It did take a while, but Geria eventually drifted back over to their group, settling surprisingly quickly into being the dividing point between the front and mid-line. With the addition, Deyana was finally able to truly focus on the destructive potential of her new staff, stepping into and out of range of the cenuras just long enough to hit them with lightning before backing off. On top of that, LJay was freed from needing to stay relatively in-line with his allies, letting him instead rampage through the cenuras and break their formations.

All in all, the addition had much more effect on their farming rate than the extra thirty-odd percent that might be expected. They ended up spending the full remaining time of the portal break killing the cenuras, with a couple of additional parties showing up near the end of the reality-invasion’s timer.

That had reminded Deyana and LJay to ask about what exactly had happened with whoever Geria had talked to, but even with repeated questioning they didn’t receive much response beyond her saying that it would be fine.

That was worrying, but nowhere even close to a top priority.

Especially when, near the end of their farming time, one of the cenuras had dropped [Repeat State], an Epic-level major rune.

[Repeat State] was used in several weapon setups, but its most known usage was in its nearly-unique ability to bring players killed in raids back to life.

Not that that was a preferred use.

It needed to be pre-set, and the cost was proportional to the time from activation and difference in state– velocity (relative to the target’s orientation), heat, electric charge, physical damage, and, most expensively, Mana, Health, and Stamina– which, given the reality of Mana and Stamina completely evacuating upon death, meant that using it in that capacity was prohibitively expensive.

However, it also allowed a DPS player to expend all of their mana in a short, five-to-eight-second burst without regard for their own life, followed by instant top-up by a support player specialized at every available chance in mana.

There were other ways to channel mana, but none discovered so far had quite the same instant kick– [Channel Mana] was constrained by flow rate, [Share Mana] had huge efficiency problems when distances got beyond a meter or two, and the various forms of pre-storing mana ran into issues with timeliness and input versus output volumes.

[Channel Mana] was still the preeminent solution in that domain, for numerous reasons, but as her first real entry into the healing-slash-support category, [Repeat State] wasn’t bad.

Plus, with its existence as a major rune, it meant that |Merge| would allow–

“–Deyana tells me that she’s thinking about crafting.” Geria deadpanned.

She blinked twice, shaking her head. “When did I tell you that?”

The other two laughed, and Deyana smiled along with them, trying to pick up the conversation.

“Wow, you really are a crafter at heart, huh? How’d you even get into fighter stuff?”

LJay scoffed. “Cause she’s fuckin’ good at it, dude. She wrote the damn guidebook on modern raid composition”

“To be fair, I was just the help with that. Over half of it was Kalis and I just touched up a few things.”

“Modern raid composition is Kay’s Guide–”

“That’s Kalis,” Deyana and LJay interrupted, then he continued, “It’s not everything, ‘n the guilds’ve got their own prudence, but Kay’s Guide’s like, the baseline. You do worse than KG, you use KG instead. I can still barely believe they went to Spearpoint.”

Deyana had to laugh at that. “They enjoy the challenge. Dawn was KGS-6 at the end but we started out as a bunch of newbies with nothing and fought a bunch of people stronger than us.”

“I mean, yeah. But Spearpoint.”

Deyana held back a smirk. “What? The NPCs love ‘em.”

“Oh, bite me.”

Don looked contemplative for a moment, then grinned. “You think they’d accept me as Guardsman #7? I know they only give out one standard kit, but…”

The other three shared a small laugh. “That’s a filled slot, unfortunately,” Geria said, adopting a grave tone, “Try #50 or #67 instead. #69 is definitely already filled.”

“As it should be,” Deyana said, before she thought about it, then blushed and bit back a second, more suggestive half of her comment when LJay raised an eyebrow at her.

“Honestly, though, why didn’t you go the crafting route?” Don asked. “Genuinely seems weird that you ended up where you did.”

Deyana gave him a shrug. “I was busy. Before we could take on portals… Red breaks are bad ones, even if nobody triggers them. As common as red portals are, those were everywhere, and everyone had to fight each other to actually get decent levelling zones where a portal boss cluster wouldn’t spawn in the middle of your group and send you back four hours. I figured out I was good at fighting, and it was more important that I got guildmates into those zones than it was for me to do crafting as a side project. After that… inertia.”

“Inertia. Really? Novsha was inertia.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Deyana laughed. “An object at rest stays at rest, sure, but an object in motion stays in motion, too. Falling Dawn breaks up a year and a half ago, and I just get flung into the whole mercenary style ‘cause Third woudn’t’ve taken me after Cadire went to them and everyone else simultaneously wants me in a high position and powerless. So I spend a year building rep, three months on top, then being guildless catches up with me.”

“And yet you’re going guildless again,” Don scoffed, “Because that worked out so well.”

She didn’t really have an answer for him, there, and just shrugged instead.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t thought about it, just that it was a problem for the future– one where she had resolved the current stranglehold before dealing with the next.

They did breaks in shifts.

As far out as they were, logging out and letting the automatic placement take over would have caused more problems than it solved, so they used the game’s features to move, instead– two of them, first Deyana and LJay, then Geria and Don, would verbally state their intention to continue heading towards the city, then log out and handle things in reality before coming back to the group having moved in that direction.

On the outside, Alex found a text on her phone from Ell noting that they needed an item with the rune on it.

That had made her a bit disappointed in herself; of course, they would need that, and the choice that she’d made in not telling them her character name would be both invalidated and a problem. The two of` them would need to meet at some unexpected time to try to slip the item between them without being caught by either the Vegas or LA guilds. In the process, they’d also need to add each other as friends so that they could do offline trading.

The only real upside she could see is that neither would really be on high alert at the moment (though that would be changing soon), and that they only needed to meet once and add each other as friends to send items between each other in between sessions.

She shot back a quick message about when she’d be taking a break from crafting, then loaded back into the game.

Picking up in the middle of a step, Alex was glad that she hadn’t lost the login touch from her last character. A quick confirmation that she was back was enough for Geria to start the logout sequence, and LJay had beat her back already.

He turned to her as they were running. “So.”

Deyana stamped down her first, annoyed, reaction. If anything, based on what she’d heard so far, she was surprised this had taken as long as it had. “I’m going to guess that I could script this conversation, but I’ll let you say it.”

He laughed at that, but it didn’t sound particularly amused. “And yet I’d still rather we have it.”

“Bodily harm? Emotional? Maybe you screw with our goal here?”

He shook his head and sighed. “Nah. This is Ly– Geria we’re talking about here, and I don’t really want to make it worse in the process. But I can make your life hell here anyways.”

Deyana nodded. “I know her IRL name too, though Don doesn’t. I don’t really plan on doing something to deserve that.”

He scoffed. “Most people don’t plan to. But I’ve talked to her sister enough to know that’s not really the important thing here.”

Deyana let that hang in the air for a second, but she’d already prepared an answer. “It’s something I’m aware of. There’s a chance she gets hurt from something that’s nobody’s fault but reality’s, but that’s not something you should blame me for, I don’t think.”

He gave her a look that was most of the way to a glare without quite getting there. “Uh-huh. Any chance you could tell me what that would be in advance?”

“Incompatible expectations. Even that much is only because you seem to actually care about her, so don’t ask for more.”

He went quiet at that for long enough that Don stumbled back into his character’s body, forcing them to slow down slightly so that he could rejoin the group.

To her surprise, LJay decided to keep their conversation private by sending his eventual response over text chat.

‘I guess I wouldn’t blame you there. She hasn’t been this excited about someone new for as long as I’ve known her, so I might be overreacting.’

‘She seems like she’s worth that.’

Nobody talked out loud again until Geria loaded back in to her character as well, breaking the stride without going all the way to stumbling.

“So what’s our plan when we make the city?” Don asked, staring at Deyana. “We just wait around for you to finish crafting stuff?”

“Basically,” LJay responded.

“You don’t need to,” Deyana said, rolling her eyes. “You’re free to keep leveling or to find something else to do if you want. It won’t be easy at this level to find a group without a guild, but it’s doable.”

He groaned at that. “If y’all weren’t powerleveling me, I really would find some guild to take me. I hate being invested.”

The sarcastic twist on the last word was enough to get a laugh out of Deyana and LJay. “Does anyone have suggestions for what the assumptions could be talking about? My main thought is the number of runes under the |Merge|.”

“Duplication,” Geria immediately responded. “It’s possible ‘Create-Create’ or ‘Burst-Burst’ does something.”

The other two were quiet for longer, but Don eventually spoke up.

“Distinct control, maybe? Like a bolt-wall where wall is delayed but bolt isn’t.”

“Actually, that brings up another point. What if you sequence it so that |Merge| doesn’t activate until after one of its component runes?” LJay asked.

None of them had an answer, which only helped convince her further it was worth trying.