-Jenifer’s POV-
I keep glancing at the woman we all had just met in the Cuties Guild, who was also registering for a dungeon quest. Her name is Lily, A Ranked Adventurer, standing at height of 5'8 feet, brown hair and black eyes with a fair tone to her skin and she’s 35. ‘I don’t remember seeing her ever in the guild’. I think to myself while following my teammates.
Although Lily had said a few mean and frightening things to us, she hasn’t done anything like that. But I still have to keep an eye on her or else, we might get into a really dangerous situation, which also might lead us to our deaths.
-Liz’s POV-
I kept following the three as they lead us all to the dungeon, which is somewhere in this forest about a few miles aways from the gates of L.A. ‘She has been keeping an eye on me from the start of this journey’. I look back at Jenifer, who is glancing at me from time to time. We were following the map and moving along a route made by the previous adventurers who had been to this dungeon.
Suddenly there is a noise in the bush in front of us, we all stop and I see everyone take out their weapons from a pocket dimension to confront whatever is coming at us. ‘The hell !! they have a system?? How did I not feel it ?’ I get distracted by that thought but I already knew what type of monster it was, as I have been spreading my mana sense all around us. It was a ten feet tall bear with stone spikes attached to its back and its skin covered in stones.
-Jenifer’s POV-
We all had stopped as soon as we heard noise from the bushes in front of us and I took out my axe and my armor from the storage provided by the system as I see the others doing the same except for Lily who is standing there in a daze, likely thinking something more important than whatever was coming at us.
I see a Stone Bear move out from the bushes and charge right at us with rage filled in its eyes.
“Get ready to attack, use the strategy we had discussed and let's take this thing down”. Although it was a B ranked monster we all could still take it down with combined effort, hell, I could take it down on my own too but I needed Rose and Anna to Level Up as much as they could, before we confronted the dungeon.
-Liz’s POV-
Thoughts kept coming to my mind as a stand in the middle of a forest with a stone bear charging right at us. I quickly compose myself and look at the bear who is charging straight at Rose, who immediately casts a spell. Roots shoot out from the ground and bind around the stone bear as Jenifer charges at the stone bear with a flaming axe in her hand, meanwhile Anna casts a support spell on both of them and me as well, which increases stamina, mana, and reflexes. Although I don’t feel the spell’s effect that much, I can see it in the other’s though. ‘Now I’ll have to deal with the system as well, fuck !!!!’ I notice that since coming to this world I have been cursing a lot about unknowns and variables that keep popping around me. These thoughts take only a second to form in my head. As Jenifer rushes towards the stone bear, it launches the spike embedded on its back at us. I take that as my queue and cast a barrier around Anna and Rose while dodging the spikes coming at me all the while Jenifer cleaves the bear in half with only one strike. ‘She might seem like a novice at understanding people but her battle experience is clearly higher than Rose and Anna.’ We watch the bear go down and the others release a sigh of relief while Anna goes over to the monster and retrieves the materials from it. ‘They might be able to survive the dungeon’ I thought to myself.
-Jenifer’s POV-
As I had thought, this monster did give one level to both Anna and Rose, getting them up to level 65, as they had just reached B Rank. ‘Hmm… Lily did defend Anna and Rose by creating barriers around them’. I look at Lily who is still in her own world, thinking about who knows what. I walk up to Anna and help her in harvesting the materials.
-Liz’s POV-
‘I’ll have to ask Reinard and warn him about the system, this will become a huge problem in the future, fuck !!’ And there I go cursing again. Rose and I observe as both Anna and Jenifer fully harvest the materials from the Stone Bear. After a while we are on the move again, killing whatever comes in our way towards the dungeon.
-Half an Hour Later-
We are standing in front of the entrance to the dungeon and there is no one in sight, not even a monster, the mana might be keeping them out of this area.
“Let’s go and keep following the same strategy we used to kill the stone bear, the drakes might be smaller than the bear but they focus more on speed, physical power and magic.” says Anna as we enter the dungeon through a portal that is anchored to this world.
I find myself in an open clearing with a forest surrounding us and the other three quickly take up the formation, discussed earlier, with Jenifer being our vanguard, Anna being the supporter at the back, Rose standing in front of me to support Jenifer and, I’ll be defending both Rose and Anna from stray attacks. But before we could even move out, Jenifer asked me a question.
“Lily, why can’t we see your level?” It was a reasonable question, which I also don’t have the answer for because I tried calling out to the system but it always kept telling me -
[Integration failed…The World needs to be updated]
“There has always been an error in my system, since the day I had been born, others have also asked me this question but even I don’t have the answer, as to why this error keeps showing itself” I answer Jenifer while not telling her the real message of the system, making it seem like I was born with the error and a lot of people asking the same question to me.
“I see…generally we don’t see each other’s level unless we are in a party or by using the identify skill, that alerts the people that others are watching them, so I thought that you might be hiding something from us. I didn’t want to doubt you so much but it was necessary because we will be fighting together in this dungeon.” Jenifer gives me a long ass answer which I find reasonable because why would anyone trust people who hides their level.
“It’s fine, I had expected that you might ask me this once we were in the dungeon” Jenifer looks at me a bit apologetically for having doubted my intentions. I had millions of thoughts forming in my head, I wanted to test them but I will have to cut this adventure short. “Let’s just go and get this done with."
“This dungeon only has one floor to it but there are areas in this dungeon, we’ll have to avoid a few of them and hunt on the marked areas in this map, the drakes in this dungeon are around level 80 - 100, so we have to be careful” says Anna as she takes out a new map. I don’t give the map much thought as we move out to start hunting the drakes.
It does not take long for us to encounter a drake, 8 feet in height, having short arms with claws and scales covering its body, in other words a mini version of T-Rex dinosaur.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
“It’s at level 82” says Rose for the first time, who has been quiet for a while now.
“Don’t get distracted and take up the formation” Jenifer commands as we all charge towards the unsuspecting drake. Just like with the stone bear, Jenifer charges towards the drake but a bit carefully because it might breathe fire at her face ( yeah they do breathe fire ). Rose uses the roots and tries to catch the drake but it moves away while breathing fire at the roots, chasing it. It rushes towards Anna but I quickly intercept it and thrust a mana blade and intentionally miss it. I just wanted to redirect it, which I did and Jenifer quickly takes the opportunity to take out its legs with a swing of her flaming axe. The next thing I see is the drake flailing around breathing fire at all of us to keep us from reaching and killing it. But I form a wind blade and send it straight to the drake as soon as it’s mana is depleted, which beheads the drake.
“You could’ve just done that from the start, right?” Anna says to me while glancing at the fallen head of the drake. I reply to her with a smile on my face.
“Yeah but where’s the fun in that? Also my role was to defend you and Rose, not to kill the drake.”
“It’s alright guys, don’t start fighting now, what she said is right. Her role was to defend you both” Jenifer interrupts as Anna tries to speak her own point. Hearing the leader, Anna backs down and starts harvesting the drake. This continues for a while as we keep hunting drakes, we had a few close encounters where we might have lost both Rose and Anna but, I being the most benevolent member of this group saves them. It’s already evening by the time we come out of the dungeon, we quickly start heading back to the city because the nights are a lot scarier out here in the forest, where you won’t even know what kind of monster would hunt you according to my teammates.
Reaching the gates after half an hour of running from the dungeon, I decided that it's best to separate now. “Hey, I’ll be going my own way from now, just keep my share with the guild and I’ll take it later on.” I tell them and see both Rose and Anna whose heads are fallen dejectedly because they wanted me to be a member of their time, although not at the start but by the end of the dungeon run, I had saved them from certain deaths, which prompted them to have me as a team member but I was quick to shoot them down. I did not want to be attached to the people here because I was not the one for people and gaining my trust was not a joke, it might even take decades or longer than that for me to trust them at all.
“Okay, we’ll do that but the offer will still remain, you can join us anytime” says Jenifer while patting the back of two dejected puppies ( Rose and Anna ). I nod towards her and walk away.
I walk into an empty alley and use a teleportation spell, appearing inside my room in the Guild and taking a bath because I was still covered in the blood of drakes, not too much but still covered. After an hour I walk out of my bedroom and sit on the chair in the lounge room, take out my phone just to see missed calls from Reinard. I know that he wouldn't have called me so many times, if it was not important. So I call him back, which he quickly picks up after a few rings, while I put up a sound cancelling barrier around the room.
“Hello Reinard, you have called me multiple times today. Did something happen?”
“Yes master, I wanted to speak to you about a very important information that I had obtained today, I called you multiple times but it said that you were not reachable, did something happen?”
“Oh..no nothing happened, I was doing a dungeon run, that must me the reason for me being, not reachable to you”
“I see, well master, are you alone right now?”
“Yes I am, why do you ask?” As soon as I answer his question I see a teleportation circle form in front of me.
“It’s because I wanted to speak to you in person about a situation that will create a lot of problems in the near future” says Reinard, both through the phone and while standing in front of me. I put away the phone as he takes a seat.
“So what do you want to talk about?” I ask him.
“It’s about the system that the people of this world have integrated with”
“I know about it but I don’t have a lot of details” I tell him a bit about the system I had learned from Jenifer today and he confirms that he has heard the same things from the people around him.
“Master, I know we have faced lots of enemies, even the system of The Elanoir and the realms too. I won’t talk much about them as they are all sad memories but the things happening in this world are not on a small scale as we think them to be.”
“Why do you mean?”
“Well earlier when I had extracted the information from the people, that was only the half part of a whole new information that I obtained today. I had investigated a few S Rankers of this world and have found out that, the system integrated in this world is not a simple one. It has been integrating a lot of worlds form this Universe. I know it might sound strange but the dungeons we see around the world are the lost realms of this universe. They might appear to be small but there are secrets that we’ll have to discover about them.” As Reinard says all these things, I think about all those eons I had spent exploring, massacring, building an doing much more things on Elanoir and the realms around that Universe.
“So what more information do you have about the system?” He tells me about the levels and the ranks in which it is divided and he is also in a similar situation to me, where both of our systems are saying-
[Integration failed…. The World needs to be updated]
And the level system goes like this, from the information Reinard has told me-
[Level 1 - 10 ] - E Rank
[Level 10 - 20] - F Rank
[Level 20 - 40] - D Rank
[Level 40 - 60] - C Rank
[Level 60 - 80] - B Rank
[Level 80 - 100] - A Rank
[Level 100 - 200] - S Rank
“[Integration failed …..The World needs to be updated], will change when the other worlds will be anchored to this world. Also the S Rankers are connected to these worlds and are acting like apostles of the self proclaimed Gods of the worlds in this Universe” Reinard said, shocking me a lot with this much information that he had gained from the S Ranker of Las Vegas.
“So what you’re saying is that the other worlds in this Universe are going to merge and create an even bigger battlefield?” I ask him and in reply he says “ Yes that will be the end goal, I guess so” Even he is not sure about this.
‘Ughh… so many things and I don’t know where I should even begin’. I let out a sigh while thinking about this.
“Well, that is a lot to process. I think it’s best to go according to our plan and keep improvising on it accordingly. By the way, when will this world update?”
“It will start when a quarter of the population will reach S Rank.” That will not take a long time, we’ll have to be fast to implement all our plans.
“Master, should we just go and end those worlds and stop this integration of worlds?” Reinard asks me the same question, I have had in my mind.
“That might solve all of our problems but the thing is we don’t have much information on these worlds and the self proclaimed gods, so we don’t even know if we could end it all.” What I said is true, I am strong and I can end this all in one go but, I’ll have to wait and see how this goes or else the same thing that happened a few centuries ago will repeat itself all over.
“Master, I know what you’re thinking about and I won’t put you in the same position as before, we will face it all, together” Reinard says while kneeling in front of me, taking my hand and caressing it. This might seem strange to you all but he has always been like this, to me a caring person, and to others a devil in the skin of a human.
“Reinard, let’s just stop overthinking it and go with the original plan, the integration will only take a few years because from what I had sensed, the number of S Rankers although in only 500 including the known and the unknown S Rankers that are hiding in no man’s land across the entire world, the number of A rankers across the world are in millions and they will only need 5 more years, if my calculations are correct. We’ll have to be fast and stop testing everything. Focus on the main goals.” After discussing a few more things, like the progress he has made so far and the plans that we will be working towards from now, Reinard leaves. Sitting on the lounge chair I take out the world teleportation scroll that I had brought with me in this world and start studying it.