One of Museumtown’s squads had found the Reversed River in the final days of Phase Two. According to them, it was filled to their waists with water, all flowing away from the entrance and dragging them further in. The first boss wasn’t a boss at all. Instead, it was a gauntlet—one you had to hammer through while controlling how quickly the Reversed River pulled you in and maintaining your footing.

  There were pitfalls everywhere—pockets of churning water waiting to trap someone and bash them against the rocks until they came apart. Monsters and Delvers alike could easily lose their footing in the waters and never be seen again.

  They hadn’t cleared the second floor; that had been Zane and Carol’s job. But they had mapped the right course across the dungeon, and anyone even thinking about entering had to memorize the route.

  Tori and I took the Reversed River at a mad sprint—my Awareness and the map were enough to pick out the safe route at full speed, and none of the mid-30s monsters were a threat to either of us. Tori simply Pushed and Pulled them, and the Reversed River did the rest. The first floor took less than five minutes, and ended with a waterfall.

  But this one fell up.

  I dove into the waterclimb and started swimming with the current, Tori right behind me. We climbed up and up, looking down at the gray fog that surrounded the rest of the dungeon. In a way, it was pretty. The monocolored mist didn’t so much as shine or break in the flat light. I’d never seen anything like it back in Cozad or Chicago.

  But in another way, it was horrifying. The dungeon didn’t exist on Earth. I tried to figure out what that meant. Was it in another plane of reality? Tori would probably have a video game explanation; she’d tried to describe them as instanced, but that wasn’t the right word for it, and she knew it. But if they weren’t on Earth, that meant that while we were in them, we existed somewhere else.

  If Solemnus Six was a resource planet of some type, were there planets dedicated to dungeons? And how did cleared dungeons and uncleared dungeons differ? Anyone could enter a cleared dungeon, no matter what the rules had been.

  We arrived at a placid, flat lake. A few ripples from the waterfall broke its surface, but aside from that, the knee-deep water was the only feature.

  I froze.

  So did Tori.

  The second we moved, the Reversing Current boss fight would start.

  “Ready?” I asked. Tori nodded, her face set in what she called her ‘locked in’ look. That was good enough for me.

  I stepped forward.

  The lake rippled, and the boss appeared.

  The Reversing Current: Level Fifty-Three Elite Dungeon Boss

  Current Difficulty: Trivial

  When the citizens of this city encountered plumbing problems, their first solution was to change the very flow of the river. In doing so, they awakened a powerful force—the Reversing Current. Its home is compromised, and it will not rest until it takes its revenge.

  Liquid - This boss takes reduced damage from weapons and increased damage from magic that can manipulate it.

  Dominion Aura - This boss’s lair grants it the Elite status.

  Elite - This monster moves faster and hits harder than a similarly powerful monster.

  This was mostly Tori’s show; I wasn’t going to be worth much as anything but a wall between her and the boss. Worse, the filth-filled pillar of water forming from the lake could easily ignore me to get to her.

  The Trip-Hammer revved, and I slammed it into the boss.

  It passed through, and a horrible stench filled the air. “It’s full of sewage!” I shouted, trying not to gag.

  “Carol didn’t say anything about that!” Tori yelled back. She launched her own attack at the boss—a double Push that shoved the water’s contents out of the far side and sprayed them across the empty lake bottom. “I bet she thought a sewage elemental would be hilarious!”

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “She probably did. Just—“ I ducked a watery fist and swung back with the hammer. “Just kill it and let’s be done with this place.”

  Boss Defeated: The Reversing Current

  Dungeon Delvers who were not in the arena will receive fifty percent of your team’s experience.

  The boss didn’t last three minutes before Tori finished dismantling it, but that was three minutes too long. By the time we’d finished it off, the whole dungeon reeked; I hadn’t smelled this bad since the last time I mucked out the pig pen back home. Worse, I hadn’t leveled.

  Tori had, but if the Tier Two dungeons weren’t going to be reliable sources of levels, and the Tier Threes were still rare…

  This was going to be a problem.

  I tried to hide my disappointment. It was easy, since Tori mistook my expression for exhaustion and disgust. When I’d steeled myself and she’d taken care of her stat points for hitting Level Sixty-Three, I cleared my throat. “The Tier Two Dungeons aren’t worth our time anymore. We need a better plan if we’re going to get close to Level Seventy and be safe in The Stronghold.”

  “Farm the Seared Wilds Tower?” Tori asked. She was trying not to breathe through her nose. I knew from experience that that move only helped so much, and this was far beyond the point where the stench overwhelmed mouth-breathing.

  “No. That’s only one dungeon, and it’s really only got one boss that’s worth levels.” I bit back a curse and breathed deep, even though it stank, trying to force my frustration down. “The same thing happened with the jump between Tier One and Tier Two Dungeons. It feels like the System wants us to find easier experience, and the easiest experience in these in-between levels is each other.”

  “Oh.” Tori went pale as what I said sank in. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Agreed. We’ll head back to Museumtown and get cleaned up there.”

  I didn’t want to hunt other Delvers. Eddie and Saul had been one thing; they’d been killing people long before the first bottleneck, and that bottleneck had been easy to bypass with only a little of what Tori called PvP. We were down to under two billion people on Earth. If we wanted humanity to survive, we needed to do what the System claimed to want us to do: advance ourselves and uplift others.

  But this bottleneck, where there was only one Tier Three Dungeon nearby? That was meant to get us to do the opposite. It was the obvious, easy solution, and it went against Integration’s stated goals. The System knew it, and so did the Consortium.

  That meant it was a trap. Or a test.

  There had to be a better answer, and I puzzled over my options the whole way back along what was left of the Chicago River. I kept thinking about it as I pulled off my clothes and threw them in a burn pile, then went under the showerhead in Museumtown’s public showers. Fresh clothes would be waiting for me on the other side.

  I didn’t find a solution, but there had to be one. Every puzzle had a solution.

  “Hal, you in there?” Calvin called from the door.

  “Yep.”

  “Great. Jessica got a message on that City Key thing. It’s…we need to talk it over. Meet us at the tower in an hour. Bring Tori.”

  “Got it.”

  Tori was waiting for me, wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt just like mine, when I got out of the shower. She looked respectable, but I still sniffed in her direction and wrinkled my nose theatrically.

  “Shut up, Hal,” she said.

  We had time. Not a ton, but some. I sat down by the Fish-Hugger fountain and waited as the sunset cast orange reflections across Lake Michigan. It looked different than it had the day before. The cliffs and canyons to the west weren’t the same as the Chicago skyline.

  “It’s all wrong,” I said.

  “What is?”

  I explained the PvP conundrum to her, and she nodded slowly. “Yeah, I agree. It’s a problem, and you don’t see the solution yet. We can’t out-level the problem. What else can we do to change the odds?”

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted. “I’m stuck.”

  “No problem. We’ll get there. But…changing the subject a little…thanks.” Tori went a little red.

  “For what?”

  “For helping me through the Mom problem. I still think of her as Jessica most of the time, and she’ll never really be my mom, but…I don’t know, it’s hard to talk about it. Listen, she needs to be a mom, and that’s not an option for her right now unless she has me. So. Yeah.” Tori couldn’t meet my eye as she finished.

  I put a hand on the kid’s shoulder. Then I hesitated. The System and all these levels made it easy to forget that Tori wasn’t just a Level Sixty-Three, Rank One Telekineticist. She was also Tori Vanderbilt, a fifteen-year-old who would have been starting her sophomore year of high school. The fact that she was my best ally didn’t change that. But sometimes, it made it easy to overlook.

  So I bit back the first thing that came to mind, and I didn’t tell Tori that she needed Jessica more than Jessica needed her. That was the truth, but she’d already put her feelings out there as much—or more—than my sister had with me. She needed this lie.

  “You’re right. She needs you. You need to be there for her, okay?” I said instead.

  Tori’s shoulders slumped just a little bit, and her eyes filled with relief. I realized that she thought I’d force the issue instead of rolling with her self-deception. “Thanks,” she said again.

  Then we went quiet, and I stared at the beach, pondering my options. This level bottleneck had to have a solution—a better one than farming a single Tier Three Dungeon and hoping for the best. Even solo, it probably wouldn’t be enough.

  There was always the Fireborn Crusade, but…that was only a step better than killing other people in Chicago. If they attacked, I decided, I wouldn’t hold back. But I wasn’t going to hunt them down for their experience.

  Then, at last, the time came. I stood up, stretched, and cracked my neck. “Let’s see what Jessica wants.”

  Just Add Mana is an OPMC story with light LitRPG elements, following a man named Cale Cadwell Cobbs. Cale's been 'gifted' with the power to be reborn when he dies - but on a brand new world. He's done this countless times when he's summoned to a new world, about to be sacrificed to a blood god. Instead, he

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