"Hey," Gene said to Eva. "What do you think you're doing, dissolving the party?"

"We're linking up with Hekla," she said. The 'obviously' was implied.

He rolled his eyes. "Fine. Invite me."

"I don't think so," Hekla said. "You strike me as rude and abrasive. I don't think you would be a good addition to the group."

He blinked. "Are you shitting me? I'm higher level than either of these two and better armed. You definitely want me in the group." He pulled his axe from inventory to show what he meant.

Hekla shifted her feet, centering her weight. "I don't think so."

Gene eyed her, his lips compressing. He glanced behind her at Sigrid and Rakel, then tossed his head in dismissal. "Fine, whatever. Eva, Katia, let's go."

"Fuck off," Eva said, summoning her trident. "I never liked you and we don't need you. Get lost."

"Goddamnit, stop with the bullshit," Gene said. He grabbed my arm, pulling me back to him.

Eva lunged forward and to Gene's left, jamming her trident across his body into the back of his thigh. He screamed and fell, tearing the wound open as the trident's barbs were yanked from his flesh. He landed hard, his head bouncing off the stone floor and leaving him dazed.

"Gene!" I said, pulling bandages from my inventory. I stepped forward but Eva stopped me, her trident held horizontally in front of me like a turnstile bar.

"Leave him."

"Are you kidding? He might bleed out, or a monster could find him!"

She shrugged, her eyes cold. "I doubt it. He'll be fine in a minute and he'll use his Heal spell or take a potion. Let's go."

Hekla eyed her consideringly, then nodded. "I agree. Sigrid, Rakel, let's go." She turned and walked away.

I gaped after them for a moment. Eva stood next to me, her trident still blocking my path to Gene.

"Fine," I said. The bleeding wasn't that bad and I didn't want to feel Gene's hands on me again.

The five of us were a hundred meters down the hall when a bell sounded.

Player Kill! Good job! growled the AI's voice.

A smoky grey skull shimmered into existence over Eva's head.

o-o-o-o

The Stellar Nyearth was indeed worth plenty of XP. Hekla stepped calmly around the corner with her crossbow already raised and shot it. The magical repeating crossbow fired two bolts per second, each of them lighting on fire a moment after leaving the string. The force of their impact knocked the Nyearth back again and again, each bolt burying itself up to the fletching. The monster was dead in seconds and my XP counter ticked up. I hadn't done anything but I had been in the party so I got part of the benefit of everyone else's kills.

There were plenty of kills. It became almost relaxing—we would scout, spreading out in careful pairs until monsters appeared on our minimaps. We would get their names and levels and share the information over chat. Hekla would choose the targets with the highest expected XP total and the whole party would converge on whoever had found those targets. Hekla would kill them and the process would start over.

The Nyearth bred quickly, so we didn't run out, and some of the variants were strong enough that we never needed to move to a different neighborhood. The one time we encountered anything like real danger was when Sigrid and Rakel got a little too close and were scented by a mixed-type swarm of fifty or sixty Nyearth. They ran for it, warning us over chat what was happening.

By the time the two arrived, Hekla had found us a position on one of the main arteries, a dozen meters wide. She used random junk that she'd picked up in the dungeon to block off the sides of the branch corridor from which the sisters were coming in order to funnel the Nyearth down. We stayed behind her with our weapons at the ready while she fired into the mob of attackers, dropping them in droves. There were too many; she had us run back thirty meters while she retreated slowly enough not to spoil her aim. The last Nyearth died almost at her feet.

"Well, that was exciting," she said brightly, resting the barrel of the crossbow on her shoulder so it pointed up and behind her. "Shall we get some lunch? I'm hungry."

o-o-o-o

Two days later I found myself reflecting on that moment as I watched Hekla finish carving through a trio of Stellars. The massive creatures could breathe a line of hot plasma that had caused us problems the first time one got a shot off. It hit Rakel in the belly and would have killed her except that Hekla had gotten several Heal scrolls in an earlier loot box and managed to get to her in time.

Killing an entire army of horrors and then treating it like just another Tuesday was exactly in character for our leader. She seemed to have limitless courage and an endless supply of strength that she willingly shared with the rest of of us. When Sigrid woke us with a nightmare, Hekla was the one to soothe her back to sleep. I tried, once, but Hekla waved me aside and talked quietly with Sigrid for a minute or two, at which point the woman lay down and slept again.

"No offense," Hekla whispered to me. "She's my patient, that's all."

"Of course," I said, smiling and nodding. I should have realized that immediately; Hekla had the training and the prior relationship, so obviously she would be the better choice for calming a frightened woman. It was no wonder Eva had thought so highly of her; Hekla must have been a wonderful doctor.

More importantly, when I stood at her back I felt safe for the first time since entering the dungeon. There was nothing she couldn't handle; most of it died from her crossbow before it got anywhere near us, but she had no problems in close either. The Night Nyearth variant liked to hide in shadows and did not show up on the minimap while doing so. We only discovered this when one of them leaped out of ambush with all six claws and its stinger aimed for Hekla, shrilling a harsh reeee! Hekla stepped calmly aside and smashed it in the back of the head with the butt of her crossbow as it passed, then flipped the weapon around and stitched a line of firebolts up its back before it hit the ground. After that she took care to fire several bolts into any shadow that could conceivably host one of the creatures and they became just more 'XP dumplings' as she liked to call them.

Back on the surface, before all this, I had only noticed one stairway in Reyjavik. It seemed likely that no one had gone down before me and Eva because, aside from Gene, we had met no other crawlers during our time on the first floor. The second floor was either smaller or we had been relocated when we came down, because we started seeing more people. The first was a group of seven women, all of them terrified and traumatized by something they wouldn't talk about in my presence and I was honestly afraid to know. They joined the party willingly and Hekla took them aside for an hour each night to counsel them.

I think taking care of all of us was starting to wear on Hekla. She was smiling less and her voice was a little flatter. One day, when we were stopped in a saferoom, I tried to reach out, offering to be a sympathetic ear. She brushed me off with a curt "I'm fine. Open your loot boxes." I didn't try again but I did keep an eye out for an opportunity.

We accumulated people steadily, although only the women stayed. All of the men and a few of the women were tough, macho types, unwilling to either follow orders from a woman or share control. In each case, Hekla calmly explained that the party was working, she was the leader, and they were welcome to join if they could follow orders like good soldiers. In every case they couldn't. Three of them visibly considered contesting the decision but let it go when they saw the skull over Eva's head and the grim way we all clutched our weapons.

o-o-o-o

Time to Level Collapse: 7 hours, 32 minutes

"Remember," Hekla said, "we'll meet back here in no more than an hour. Make sure you eat something, but not too much. Fighting a Borough boss is going to be difficult."

"Yes, Hekla," Eva said. "We know."

She smiled, the expression grimmer than when we first entered the dungeon. "Okay. Off you go." She gestured towards the tutorial guild door.

Eva pulled it open and the two of us stepped inside to where Bannon awaited us.The door of a tutorial guild always led to your own guide. When Sigrid and Rakel opened they would find themselves talking to their guide, Yimda, while Marsha would be talking with Talmor, and so on.

"You two are cutting it close," Bannon said, looking up from his book. Once again he was in his chair by the fire, but this time he was wearing silk pajamas and slippers. They looked strange on his digitigrade feet, more like little booties than what I thought of as slippers.

"We had things to do," Eva replied. "We're getting off the level after we talk to you."

He looked at the clock on the mantle. "You'll want to wait a bit. If you go down more than six hours before, you'll be held in stasis until the level collapses."

"I know," Eva said impatiently. "Everyone is talking to their guides, then we take an hour or so to pool our information, then we go fight."

"We originally thought we would all talk to all the guides," I said. "If Eva or I held the door open then everyone could come in here even though they had other guides, right?"

"Sure," Bannon said, laying his book aside. "Why didn't you?"

"Take too long," Eva said, taking a seat on the couch opposite Bannon with me beside her. "There's sixteen guides in our group. What can you tell us about fighting Borough bosses, and about the next floor?"

Bannon's fuzzy eyebrows went up. "You're having to fight a Borough boss to get out? Damn, that sucks."

"We haven't found any other stairwells," I said.

"Tch. Shame. Well, you've got...what, twenty-one people?" He had been watching us on the recap; Hekla was featured on every show.

"Twenty-four," Eva said. "We met three more a few hours ago."

"Ordinarily I'd say you're still a little light for a Borough boss on the second floor, but you've got that chick with the crossbow. That thing is ridiculous."

He was right. Hekla's crossbow had been getting more and more powerful as time went on. It now fired so fast that it looked like a laser and the damage was so high that low- and mid-level mobs simply exploded when she hit them.

"Sure," Eva said. "So. What can you tell us?"

"Every boss has a weakness, and there's always clues. Have you scouted this thing?"

"No," Eva said. "We didn't want to get locked in. The monsters in the area are these weird centaur things. Bottom half is a spider, top half is a snake with arms."

He nodded. "I'm not allowed to tell you what the weaknesses are or even hint at them, but think about how you would fight spiders or snakes and you'll probably come up with something. Or just have her shoot the crap out of it. That's been working for you so far. Of course, it also means that the two of you haven't done squat as far as I've seen."

Eva glowered at him. "The recap doesn't show everything. We've fought."

"Uh-huh." He gestured to the lone bronze star above each of our heads. "You've only killed one boss so far, and it was a Neighborhood boss. There's a big jump in power between each level and the next. Don't expect this one to be twice as hard as the Neighborhood boss, expect more like five or ten times. That's usually damage and hit points both. They'll often have some sort of resistance to a damage type—fire won't work, charm magic won't work, that kind of thing. Not always but often. They're always either very fast or very tough and the terrain will always favor them. Again, look for the weakness." He laughed. "Or don't. Her crossbow is powerful enough it can probably take down a second-floor Borough boss without too much trouble."

Eva nodded. "Fine. Anything else?"

"Nope. So let's talk about the third floor." He rubbed his hands together, grinning. "That's where things get juicy. You'll be picking races and classes."

"What does—"

He waved her silent. "C'mon, Yappy Girl. You should know how this works. You shut up and listen, I take questions at the end."

Eva seethed.

"So. You go down the stairs, walk through a short hallway, I'll be waiting for you. You'll come back in here and we'll do the whole selection thing. The audience won't be able to see you until the process is over so you'll want to get through it as quickly as possible. Gotta keep racking up those sweet, sweet social numbers."

I forbore to comment. It was the end of the second floor, I had been traveling with one of the most elite crawlers in the game, and I still only had 517,812 followers while Eva had over seven million. I hadn't even dared to ask Hekla or the other Daughters how many they had, for fear that they would ask me in turn. It was too embarrassing.

"The AI is going to give you a list of races and you'll choose one," Bannon continued. "You can choose to stay human if you're an idiot but the other races will give you cool bonuses. Once you've made your choice you'll be given a list of classes and you'll choose one. I'll help you evaluate the options but I'm not allowed to choose for you."

"Why not?" I asked, forgetting the 'questions at the end' rule.

He ignored the question completely. "Important thing to remember is that I'm only your guide for the first three floors. The third floor is where you start running into quests, elites, and all that stuff. We'll talk about that when you get there. No point in doing it now when you're about to fight a Borough boss."

"What about—" Eva began.

"Bup." He chopped the question off with a wave of one hand. "That's all you need for now. Get out there and go kill your Borough boss. Wait until exactly six hours before collapse, then go down. You should be able to make it through selection and have a few hours to start grinding before the majority of crawlers make it down. The third floor is still big, but it's smaller than this one. You don't want to lose out on loot and stuff because someone else killed it before you."

Eva snorted. "I doubt that's going to be an issue. With Hekla in our group we kill stuff way faster than anyone else can. Other people will be worrying about us taking their opportunities."

Bannon laughed. "Oh, did I forget to mention that? Yeah, you get shuffled around when you go down to the third floor. Us game guides get scattered around the level and our adorable little students get dropped in near us. You'll still be in a party with Crossbow Chick but you probably won't be anywhere near each other."

"What?!"

He stood up and flapped his hands like a farmwife shooing chickens. "It is what it is so get over it. Off you go."