Veyra had been right. Dungeon hunting was seriously fun.

  Or, well, it wasn’t really the dungeon hunting that was fun. Every monster here was level 350 at minimum, and the rooms only grew more cluttered monsters as we descended. Fighting monsters was stressful and insanely difficult.

  Really, the fun came from our teamwork. The dungeon itself was a massive hurdle, but beating that hurdle together was the most fun I’d had in years.

  The next room in the crypt was a larger hall with three more monsters. Two Lost Travelers Of Time, because of course those insane pieces of shit were just basic monsters in a dungeon like this, and they were accompanied by a Sword Of Time (Level 370).

  The Sword Of Time was essentially a melee swordsman variant of the time mage monsters. Its steel sword was enchanted by time itself, and its techniques were inhumanly insane.

  The time swordsman didn’t just fight with [Swing]. It followed actual stances from real life, fighting with hyper aggressive thrusts. It didn’t care about leaving itself in an unfavorable position—because of course it could also teleport to reposition itself. It used teleportation much more extensively, each time complementing its swordsmanship, relocating to positions where it could attempt to land a vital strike on me.

  I came very close to dying again when we first encountered it, but a panicked [Shadow Dash] made me avoid certain death, and a quick portal managed to just barely bail me out of the room.

  From there, more planning ensued. Veyra and I wondered how exactly we were supposed to clear a room with three of these monsters, when just one of them required all of our attention.

  We came to the conclusion that dealing with three level 370 monsters wasn’t feasible in any way. We had to somehow separate them and fight one at a time. And so, the first hurdle was to figure out how to manipulate the time swordsman to abandon its mage comrades, so that we could assassinate only it.

  At first, Veyra tried the classic strategy of throwing a pebble at it from a distance with the hopes that the two mages wouldn’t be aggroed. That sadly didn’t work. It looked like the mages were coded to get aggroed along with the time swordsman.

  I would have given up there, and I was about to suggest just waiting for the first time mage in the upper room to respawn, so that we could farm it. The respawn would take a day, but a slow and steady strategy would have suited me just fine. In the meantime, we could assassinate guilds.

  Veyra, however, figured out the solution right away. “We need to cut the floor underneath the swordsman,” she said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I’ll need to portal it out,” she said. “But if I spawn a portal directly underneath its feet, the monster code always considers that as an attack, which will aggro the two mages. If instead, I portal the bricks underneath its feet, it won’t realize that it’s being attacked, and the time mages hopefully shouldn’t follow. It’s a bug with the portal spell. I found it last week.”

  From there, the most ridiculous cheese setup I’d been involved in started. Veyra ran into the room, and shot an icicle at the bricks underneath the Sword Of Time. The bricks broke ever so slightly. That, of course, alerted the monster, so it teleported to Veyra and tried to kill her, at which point she used a portal to escape.

  We then waited a few minutes for the monster to lose aggro. When it did, it returned to its original position above the bricks, which were now slightly broken.

  Veyra repeated that seven more times, slowly breaking apart the bricks, until the floor was essentially just rubble. With the eighth time, she sneakily spawned a portal, but she spawned it underneath the broken bricks. The floor fell in, and the Sword Of Time followed with its footing gone.

  The Lost Wanderers Of Time did not follow.

  I couldn’t believe it actually worked, but that still left us in a room together with a level 370 teleporting swordsman. Another endurance battle with no margin for error ensued.

  Outwardly, the Sword Of Time wielded a simple steel sword. The monster as a whole looked like some street beggar. In combat, however, it was clear the developers had added some inhuman speed boost to its movements. It switched between stances so quickly that even looking at its footwork to guess the next attack was impossibly difficult.

  A perfect block could just barely withstand its insanely heavy basic swings, but landing that perfect block was crazy in itself. I had to read the monster’s swings perfectly, react in time, and hope to dear lord that the system evaluated my block as “perfect” because anything less would end up in me getting blasted into orbit by the weight of its swings.

  That was notwithstanding its ability to teleport, and all of the skills it could use with its swords for more powerful attacks. Those could not be blocked, and I was pretty much forced to use [Shadow Dash] every time it wound a heavy attack.

  I had to manage regardless. I dodged, I blocked, and I struggled for my life—because if I failed, Veyra and I would both die, and that would be embarrassing.

  Still, my thousands upon thousands of hours of practice in combat didn’t amount to nothing. As was always the case, monsters in the game were limited by physics. If the Sword Of Time missed an attack, it needed time to recover.

  Time that Veyra and I could use to blast it with critical strikes.

  She made her spell rotation look so effortless. [Chronorift] was somehow always active, pumping damage, and she constantly interrupted its footwork with ice from below, all the while her positioning was fantastic as well, always safely in a spot where she could keep shooting it without being at risk of taking damage herself.

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  The calm concentration on her face was incredible. I didn’t have many opportunities to admire, and I almost got hit when I found myself glancing at her, but something about her casting was just so transfixing.

  Fifteen minutes later, we did it. Our strategy wasn’t all that different from the first one. We dumped all of our damage into the monster, until it died. I leveled up twice again, and we obtained another frostfang feather. The fight left us so exhausted that we genuinely had to take a thirty minute break just to calm ourselves.

  While we sat, I caught myself just looking at her. She blinked back, and my eyes flinched away.

  Now that I thought about it, redhead time and frost mages were kind of hot, though.

  We moved to the next opponents, and I had to tell myself to pay attention to the monsters, and not Veyra.

  With our insane strategy, we could slowly and just barely whittle down the S ranked level 360 dungeon. We had to first separate a monster with Veyra’s method, then hope I didn’t blunder anything in the defence, while spamming the monsters with a constant spray of damage, and this arduous process had to be performed on every single monster we came across.

  So that’s exactly what we did. For the next six days, we became total rats, clearing one monster after another, room after room. The speed of our advancement down the dungeon must have been less than an inch per minute. On average, killing one monster took just over two hours, and only about one in fifteen of those monsters dropped a frostfang feather. Every part of the process was intricate to the point of being tedious. I’m fairly sure most players would have gone insane hunting dungeons like this.

  Yet, the dungeon hunt was still fun. Or at the very least, insanely satisfying.

  The time of rest in between fights gave us time for banter and nonsense. Those chats were equally as fun as the monster fights. I kept being reminded that Veyra was one of the most interesting, liveliest people I knew. She smiled more often than not, and if she didn’t smile, she was giving me her signature side-eye. For some reason, receiving those was also satisfying.

  On day three, I tried to ask again where Veyra was from, to which she apologized and said she didn’t reveal anything about her real life to anyone, no hard feelings. She tended to avoid any topics related to real life, even simple things like foods. I did, however, learn that Veyra’s favorite animal was the red-eyed tree frog, which she used to have as a pet as a child, and I learned that she started playing the game eight years ago during the Wand Of Lords expansion.

  The same expansion as when I first booted up the game.

  No wonder her spells were so pretty to look at. She’d been playing for eight years.

  The hunt continued from there. We leveled up and gained more experience, which made killing the basic monsters easier, but our improvement was off-set as the dungeon itself got harder and the monsters leveled up to 380.

  That led to both of us dying a few times due to mistakes, but we laughed those off and continued fighting right after our timeouts. We slept in between with our fucked up sleep schedules, and we met up in the morning to fight more monsters.

  On day six, after clearing another hall full of time monsters, we were faced with a large set of double doors.

  “Oooh, did we find the boss?” Veyra asked. “That was quick.”

  “To be fair, this was one of the slowest dungeon hunts I’ve ever been on,” I said.

  “And also one of the most profitable,” Veyra said.

  That much was true. After the grind, my level had risen all the way to 239. Enough to almost consider myself a top level player. Neither of us had appeared on the top 500 leaderboard yet, but we certainly gained a lot of experience.

  And the loot drops weren’t bad either. We gained a lot of random rare and epic gear, which were probably worth around 5000 gold in total, and a lot of crafting materials. We had seven frostfang feathers, thirty aether wisps, and a lot of other junk, which we estimated would grant us another 2000 gold. We hadn’t even defeated the boss, and the profit was already insane.

  “So, how long do you think it’ll take to whittle down the boss’s health bar?” I asked.

  “If we open that door, we’ll be out of the game for another two hours,” Veyra said.

  “Maybe we can portal one of its limbs and fight that separately,” I said with a funny grin.

  “Ha-ha, hilarious,” Veyra said, shaking her head. “Fighting the boss will be impossible. Even peeking in will probably screw us over. How many feathers do we have now?”

  “Seven,” I said.

  “One more, then,” Veyra said, looking satisfied. “We’ll gain that tomorrow. For now… I should probably head to sleep.”

  The moment she mentioned heading out, her smile fell into a more somber look. She faced the menu screen, and the log-off button as if it was the clock in button at the one part-time job I’d once had. A notification came, though, and she checked that first.

  “We could make the push for the final feather today,” I suggested.

  “Honestly, I’d like to,” Veyra said with a sigh. “But I need to follow a schedule. I’ll probably die if I don’t. Cup noodles unfortunately don’t work as an infinite energy glitch with my body.”

  “Ah, shame,” I said.

  I kept eyeing her, trying to think of something to say. I was usually good at coming up with some funny nonsense to make her smile.

  No good jokes came, though, and my chest tightened with pressure instead, until I eventually said, “I’ve actually been living healthily for the last week as well.” I smirked like an idiot. “On top of my usual cup noodles, I also ate a hot dog.”

  Veyra rolled her eyes, cheek lines vaguely rising, but that quickly fell as well.

  Bad joke, bad joke!

  Maybe something was going on in her life?

  “Veyra?” I asked.

  My hesitant tone made her look up from the system menu. “Yes?”

  “Is, um… Is everything alright?”

  She was taken aback.

  “In real life, I mean,” I added. “You always look down when anything from real life is mentioned.”

  She blinked, considering her answer for a bit. Her eyes pointed down. “Life is life, I guess. Nothing unusual.”

  “I’d like to know,” I said. My heartrate increased, as if every word I said could somehow make or break our… our… Our what? What even were we? Friends?

  “I’ll respect it if you prefer to be secretive,” I said. “But… I also want to know you better. If something is troubling you in real life, I’ll support you.”

  “I exist in real life, and that’s it,” Veyra said curtly.

  I opened my mouth to say something, but nothing came out. I bit my lip instead.

  “Sorry, I don’t mean to be rude,” Veyra said, vaguely smiling. “This dungeon hunt has been really fun. I look forward to logging in tomorrow. But really, if I could live in Wonderwind, I would.”

  “I get that,” I said. “I’m sorry for prying into your life. I’m just curious.”

  She sighed, looking embarrassed. “As I’ve said, I’m the solo mage for a reason. I’m a bit gloomy.”

  “That’s not true, though,” I said. “You’re really fun to hang around with.”

  She tilted her head at me, as if wondering if I was serious. She then looked away and chuckled. “I’m so bad at serious talk, it’s embarrassing.”

  My heart was positively blowing up.

  “I guess you’re right,” Veyra said. “This has been fun. I’m looking forward to tomorrow. Thanks for the great loot, Aiden. Coming with you was the right decision.”

  With that, Veyra logged off, now with a smile on her face.

  I stood perfectly still, watching her go. The pressure didn’t wear off with her gone. It only grew tighter.

  Nervously, I logged off as well and headed to sleep, where I pressed my face into my pillow, and I still couldn’t make the feeling calm down.