“I could so use a new bow!” Drakov dreamed out loud, starry-eyed as they went walking through the forest. “Or a nice set of leather gear. I haven’t been able to upgrade my gear so long...”

“Let’s not count our chickens before they hatch,” Star chided. “We don’t even know if we are going to be able to do this dungeon.”

“What chickens? There are chickens?” Tea went, looking around. “Where?”

Bahena patted him on the head. “It’s a human saying,” she said, explaining the meaning to the all-too-easily embarrassed garule man.

“Even if we can do a part of the dungeon, we need to consider that the bosses will only get stronger as we go on,” Guin frowned. “Chances are we won’t be able to get all the way to the end on the first try.”

The Catacombs was not a real dungeon. They called it a dungeon because it was pretty close to an actual, dictionary-defined sort of dungeon, and, being a level above Moarbits and Beedants and the like, it was best to have a proper group with you when you went down into it.

It had powerful monsters, and occasional rare spawns and elite areas, but it didn’t have boss-type monsters. On one hand, this meant it was easy to run away from mobs that were too much for the group to handle. On the other hand, loot was relatively average, and gear drops were few and far between. Only the higher-tier mobs had a chance of dropping gear, and even then, most of it was junk.

Drakov scowled. “Hey, as long as we don’t die, it should be a great experience even if we have to run through it a few times.”

“I’d really rather not do that,” Star said. “But I do like treasure.”

“We’ll be able to find out more at the front of the dungeon, I’m sure,” Guin said. “Even if the captain tells us nothing, there's bound to be people gathered outside we can get some info out of.”

“I wonder if it will be as crowded as the Cats usually are...” Tea said.

Bahena hmmed before noting, “If the crowd at the board is anything to go by, my guess it will be far more crowded than the Catacombs. Most people were looking for groups; most small groups were looking for either a healer or a tank.”

Drakov nodded. “That makes sense.”

“Why does that make sense?” Star asked. “Isn’t a knight a tank? There are tons of them running around.”

But the young man shook his head. “They can also DPS,” he told her. “Kind of the reverse of what Bahena does; she’s a DPS class who can, at this point, pass as a tank. A lot of people don’t like playing tank or healing roles because they are usually the first ones blamed when something goes wrong. Which is usually stupid because without them DPSers are screwed because they can neither take a lot of damage nor heal any damage they have taken. A group of support players can hold things together for a while, but they generally don’t have enough DPS to sustain progress.”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

“That’s a benefit of being with a group of actual friends,” Tea said. “You don’t get yelled at as much or even dropped from a group in the middle of a bad place.”

“Speaking from experience?” Star mused.

“I think most anyone who plays a healer or tank role has been in that kind of position at some point,” Guin said with a shrug. “Playing a healer in older games, there were groups I’d heal through impossible situations. There were also ones that would wipe even in the most basic of dungeons. There are factors aside from sheer skill and situation. Sometimes, your fingers trip on the keyboard, the internet is shit, or the timing is off. Sometimes the enemy gets the better of you. Sometimes you just... screw up.”

Starshine snorted. “Gamers are very serious creatures.”

“We are. Very serious about what it is we do,” Drakov agreed and puffed up his chest. “Mock us if you will, you non-gamer, but we stand proud!”

Tea and Guin laughed with him as BronzePaw and Star just shook their heads.

“It’s all fun and games until the combat is real,” BronzePaw said, crossing her arms. “Maybe not so much in your other games, but TheirWorld is basically a combat simulator. You shouldn’t be so flippant about it.”

“As I have no intention of ever going to war, I will be damned if anything in this game is going to ever make me feel guilty about mocking it,” Star waved.

“You’re telling me,” Drakov said under his breath, which earned him a glare, but before the conversation started to spiral into yet another argument, the new encampment appeared before them.

To say there were a lot of people would have been an understatement.

“What on Earth,” Star said, landing gracefully on the ground. Her witch’s attire earned her almost as many glance’s as Guin’s ears and fluffy tail, but she seemed able to ignore them a whole lot better than Guin was.

Drakov, free of the extra attention, tsked at her. “We aren’t on Earth; here or in reality—and you aren’t even from Earth, anyway.”

“I can’t pick up the sayings of my human friends?” she snipped back and stuck out her tongue at him.

“W-Why are there so many people?” Tea asked, grabbing hold of Guin’s arms from behind and putting her in front of him to use her as a shield.

“And of all people, you choose Guin to use as a shield?” BronzePaw mused, raising a brow as she took a place on Guin’s right. “Not a great tactical decision.”

“Not everything is about tactics,” he told the female with indignation. He put his chin on Guin’s head as if he were trying to be Liorax. “It’s about comfort.”

BronzePaw looked both amazed and confused, but Guin reached over and patted the hand that was on her arm.

“You and me both,” she reassured him in a low voice. It was an impressive number of people. If this had been the real world, ‘Dassah’ was certain to have had a heart attack. Luckily, she was Guin, and for Guin it was easy to just repeat: “You and me both...”

Unlike the other encampments, this one had no walls. Only two tents were set up inside of the small clearing. A flood of players filled the area, so much that Guin couldn’t tell if there were any soldiers in the area at all, but she assumed that Captain Othren had to be somewhere in it all. But there was something that everyone could see if they knew what they were looking at.

“Interesting tree,” Star pointed to it: a very tall, wide, dead-looking tree in the middle of the area. To Guin, it was a very familiar-looking tree.

BronzePaw shrugged. “What’s so interesting about it?”

Tea and Bahena commented on the general eeriness they felt looking at it or the ethereal beauty of what looked like Spanish moss hanging from its leafless branches in large chunks. Drakov pointed out that the trunk was so covered in a waterfall of dead vines that one could hardly see the trunk. Those sections that weren’t covered by the stems of the vines or Spanish moss oozed black goo that glistened with an unnerving sense of life—though only she and Drakov could have seen that part.

But Guin, she gaped at it as it jerked on the strings of her memory.

It was the Tree of Dreams.