

"Yes. Because I'll be there. My team has been clearing bosses all week, this one included. It won't be a problem, and it'll be a good chance to put you all under pressure." Levi grinned. "As soon as you activate your weapon and keep it active, I'll come to your defence."

"What if I can't activate it?" one of the older women asked, suddenly fearful. Rachel, level 3.

"Then you'll learn very quickly. That's the point of putting you under this kind of pressure. It's going to be do-or-die a lot from now on, best you get used to it when you still have me around."

As it turned out, do-or-die pressure was exactly what this group needed. They'd been treating it as a game for so long they'd nearly forgotten that their lives were at stake, taking it slow and casual. But now that Levi was there to push them to their limits, they fell into line very quickly.

He was astonished by how easily they adapted, in fact.

They quickly formed a strategy, and a formation, and attacked with complete focus. Coordination aside, though, they were still leaving openings that the boss exploited fully. Levi stayed back, letting Frosty prance around slowing the goblin with her frost breath but otherwise not interfering.

It was a spear-throwing type, this boss. A goblin that scampered around the room to dip its projectiles into the slow waterfalls of orange destructive goo that flowed down the walls in six places around the room, each forming a pool at the base. Each time it would stop, throw between three and six spears in quick succession, then run around the perimeter of the room cackling until it stopped at another pool.

Their initial strategy was simple, position someone at each pool to interrupt it before it could throw. Unfortunately, this didn’t work out, as it simply stabbed the spears into whoever was attempting to guard the pool and their inability to actually block or dodge meant they started losing health very quickly.

“Focus on your weapons,” Levi shouted. “Remember, the point isn’t for you to win, but to learn something.”

“Easy for you to say, standing and watching!”

“I’m not going to save you until you get your weapons glowing.”

Gremlin Two looked up at him anxiously, clearly unhappy with this declaration. He watched as the youngest man in the group, the level 4 ranger, tried to jump back from the boss’s close-range attack only for the boss to hurl the spear point-blank into his leg. He stumbled and toppled into the pool of corrosive with a scream and a splash, his health dropping fast and not slowing down.

“Help him!” shouted Rachel, leaving her post and running toward the ranger.

He crawled out of the pool, drenched and whimpering. Luckily his armor had taken the brunt of the damage, or he’d have been dead already.

The goblin cackled, readying another volley of spears.

Laurence’s sword lit up, corrosive-orange and steady. He ran at the boss with a yell, and Levi gestured for Cen to jump in. The two of them easily grabbed aggro away from the wounded man, and Rachel managed to pour a health elixir down his throat.

She glowered at Levi the whole time.

Levi only shook his head and gestured at Laurence. “That’s what we’re aiming for. Results. It does you no good to have me save you for no reason.”

Her sword flickered as she looked about ready to attack him herself.

“That! That feeling, hold onto it. Use it.”

She stared at Levi, then at the sword, then it gradually steadied and the glow grew stable.

“There, see? You can do it. Three to go.” Two jumped to her defence, knocking aside any attacks aimed in her direction.

The ranger’s health had stabilized as he flicked away the clinging corrosive, and now he staggered to his feet. He took a deep breath, then drew his manabow smoothly, the ice-blue glow lighting up his determined face.