He knew he shouldn’t have said it. As the words were coming out of his mouth… he regretted it immediately.

But Jinyoung knew he was right. Wasn’t he?

He and Cyrus would be graduating at the top of their class. The top of their class at the Academy. They could be the best in the country. And starting tomorrow, they’d have to start looking for work.

You needed gold to join a guild. Even the lower-tier guilds required tens of thousands of gold. Most players took on loans or had family money.

But Jinyoung barely had a “family” much less family money. And if he took money from his “father”, that’d leave nothing behind for Hana who would graduate in just a few years.

And a loan came with strings. The last thing you wanted in a world full of violence was strings. But this… This could put them on the map. In a way that would make all the hard work worth it. In a way that would-

Hana’s voice snapped him back to the present. “Jinyoung.”

She put a reassuring hand on his arm.

“Are you okay?”

He remembered where he was.

And who he was with.

He shook his head at himself.

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“Your sword,” he heard himself say. He pointed at Hana’s short sword. It was Academy issued. A plain short sword, but it’d been chipped when she hit the ground in their first encounter. The chip had grown a few cracks and it was showing clear signs of breakage. “Give it to me and take mine.”

Hana hesitated. She’d noticed the crack earlier, but had stayed silent. She was the only one in the team carrying a sword and shield. But the look in Jinyoung’s eyes. He wasn’t angry, just… tender. She handed her sword to him in exchange for his.

“Are you sure you’re okay, Jinyoung?”

“Yeah, fine.” The words were bitter, but they needed to be true.

He looked up at Cyrus whose expression was still hard and nodded. The entire team let out the breath they’d been holding.

“If that’s done, then I think I’ve found a way out.”

The team looked at Johann who held up the map. The scouts had detailed all the main pathways, but not the branching corridors and smaller rooms which would’ve been helpful in finding an alternate route.

“But they did mark all the doors in the main station as well as the platform.” Johann traced a finger to a door on the platform. “This one. We can’t be sure where it goes, but it’s located just below one on the upper floor. And, if we’re lucky…”

“Stairs,” Hana sighed in relief.

***

The corridors were cramped. There was barely enough space to walk side-by-side without bumping into something so they walked single-file. It felt unsafe. Exposed.

Johann was right, though. There were stairs. And other hallways. And more stairs.

More than once they had to backtrack and take a different route that was more or less in the correct heading.

It was an hour of dreary corridors and pale walls when they saw it.

A tree. But it was all wrong. The tree was growing out of a concrete wall. There was no soil, nothing for the tree to grow out of.

And then a few minutes later, the walls slowly gave way to stone and the tiles beneath their feet turned to dirt. This was worse than corruption. This was worse than cave-ins or monsters.

It was an incursion.