Ping!

Level up!

The sharp noise was so unexpected in the aftermath of the carnage that Alex nearly yelped. He didn’t. What he did do was trip his ankle on a rut and flop down on his back, rolling down the dirt hill until he sprawled onto the grass below.

Diana’s laugh followed him down to the base. “And I was just about to say that had looked awesome.”

Alex groaned and spat a clump of grass that’d found its way into his mouth. “Screw you,” he muttered, picking himself up from the ground. His freshly-cleaned clothes were brown with dirt, and he dusted himself off as best as he could.

Had he not just leveled up—with his mana restored and the aching bruises on his neck gone—the sting of tripping over himself in front of someone else might have been worse.

Above him, Diana stood pensively for a second before she hopped down next to him. “Let’s see if that helped any,” she said, closing her eyes.

Alex almost asked what she was doing, until he noticed how focused she seemed to be. Whatever it was she was doing, he didn’t want to interrupt. So he took a couple of steps back, raised his hand up into the air, and sent out the signal, an orange flare that flew in an arc over the anthill. It was slow, and it wouldn’t hurt a fruit fly if it tried, but it worked.

“Alright there?” The yell came all the way from the other side of the clearing. Cedric’s voice.

“Yeah,” Alex called back, two hands around his mouth.

In front of him, a shudder ran through Diana. She made a noise on the back of her throat, a pleased sound close to a purr. “Finally,” she whispered.

Now he had to ask. “What?”

“I plateaued,” she said. He could hear the smile on her voice, and saw it when she turned to him too, a bright and sunny thing he hadn't seen on her face just yet.

Then Alex had to stop himself from frowning. He looked at her properly again, at the weariness hidden beneath her white smile, at the small cut still red on her arm. Unconsciously, a hand rose to rub at his neck. His good-as-new, uninjured neck. As if that Bushtail had never suffocated him.

Do… do they not recover like I do when they plateau?

He heard footsteps approaching, three sets, trotting around the side of the anthill. Alex quickly turned away. “I need to go, uh, to the bathroom,” he said the first thing that came to mind. “Take a piss, you know. And more, maybe, I don’t know.” He cringed.

“First save me, you're worse than Daven.” She waved him away. “Just go, we’ll wait here for you.”

Alex didn’t wait to hear it twice.

xx

Shit. Shit. Shit.

He scrambled through the brush, thinking furiously. The tree line was left a bit further behind, but he could still spot the crew standing around by the anthill if he squinted. That means Daven could still see me if he tried.

Alex clambered on, dodging past thick briars, stepping over tall roots. He kept his ears open to the familiar snorting of the boars and the click-clacking of the Vinelings. A close perusal of the canopy showed no Killer Sloth either, so he chose a broad tree nearby to stop. He put his back to it and slid down to sit on the ground, panting hard.

It’s different. Too different. Plateauing and leveling up. This Sight and his status screen. The Gates and his Skills page. How could their magic be so similar and yet… no talk of actual numbers as their levels, no attributes, no leveling the same skill more than once. And now… no reset to HP and MP when they plateaued.

Hell, Alex didn’t even know if they had health points or not. Surely that would’ve come up at one point or another. Think. Think straight. He breathed in deep of the crisp air. Center yourself. Then breathed out. Center. In, and out. He felt the rough bark against his head, the trunk solid against his back with the reassuring weight of reality.

Yes, he’d already decided this was reality. But the game itself had been wrong since the beginning. Too lacking in too many ways—no charisma or luck, no inventory, no starting gear. And though the other people’s magic system resembled his own, clearly his video-game powers were solely his and his alone. At least the worst offenders when it came to reality-breaking gaming logic.

There was that bit about the Second too, of course. He’d taken it almost as a joke after the starting screen called him that. It hadn’t come up with anyone, aside from the worrying deification of the figure of the First, whoever he was.

But if he was the Second—and people believed that he was given his extra abilities, would they worship the ground he walked on like they did to their blessed First? Or would it be the other way around?

Alex gulped, too familiar images coming to mind. Yeah, not touching that with a ten foot pole. Prophets weren’t exactly universally accepted when they first came up. He didn’t want to have Romans on his heels any time soon.

No, he needed to hide those parts of his powers. It was too dangerous. At least while he wasn’t strong enough to take care of himself. At least while he wasn’t sure it would either get him killed or have people fawning over him. Both were frightening outcomes.

That meant he couldn’t let these people get too close to him. None of them. He might not have been right about Cedric, and the other three seemed the good sort of people. But who would Daven and Diana tell, if they knew? What would Valerian do?

His breathing picked up again, and a strange tightness twisted at his stomach. Centered! Alex tried inhaling deep, but his throat felt locked. Damn it, not now! Sweat rolled down his face. His hands were shaking like leaves in the wind. Coward! Blood pounded on his ears. He couldn’t hear the forest anymore, couldn’t feel the tree at his back. He was trapped. Frozen.

Do something! With shuddering arms, Alex hugged his knees to his chest, buried his face in them until he was all alone in the dark. There was nothing but him and the darkness. Nothing. No one. He tried breathing, failed, tried again. One inhale. Out. Then another.

Slowly, breath by breath, his body stopped rattling like he was hypothermic. Sound returned. Until he was sitting in the forest again, the peeling bark hard against him.

Letting out a sorry chuckle, Alex hugged himself closer. He hated doing that as much as he loved it—as much as he knew it helped when just breathing and trying to center himself wasn’t enough. The position was comforting and warm. Familiar. Like only her hugs had ever been.

He had been a ten year old child just arriving in the system when he first held himself like that, all alone and scared of the bigger kids. He remembered crying as he sat on one of the bunker beds at night, knees close to his chest, hoping it had all been a horrible dream and his sister was on her way to come pick him up.

She hadn’t.

Rachel had grown distant after their parent’s death. It was like she’d died herself. She was eight years older than him, an adult already when it happened. And yet her deep blue eyes, the same color as his own, slowly lost their usual brightness, until they were as dark and empty as the abysses on the bottom of the ocean. She became gaunt and pale, her cheeks sunken in, and he couldn’t remember her eating for a whole week before she abandoned him.

He didn’t understand much then, being only a child, but he did after. And the warm memories of his sister had only soured with time, and he in turn became cold. It didn’t matter why she did it, just that she did. He’d trusted her, loved her more than he ever did their parents, and she left him. Alone.

Bile rose at the thought of her, and that nagging feeling of guilt tugging at his chest returned. That only served to make him angrier. I was ten, damn it. Alex’s teeth grinded against each other, hot tears pricked at the corner of his eyes. How was I supposed to know? What was I supposed to do?

He held on to his knees tighter, but at least he could breathe again. The bitterness was always better company.

xx

After pulling himself together, and spending a few minutes molesting his throat until it turned red like it had been prior to the level up, Alex turned back the way he came and walked back to the giant turd’s clearing.

Valerian stood up when he saw him emerging through the brush. “You shouldn’t go too far alone in a dungeon,” he said, face stern like a block of granite. He sounded like a math teacher Alex had in tenth grade. More disappointed than angry.

Alex couldn’t find it in himself to care much. “I just really had to go.” He tried for a smile.

“Man, you’re pale as plaster,” Daven said from the side, then he grinned. “Those are the best ones though, I know. Nothing better than a good dump after some monster-killing.”

Diana rolled her eyes, but Cedric chuckled and patted the archer on the back. “There’s plenty better young grasshopper,” he said, eyes twinkling. “Now come on, we should start moving now. You two did a good job here, but there’s still some dungeon-ground left to cover.”

They set off deeper into the forest this time, aiming toward the center. They had been going on ever narrowing circles around the dungeon since the morning, but Cedric thought they’d killed enough of the monsters to access the second stage.

“And if we haven’t we’ll just hunt them as they come,” he said, spearheading the crew as always. “The Vinelings are the only ones with a fixed spawn here, and the largest in quantity. There’s not enough Bushtails to make that big of a difference and the boars will come to us eventually. The sloths will too, if slower.”

Alex thought of the Grasping Grass monsters they’d encountered yesterday, and how Cedric thought it was some kind of environmental reaction to staying in the same spot for too long. Correcting him on it wasn’t even an option now. He would ask how Alex knew, and then he’d have his back to the wall.

“So there’s a set number to dust before we can go to the second stage?” Daven asked, though his eyes never left the treetops, an arrow knocked to his bow. “That’s boring. Where’s the mystery in that?”

Cedric sent an amused look to the archer. “There’s plenty of mysterious dungeons out there if you want, Daven,” the professional chaser said. “But this one does, yes. Not an exact number, perhaps, but something in the line of a good deal more than half of the monsters in the first stage. And the longer you leave it unpruned, the more monsters there will be.”

“Well,” the archer started saying, then paused before he could say anything. He drew an arrow taut on his bow and pivoted around in a circle, his movements slow and deliberate, eyes peering like a hawk.

Alex and Diana immediately looked about themselves, searching for an invisible enemy in the shrubbery or up on high. Alex had his fire ready and waiting, but Cedric stopped him with a raised hand. Instead of being watchful like them, the crew leader was looking at Daven with an expectant narrowing of the eyes.

In a burst of movement, Daven shifted on his feet and fired an arrow into the trees, past a thick clump of foliage that obscured the sight of anything beyond.

“What—” Alex started, until he caught the Bushtail with the arrow through its eyes falling to the ground with a dull thump almost thirty meters away.

Daven turned to them, cocky as a rooster. “Well… let’s grab this bloody dungeon by the balls and squeeze, then.”

Cedric smiled like a proud father.

It was after another hour of slow grinding before a second, smaller dome of shimmering air appeared at the center of the forest. Alex watched in awe as it blinked into existence in the distance like a great hologram, before it solidified into the same hazy surface of the outside dome.

Along with the other hopefuls, he was more than confused when he realized they had covered that area before, and thoroughly too. There had been no sign of a pre-made, portal-like dome ready to expand a thousandfold into another dimension inside an already separate dimension. Just more trees and shrubs and leaves.

According to Cedric, however, that was standard dungeon business. Pocket spaces. Portals. The whole nine yards. When the crew leader first mentioned dungeons having stages, Alex had imagined gloomy caverns and tight crawl spaces that served as passages to these higher phases. There were those, too, apparently, but Riverbend’s dungeon was as tame in this regard as it was in everything else.

They weren’t too far off from where the dome showed up, so the crew stopped chasing around the base of a small wooded hill and trod off toward the dome. Before they got too close, though, Cedric called for a stop after they forded a small brook not unlike the one where Alex had first met the crew.

“We’ll pause here,” he said once he found a nice spot where two fallen logs formed a half-square. “Drink, eat, and rest up. We’ll set off again in an hour, then we’ll make a straight push to the flower spot of the second stage. We don’t need to clean up most of the monsters there like we did here.”

“But we can though, right?” Daven asked, beaming. Some fifteen minutes after his impressive Bushtail kill—after sniping an errant Vineling nesting inside a burrow of roots—the archer suddenly jumped up and down like a kid at Christmas when he plateaued. He’d been insufferably cheerful ever since.

Cedric shrugged, settling down on a log. “We can,” he said. He loosened his shoulders, then craned his neck to one side and the other as if after a long day’s work, even if he didn’t appear at all tired. “The festival isn’t until tomorrow, so we have the whole day. Though we will leave before nightfall without mistake. You all aren’t quite ready to chase in the dark.”

Valerian hummed in agreement. He unstrapped the tower shield from his back, scanned the underbrush around them a final time, and sat down heavily at the end of the other log.

The whole time they were in the dungeon, Alex had yet to see a drop of sweat coat the man’s brow. Then again, Valerian only had to step in once, when Alex and the siblings were occupied by a scattering of Vinelings and two Killer Sloths.

From the quick glimpse Alex got before the paladin was done with the three boars that tried to attack them from the back, he hadn’t even unsheathed his sword. A little love tap from his shield’s hefty iron boss had been plenty enough to dust the creatures.

Alex took a seat himself near the paladin, and watched Diana plop down on the grass across from him, her head lolling back to rest against the trunk of the log. Her eyes closed with a weary sigh, as if that would help transport her to some lush bed in her dreams.

His fellow mage was still feeling the effects of closing all the tunnels of the Vineling nest, though had he not had his mana recovered by leveling up, Alex reckoned he would be in worse shape than she was.

He would have to be careful not to drain his mana when a level up wasn’t imminent. And without an exp bar to note his progress, that meant never doing it without an exit plan. That sort of exhaustion didn’t seem like the fun type you get after a good workout at the gym. After leaving the giant turd, Diana used her more powerful traces sparingly and often called on him to take his turn on the rotation before he was due.

Naturally, Alex didn’t complain.

Of course, taking the lead in their combined duty kept him too occupied to think about his level up, but now that they would rest, he had a few decisions to make.

With a thought, Alex brought up his status page. It was time to distribute his new skill and attribute points.