Jade is definitely still better than me at physics, Nathaniel thought, logging in to Arrows almost fifteen minutes after she’d gone to do that herself.

They didn’t often play at different times, of course, but it still happened from time to time that one or the other of them would be done with their schoolwork with enough time to spare that they’d get into separate games, then link up later if they felt like it.

Usually, after solo-stints like that, he’d lost a few ranking points and Jade had gained a few.

He had a little bit of insulation from the sting of that because of how important his personal synergy with the carry in the south-lane was over her more voluntary association with the random team members, on top of his already strange build.

He was still very happy with his Desktop whenever he logged in to it.

It hadn’t been easy to find all of the pieces he wanted, and even more difficult to piece them together, but he’d somehow managed to end up creating a “Restaurant at the End of the Universe” vibe– though less Milliways, perhaps, and more a family business that had just never bothered to close and now found itself staring into the jaws of entropy as stars burned out around them and deciding that that, too, was not worth shutting up shop over.

The building that made up the primary menu access was a single, open-air café on top of a darkened hill, the star setting in the distance a red dwarf. The change in luminosity meant that the planet was wildly closer to the star than the Earth was to the Sun, so its size combined with the very few stars in the sky having a similar redness to them, made him feel like being a very small piece in a game where he was irrelevant.

Someone else might be bothered by that, but he always felt a little bit more at home here. Plus, Jade had worked out the math to make this place into what he actually wanted, so there was a bit of a family connection there, too. Not much of one, obviously, but there was something.

Nathaniel picked up the menu that was the primary connection to the game and told it to find a match for him.

He didn’t need to worry about being filled into his subrole as much as most other people usually did, at least.

There was a bit of a dearth of concentration-specialists at the higher levels, so he didn’t need to wait more than two minutes before matchmaking popped up and pulled him into the game.

Unusually for when appearing into a game with a random person as his carry, Nathaniel couldn’t tell who it was going to be just looking around the table they were locked to for the first two minutes of the game.

The intent was supposed to be for discussing strategy, but certain parts of the decision-making process were so ossified that the carries usually just took control of the “meeting” and listed the decisions they weren’t thinking about.

Instead, everyone looked around similarly to the way he had been, and their gazes settled on him for some reason.

Maybe he just had the nerd look to him that the carries usually had.

“Uh. Hey. I’m Nathaniel. Support caster, not the carry. But uh…” he looked at the stat and ability sheets that appeared in front of him when he focused. North lane and their diver were dodge tanks, Mid lane was a physical snowball assassin, their ranger was another tank, albeit an ability one… and his lane partner was a physical carry. Really, a physical slash calculation hypercarry. He looked around the table to check who that was, and saw a girl with long black hair staring back at him, visibly glancing back and forth between his stat sheet and him.

He decided to finish his though from before. “I uh. Don’t think we actually want to go eighteen mechs?” His voice went up on the last syllable. Not quite a crack, but he certainly wasn’t comfortable saying that to a group that was almost certainly all older than him.

That girl, Jessica, was the first one to respond. “Holy shit, thank you. That’s such a terrible choice for me, but nobody ever listens to me when I say that.”

Now she was getting stares. “What? Why? Unless you have minion buffs, you go mechs. That’s just how it works.” The midlaner, a guy named Damian said, visibly confused.

The ranger saved Nathaniel from having to explain himself. “Normally, yes, but… our team…” she looked almost as uncomfortable as he had felt coming to that conclusion himself. “We actually want them to push us, I think.”

The north laner, a woman who looked like she was in her late twenties named Helen, was the next one to speak. “What then, thirty-six?”

She was referring to the other extreme of the scale, where they would choose to send twice the volume of the weaker minion type, strawmen, down every lane. Nathaniel had already dismissed the idea, but now he was going to have to explain himself.

“I’m thinking we want five-two, six, four-four,” he said, slowly. “Helen gets pushed back over time and Damian goes over to north lane with ‘Retreat’ for double the kill opportunities. Kurt focuses on helping south lane and objectives while Diane puts pressure on north side to keep us in the game, all while we’re scaling up Jessica.”

Nobody objected to his gameplan, but nobody said anything for a few seconds, and it began to make Nathaniel nervous as he watched the counter tick down further.

“Sounds good to me,” Jessica said, tapping her vote into the table.

Following her, there was a more complete chorus of agreement as they all tapped their agreement into the table and it disappeared, replaced by the normal spawning platform of the home circle.

Kurt, their diver, was cracking his knuckles by the time they got there. “Damn, it’s been a while since I had one of those be an actual discussion. It’s refreshing.”

“Honestly, yeah,” Diane said, a bubble appearing around her, along with a magical-looking staff in her hand. “Even if it is just because we don’t have a caster like we should.”

“Fuck that!” Jessica nearly shouted, pointing at Nathaniel. “This guy’s got one-eighty concentration!”

She giggled in a way that had him a little bit worried about her health. “I get to play my carry!”

Buying his own starter sword and shield bubble along with the HUD map, he watched as a bow materialized in her hand, along with two quivers of arrows and her own shield bubble.

He could still scarcely believe it, even after reading her ability list. Ammunition could be bought at bases, of course, but the massive difference in carrying capacity between archers and gun-users was usually well more than enough for most people to forgo the slightly more powerful arrow-related abilities, even on the rare physical carry.

The others looked a little bit worried too, but any complaints would have to be made on the move– the minions had spawned.