Laurence and Bradley found Ken waiting for them three (emptied) rooms on, where he was having a casual sparring match with a miniboss. (Though 'mini' was a bit of a misnomer when it was roughly the size and shape of an angry bull, only with bigger horns and much pointier teeth.)

Level 10+

(Spined Kalvex)

Health 68%

More specifically, the miniboss charged after the shirtless man with the sword, and the shirtless man with the sword skipped away with impunity, inflicting quick slashes on the furious kalvex as he did.

He waved cheerfully when he saw them, ducking aside from a swipe of the kalvex's horns as he called out, "Two minutes, gotta finish this up real quick."

He turned and shifted his angle and speed just enough that when he took a running jump the kalvex charged straight under him. He landed in a perfectly balanced crouch on the kalvex's back, then stabbed his sword straight down into its skull. The orange glow of Destruction power pulsed steadily down his blade and the kalvex boss's health began to visibly drop.

Laurence stared. He'd thought Levi was impressive, but this?

The furious creature bucked and rolled, howling in rage as it tried to dislodge its unwelcome rider in any way it could. It slammed him into the walls, rolled to crush him against the floor, and twisted its head every which way to try and get a grip on him.

Ken was clearly used to this behavior. He twisted aside to avoid the worst of the wall slamming, flattened himself to absorb the impact of the rolling, and maintained both his balance and his grip on the sword without the slightest difficulty.

And he grinned like a maniac the whole time, as though this were a fairground ride instead of a desperate struggle of life and death.

In just under two minutes, the kalvex dropped to 0% health and crumpled to the floor. Ken withdrew his sword and leaped off the falling monster’s corpse, slipping the blade into an orange-glowing sheath at his side before he even hit the ground.

As he walked forward to greet them as though this were nothing more than a light workout, Laurence immediately saw why he’d been able to treat the kalvex so casually.

Ken Lewis: Level 27

(Fighter/Medic)

"Who are you?" he asked, faintly. Level twenty-seven?

"Glad you asked! But fair warning, it's a long story."

Three months ago, Ken Lewis was a receptionist. He hated the position, but it was his mom's practice and the only place he could get a job without having to go through an excruciating interview process in which he invariably lost his composure and melted down into a gibbering mess.

So when the magical portal to an alternate dimension dungeon full of monsters opened in the middle of the workday to swallow him alive it was the best thing that could have happened to him.

The dungeon was small and full of little gremlins, but Ken was a runner and none of them could catch him. It was only when he reached the boss room at the end that things got dicey. A goblin shaman, casting destructive little spells at him, and him running and running and running with nowhere to go.

It wasn't a great first boss fight, but he'd been unAwakened at the time and had no clue about anything. He'd eventually worn down the goblin's health with kicks and punches, before dragging it down from its pedestal and drowning it in its own destruction goo.

That was when he got the system notification, and his life changed forever.

Ken understood video games. He understood levels.

He understood the stakes.

First thing he did was backtrack through the dungeon to pick off the gremlins with the new weapon he'd obtained from the treasure room after the boss fight.

He wasn't sure about the potion bottles, they didn't look like what he'd expect, a blue electrical looking one, a slimy green one... they looked more like grenades or poison than something he'd want to drink, so in his second boss fight he'd thrown them at the ogre bearing down on him, hoping they exploded.

They didn't explode, just shattered and spilled their contents in a disappointing lack of damage-dealing. Surviving the next few minutes had been a matter of luck and running faster than he thought he’d ever run in his life, but the one good thing to come of that encounter was that he unlocked the Medic subclass.That particular happy mistake subsequently saved his life more than a few times.

It didn’t take long to learn the rhythms of the dungeon. He slept in the treasure rooms whenever he was tired or too injured, waking up to a newly refilled dungeon he could run to his heart's content. He started to experiment with things rather than just flailing around, training himself as best he could how to fight, how to level, and how to survive.

If someone asked him how many days he'd been there, he wouldn't be able to answer. It felt like a lifetime, like a paradigm shift. Like the way things were always meant to be.

He'd grown stronger and faster as he leveled steadily. The dungeon expanded around him, becoming ever more challenging, growing new rooms and, eventually, a whole new floor.

And in this new paradigm, Ken thrived. He soon came to realize this was what he’d always been meant for. He was born to be a warrior, a slayer of monsters, not a receptionist. Not even a competitive runner like he'd sometimes imagined. Looking back now, he wondered how he’d ever been so shallow. Ribbons and accolades meant nothing. Testing himself against opponents who wouldn't hesitate to tear him apart? That was what he was made for.

He sometimes found evidence of others who'd stumbled into the dungeon. Skulls and bones mostly, though once he came upon a recently-killed woman with her face and half her chest eaten off, four gremlins crouched and gnawing away.

He killed them all, but there was nothing he could do for her. He poured his strongest healing potion over the body, but she was long past saving. In the end, he carried her to the corrosive lake. At least then she wouldn't be eaten. It was the best he could think of. Her memory still haunted him. For days he wondered if there was anything he could have done, if he’d been faster, if he’d been paying more attention…

Mostly, though, it was just him and the dungeon. He learned its patterns, even as it learned his. He took to prolonging fights to leech out maximum experience, dancing around his opponents, using his Fighter abilities to bleed them, then Medic abilities to keep them on their feet longer. The goblins were particularly useful for this, since they were moderately sturdy, but not too strong. Gremlins and scarabs were too small to be any use, and kalvex and ogres too risky. Sometimes healing those triggered rage or other empowerment stages, and those could come closer to threatening Ken than he liked.

The goblin tribe came to fear him, and he found he enjoyed it that way. He roamed the upper halls, killing anything in his path, but the goblin village on the lower floor he reserved for training his medic abilities. He rarely ventured past it, the maze with its gremlins and the scarab lake weren't worth the time. It was upstairs that things were dangerous enough to be worth fighting. And, if he was honest with himself, he didn’t want to see the lake again.

But the time came that he could no longer run the dungeon with impunity. He'd outleveled it early on, but it was gradually catching up to him as his levels came slower and slower. A regular level 10, sure, he could win. A single plus miniboss? No problem. But the boss rooms, they grew more and more challenging. The bosses' multipliers ramped up at a ridiculous rate, and they no longer came in ones or twos, but in full teams.

He cleared the first floor's final boss, but the second floor... twice now he'd almost died to the midboss. He had yet to confront the final boss room since the dungeon leveled to 10, though he'd spent days sitting outside and examining the boss team. Finally he reached the conclusion... it simply wasn't possible alone.

"So when I heard you guys raising a ruckus, I rushed to get to you before you got yourselves killed.” Ken concluded. “I wish I’d been faster. This would be a lot easier with a full team. But I think we have enough to work with here. How'd you like to join me for the biggest, baddest dungeon run of your lives?”

If he'd been any less disheartened and empty, Laurence might have laughed. There would always be someone else, wouldn't there? Always an opportunity to avoid taking responsibility, always another chance to be a subordinate, to slip into a support role and spend his life for someone else's benefit. Well. It may have cost too much and taken him far too long to really understand, to see the cycles and patterns he kept playing out, but this time he was done getting swept up in someone else's story.

"No."