The loot that Elijah picked up off of Bob the Mana Mage was excellent. Two of the three enchantments were Celestial-tier, and even the third was Legendary. The only problem was that, as Master-tier gear, it was well above the level that he or any of his party could use. He had tried adjusting the requisite stat levels to use the gear, but that appeared to be one of the few things that he couldn’t change.

  He wondered if he could change that setting once he was at a higher level, but at the moment he couldn’t do anything with it. He stashed the items in his inventory, planning to keep them safe until he could experiment later.

  The run-in with Bob and Tom had set Elijah on edge. The city was supposed to be safe; after all, Arturus was its protector, but the day’s events had shown him that wasn’t the case. He couldn’t expect Mara to appear and save his neck every time he got into trouble. Even if he wouldn’t mind seeing her fight again.

  Both of the two reapers would have respawned by now, and although they would struggle with death sickness, they were still a present and credible threat. Not to mention, he was sure that there would be more members of the Reaper’s Guild in the city. He needed to get far away from this spot if he wanted to avoid another confrontation. And he felt an aching need to grow stronger.

  Growing his ability and class would allow him to make changes he didn’t have the skill now to change, allowing him to get stronger than he was before.

  He needed more than just to grow stronger; he needed his entire party to grow strong so he could face this Reaper threat. Even if he wasn’t just a support class, sort of, he knew he would need not only the skills but also the backing of his friends. They had a vast gap to make up if they were going to make a difference in the city.

  He stepped into a shadowy alley, looking around to make sure nobody would see him before remembering he still had two scouts in the air. He checked with them and the coast was clear, so he activated his ‘Dragontooth Teleport’ ability.

  He had planned on just teleporting repeatedly along the road until he found a trace of his friends, but in the targeting interface that popped up he saw Nicholas was a valid teleport target.

  His bats swarmed around him once again, a cyclone of fur and wings. When they receded, Elijah dropped into the middle of a campsite.

  Nicholas and Bo jumped to their feet, ready to fight as the cyclone of bats finally dissipated.

  “Damnit, Elijah! A little warning before you do that would be nice once in a while.” Nicholas re-sheathed his sword and slumped back down onto the ground. “What’s up, buddy? I thought you were supposed to be checking out the dungeons around Raystown.”

  Elijah nodded, looking around and noticing Sasha was missing. “I’ll tell you guys, but where’s Sasha? There’s a lot going on in Raystown, and it’ll be easier to tell everyone all at once.”

  Bo grunted and pointed over his shoulder. “She’s down by a river over that way. We got into a fight with some slime blobs earlier, and she got slimed pretty good. She’s trying to wash the slime out of her robes.”

  Elijah turned in the direction Bo had indicated. “Alright, I’ll go get her.” He caught Nicholas out of the corner of his body shifting to follow, but Bo and Benjamin both lifted their hands, silently stopping him.

  Elijah travelled through the dense woodlands, following the sound of water splashing. When he finally rounded a tree and came to the river, he was stunned into silence.

  Sasha was wading in the middle of the river, her clothes hanging on an overarching tree branch drying out as she washed slime out of her hair. She locked eyes with him and smiled at him. He tried to avert his eyes, staring off into the far distance. He watched a moose picking its way through the forest. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude, Sasha.”

  She giggled, and he could hear her wading through the water closer to him. “Oh? Is the big scary Reality Warper scared of seeing a woman show off a little skin?”

  He clenched his jaw and took a deep breath. Against his better judgement, he slowly lowered his gaze away from the nature scene in the distance and locked eyes with her. Goblins weren’t the only creatures that were modelled with exceptional detail.

  “I just thought that maybe you’d like to preserve some modesty,” he told her stiffly.

  She stopped, arching her eyebrow at him. After a moment, she splashed water at him and laughed.

  “Modesty? Elijah, I’m an actress who is also objectively attractive to male audiences. I’ve been doing full-frontal scenes on network television since I was eighteen. Plus, this isn’t actually my real body.”

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  He looked her up and down, his brain not even fully registering what he was doing. “Could have fooled me,” Elijah muttered before he realized what he was saying.

  He’d seen the scenes she was talking about. Most recently being a crime scene investigation show she’d been a guest star on for a few years. He had watched little of it; it wasn’t really his cup of tea, but he’d seen every episode she was a guest on. They’d killed off her character rather brutally and had shown everything.

  How was seeing her body in-game any different from the countless times he’d seen it on television?

  She smirked up at him. “Oh, is that the case?”

  “Still, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t respect your privacy.”

  She reached up, her hand reaching out to him to ask for his help up the steep river bank. “Respectful, but awkward. How adorable,” she chuckled.

  He took her hand, pulling her up even as his cheeks flushed red with a blush. “I suppose it’s better to be awkward than to be considered a creep.” She slipped slightly, and he caught her, her weight landing against his. For a moment she looked up into his eyes.

  “Oh? Elijah?” she whispered, her lips against his cheek as she spoke. It was every teenage nerd’s dream to have their childhood celebrity crush pressed up against them. A dream that had followed Elijah into adulthood as well.

  “Yeah, Sasha?” he answered, his voice weak as he tried to force the words out through a tightened chest. His heart was racing in his chest as she placed a hand against his cheek and backed a half step away to look him in the eyes.

  She slapped him across the face, breaking the moment, not hard enough to actually hurt although he lost a single health point. “That’s for naming our guild after me, you half-wit. I still can’t believe you used a joke name.” Her voice was angry, but he could see the quirk in her lips as she tried to repress a smile.

  He pushed her away and cracked a stupid grin at her. “Come on, get dressed and meet me back at camp. I need to update everyone on what’s going on in Raystown.”

  He turned his back on her and headed back to rejoin the rest of the party. He couldn’t help the smile on his face. If anyone noticed the grin on his face or the missing health point when he arrived back at camp, they didn’t mention it.

  “It’s really not good if Mara needs to get involved,” Nicholas said as Elijah finished telling the party about the events of the two days.

  “Let me get this straight, one of the top six players in the entire game, not only knows who you are, but is getting herself involved in your quest?” Sasha sounded more upset than there was any reason for her to be. “How does she even know who you or Alastor even are?”

  Nicholas fielded this question. “He’s one of the top-tier Legendary players. The celestials monitor them in case one of them gets close to joining their ranks. Alastor has maxed one character already and is close to maxing this second one. It makes sense that they know him.”

  “The prisoner thing bothers me the most.” Bo grumbled. “It’s not right that they’d be trapping a player. There are supposed to be safeties in place to prevent that sort of thing.”

  Everyone looked at him, his fists clenched in anger. “They shouldn’t be able to have even that amount of control over the city’s infrastructure. Assuming what you think is going on with the realtor and guild halls is correct.”

  Benjamin stood up and walked over to Bo, sitting next to the man. “We’re not even level ten yet, Bo. I think we just need to pass this along to Mara and the other Celestials. Arturus protects Raystown, right? Surely he’d be the best option to—”.

  Bo cut him off with a wave of his hand. “No Benjamin. If Arturus hasn’t done anything about it yet, he is either complicit or an idiot. He has been the protector of Raystown since before he reached Celestial. He isn’t about to change things if he hasn’t already.”

  “What do you expect us to do, Bo? The problem still stands that we’re low levelled. We can’t do anything against enemies that are already in Legendary-tier.” Sasha’s voice was soft, almost scared, presumably at the idea of fighting Legendary tier opponents. “Or higher.”

  “What about Alastor? He seemed to be pretty close to Mara. Could he get involved with his guild?” Elijah was rubbing his chin trying to figure out a game plan. He couldn’t believe the system would give him a quest with no actual way to complete it. He had to find the solution, even if it wasn’t obvious at first, just like the last quest didn’t have an obvious ending.

  Nicholas shook his head. “I sent him a message after you told us everything that happened. He can’t get involved and risk annoying any of the celestials. Not even Arturus. They’re the most likely to get a line on a Celestial Relic that can finally help push him past the blockage.”

  His eyes darted over to Elijah. “Present company excluded.”

  “Mara herself got her Celestial relic from a high-level raid by Annika and Kyle, instead of having to wait for someone to sell one.”

  Elijah leaned back against a tree. “So the Celestials aren’t an option, and Alastor isn’t an option. So what do we do?”

  “If we try this and fail, it could be worse than death for us. If we die, we’ll just respawn, but if they capture us, they could hold us indefinitely. There’s no way this player hasn’t sent a support ticket to the devs, so there is some reason they can’t intervene.” Sasha’s voice was fearful, but there was a stoic determination present as well. She obviously wanted to save this player, even at the risk of losing access to the game herself.

  Bo stood up, pacing back and forth a few times. Elijah could sense that Bo was upset about something and struggling to decide whether he should even suggest what he was thinking.

  Finally, he stopped and turned to face the team. “Alright. I shouldn’t do this, but we have to rescue that player.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a map, laying it down in the center of the group. “I know a way we can get a massive power boost, but it’s going to be dangerous. And not in the dying horribly kind of way, but the getting us banned outright kind of way.”

  “And I think Elijah is the only one who can get us there.”

  His words settled over the party, and nobody could bring themselves to speak. The fate of the prisoner rested firmly on Elijah’s shoulders.