As I walked down the outside steps toward town, I admired the new ring on my right hand—apparently all I’d needed to become a jewelry person was to find jewelry that let me shoot missiles. Then I frowned down at my abilities. I didn’t need to prepare Elemental Aegis—just figure out what I’d replace with it if it was sorely needed.

After I did this, I opened up my character sheet to go over all my abilities.

Ability Slots and Abilities

Fixed Iconic Passives [2]

Mage Class

Psychic Class

Iconic Spell Slots [2]

Mana Shield

Moment of Mastery

Spell Slots [6]

Unnatural Confusion

Elemental Weaponry

False Identity

Hex of Chains

Magic Arrow

Mighty Leap

Spell / Spell Augment Slots [1]

Reactive Armor

Iconic Spell Augment Slots [2]

Supercharged Spell

Fragmented Spell

Granted Spells [1]

Implosive Missile

A lot of stuff. Maybe it would be easier to track if I had a hotbar or something, but engaging abilities was done by instinct, not by pressing a button with my strange mind-cursor.

Offensive spells didn’t have to have a target until their casting was completed, and so despite the fact that I was in a safe zone, I was able to cast a Supercharged Fragmented Implosive missile to completion and essentially store it until I wanted to loose it instantaneously, at which point it would do… more damage than I’d had hit points as a level 6 Mage, that was for sure.

As I descended the stairs, my thoughts were split between two tracks. First, I kept looking forward to going out and getting to use my new toys on some monsters—imagining what my character might be like once I’d gotten a few more levels, a few more abilities. You know, typical gaming stuff once you get stuck in the progression loop.

But these thoughts were a distraction, something I was comfortable and used to. My mind also kept returning to the insanity of my situation—I had to be in the future, somehow because humanity had taken over the galaxy, built a giant 2000s-era RPG simulator, then… vanished, somehow, or something, and been superceded by this Hierarchy of El. But if I was in the future, what the hell did it mean that they were about to find Earth? Wouldn’t they know where the homeworld of their precursors was located already?

And who was I supposed to find in the first dungeon?

A bright orange light suddenly flared in the sky to my left, breaking me out of my thoughts. I turned to see that the light, which had seemed almost like a firework, was instead a rune, glowing in the air some hundred meters away from me, almost level with my eyes. A few dozen meters beneath the rune I saw the shadows of people, shouting and running about, all of them surrounding a squat little pillar with a glass crystal placed atop it.

As I realized what might be happening, I shook my head. It was too early: no one was asleep yet. Haroshi wouldn’t—

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A bell began to ring out from the direction of the town square. I received two system messages.

Quest Unlocked – Defend Oromar’s Bastion

Objective:

Maintain control of the four beacons of safety that keep Oromar’s Bastion a Safe Zone.

Beacons can be recaptured if lost by standing on the beacon platform while no attackers are present.

Accepting this quest will mark you as a Defender, removing the protections of the Safe Zone and preventing you from attacking other Defenders.

Reward: 20 Virtue Points, Spellward Amulet or Bladeward Amulet

Quest Unlocked – Attack Oromar’s Bastion

Objective:

Seize control of all four beacons of safety to declassify Oromar’s Bastion as a Safe Zone.

Beacons can be captured by standing on the beacon platform while no defenders are present.

Accepting this quest will mark you as an Attacker, removing the protections of the Safe Zone and preventing you from attacking other Attackers.

Reward: 20 Vice Points, Spellward Amulet or Bladeward Amulet

“Shit,” I hissed as I read the quests. Well that certainly made things obvious. I still hadn’t spent my skill points. I still hadn’t spent my gold.

I wasn’t ready.

Maybe that was the point?

I took the defender quest, naturally—then replaced my Unnatural Confusion spell with Elemental Aegis, which I cast on myself—as a Supercharged spell, of course—choosing the Shock element for no particular reason while I watched the small shapes below me, tagging one:

Oderion – Level 4 Defender

Their health was at full, so I guessed they weren’t being attacked just yet. Was it another one of the beacons that had been assaulted? Had Haroshi decided to focus on them, one after the other? The quest had said they needed to be controlled, not destroyed—he’d have to split his force at some point.

Then I saw a half-dozen monsters crawl up over the side of the mountain, tagging one even though I could tell at this distance exactly what they were:

Webling – Level 4 Attacker

“Oh,” I muttered. This wasn’t Haroshi—or it didn’t seem to be. Instead, it was the dungeon, the demons, the corruption. They were attacking.

I wanted to breathe a sigh of relief, but I knew that any relief was coming too early: if Haroshi still planned to attack the town, this would make it easier for him, not harder.

I figured out how to make my way down. The pillar of safety was set onto a large platform of stone carved out of a natural ledge that began some dozens of meters below me after a sheer drop over the side of the stairs. I could see another stairway, a narrow path that began at the base of the steps I was currently descending and came out near the stone platform, but it was a long trip around. For a few seconds I wondered about just jumping—surely thirty or so meters of fall damage wouldn’t kill me? But I had no idea.

I tried to look for an outcrop halfway down, hoping to use my Mighty Leap to mitigate most of the fall damage, but the cliff face was essentially a sheer drop—the dwarves had likely destroyed any outcroppings precisely to stop invaders from making use of them in the way I wanted to.

There was a small opening near the beacon, a narrow stairway carved into the rock. After a moment of searching, I found its other end, difficult to spot because it was so small and unobtrusive, near the base of the steps I was descending. Hoping that the defenders weren’t too hard-pressed, I sprinted for the opening.

As I ran, I equipped my grapple gun out of my inventory, watching it materialize on my left hand, strapped to my forearm. Perhaps I should have burned the power cell to test it even once, but it was too late to think of that now: I had to trust on the system’s strange power to make me do things as if I knew how.

I emerged from the carved stairway to a reassuring sight. Three armored defenders, two dwarves and a gnome, fighting with heavy weaponry against three remaining weblings. A fourth defender, their highest level at level 6, was hanging back by the beacon, casting spells and restoring health to her comrades. There were no fallen defenders—only the lizards with twisted heaps of metal emerging from their heads.

I started casting a Magic Arrow, intent on spamming them until the weblings were dead. As I began, the healer, a middle-aged human woman in plain red robes, glanced over at me.

“Level 8!” she said, breaking into a grin. “Nice!”

She’d read my false identity, but she wasn’t wrong: all my abilities were a base level of 8 from my two level 4 classes. I had the stats of a level 8, too. If all the attackers were level 4, then I’d be more than—

My thoughts were interrupted by a warped-sounding, earsplitting shriek, a sudden gust of wind, and a the shadow of something enormous passing by directly over head.

I looked up with a sudden sense of dread and saw it: a glowing red eye at the head of a dark shadow shaped just like—

“Oh fuck,” I said. “Is that a motherfucking dragon?”