When Waverly gave them a timid little wave, a person on the back of the adventuring party waved back, only for the guy in front to smack his arm down.
Okay, they’d seen her alright, which meant she couldn’t just sneak away, even if she wasn’t crap at sneaking. Damn, damn, damn! What was she supposed to do? She turned to the water, saw Victor floating there, and (getting lucky for once) caught his eye. When she was sure he was watching, she pantomimed hiding toward the cat boy, which took a frustratingly long time for him to get. He had [Stealth] at A rank or whatever, shouldn’t he understand what she meant when she pulled up her shoulders and acted all sneaky? Just to be sure, she mouthed 'adventurers', but didn’t have the time to check if Victor got what she meant. She had other stuff to do, like for example getting dressed, and also hiding Victor’s armor somewhere so the adventurers wouldn't notice that there were two people at the lake and not just one. Her getting caught out like this was already bad, but she could switch into a human form real quick and none would be the wiser, right? Oh, shit, she totally needed to shift!
With an effort of will, she pulled the the fur, skin, and cartilage of her ears into her skull, and shifted her tail up into her spine and her thighs. Immediately, the world seemed more distant, a little less friendly, and less interesting. It was hard to describe to someone who didn't have wolf hearing, but she suspected it would be fair to say that it felt a little bit like having these fancy headphones on that canceled noise or whatever (not that she could afford those), except that you couldn’t just pull them off. Actually, it was more like having water in your ears, and it was all annoying and you kept wanting to get it out! Yeah, that was it.
No, Focus, Waverly! She was being watched. She checked with a quick glance over her shoulder, and realized they were already more than halfway to the jumping rock, as she‘d begun to call it because it was a good location to jump from, see? Oh, wait, damn, how good was their eyesight? What if they had spotted her tail when she warned Victor? Damn, she was such a ditz sometimes. She’d probably forget hiding the armor, too, if it wasn’t so important…
Oh no, no no, she still needed to deal with the heaven-damned armor! She was just about to just take it and throw it into the lake, leather, metal buckles and all when the party reached her. They were surprisingly fast, which wasn’t good because it meant they were probably really high level. Unfortunately, turning around and taking a peek at their gear totally confirmed her suspicions.
There were four of them. The first guy was the kind of person she'd learned about in school when they'd discussed working in the dungeons in 10th grade. He was basically a walking tank, which is why they called people like him tanks, which totally made sense. Layers upon layers of armor, and a really huge sword on his back made him ideal for fighting where the battle was the thickest. At least with the System. Without it, a sword that big would probably get stuck everywhere in a brawl.
The second adventurer was a girl, wearing a dress that was tight up top, and flared into massive frills that started just above the hips and went down halfway past her knees, with a very pretty black and blue waving pattern. Waverly couldn’t stop herself from checking out her shoes, and of course, they were awesome too. She didn’t use them, though, she just seemed to hover on a cloud of mist. Probably some sort of mage or something, usually these people went all out when it came to outfits and were a little bit extra in general, but they were usually nice people, or so she’d heard. Down in Hell, at least.
The next guy sported a massive cross-shaped scar directly over the bridge of his nose and wore two patches over his eyes. Waverly didn’t really get why he wasn’t just wearing a blindfold because, to be honest, it kind of looked a little bit ridiculous, even if you ignored the fact that the eyepatches had little skulls on them. The entire thing made him look like a bad guy who really wanted to let people know he was a bad guy because his actions weren’t bad enough. He had a lot of knives strapped to a bandolier across his chest and also a crossbow slung to the small of his back. If she had anyone to bet with, Waverly would call two coins that this guy dropped into stealth at the first sight of trouble.
The last guy was the oddest of the bunch. He’d chosen an elf as opposed to the other three (they’d all picked human) but maybe it was just Waverly’s impression, but he totally didn’t act elflike, at all. He stood all stooped and kept looking at the ground and stuff, unlike the elves she’d seen, who were all very “confident”
…Okay no, they were stuck up and pretty fucking arrogant.
Anyway. This one was different, and not just because of the cowering. Where the others obviously paid a lot of attention to how shiny their gear looked, the last guy wore long white robes with a few golden ornaments, but they weren’t overdone or ostentatious, anything. Very tasteful, really. In fact, Waverly would have thought that the elf was the lowest level member of the group, if it hadn’t been for the fact that his weapon looked the most impressive. It was a staff as tall as him, plus at least another two Nails, and every single available splinter of its surface was covered in runes that glowed with rippling waves of energy, emanating from a bright blue crystal hovering at the tip of the staff. Up there, the craftspeople had woven the wood to resemble two ribbons that were so thin that they almost looked like they were moving as they circled around each other. In their dance, they seemed to hug the gem, which radiated warmth like a hearth on a cold winter's night: Comforting, offering relief, but also struggling to keep the endless cold at bay.
The elf made eye contact, and Waverly smiled at him, but after returning a glimmer of a smile of his own, the guy glanced toward the tank and then looked away again.
Okay…. Awkward…
“Uh, hi,” Waverly said. She tried to wag her tail, but all that did was shimmy her hips a little, and she suspected it made her look like an idiot, so she stopped immediately.
As far as responses went, it was mixed. The mage and the rogue just looked at her with smiles that they probably thought looked friendly but really weren’t. She could easily tell. Not with any [Werewolf] sense, but a lifetime of having to find, confront, and/or beat up her brother's (and later also her sisters) bullies in the schoolyard. It was super important to know the difference between a jerk and a kid that pissed her brothers off. She couldn’t let herself get weaponized into some sort of attack dog, could she now? Anyway, those two ticked that sense, and if she hadn’t already made up her mind, she would totally be sure to hang out with this group as briefly as possible.
The only two people who actually spoke were the tank and the weird guy in the robe. They both said “Hi” at the same time, but then the guy in the armor shot the robed dude a mean look before turning back to Waverly.
“Hi there, how are you doing?” he said. “I’m Terrence. You don’t need to bother hiding that loot, we’re not going to steal it, promise.”
“Mostly because it's complete trash…” the guy with the stupid eyepatches muttered as if he was trying to be sneaky, but it was totally loud enough for her to hear it even without her regular ears.
She noticed that Terrence didn’t introduce the other members of his party, and also that he snickered a little at his friend’s comment before straightening his face and extending a hand to Waverly.
“What’s your name? Are you new?”
“Uh, yeah!” Waverly said. “I’m Waverly. Nice to meet you.” Instead of taking his hand, she gave him another wave.
The robed guy looked like he was about to tell her his own name, but when the others just kind of nodded, he kept quiet and stared at the ground again.
Terrence let his ignored hand fall to his side, acting as if he was wiping it on his pants.
“That’s great! We’ve been looking for a fifth to join our party because we are going to a new dungeon that our healer over here discovered a few weeks ago.” He thumbed over his shoulder at the guy in the robes. “Come on, let's go. There’s super cool loot in there and we’re going to get you equipped. What’s your class?”
That was kind of rude. Did he really just assume that he was going to go with them because… well, just because? And he still hadn’t introduced his friends. Yeah, there was absolutely no way that she was going to go anywhere with these people, but she kind of needed them to leave so that Victor could come out of the water and they could beeline back to the dungeon before these idiots made it there. Well, that was assuming that it was The Broken Mines that Terrence was talking about, but actually, one thing that Victor had mentioned was that there were very few other dungeons in the area, and especially no other low-level ones, which didn’t leave many other options for them to drag her to. So, long story short: she needed them to fuck off, so that Victor and her could get back to the Dungeon and prepare for their first adventuring group!
Exciting, but also kinda stressful.
“Um, thank you, but a dungeon sounds way too dangerous for me. I only just started this game and I don’t really feel like I’m ready for that sort of stuff yet, you know?”
“Oh, don't worry about it. We’ll pull you through.”
Uh, oh, not good…
Oblivious to her thoughts, Terrence went on, “We’re all max level and we have pretty good gear. You won’t be a burden that we can’t shoulder. Come on, let's go, that dungeon won’t farm itself.”
Waverly wanted to say something else, but Terrence and his crew were already marching in the direction of the Broken Mines. When she didn’t follow, the tank looked over his shoulder, and this time, he was definitely scowling at her.
“What are you waiting for? Come on!” There was an undertone there, one that she had heard so often around the Dregs. I thought we were friends. You do want to be friends, right?
Ugh, this was so a-nnoy-ing-uh. Everything this guy did, he could have taken straight out of some low-level hustler’s playbook. Rush her, make her think that she came up with some decision when she totally hadn’t, don’t leave her time to think…
Normally, she would just ignore the ass and walk away, but she couldn’t die without the humans discovering she was a monster, so this was kind of bad. She couldn’t just fight them, either. She was only one level 20 werewolf, and they were probably max level, outnumbered her four to one, and had pretty good gear to boot. That meant if they attacked her, they would immediately kill her, which would mean that she would die like a regular monster: Hellfire, experience gain, loot drop, the whole shebang.
Perhaps the system would try to be funny and unfurl a giant banner over her corpse that said “Yeah, that’s right! All monsters are actually sentient and you have been slaughtering them for your amusement! But don’t worry, they get paid well for their jobs in this game! By Satan! Who is real! And who probably already owns over half of the shares on your soul! Thank you so much for playing VDO!” and then in fine print: (A game that is literally being run by the forces of darkness!)
Yeah, if that happened, she might as well fill out her applications for that open position at the 6/66 Convenience Store at the corner of Famine and Despair, so that meant there should be absolutely no fighting on her part, or else she’d blow the whole thing, which meant that she had to follow this guy to her own dungeon if only to buy Victor some time to come up with some sort of plan because she was totally running out of ideas. So that only left one option. With a hidden eye-roll, she jogged to keep up with the group.
----------------------------------------
When the humans finally left, and Victor was sure he could wade out of the water without being spotted by their Pathfinder, he was very tempted to just lie down on the hot rock, face down, and just sleep the rest of the day away. He was so cold, but it had been worth it, because he’d actually found out that swimming wasn’t half bad. It made him feel very nimble, a little bit like flying perhaps. At least it had felt a little bit like those dreams of flying he had when he was a kid, chasing the bats around the entire span of Elysium from the comfort of his bed.
But now was not the time for sleep.
For a second, he thought he needed to convince himself to act, like before. He tried stupid ideas like “Waverly needs me to help her!”, but he couldn’t even think that stuff with a straight face. She was more capable of handling herself than him. Still, he found himself hurrying up to not lose track of the group of five as they left. Waverly and he were a team, and you don’t let your team members run around with a group of adventurers out for blood. That it concerned the safety of the dungeon that they now shared responsibility for was just cream on top of the milk.
He looked around but could neither find his armor nor his boots. Either Waverly must have hidden them, or the adventurers had stolen them despite what they had claimed about the quality of his gear. To be honest, he felt a little embarrassed at their comment. They really needed to fix that loot machine. With a long sigh, he looked at the uncomfortable little stones that jutted out of the dry dirt road that led towards the dungeon. The sight alone made his poor feet hurt. Then he shrugged and dropped into [Stealth] to follow after his best friend.
Congratulations! For sending your minions into danger while skulking in the shadows and hatching sinister plans, you have received 1250 [Vampire] experience!
Catching up with the group wasn’t too hard; they weren’t that quick. What was more difficult was staying out of sight of the guy with the eyepatches. Victor was sure he had some sort of tracking ability that would allow him to see through his [Stealth]. Their level disparity further limited the efficiency of the skill. Still, if he kept his distance and took it slow, it should be fine. Hopefully. So, despite wanting to overtake them and head back to the Dungeon to warm his colleagues, Victor stayed back. There was one thing he could do, however, and that was to do what he did best: stick his nose into things.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Matching pace with the group, Victor strained his ears, eavesdropping without the slightest hint of guilt or shame.
And did he ever get some nice nuggets out of it. At first, the tank of the group, Terrence, tried convincing Waverly that she should pick up a healing class. Despite the tense situation, Victor couldn’t help but smile at the thought of Waverly wearing robes, looking pious. He had to be careful not to imagine her in a nun's habit with a little halo on top, or his cackling might have given him away.
After Waverly had assured Terrence that she would “like, totally” pick up the class he suggested, the conversation dropped off. However, the healer of the group approached the incognito werewolf and, after showing her some of his spells, he started talking.
“I know that healing might not sound like the most exciting thing in the world,” he said, his voice so timid and unassuming that Victor had issues picking it up, even with all his stat boosts towards perception. “But I find it very rewarding. You’ll see, there’s something great about being a person that everyone can rely on. Oh, and you will always get invited into parties, with barely any wait time. There's just never enough healers to go around, so you’ll always have friends to play with.”
“Oh, yeah, I can totally see that,” Waverly said. “I just feel as though that should be a choice I make for myself, right?” She sounded way more like herself when she was talking to the healer. Probably because she had a soft spot for shy people, and the elf was definitely shy and then some.
“I know Terrence might seem a bit pushy, but he means well. He’s just in a bad mood because we wiped on a very difficult boss yesterday and lost a few of our members.”
“Oh, really? What happened? Did they, like, die or something?”
“No, well, I mean yes…” the healer said. “You see, death is not permanent in this game... You can actually—”
“They all left the guild because they died so much, they couldn’t afford to buy new gear off of the auction house,” the mage said, interrupting them. From Victors distance, it was hard to tell, but it seemed like she was focused on Terrence, who was walking ahead of her.
“Still saying that you should have just paid them out of guild funds,” she complained at the tank's back.
Terrence didn't even look back as he replied, “Why the fuck would I pay them for being dumb enough to die in the most basic encounter I’ve ever seen in any MMORPG ever? I gave them a chance to show their commitment to the raid and they failed. We’re way better off without them, especially if we keep finding promising new recruits like Waverly here.”
That made Victor's eyebrow rise. How bold of him to assume Waverly would join a Guild with a leader like Terrence. The catboy would have understood where the guy was coming from if Waverly had been acting all interested and eager, but that was far from the case. If anything, she looked more like a prisoner being marched to the dungeons, which ironically wasn’t too far off the mark, even if the humans didn’t know half of what was going on.
No, besides all the other optimistic statements that guild leader had made in the last 10 minutes, assuming that Waverly was going to happily join their guild spoke of a very special character, and it told Victor that his helmet probably had rather thick plating on the inside.
The group fell back into silence after that, and as Victor snuck behind them, he idly wondered if Waverly had kept her scroll of dark resurrection with her. He would prefer that she had. If she died, she would just wake up back at home, or at the resurrection circle if the people at the dungeon got it cleared in time. If she didn’t, sure her death would look more like that of a regular unclassed player, but he knew for a fact that she had already died twice. Once as a kid, and once while defending one of her siblings in middle school. Resurrection scrolls attuned to her were getting expensive, and he knew her Family wasn’t exactly swimming in cash. If it came to it, he knew he would pay the fee himself, but the thought of forcing his generosity on people left him feeling dirty, and he knew it would be a strain on their friendship.
In many ways, he would actually prefer paying the absurdly high fine for breaking immersion.
Hopefully, neither of those two would come to pass, but if push came to shove, Victor could see it ending both ways. Waverly was very frugal, yes, but she was also loyal to a fault. If she suspected that she could save him and the dungeon trouble, he feared that she would draw the wrong conclusion and risk being stuck in limbo for a couple of weeks.
Luckily, all Waverly needed to do was to keep playing her role and wait for a good moment to vanish. And if half the stories she told about her family were true, she was really good at self-control.
----------------------------------------
Okay, like, should Waverly drop the scroll or not? It was so hard to decide, especially because of the Terrence guy who kept trying to impress her with some bolt or another. She really wished she could just punch him in the face and go her merry way and hang out at the lake with Victor for the rest of the day. But of course, that wasn’t possible because she was here for a job, and she would do that job well! That meant keeping her thoughts to herself and not drawing attention, no matter how punchable, because any sort of fight would either end up with her both dead and/or immersion broken.
And what would her amazing new job actually do for her, if the first 15 salaries went towards nullifying the debt her parents accrued for buying a third resurrection scroll? Those things weren’t cheap to begin with, and they kind of just kept increasing in price after. Besides, she would have to explain why she didn’t have her regulation scroll with her when she died. The office of health and safety was totally not chill about these kinds of things, because they'd had some permadeaths at the very beginning of the whole dungeon thing, because people just couldn't afford to pay before the soul expired, and that was very bad for morale. So now, scrolls were mandatory, Death made a killing, and everyone was happy… if they didn’t forget their Scroll.
But that didn't answer the question: should she, or shouldn’t she? Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you looked at it, that was the exact moment when they arrived at the mining pit. Terrence held up his hand and they all stopped behind him, the guy with the eyepatches leaning over the edge and peering down into the empty Dust Bowl.
“Man, are you serious? That’s supposed to be the dungeon? It looks like absolute trash! How are we supposed to train up our newcomers in here?” he said, which was rude, but what Waverly really wanted to know was how he could tell with those ridiculous skull-covered patches slapped over his eyes.
“Didn’t you say there were a billion warning signs or something? That at least would have made it look kind of interesting,” said the girl, also looking down while idly playing with a levitating stream of water that rushed through her fingers in a figure-8.
“There were signs, I swear,” the elf said, defending himself in his usual meek voice. “There were hundreds of them, and they all said 'Under maintenance' or something like it. I promise…”
“Well, I don’t see any signs,” Terrence said with a threatening rumble in the elf’s direction. “but it doesn’t matter, just like how trash the place looks like. Once we place a few squads here to stake our claim, and then begin funneling noobs into this thing, it will grow quickly enough. They all do. For all you know, this is exactly how the Dread Mines looked like when they started out, and now they’re the most farmed newbie dungeon in the entire game. All because that guild with the ridiculous Latin name claimed it and leveled it up.”
“Oh, that's the plan!” the mage said, and for the first time, she seemed interested in anything besides her water magic. “Does that mean we’ll kill anyone who tries to enter without paying our fee?”
“You fucking bet,” Terrence said. To his side, Skull Eyes laughed.
Waverly struggled not to groan. That was absolutely terrible. Not only would that mean they’d get far fewer players in, but the ones that did would already be annoyed. How was anyone supposed to have fun in their dungeon when it became all industrialized and stuff? It would take ages for the Broken Mines to gather any meaningful amount of mana, and most likely they’d have to specialize Debbie toward siphoning annoyance or something, and she would bet the rates on that were terrible.
“I still think it’s a bad idea,” the elf tried to interject. “It’s not going to make us very popular in town, you know?”
“Anyway, let’s go and see what the dungeon is looking like from the inside,” Terrence said, completely ignoring his healer.
But for once, the elf didn’t give up immediately.
“They haven’t had a good dungeon around here since the early days of the game and have been looking forward to a new one spawning where people who start here can level up. Now they all just wander off to other cities and dungeons and it’s hurting the region really bad economically, which means that there will be no one…” he trailed off under Terrence’s 1000-ton stare.
“Anyway,” the tank said very carefully through gritted teeth, “let's go inside and show our new person here a good time, instead of being incompetent naysayers. Who’s with me?”
With a sigh, the mage clenched her hand into a fist and the ribbon of water exploded. “Yeah, let’s kill some shit.”
“Yep,” the guy with the eyepatches agreed.
“But what if it’s still bugged…” the elf tried once more. They all ignored him, except for Terrence.
“Then we will fucking deal with it. Get your fucking ass in gear.”
Oh, yeah, because that was totally a guild environment Waverly was going to look forward to joining. What the fuck was this guy thinking? The poor elf. And that was totally the worst thing ever, because Waverly could forgive the guy for holding her hostage, because maybe he was just really bad at reading people, or whatever, but Terrence had made her feel bad for an elf, and that was something that you just don’t do!
And yet, she could hardly leave now, right? Her scalp itched where her ears should have been, her butt felt all weird from the additional mass from her tail, and in her core, that tea kettle feeling started building again, and it took so freaking much energy just to keep it bottled up. In a way, she was super happy that these guys were the first people to come into the dungeon because she’d get a real excuse to put them into the ground. They would get scaled-down, after all, and with a little bit of luck and a numbers advantage, the Monsters could kill them and reset their level to 5. Give them a nice 95 hours to think about their attitude, too, assuming of course that they really were max level. She was beginning to have doubts.
But somehow, Waverly felt that the elf guy didn’t deserve all of this stuff. He was the only guy in this group that noticed she felt uncomfortable and had tried to cheer her up a little. He couldn’t know that she would never in her unlife pick a healing class, but when he talked about it to cheer her up, it had felt very sincere, like he actually enjoyed it. And then when they had fallen into silence, he actually showed her a few spells that looked kind of cool, just to cheer her up more and give her something to look forward to. The spells were all bright and fluttery and warm, and reminded her of the sunlight glittering on Lake Crystal.
What the fuck was this guy doing with these assholes in the first place? No matter how this ended, Waverly would find a way to get him away from them. They were a bad influence, and Waverly had so much experience in getting people away from bad influences. Mostly because when each and every single one of her 25 siblings had hit puberty, they’d all started making very dumb decisions, and she had to break too many noses to count to save them from the consequences. So she had switched to encouraging her little brothers to not hang out with a fucking street gang in the first place, and that had helped, but still sometimes required a bit of nose-breaking.
Just like here.
If only she could drop her disguise, but of course, that was completely impossible. She would have to wait and see and be patient, and smile, and nod along to this bullshit, no matter how much it felt like the pressure would explode in her chest.
Terrence snapped his fingers in front of her face, yanking her back to the present. In a way, she appreciated it, but the way he did it was obviously totally rude. She had to stop herself from staring him down, or worse, just punching him right in the throat. Beelzebub’s Balls, why did this guy have to push her buttons so much? But of course, there was nothing she could do about it, so she smiled in that particular way that made her cheeks hurt, nodded, and said, “Yeah, what’s up?”
“You’re a bit of an airhead, aren’t you?” Terrence said, and it was all Waverly could do not to twitch. “Anyway, I said we need to go down there now, and I want you to stay at the back and yell if you see any monsters flanking us. Can you do that?”
“Actually,” Waverly tried once again, speaking slowly like to one of her youngest brothers when they expressed interest in smearing peanut butter on the TV to ‘make the picture sweeter’ “I would much rather not go in because…”
“Don’t worry!” Terrence cut her off. Then, while she was busy suppressing an annoyed groan, he put his hand on her shoulder and gently, but insistently, pushed her toward the small road that led down the slope at the edge of the pit. “You’re going to be doing just fine, I know it, and you need the XP if you ever want to amount to anything in this game. It'll be fun, you’ll see.”
Waverly said nothing because if she opened her mouth all that would come out would be a high-pitched whistling noise or a very inhuman growl. To her surprise, however, the elf spoke up on her behalf.
“Terrence, come on…Why don’t we just leave her alone and let her go her merry way? It’s not like we need her help in this lower level dungeon,” the healer said. He still hadn’t introduced himself, which was a little bit odd, but Waverly appreciated the sentiment anyhow.
“With you as our healer, we need any help we can get,” Terrence snarked. “Besides, she's obviously going to need the XP if she wants to become useful to the Guild. You know I don’t do freebies.”
There was a second of hesitation, but then the healer said, “Terrence… I don’t think that she wants to join the guild. I don’t even think she wants to go in that dungeon…”
For a split second, there was a look of utter confusion on Terrence's face, but then he scoffed. “What the fuck are you talking about? Obviously, she wants to join. Stop trying to dissuade her. Are you worried that she’s going to become a better healer than you? Are you jealous? Is that what this is about?”
“No, Terrence, you see…”
“Then there’s nothing to talk about. Let’s fucking go.”
A lot of things clicked into place for Waverly. People like Terrence were everywhere. In a way, she almost pitied him, because he was so far up in his own little dream world, that he had no clue what was happening in the real one. And sadly, he was strong enough to totally crush anyone who came even close to bursting his bubble, which meant he was stuck in there forever. But that was totally not her problem, her problem was that he was being a gigantic dick about it.
If only he wasn’t three times her level, didn’t have super well-enchanted gear, including a sword that glowed red with enchantments, and planting her fist between his eyes wouldn't carry a major fine. Then, maybe, that feeling that was building inside of her like an avalanche pressing against the security net would have somewhere to go.
Terrence's façade crumbled even more the second they stepped into the mining pits.
“Synched to level fucking 5? What kind of cheap-ass dungeon is this?”
“Are you fucking kidding me? Over 90% of my skills are locked because of the level synchronization bullshit…” the mage grumbled, dropping to her feet as the cloud that allowed her to levitate disappeared like morning mist.
“Stop bitching, you can at least still drown people or something. All I got are a few backstab skills and [Minor Dodge],” the guy with the eyepatches said. Except he wasn’t the guy with the eyepatches anymore, because he was taking them off, revealing two completely normal eyes behind them. “Can’t even wear my best gear anymore! Terrence, this better be worth it, or I’m going back to Honor Of Duty.”
“Relax, Slasher. With the amount of people we’re going to bring into this dungeon, it’s going to level up really quickly. Also remember it’s not for us, it’s for all the noobs, so think of it as a business investment,” Terrence said, unsheathing the massive sword he carried. As soon as it came free, the blade blazed brighter than before.
“I didn’t come here to build a business empire, Terrence. I came here to drown things to death and not go to jail for it,” the mage said. She had also unslung the staff from her back, but despite all of them getting ready for a fight, the humans didn’t seem like they were going to fight each other. More than anything, they all looked super annoyed, as if they had stepped into some sort of dung pile. Maybe they didn’t expect to have to put in a real effort.
The only person who didn’t say anything was the healer, who just gripped his staff a little tighter, and kept his eyes trained on the mine’s entrance.
“Congratulations, Waverly, you are now almost as strong as all of us,” Terrence said, looking at her with a smile that was half grim, half sardonic.
But that wasn’t true.
She wasn’t a player.
The dungeon core didn’t touch her level at all.
She was actually almost four times his level now.