“Poop? Really?” I couldn’t help but question Aisha’s choice of words, what was she, six?

“Shut up!” Aisha shouted back at me.

“That’s a lot bigger than the first two,” Lilith’s self-assurance remained unphased, so I knew we’d be fine, maybe she’d seen the flicker of shadows too. “Distract it, Alexander!”

“Right!” I shouted, swiped one of Aisha’s glowing rocks, and ran to meet the powerful monster. The System labeled it a Giant Rusty Crayfish, and its hard body varied between gold and deep red. Its beady eyes followed me as I ran towards it, and one of those pincers, which were about twice my size, shot out to try and catch me. I easily dodged it, hopped onto the pincer, and then hopped up onto the back of the crayfish.

I took a deep breath and whipped the glowing rock in my hand right at the thing’s eye. The rock impacted the eye with an awful squelching sound, followed by a burst of powerful light – the Light Enchantment from Aisha adding its damage in. I didn’t hang around to find out if I’d blinded the thing, instead I ran along its back, hopped to kick off the wall, and tried to pull its attention towards me and the way it had come.

“Dang!” Derrick whistled at the damage I’d done to the crayfish, but unhelpfully he hadn’t shouted after me if I had blinded it. I had to look back to see that it was missing one eye, and waves of red energy radiated from the creature. I must’ve made it real mad.

“Don’t just stand there, go stab its other eye with your wind blade!” Lilith commanded Derrick, while I danced between claw strikes. It was a fun work out, although each time the strikes got within a few inches of me I could feel my heart pound harder, and the world seemed to slow down. My body didn’t react as fast as it normally did in this weird state of being, but it let me think a little harder about what I needed to do, so it let me plan better.

“Take this!” A series of glowing rocks smashed into the back right leg of the Crayfish, thrown by Aisha. She lacked the strength and speed to pull off an attack like I had, but when each rock struck the leg it exploded in a pulse of light. Of the two rocks that hit the leg, and the other four that hit the body, the light explosions managed to put a lot of cracks in the creatures exoskeleton.

Derrick, prepared to jump up onto the monster the way I’d done, wasn’t ready when the thing suddenly spun to face the source of its attacks. He screeched loudly, and flailed. By sheer force of luck, he flailed the blade of his wind-sword into the remaining eye of the huge monster. The loss of its eye threw off its aim, and Derrick only lost the sleeve of his shirt to the attack, and a few scrapes. He totally didn’t wet himself at how close he’d come to death.

“It isn’t dead yet, move!” Lilith commanded, and charged in from behind him, the large magical tree branch in her hand. She slammed the club down, the first time without the glow of magic, but Aisha managed to renew the enchantment for the second blow, and the fourth.. By the fourth, the Giant Rusty Crayfish had fallen to the ground and no longer moved.

“I thought I was going to die,” Derrick whimpered. He had different, clean, pants on now. I pretended to not have noticed, and Lilith was more interested in poking the dead monster with her stick than in any of us.

Congratulations, you have reached level 6. You have gained +1 to Strength, +2 to Agility, and +1 to Will.

I looked at Lilith, and her self-satisfied smile told me she’d leveled up too.

“I leveled up. Did anyone else?” Derrick asked, no doubt staring at his status screen instead of anyone else.

“I did too!” Aisha, now carrying another handful of glowing rocks, said as she joined us at the corpse of the monster.

“So did both of us,” Lilith spoke for herself and me.

“Quest didn’t complete, so we still need to find the source of the magic. Shall we head deeper?” I rocked back and forth from my toes to my heels, impatient to see what lay at the end of the cavern.

“Let’s take a quick break first, then we’ll go down?” Aisha suggested. Reality had, subjectively, sped up. The others were still quite a bit slower than me, though. I wanted to go now, but the controlled breathing Aisha and Derrick were both using was a mana recovery technique. Neither Lilith nor I had spent any mana, so we didn’t need to use a technique like they did to increase recovery.

“It’d be a lot easier to kill monsters like this if we had traps to lure them into, don’t you think?” Derrick mused.

“My dad is a trapper; he could teach you. Maybe he’d leave me alone then, I don’t want to use traps,” Aisha mumbled, then smiled hopefully.

“Maybe. Would he really teach me? I heard a mentor can help you unlock special classes.” Derrick sounded excited, and Lilith and I exchanged glances. We already had mentors.

“Sure, dad always complains there’s not enough trappers. We can’t always rely on Headmaster Arkaziel or the Supreme Chef to save Winona, at least that’s what dad says. We struggled before they joined town, and if they leave, it would be bad.” Aisha glanced at me and Lilith, and I could see her thoughts putting together the fact that we lived at Uncle Arkaziel’s house during the school seasons.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“Are you two ready to go deeper?” I asked with a grin that hopefully would keep Aisha from wondering if she could talk freely before Lilith and I. Most of the citizens of Winona were humans. Arkaziel and Bobbi were both very obviously non-humans, and glowing hair and eyes made both Lilith and I look inhuman.

“Yeah!” Derrick chimed in, a new resolve in his voice that hadn’t been there before.

“What do your parents do?” Aisha asked Lilith as we fell back into formation.

“Mommy makes things, and Momma does magic,” Lilith’s answer sounded vague compared to a direct profession, like a trapper, but maybe I was just feeling self-conscious. Our family wasn’t like the other kids.

“Are they strong?” Derrick asked. “They must be, you two are really strong.”

“Maybe?” I said, at the same time Lilith said “Very”.

“Uncle Arkaziel acknowledges Mommy is stronger than him,” Lilith pointed out.

“She’s stronger than Arkaziel? Wow,” Aisha murmured in wonder. “But he killed that giant Chimera in one hit!”

“Eyes on the prize,” I said and drew the parties attention to the descent, and not gossip.

“Eyes on what prize?” Derrick grumbled.

“An imaginary one? It’s something Momma says.” I admitted to partial ignorance with a shrug of my shoulders.

We had to slay seven more of the smaller giant crayfish as we proceeded, but now that Derrick and Aisha had a better grasp of teamwork with Lilith and I, we breezed through the cave. At the bottom we found a glowing sphere of stone embedded in the cave, the crayfish had been drawn to it and attempted to excavate it. At two meters high and a half a meter wide, it looked like a very simple discarded obelisk covered in basic pictographs of different insects. The stone itself had a black hue with streaks of white.

Quest Update: Magic Source Discovered.

New Quest Objective: Remove Obelisk from the earth.

“Oh, that’s easy,” I said while Derrick and Aisha looked confused at how we were going to move the thing.

I touched it with my finger, it vanished, then I dropped it back into existence next to me, where it could now stand tall and free.

“Uhm, what?” Aisha asked.

“How the heck?” Derrick almost swore.

“You two can’t use Inventory?” Lilith asked sarcastically.

“No, I can, but I can only put seventy pounds into mine.” Aisha poked the large, tall rock.

“Yeah, I’m only able to do seventy pounds too. How much can you put into yours?” Derrick asked in disbelief.

I eyed the status for my inventory. Weight: 9,234 kg / ??????

“How many pounds are question marks?” I asked.

Quest Completed.

Congratulations, you have reached level 7. You have gained +2 Agility, +1 Intellect, +1 Will.

Congratulations, you have completed the quest. Touch the pillar and choose the pictograph that you like the most to receive your quest reward.

“Two levels in one day, and a quest reward? This was as good as a dungeon!” Derrick chimed in victory.

“I’m fairly certain this was a random dungeon,” Lilith asserted, while she walked slowly around the obelisk. We were all doing the same thing, looking at each carving on the obelisk to pick the one we liked the most. After three treks around the pillar I was the first to reach out and touch one. My hand brushed the dark stone, and I traced the pictograph of a dragonfly. A burst of prismatic light filled my eyes, and as it faded I momentarily saw the phantasm of dragonfly wings on my back that slowly faded.

Congratulations, you have been blessed with the boon Dragonfly Style. You have also learned the Ability Dragonfly Strike. (Dragonfly Strike: You vanish and reappear behind the target (up to 15m away), and strike them with a savage blow that inflicts bleeding. For ten seconds after (stacking, refreshable) you gain a 20% increase to evasion. Ignores 10% of target’s armor.)

“Sweet!” I crowed. “I got a boon and an Ability.”

“Me too,” Lilith said as light faded around her. For a brief moment I thought I saw a swarm of some kind of insect around her.

“I don’t know what to pick!” Aisha whined.

“The one you like the most. You like butterflies, don’t you?” Lilith inquired.

“I do, how’d you know?” Aisha sounded suspicious, suddenly. Twins always had rumors about their powers, and with our prismatic glowing hair, we were pretty suspicious.

“You’re wearing a butterfly hair clip,” I pointed to the two clips on either side of her head.

Derrick ignored the awkward tension in the chamber by immersing himself in the choice between an Assassin Bug and a Spider Wasps. His choice appeared to be the Assassin Bug, since the palms of his hands glowed with an intense radiance in the shape of pincers.

“Oh, yeah… sorry Lily”, Aisha squeaked out a little timidly, before a burst of radiance behind her resembled the butterfly in her plum-colored hair.

“Quests are so cool,” Derrick started to talk up, but from the way the shadows danced I could tell it was time to go back to Arkaziel and Bobbi.

“Let’s head back,” I encouraged.

Ω

After the kids filed out of the chamber three shadowy forms stepped out of the darkness to watch them retreating.

“Not too bad for 8-year-olds, but Lilith and Alexander were definitely holding back,” the three eyed shadow of Telos noted.

“Sure, they held back a little, but not the way you hold back. Alexander stuck to his strengths, and so did Lilith, while encouraging their teammates to be participate to the best of their abilities. I’m shocked you haven’t scrounged up a healer to duct-tape to their friends group,” Arkaziel’s shadow quipped.

“Don’t give my darling ideas,” Kallos sighed at Arkaziel. “The kids did good, Libby may continue to expose them to dungeons. How much are we supposed to support them? Do we give them weapons? Accessories? Or are opportunities enough?”

“Opportunities, and a few lessons from their parents, should be enough. I’ll teach Alexander some of the moves I learned from the Monkey King. Good move with the shadows at the end, Ark. I didn’t realize they were perceptive enough to notice us, but thanks to your shadow stirring they only noticed you.”

“Yeah, but I still don’t get the whole hiding in the shadows thing. Lots of kids have powerful parents, who’s going to threaten them that’s stronger than you?” Arkaziel mumbled.

“Dunno,” Telos shrugged. The uncertainty left the other two disconcerted for days, especially in the quiet hours of the night.