6 hours later…

“So uh…” Darkshot spoke through the party interface. He was leaning up against the large dark oak double doors that lead into the boss chamber of the dungeon. Lina was down a nearby corridor hunting lone enemies that hadn’t been slain yet, either spiders or assassins. Darkshot had a lot of interface windows open in front of him, many of them were unrelated to The Shattered World. He glanced at the party status to see Rakkan at level 19, Aegis at level 13 now. Aegis’ hit points and stamina kept dipping and slowly going back up, whilst Rakkan’s health remained full but his stamina and mana bar remained nearly empty at all times.

“You got a second to talk, Aegis?” Darkshot asked.

“Uhgn.. I guess? What is it?” His voice was strained.

“Good, it’s about our exam tomorrow. I’ve been studying and I'm not quite sure I understand the bit on Nanocircuitry.” Darkshot asked.

“You’re going to make me help you study? Now?” Aegis replied annoyed.

“What? You said you had a sec. I’m stuck up here waiting for you guys, trying to make the most of my Simbox time.” Darkshot replied unashamed.

“You guys are students?” Rakkan asked, to which Aegis sighed.

“Ok fine, what’s your question.” Aegis reluctantly replied. Darkshot didn’t hold back and proceeded to bombard Aegis with questions on his upcoming exam. When the questions began to die down, Lina jumped in as well with a few questions herself. Unexpectedly, the grind session quickly turned into a study session.

Aegis and Rakkan were able to hold their own. Initially the waves of cultists that came at them through the doorway were tough and his resources were getting low, but Aegis eventually noticed that some of the cultists were hitting a lot less than the others - there were non-elite enemies mixed in with the elite ones, and he could tell Rakkan to let the non-elites block the doorway for longer periods of time to let his resources out-regenerate them.

It was tedious and repetitive, but Aegis couldn’t argue with the results. He was gaining experience much faster than the normal rate, and his skills and stats were all being improved significantly. His biggest gain was that shield mastery reached level 23, and his shadow resistance went up quickly to level 8.

Talking about exam topics was a nice distraction from the monotony of blocking attacks for multiple hours straight. He started feeling bad for Rakkan, he was in truth doing most of the work, and he had no interest in talking to them about their upcoming exams. Aegis got the impression that the player behind Rakkan was either much older, or much younger than them.

At the 8 hour mark is when the unthinkable occurred, the crowds in the corridor seemed to end, and a final Shadow Knight stood in front of the doorway. Aegis used his standard tactics to dodge the flail and block the sword, and once Rakkan finished it off, it went quiet. Absolute silence, save for the heavy breathing from the two of them.

“Did… we do it?” Aegis asked in disbelief, peering out of the doorway to look down the hall in either direction - it was empty. “Oh man, finally!” He cheered as he fell back against a wall, relieved. Rakkan smirked and leaned against a nearby wall as well. The burning oil trail behind them was on its last legs, and looking over it down the stairs they saw Luryala, the Dark Elf, was still laying on the ground unconscious.

“Guys, we did it! We cleared the entire floor! Finally! We’ll be able to meet up with you. You said the boss room has a staircase from the first floor to the second, right?” Aegis said to them excitedly.

“Y-yes!” Lina’s enthusiasm returned to her as she stopped hunting stragglers, returning to Darkshot’s side as he closed out his studying interface and got his bow ready. “Look for a set of large double doors. You guys can enter from the back and we’ll come in from the front at the same time.” Lina replied.

“Alright. Let’s hurry and find the way up.” Aegis said as he hopped over the dwindling flames to lift up the very light Luryala. Rakkan led the way out of the stairwell and the two began to explore the corridors of the 2nd floor. The hallways themselves were empty but they passed by numerous closed doors, opting not to try and peek inside them.

It took another 30 minutes of exploration, encountering minimal enemies wandering the halls, but eventually Rakkan and Aegis found the double doors that Lina had described. Rakkan cautiously pushed the doors open to confirm that a staircase leading up to the first level was behind it.

“We found the stairs up, you sure this is it?” Aegis asked as he and Rakkan tried to get a view of the top of the staircase, seeing that it led up into a large open room.

“I think so… let’s confirm.” Lina whispered, motioning Darkshot to step into the room through the doors. The two squeaked the double doors open as little as necessary to slip inside. The room was a large square shape with an elevated circular stone platform in the center and an ominous statue on the back wall of a nude female with long hair that covered her where necessary, her arm stretched out to the sky, and to the side of the statue was a staircase built into the back wall leading downward.

On the elevated platform was a single hooded figure sitting cross legged in the center of a magic circle etched into the stonework, the circle giving off a faint glow. The figure was humming and chanting something that they couldn’t hear clearly, but it didn’t sound english.

“Try shouting something, if Aegis can hear us, then they’re in the right place.” Lina whispered to Darkshot.

“Won’t that get the boss's attention?” Darkshot hesitated.

“He’s meditating, he probably won’t notice.” Lina replied.

“Probably? Why don’t you shout?” Darkshot asked.

“I’m a thief, I do more damage when the enemy doesn’t see me.” Lina replied.

“A likely story…” Darkshot grumbled. He opened his mouth while looking at the hooded figure in the middle of the room with [Boss] above its head, hesitated, then closed his mouth again and fiddled with his party interface. “Hey Aegis, Lina wants you to shout something so we know if we’re in the same room or not. We see the top of a staircase but we can’t see you yet.” Darkshot said, and as he did, Lina elbowed him.

“Don’t make Aegis do it, it’s dangerous!” Lina grumbled at Darkshot.

“What? So why is it okay for me to do it then? He’s level 13 now and has a shield.” Darkshot growled back at her. She didn’t have a good response to this so instead pouted at him angrily.

“What should I shout?” Aegis asked back through the interface as he and Rakkan stepped onto the first few stairs and Aegis gently set down Luryala.

“I dunno, anything.” Darkshot shrugged.

“Spaghetti!” Aegis shouted as loud as he could, his voice echoed off the stairwell walls until it reached the room above where Darkshot and Lina clearly heard him, as did the boss who stopped chanting and slowly stood up from his meditation, glaring angrily at the only visible player in the room - Darkshot. Lina had quickly dove from the front of the doors to hide in one of the dark corners of the room, which Darkshot didn’t notice until the boss’s eyes began to glow red and glare at him.

“Seriously? But I didn’t even do anything? Aegis, it worked, it's the right room, hurry your ass up here!” Darkshot shouted angrily, this time without using the interface so that Rakkan and Aegis could hear his voice carry through the room and down the stairs.

Aegis was on his last reinforced copper shield now, having gone through the others while grinding, but he fastened it to his arm and rushed up the stairs alongside Rakkan. When they reached the top, Aegis was surprised to see the boss was so small. Up until this point he’d only fought a giant spider and a giant boar as bosses, but the cultist leader was just a regular sized human.

As he rushed towards Darkshot, the boss’s hood fell back revealing a bald man’s head covered with strange markings, glowing red eyes, and he materialized a pair of longswords in both of his hands - the swords made purely out of an unstable looking dark shadowy material. Darkshot tried a few pinning shots, but it didn’t work, so instead he started sprinting around the room towards Aegis.

“Get his ass off of me!” Darkshot demanded, and Aegis responded by rushing forward to stand between the two, blocking a set of attacks from the bosses shadow blades.

You take 46 Shadow Damage.

You take 41 Shadow Damage.

Seeing the damage numbers through his Brace, it felt surprisingly weak. Aegis couldn’t help but smile to himself. The past few hours of grinding were paying off, he felt that he’d easily be able to handle tanking this boss, especially with the help of the manacles. His Shadow Resistance, Leather Armor Proficiency, Shield Mastery, Minor heal, and his base stats were all now abnormally high for his level of 13, and the level itself was above what Aegis believed the dungeon to be.

It felt good, for the first time he experienced being overpowered, albeit against an NPC that was presumably lower level than him. At no point did he feel remotely threatened by the boss as the encounter went on, and just as he had improved, Aegis noticed Rakkan hitting the boss with his battleaxe and longsword much harder than he had been hitting before. He flanked around the back of the cult leader with Lina, and the two competing for who could deal the most damage, but it was clear that Rakkan was winning.

Darkshot joined in too, firing in the distance, and with steady tanking and damage, the boss was showing weakness fairly quickly. He switched from using swords to a flail, to blasting Aegis with shadow magic, but it was all things that Aegis had seen the other cultists do for the past few hours, and he was able to brace the attacks with ease while healing himself as often as possible to maintain the bosses aggression.

After a few minutes of standard fighting, the boss began to glow red and enraged, growing larger in size as he began to pulse out waves of shadow energy periodically, blasting Rakkan, Aegis, and Lina all with damage.

“Just keep attacking and kill him as fast as possible, I think I can heal through it!” Aegis encouraged them. They listened and continued their onslaught of attacks as all three of them took roughly 100 points of shadow damage every few seconds.

Darkshot was far enough away that it wasn’t hitting him, but Aegis was forced to expend a lot of his mana to keep all three of them topped off, and eventually he got to the point where he could only heal 2 more times, and the boss didn’t go down.

“Uh, okay nevermind. Guys, get out of the damage range once you get too low, I can’t heal you anymore - I’ve got to use the rest of the mana on myself.” Aegis shouted. Lina and Rakkan nodded, they stayed in until they were both just barely above 100 health remaining, and just as they were preparing to retreat away from the boss, he cried out in pain, dropping to his knees. He shouted a few incoherent words in anger as he crawled towards the center of the magic circle, reaching out helplessly to the large female statue that towered above him before collapsing on the ground.

Valrune the Sufferer slain!

You gain 2616 Experience!

You gain 150 Favor of Eirene.

“Phew, that looked rough.” Darkshot said as the message popped up, he was safely sitting in the back at full health. Everyone else threw him a nasty stare as their health bars dangled in the red. “I mean, good job guys. You got really tanky really fast Aegis.” Darkshot lowered his head.

“It’s a bit weird how easy it was…” Lina commented as she walked over to the collapsed Valrune, seeing a single blue orb had rolled out of him. It cracked open to reveal a scroll casing.

“What is it?” Aegis asked excitedly as Lina picked it up and opened the case, everyone watching her curiously as she unrolled the parchment.

“It’s unidentified, the item card doesn’t tell me what it is…” Lina mumbled as she unrolled it and looked at the parchment. “It’s not sealed magically - the reason it's unidentified is the language. Does anyone speak the Dark Elf language by chance?” Lina looked up from the parchment to the others, though she had an expression on her face that said she didn’t expect anyone to say yes. Aegis and Rakkan both looked at each other and Rakkan gave a nod, making his way to the staircase to retrieve Luryala.

“The girl we saved was a Dark Elf, so she’ll probably be able to read it.” Aegis explained to the others.

“That’s convenient…” Darkshot shrugged. “Hey, that means we just cleared our first dungeon right? What a badass way to kick off your livestream. How’s the status with it?” Darkshot asked excitedly. Aegis opened his menu quickly to see the livestreaming button was now enabled as a member of the Fanta-see Network, and he was able to turn it on.

“Uh, looks like it’s approved. I can start streaming now.”

“You should do it!” Darkshot urged him, meanwhile Lina was busy investigating the spell circle in the center of the room suspiciously, having put the scroll in her inventory.

“Really? Right now? I’m not really ready…” Aegis hesitated.

“Shinji said they'd set up stuff first anyway. And he wants you to just play as normal, you don’t need to do anything special. C’mon! No, wait!” Darkshot shouted as he quickly tried to fix his hair. “Ok, now, I’m ready.” Aegis sighed as he reluctantly pressed the livestream on button. Immediately the livestream icon appeared above his head as he got several messages and icons in the top right of his peripheral vision. There was a camera icon with the words ‘Live’ next to it, the text fading after a few seconds, then there was a microphone icon, and an icon of two microphones crossing over each other, and an icon of a person’s head labeled ‘first person view’.

“Hey there Eli, Aegis is it now? Not a bad name.” A familiar female voice entered his head, almost as if she was standing beside him.

“Hae-won?” Aegis asked.

“Yup, just got back in the office 15 minutes ago. Let me walk you through streaming a bit. As we said, I’ll be narrating you and Shinji will handle the editing, he’s already working on your dungeon clearing footage - good stuff. The most popular view for streaming is third person, so let’s start by having you press the little head icon to switch out of first person.” Hae-won sounded very professional, completely different than how she spoke in person. Aegis complied by pressing the head icon and it switched to that of a full bodied person.

“Nothing happened except the icon changed…” Aegis commented.

“Yup, that’s fine. It doesn’t change anything for you, but it switches the viewing perspective of your viewers so they can see you as though there’s a camera floating around you nearby - Shinji will be in control of the angle. Whereas first person means that your viewers will only see exactly what you see.” Hae-won replied. “If you want to turn off your stream, hit the red live streaming icon, it will remain on the top of your screen permanently from now on. It has two settings. Red camera means live streaming, if you press it once it’ll swap to a gray camera which means playback recording, and if you press it again it will cross it out - that means anything you do won’t be saved or shared in any way. Use that if you are doing something you don’t want us to use at all, got it?”

“Got it.” Aegis replied. It was clear to him Darkshot could hear only one side of the conversation but seemed to be getting more and more excited with anticipation.

“The microphone icon is muting your sound, it has multiple settings as well. The red means its picking up all sound, grey means its picking up only the game audio and yourself and not other players nearby, this is good to prevent stream snipers from putting your stream in danger by shouting vulgar things. You currently have the parental filter on, if you ever want to stream with it off we’ll need to go over some more rules.” Hae-won continued.

“I don’t plan on turning it off.” Aegis rolled his eyes.

“Good. Lastly is the crossed microphones, that is for communicating with me and doing interviewers. The icon is a special exception to the rule of communicating outside of the game to allow you to communicate exclusively with me or other people on our network. Because of that, it’s extremely limited to what we’re allowed to discuss. For example, I am not allowed to tell you how to fight certain monsters you are encountering without risking you being banned for cheating. I’m only allowed to ask you interview-like questions, as would be any other interviewers you speak to.

When it's on, you’ll be able to hear me narrating and commentating on your stream, or giving you notifications of viewer chat messages and questions from them that you can respond to in real time. You can also use it for technical issues, but otherwise if you press it, it will mute communications with me. Understand everything so far?”

“Yup.”

“That’s about it. Your livestream feed is coming directly to our network, so right now you are not being broadcasted to anywhere but our studio. Do you have any questions, or are you ready to officially go live to the world?” Hae-won asked with enthusiasm.

“I… guess I’m ready?” Aegis shrugged reluctantly, to which Darkshot gave him a thumbs up.

“Okay, have fun! You can mute me so I don’t bother you, and if you need anything, just unmute.” Hae-won replied.

“Gotcha. Thanks.” Aegis replied as he hit the crossed microphone icon so that he couldn’t hear her anymore.

“So, are you live now?” Darkshot asked excitedly.

“Yep.” Aegis sighed, anticipating something ridiculous.

“Hello.” Darkshot suddenly spoke with a deeper voice. “My name is Darkshot… and I-”

“Darkshot, check the door.” Lina shouted urgently, interrupting him. He threw her a nasty glare before grumbling something incoherent and heading to the double doors that they’d used to enter the room.

At that same moment, Rakkan returned to the top of the stairs holding Luryala, but he caught sight of the icon above Aegis’ head.

“Aegis. You’re a livestreamer?” Rakkan spoke coldly.

“Aheh. Yeah, kind of, I guess. First time.” Aegis replied reluctantly, he was more curious about what was happening with the door as Darkshot tried to push it open, but it wouldn’t budge.

“Everything we’ve done together, was it being recorded?” Rakkan asked.

“Yeah, sorry, I should have given you a heads up. I can tell the guys to not use the footage if you want.” Aegis replied, glancing at Rakkan to see his head lowered as he gently set Luryala on the ground.

“The door won’t open, it’s sealed shut.” Darkshot shouted across the room to Lina.

“Not good. That means that the-” Lina’s sentence was interrupted as two messages popped up in front of Aegis’ eyes.

Rakkan has left your party.

Party Member Lina has been slain.