It was reminiscent of times long past.

Even early on, I wasn’t great at making friends, but that didn’t stop my parents from trying. There was a never-ending series of play dates in my early childhood. Said encounters eventually gravitated from meeting schoolmates at McDonald's to hours spent attempting to clear a particularly difficult game, but there was a golden period during the resurgence of DND.

For a while it was just me and the DM—Brandon Hew, the son of one of my mother’s finance friends. He looked every bit like you’d expect, acne, glasses too small for his face, and the slightest whisper of a lisp that only revealed itself when he was stressed. But god-damn, could he tell a story.

I pulled Daph into it, Daph pulled one of her friends, and soon enough we had a group.

Thing was, Brandon wasn’t content to just let us describe what we were doing. He wanted us to act it out. The better we acted, and the more clever our solution, the more Brandon would fudge rolls in our favor.

And, yeah, looking back on it now, you’re right. It was pretty cringeworthy. LARPing before we knew what LARPing was.

But those shared moments—no more than a few minutes per multi-hour sessions—where strategy, group storytelling, and luck all melded together in a perfect moment are memories I still cherished.

Which should be your first warning sign that you’re getting attached. tactlessly cut through the nostalgia.

I had no intention of staying with this group long term. It wasn’t a good fit, and while the scrappy class wasn’t hard to emulate while it was low level, that would only grow harder as the group gained experience. It would be a lot easier to dismiss them out of hand if they were incompetent. But, they weren’t. Not in the slightest.

It was approaching late evening, though within the instance, the sky and lighting all appeared to be midday.

Sae and Nick were sparring further in. Sae was a which was precisely what you’d expect, a mage with less direct firepower and a focus on buffs and debuffs. Nick wasn’t breaking a sweat, but that was an aspect of his class. He was a From the skills and feats he described, the class was almost broken. He had—to my shock—foregone entirely, instead taking a laundry list of cheaper, class-specific perks tailored to one purpose: to be able to take on enemies far above his level and still stand a fighting chance.

There was something else to it. Some sort of pact or ethos he had to adhere to, the consequences of not doing so supposedly severe enough to cause him to lose access to certain feats permanently. According to Nick, they were all things he would have done anyway.

I was recovering from a spar with Nick in a poolside reclining chair, watching Jinny cast a ranged crystal spell, over and over again. A violet blue cloud of magic coalesced into two solid projectiles. She was firing them in a pattern. Careful aim, then one, then another right after. One-two, one-two, one-two.

“How did you end up with Nick?” I asked, wording intentionally double-edged.

Jinny’s surprised expression lasted less than a second, but it was there, confirming what I already knew. “We were hanging out when the meteor hit.”

“Oh?” I asked, hoping she’d provide more details.

“It’s kind of a funny story. I’ve been… having a hard time over the last few months. It’s not something I’ve advertised. I wanted to avoid making things worse, you know, with rumors and such. But…” She trailed off.

“It’s been lonely,” I finished for her.

She nodded. “That and other things.” Jinny smiled as she recalled the memory. “Somehow, Nick figured it out. Despite everything else he was dealing with that day, he asked me if I wanted to fuck off from school early and get ice-cream.”

Dumbfounded, I remembered the conversation we’d had that day. How I’d told him that Talmont wouldn’t be focused on him much longer, and that Jinny would soon take his place in the public ire.

He was supposed to stay off the radar.

“And after?” I asked. “You guys started in the same place, and I’m assuming it was dangerous. What made you want to keep going?”

Jinny shook her head. “It’s hard to explain. I’ve… never been naturally talented at anything. There are things I’m good at, But I had to work my ass off to get there. But when Nick and I were down in those tunnels, fighting for our lives—I couldn’t get over how intuitive it was. It was like magic had always been a part of me, and ignoring it would be harder than forgetting how to breathe.”

I couldn’t help but contrast her experience with my own, incredibly awkward initial steps, and feel slightly jealous.

Jinny raised her staff and fired two more shots into the mannequin target, in the same one-two pattern.

“What’s with the double-tap?” I asked.

“You have Awareness, right?” Jinny shot me a sly smile.

“Uh.” Suddenly, it was very tempting to deny it, even though I’d gone over my bogus Page sheet with all three of them less than an hour ago. “Maybe?”

“Go stand down-range, and I’ll show you.”

“Pretty sure ‘Go stand down-range’ might be the worst life advice I’ve ever heard.”

Jinny smiled innocently. “Come on, please? I won’t fire them at full power, it’ll give us a way to test out that fancy armor of yours, and it’ll also demonstrate something important.”

Unable to find a hole in her logic—it was somewhat uncanny how quickly she’d locked on to how to persuade me—I reluctantly stood, swiping through the menus and equipping my armor. I had to remind myself to make the physical motions other Users did while I was around them. From every other example I’d witnessed, Ordinator was potentially the only class that could operate the system menus entirely mentally. It was possible that the others simply hadn’t figured it out yet, but far less likely.

I’d gone back and forth on whether to show them the armor. The would supposedly obscure anything I was wearing, as well as identifying details such as height and voice. In the end it came down to practicality—the awkward position it would put me in if I revealed it, versus going in under-equipped and potentially dying.

Nick knowing me and understanding how I operated gave me cover in that regard. When I floated him a naturally vague story about taking a few odd jobs for a User in exchange for the Selve I used to purchase my armor, his only misgiving was a throwaway complaint about having to sell back the basic armor he’d bought for me.

Instead, he gave me a hand-me-down weapon. The first thing he’d looted since the game began, a rare saber imbued with light-magic.

It was strange to see this side of Nick. In my mind, we’d only become friends because of his disadvantaged state, and if he ever recovered—socially, physically, or both—that friendship would likely end. Only, I was wrong. He wasn’t disadvantaged anymore. And not only were we still friends, he was actively setting out to raise me up with him.

I strode downrange of Jinny, trying not to let my trepidation show. I crossed my arms, so my hands covered a particularly vital target, and felt my cheeks redden as Jinny laughed.

“Don’t worry. I’ll aim for center mass.”

“That supposed to make me feel better?” I muttered. Then, louder, I called out. “Ready!”

There was a glowing screech as a crystal was summoned mid-air, floating above Jinny’s staff.

The first shot flared towards me, blisteringly fast, seeming to heat the surrounding air. screamed, telling me to drop low and move to the right.

I did.

And then I took the second shot directly in the chest. An audible “oof,” left my lips. My armor resisted the magic, but it still felt like taking a haymaker directly to the solar plexus. More interesting was how had only warned me of the first shot, not the second.

I stared up at the blue-sky, suddenly on my back in the grass.

“It took a while working with Sae to get the timing right,” Jinny called across the distance. “If you fire the shots too close together, the feat recognizes it as a single attack and predicts accordingly. If they’re too far apart, same issue, only it’s registering two attacks instead of one.”

That was incredibly valuable information. I’d grown increasingly reliant on the feat ever since I’d bought it. If I’d continued unaware, it would have been easy to be blindsided by a crafty User.

One more problem on my ever-growing list of pitfalls to watch out for.

I pulled myself up, not bothering to brush the grass and dirt from my armor. This was the perfect opportunity to practice.

“Hit me again.”

/////

A few hours later, I could reliably dodge the second hit. It was tricky—I had to work against taking an extra second to watch for where the follow-up was going to hit, instead of just immediately throwing myself in the direction the feat prompted.

“So,” Nick said, glancing at all three of us. “I think we have a general idea of how this will work. I’ll be at the front, drawing initial attention and diverting big hitters. Sae, I know you want to be at the center of it all and use your contact spells, but you’re squishy. Try to stick to buffs and support me from a distance. Jinny—just go with your usual. Rain down hell.” He looked at me. “Matt, you’re the lowest ranking level, so don’t get bogged down. Hit-and-run. Harass, try to land a critical hit if you can— is fantastic for that— then run like hell back to me if you pull anything too big to handle. I’ll be focusing on protecting Jinny as she’s our main damage, so try to stay close to Sae in case she bites off more than she can chew.”

I blinked. “Fine, but I thought you wanted me as the strategy guy.”

Nick waved the comment away. “That’s just the default marching order for the basic stuff. If we run into a situation that’s in any way abnormal, or if you see something, I want you to back off and use the text chat.”

“Why text chat?” Sae asked. She’d run out of water a few minutes ago and had taken to chewing ice.

“Because Jinny and I have been talking, and we’re pretty sure some monsters can understand us.” Nick chewed his lip grimly. “Better to play it safe until we know for sure.”

I raised an eyebrow. I couldn’t say anything to that effect, but that had certainly been the case in my experience. Every creature beside the gnolls had some capacity for human speech, be it mental or verbal. “Fine by me.”

Jinny stretched her arms above her head. “We should sleep soon. I’m beat.”

“I’m literally beat,” Sae grumbled.

“Guest room’s already set up for you, Matt.” Nick said, as if he’d read my mind.

“What time are we heading out?” I asked.

“As early as possible,” Nick rose from the couch. “I want to be able to double-back a few times, make sure no one follows us to the tunnels.”

“Okay,” I said. But in truth, I wasn’t willing to leave the countermeasures entirely up to Matt. Some time later, after I was set up in a guest room that was likely larger than our entire apartment, I pulled up the system screen and sent a message.