Kyle lay awake in the early hours of the morning. He had fallen asleep soon after he went to bed, but woke up around 2:00 AM and had been tossing and turning ever since. It was now almost 5:00, and he still showed no signs of falling back to sleep. At this point it might not even be worth it, since they were supposed to be ready to leave by 8:00.

Every time Kyle tried closing his eyes he kept remembering the last time he saw his dad.

Right before he went into a level two dungeon.

At the time, Kyle hadn’t been worried. After all, if anyone would come out, it would be his dad.

Instead, his dad was the only one who didn’t come out.

So Kyle lay awake in bed, eyes wide open.

It didn’t help that is wasn’t his bed. This bed belonged to someone else. It belonged to the person who had been living his life as Kyle Anders.

Kyle’s mom had disappeared when he was younger. She left him with Carl and Lisa while she said she was going to do some shopping and never returned.

Kyle was three.

Kyle’s aunt and uncle raised him until he was five while his dad was still on tour with the army. When his dad came back, he raised Kyle by himself until Kyle turned eleven when they then moved in with his aunt and uncle and Kyle’s dad joined the bounty hunting group his uncle was part of.

Kyle loved his aunt and uncle and Cousin Mickey, but his dad was a superman in his mind. With him gone… The world felt a lot grayer.

But Kyle did still have family, and Kyle’s dad didn’t raise someone who couldn’t go on without him.

It was just so much harder.

So Kyle lay awake in bed, sure in his conviction of entering the level two dungeon and growing stronger. Strong enough where he didn’t have to worry that someone wouldn’t come back.

Kyle eventually got up and started to work out. It didn’t make much of a difference when just one more point of physical power could make him able to life fifty more pounds, but the repetition was comforting. Kyle did the workout routine that his dad had designed. It hadn’t made his dad go bald, but Kyle was sure there was no better set of exercises.

Kyle worked out without rest until around 7:00, when he hopped in the shower. He always jumped in when it was still cold, and then let it warm him up.

By the time Kyle got out of the shower there was no trace of another sleepless night. The only sign something was amiss was when Sarah came out of her room, Kyle grabbed her hand and squeezed it for a good five seconds before letting go.

Sarah squeezed his hand back before she let go continued to get ready.

Walt nearly made them miss their scheduled departure date, which didn’t really need to be a set time, but Sarah insisted, and the leader’s word was law.

And so, three perfectly awake people and one half asleep one set out to have breakfast at the perfectly normal time of 8:00 AM.

Walt quickly woke up after eating only a bite of the ungodly good breakfast. The meal passed relatively quickly, with Li regaling the other of her last high school play. It didn’t end well.

On the last night, one of the tech crew was sick. The director had a heart smaller than the Grinch and wouldn’t hear any excuses. It just so happened that the sick crew member was responsible for being on the catwalk and manipulating the props during an important scene. Apparently he got dizzy, and instead of birds flying across the stage, he spewed vomit down onto the female lead. Her scream nearly shattered the windows according to Li.

After breakfast was finished the group went over to check in for the level two dungeon and pick up the gear they needed. To enter the level two dungeon you needed to pass certain requirement and show that you understood the dangers yada yada yada. The process went much smoother since Sarah was with them and she had been in a level two dungeon before.

There were rumors that there were enchanting skills that could create fantasy style bags of holding, but Kyle and his group did not have access to any if they existed. Sarah’s plan for the transportation of gear involved Kyle and Li, the backline, carrying large packs while Sarah and Walt, the frontline, were unencumbered. Sarah’s basic formation revolved around Walt protecting the two mages while they attacked from the backline while Sarah went forward to deal with any front line the enemy had and potentially reach their backline.

This was made possible by Kyle’s shielding ability. Kyle could easily give Sarah a four hundred health shield and she could then ignore defense and, in her own words, “crush my enemies while I drive them before me and hear the lamentations of their women”.

Kyle did not want to think about what the lamentations of kobold women would sound like.

The kobold dungeon was actually the closest one to the main area of buildings, so once they had filled out all the paperwork, paid the admission fee, and suited Kyle and Li up with hundred pound bags of camping equipment, they were ready to go.

It was kind of comical to see the five foot tall Li carrying a bag almost as big as she was. If it wasn’t for the physical power stat, physics would have made her fall over based on distribution of mass.

While mana and magic power were, well, magic, it was health and physical power that were really the stranger of the stats. As Kyle understood it, health and physical power did not only manifest themselves in your body.

Instead, they acted more as a sort of invisible power armor of sorts. Like how Li, who was carrying more than her weight, was not over balanced despite being top heavy. Even if she was the strongest human alive physics should have made her fall over as she had no leverage to keep herself upright.

Yet, somehow she was standing upright. Her own mass and weight were the same, but outside mass and weight interacted with her differently.

It was the same for health. When Walt took a hit form the ogre they fought, the difference in mass should have dictated that he go flying. In reality, he only lost some health and didn’t even bruise, let alone move from where his feet were planted.

The same mystical force allowed Sarah to move at speeds that really should not be possible when calculating air resistance. She was also able to stop on a dime, too, which also made zero sense.

Kyle had long given up on questioning things like that. He was just happy that he could shoot glowing blue bolts from his hands.

A little over five minutes later the group was in front of the kobold dungeon entrance. Sarah showed the people monitoring the entrance their entrance permit, and into the dungeon they went.

Kyle was the last one in, and he took a long deep breath before following his teammates through the portal.

Sarah called a huddle in the stone room before they entered the dungeon proper.

“Okay team,” Sarah said with a rare serious expression on her face. “This is not like the level one dungeons. Level two dungeons are different every time you enter them, so we are entering an unknown situation in enemy territory. While individually the kobolds are not a threat, if they manage to separate us or surprise us we could be in serious trouble. Remember, I will be in front scouting, Walt behind me, then Li, then Kyle. Kyle, at the first sign of trouble or when I engage hit me or whoever is in trouble with a two hundred mana shield. I will tell you if I need more and use your own judgment for others, but always try and save at least five hundred mana for true emergencies.”

Kyle now had an effective mana pool of 1,540, so saving at least five hundred mana wasn’t an issue.

Pep talk done, the four members put their hands together and with a shout of “go team” they entered the dungeon proper.

You always spawned in a safe zone when entering a level two dungeon. Safe zones were areas where monsters wouldn’t normally go unless you directly lured them there. There were various safe zones scattered around the dungeon, which was important since sleeping outside a safe zone left you vulnerable to attack.

So while Kyle was aware that there would be no monsters in sight right after entering the dungeon, he was still on full alert.

Or he tried to be, but ended up following the rest of his party in gaping at their surroundings.

None of the four had ever been to a rainforest, but even if they had it still might not have prepared them for this. They were in a small clearing in what could only be called a rainforest, but only because there was no grander name to call it by.

The first thing they noticed were the sounds. While modern life could be noisy, what with traffic and the like, that noise was nothing like this noise.

Omnipresent was the slow fall of rain through the mist. It created an almost magical fog that echoed the sounds of numerous bird and insects, blending them together to create a sound that had more pure life in it than anything the four of them had ever heard before.

The second thing the noticed were the colors.

Deserving of being someplace not on earth, the colors of the giant trees and large ferns and flowers were generally those you could find on earth, except they weren’t. The browns, instead of being just brown, had some mystical shade of their own that almost reminded Kyle of a chromatic tint. The pinks, purples, blues, and greens were just so much more.

Li slowly walked over to a purple and blue flower adorning a fern type plant that had fronts taller than she was.

“You didn’t tell me it was going to look like this,” Li said in a voice suffused with wonder.

“I didn’t know,” Sarah replied.

They all knew it was going to be a rainforest type terrain inside the dungeon, but they hadn’t known just what that meant. Since most technology did not work in dungeons, there were no pictures. And how could they have known? Each of them didn’t know how they would use words to describe what was in front of them to someone who hadn’t seen it themselves.

Sure you could describe the Redwoods to people, but even if you had seen pictures, it wasn’t the same as the real thing.

Walt was the first one to break out of their nature induced reverie. They were not here to sightsee after all, even if the fauna was breathtaking. They were here to kill some kobolds.

It took Sarah mentioning growing his mana pool for Kyle to snap out of his wonder induced haze. By this point, Li and Walt had already given up on Kyle zoning out while focusing on something. Sarah had already known about that trait of his, seeing as she used it to tease him mercilessly.

It was time to focus on the dungeon though, and losing focus could easily mean your life here, as Kyle was all too aware of.

Once everyone was settled in and focused, the group moved off in their prearranged formation. The rainforest made it so that despite being in the middle of a forest, the area was actually rather open. The forest floor had very little plant life most likely due to the large trees creating the forest canopy far above.

Their goal in defeating the dungeon involved finding and crushing a large stone that the two kobold shamans and their guards were protecting. While other monsters could still drop crystals, the real treasure lay in crushing the stone, as not only did clearing a dungeons win condition offer considerably superior rewards, but the kobold shamans themselves were likely to have good drops.

The trouble lay in finding the win condition. While a level one dungeon like the giant ogre one was a sprint, higher level dungeons were more of an endurance race. You had to search through a forest that changed for each team entering it, all while avoiding monster ambushes. While the average clear time for this kobold dungeon was two days, that didn’t mean you couldn’t take a shorter or longer time. The shortest recorded time was only three hours, the group spawned with the boss right outside the safe zone, while the longest was over five days.

As the group made their way through the trees in search of kobolds, generally if you followed the kobolds you could find the shamans, they encountered their first monster. Sarah moved, and it was over before the others even noticed it had started.

A panther the size of a horse had jumped down from the trees above them towards Li. Sarah had moved and intercepted it midair and beheaded it.

While the attack most likely would not have killed Li, it was still a wakeup call. Dungeons were dangerous. Most of the higher level dungeons had a set amount of health and physical power you needed to enter them, even for mages, as you needed to be able to survive or avoid surprise attacks from enemies or traps.

Kyle had over 1,500 mana, which meant he could shield himself for over 1,500 damage with his shield skill. That was all useless if he couldn’t see the attack coming though.

“I told you attacks often come from above,” Sarah admonished. “People have even been ambushed by kobolds in the trees raining magic down on them.”

They continued on, this time with more than one member keeping an eye up above.

The next panther that attempted an ambush was met by glowing blue bolts of death.

It took another two hours of searching the forest with multiple ambushes by monsters other than kobolds, including a pack of crazily aggressive clawed monkeys that threw Walt into a fit by reminding him of The Wizard of Oz, before they found their first kobold.

It was by itself, and was harvesting some sort of berry from a large yellowish fern. The berries looked vaguely like apple sized blueberries.

Sarah snuck around behind it with a shield from Kyle, and once she was in position, Kyle and Li blasted it with magic while Sarah pincer attacked it. Or she tried to, as the kobold didn’t have enough time to put up a shield so Kyle and Li’s magic put it out of its misery.

Now that they knew there were kobolds around, the group was even more cautious.

Their caution seemed unwarranted though, as the only other kobolds they found were a small group of three that they took care of using the same method, although this time Sarah got a chance to join in on the action.

After a short lunch break they still seemed unable to find any large groups of kobolds, with only two more groups of four or less appearing and numerous attacks by animals, including what looked like a giant chinchilla.

Li at first wanted to try and befriend it when Sarah said she saw a giant chinchilla. But by giant, Sarah actually meant over fifteen feet tall, so Li had to put her chinchilla cuddling plans on hold when the giant ball of fluff and very sharp teeth quickly turned violent. It dropped a skill crystal though, so the group was very happy with the encounter.

They found a safe area to have dinner in, and Sarah made the executive decision that they should spend the night there rather than risk wandering around in the dark. While it was easy to tell if you were in a safe zone from the feeling it gave, there were no visual cues it existed so finding them was a matter of luck. They could have picked up a light spell for their mages to explore in the dark, but Sarah admitted she forgot about one as they didn’t actually need to move around in the dark, and using a light spell at night only drew monster to you.

After dinner, the group did some skill grinding which payed off for Kyle as Mana Pool Extension leveled up bringing his total mana up to 1,820. Despite it being more difficult to level at higher levels, it actually seemed to be leveling faster since the higher leveled it was, the more mana Kyle could regenerate.

It eventually got late enough that the group turned in for the night. They had to two large two person tents, one for the girls and one for the boys.

Kyle lay awake listening to Walt’s snoring. He tried imagining he was in a tent somewhere on earth, just out on a regular camping trip. It didn’t help his visualization that Kyle had never actually been overnight camping before.

After a while he quietly left the tent and sat outside with his back to a tree, just listening to the sound of the forest.

Not even five minutes later, Sarah came out of her tent. She immediately saw Kyle sitting against the tree and came over to stand in front of him.

She stood there a few second while the two looked at each other before she sat down next to him and held his hand.

They sat like that for a long time, blanketed by the quiet hum of raindrops through the mist.

Kyle woke up to a scant few rays of morning light piercing the canopy above. Sarah was already up and preparing breakfast. Kyle must have eventually fallen asleep last night without knowing it.

He slowly got up and went to help Sarah prepare breakfast. Not a word was said between them.

Their mutual understanding only needed silence.

Li got up a few minutes later and then Kyle had to go and wake Walt up, which involved a long drawn out process that ended with Sarah coming into the tent and kicking Walt’s stomach, shaving off a few HP in the process.

After a quick breakfast, the group set off.

Three panther attacks later, and Sarah called for a halt.

“Kyle, can you give me a 200 point shield?” Sarah said. “I think I hear something ahead and I want to check it out.”

Kyle complied, and Sarah stealthily moved forward through the trees to check out the noise that the other couldn’t hear with their lower physical power stat, which passively boosted your senses.

A few minutes later Sarah came back.

“You’re going to want to see this for yourselves. Follow me quietly. We are going to move forward and then scale a tree,” Sarah told the group.

The other three slowly followed Sarah until they reached her designated tree. By this point the other three could hear what sounded like shouts and yells coming from the forest ahead of them.

Sarah took some rope out of Li’s pack and effortlessly scaled the tree in front of them. To Kyle it looked like she almost ran up it she went up so fast.

Sarah secured the rope and the other three then followed her up, though not nearly as quickly.

She then lead them through the lower canopy sixty feet from the forest floor while they advanced towards what now sounded like a celebration ahead of them.

They eventually reached a good vantage point for what Sarah wanted them to see.

Below them in a large clearing was the corpse of a giant chinchilla monster. This one looked like it was at least twice the size of the one they fought previously though. Surrounding it were legions of kobolds who appeared to be having some sort of celebration and were feasting on the monsters flesh.

“I counted,” Sarah said. “And there are over three hundred kobolds down there.”

And beyond the corpse of the giant chinchilla, guarded by two kobold shamans and their beefy guards, lay an altar with a large glowing blue stone sitting right in the center.