Kira slammed into another tree before dropping back to the ground, landing on her face. “Ow...” she said softly before slowly glancing back to Ervent. Fortunately, the other girl was doing her best to avoid laughing.

Barely succeeding. But at least trying. “Are you okay?” Ervent asked.

“I hate wings,” Kira said before slowly picking herself up. “Let’s just get me that stupid restoration spell so I never have to play as an angel again.”

“Sorry,” Ervent said sheepishly. “It’s not so bad once you get used to it. And being able to fly is really fun. You’ll love it.”

“Sure I will,” Kira said with a roll of her eyes.

She’d finally decided to go through the quests to unlock all of the other classes, namely to unlock the different spells. While she figured it was unlikely she’d unlock all of the spells anytime soon, having a few of the lower level ones would still be useful. It was nice that a lot of the spells continued to level up with her, rather than becoming obsolete as she leveled. The basic heal spell was quite nice, namely that it allowed her to adjust the MP cost to heal for more or less as needed. Her big goal, however, was being high enough she could unlock the restoration spell. Removing status effects on herself would be amazing. That and it was the perfect time to start leveling their companions.

Though, something still felt strange to her. Kira glanced back to Ervent, who was in a leviathan form now. The soft, blue scales were kind of adorable on her, made her want to pinch the smaller girl’s cheeks. “Are angel stats always this high?”

“Huh?” Ervent asked. “What do you mean?”

“Well, whenever we fight things. I’m easily killing enemies in one hit that used to take me almost a dozen hits when I was this level as a demon. Sure, I know my weapon is a lot more powerful now, but it’s not that big a damage boost,” Kira said.

“Well, yeah. Your character level is a lot higher now too,” Ervent said.

Kira blinked a few times before sighing. “What does that mean, exactly?”

“Your class stats are based on your character level, up to the class cap,” Ervent said sheepishly. “You didn’t notice that? Really?”

Kira opened her menu again and started looking over her stats. “Really? Seriously? Where are my character stats then? How do I know where they-- oh, you have got to be kidding me. How is ANYONE supposed to notice that? Who designed that?” she asked before shaking her head. While she could select her classes to see what skills and stats they had, she also found when she unclicked the one she currently was, she could see her base stats. She blinked a few times before selecting her angel class and then demon class. While all of her angel stats were highlighted, her demon ones were not. “Really? I guess my character level is still low. It looks like my demon stats aren’t capped. That’s annoying, do I really have to grind them up too?”

Ervent sighed and shook her head. “It’s not that big a difference. Besides, you keep getting experience even when you cap your level, right? So once we start doing more max level stuff I’m sure you’ll hit the cap before you know it.”

“I hope so. Okay. Here I go!” Kira yelled before flapping her wings again and trying to fly back up into the air. The control was awkward and unwieldy, trying to control the wings as best she could. She felt just a hint of jealousy towards Ervent who never seemed to struggle with flight. Though, she supposed Ervent had been doing it for months. Kira slowly flew up, landing on one of the massive branches and looked out over the forest.

“You know, maybe practicing here was a bad idea after all,” Kira said with a shake of her head.

“I tried to warn you,” Ervent said sheepishly.

“Still better than the angel lands. They’re so bleak and desolate. You’d think they’d be a little better.”

“There are a few places that aren’t so dead,” Ervent said defensively, her cheeks going a little redder. “Just not many. Forests and green tend to really be more the fae things.”

She knew it wasn’t Ervent’s fault, but she still found it a bit annoying. Each of the race’s lands had a common terrain effect in their lands. Angels lived in floating cities and had a lot of war torn, desolate lands. Dragons had volcanos and boiling lakes. Leviathans were, for the most part, underwater and a pain to travel through unless you had the right spells, potions or were a leviathan yourself. Holy beasts had nicer areas, but were largely underground, caverns and the like. Demons had foul, corrupted lands that often oozed poisons or were coated in obsidian. Fae had the best, massive forests that seemed to go on for miles, with trees that were sometimes thick enough her apartment could have easily fit on top of them, with massive cities built in the branches. It did sometimes make travel a little difficult, though.

Primarily the dense foliage. “Okay, I see something!” Kira yelled. “How’s Crystal?”

“Oh, I’ll summon her. One second. Crystal, come!” Ervent yelled. A moment later a squirrel-like creature the size of a small dog appeared at her feet, its coat a glimmering red with a diamond embedded in its forehead. The carbuncle shook its head before giving a small, gentle chirp.

“Doof, come!” Kira yelled. A moment later her great blue dog appeared at her feet, towering over her. She reached out and gave him a small pet. “Ohhh, who’s my big, doofy boy? You are. Yes you are,” she said before she turned towards the strange, plant-like monsters below. She could only barely make it out, its body meshing well with the foliage. “Ervent, you see it?”

“I can’t see much from down here,” Ervent said.

Kira gave another sigh. While she suspected it would be incredibly broken, she really did wish that there was some way to keep their racial abilities when in different forms. It would be so much easier to learn to fly if Ervent could be up there with her when she did it. Then again, she supposed letting every class have all of the abilities like that would be a little over powered. She reached out to the map and targeted the monster, before sending the location to Ervent. “See it now?”

“Yes! Barely. It’ll take me a minute to get into position,” Ervent said before she started walking towards it, the bushes tugging at her every step of the way.

Kira sat down on the branch and sighed, watching her. She supposed this was the price of doing things with a partner, though. Patience. If this was a single player game she could just go off on her own and be done already. Odd, though. Even when she thought about it, the idea of going to play somewhere else just didn’t sound fun. “Hey, Ervent?”

“Yes?”

“Before this game, what did you used to play?” Kira asked.

“Oh, I used to play some old online games. I haven’t touched them in ages, though,” Ervent said.

“Don’t your friends miss you in them?” Kira asked before readying her ji. Only a few more moments. “Also, have Crystal do the buffs now.”

“On it!” Ervent said and a moment later a small icon appeared over all four of them, showing they had the damage buff from the small creature. “And not really. I’ve never really been good at making people on those games. I also kind of, well. I mean. I’m not good at running guilds or anything like that. They usually feel so impersonal when you join. Be on at X time to do Y dungeon and stuff. We’ve never really done that.”

“We’ve done it a few times,” Kira said with a light laugh before leaping off of the branch. “Here I come! Necrotic ram!” she cast, driving the blunt ram into the center of the viney monster. It let out a hiss of pain, pulling its body back and finally allowing her to see all of it. A small, green bulb with vines slithering out from all over it. She stomped on one of the vines and cut it off.

“I mean, yeah. But we don’t force people to come to them,” Ervent said before bringing her new mace down on the monster. “Freezing blow!” Ice washed over the creature and, a moment later, it disappeared in a flurry of red sparkles.

Kira nodded before spreading her wings and taking back to the skies again. A small alert had popped up, letting her know that Doof had leveled. “Yeah. But we’re not exactly pushing end game content now, are we? You and I only just hit the level cap.”

“I think the term people would use for us is ‘filthy casuals’,” Ervent said with a light giggle. “Are you still having fun?”

“Definitely,” Kira said. Though she couldn’t help but think on that for a moment. When she played before she never would have been like that. She always rushed for the best weapons, the best equipment, hitting level cap and getting as strong as possible.

She’d been playing this game for so long already and she had only just hit the level cap. There were still plenty of spells for her to unlock and her other classes were nowhere near max. She didn’t even have her master armor yet. Half the time they didn’t even do dungeons in full groups. She was wasting her time doing meaningless things that she didn’t need to.

Kira glanced back to Ervent. She remembered back when she first joined and grinned. The whole reason she hadn’t wanted to join to begin with was because she hated the idea of being stuck on someone else’s schedule. But this, oddly, felt different. “Are you having fun?”

“Always,” Ervent said quickly.

This was all just a waste of time. Already today she had spent probably two or three times as much time as she would have normally doing these quests, just waiting on Ervent. Yet it didn’t feel like a waste of time at all. In fact, more and more she was finding herself thinking about the game when she wasn’t on, just because she wanted to see what everyone else was up to. “Oh, another one! Come on,” she yelled before taking to the air again, flying towards another one of the viney creatures.

------

“Soooo, what do you think?” Kira asked, unable to suppress the grin on her face.

“How did you even do that?” Orion asked, his eyes wide. “We don’t have the space for this. I would have if we could. But that’s way too big.”

“It’s not nearly as big as it looks,” Kira said with a laugh before nudging him up the stairs. “I modeled it after the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Now, as impressive as it looks, it’s not really that much. Namely, it’s only one level.”

“What? But it’s four, I can clearly see that,” Orion said, shaking his head.

Kira nudged him up the steps. It had taken her a while to make it, but she’d finally created the garden location of the guild hall for them to grow different plants and ingredients. It was divided into four sections, with each section getting smaller and smaller than the previous. At first glance it looked like four block tiers, each tier rising out of the middle of the lower one, which were surrounded with plots of land where things could be grown. The last plot was only a small four by four plot. She’d filled each of the plots with smaller plants as she went up, the lowest housing trees and the tops merely having a few berry bushes.

While at first it really DID look like they were going up, the reality was that the entire thing was only coded to appear that way. The ‘walls’ were just places where people couldn’t go any further, with only the staircases allowing them to go further in. While they did technically go ‘up’ when they walked on the steps, there was nothing actually beneath the dirt and stone. The entire structure could be flattened with ease, conserving the space beneath it. “Just a simple trick. The important thing is that it looks like it goes up, right?”

“I am going up, right?” Orion asked. “How did you fit this in? I didn’t think we had enough blocks for something like this.”

“I told you, I’m really good at what I do,” Kira said with a laugh.

“But there’s ten blocks down there,” Orion said. “I mean, ten by ten so--”

“It’s only the same hundred blocks for farming,” Kira said, cutting him off. “Just trust me, okay? The only blocks that aren’t usable are the ones for the stairs. If you’d like, I can shrink those down as well. Check out the interface, okay?”

Orion nodded before reaching out and tapping on the air a few times. That had actually been the harder part. While the gardens looked rather complex, it was really a simple trick of adjusting the display and setting up proper invisible walls. Setting up the garden so it could be easily adjusted to what was planted, when it was, where things ended up if harvested, who could and couldn’t harvest or if it was done automatically and scheduling different plants had been a lot harder with the system’s tools.

“I didn’t even know you could do this,” Orion said gently.

“I’m not surprised. They use some really old setup systems. I had to run quite a few different scripts just to get it to do what I wanted. Do me a favor and don’t look up what I wrote, I’d rather you not see how crazy some of those tricks are,” Kira said, unable to keep the excitement out of her voice. “I tried to have it update automatically whenever new plants that were growable were found, but I couldn’t. They’ll have to be manually added whenever we find them.”

Orion gave a light chuckle. “Oh? I guess that’s one way to make yourself indispensable.”

Kira gave a light snort of amusement. “Please. You all would be lost without me. Who would go around stabbing people with sharp, pointy sticks if not for me?”

“True, true,” Orion said with a solemn nod. “However will we find someone so talented at nearly suiciding herself on the enemy blades?”

“Exactly. Otherwise, who else do you have? You, who uses flat sticks. Totally a different department. Ervent? She uses entirely sharp sticks. My sticks, however, are MOSTLY unsharp. With sharp bits at the end. And don’t even get me started on Blueberry. Wide sharp bits? The horror,” Kira said with mock disgust.

“Wait. Your ji has that crescent blade on each side,” Orion said, giving her an amused smirk.

“Ah, but my flat stick part is MUCH longer,” Kira said solemnly.

“True enough. I guess size matters, huh?” Orion asked.

Kira froze in mid step, running over those words in her mind. Finally her cheeks went red. “Okay, you win this round.” She opened the guild menu and sighed. “You know, I hadn’t really noticed before. But we really don’t have any demons in our guild, do we?”

“Not really. They’re not that popular a class,” Orion said. “Their ability is rather circumstantial. Amazing when it works, but everywhere else it’s kind of useless.”

“We have a lot of dragons, though. Few angels. Few fae. Wow. Like two leviathans. Oh, wait, no. Looks like they’re primarily a dragon too. No holy beasts?” Kira asked with a light chuckle.

“Not everyone feels comfortable punching out monsters,” Orion said with a shake of his head. “That and their abilities are pretty circumstantial as well. Digging underground is cool, but you have to take a lot of spells to be able to find things and it can be really rough since it offers no real combat advantage. Leviathan at least lets you see in the dark everywhere.”

“I think being a demon is pretty cool. Wish I could do more with the tail, though,” Kira said before glancing back at her own. “The wings you can at least feel and move around. All that thing does is stand there. I think I’ve even gotten it snagged on things before and it just phases through.”

“Well, a lot of demons don’t even have them for that reason. I think it’s kind of cute, to be honest,” Orion said.

Kira gave a light chuckle at that. “Oh? Really now? So is that the real reason you invited me to your guild? All this time I thought you only invited me because-- OH YOU BASTARD!” she yelled, making him jump.

“What? What I do? What?” Orion asked, quickly backing away from her and holding his hands up. “I’m sorry! I don’t know what I did but I’m sorry!”

“You know EXACTLY what you did!” Kira yelled, pointing a finger at him. “You distracted me!”

“I did?” Orion asked, looking as clueless as she felt annoyed.

“Yes! We never had our makeup duel!” Kira yelled.

Orion stared at her as if she was nuts. “Our makeup duel? What in the world are you talking about?”

“Our makeup duel,” Kira said again. “I lost because I was lower level before. I’m not now. So you owe me another fight.”

Orion stared at her for a few moments, mouthing the words. Finally he gave a sigh. “Really? That’s what you’re yelling about? When you ambushed me?”

“I did not ambush you. You were intruding in our lands. I was merely a noble, brave demon, struggling to save her people,” Kira said, standing as straight as she could and giving a flourish with her hands. “To keep them safe.”

“You stabbed me. A lot,” Orion said, giving her a flat, unamused look. “You also punched me in the face.”

“Yes. But now I can do damage,” Kira said. “I did tell you that you’d owe me another one, you know.”

Orion gave a small nod, though she could see a smile starting to form on his lips. “Fine, I understand. When?”

“I don’t know! I didn’t think that far ahead,” Kira said before covering her mouth and laughing. “How about this weekend? We can make a day of it. You can come on. Fight me for a few minutes. End up eating dirt and have the rest of the weekend to revel in shame and humiliation.”

Orion sighed and rolled his eyes. “Wow. Aren’t you just a little too cocky?”

“Am I ever not?” Kira asked.

“Point. Do you want an audience for this, then? I could do a guild announcement. If you really want to kick my butt that badly. Want me to make a new title for you and everything? Perhaps ‘Guild champion’?” Orion said in a teasing tone.

Kira stared at him for a few moments, her mouth falling open. “Is that a thing? Can that be a thing?”

“Wait, really?” Orion asked, his smile wavering.

“I mean, that sounds awesome! It could be like a real tournament or something,” Kira said, her excitement growing. “Or whenever someone wants to try and win it from me, they have to fight me to the death.”

Orion gave another long suffering sigh. “Of course. Come one, come all, to Kira’s ‘wanna stab you all’ tournament. Truly everyone will be thrilled.”

“Awww, you’re just jealous because you know I’m going to kick your butt,” Kira said in a teasing tone.

“How about we just do you and me for now?” Orion asked. “We--”

“Nope. Too late,” Kira said, cutting him off. “You offered a title and tournament, now it’s set in stone. Besides, it’d be boring if I just kicked your butt normally now. You can’t just offer all of that and take it out from under me.”

“Fine, fine. I’ll make an announcement,” Orion said with a roll of his eyes. “Short notice. More people will want to fight whoever wins, though. It--”

“Well, once I become the guild champion, anyone and everyone can challenge me for the title at any time. So they’ll get their chance.” Now she couldn’t help looking forward to this weekend. A tournament, she couldn’t believe it. It was going to be incredible.