For killing a servant of evil, you receive 100 Virtue Points.

Congratulations! You’ve reached Pure Virtue Rank 5.

You have been awarded a new ability: Gift of Purification

Quest Completed: Liberate Mirrakatetz

Quest Unlocked: Claim Mirrakatetz

You have successfully completed this dungeon for the first time in the world. You may convert this Free Dungeon into an Instanced Dungeon at the final boss chest at any time. It will automatically convert in 24 hours.

I read this message and sighed. We’d done it.

“Alatar!” Cuby said, grabbing me and bringing me into an embrace. “We did it! For a second I thought—but we did it!”

“Thank Sudden Spell,” I said, showing her the ability. “I think when I took Fragmented Spell I thought that Sudden Spell wasn’t very good… but I was wrong, very wrong. It’s a PvP monster.”

“Your invisibility was useless and still,” said Cuby, laughing. She was visible, now—I wasn’t sure if she’d canceled the effect herself, or it had been dispelled by Haroshi, but it had been gone for most of the fight.

“It’s these classes,” I said. “The angels gave us everything we needed.” I had to wonder: were all the uncommon classes going to feel this strong?

“We’ve got a lot of loot to get through, now,” Cuby said. “There’s a lot of gear and such, just like with Nerien. But I’ve got… I mean, it’s hard to believe, but I’ve got 2 boon cards in my inventory!”

“Yeah,” I echoed. “Hard to believe. Let’s go get our loot for the last boss. And hopefully…” I took a deep breath and sighed again, suddenly incredibly nervous. “Hopefully there’s somebody there that I’m supposed to meet.”

“And some more class cards,” Cuby said. “Both of them dropped a stack—High Priest, which I think Haroshi used one of, and Elementalist. You might want either of them—but I really think we should find some other players, or something, and shop around. Trade these for better cards. I think the bosses are just dropping them randomly.”

“Yeah,” I said. I started to walk slowly toward the great hall that had been blocked by the barrier of energy.

“Alatar? Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s just…” I searched my feelings. What was I so worried about? “This may sound strange, but do you have a word for misanthropy?”

“Oh,” said Cuby, looking at me sidelong. “Alatar, misanthropy is evil.”

“I think we agree,” I said cautiously. “Though maybe for different reasons. Humanity—my humanity, that is—has come a long way. I’m not a historian or an anthropologist, but… from what I know, we used to live in mud huts, with two thirds of our babies dying before they grew to be six years old. Slavery was universal, and brutality could be found in every corner of the world. But things are so, so much better now for my people than they once were—better than they have been for almost all our species’s existence. There’s two reasons that misanthropy is so wrong, and the first is that it’s wrong factually—that any long term view of our species is a story about the light inside us, good overcoming evil again and again as we grow better at confronting the brutality in our nature.”

I frowned. “But it’s also wrong for spiritual reasons, or moral reasons… I don’t know what I’m trying to say, really, or how to say it. But if you look at humanity and you see a disease, a failure, something wrong with the world… you’re a monster. It’s not that there’s no bad in us, it’s that misanthropy can never be the ultimate conclusion for a human because it’s against… I don’t know. Our nature. What’s right. If you’re not judging with the hope of finding a better way, then you’re an unfit judge.”

I reached up and ran my hands through my hair, my fingers snagging on the metal circlet I’d been wearing since Oromar’s Bastion. Then I opened up my player race and read the first part:

True Human

Human beings are the rightful masters of the galaxy and the creators of the Colosseum. As a human player, you gain the following benefits:

Once again, I drew in a deep breath and sighed. “I’m just worried about what I might learn, about these other humans. But no matter what happens, I have to keep faith in humanity.”

Cuby was silent for a while. “I have faith in humanity,” she said quietly. “Maybe I can help.”

“We’ll see,” I said.

The great hall opened up to a circular chamber with a high, vaulted ceiling. Alcoves lined the walls, each of them hosting a metal apparatus of gears, hoppers, chains and pulleys, or levers. A set of thick chains, glittering with runes along their links, spread from manacles at the center of the room to the walls around them—Ryxariel’s now-defunct prison, was my guess.

Past this, a metal chest like the ones we’d seen before sat in the center of the room. And past that, a pane hung in the air. As I approached, its text came into view:

Activate to lock this dungeon.

Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

[This will spawn a portal near the dungeon’s main entrance which players can use to confront the legacy dungeon as an instance. The dungeon as it exists in the world currently will not be affected, and will remain a part of the world like any other.]

[You have 23:56:05 until the dungeon locks on its own.]

“A portal,” I murmured as Cuby looted the chest behind me. “Strange… Cuby?”

“Mhmm?”

I narrowed my eyes at the pane. “The Archivect… it prepared you for the game.”

“Yeah.”

“Did it tell you anything about loading screens?”

“Sure,” Cuby said. “You get them when you travel and when you enter an instance.”

“Travel?” I asked. “But we’ve been traveling.”

“Not like us,” she said. “I meant when you travel using Waypoint Warp. Actually, we should get Waypoint Warp now—oh,” she said, looking away from me. “It’s in the quest.”

I opened up the Liberate Mirrakatetz quest. I’d assumed it was just about killing the boss again, like the other two had been.

Quest – Liberate Mirrakatetz

Objective: Be the first players in the world to kill Ryxariel and finish the Mirrakatetz dungeon.

If you do, loot will contain additional rewards. Loot will be selected to suit your characters, rather than randomly determined.

I finished the quest, and immediately got a new one:

Quest Unlocked: Waypoint Warp

Quest – Waypoint Warp

Objective: Visit two safe zones and complete a dungeon.

Reward: Waypoint Warp Ability.

And I finished this quest as well—it even gave me a sizeable chunk of experience.

You have gained a new Fixed Ability – Waypoint Warp

I opened the ability:

Fixed Ability – Waypoint Warp

Use Time: 10 Seconds

Use Cooldown: 6 Hours

Recharge Time: 12 Hours

Uses: 2

This ability warps you to a safe zone or a locked dungeon that you have visited before.

“Well hello,” I said. The ability currently had 1 charge and was recharging by the second. “You said that using this would get me a loading screen?”

“Mhmm!”

“Good,” I said. “Because I think that I need loading screens. I think that someone can communicate with me through them—I think that if I go into and out of the dungeon repeatedly, they can give me longform instructions. That, or they’re in here and we just haven’t found them.”

“Simple, then,” said Cuby. “We’ll finish things off in here, and then tomorrow you’ll hang out by the dungeon portal and use it for as long as you need.”

“Why to—oh. I can’t do the dungeon more than once in a day, can I?”

“Nope!” Cuby shrugged. “Although maybe you can do it today. I don’t know if doing the free dungeon counts.” She frowned. “Also, maybe you can at least use the portal today even if you can’t do the locked dungeon—then you’d at least get a loading screen.”

“It’s worth trying,” I said. I looked at the boss chest in the center of the room—its surface was etched with a dramatic image of Ryxariel, her swords drawn and her dress flowing out behind her. “I have to ask,” I said, a thought coming to me suddenly. “Why do load screens even exist? The Colosseum is simulating the whole world, simultaneously—surely it doesn’t need to spend time loading the next area to warp us around?”

“Probably not,” said Cuby, shrugging. “But they’re there anyway. Loading screens and helpful hints—mine was about how important my choice of class would be, if you’re wondering.”

“And mine was about how my homeworld might be in danger. This whole game is imitating games from my world, even for things it doesn’t need to imitate like loading screens. But from what I see, there’s no consequences to us locking the dungeon now—the system’s not going to kick us out or anything.”

“Nope!” said Cuby. She gestured to the room around us. “This is it. This doesn’t change. This is Mirrakatetz forever, and if people want to come back and live here now, they can. They’ll just have to clear some bodies, probably.”

“Well our divine damage helped clear the demon corpses,” I said, thinking of how much of them we’d simply burned away. I looked at the system pane that hung in the air by the boss chest. “I don’t know if my quest was time-sensitive or not,” I said. “I should probably lock this place and find that gate as soon as possible.”

“But we have to level up and loot,” Cuby said, her tone one of mild reproach. “It’s going to be a lot of loot, Alatar—we left all the demon parts on the ground as we came. Wouldn’t they have told you if you were on a time limit?”

“Maybe?” I said. “They didn’t seem to have a lot of space. They warned me not to say I was human, told me to find them here, and told me….” They are going to find Earth. “But I suppose they could have made room for ‘Find me in the first dungeon, quickly,’ or something.”

“Right!” Cuby said, grinning. “So let’s be efficient—we’ll loot everything as we go by it, and we’ll level up as we go, too.”

“This place probably has a lot more demons hidden around, too,” I said. “Should be trivially easy to clean them up, now.”

“Definitely,” said Cuby. “And I’ve got to decide what I’m taking for my second boon. I’d say so do you, but….”

“I’m taking Signature Ability,” I said. “And getting a second copy of Supercharged Spell. Triple strength resistance and damage buffs, triple strength Mana Shields, triple strength implosive missiles.” I smiled at the thought, then added: “But maybe best of all, once we get to a few towns and I stock up on basic illusion spells, I can triple the illusion strength of everything I’ve got spellcraft for. My Perfect Invisibility might be a long way off being immune to true sight… but the others won’t be.”

Cuby grinned. “I can’t wait to kill people who can’t fight back and don’t know what’s happening!”

“I’m not surprised,” I said dryly. “We’ll get there, but you’re right… let’s loot, level, and purge this place of any leftover demons. And I got another quest.”

I opened this one up:

Quest: Claim Mirrakatetz

Claim Mirrakatetz as your territory by spending the requisite experience at its center of power.

Reward: Mirrakatetz

“The claim quest,” said Cuby. “Obviously the territory will be going to you, because you don’t have to spend experience for it.” She grinned, then added: “Human.”

“Yeah,” I said. I rolled my neck and opened up my abilities pane. “Human. Let’s get to work.”