Levi Morrison, Secret Seeker
Tamer Level: 6
Subclass: None
Minions: 4/4
Strength: 1
Health: 141/141 (+2/minute)
Psyche: 2
Mana: 61/61 (+3/minute)
Spirit: 3
Stamina: 111/111 (+4/minute)
Mana Ping 1: Returns location details about mana entities nearby.
Tame 1: Attempt to convert a creature with less than 5% health into a minion.
Mana Push 1: Fire a focused burst of mana at a targeted location.
Revive 1: Restore one [Dead] minion to 10% of its maximum health.
Pack Leader 2: Increases minion slots by 1 every 4th level.
Coming along, even if it still felt wrong having regens so low. He sent out another ping to locate Gordon, who hadn’t moved from the previous location. Getting through town to reach him was harder than he’d expected. The amount of car traffic meant he couldn’t run through the middle of the road like he’d normally have done.
Waiting at crosswalks for the light to change while escorting a centipede nearly as tall as Levi himself was awkward. He got more than a few strange looks, and tried not to guess what people thought they were seeing. Mana distortions could be strange. Sometimes it was a simple blur—particularly on camera—other times it made things appear entirely different. It all depended on the person observing.
It was a relief to arrive at Gordon’s familiar car. Flomper sat inside grinning wickedly at him. Gordon himself was nowhere to be seen.
Levi gave the oversized prairie dog a flat look. “Let me guess, you’ve locked me out.”
The cynomis sat up on her back legs, resting her furry paws on the lock switch. She blinked at him in mock innocence.
“Why are you like this?”
Skarm squeaked and prodded Levi’s leg.
“What do you mean, it’s my fault? She’s clearly being unreasonable.”
Skarm squeaked again.
“Then you try reasoning with her.”
Skarm hopped up, reaching. Levi reached down and helped him up. Skarm pressed his face against the window and smiled with all his teeth, spread one of his claws against the glass, and began to slowly press down.
Flomper squealed and toppled over backward as Skarm’s claws screeched against the window.
Skarm pointed to the unlock switch.
Flomper bared her overly large teeth at him and sat stubbornly with paws crossed over her chest.
Skarm’s claws clenched on the window, beginning to cut through.
Flomper scurried to unlock the door, tugged the handle, and kicked it open with all her strength. The door popped out a few inches, then fell back closed. But it was unlocked. Levi had to crawl in through the back seat and reach over to the driver side door to hit the trunk button and unlock the rest of the doors, but it was better than standing awkwardly outside the car until Gordon finished.
He unloaded Cen’s remains into the trunk, while Centoo looked on mournfully.
“Don’t worry, we’ll be getting him back soon.”
He ushered Centoo into the back seat as Flomper glowered at Skarm resentfully. Skarm was gremlin enough not to gloat, for once. He sat quietly on the floor beneath Centoo’s coiled form without doing anything provoking.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Levi pulled out the laptop and connected to the open Wi-Fi. It took a few minutes to refamiliarize himself with internet functionality, but his old instincts came through before long.
First, he searched for variations of “RL game doom raiders triple x.” After several pages of unrelated results, he found a clearly homemade site with a badly photoshopped banner depicting Tom Arlon and a dozen other people in various states of cosplay mixed with dungeon equipment Levi recognized immediately. He couldn’t help but smile. They really had been fighting dungeons already, and pretty seriously, from the looks of it.
No wonder the dungeon in Tom’s yard had been level 2. With so many of them running through it, he was surprised it wasn’t higher. They’d clearly been skipping bosses. He'd need to start circulating info about Essence prevention, now that he'd been so dramatically reminded of the necessity, but at least their decision showed wisdom in the short term. Maybe his recruitment attempts wouldn’t be as much of an uphill battle as he’d feared.
“Doom Raiders XXX,” declared the banner, the professionalism of the font immediately spoiled by assorted gamer slang exclamations. They were tilted and skewed, scattered haphazardly across the graphic as though scrawled by graffiti artists with strangely perfect lettering.
Apart from the header and several more pictures of the individuals in the group, the site provided little content. Nothing to indicate it was anything but a group of cosplayers doing photo shoots.
“RL game forums” brought up so many unrelated results that he couldn’t begin to guess where this particular subculture’s hangout was located. A group of gamers based around a normal game looked very similar to a group of gamers based around fighting dungeon creatures in their backyards.
Levi reverse-searched each of the images from the Doom Raiders XXX site. Two showed up in various other places, including a small forum which, despite its name having nothing searchable for related keywords, was titled “RL GAME” and included a few hundred people discussing the dungeons.
They even had their own wiki already started.
Levi smiled at the sparse and often inaccurate information they were sharing, but it was certainly more than he’d hoped for when he arrived in the past.
He created an account for both the forum and the wiki. The forum application process was long and convoluted, but he was grudgingly impressed by the group’s ability to weed out people who hadn’t actually Awakened or encountered a dungeon. He answered those questions with ease, but some of the other requirements were more of a stretch. Fortunately, many were reliant on commonly available memes or game information which could be found by searching the internet.
Once he was finally allowed to post, he located the trade forum and made a request for a Seed Fragment. In keeping with their formatting guide, he listed his available resources—Destruction tokens, basic wand, orb, staff, and weather stones. He left out the Beast token, since he suspected it might be necessary for the Summoner evolution, and he retained ingredients for restoratives, to make use of in future.
“I wonder what’s taking Gordon so long.” He glanced up and sent another ping, but Gordon’s mana presence remained nearby and clear. Assuming it was Gordon. He couldn’t actually tell one person from another by their mana presence unless they were drastically different strengths, but he could tell there was one low-level Awakened in the diner. Given the proximity of Gordon’s car, it was a safe bet, but…
“Think we should check on him?” He started to fold away the laptop.
Flomper squeaked at him angrily.
“He needs time?”
She nodded.
Levi relaxed back into the seat and reopened the device. Next, he searched deeper into the maze of forum posts and wiki pages. The RL Game guilds each had their own private forum section; he sent a request to Doom Raiders XXX to join their guild. There wasn’t a “request chat access” option and he had no way of guessing usernames to message them directly.
He set about transferring the documents he’d been creating to the wiki; converting them into their formatting took the bulk of his time. He checked back on his forum post a few times, but apart from people asking if he'd accept something else in trade instead of the Seed Fragment they'd never heard of, it was quiet and unhelpful.
He continued to add information to the pages the wiki already had and created new pages it didn't. He wrote an overview of each dungeon type, the environmental challenges and types of enemies he knew of.
Destruction dungeons he knew well enough to detail everything from the level 1 gremlins to the level 120 behemoths that could one-hit even a well-prepared Fighter. About other dungeons, his knowledge was patchier. Between sixty and eighty percent of all dungeons were Destruction-type, and the others were split among specialty varieties.
Levi's understanding of the remaining types could be important at high levels but wasn’t enough to predict them at this level. He knew, especially after encountering a soul-seeker in the level 1 Control dungeon, that his preconceptions about what would be normal this early were clearly inadequate. His understanding mostly came from general knowledge, not personal experience of low-level conflict.
He'd run a handful of dungeons of most types over the years, but never at such a low level, and the vast bulk of his time fighting had been against demons, not dungeons. They were an occasional thing, when they had time and space to breathe between waves of demons, if they could get enough people together, and thought the risk and inevitable loss of life was worth the experience gained.
It might be near-suicidal to run a dungeon 40 levels above them, but it certainly did more to increase their power than they could ever hope to manage on their own.
His phone rang, interrupting with music that filled his heart with an ache of longing. Long-buried memories flooded back and brought tears to his eyes. He should ignore it. He should stay focused on this, not get dragged back into everyday life. It would be so easy to forget his purpose and indulge in what he had until it was too late. He couldn’t afford to be distracted.
But he glanced down at the phone, and Irene's icon smiling at him broke his fragile resolve. He pressed Accept.
“Hey, beautiful,” he said, voice coming out hoarse. “How are you?”
----------------------------------------