The drive home I thought about hunting with Lily’s group. I wasn’t a fan of her or her followers, but I had to admit that hunting in a large group did seem to be much safer. We could handle large amounts of three star mobs, and while we hadn’t run into any four star or king class three star mobs, I was quite certain we could handle them without much of an issue.

On the downside, I missed the solid teamwork from hunting with just Lars and the others, None of us knew how Lily’s group fought, so we couldn’t rely on them too much until we knew how much backup they’d be able to provide.

Unfortunately, so far it had seemed like we couldn’t rely much on them at all. Only a couple of them seemed to be competent, with most just sort of waving their weapons around hoping they’d hit. With their massive stats from the constant hunting, said waving of weapons could do a lot of damage, but if we ran into something dangerous, I wasn’t going to bet on them being much use.

What really grated my nerves though, was that Lily actually seemed to be the most competent of the bunch, though I’d only seen her fighting in melee a couple of times. She was only a tad slower than I was at completing her spell patterns, and seemed to do more damage than my spells, though I had plenty of stat points to spare to make up for that.

I shrugged, we were going to be hunting together for a while, if only for safety, so I may as well try and get used to it. Once I’d arrived home, I decided that it was about time I got a proper defensive spell, so I hopped on in game.

I arrived at the mage’s college without much fanfare, and was soon asking about different defensive spells.

“Well your best bet is to just get a first circle defensive spell. They won’t give a massive amount of protection, but you can actually draw them in time to react to threats. Higher circle spells are nice if you want a fortified position, but they’re not too useful in the heat of battle unless you need to be blocking dragon breath or something that the lower tier spells can’t handle.” The man at the counter kindly explained to me.

My first thoughts on that were very simple. So dragons do exist. While wondering if dragons were part of the invaders, or simply one of the species that survived the invasion, I decided I was going to have to see one eventually. After getting over my giddiness at finding out about the fantasy classic, I agreed to get a first circle defensive spell, ice wall. I handed over the pittance of money required, and then walked over to the training grounds to practice.

When I arrived, I decided to see exactly how this spell worked. Drawing up the pattern, I luckily didn’t explode myself, and soon released the pattern. I watched as a speedy blue ball of light flew downrange, hit a target, and made a large ice wall right in front of it.

Realizing it would probably be better to aim at the ground in most cases, I drew up another, and sent it flying a couple feet in front of me, causing an ice wall to simply materialize, growing outwards from where the glowing ball had impacted in a fraction of a second.

The spell seemed useful, but at the same time it was also quite disappointing. I wasn’t expecting to be making castle walls or anything, but a wall around my height was all I was getting, and it couldn’t have been more than a foot thick.

Figuring that it may be slightly less dinky with my increased wisdom in real life, I practiced it a bit more before hopping out of game to practice in real. While out in a park, the spell worked much the same, and this time, I noticed that it seemed to melt a good deal slower than my ice spears did. It wasn’t that it would last as long as real ice, but the walls would last a couple of minutes, though they were constantly shrinking during the duration.

After practicing a bit, I decided to do some experimentation. I found a reasonably large rock and brought it over, before casting ice wall below it. Interestingly, it pushed the rock over rather than simply freeze around it like I had expected. Thinking that it could be useful, I then cast ice wall at the top of the rock, only for the wall to form a bit ahead of the rock, it seemed that the wall had to grow out of the ground.

Wondering how on earth that worked, why hadn’t it just formed directly under the rock, and why hadn’t it formed on top of the rock, and how had it decided the ground was acceptable to grow on?

I eventually decided to leave the experiments for later, and decided to try something new out. Casting an ice wall directly below me, the wall formed up, and started to form under my feet, instantly causing me to slip on the slick surface and fall down. Grumbling, I tried again, and again, and kept failing, completely unable to keep my balance on the very slippery surface as it rose up.

I eventually gave up, disappointed I wouldn’t be able to use it to launch myself with. Maybe I should go learn the earth equivalent in order to do so. Or maybe I should see if there are any ice mobility spells available.

Deciding that that could wait until another time, I walked back home, trying to meditate while I went, and seemingly getting oh so close to succeeding. Once I’d gotten back, I checked the internet again, hoping that I wouldn’t see more posts about towns being destroyed by monster waves.

The more recent waves hadn’t been quite as deadly as the first ones, as people had expected them and built up barricades, and been on watch with their weapons rather than just relaxing at their homes, but they still lead to the deaths of a lot of people.

Sighing at how much of the population was going to be forced to learn to fight, or at least use a gun, I hopped off and went to bed, thoughts of my town being attacked running through my head even as I tried to meditate myself to sleep.

The next couple of days passed in a peaceful manner, and hunting with the militia had become pointless, the streets had been entirely cleaned of monsters, they only were in the forests nearby. Wondering how that worked for more urban areas that didn’t have much ground for monsters to live apart from humans, I finished what I decided was to be my last patrol with the militia, and headed home.

Deciding to figure out exactly how the monsters were dealing with cities, I did some research. It seemed that the monsters would congregate towards portions of the city, and completely take it over, though the military would completely clear them out from time to time, they would always come back, and always in the same spots, so people had taken to building walls to separate off the monster filled areas, and the city and military had looked the other way.

The next day it was time to go hunting with the group, so I hopped in my car and drove down to a sandwich shop, where I got lunch and waited for the rest of the group to arrive. They showed up right when I was finishing off my meal, so I waved them over. Seeing as how none of Lily’s group had arrived yet, I decided to voice some of my complaints.

“Do we really need to be hunting with Lily’s group? Their sheer arrogance has been driving me up a wall. We haven’t seen any four star mobs, and we could maybe handle them on our own anyway.”

“Look, it’s better to not risk it right now, once we get more used to the forest we can maybe try hunting on our own, but as is I don’t want to risk any of our lives, and if putting up with a little arrogance is what we need to do in order to keep us safer that’s what we’ll be doing,” Lars explained.

“A little arrogance, hah,” Liz said, her voice dripping in sarcasm.

Rachel just fidgeted, likely not comfortable complaining about someone behind their back.

“Fine, but once we have a better idea on what’s in the forest I want us to split up, I’d really rather avoid them.”

“Why do you seem so put out with them anyway? They’re a bit arrogant, but they’re not outright rude or anything,” Lars asked.

“I never did tell you I ran into them in game did I?” I proceeded to explain how they had hunted me down simply over bumping into Lily.

“I can’t believe she did that to you!” Rachel said, clearly believing far too much in the good of humanity, her surprised expression contrasting with Liz’s dark one.

“Well that does sound pretty bad.” Lars agreed. “She doesn’t seem to be as bad in real as you described her in game though.”

“People tend to let more of themselves show in game, and I’d really rather avoid her if possible.” I shrugged my shoulders.

“Ok, but only after we’ve gotten more used to the forest,” Lars confirmed.

I let out a small smile, at least I wasn’t going to be stuck with Lily and her group for an extended period of time. It wasn’t too long before Lily’s group started to trickle in, a good five minutes after we’d agreed to meet. Lily herself was the last one there, being around fifteen minutes late.

Holding in my annoyance, I greeted the couple of people who had been polite to me, while ignoring the rest of them as they arrived. Lily of course got no greeting.

Once everyone had arrived, we were soon headed into the forest to continue our hunting. We breezed through plenty of three star mobs, not having any trouble, as they would only group up to groups of about twenty or so, not even double our group size.

WE’d gotten quite far into the forest, when someone noticed something odd.

“Hey, what’s that thing?” He said, pointing at something in the distance. Having nothing better to do, and hoping it wasn’t a four star mob, we approached whatever it was he had seen, only to be very surprised.

It looked like a crack in the air, with light distortion around the edges, and on the other side could be seen a forest like the one we were in, but with completely different trees than the ones around us. Thinking for a bit, I started to believe that the trees looked familiar, but I couldn’t place them.

I walked around the crack, to see what was behind it, only to see nothing. From the other side the crack simply didn’t exist. The group chatted for a moment, discussing what the crack was, before we took some photos, marked the gps location, and threw some rocks through it before we went back to hunting. The only thing we discovered is that rocks went through it just fine, making us all agree it had to be some sort of portal to another location somehow, maybe where the monsters were invading from.

Aside from the crack in the air that we had all agreed was too risky to try walking through, the day was quite peaceful, just hunting down mobs quite easily. By the time I got back home, I was really starting to wonder what on earth that crack in the air had been.

I quickly posted a couple of pictures, along with a quick description and where I’d found it. It didn’t take long until I was getting nearly drowned in replies from other people who had found similar things online.

Unfortunately, even with all of us talking about what we’d found, we were drowned out by people calling it a lazy photoshop, fake, attention hungry, etc. Deciding to try and get some answers without all of the people who were just claiming we were trolling, I set up a chat room, and invited everyone to join who had posted an image of whatever we were looking at.

Rayth: So does anyone know more about these things than I do? I just found one today. They look like some sort of gate to another area, but I’m not really sure.

Jolee: Well from what I’ve seen there’s two types of gates, there’s the kind where it just seems to lead to another area, and then there’s the kind of gates where it’s completely filled with mist behind it, and monsters just seem to pour out of those, though the only photos I’ve seen of them are from some friends of mine in the military.

Soul: Yeah, I’ve seen the mist ones as well, the monsters seem to never stop coming out of them.

Ryah: You in the military then?

Soul: Nah, just a large hunting group from in game. The gates seem to be safe to go through by the way, some idiot went in for a twenty dollar bet.

Rayth: Gates?

Soul: Yeah, it’s what we’ve taken to calling them. They seem like gates to another dimension you know? It would explain where some of the monsters are coming from, though they can’t all be coming out of those gates, there’s too many of them for that.

Rayth: Well if the mist ones lead to where the monsters come from, where do the other ones lead?

Jolee: I’d place money on it being the world from Sanity Online. I swear I recognized some healing herbs from last time I was looking through one of them.

I looked over the photos, and while I couldn’t find any pictures that had healing herbs in them, I could easily see the stamina herbs in one of the photos I had taken.

Rayth: I think you’re right, I recognize some stamina herbs in the photos I took. Anyone willing to go exploring through one for a few days to find out?

Jolee: Not a chance, the gates disappear every now and then, you’d have to find your way back through another gate if you went through

Rayth: Well it was worth a shot. I’ll be sure to keep that in mind, no going through any of the gates. Stay safe in your hunting, I’m off to bed.

Jolee: Night.

Ryah: Gnight.

Soul: night

I then stretched out, brushed my teeth, and went to bed, it was interesting that the helmets no longer seemed to be the only link between worlds, but I had no intention of having anything but my game avatar be there.