My friends are laughing. Mercy rolls a sparkly purple d20 and curses when she sees the natural 1 come up.

“Bad news,” Brian says. “The orc chieftain is incredibly interested in trading the slaves for turkey legs.”

“How is that bad news?” Mercy asks.

“He doesn't want 4,” Brian replies. “He wants 400.”

“Aw, fuck that shit!” says Franco.

“Oi! You gotta be pullin’ our legs, eh?” says Quins.

Brian says, “no, I'm pulling turkey legs.”

We all laugh as the roof of the Get! break room is ripped away and suctioned into the vastness of space.

Quins rolls to deceive the orc and barely passes the check.

Brian nods and says, “great, you can ascend.” Then Quins begins to float upwards towards the spiral galaxy that spins slowly above us, both just out of reach and billions of light years away.

“Nah, me first!” says Franco, and pulls Quins down. Then he jumps up and flies into space.

“Get back here ya bugger!” Quins shouts as he follows, leaping into the abyss of stars.

Mercy looks at me, with tears in her eyes. “I have to go too,” she says.

“No, not you!” I find myself shouting. “Don't go, don't go! We really only just found each other. I need you, I need more of you. Don't go, don't go!”

She starts floating upwards, her flowing purple dress slowly fluttering. I leap up and grab her hand and pull. She's light, she's too light.

“No, don't go!” I shout.

The galaxy above shines with one thousand stars. I know it's one thousand stars. I begin to push them away with telekinesis. Mercy stops flying upwards.

“I would conquer the thousand stars for you.” I say to her.

She smiles. “Then do it. Conquer the thousand stars and break the five heavens.”

“I will,” I say, and Cthulhu's hand reaches out of the galaxy, and wraps around Mercy. He squeezes her and I hear a meaty, liquid pop.

I awake with a start, sitting upright suddenly. I look around. Alicia Bennet is here, sitting next to me. I'm in... Some kind of tool shop. There's tools hanging on sheet metal walls. Hammers, screwdrivers, etc. There's a table saw slick with blood about 20 feet away.

“Where's Mercy?” I ask, with too much desperation in my voice.

Alicia rolls her eyes. “She's fine, she's with the boys clearing floor number nine. We couldn't wait for you forever, sleeping beauty.”

I rub my head. It's sore from sleeping on the... Apparently wooden floors. “How long?”

“Five hours,” she tells me.

“Shit.”

“Yeah, you fixed my leg though. Thanks for that.” Just to prove it she wiggles her foot.

I look around. The room seems like a 30 foot per wall square. Using my radar I see that we're the only ones around. There are two doors on the north wall, one on the south and two doors on the west wall. They look like wooden barn doors, painted bright red and white. “What's the theme on this floor, barnyard horror?”

Alicia grimaces and stands up. “A bit. But it's mostly tools and shop equipment. The next floor is a chemical lab so we think this is actually a backyard bomb making thing. The monsters, which were farm animals, exploded when killed. Not super dangerous except for the smokey horse.”

I decide to not ask about the probably super cool looking demon horse and let my imagination fill in the blanks. Yeeeah, I bet that looked cool. “Everyone alive, then?”

“As far as I know. ” Then, talking into her comm she says, “hey, Jun is up, you guys still okay?”

I hear Mercy's voice first. “Juuuuuuuun!”

Jose chimes in, “you okay bud?”

“Yeah, I'm fine guys.” God my throat is dry. “We'll move towards you while Alicia catches me up. See you soon.” I pull an Igloo chest from my inventory, fish a Dr. Pepper out, and crack it open. It's not the AP recovery kind. Just the regular delicious kind.

I put away the cooler and then I get up and check myself. Everything is where I left it, though someone must have put my wakizashis back in their sheathes for me.

I start looking at my menu through my eyepatch as we head to the 8th floor. I got three level ups from the big green demi-God. They go into Scoundrel/Archmage, which unlocks subclasses for both.

All the Scoundrel subclasses key into the technique you get at level 1 of the class, Injury To Insult.

Injury To Insult

Master

You deal 33% more damage to foes under a status effect that you dealt to them. This effect doesn't stack if you apply multiple effects to a foe, but honestly, being a dick to monsters is fine, so why not?

Passive

Proficiency: 0%

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I don't remember the rank being included in the ability descriptions before. Maybe that happened with the system update. Anyways...

Scoundrel Subclasses

Dirty - Status effects and debuffs you apply to foes last 33% longer.

Rotten - Injury To Insult deals 33% more damage.

Scummy - Your status effects and debuffs are 33% harder to resist.

Villainous - When a foe under one of your status effects or debuffs dies, they may spread that effect to a nearby foe.

I don't actually have that many ways to inflict effects so I'm not enthusiastic about any of these. I put off the subclass choice for now. What's Archmage got for me?

Archmage Subclasses

Tower - You can spend additional time casting spells to empower them, spending up to 10x longer for 5x effect.

Castle - While casting spells you gain resistance to elemental attacks based on the element of the spell you are casting.

Library - You gain all advanced spells.

Wandering - You can cast master and lower spells faster, casting them 33% faster.

No to Tower, I don't usually have time for that. Castle seems very, very situational. Wandering is good, but I've noticed that my casting speed is a bit faster because of my Dexterity being high, so I can probably skip it. Library seems promising, and I bet it would give me at least a few status effect spells, which I could use with Scoundrel's Injury To Insult. Okay, let's see what we get with- Oh holy crap!

You have gained the spells Heat Sheathe, Spark Jump, Zap Shot, Stun Snap, Stone Shot, Stone Shield, Stone Ride, Whirlwind Slash, Gale Boots, Water Cutter, Bubble Helmet, Wet Floors, Sapping Cold, Ice Armor, Yellow Beam, Sunglasses, Shimmer Step, Void Lance, Shadow Shell, And Darker Still, Poison Blade, Splash Guard, Toxic Breathing and Psi Punch.

All that and I still haven't gone into the spell selections that Archmage gives me, which will net me another 6 to 15 spells. Good Google that's a lot of spells. I start going through them but a lot are just “shoot magic ball” type spells. Which, I guess is fine? Advanced spells are only the second rank of spells, so I guess I shouldn't have expected grandeur from the additions.

Still, there's some nice pick ups. For status effects I've got Heat Sheathe, which makes weapons deal burns, Stun Snap which stuns, Sapping Cold which inflicts slow and Poison Blade, which, you guessed it, makes weapons poisoned.

I decide to take the Scummy subclass for Scoundrel. If I'm trying to inflict status effects then I want them to actually work.

I sigh as we pass through yet another small, square room. The 7th floor looks like it's a maze of small, square rooms. The tools in each room are the only things that seem to vary. And then I realize that all my thinking and sorting through level ups and spells only took about a minute. My Intelligence is so high that I'm actually thinking faster? Neat.

I allocate my level up attribute points and reach 100 in both Agility and Intelligence. And boy is that worth it.

Notice! You have reached 100 Agility, and are offered the following choice: Sprint or Marathon.

Sprint - Increase your running speed by 50%.

Marathon - Running no longer drains your stamina.

Holy shirt balls, that's awesome. I'm not ever running long distance, so I'll take 50% faster run speed, no question.

Notice! You have reached 100 Intelligence, and are offered the following choice: Multitasking or Deep Dive.

Multitasking - You may split your intellect up into sub-minds to perform multiple tasks and thought patterns at once.

Deep Dive - Think about one thing rapidly, seeing every angle at once.

I actually have a use for Multitasking, so I take that. Immediately I feel a murmuring in the bottom of my brain as separate thoughts appear. It's like people having a conversation in the background of a restaurant. And if I want to, I can hear that conversation. I put my minds to work and cast Telekinesis on four wakizashis. I give each of my sub-minds two to control. I have two sub-minds? Yeah, seems like it. And each can probably wield up to three blades at once.

Alicia looks at my floating blades. “You gonna kill me?” she asks with a raised eyebrow.

“Just checking my new sub-mind capabilities.” The four blades carve into the wooden floor, each performing different types of slashes and thrusts in a whirlwind of cutting death.

Unfortunately having multiple minds active lets me remember that dream. The void of space, the arm of Cthulhu, Quins and Franco gone. Mercy's death and the one thousand stars. One thousand stars. Odd number. Well, an even number, actually. But weird. On a hunch I think at the system, “hey what's the total number of classes?”

There are exactly 1,000 classes.

One thousand classes. One thousand stars. And I... Need to wield them all? Yeah, right!

Unless I can. Unless that's what I need to do. To save Mercy. To defeat an impossible evil. What did Mercy say? “Break the five heavens.” Five worlds? Five realms? I don't know yet.

And plus, this is all a dream. Not real, not a prophecy. The last dream I remember had me teleporting around my grandmother's neighborhood using a Nintendo DS. Soooo, maybe I'm overthinking this.

That's when I hear it over the comms. “Alicia, get Jun here now!” comes Jose's urgent voice. “It's Franco, he needs healing, ASAP!”

Alicia rushes through the remaining rooms and I'm right on her heels. I have to slow my pace so I don't run past her. We get to a larger room with open barn doors that lead to a freight elevator shaft. The elevator is down at the bottom. Alicia reaches for the up button on the wall and I grab her hand.

“No time,” I say, and I come to the edge of the elevator shaft and look down. It's probably a hundred feet down. Two wakizashis float in the middle of the shaft. “Grab on,” I say, and point at my back.

“No way,” Alicia says, waving me off.

I ignore her and leap 12 feet to the center of the shaft where my wakizashis are. I snatch them and start falling. It takes only seconds, but I pull up on the blades with telekinesis, slowing my descent just enough. I drop to the top of the elevator and roll to a stop. I flip open the ceiling hatch and drop down into the elevator car.

There aren't elevator doors here either so I dash forward. The 8th floor looks like a video game version of a chemical lab. There are giant glass tubes of flowing liquids of different colors running across the walls. The floor beneath my feet is a metal mesh and I can even see more “chemical pipes” below.

Fortunately this area seems mostly linear. It's a long, twisting hall where clearly no actual chemicals get processed, but plenty of them get piped to other parts of the floor. I dash around a 75 degree corner and blast past several small offshoot rooms to my left and right. One was a safe room, I notice. Doesn't matter much now. I hit another corner of the long hall and have to kick off against it to keep my momentum. How fast am I going right now? It must be well over 50 miles an hour. And I'm not going my top speed, I can tell. I push faster and I must be running 75 miles an hour. I rely on my superhuman Agility and push myself more. My Reflexes keep me from slamming into another corner as I dash forward at close to 100 miles per hour.

I see the exit, a large pipe I can enter. I dive into it and the 10 foot diameter pipe spirals down. I run at an angle to compensate for the centrifugal force of the spiral, and quickly come to the bottom. I see my team on my radar.

The 9th floor's entry room looks like NASA mission control circa 1969. Refrigerator sized computers with blinking colored lights and data reels dot the hundred foot wide room. A big board with a world map covers most of the right wall, dozens of small green and red dots spread across the globe. And there, huddled under the giant map, is my team.

Mercy's blue and white mecha armor is covered in red blood. She's kneeling over Franco. Jose is on top of one of the refrigerator computers, taking aim and shooting at some distant foe. Quins sees me and shouts for me. And Franco is down. Franco is covered in blood. Franco is missing half his face. His right arm and shoulder are both... Gone.