The next day, Sen has his breakfast, and while checking his phone he sees that there’s some more big news. Spaceships from Earth have been landing across the globe. Sen opens the many photos of them, and frowns. He’d expected something cylindrical to generate some sort of artificial gravity, but they’re far more blocky than that, looking more like rectangular prisms with rounded edges.
Looking at them, he sees something else that worries him. There are a multitude of ports of some type on each of the sides, and the only thing he can think of for them is that they’re weapons systems, as they’re far too large to be directional thrusters.
Eventually, he finds a video of them landing, and is even more confused. It has no jet thrust of any kind, seemingly just floating down like they can control gravity. As he’s finishing his meal, his father comes over, and Sen decides that he’s going to try for some answers.
“Can you really not tell us anything about Fifth Dimension?”
His father frowns, before giving him slightly more information. “Let’s just say that people who don’t do well tend to not be treated so well in the United Federation of Humanity. You’ll find out more once you get yourself to A rank in game.”
Sen frowns, but nods. If all he needs to do is get to A rank, then he’ll do that as quickly as he can. He wonders what a simple game has that would make them not treated so well, but still can’t come up with anything other than conspiracy theories.
Eventually, he gets back in game, and back to farming with his group. Every time they walk around the city, they gets looks and whispers, their second place in the tournament having granted them a lot of exposure.
Kang is absolutely relishing in the looks, while Xue, Sen and Lynna simply ignore it. Jennifer and Julie are the only ones who seems to be bothered by it, not comfortable with all the attention.
The group goes through their daily dungeon runs for the next few weeks, and eventually get to the point that their stats are all above C rank. Once they’ve gotten to that point, they realize that they’re going to have to start grinding out B ranked dungeons.
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They all hop off for a time while Julie goes to calculate the positions of the B ranked dungeons. Sen actually takes the time to go get some bubble tea with Xue, and they chat for a while about the spaceships that have recently warped into the area.
Xue seems to be very interested in the fact that the spaceships appear to have weapon systems, wondering if they’re using them to pressure the government of Alpha, or if they need them for a different reason.
Sen wonders for a moment, is Earth leaning on Alpha’s government why they had agreed to join the United Federation of Humanity? And if that’s the case, how much is it really a Federation and not an empire? Sen shares his thought with Xue, and they sit in silence for a bit.
They’re interrupted by a ping from their phones as Julie messages them that she’s found a few B ranked dungeons. They share a hug, both of them a bit too awkward to do anything more, then head back to their own homes to get into game.
Once they arrive in game, they all go to meet up with Julie, and hear some annoying news.
“I’ve found where a few rank B dungeons should be, but there’s only one in the vicinity of Falan. The others are near other cities, and we’re going to have to do a lot of traveling until we unlock the other cities for fast traveling.” She then pulls out a big map of all the cities surrounding Falan. Interestingly, Falan seems to be in the middle of a circle of cities, and when Jennifer asks about where the other cities are, as that is far too few for the players of the world, the group learns that cities are grouped into chunks of about thirty, then it’s a six hour drive to the next group of cities.
“The A rank dungeons are probably going to be in the large areas in between the groups of cities. I checked, and there’s no A or higher rank dungeons in the areas directly surrounding the cities.”
The group groans, they’re probably going to have to set up a campsite around some of the A rank dungeons once they get to that rank. At least the B rank ones are in between the different cities so they can just fast travel around to each city before going to the dungeons.
They discuss for a bit, The C rank dungeons are already hotly contested, so the B rank are going to be even more ridiculous. Sen expects at least a few guild wars to break out over them, and with his small group, the best they’ll be able to do is hire themselves out as mercenaries.
At least with their second place in the tournament, they’re not going to have any trouble finding people to hire them. They probably won’t get any additional pay, but simply being able to use the dungeons themselves will go a long way.
“Want to go see what a B ranked dungeon is like?” Julie decides to ask the group.
She gets a lot of nods and smiles, and a “I’ll never back down from a challenge!” from Kang. The group smiles, they’ve come to appreciate Kang’s attitude. While it can definitely be annoying at times, it’s mostly just amusing to them now.
The group finished up their discussion, then rents one of the blocky off road cars from the school, and starts to head out to find the B ranked dungeon.