Vantage points are always appreciated no matter where you are, be it in real life or a video game. This applied to dreams as well apparently, as the view from atop the highest point of the Great Oak was nothing short of breathtaking. From there, I could see a wide view of the whole of Briarwood stretched out below me.

The land beyond the Roots was covered in leafy forest, with clearings interspersed in between to house the various zones. The leaves made a pretty dense canopy, making it difficult to see past the trees and into the area below. The zone closest to the Capital was a wide splotch of swamp, the Light Marshes, where the fog hung low and covered most of the structures hidden beneath. To the left of that were some large patches of water — the Lakes of Luna, where the nixies lived. Then there were the Mounds, the Deep Woods, the little glades hiding the entrances to the Ruinspun Catacombs… And far, far in the distance, where the line of trees faded to silver sand, the Ironsalt Wastelands, and the Decay’s Fortress of Ruin.

At the moment, there seemed to be a large gathering around the Fortress of Ruin, a dense cloud of moving characters and nametags hustled at the base of the crooked structure. Probably raid teams preparing to enter the dungeon.

Getting up and wandering around the Inner City had been enough to conclude that it was uncannily similar to Briarwood Rebirth the game. All the details, all the visual textures, all the hidden watermarks… they were where they should be.

I even tried out the spot where you could clip through the floor and into the dungeon below the Capital. It worked, but it being an S tier dungeon and me being Level 1, naturally, I died.

Which was when I discovered that dying in a dream does not, in fact, wake you up, but instead respawns you at the nearest spawn point.

What was funny was that despite becoming corporeal again thanks to the mirror, there wasn’t any pain in dying. There wasn’t any pain at all, in fact. Every time I got hit, all there was was the noise of my HP bar going down.

No pain, not even the sensation of getting shoved really hard. It was just as if my body had recognised I’d gotten hit, but decided to turn off all the nerves that contributed to my sense of touch. It was a weird feeling, and definitely a sure fire way to get yourself killed. Without the feeling that I was fighting a losing battle, I ended up losing track of my HP bar altogether and died.

If I had to pick something that was different, it would be the NPCs in the Inner and Outer Cities, but then again, those would have been randomly generated in the game anyway. All of the non plot relevant NPCs had been like that. There would only be a designated title, and the names, faces and descriptions of the NPCs that came along with that title would then all be random.

This time, the blacksmith was a large bellied Dwarf named Richard, with a wife named Lydia and a wide eyed daughter called Emmie. Just like in the game, they had had the faces of one of the randomly generated NPCs, and upon questioning, I found that Richard was actually a Chess Master and that Emmie wanted to be a princess when she grew up.

I’d gone into the blacksmith shop to ask about the freebie weapon I’d gotten from the ghastly scare, hoping that, since this was a dream, Richard would say something more than just the default blacksmith dialogue. To my delight, he had, remarking about how the weapon was something he’d never seen before.

I pulled the sword out of my Inventory and inspected the description again.

Sorrow (B)

Sword form

LV 1

ATK: +100

Reduce skill cost by 10%. For every crit hit, reduce skill cost by a further 10% for 10s.

Level increases with “Bad_Luck”’s level

HUMAN Class Boost: Increase damage done to fae by 10%

A sword forged from the flames of Oberon’s wrath and tempered by the soul of the beholder. It bears the sorrows of all the forgotten dreams in this world.

Despite having collected all the available weapons in the game before my account was reset, I’d never seen a B weapon called Sorrow before. Didn’t even know that it existed, for all I knew, there wasn’t any sign of it on the Wiki back then either.

I had wandered up the Great Oak, visiting each building along the way. Well, each building except those on the third floor, since those belonged to the various Guilds. Normally, you couldn’t go into the Guild Halls of other Guilds, but apparently this didn’t apply to dreams, and I managed to walk right into one. I had been met with an angry dm threatening to report me for hacking, and so I took my leave. I didn’t try with any other Guild. I did, however, visit the Chosen Ones’ Alliance.

It was a decidedly pretty impressive base, decked out in custom designs you wouldn’t be able to find anywhere in the game. Contrary to the more fairy themed designs of the other Guild bases, the Alliance's base was a cozy looking cottage made out of wood and stone, nestled into the trunk of the Great Oak.

Going in through the wooden door, it had only gotten stranger, because inside was not the cozy interior of a cottage. Instead, there had been a tall arching hallway paved with stones and lit by torches. A bit like the hallway I’d fought the Decay in, but this time with a reception desk in the centre, along with cushy chairs and large stone doorways lining the walls. Signs next to the doorways spelled out where they led to, which you really wouldn’t have been able to tell due to the condensed darkness occupying the doorways.

I had decided to explore those as soon as I saw them, finding that most of them transported me to loosely organised storerooms filled with gear, money and drops. Retreading back to the main hallway, I had checked out the empty reception desk to find a screen containing the lengthy list of Guild rules and instructions for stuff.

Scanning the list revealed the standard expectations for Guild rules. No stealing, no griefing, no player killing.

I had then left the Alliance to continue my tour of the Capital, which led us up here, to the top of the Great Oak where I was currently admiring the view.

This particular area was actually supposed to be off limits to players, but somehow, like with the other Guild Halls, there was no invisible wall to stop me from climbing my way up here.

A part of me was starting to feel that something was off. There were too many details, too many fixed rules that I could identify and follow. Aside from the access to off limits areas, most of my knowledge of Briarwood Rebirth’s map could be applied without a slight bit of deviation.

This… didn’t really fit in with the characteristics of dreams. Those were supposed to be sporadic, illogical, vague. The point of dreams was that they weren’t supposed to make a whole lot of sense, especially if you were dreaming lucidly.

And, supposing that I was dreaming lucidly, it certainly wasn’t like any lucid dream I’d had before. While I couldn’t say that I had lucid dreams often, I certainly had a good 10 or so of them in my whole lifetime. I don’t know about other people, but in all of those 10 lucid dreams, I had been able to exact a certain degree of control over the dream world.

Not liking the environment? A few edits would do the trick. Too difficult to handle? Give yourself some new powers. Finding the adventure too scary? Delete the threat and replace it with a smaller one. In all the lucid dreams I’d had in the past, I’d felt like a child playing in a sandpit, going with the natural, gravity-like flow, but still being able to shape the dream to how I wanted it to be.

But in this particular dream, I did not have any control of that sort at all.

Back when I’d clipped through the floor and into the dungeon I was way underleveled for, at one point, I’d tried. Tried to vanish the opponents, tried to raise my Level to something higher than Level 1, tried to reverse clip my way back up to the surface (that one didn’t work ingame either, but I’d thought it was worth a try). None of it had worked.

Yet the lack of sensation, the lack of allergies, the lack of 400 degrees myopia… These were glaring pieces of evidence in favour of it all being a dream.

There was also the lack of the need to sleep, the lack of the need to eat, the lack of the need to take care of any bodily needs whatsoever other than making sure my HP did not drop to 0. Even if it did, the only consequence was that I would respawn.

As absurd as being transported to another world already sounded, surely I would still be myself when I got there, right? Unlike other pieces of “transported to another world” literature, it wasn’t as if I’d died and left no original body for my drifting soul to inhabit.

If I hadn’t dropped my body during the transport, or passed in my sleep, then home was where my body should be. Home asleep, tucked under the covers in my cozy little apartment. Which, logically, would make this a dream, right?

I decided to shelve the topic for the moment. Going around in circles thinking about it wasn’t exactly going to help.

With my tour of the Inner City more or less done, I decided to deal with the second order of business — changing my class to something more flexible. The Human class wasn’t bad for a starting class. However, it was also the only non magical class. Definitely not my play style.

Fae, Druid, Troll and Dwarf were out of the question. Fae was a buffing support, Druid a healing support, and Troll was your classic tank with low damage. I had no interest in playing support classes in my dream when I could be playing more fun, less team based classes.

Dwarf… well, the Dwarf class was a mainly crafting class, the investment lying in crafting OP weapons from rare ingredients. Grinding was… unfortunately not my strong suit, so that was out.

I considered Briar Elf and Pixie, but decided that they weren’t for me. Briar Elf was what you could consider a mage class, with explosively high damage spells at the price of a long cast time.

Pixie was a long ranged archer class that depended on headshots for doing damage. There was a lot of decoy placement and maneuvering and strategising involved in the class if you wanted to play it well.

At the end of the day, the Kobold was the most suited to me. The added agility, variety of MP cost skills, and thrill of danger from low HP made playing a lot more fun than any other class.

I hopped off the branch I was perched on and began walking along another all the way to the trunk of the tree. Placing both my hands on the bark (which felt just like a smooth piece of paper and definitely not what a tree should feel like) I willed hard about my request.

“I seek an audience with the Faerie Courts.”

The great tree rumbled, and the air around me crackled with electricity. The space crumbled, collapsing in on itself like a sandcastle washed away by the sea, to reveal an amphitheatre carved out of the inside of the Great Oak.

It was a wooden, circular room, the moss covered wood sloping down along the edges to form a sort of bowl-like shape. Large, multicoloured toadstools arranged in rows from large to small grew out of the wood. The floor of the room was patterned with concentric circles, the type of rings that you’d typically see in a tree stump.

I was standing in the centre of the innermost ring, a spotlight coming from an unknown source shining down on me. It would look as if I were alone in the dimly lit room, but…

“Bad_Luck,” Dozens of voices chanted out from thin air. They echoed through the amphitheatre, the noise booming from my right.

“Changeling,” from the other direction, another set of equally booming voices.

“Replacement.”

“Human,” the rest of the voices hushed, as one stood out louder and clearer than the others.

Silence. Then the loud voice spoke again.

“By the grace of Her Highness, Princess Rosa, we allowed you to take residence in our great kingdom.”

“A mere human!” came a jeer from the left, along with a flurry of cackles.

“A victim of the Decay!” wailed the right.

“Silence!” boomed the voice, and the cackles died down.

“We, the Faerie Courts of Briarwood, will hear your request,” finished the voice.

My mouth moved on its own against my will, as it started to recite the dialogue of the script we were following.

“I seek to become Rosa’s personal knight.”

Huh. I frowned. I didn’t intend to say that..

“You?” the left shrieked in a flurry of laughter. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the faint flutter of thousands upon thousands of translucent fly wings.

“A human…” murmured the right disapprovingly.

“Humans cannot be her Highness’s guard,” the voice informed me. “It is against the laws His Majesty, the Wise King Oberon, set.”

“If it is for her Highness, I am willing to shed my identity to become one of yours,” there it was again. Maybe a dream quirk?

“A change of class!”

“Insolence!”

“I SAID SILENCE!” the voice seemingly turned its invisible head to me. “Do you have commendation from one of ours?”

“No.”

The amphitheatre erupted in a flurry of gasps and jeering. Most of the jeering came from the left, where the fabled haters of humans, the Unseelie Court, was seated. The opposite side was the source of the horrified gasping, the Seelie Court, supporter of coexistence with humans. The voice hushed both sides of the Court again, before speaking.

“Then you will be challenged, to prove your worthiness of our blessing,” announced the voice. “Kneel, and accept the trial of the Faerie Courts.”

My knee buckled on its own, and I found myself dropping into a crouch. The spotlight above my head shut off, and I was left in the dark.

“Which class do you wish to be blessed by?” the voice enquired, and a series of glowing icons appeared in the air before me. Briar Elf, Fae, Pixie, Dryad, Troll, Dwarf, and Kobold. At this point, if I turned away, I would stay Human.

Not really knowing how to select a choice in a dream, I took a guess and reached out for the Kobold icon.

It shattered.

The voice made an affirmative hum.

“You will be challenged to the Trial of the Kobold.”

The world crumbled as I was transported away to the Class Change quest.

The Class Change quest took place near the highest branches of the Great Oak, a little bit below where I had been admiring the view just a while ago. The dense foliage had been arranged to form a green canopy above, casting the gnarled branches of an obstacle course in leafy shade. A large number of Level 10 mobs prowled the vicinity, enemies you were supposed to defeat on your way to the finish line.

“Objective: Reach the finish line within a minute. You may select one Kobold specific skill,” announced the voice. Another selection, though this time, it showed a series of icons very familiar to me. They were the icons representing the various skills under the Kobold class.

From what I knew of it, the Class Change quest was designed to be extremely difficult to clear by normal methods, especially when your Level was lower than Level 10. It was supposed to be a shortcut for old players using sub accounts, and a gate to prevent newbies from skipping the tutorials and ending up not knowing what to do later on.

Luckily, I did know the shortcut from clearing the Class Change quest on sub accounts in the past. I just needed to jot my memory first.

I looked through the list of icons, trying to find the one I was looking for.

Fireball, Curse, Speedster, Short-range Teleport… aand there it was.

Invisibility.

“3, 2, 1, Begin.”

I ran out beyond the starting line, nearly tripping over myself in trying to dash. Fortunately, a bit like the forced kneel in front of the Faerie Courts, it seemed as if my body knew exactly what to do. My legs righted themselves into a proper looking dash, letting me traverse five meters’ distance in a stride. It was a fascinating feeling, how I’d take a step like normal, only to push off with explosive force.

In front of me, the first few enemies were in sight. A pair of Hunting Dogs, Level 10, as displayed by the floating words above their heads. They patrolled down the path in front of me in an anti parallel formation, ensuring that there was no getting past both without a fight.

“Invisibility,” I activated the skill, my Level 1 MP bar dropping fast as the skill drained my Mana. The dogs ignored me while I was cloaked. I made note of their locations respective to the path when I reached them, and carried on.

A platforming section, with Level 5 Bees interspersed between the floating ledges. The distance between each ledge was too far to simply jump – you’d have to dash to get to the other side. Yet the patrol positioning of the Bees made it so that you had to wait for them to get out of the way before you could make the dash, lest you risk getting hit and falling to the bottom of a pit, where you’d have to climb up and start all over again. I stopped, and watched the timing carefully.

Fortunately, it looked like these moved in unison, unlike the Dogs, which would make things easier. I did the platforming, pleased to find that my dream had given me parkour abilities, and continued down the course.

I took my time, looking at each obstacle and noting the distance between each mob and the path. I even tested jumping on some of the taller enemies, finding that, while I could jump a startling twice my height, I still took damage from just landing on them. Eventually, I got to the end, where a single Level 12 Dullahan blocked the path, the sheer size of it in person looking incredibly intimidating. By now, my time was at 3 minutes.

“Retry,” I told the air. The scenery crumbled as I was transported back to the starting line, where the voice kindly asked me again which skill I wanted to pick.

Now that that was settled…

I reached for Short-range Teleport, feeling the knowledge of how to activate it seep into my head as naturally as if it had always been there.

“3, 2, 1. Begin.”

I took off again, this time minimising the time between each Dash to ensure maximum speed. I wasn’t going to use Short-range Teleport so early on, as each Teleport only took you 1.5 times the distance of your Dash while using up MP. Even with the skill cost lowering effect of Sorrow, my MP at this Level wasn’t exactly high enough to support the sort of consecutive casting I would have done usually.

Upcoming were the two Dogs, running opposite to each other down the path. The closest one was sprinting towards me at top speed, having noticed my presence and making a beeline for me.

Closer, closer, closer… and now.

I took a flying leap and dashed, positioning myself to begin falling right above its head. I raised my Sorrow, and, the blade gleaming, flipped over and slashed down at its back. The rebound launched me up from my fall, resetting the dash cooldown so that I could immediately propel myself through the air to the next Dog. I cleared both Dogs in 3 seconds, and continued my mad sprint towards the Bees.

The fact that attacks had recoil was something that most players noticed immediately upon launching the game. If you were using melee weapons, any attack you managed to score on the enemy would push you back a few steps. It was annoying at first, but soon after, we discovered that using the recoil, you could bounce on enemies without taking damage. Not long after that, I’d discovered that the dash cooldown reset every time you attacked, while the attack animation reset every time you dashed.

This created a potential for a loop where you could attack and dash with a cooldown equivalent to nothing.

Leaving the dogs behind, I moved on to the Bee parkour. I hopped onto the first platform and jumped, scoring a dash hit on the Bee and launching myself towards the next. And the next, and the next, and the next. I managed to successfully clear that section of the course without having to stop to wait at all.

On and on. I used my observations from the test run to time my dashes. Whenever an enemy ended up a bit too far for my dash to reach, I used Short-range Teleport to adjust my position into one that was more favourable for me to bounce off and continue the dash chain. I sped all the way to the end, till there was only one more enemy that stood between me and the finish line.

The Dullahan loomed over me, too tall for me to jump over and too beefy to go around.

52 seconds.

I used the last of my MP reserves to teleport through the Dullahan.

Whew. I allowed my focus to drop as I crossed the finish line. If I could sweat, I would, but this being a dream, meant that there was no sweating to be had.

That was fun. A close call near the end, but not bad.

The world crumbled again and I found myself back in front of a very loud Faerie Court, the right cheering and the left booing my performance.

“Bad_Luck, you have proven your worth,” the voice said, without a scrap of emotion in its tone. “The Seelie Court hereby blesses you with the class of a Kobold.”

A flash of light and another teleport later, I was back outside the Great Oak, having changed my class and gained a grand total of 7 Levels. That was more than I’d anticipated for the quest, must be the increased experience Perk at work. I checked my status to make sure that the Class Change had worked, and there it was:

Username: Bad_Luck

LV 8

Class: Kobold

Guild: Chosen Ones’ Alliance

I checked the sword in my hand, finding that it had transformed into a small, silver dagger.

Sorrow (B)

Dagger form

LV 8

ATK: +180

Reduce skill cost by 10%. For every crit hit, reduce skill cost by a further 10% for 10s.

Level increases with “Bad_Luck”’s level

KOBOLD Class Boost: Increase attack speed by 10%

A dagger forged from the flames of Oberon’s wrath and tempered by the soul of the beholder. It bears the sorrows of all the forgotten dreams in this world.

Eagerly opening my status screen, I found the number of Skill Points I had had been raised to 8, meaning that I could finally pick out some skills.

I opened up the skill tree and surveyed the contents of the Kobold skills.

Passive skills:

Fire Resistance (3): Grants 30% resistance to fire attacks.

Compensation (3): Completing a quest perfectly doubles quest rewards.

Retaliation (3): After getting hit, increase attack speed for the next 5s.

Speedster (3): Dash cooldown reduced to 0.3s.

Backstab (3): Attacking from behind has a 50% chance to crit.

MP skills:

Short-Range Teleport (3): Allows the caster to teleport anywhere within a 7.5m radius.

Fireball (3): Shoots a flaming ball of fire.

Curse (3): Inflicts blindness and weakness on enemies.

Candle Flame (5): Summons a fire spirit to protect the caster from damage. Max 3.

Shapeshift (5): Allows the caster to shapeshift into any enemy lower than their level.

Stamina skills:

Boost (3): Launches the caster in a certain direction.

Throwing Knives (3): Throws 3 knives in a certain direction.

Flurry (5): Peppers enemies with rapid attacks

Unique Skills (MP):

Invisibility (3): Turns the caster invisible. Enemies stop aggroing. Drains MP over time. Attacking in this state guarantees a crit hit.

Territory (3): Set a 10m by 10m area as “home”. MP gauge refills 200% faster and all skill cooldowns are reduced by 80% at “home”. Territory can only be set once every day, and cannot be set inside a boss room.

Blaze (5): All attacks do high burn damage. The caster is engulfed in flame.

Indoors (5): Crit rate increased by 10% in an enclosed space.

Goldemar’s Judgement (7): Gives the caster the same stats as Territory even if not at “home” for 30s.

The unique skills were all good stuff, since they were specialised to the Kobold Class. Other skills from different classes could be picked interchangeably, but since they were general use, they were less useful to my specific case.

Goldemar’s Judgement was particularly good, but it cost a hefty 7 Skill Points. Not to mention the MP cost was absurdly high, making it impractical to use at low Level.

Short-range Teleport was always a good, versatile option, so I quickly spent 3 Skill Points on that.

For the second skill that I could pick… I picked Throwing Knives. While I didn’t like Stamina skills, having one Stamina skill and one MP skill allowed these two skills to draw from different resources without needing to compete with each other.

At low level, management of MP and Stamina was important to winning battles you were underleveled for. Until I could get my hands on MP recovery items, this was a good option.

What’s more, the Throwing Knives skill also caused recoil. It could always be used as a backup for adjusting my position when my MP reserves were too low to sustain Short-range Teleport.

As I was selecting the skills, I registered a tap on my shoulder. Turning, I found, Princess Rosa standing right behind me. She was the same as when I had first met her, with her pretty golden locks and piercing blue eyes. Still with that innocent looking tilt to her head, if slightly ruined by the scathing quality to her gaze.

“That was quite the performance, Chosen One,” she smiled in a way that felt like she was being disingenuous. “I fully enjoyed it.”

“Thanks,” I returned. “Came in clutch near the end but I managed to make it.”

“No, truly,” she crossed her hands behind her back and began pacing around me. “Clearing a Class Change quest at Level 1, that’s something unheard of.”

“Well, I didn’t exactly try to kill anything, so Level 1 or Level 5, makes no difference.”

“I suppose,” she looked down at her fingers, before looking back up at me with those piercing eyes. They were like spotlights, glaring through me as if trying to see what I was thinking. “Still an impressive feat nonetheless. As expected of a veteran.”

“Thanks. Is there anything you need?” She was giving me the creeps, beyond the piercing gaze, and I didn’t know why.

“Oh, come now. Don’t look at me like that,” she laughed, her voice sounding like tinkling bells. “I merely wanted to tell you something. Guess what~”

“I don’t know, what is it?”

“It’s your new quest!” she giggled again. “The Light Marshes are lovely at this time of year aren’t they? A shame that the Redcaps happen to be unusually active too. Investigate the cause for me, won’t you, my sweet?”

A green screen dinged up in front of me.

Story Quest: Crimson Mayhem

Investigate the resurgence of Redcaps in the Light Marshes.

Ah, a story quest. I stared at Rosa. While the delivery was different, and Rosa had given it to me a few levels too early, it was definitely the story quest that occurred after the Class Change.

“No need to thank me,” Rosa continued before I could say anything. “Oh! And one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“There’s someone waiting for you at the Crimson Hall. Someone very dear to me,” her image began to ripple into nothingness. “Do not keep him waiting.”