I enter the dungeon and find a large, empty, cube chamber with a concrete floor cut into two foot by two foot tiles. At this point the airplane-hanger size of the room doesn't faze me. Dungeons are bigger on the inside. I am no longer impressed.

If I remember correctly I have to follow a path of yellow colored floor tiles. I look down and see a line of yellow tiles that snakes a few times before reaching the far end of the room. I book it across the room to find steel doors that open up into a concrete fire-escape style staircase up.

I yell up the stairs, “Hak-Kun, you there bud? It's me, Jun Kyung!”

There's no response, so I climb the stairs to the 2nd floor. It's another big empty room with a yellow floor path. This continues through the 4th floor, with me yelling for my brother at each step. When I get to the 5th floor I find the strangest shit.

It's literally strange shit, pooped by strange bird cows. Cowbirds? They're big and shaped like cows but have two legs and little wings. Their feathers are blue and green. Their beaks are yellow and hooked.

Buffado. Tier 4. The combination of a dodo and a Buffalo. A nearly extinct animal and a totally extinct animal, together, for the price of one! And yes, this hybrid does open the door for a Tyrano-mammoth Rex, thanks for noticing!

Possible Loot: eggs.

The 5th floor is essentially a large, industrial farming sized barn. There must be dozens of the buffados roaming around, minding their own business. They're technically monsters and technically not real lifeforms. But they're... Kind of majestic.

Wait. Loot taken outside the dungeon persists while monsters inside dungeons get reset every 24 hours. So the egg loot of the Buffados might imply that these could be raised and live outside the dungeon? The fabled fifth meat is Buffado meat!

“Hak-Kun!” I yell out. “Dude, this place is weird!” I look around. There's farming implements, including a bolt gun for putting down animals. How... Convenient. This was what Hak-Kun made for him and his friends, custom dungeons full of easily killed monsters. Creatures who are perfectly peaceful and damn majestic, just being used to fuel level gains.

“It's disgusting, what he's done to you guys,” I say to one of the buffados.

“Not any worse than regular farms, really.”

I wheel around to see Hak-Kun about 50 feet away. He's not on my internal radar that detects nearby creatures. I didn't hear him close in, either. My hands go to my wakizashis as I study my brother.

He's buff, much more muscular than I am, though he's a bit shorter at 5’ 7”. He's wearing a black t-shirt and black jeans, but also has a dumb red cloak around his head and neck, with a flowing cape around back.

“You look like post-steroids goth Gandalf,” I say.

“And you still look like a dog of the military,” he says.

My uniform is indeed military cut, but it's also pure white and has a near-future aesthetic to it. “Fuck off, fashion disaster.” I am very articulate around my brothers.

“Here to kill your own brother, brother?” His snide, nasally voice hasn't changed with his level ups. He also still has some remnants of his acne scarring, which means he hasn't hit 40 in Charisma. So he's buff and strong but doesn't focus on techniques?

“Just gotta bring you in. Cooperate and I'll get you a deal. Talk and get immunity, that sort of thing.”

“Bullshit!” He clenches his fists and red lightning crackles around them. That's probably bad. “You never had my back! You just want to take what I've got now that I'm stronger than you!”

I really don't want to fight him. “Hak-Kun, hold up, it's not like that, I just want-”

“You took my fucking class, you shit! Synergist! It was keyed to the conditions of ‘must have last name Han, must have experience with writing about multiclassing.’ You're the only one who could have taken it!”

“Sorry? I didn't know what was going on when I chose it. I didn't know you'd set that class aside for yourself.”

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“So you just happened upon it? That's some shit, man!”

He was always like this. Always able to play the victim. “I'm... No, actually, I'm not sorry, you killed my coworkers! I used this power to save people! Fuck you and your always selfish ass! You and your friends are killing the world! I thought I was here to save you but fuck it, imma beat your ass like our father should have twenty years ago!”

He flies forward, hovering just inches off the ground and charges red lightning in his hands. Against electricity I'll go with cold, stone and crystal. “Lunar Mind!” My sub-minds are both filled with cool, clear thought and I use the spell Lunar Arms.

Layers of dark blue, crystal samurai armor swirl around me before snapping together all at once. I pull two wakizashis out of their sheathes and they become coated in bright teal energy, doubling their blade lengths to around 4 feet.

Hak-Kun holds his hand forward and red lightning bolts arc forward towards me but I intercept with the lunar edge of my sword. The red lightning spirals around the blade and simply disintegrates the metal.

A split second later he's up in my face and swinging a disintegration-charged punch at me... But he's too slow. My reaction speed lets me easily slap his hand away with the flat of my right hand sword, but the blade snaps in half where it makes contact with his energized fist.

Then I knee him in the gut. His momentum and my extra force send him flipping up and over my head and he lands on his back, his cape covering his face.

“Give up?” I ask.

“I'm a 6th step, Jun! You can't stop a 6th step with Synergist!” He pulls the cape out of his face and tries to get up but I'm too fast. I kick him in the ass as he stands.

“Yeah, I'm 6th step too, but unfortunately-” I wheel around to his front and whack him twice across the face with the flats of two new blades. “I've got actual combat experience.”

I kick him in the knee and he drops. “You didn't improve your Toughness enough. And your speeds are awful. Did you min-max?”

He begins muttering and I suspect the fight is already over. “Fucking shit brother always...My Arcana Points are over 300!”

I bash his head with the pommel of my left sword. “Doesn't mean a fucking thing if you can't fight.” I use telekinesis to float my right sword up, then just slap Hak-Kun across the face. “Give up?”

A massive sphere of red lightning surges around Hak-Kun and I have to dash back to evade the disintegration wave. “My class is Ruinous Hero! And I won't be beaten by the likes of you!” He pulls dozens of crimson bolts into his hands and even his eyes shine with the red electric energy.

If he's going for a big attack, so will I. I use Moon Crash, and a dark blue crystal ball appears before me. It's a little taller than I am, and I can't actually see through it. That's fine though, because Moon Crash is a counter attack.

Moon Crash

Exotic

Summon a crystal moon that breaks upon taking damage. The pieces home in on the origin of the attack, pelting them with chunks of solid crystal.

Range: Infinite

Duration: 30 seconds

Cost: 50 Arcana Points

Proficiency: 3%

“Take this!” Hak-Kun yells dramatically. “Red Tempest!” Dozens of red bolts lash out at my side of the room, ripping through barn doors, buffados and even ripping apart the floor. Whatever it touches is immediately vaporized, leaving behind only ash.

Okay, that red lightning is actually destruction incarnate. I probably shouldn't have been so flippant earlier. Ah well.

The bolts strike my makeshift moon and it cracks in half, two massive chunks flying towards Hak-Kun. As they close in more bolts rip into the crystal, shaving it into smaller, but more numerous pieces. A fist sized shard batters Hak-Kun in the shoulder, followed by a barrage of crystal. The red bolts stop and I hear cracking sounds from my brother. He's fallen to the floor.

I rush over and brush rubble off of him. He's alive. His arms are mangled and his jaw looks broken. His nose is bleeding. He looks like shit.

With more sadness than condemnation I say, “what you did, to gain power, it killed a lot of people, Hak-Kun.”

He looks at me with anger in his eyes. Anger, and red lightning. This time I'm caught off guard. This time I can't block. This time he gets me good. The red bolts streak up as I stand over him. All my Toughness and this lightning ignores it completely. He shoots me in the right shoulder and the beam punches through my armor. The beam cuts into my shoulder, which evaporates into ash, my right arm falling to the floor.

It hurts so much. It hurts so, so much. I drop to my knees and try to heal myself with Restoration Palm. Hak-Kun rises from the crystal shards, cuts all over his body, the dumb cloak cut away and left behind.

“Hak-Kun,” I say through gritted teeth. “We don't have to-”

He slams me in the face with a charged fist and I feel parts of my face burn away. “Jun Kyung, the soldier,” he says in a mocking tone. “Never could beat me in Street Fighter 4.” He raises a bloody arm up and I see his wounds mending and the bones in his hand pop into place. Constitution. He put everything into regeneration with Constitution. His left hand glows red and he holds the open palm to my face.

The wakizashi I'd lifted up earlier finally drops straight down and plunges into his wrist, severing his hand. A spurt of my brother's blood shoots onto my chest, staining my white uniform. He clutches his stump with his other hand and flies backwards away from me.

I could probably stop him from escaping. I should probably stop him. But I can't. He's my brother.