Levi stood by the gate, gazing out over the plains as the sun crested the horizon, casting its rays on the golden grasses swaying in the breeze. Last night he was able to convince Kelly to let him come on the leveling expedition today. Now that he had a clear idea about what he wanted for his class skill there was no reason to wait. It was better to gain power now than wait for a pack of dinosaurs to overrun the outpost.

Truthfully, he was a little suspicious of this whole leveling expedition in the first place, but if he was going to be part of community he should at least give it a shot. If it was too slow he could always leave and level by himself. There was that dungeon across the river too. He could still feel it calling to him.

A quick shake of his head and a flaring of Aecylic Energy had his mind clear. He wasn’t sure why he couldn’t put that damn dungeon out of his mind, but whenever he had a free thought his mind kept drifting back to it. He needed to get a team of people together and destroy it. Then he wouldn’t have to think about it constantly. The way it kept insidiously worming itself into his thoughts was annoying. It needed to be dealt with.

But that was a problem for another day. Now he was stuck waiting for the last few stragglers in their expedition. Some people just weren’t morning people, even without things like electric lights to keep them awake at night. He didn’t have to wait for long though, and the last group soon showed up, rubbing the sleep from their eyes.

“Okay, everyone,” Kelly said, addressing the group. “Some of you may have met him before, but for those who haven’t this is Levi. He is new to our community and arrived two days ago. He will be joining us on the expedition. He had to survive by himself out in the wilds, and, as you might expect, because of that he has ample combat experience. Right now he is going to take the position of final defense, but later on he might be moved around. Levi, why don’t you say a few words about yourself?”

Levi wanted to throw a stink eye at Kelly for putting him on the spot. She hadn’t mentioned any self-introductions.

“Ehum. Hello everyone, I’m Levi. It’s a pleasure to meet you all. I’ll be joining you all for this trip. Uh, hopefully it goes smoothly and stuff.”

“Alright,” Kelly continued, saving him from further embarrassment, “let’s form up. Everyone knows their role? Good. Today we are heading East along the tree line before sweeping back into the plains and coming back. Remember: just because there haven’t been any attacks from the forest recently doesn’t mean there won’t be any. Not to scare anyone, but there could always be more of those tree things. Okay, form up!”

Spellbound, Levi watched as everyone quickly formed their formation. The group was twenty people, with ten combatants, eight leechers, himself, and Captain Kelly. They quickly set off across the plains, angling towards the tree line in the distance. The pace surprised Levi. While it was nothing to him, it would have been enough to leave behind most people who weren’t long distance runners back on Earth. But this wasn’t Earth anymore, and times and people had changed, and even the non-combatants were no exception.

Levi ran along next to Kelly, his position in the formation guarding her and letting her focus her ranged power on their enemies without worrying about any harm to her person. He also suspected this was the easiest location to place him, as his job was straightforward. He had asked about the forward guard, and the detail that went into their formation blew him away. It was much easier for him to guard someone than join a formation he was unfamiliar with, especially as his teamwork was severely lacking. But everyone needed to start somewhere, and Levi was looking forward to observing the other members of the group and how they reacted to combat.

After a short time of running Levi started up a conversation.

“Hey Kelly,” Levi said, “so what exactly are we going to fight?”

“The most common monsters around here are triceratops dogs. But there are tons of other monsters we could run into. Most monsters gather in groups, which makes it easy for me to burn them to death. We’re actually rather lucky in that regard. If you listen to Alex, leveling up isn’t that hard if you have access to large groups of easy to kill enemies. And also because of my ingenious plan. We would be in a lot of trouble if the non-combat people had to only rely on skill gains to level up.”

“So the basic plan is to run around until we find a group of monsters to fight?”

“Pretty much yeah.”

“Isn’t that, I don’t know, kind of inefficient?” The way Kelly was talking made it sound like this was the best way to level, but if they were just going to be running around for most of the day he was skeptical.

“Monsters don’t just drop out of the sky you know,” Kelly said dryly. “We have to find them, and the only person we have with a mapping skill can only map terrain, not groups of monsters. And his skill takes too long anyway. Yes, it might take a long time to find the monsters, but killing hundreds of monsters at once it much better than individually killing small groups.”

Levi continued running, thinking over what Kelly said. While on the surface it seemed like sound logic, he couldn’t help but feel there was a better way. Mostly because he would be bored out of his mind if he had to go on more of these outings. Levi understood that travelling was a necessity, but boring was boring. It didn’t help that he could travel much faster by himself than the group was moving.

As he brainstormed ideas Levi couldn’t shake the feeling he was missing something obvious. There had to be a better way than running around blindly. It sounded like no one had a searching skill, but while that might be the way to go about things in a game, this wasn’t a game. That he was well aware of. So why was everyone assuming you needed some skill to search for monsters? From what Kelly was saying, it sounded like there were quite a few large groups of monsters roaming the plains. If they were as large as Kelly said they were, they should be easily seen from above.

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Of course! That’s what was bothering him! It seemed so obvious now.

“Hey Kelly.”

“Captain Kelly.”

“Uh, yeah, Captain Kelly. Is there someone with a flying skill?”

“Flying? I wish. Don’t you think they would be scouting if we had someone like that?”

“What about an enhanced vision skill? There must be someone like that, right?”

“Yeah, there’s a few people with enhanced senses. I think Sam has the most powerful skill. She usually come with us, but right now she’s stuck on lookout duty as punishment. She was caught sneaking out to kill monsters at night.”

“Uh, is that a bad thing?”

“If it was safe, no. But it’s not safe, and anything that puts someone at risk is unacceptable. And it’s also against the rules. We all decided on some ground rules for the outpost, and one of those was not going out to fight monsters by yourself. We have too few people to risk losing some for stupid reasons. While Sam might be perfectly capable, going out alone, especially at night, is a stupid risk.”

Levi thought those rules sounded a bit strict to him, but he could understand where they were coming from. Especially as someone dying wouldn’t just be their own head. There was only three hundred or so people in the outpost, so each person lost had a large impact on their manpower. And manpower was one of the key factors in power, especially now in a world without modern technology. 

“I see,” Levi said. “Actually, it was the lookout tower that made me think of this, but why don’t you employ other lookout methods? Having someone that can fly might be easiest, but there are other ways to look over large distances. Just having a higher vantage point would help, especially for someone with enhanced vision.”

“Oh, do tell? It’s not like we can just carry a lookout tower along with us?”

“Why not?”

“What?”

“Well why can’t you? I mean, we may not have vehicles or anything, but I think I could carry a few hundred kilograms easily. You can just have people carry around a lookout tower and then set it up whenever you need it. Hell, you could probably just throw someone really high into the air or something. Maybe you would need an acrobat for stuff like that in the past, but I feel like with increased stats something like should be much easier now.”

Kelly opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Her thoughts were a blur, racing a mile a minute. She wanted to shoot down Levi’s idea, but the more she thought about it the more it made sense. Why hadn’t they brought along a watchtower? She had watched the lumberjacks carry whole trees on their backs. She knew it was possible. It would be almost trivial to carry along a large pole and set it up to create a pseudo lookout post. It was just that an idea like that would have been ridiculous back on Earth. But here?

“Of course!” Kelly shouted, drawing startled looks from the other people in the group. “Why didn’t I think of that? It’s genius! Everyone, Halt!”

The group stopped running, gathering around Kelly.

“Levi here just had a genius idea. It makes us look like a chicken that’s been running around with its head cut off. Okay, I want Jeff, Leah, Dominick, and Kurt. You guys come over here. Levi, you’re going to help too. We’ve been going about this all wrong. So the basic idea is that you four are going to stand over here with your arms locked together. One person facing another, yeah, like that. Then Levi is going to hold is hands out like this and I’m going to climb on top of them. The he’s going to throw me up into the air and you guys are going to catch me. Any questions?”

Kurt raised his hand. “Hold on a second captain. Can you go over it one more time? And can I ask why exactly we are doing this?”

“Levi just brought up that we are doing almost no scouting. There’s no reason we need to stay on the ground to look around when we can easily get an aerial view. Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing. I used to be in the circus. Just do what I tell you. It’ll make sense after.”

Levi bemusedly went along as Kelly put everyone through rehearsal after rehearsal. He though his idea had merit, but he hadn’t expected Kelly to immediately put it into action. But after practicing a few times it was obvious that while it might have been a crazy thing to try on Earth, doing circus acts with people who had superhuman levels of strength and agility was surprisingly easy.

His task was to throw Kelly up in the air. He held out his hands in front of him, palms face up, while Kelly stood on his hands. He then had to throw her into the air. It took him a few times to get the hang of it, as it wasn’t so easy to throw her straight up, but that’s what the practice was for, as he only started throwing her up ten or so meters to make sure she would be okay even if she wasn’t caught. It was then the other four’s job to catch her, holding their arms out to form a net.

The practice was slow at first, but as everyone got used to their jobs Levi slowly started throwing Kelly higher and higher, eventually reaching heights that he estimated as even higher than the watchtower back in the outpost. It was thrilling, and Kelly was clearly enjoying it as she let out whoops of joy. It was infectious, and Levi could feel himself smiling as he watched her soar up before safely landing back down.

Finally, Kelly thought they were ready for the real thing.

“Okay, this time I’m going to have Levi throw me up as high as he safely can without losing control. I might have been able to survive the fall from before, but this time it’s more important than ever I’m caught. Does everyone think they can handle it?”

A chorus of aye aye captains answered her back.

“Levi? You’re the most important person here. I want you to throw me up as high as you can, but it needs to be straight up. Can you do that?”

“Yeah, but are you sure it’s a good idea? I think I can throw you pretty high…”

“Don’t worry about me,” Kelly said, waving her hand dismissively. “Just focus on your own part. If everyone does their job it’ll be fine.”

Levi was a bit nervous as everyone got into position for the final try. By relying on Concentrated Will he should be fine, so he put all his doubts out of his mind and just focused on what he needed to do.

“Everyone ready? Alright Levi, I’m ready whenever you are.”

Levi let the pressure roll off of him as he focused on his task. He activated Aecylic Empowerment, letting the energy flow through him, boosting all his physical stats. He had enough practice that his body knew what to do. With a final deep breath, he drew on his Strength and threw Kelly, tilting his head back to watch as she soared high into the air.

She flew, continuing to ascend, going up and up until she reached a high that Levi thought had to be at least twice what she had reached in any of the previous attempts. It was amazing, the sight of someone flying like that filling him with wonder. She finally reached her peak, her momentum slowing before she started the fall back down. The people catching her did need to reposition a little, but they caught her without a hitch, and Levi let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. He didn’t want to think about what would have happened to him if Kelly didn’t touch back down safely.

She jumped up out of her catcher’s arms, her laughter infectious as she whooped for joy.

“That was fucking amazing! We’ll have to do that again sometime.”

“But did it accomplish anything?” Dominick said. “We’ve been here practicing for a while, which is time we could have spent moving.”

“Don’t get your panties in a twist. I didn’t forget the end goal. I saw a group of monsters over there.” Kelly pointed off towards the plains. “But you’re right, we’ve stopped for long enough. It’s time to get a move on. There’s monsters to kill!”