Blix shifted in her harness and wrapped her arms around Alf’s neck. “You’re doing great.” She let her lips brush his ear. “Keep going.”

He nodded and walked over to meet Hannah and Patrick, the final pairing of the day. According to Jane, Hannah was an important artisan on her planet. She was particularly known for her creativity and elegant engineering designs. And according to Maddie, Patrick was a successful mechanical engineer and part-time sculptor—in addition to being a nobleman in the Society for Creative Anachronism’s West Kingdom. Short and stocky with thinning gray hair, Patrick was the perfect match for the coarse-featured dwarf.

No, not match… She was a general in a war, not a matchmaker in some kind of twisted dating sim. This was an alien invasion. There wouldn’t be any 1-Up mushrooms that granted them extra lives.

Even so, Alf’s alien-human partnership thing seemed to be working. Maddie had already managed to level Joseph, and Alf hadn’t even finished pairing everyone. Surviving against the king’s armies was still a huge longshot, but at least everyone was motivated. If they could hold out a few more days, they would be a force to be reckoned with.

“Hannah!” Alf dropped to his knees and wrapped the dwarf in a warm hug.

“What is this?” The dwarf sounded outraged, but Blix didn’t miss the goosebumps covering her arms. “Jane? What are you doing?”

“It’s a human strategy for winning the game.” Alf kissed the sputtering dwarf’s cheek, and Blix almost lost it. Alf might be a little awkward with humans, but he was the perfect alien whisperer. And he didn’t seem to be acting. He seemed to really care.

“I already got the strategy from William and his pet human, but why? It doesn’t make any sense. The humans are supposed to be shopkeepers and the like. They’re not supposed to take part in the combat. It’s against the rules!”

“Is it?” Alf took the dwarf by the shoulders and turned her to face Patrick. “Do you know the rules of human games better than Patrick does?”

“Stop doing that! It’s… Distracting is what it is. This character is defective. The neural pathways are too easily flooded.”

“Don’t worry,” Alf draped an arm around Hannah’s shoulders. “It’s completely normal for dwarves and humans. It’s a good thing.”

“How would you know?” The dwarf squirmed but didn’t pull away.

“Because I have a human partner who is coaching me on how to win the game,” he said. “Do you think I could have gotten this far on my own?”

The dwarf turned an appraising look on Alf, let out a sputtering sigh, and then turned expectantly to Patrick.

“Hannah, this is Patrick…” Alf worked his magic on Hannah while Blix went through their party composition one more time. She felt like she was missing something, but she couldn’t figure out what it was.

Patrick would build Hannah out as a miner and stonemason with secondary combat capabilities. Together they were in charge of fortifying their camp—which would hopefully involve making their cave big enough to hold the party and all their supplies.

Kashelle, one of the non-gamer farmers, was a chemical engineer, and William, even though he looked like Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, was something Jane called a ninety-ninth-ranked creator. Their job was to assist Patrick and Hannah on the fortifications by focusing on developing woodcrafting skills to build a defensible wall around the rim of their crater.

Uther, Maddie’s sword champion friend, was tasked with building out Winston the giant Half-Orc as the party’s main tank.

Danielle, the too-pretty-by-far mixed-race farmer, wasn’t a gamer, but she said she’d read a lot of isekai manga and was confident she could build Marie, the Asian-appearing scientist, into some sort of DPS (Damage Per Second) mage.

Taylor, the graphic designer, would build out Isabella, the ridiculously buxom tone artist, as a ranger and possibly an illusionist if such a thing were possible.

Noah, the assistant veterinarian, would build out Darwin, the elf xenobiologist, as a healer.

Matthew, the overly dramatic roleplayer, would partner with Abraham, the equally dramatic experience-artist. She’d wanted to build them out as a DPS melee warriors, but Matthew had insisted on archery and Alf had given in way too easily. Which left her short several melee warriors. She’d been hoping to build out a party that could function without Alf, but that probably wasn’t going to happen until they could recruit more aliens and gamers.

Blix frowned. Including Maddie and Joseph, that was eight couples. What was she missing?

“Alright, thanks Patrick.” Alf shook the engineer’s hand and then turned to Hannah. “Thanks, Hannah. You have one of the most important jobs of all. If the two of you can figure out how to turn our cave into a defensible base, we’ll have a much better chance of standing up to the king’s army. Okay?” He gave the frazzled dwarf another hug and send her and her partner back to the cave.

“That’s everybody.” Alf climbed to his feet with a groan and started picking his way down the rocky wall. “Think it will work?”

Blix melted into Alf’s back, remaining motionless until he’d finished his descent. “We need more damage dealers,” she said. “More melee warriors. And we should have gotten our engineers to work on their bow skills. And maybe our healer as well. This isn’t a video game. We’re not going to be fighting stationary bosses or well-behaved mobs that stay in their combat zones. We’re going to be fighting an army. We need to deal overwhelming damage to lots of targets. We need to get Danielle and Marie to focus on AOE attacks. And we should have—”

“We’re fine,” Alf insisted.

“But we should have—”

“We’re fine.” He interrupted again. “Everybody but Joseph is still at level one. There’ll be time for fine tuning later.”

“But we might not have a later.”

“Shhh…” He took her gently by the hand. After watching him with the aliens, she knew she was being worked, but she couldn’t help it. His working was working. “I asked Jane to searched their feeds,” he said. “She hasn’t found a single mention of leveling up. They’re still at the ‘how do I make my mating appendage work?’ stage of the game. The most active topic on their forum is hysteria over defecation.”

“Crap! We didn’t teach them crap.”

Alf’s easy laughter helped ease some of the tension in her chest. He was right. She couldn’t think of everything. That’s why they’d given the aliens coaches.

“What should we work on now, Boss?” he asked with a smile in his voice. “Think we can reach level eight?”

We… Maybe she was an idiot, but she liked the way that sounded. “I’d hoped to level your archery skill, but with Matthew and Abraham training as rangers, we should probably keep going on swordmanship. No matter how you look at it, swords do more damage than sticks.”

“Um… commanders?” A whisper soft voice sounded behind them.

Alf and Blix turned to find Mouse looking up at them with wide glassy eyes.

“What about us?” the tiny South Asian asked in a barely audible voice.

“I’m sorry,” Alf said. “We didn’t mean to leave you out.” He looked around the rocky slope. “Um… Us?”

“It’s okay,” Mouse coaxed. “They won’t hurt you.” She walked over to a clump of rushes and extended a hand. The area behind the rushes distorted as a cloud of dust settled to reveal a willowy two-foot-tall girl with inhumanly sharp features. “This is Hopper. She’s really good at hiding, so I was thinking maybe she could be a scout?”

“Sure, that would—”

“Wait!” Blix cut Alf off. “Hi Hopper,” she gentled her voice. “I’m Blix and this is Alf. Does your stats sheet say what your race is?”

The tiny alien fluttered her arms. “I paid extra for something called Fae. It’s supposed to be good at hiding. Very magical.”

“Were you on the wagon?” Blix asked. “I don’t remember unchaining you.”

Hopper fluttered her arms again. “Isabella was taken, but I hid under the wagon.”

“Well done!” Blix hugged Alf tighter. This was perfect. Exactly what they needed. “Hopper, Mouse is going to train you to become one of the most powerful types of players in the game. It’s a class called assassin.”