“You’re glad to still be a cowboy?” Sarah asked, raising her eyebrows.

“Yep,” Jay confirmed. Everyone shot him suspicious looks. The new people joined in on that, too. “So, who are these other players, anyway? I’m Jay. Nice to meet you.”

Jay took the time to equip the cowboy armor as they introduced themselves. With a shower of the usual sparks, the armor equipped him.

“Maria and likewise.”

“Carlos.”

Maria was a level 21 Medic, and Carlos was a level 20 Cardinal. They both wore similar guild robe armor. Maria’s face held a welcoming smile, whereas Carlos didn’t seem thrilled to be present. Jay wondered if he was strong-armed into participating in the island.

Jay nodded to each of them in turn. “I take it we’ll be keeping the five of us and then having the other healers and Lurian join Casey and Sarah?”

“Not exactly,” Lester said. “Maria and Carlos will be joining us to replace the twins. That’s how they decided to do it, and I’m fine with it. You and Taylor Lynn both have serious firepower, and we have plenty of potions to recover Taylor Lynn’s mp. The two healers will help sustain our team, whereas Jenny can do the most widespread healing. We’ll be good.”

The plan made sense to Jay. Jenny and Sarah were making fast friends, anyway. Enough so that Taylor Lynn seemed to be getting a little jealous. He figured she was feeling slightly forgotten, but it would also give him more chance to reconnect with her.

“Makes sense to me,” Jay agreed, although the other party was already approaching the arena.

“Sorry, bud,” Jenny said, playfully punching him in the shoulder. “Maybe next time.”

She ran smiling after the rest of her arena party. Jay watched her go, and she caught up with Sarah, immediately engaging in an animated conversation. The group talked and laughed like old friends as they approached the arena.

The arena was built like a coliseum but made of living trees threaded together. Fortunately, developers didn’t need to worry about manually growing the trees in such an intricate pattern. Still, the artwork would have been challenging. The Burlen trees created a particularly vibrant scene in the middle of the thriving trade city. The coliseum certainly wasn’t trying to avoid attention.

“We better get moving, too,” Lester pointed out. The party made their way to assemble in one of the challenge rooms. As they entered, the trees blotted out much of the natural light from the sun. The living trees were soaking it all up. Instead, there were glowing orange orbs of light, which created a strange hue to the environment as the party walked through.

As the party searched for a room to challenge the arena, Jay took care of some other required maintenance. He had ten statistic points and quickly dumped them into his Perception. He was very curious to see if hitting the 50 Perception threshold would change anything about his senses. It also contributed to his damage with crossbows, which was nice.

Next, he experimented with a little cheat he had discovered during his solo training. Mentally dragging things in his inventory, he loaded one clip with ice traps and one with swampy traps. The other two clips were loaded with a single necrotic bolt and four regular bolts. Loading inside his inventory was much faster than manually refilling the clips.

Jay and his party gathered in one of the challenge rooms, which seemed to be nestled inside the root system of one of the Burlen trees. He hadn’t ever seen the underside of the Burlen trees before. The root system was decorated with small white crystals. They were sparkling from his Herbalism skill, throwing off green sparks to let him know the crystals were not dangerous to harvest.

System Message: Burlen Crystals. These crystals grow at the bottom of Burlen trees and are particularly useful in crafting potions to temporarily raise statistics. The crystal thrums with barely contained power.

Jay felt a little weird about stealing the crystals since they were inside a safe arena zone. He thought someone might complain about it. But he tried to grab one anyway.

As his fingers peeled the first one away from the root system, he waited for something terrible to happen. He waited for the tree to instantly wither and die. He waited for someone to come into the room and scream, accusing him of thievery. When nothing happened, he gathered another four crystals. He stopped after collecting five total for two reasons.

The first reason was that Jay didn’t want to push his luck. The more crystals he took, the more likely something would go wrong. The other reason was that the Turmoil Arena was starting. The scene around Jay blurred in a wavering blast of teleportation magic.

The party appeared in the center of an outdoor area, nestled inside the ring of living trees. The other party wasn’t present, only Jay’s own. He estimated the room was three or four hundred feet in diameter, leaving plenty of space. Looking up, he could see NPCs around the arena, adding ambiance to the fights. It created a realistic coliseum feel, complete with a roaring crowd. A loud message rang as if playing over speakers. The narrator’s voice was assertive and confident.

Welcome to Turmoil Arena. Challengers here will be inundated with increasingly difficult combat encounters until they are overwhelmed. As this is meant for sport, Turmoil Arena is a safe environment. Our mages stand by to ensure that your death does not result in losing the experience you are fighting so hard to win here.

The first round involves dealing with some specially prepared elementals. Naturally, the particular type of elemental is randomized to prevent players from coming in ready to breeze through the early rounds. Easy fights are no fun. Prepare for Turmoil!

As the announcement ended, a horde of creatures materialized in the arena. Each monster was about three feet tall and composed of lava that cycled throughout its body. As lava fell to the bottom, it was pulled back up to the top. The strange body mechanics created the sense of a thin, tall slime made of coursing lava.

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Volcanic, Level: 22. Health: 200/200.

There were at least a hundred such creatures around the arena. Jay watched in fear, expecting the whole horde to descend on them at once. Luckily, that didn’t seem to be how the coliseum rounds operated. Ten smoldering creatures fell on the party, and Lester ran to meet them. Several attacks laid into him straight away, but he absorbed the damage effectively. Jay opened combat by inspecting the creature with Analyze.

System Message: Analyze successful. The origin of Volcanics is unknown; however, some classes can summon such servants. Scholars have discovered that the systems maintaining their lava are quite sensitive. As such, they remain highly vulnerable to Temperature and Ice magics.

“Focus on ice attacks!” Jay exclaimed as he quickly skimmed through the system message.

“Sort of figured that one myself,” Taylor Lynn said, falling immediately back into mustering her icicle spells.

Lester was holding quite well against the monsters since both healers could provide quick maintenance on his health. Their low output heals were also relatively low mp cost, so neither was burning through energy. Jay had extra potions, but seeing them holding up well so far was a pleasant surprise.

Jay loaded one of his necrotic-regular mixed clips. He left Taylor Lynn and the healers behind and looked for enemies breaking through Lester’s wall. Lester’s class wasn’t well-suited for keeping the attention of so many monsters, even though he absorbed damage well.

Jay found one breaking its way around the others and dashed to meet it in combat. His first strike was to blast one of the creatures inside the throng near Lester with his necrotic bolt.

He could tell he was much faster than the creature escaping Lester, so he leaped close to it, blasting the monster with a point-blank shot. The creature fractured into shards of hardened lava, landing all over the ground.

The attack was super devastating, but Jay was suffering for it. He felt burning pain as the tiny shards of molten lava charred parts of his skin. It was utterly unpleasant, immediately causing him to curse the concept of full immersion again. And just like nothing, in a second, the pain passed.

A wave of healing from Carlos brought him to full health and erased all the pain. Taylor Lynn was still blasting icicles, which brought individual volcanics down. Maria’s focus was on keeping Lester up. Watching her showed Jay that Lester was taking more damage than he thought. He didn’t take quite as much damage as Jay, but Lester took a small spike of damage from the hardened lava shrapnel every time an enemy died.

Jay ran through the front line as fast as possible, popping three more with point-blank shots. When he emptied his first clip, the initial wave of volcanics was absolutely destroyed. Five of them were chalked up to his own handiwork, but the other five lay completely destroyed in piles of shrapnel marred by ice.

“That wasn’t so bad,” Lester said, drinking a health potion so the healers could conserve some of their mp. “Think we can do that nine more times?”

“Should be easy,” Taylor Lynn agreed with a grin. She reveled in the fighting as she downed a mp potion to prepare for the next wave.

Carlos and Maria were much more mp-efficient than Jenny, so they didn’t need to drink potions.

“This is pretty fun,” Maria said but fell silent as the second wave of ten volcanics descended on the group.

The party fought similarly well against wave two, which made it easy to take down the second wave. Jay focused on blasting the enemies at point-blank range after he started the necrotic health drain effect on one. Lester tried to juggle the attention of ten enemies to marginal effect. Taylor Lynn blasted enemies with her icicle spell while Maria and Carlos kept everyone alive.

There was a brief reprieve before wave three, so Jay took the time to drink one of his health potions. He quickly turned his attention to repeater clips. Dragging his bolts around in his inventory, he tried to reload the two empty clips as they were before: one necrotic, four regular.

System Message: You cannot take this action. Quick reloading is not available during combat.

Unfortunately, that changed the whole dynamic of the fight. Jay was forced to use his shortsword in combat, but Purple Haze could make quick work of the volcanics with two or three attacks, depending on if he could fit a Wild Strike attack in. On the other hand, it was slower and resulted in Jay taking more damage. He was taking burning damage for every kill at close range.

Taylor Lynn’s icicles became significantly more critical, so Jay passed her ten of his mp potions during the break after wave three. She accepted them gratefully. Hoping it would help him notice something, Jay drank one of his Novice Perception potions. It helped him see things in more detail, but he didn’t detect any further weaknesses in the volcanics the party could exploit.

The waves of fighting quickly turned into a grind. The shrapnel of the strange volcanic creatures kept the healers working. Maria and Carlos needed to start drinking mp potions between waves. Still, they seemed otherwise fully capable of keeping up with the damage. Taylor Lynn’s icicles did the lion’s share of the work as she burned through mp potions to keep up her damage output.

Jay just did the best he could. Aside from attacking with his shortsword, there wasn’t much for him to do. He quickly learned the volcanics were immune to being blinded, even though his entry hadn’t explained that. Activating his more powerful Wild Strike whenever he could, Jay lunged at any volcanics that broke from the horde.

Taylor Lynn’s icicles rained like mad, keeping the party aloft and surviving the chaos round after round. She tried her lightning spell during the fourth wave but discovered it wasn’t nearly as effective as blasting the monsters in the face with ice.

Everything was still relatively smooth until the middle of the sixth wave. The seventh group of enemies attacked before the sixth group was defeated. One of them slipped past Jay, even as he activated all the abilities in his arsenal to thin the herd of combined waves.

A volcanic that broke through slogged its way over toward Taylor Lynn. Jay watched in horror, expecting the creature to take her out or at least deal heavy damage. Instead, a curtain of rock appeared floating in thin air, blocking the lava whip attack from the volcanic. The earthen shield completely absorbed the impact. As the protection disappeared, Taylor Lynn blasted the volcanic with ice, shattering its face.

“What?” Taylor Lynn said quickly as Jay shot her an impressed look. “A girl has to have a few tricks up her sleeve.”

Now that the volcanic waves were coming at ever-increasing rates, Jay started using his ice trap bolts to create space whenever a new wave approached. Being ready for this, the ice traps gave the party the breathing room they needed to maintain a steady state of fighting.

The ice traps had an additional unintentional positive consequence. The ice seemed to affect the internal temperature of the volcanics, causing each wave that passed through a trap to have taken damage before the fighting started. Jay was highly impressed with this and wondered what additional synergistic effects might occur with other trap and enemy combinations.

The party trudged through the final waves using the ice traps to funnel and weaken the volcanic creatures. The hundredth and last volcanic creature fell with a well-placed icicle from Taylor Lynn.

The party had still not received any experience, but some loot was distributed at the defeat of the tenth wave. Jay received 20 Volcanic Remnants, described by the game as a Blacksmithing crafting item.

“This was not so bad,” Carlos said at the end of the round. “I’m glad you asked me here, even if it will force me to go to this weird, buggy island.”

After the final kill, Jay activated his Catalog ability to add the volcanics into his Bestiary. While he was watching the web of energy analyzing the creature, an ominous message appeared on his screen.

System Message: The first boss approaches. Prepare for Turmoil!

“Lester, why do you do this to me?” Carlos asked rhetorically. “Why are you the way you are?”