Chapter 6.

The teens listened to Eli’s plans and mutually agreed to wait until the morning to see what class the system assigned them before planning any further. Eli had left intentionally unexplained his deliberate role in spreading the system, but had stated authoritatively that everyone, or almost everyone in the city at least, would have the system in the next few days, and that included everyone at their school.

After all, there was no point in planning group dynamics or party formations for the dungeon before anyone knew what their class was. And if everyone was assigned Scholar like him, then … well, they’d have to figure out how an all Scholar party cleared dungeons. So the first meeting of the party didn’t last very long, just long enough for a boring explanation of the system and the upcoming apocalypse from Eli.

After he’d told them that it would probably wait until they were asleep to activate, his schoolmates mutually decided to go home to try to sleep. Either to prove him right or prove him full of crap, they were divided upon which.

The teacher, one Mister Estabon, held Eli behind.

“You drove to the meeting,” the teacher said.

“I’m pretty sure the cops have bigger concerns than a fifteen year old driving,” Eli answered. “What about you? Are you part of the party, or—”

“I don’t know if this is real or not. But I don’t expect that I have the power to stop you, so I might as well try to keep you safe,” the teacher said, sighing. “I suppose we’ll find out tomorrow whether your claims that the system will be spreading are true. I have no other answers as to how you manifested that … thing, in front of us. So in lieu of another explanation I’ll accept yours for now. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m not looking for another one that fits the fact better.”

“Yeah, that’s fine. You’ll probably get scholar like me, Mister Estabon,” Eli said. “I’m not certain if it’s a rare class or not, but you’ll enjoy the logic of magic, I think. I’m just starting to figure it out, but it’s really intriguing.”

“Magic and logic are things which traditionally do not belong together, in my experience,” Mister Estabon said, but he sighed. “But who knows, perhaps that’s exactly how the system works. Perhaps it’s simply the codification of a force which we primitive humans have previously been unable to access. If that’s the case, then everything you’ve said would make sense.”

“Yeah, if you say so,” Eli said. “I’m going to go home now.”

“Let me drive you,” the teacher said. “Now that I know you’ve been driving yourself I can’t turn a blind eye to it, and so you have a choice. Either I call the police and report you, or you accept the ride.”

Eli sighed. “Okay, but let’s at least take my mom’s car. If mom is awake when we get there, she’ll want to know where it is, and she won’t mind dropping you off somewhere, I think.”

“You shouldn’t make promises for other people, Eli,” the teacher scolded, but accepted the suggestion.

Once they were on the road, Eli’s phone rang. It was his mother, who immediately erupted into a tirade that showed just how concerned she’d been to find her son missing when she’d awoken from her system integration.

“And what the hell were you doing with the salt in the kitchen? Why is the backyard all dug up? What were you—”

“What class did you unlock, Mom?” Eli asked, cutting through her concerns.

She paused. “What are you—”

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“It wasn’t a dream, Mom. Or it wasn’t just a dream,” Eli said. “Look, I’m almost home. Mister Estabon is driving me, but you’ll have to give him a ride somewhere when you’re both done yelling at me for my irresponsible behavior. Either way, things are going to be different from here on out.”

“Oh is that right?” His mother asked.

“Yeah, that’s right!” Gabri shouted, sneaking up to shout into the phone. His high-pitched voice resonated with indignation. “I won’t have my master bowing and scraping to his own mother! Eli, if you can’t even stand up to your parents, then what sort of master are you? I won’t—”

“That’s enough Gabri. Just relax,” Eli said. “Mom, what class did you unlock?”

His mother was silent. “I had a dream where I was told that I was supposed to be a Warrior.”

Eli blinked in surprise, then made a little fist pump. A warrior might mean either a tank or a damage dealer, and either way, if he could convince his mother to join his party, then he’d have one key piece of the party in place.

“We’ll talk more when we get home, Mom,” he promised. “But do me a favor. Why don’t you go outside and try splitting some wood? Also, I’m not one hundred percent sure about this, but you haven’t looked in the mirror since you woke up, have you?”

His mother was quiet on the other end, then the line went dead.

“Sounds like she’s mad,” Mister Estabon commented.

“The last thing she remembers last night was grounding me for skipping school, then she finds out that I took the car today,” Eli said. “Yeah, she’s mad. It doesn’t matter though. I’m pretty confident that the system doesn’t consider eighteen to be the age of majority. School’s out, Mister Estabon. Maybe forever. Trigonometry and Macbeth aren’t going to help us survive what’s coming.”

The teacher didn’t have anything more to say until they arrived at his student’s home. After a brief conversation with the boy’s mother, and a reaffirmation that the teen was grounded until the heat death of the universe, the woman agreed to drive the teacher back to his house after offering him a bit of hospitality.

Nobody addressed the hovering Pixie in the room.

The teacher, as a normal heterosexual male, couldn’t help but notice that the physique of the boy’s mother had become significantly more muscular than the last time he’d seen her. Which meant that either she’d taken up a rigorous exercise routine, or the system had something to do with it.

Regardless, Eli obediently went to his room and began focusing on the last thing on his agenda for the day.

Enchanting the purchases he’d made at the mall.

Fortunately there was an entire section in the Runekeeper’s Grimoire dedicated specifically to such an endeavor.

~~~~~~~

Mattie Mathews pulled up in her driveway, forcing herself to be calm. Her day had not gone well, starting with waking up after noon and realizing that she’d slept straight through work. She’d called the office, only for the call to go to voicemail. It had taken thirty minutes for her to figure out that the entire office was on lockdown.

And fifteen minutes beyond that to realize that her son had made a mess at home and then stolen her car.

Furious, she’d called him, and it was only after speaking with him that she’d realized that the weird dream she’d had was more than a dream.

She had never been fat, but neither had she been particularly strong. Now, however, she was solid muscles. She wasn’t quite in body-builder status, but the normal amount of body fat that she’d been content with was gone. She didn’t have calipers or anything, but she estimated that she was at 6% or lower.

On top of which, she weighed twenty pounds more due to the muscles which had grown. Overnight.

She’d taken his suggestion to heart, going out back to split some wood. The results had been...staggering. She’d split not only the top log, but the one beneath it. The ax, empowered by some sort of energy she couldn’t understand, had shred the wood into splinters and pierced through into the dirt beneath, leaving a small crater.

She swallowed, and put on a polite face while the teacher was present, but when she got home after breaking several laws regarding the suggested speed at which you drive your car in certain areas, she stalked through her house and kicked open her son’s bedroom door.

“Okay, spill it,” she said. “What the hell is happening?”

He sighed. “Okay, but let me record it this time so that the next time we bring someone into the circle I don’t have to repeat myself,” he said, and he pulled out a new phone—when had the little brat gotten a new phone? He pulled out a new phone to do exactly what he’d suggested.