While Rayne had been somewhat deliberately vague when she was explaining the person he’d be talking to, he still wasn’t quite prepared for what awaited him upon loading into her desktop.

He got a look at straight, black hair and green eyes, one of her eyebrows quirked, before whoever-she-was turned, holding her hand out of the information panel.

Rayne handed it over almost instantly, though he caught a conflicted look on her face for a moment. What was that about?

“So, you’re the guy I’ve heard so much about. Two sets, but the primary you want is Protector’s Rage, Driven Spear, Challenge, Rallying Strike, and Possess Item, resulting in the Penultimate Paragon’s Ultimatum and the Ultimate Retributive Zone. You are therefore a physical tank player, which plays into what I can see of you, just visually.”

She paused for a moment, pacing slightly to the side before turning to the side and hitting him with a stare that felt like it was pinning him to the floor. “I don’t have a bias against you, really. But you need to explain your thought process on that. It’s highly atypical.”

Jeremy took a moment to gather his thoughts. She seemed like the serious type, so he would do his best to go over that where she was.

She was also intense enough that he was having trouble with that.

“Well, uh, miss, it was really just my first real set, and I just built it with the game’s tutorial plus the little bit of knowledge I had from the earlier games. I like it because it works just fine as a tank, though a bit low on CC I admit, but it transitions into a bruiser with full tankiness with late-game incomes and especially works well on people who try to use the standard plan of ‘ignore the tank.’”

“Hmm. Better than I expected, I’ll admit. Tell me what kind of teammate you have the best synergy with.”

Huh.

That was a hell of a question, actually. He was tempted to say assassins or carries, given the archetype that he fell into, and he even started on saying the word carry before stopping himself.

She’d dropped that like a gotcha.

And she’d obviously done some research going in, probably from information Rayne had given her in advance.

So, maybe it wasn’t?

It took him a moment, but he did get there. “Bruisers and tanks, particularly those with heavy regenerative abilities and/or self-damage.”

He knew that the answer was right in her eyes when a small smirk crept onto her face before she turned away again. “Alright. The other set, I won’t even be bothering with. It’s obviously just you taking what people build in the Mists and putting it on a sheet.”

That managed to sound so dismissive he had to force himself not to cringe. That was, in fact, exactly what he’d done. He’d ended up in the mists before, but…

“You shouldn’t have bothered, of course. While you lose the ally-supportive abilities while diving, it has well more than enough to manage just fine with a different item buy. I assume you never bothered to read through the unfiltered items list and were therefore unaware of the existence of Jupiter’s Authority.”

He didn’t even recognize the name, so no, he didn’t.

What the hell kind of person could name an item like that off the top of their head?

That must have shown on his face, though, because she duplicated the screen she was looking at and flipped him the item’s window.

It was one of the items named after a god, so it was obviously one of those with enough upgrades to be viable into the later game, but that wasn’t the important part.

The important part was that it was, based on the price, a fairly reasonable mid-game item that could take the form of any non-back-spiked polearm.

That wasn’t the part she’d been referring to, though. Because as soon as he read the first upgrade, he felt like an idiot for having never built it before.

[When thrown, generates a lightning aura. If this weapon makes contact with a shield or the ground, discharge the lightning aura, dealing damage in a small area, and rooting any shielded targets in the radius, which shrinks over the course of two seconds.]

“Can I get you to help me with those item buys? Whether or not you let me on the team, I feel like you’ve got a way better handle on this than I’ve got.”

Both of her eyebrows went up at that.

“I probably would if you were on my team, but why should I let you on my team?”

He was a little bit taken aback at that.

“Well, I don’t know who you have already…”

“We have a carry, a ranger, and a support. A long-ranged defensive physical slash caster hybrid carry with massive burst potential, a trickster-assassin ranger, and a caster slash burst damage support with passive healing.”

He’d been plotting answers for her in advance depending on which roles she’d had filled, but her statements just blew all of them out of his head.

What kind of wild team composition was that? It could manage just fine so long as the enemy didn’t have a way to close in on them or survive the opening salvo, but it was severely lacking in follow-up and any options for really forcing a game to close beyond the enemy team massively screwing up or just managing to jump some of the more important members in the mists.

It did tell him that Rayne had been serious about him being a good fit, though, which he could already see.

“I form the backbone of the staying power you need, miss. From what I can tell, your early game and late game would be good, but they depend on a having a solid pivot mid- and front-line. My ability to assist and be assisted by other frontliners opens up siege strategies that are basically unavailable to you without otherwise ludicrously strong tanks.”

He was fairly confident that his answer had been good, so when she burst out laughing, he got worried. Had his answer been terrible? Was she going to send him away over a mis-read?

“M’dude, why the fuck are you calling me miss? I’m probably younger than you! Holy shit, Rayne, where’d you find this guy? He’s great!”

He was too shaken to properly respond, and it seemed like Rayne was in a similar boat, false-starting twice before she managed to actually speak. “I just know him from an IRL club. What the hell was that?”

“I just wanted to see how y’all’d react if I went all serious. Grr.”

He struggled to fit the adorable fake-growl into the image he had of the girl for a second before giving up. She’d obviously been acting the whole time.

“But hey, don’t worry about it, guy! You’re fine. On the team, if you want it. Jade.” She stuck a hand out, expecting a handshake, and he took it automatically before he could question it too much.

“Jeremy. How much intro time did Rayne give you on me to know all that stuff?”

It was weird, because she pulled back at that, looking at the ground as though embarrassed.

Had she spent hours on him or something?

The silence lasted long enough that Rayne answered instead.

“I’m… fairly certain that she saw your abilities for the first time when I handed her that sheet. Like, just now.”

Jade made a confirming noise, and he just had to stare. What kind of monster-team had Rayne found for him? And why did Jade instantly become shy at a single implied compliment?