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Snow and ash melted together into black rain. Unnatural fire in a rainbow of death as the demonic armies closed in. Fighting desperately amid the ruins of humanity’s last stronghold. After fighting for so many years, being pushed back into the sole remaining dungeon. Trapped. Screams and wicked laughter filled the air as the final defenders were slaughtered. A look of triumph on the Demon Lord’s face as his claws came down—
Disorientation.
In a well-kept park in the dead of summer, Levi Morrison stumbled as something small and alive impacted his lower leg painfully, a bladed protrusion stabbing deep into the muscle.
He instinctively tried to surge stamina to correct, but no rush of stability answered his call. Without the anticipated augmentation to his balance, he toppled forward in an uncontrolled fall.
It happened so fast, Levi barely had time to throw one arm out to catch himself and prevent a face-first collision with the sidewalk. He twisted himself sideways to land in a half roll on his back in the grass beside it.
“Grass?”
Not dead grass, or scorched grass, or grass you had to wade through up to the knee. Kept grass. Low and green and vibrant.
His head throbbed as though someone had smacked him up one side and down the other with a rock the size of a power shield.
Levi blinked and stared up at his surroundings, hand running across the tactile soft greenery.
This had to be a dream.
Thoughts came slowly, reactions dulled and distant. Everything looked wrong. Felt wrong. He couldn’t make sense of what he was looking at.
Trees, strong and leafy. Not dead and choked with ash.
Sidewalks, covered with only the detritus of city life, not overgrown, not stained with blood. And stranger still, occupied.
People walked past, not wearing armor, not carrying weapons. Casual and untroubled.
And beyond it all, clear blue sky. How long had it been since he saw anything but gray and black and fire?
The sky wasn’t supposed to be that blue, was it?
This couldn't be real.
He closed his eyes and mentally checked himself over for the disconnect. No illusion was perfect. Once you knew to look, there was always a flaw to slip out through.
The pain in his leg felt strange, both sharper and duller than he expected, but it didn’t collapse under scrutiny. He’d been so stunned by what he was seeing, he’d ignored what tripped him in the first place.
Which was strange in itself. If he was snared in a mental trap for more than a second, he should be dead by now.
He flickered his attention to the corner of his vision where his stamina, health and mana active status indicators should be. Nothing. Not even empty bars, no interface at all.
His stamina shouldn’t be empty, should have at least regenerated a little over the past few seconds. Levi ran through the chromatic and mathematic sequence to manually bring up his system status. Nothing happened.
Yet there was no sense of disconnect, no double-existence as he’d expect from a false reality. The only dissonance was inside his own mind.
He blinked his eyes into focus, searching his surroundings again with a confused frown. Everything felt real — properly, fully real. He couldn’t deny it.
So, what happened? Where was he? How?
He searched his recent memory, straining for details through the mental haze that made everything so slow and uncertain.
Driven back into the last dungeon. Death and fear and knowing that he was next but unable to stop, driven onward until —
Levi sat bolt upright, adrenaline flooding his body, suddenly hyper-aware of the pounding beat of his heart.
He put a disbelieving hand to his chest, staring down at the white cloth and dark overjacket. Undamaged. Not even a drop of blood to mar the flimsy fabric.
But... wasn’t he...?
Last thing he remembered, he’d been fighting for his life. Spells going off in all directions, blood running freely down the streets, friends torn apart in front of him. The combined overlords of five invasion waves burned through humanity’s last defenders in an unstoppable assault, pushing them deeper and deeper into the last dungeon.
Until...
Hadn’t he died?
He should have been dead.
But apart from the pain in his leg and his throbbing headache, he seemed to be uninjured. He felt weak, small and vulnerable without his massive health pool or stamina to draw on, but very much alive.
Someone must have found him at the last moment and healed him. Who? How?
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His hands instinctively went to his swords, but met only empty air where they should have rested. His eyes trailed down his body, across the casual suit that looked so foreign to him now, until he finally recognized something familiar.
A tiny purple-gray creature crouched there, gnawing on his leg. He supposed it said something about his mental state that it took the visual reminder for him to do anything about the attack.
Blood stained the dark gray fabric around the injury. The tiny creature looked up with its pointy teeth bared, meeting Levi’s eyes with a cocky, “What are you going to do about it, huh?” expression.
Levi hadn’t seen one in years, but he still recognized it immediately.
Gremlin.
With a clear enemy in front of him, Levi snapped into action, confusion shoved aside to deal with later.
He jumped to his feet, ignoring the injury, and kicked the gremlin away to buy himself a moment to plan. He’d survived eight years of nearly constant battle. Stats or no stats, he could overpower one gremlin.
Goblinoid, gremlins topped out at about two feet tall, though this one seemed a bit shorter than that. The basic scout type of Destruction dungeons until level 80 or so. This particular specimen was scrawny and pale lavender, with a slender sharp-bladed horn on its snout, long spidery fingers, and a thin pointed tail.
Destruction creatures often left corrosive lingering damage behind; without his health pool to rely on, he’d need a restorative elixir soon if he didn’t want to lose the leg. He couldn’t believe he’d been so complacent as to be injured by a gremlin of all things, the lowest of the low. Basic dungeon monsters like gremlins could be dangerous in swarms, but this looked like a lone scout who had left the safety of its dungeon in search of easy prey.
“You alright there?”
The woman’s concerned voice cut through his focus, the last thing he’d expected to hear. He spun to find her wearing the casual mundane clothing he hadn’t seen in so long, watching him with a faint frown.
“Uhh.” He couldn’t think of how to reply. Nothing made sense.
The gremlin squealed and rushed at him; he heard tiny rapid footsteps closing in.
“Hang on.” Levi stepped aside, then crouched to grab the tiny creature by the throat as it ran by, slammed it face-first into the ground, and pressed his knee against its back to hold it in place. It flailed its clawed hands, but Levi grabbed both wrists in one hand and held them down as well.
He may not have his stats, but with a scrawny under-two-foot monster he didn’t need them.
The woman’s concerned expression darkened to something more like horror. “You can’t treat a kid like that!”
“Kid?” Levi looked down at the squirming and thrashing monster beneath him, then up at the woman. She didn’t carry a weapon, and no name or level appeared over her head. It’d been so long since he met anyone unAwakened that it took him a confused moment to make sense of the situation.
Right. Before acclimating to the System, anything made of mana would be heavily obscured to mundane senses. Dungeon creatures, being practically nothing but mana, would be perceived as whatever the person’s mind came up with that felt reasonable to them.
She backed away, eyes darting between Levi and the gremlin. She clearly wished she hadn’t said anything and would rather escape the situation.
Levi let her go. Her inability to recognize the monster reminded him of something. Technically, he was unAwakened right now himself. That he saw the monsters for what they were probably said something else about his mental state.
He was disconnected from the system right now. But it didn’t have to stay that way. Even if coming so close to dying had stripped him of his class and levels, he could always start over; could take a class right here and now, get leveling.
Whatever miraculous untouched paradise he’d been brought to, they would need fighters as soon as the invaders found them.
He had a second chance. Even if he’d failed North America, he could start over... wherever this was. If he killed the gremlin, he could reclaim his Fighter class. But if he had to start over…
Would Fighter be good enough? In the end, all the personal strength in the world hadn’t mattered. He’d been level 79 when he died, and it hadn’t made a single difference to the demonic overlords who’d annihilated them with impunity.
“If you had it to do over again, knowing what we do now, when you made your first kill… would you do the same thing?”
Old memories resurfaced, idle discussions in the lull between desperate dungeon runs and skirmishes against the invaders.
“Of course. You don’t see a thousand Mages who survived. Fighter is the best choice — for the double health if nothing else.”
“Some of the Scout evolutions get pretty scary. I think I could have been happy with Nightblade.”
“Or Shapeshifter! I saw a couple of those guys, who actually managed to take demon warrior forms and fight them on their own level!”
“I seriously considered going Bloodrager, but even if the regen is nice it doesn’t matter as much as base health at this level. It might have been viable at lower levels, but now I’m glad I went with the ‘boring’ option.”
But that had been before they all died one by one anyway. Fighter’s boost to health kept them alive in the dungeons, but it wasn’t enough against the Demon Lords.
No matter how strong they got, no matter how much they leveled, humans simply couldn’t stand up to power on that scale.
Levi needed something more.
The gremlin clawed ineffectually, unable to reach him with its face shoved into the grass and its wrists pinned down. He supposed the creature might have horrified him once, but having seen the true horrors that waited to invade... he watched the weak thing dispassionately.
It continued to hiss and snarl, squirming and whipping its tail about. Levi tucked a foot over the appendage to hold it still. Only the tip continued to twitch.
“What to do with you,” he mused aloud.
He’d never been drawn to the flashier classes himself. Swordsman was a mid-tier evolution of Fighter and he’d been perfectly happy with the choice. It complemented his fighting style well, augmented a lot of his attack moves, and provided enough stat bonuses to keep him alive. But if even the strongest human fighter couldn’t stand up to the invaders, he needed to change course entirely.
Fighter, Mage, Ranger, Scout, Tamer, Medic. The six basic combat classes from which all others evolved. Of them, only one provided the potential he needed to stand up to the coming invaders with any hope of victory.
Few Tamers had survived to the later years of the war, but those who had were incredibly powerful. Some of Tamer’s later evolutions more than made up for its early weaknesses. Specifically, the Summoner branches. Levi once worked with a Summoner who had bound a dozen hellhounds and even one imp before he’d been killed, not counting the hundreds of dungeon monsters he’d had at his command.
The more he thought about it, the more he liked it. Summoners were Mage-adjacent, something he’d never had much interest in, but with the major advantage of not needing to be physically present. Minions could be commanded from a great distance, providing a layer of safety no other class could boast.
If he couldn’t possibly win, then he’d find a way to control something that could. To bind powers beyond humanity and make them his own.
And that path started here and now.
Levi stared down at the trapped gremlin. “So, little squirmer. What’s it going to take for you to submit to my will?”
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