Looking out onto the flat wasteland, the ground dry and cracked, Vincent watched the oncoming enemy army. They had thousands of troops. He had his wife, Janice and his best friend, Hammy, his hiker party.

The destruction started the first meteor in Janice’s meteor storm hit the army. Vincent watched his wife as she skated across the ice that she was creating with her own hands up into the air, gaining elevation by creating the ice at an angle that she was skating up. Looking down at the enemy army of Mithrils, large bulky insectoids, she continued to conjure her destruction.

Shards of ice shaved the skin of the insectoid faces off. Heavy meteors continued to drop in explosions every few seconds in their backline and she created a beam of purple death in the middle of their formation, which spiraled out as it rotated clockwise, cutting their bodies cleanly in half. As some of the enemies shot at her with bows and arrows she skated away and back around down to the ground, she felt a fiery shell around her. Vincent’s shield of fire was always there to protect her from any danger. She felt a couple of arrows poke the fiery shield around her and disintegrate in the heat.

Hammy jumped into the fray, cutting through the bug people like butter with his blades of shadows. He had been telling Vincent about how he really enjoyed his shadow barbarian ascendancy that he had earned a couple of months back, adding new depth to his combat skills with his increased agility and death magic mixed in with his powerful attacks. He used part of his magic reserves to propel himself over the top of their shield guards at the front of the formation, dropping down into their healers that were supposed to be protected in the middle of the formation, he spun rapidly, creating a whirlpool of black shadows that consumed most of the formation, he jumped out of his pool of destruction into the next formation that were ten strides away.

Vincent sat back throwing some shock heals into Hammy as a few blows connected into his flesh, as much as Vincent had encouraged him to acquire some better armour, he said he had trust in Vincent’s shields and healing spells and would rather keep the flexibility of loose but thin armour. Some quicker, flying assassins flew over the top of his team mates and went for his throat, three of them at once. He swerve dodged the one coming from his left side and extended his arm quickly to shield bash the two coming on his right side. They sat their, stunned and floating in the air, unable to move for several moments as Vincent prepared his blazing hot razor cut, a line of glowing red hot force decapitated the two smaller but agile insectoids. As much as Vincent liked to support his team, he had picked up a few tricks to look after himself in the meantime.

They continued to slaughter hundreds of the army without too much trouble, Vincent still feeling energetic and hadn’t depleted much of his reserves. All events on this planet so far had led to this big fight, they had arrived to find the native inhabitants of the planet enslaved by the insect like race of invaders. Their mission from the hiker menu was to liberate the native people and push out the invaders. It had taken them a lot of probing but as they fought, the people had formed their own army in retaliation to the invaders and were fighting their own battle. These three were here to take on the head army that would have otherwise overwhelmed those they were trying to help.

Vincent’s hope began to rise as he watched the enemy army get whittled away, another successful planet on their hiker journey. He watched, throwing the occasional shield onto his allies and protecting himself from the odd flanking attack when another spacecraft arrived above them, flying out of the ship came thousands more troops. They had called for backup and received it. This was becoming too much, he knew Janice couldn’t maintain multiple high level spells like that forever. She had already exerted herself heavily with multiple meteor storms and all of her ice track travelling. She come skating back towards Vincent as Hammy also came back, twirling in his shadowy apparition form and popping out of it, landing on his feet next to them.

“What do we do about this? This is too much, even for us.” Janice said to him, looking at him with a stare of determination.

“I can’t keep spinning and winning through them for much longer” Hammy added with a grin, he always enjoyed himself in large scale fights like this.

“Well, we are close to levelling up.” He said, flicking his wrist, they had customised their hiker menus so much since the early days of their journey, they were pretty happy with their set ups at this point. He flicked through his status menu to find he only needed 2000 more experience to hit level eighteen.

“We keep killing and I’ll be able to unlock my first mega ability, my cleric ascendancy of Bastion gets it earlier than you two, I was keeping it a surprise.”

“What? Mine isn’t until level twenty.” Hammy was outraged to hear Vincent was going to get a mega ability before him.

“I thought we all got it at twenty.” Janice said, she tried to feign surprise. Vincent had already told her all about it but they didn’t want Hammy to feel excluded like he usually did.

“Like you didn’t know” He said, causing Janice to look down at her feet.

A blade cut through Hammy’s shoulder blade as a supersonic speed Mithril went flying past.

He yelled out in agony “These ones are so much faster. This is really bad.”

Janice looked at Vincent with fear on her face, something he had not seen in more than a few planets on their journey now.

“2000 experience and we are good, do that for me, my love.” He still felt blessed every day to have been chosen to be a hiker with his own wife, he didn’t know of anyone else from his home planet that could placed with anyone they even knew, let alone their own spouse.

Vincent looked up as she jetted up into the air rapidly with icy blasts used as propulsion, shooting out of her hands. Throwing her all into it, she activated her self buffing abilities, she could only use this once per fight generally, her eyes began shining like beacons with bright golden light as a powerful, thick green aura surrounded her. It crackled with green lightning. She created an ice platform for herself to stand on as she held out both her hands and started blasting, huge waves of green lightning energy made enemies start falling out of the sky, as they exited their ship and come flying down to join the army they got zapped.

Most of the experience was tied to their final objective of liberation but he was at least getting trickle amounts of experience with each one that died. He was so proud of his elementalist ascended wizard wife as she lay out more destruction than Hammy or himself could dream of. Hammy continued to carve away best he could in their frontlines, managing to stop them from approaching Vincent or flying up to Janice.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Vincent continued to support as he kept close track of his experience, he knew what he had in store could do the job, or at least, had a chance to push them over the line, but he had to get that level and skill point first. The flying army began to focus in on Janice as her threat level became more and more obvious, the ones that got close were trapped in temporal prisons, frozen in time by Janice’s smart move into the time side of her skill tree for a few points. Vincent helped blast away a few as well as he kept shields and healing up on her. He was excited for the skill point after his mega ability where he could transfer his buffs and enhancements onto his wife as well to further her power.

They were just barely keeping on track as his experience tracker got closer and closer to level eighteen, it had to happen soon, he could sense that his wife’s energy levels were depleting and that her magic would soon run dry, he knew her too well.

His menu popped out suddenly

Target: Pluk

Class: Assassin

Level: 23

Floating with the airborne army of insectoids, stood in contrast a man, another Hiker, he was obviously with them and seemed to be commanding many of them around. He was higher level, but his class wasn’t even showing an ascendancy yet. They could put up a fight, but this on top of the army was too much, he needed that level right now.

Vincent buffed himself up with everything he had, his Bastion Of Justice ability greatly increased his power for a very brief period of time, manipulating his fiery shields into explosive bursts of force to climb up to the icy platform Janice had created. Standing behind his wife he threw out holy blasts of magic to help wipe out the army, including some thrown at this enemy hiker. Most other hikers they ran into were actually friendly and cooperative, not that they ran into them often, but a couple in recent times had been hostile. He tried to throw some powerful bursts at the enemy hiker but he easily evaded, swerving through the air with ease, what made assassins able to fly like that?

With all his might, he threw out another hot razor cut of force, a thick line of sharp, glowing red hot force appeared through the air and flew through the air towards the army. This would take out enough of them for his level up, he was less than a hundred experience away now. Blinking into existence was some kind of receptacle, it looked like a black void of nothing, his line of red hot energy got tangled and wrapped itself into the receptacle, almost pulled by some strong gravitational force. Janice turned to blast some troops that had gotten close to them while Vincent was distracted by the strange object that had just eaten his ability.

A moment passed and his own spell come flying back at them at ten times the speed, tangled up in a ball at this point. He ducked as an instant reaction to what he saw coming, trying to pull Janice down with him, she remained standing and he stopped breathing as he heard her head thunk onto the icy platform high up in the air. He couldn’t dare to look but he knew what happened. He sat, frozen, in shock. The ball of hot force continued past them and into the ground near a formation of soliders. It wiped them all out in an instant.

You have reached level eighteen! (30/45000 experience)

The enem hiker, Pluk come floating closer to the platform inspecting the damage and headless corpse that lay there. He blipped out of existence. Vincent roared in passion as he activated his mega ability. Black Hole Pulse flew out from himself as the central location, pulsating outwards in a large radius he felt a strange sensation as his body felt impossibly heavy and dense. He watched as the black line extended far out, past the new spaceship, past the entire wasteland battlefield, it then come flying back in at an accelerated pace, sucking in everything around him. He blacked out.

…

“So that’s what happened to us, that was the last planet we were on before we got here on Trystoff. I found him laying there, motionless, silent. The first thing he did was vomit, I had no idea what had happened, once the other Hiker showed up and then that black hole ability went out I just got away. I figured something really bad had happened when there was no Janice to be seen and he just sobbed uncontrollably. Hardest thing I’ve ever had to watch, in my previous life on our home planet and in my entire hiker journey.” Hammy explained the events that led to the passing of Janice and some of the aftermath to Adam as they cleaned out his farm’s stables.

“That’s a lot to take in, wow. I guess I can understand why he doesn’t want to fight anymore.” Adam was both horrified at the graphic detail Hammy went into but couldn’t help be excited at hearing more about how they fought together, they sounded amazing as a team. Adam hoped they could get to that level. But it seemed like even their first planet the ship assigned to them was going up against insurmountable odds.

“Aye, fighting led him to deep trauma, he used to enjoy it but I don’t see him being able to go back, it would bring back those memories vividly. I was surprised he even continued using any of his abilities, I suppose it made him feel better to help people.”

“One way to keep living, I can’t imagine something like that.” Adam stared into space, contemplating what he had just been told.

“Stables aren’t clean yet. Let’s keep going.” Adam shook himself out of his deep thought and continued helping Hammy, this had to be worth it, he couldn’t get enough of this, it was beyond what he had dreamed of when the Refined first came to Earth.

“So, what happens when you solve an issue, and go to another planet, the ship comes and gets you, can you choose to stay or go?”

“Not sure on the latter part, the ship shows up as nearby as possible, sometimes as a large inconvenience as it draws a lot of attention. We always went, until we got here. I suppose you could just never board it.”

“So the menu just says, good job, you finished the quests and saved the day?”

“Something like that, nothing special but you’ll know it when it’s all done and happens, no doubt about that.”

They continued throughout the day, performing many odd jobs around the farm, Adam occasionally bumped into Matilda and Brian and they cleaned the place up pretty well. Apparently Hammy grew crops here, not that they saw any around or any activity in the soil.

Later on in the night they were sitting around eating some type of stew that Hammy had cooked for them, it was definitely some vegetable he had never tasted before that had an odd purple colour throughout the stew but in the end it tasted like most root vegetables do. It was okay, got the hunger job done.

“So, what are you guys going to do now?” Hammy asked all three of them.

They all agreed that they had to get back into the city and get back to Vincent, it was the only option they could really think of.

“We will sort out a full plan tomorrow, I don’t fight anymore either but I’m willing to lend a helping hand to get you guys back into the city. Doesn’t sound like it will be easy. I can also help you guys get another level or two under your belt, sounds like it has been an uphill battle so far, might work out to be a smart investment of time to get a couple of abilities and passive perks.”

They nodded, agreeing that it sounded good and if he knew a good way to safely get experience they would try it out. Adam wanted to do nothing but level up more and more. He felt flashes of guilt about how he had judged Vincent after hearing that full story from Hammy.

Later that night, Matilda and Brian went to bed a little early while Hammy told Adam some more stories of their past adventures.

A couple hours later Adam went to enter the spare room they were staying in and could hear cries from Matilda through the door.