Nate blocked a blow from a giant bird as its razor beak snapped for his throat. Julia's water bolt crashed through the beast's chest, exploding it into a spray of blood and feathers. Another fight, one of countless battles as they spent days scaling the mountain under the weight of endless hardship.

  Their goal was to pick their pace up to a respectable speed—Frustratingly that didn’t happen. Climbing the mountain was harsh, the steeper it became. Like before, the density of wildlife only increased. Monsters ate up a significant portion of time—having to cut through waves of birds was understandably taxing.

  With combat came wounds. Sarah received a nasty tear to her arm; Nick was nearly tossed off a cliff, and Julia got knocked unconscious. Many small scrapes and dangerous moments. That, without one factor, would have led to someone’s death.

  That factor was their new living shield wall: Nate, the soldier, threw himself between them and anything and everything with the wicked desire to kill them. And thanks to his efforts, more than a few killing blows were redirected and absorbed.

  Where non-lethal blows landed, Endurance picked up the slack.

  But Nate’s forge let him generally restore such injuries with little wear after an hour or two. Absent a healer in their group, being able to take blows that would’ve killed them all before and keep walking and getting up was proving invaluable.

  Healing was, and continued to be, a broken ability. And at the first opportunity, Colt wanted to get himself some of that good regenerative stuff. Alas, until he had it, he had to suffer.

  The thick vegetation of the forest floor grew more diverse as they climbed, morphing from the dark black crops that drank in every ounce of light they got to more varied and natural-looking greens. Their livery and the increased number of animals brought an odd hallucinatory property; if Colt closed his eyes long enough or walked far enough, it was easy to forget they were in a dungeon, entirely"

  Easy to forget they probably weren’t even on earth.

  Colt almost wished that the eggheads of before were holed up somewhere in New Nashville, experimenting and trying to draw conclusions about what happened as he stepped through the thick grass of plants. It was almost like what he was used to—or completely the same as what existed before—but it only left him with questions.

  Someone needed to pay them to figure them out.

  New Nashville was a long way away from that; with such a fledgling community, they were getting their feet under them and trying to stand back up. In a way, he thought of the growing little town as a new cook, overwhelmed by a crazy dinner service. They’d walked into a kitchen, this new world, and then suddenly they received an order. Then, another order. Then five more.

  Like a new cook, they didn’t know what to do, didn’t know where to go—and right now, we’re just figuring out how to even chop a salad and get the easiest ticket out of the wall before a customer burst in to scream at them.

  But it was filled with good people. The soul of New Nashville was already there, alive with love and music, and walking up this mountain in the middle of a dungeon, he found he had already missed the place.

  Was it too much to ask for a home in this apocalypse?

  They ran across more monsters. And more monsters died. The notifications kept coming, spurring them forward:

  ———

  You have leveled up!

  You have leveled up!

  You have 6 Stat points to spend. You have gained 2 points of Dexterity and 2 points of Soul.

  ———

  He spent the points quickly, pushing deeper into dexterity. It was rapidly approaching 100, and given that the system hadn’t blessed him to receive an Edict that stitched his body back together, his primary defense strategy still boiled down to the same principle: don’t get hit.

  It was effective.

  What he didn’t do, though, was be too present in combat. Despite his level was around that of the enemies they were facing, and his Edict and raw firepower could take out most things in a hit or two—he held back, letting his friends get in practice and level themselves.

  The best they could tell gathered around campfires and in their theory crafting, was that your experience from a slain enemy was proportional to how much of an effect you had in taking down that particular enemy. Given everyone else lagged behind him, Colt played a more defensive role in combat. Getting involved to save a life, or to take out the couple of enemies that would otherwise overwhelm the rest of his group.

  After two days of travel and practice on such stronger enemies, they closed the gap and hit a point where tackling these beasts was coming down to a well-worn dance for them.

  Nick would start the fights by peppering with arrows—softening an enemy up, distracting them, or sometimes outright taking down one or two. Julia sat around mid-range and blasted stuff with water, doing damage and ripping through stuff with concentrated streams. Where Nick lacked direct firepower, Julia didn’t, complementing him in taking down stronger foes he weakened.

  Nate ran into the front line while the other two went to work, blocking them from getting to their mage or healer while taking hits and dishing out his own. Sarah weaved in behind him, hitting and disabling, and with that new item of hers, it let her get in a type of disabling effect when she landed a punch. The way their skin would bubble and blister when she connected was downright gross.

  Colt flexed around the battlefield, his high dexterity making it an ease to maneuver, and often, if he sighted a monster down as his, it was as good as dead with a cut as a death sentence before they noticed him. A rogue in plain sight.

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  It was odd to him.

  Julia kept calling him a rogue, and sure, he used a knife. Sure, his dexterity was high.

  Sure, his ability to cause damage to a single target was also incredible—

  Damn, maybe Julia had a point.

  But he didn’t want to be a rogue. It implied that he stole, that he was on the wrong side of the law and looked after himself and only himself—that was the path his mother had taken.

  That path led nowhere he would follow. He’d come close to it in the first dungeon.

  It was not the person he wanted to be.

  So Colt wouldn’t think of himself as a rogue. And when he used to play games as a kid, he didn’t go for that type of class, finding magic much more interesting. Every time he leveled, he felt a temptation to put a point into intelligence, but when talking with Nick and Julia about it, intelligence didn’t make you smarter.

  It helped you understand complex equations and memory and to work with more metaphysical problems than one might anticipate, rather than raw processing power. Two things that contributed more to wielding magic then anything else.

  So he resisted the urge, knowing that now he was too invested in the direction he was heading to turn around and get sidetracked.

  He wasn’t a rogue. But he didn’t know exactly what he was.

  Taking on too many side missions or spending too much of your precious time and resources on skills that didn’t go with your strengths was a quick pitfall to stagnation. Right now was a time for drastic growth, so he’d embrace… His strengths, and not put a title on it.

  Having teammates that invested in other directions is what made them strong.

  Together, they would make it through this dungeon. All of them. His new growing family.

  After two days of further climbing through the mountain, the atmosphere changed; the air got thinner, the trees more rare, and just a fraction of the forest below. From this position on the mountain, the vegetation faded away, transforming into an empty, vast track of dark stone. Obsidian, maybe? Colt wasn’t a geologist, nor was anyone else here. So, he’d call it obsidian.

  Where the forest grew scarce, so did the monsters that populated it. Now, free of the blanket of green, they could see the vast stretch of trees that made the dungeon; their magnificent grace and trunks thick and all-powerful—a canopy and sea of trees that trailed until they reached a black endless abyss surrounding this place in a perfect circle. If they looked upward, the way was clear enough now to see the top of the mountain. Another day away.

  The path forward was a pure stretch of endless black rock.

  At night, the sky took his and the rest of his group's breath.

  Once more, like that night he’d scaled the tree, they could see the stars embraced the tip of the mountain, a river of celestial might making a pathway to the tip of the jagged black rock. They weaved in patterns on grace, their celestial beauty radiant in its full glory. An almost endless river of small constellations wrapping around and twisting in the eternal darkness of the night.

  Compared to the fireflies Colt saw days before, this might as well have been a difference between heaven and earth.

  It was difficult to tear your eyes away from the tapestry above and find sleep that night. The only way Colt managed was from his exposure before, knowing that the next day, they would see what awaited them at the place where the earth met heaven.

  What manner of monster would they encounter up there? What sort of Boss could make its home among such an awe-inspiring sight?

  The next day the trip up the mountain was one of more practical difficulty than any true danger. Scaling the rocks was a conquest of will—they had to be careful, too, as a wrong step wound sent down a cascade of black stones that might injure and maim any one of them.

  The air was also thinner up here, but not enough to cause problems, most likely because human limitations could no longer consider all of their bodies.

  Enough to notice that catching your breath took one or two more puffs.

  Onward, they scaled.

  The sun traversed the sky in its chariot, streaking past as they moved as one, falling into silence as they neared closer and closer to their peak. A promise that soon they would face their last challenge and be brought once more back to their world, or what was left of it.

  For Colt, as he paused during their breaks and saw the vast greenery and trees of the island, he felt a sense of accomplishment. Seeing how far they climbed from where they started was a tangible and real marker of their progress. Inspecting his friends and seeing their levels near his was another great representation of their group’s growing strength—enough together that they represented strength and had a weight to their power.

  From Nate’s growing iron will to march forward and the way such a soldier's determination carried to the rest—to Sarah meditating every night, still reaching after her Edict alongside Nick, who tried to help guide her.

  Even to Julia, who started to refer to the rest of them no longer as NPCs but rather as ‘companions.’ Which, if Colt remembered right, meant that they’d just moved a step up in her judgment of their place in her perceived digital reality. It was a gradual thing, happening slowly over the coming days.

  Sarah was the first who got the ‘companion treatment’ when she handed Julia a warm mug of tea to start the day; Julia referred to her as ‘her favorite one’ due to her attitude. Then went to sipping her mug without elaboration, until later she said she was a ‘useful companion’ when Sarah helped her up a particularly troublesome wall.

  A warm sense of wholeness settled in his chest as they worked through the day.

  They would be enough to cling together and pull through this apocalypse as far more than they started.

  The sun sank in the sky, and the tip was only a mile or two more. Stars began to light up one by one, cascading downward in a veritable pathway to the destination in front of them. This close, their brilliant luminance was hard to take in; they burned the retina as if his body was too stunned to grasp such brilliance completely.

  Colt kept his eyes on his feet, the obsidian beneath their feet gleamed like frozen midnight, each step echoing with a crystalline ring. Wind whipped harder here where the trees thinned, carrying an alien chill that spoke of the void beyond their tiny island of reality.

  He felt an intense weave of Edicts… Something on par with his Movement, hanging there, just beyond reach.

  The stars weren't just lights now - they were physical things, burning motes that seared the eyes and pulled at something deep in Colt's soul. He kept his gaze down, focused on the treacherous footing, but he could feel them. Feel the weave of Edicts as tangible as silk threads brushing his skin...

  An hour later, they reached the peak of the mountain; it was as if someone chopped the tip of it off at the very peak, leveling the tip into one smooth black rock floor; at least a football stadium width across. Miniature stars hung around it in a celestial curtain, shifting as the five of them arrived; illuminating the space with just as much light as the sun itself.

  In the middle of the smooth black floor was a massive man with golden hair, a giant about thrice the size of them; on his shoulder rested a hammer that could take down a building with a single swing. He rested casually on a black throne made of the same obsidian rock as the rest of the mountain.

  Around that throne, though, the vast track of pure darkness was broken with the stark white bones of skeletons. Countless skeletons. A sea of corpses, some the size of the monsters below—others the size of humans.

  “So my challengers have at last arrived. To sail among the stars, you must show might worthy of a warrior. So, I wonder, shall you perish like those that have come before?” he spoke,