“I’m sorry.”

  “Melia, we’ve been over this. It was an accident. No harm, no foul.”

  “But you could have been seriously hurt!”

  “Which was kind of the point, remember? Not exactly my finest moment either. We live and we learn.”

  “Still, I’m sorry.”

  Melia truly was remorseful. Looking back, it was obvious that sparring with her party members was not going to work for her, at least with the way she was right now. If she got panicky and nervous when other things threatened them, what did she honestly think was going to happen when she was the one causing physical harm? Maybe someday she would be able to separate her emotions from their well-being, but it would take conscious effort.

  “Can we move on now?” Jessica asked with a slight smirk. “If you’re going to spend all day apologizing like crazy, you still haven’t done so for nearly capsizing that fishing boat we were all on.”

  Melia’s eyes widened, remembering her impulsive dive into the lake the other day. She was about to open her mouth, but Jessica stuck up her hand.

  “It was a joke. I’m joking. We’re fine, and I’m sure if any of us fell overboard, you’d have scooped us out of the water anyway.”

  Melia slowly closed her mouth as she nodded. She would have. She needed to do better about remembering her new body was something of a natural disaster to everybody around her if she wasn’t carefully regulating herself.

  “Oh! That reminds me,” Melia snapped her fingers. “Here. I got this from the [Thresher]. You can have it back.”

  Melia pulled a familiar steel rod out of her inventory and held it up for Jessica. The girl’s face took on a complicated look as she contemplated the harpoon.

  “[Whalebane],” she sighed, eventually taking it back and stashing it in her own storage. “I’m surprised it’s still bound to me. I guess it wasn’t gone for long enough. Did you dive into the lake to get it back?”

  “Not really?” Melia admitted sheepishly. “If I’m honest, I didn’t even know you lost it. It got stuck in my teeth as I was eating, and I had to pick it out with a claw.”

  Jessica nearly stumbled as they were walking and Ellesea choked out a laugh.

  “Only the finest of toothpicks for our dragon,” the [Mage] grandly proclaimed.

  “Now I’ve gotta think about that every time I use the thing?” Jessica groaned.

  “Are you planning on using it often?” Ellesea raised an eyebrow.

  “Not anymore!” Jessica wailed, making everybody laugh. This was the kind of banter they were all used to, and the group was in high spirits now that things were back to normal.

  Today’s goal was a bit of a mashup of some old and some new. As a group, [Sunrise] had taken one of the standing quests from the guild that always needed tending. That was part of the party’s usual routine, and now that they were set to operate out of a new zone, they wanted to get familiar with the ins and outs of daily life. Find out what problems regularly plague the residents of their town, see what they could do to alleviate those problems, and find out how to turn that into sustainable income and growth. Fortunately, those often came paired together nicely when accepting quests through the guild, as it was designed to serve as a bridge connecting average folks and adventurers. When done properly, everybody went home happy.

  The only catch in today’s outing was that they had Melia with them.

  She stayed silent during the trip to the guild, observing her party as they worked. How they instantly took stock of their surroundings, identified any potential rival groups (of which there were none, as the guild was nearly empty), and formulated a plan. They’d taken a single quest from the board and introduced themselves to the receptionist at the counter, a handsome man in his thirties who looked like he could do well for himself modeling for the cover of romance novels. It was the hair, mostly, wavy locks the color of the sun, and a smile that practically sparkled whenever he showed his teeth.

  Melia wondered if it was some sort of skill.

  From what Alastair learned from innocuous smalltalk, Lakeridge was home to six other adventuring parties and a large handful of solo questers. Most were around the same level as [Sunrise], floating in the middle of rank 3, while only one was composed entirely of rank 2s. The level spread fit mostly what Melia would have imagined from the game, if a touch on the higher side. She guessed that when people only had one try when fighting against monsters, they’d hedge their bets on the side of not dying.

  As it turned out, most of the normal resident adventurers were out doing the same quest [Sunrise] accepted: thinning out the local water goblin population.

  Or, to use their system-given name: [Gorblins].

  …why did adding an “R” suddenly make them water-attuned? If Melia dwelled underwater, lived in a lake, or was otherwise a water-gnome, would that make her a [Gnorme]? Madness.

  What Melia was more curious about was why [Sunrise] only took a single quest. But, as Alastair explained their reasoning to her, it made much more sense. It also shed a little light on something Melia had thought about once and then quickly forgotten. And it all boiled down to a basic principle she kept running into, over and over.

  This world was not a game.

  While outliers existed in every walk of life, the actions of people as a whole boiled down into something of an average norm. A bell curve, perhaps, where most people fit somewhere in the middle, and over- (and under-) achievers slowly move toward the edges. The more extreme they were, the further toward the edge they’d be.

  Adventurers were not immune to this.

  There were risk-takers, daredevils, and people who did not consider their safety nearly as important as the next paycheck. Some of those people were very successful, breaking into higher ranks, raking in the gold, and generally becoming the sort of person that, when asked how they achieved their success, would reply with: “Just do.” Melia envisioned them as the boardroom CEOs who made it to the top at a young age or pioneered a new market or idea, becoming icons of their own. Those people tended to be one in a million in her last world, probably even rarer.

  In this world, at least in the realm of adventuring, that also applied. It was probably one reason there were more adventurers in Hammerfall than there were in Lakeridge. The former had over a thousand, while the latter had maybe a few hundred…and it wasn’t because they were all very young.

  Melia wouldn’t quite go as far as to call those older groups of rank 2s the adventuring equivalent of basement dwellers, but….

  They clearly lacked something when the average retirement level of a solid adventurer was high rank 4, aiming for rank 5.

  It was why Jessica and Alastair were content to take their time and hunt wolves far beneath their level slowly and steadily back at the abbey, not willing to risk permanent injury simply because they grew careless.

  Today’s excursion was another exercise in careful planning and procedure. As in, what a real person born and raised in this world might do when confronted with a group of hostile monsters. In this case, [Gorblin] hunting.

  [Gorblins] lived in what could probably be described as a primitive village culture, though there was obviously no real community behind it. The monsters existed as a twisted mirror of civilization, taking on only the most rudimentary of similarities. Such as huts, which they may or may not have actually lived in. It wasn’t well known what a monster’s biological needs actually were. But they had no other buildings, not like one would find in a rural town, with communal areas, places for storage or meetings, or even a shop or two. There wasn’t any infrastructure like wells or sewers, though Melia wished there was, because they stank.

  [Sunrise] was currently facing down a small pack of [Gorblins] that had wandered far enough away from their ramshackle huts that it looked like the group could pull them away safely without alerting the rest. From there, the group entered what Melia considered “silent running mode”. They didn’t speak, and each person knew their job well. Alastair would generally pull the pack from a safe distance or get Jessica to do so with an arrow before drawing aggro onto himself. He generally didn’t need to resort to [Taunts], which was a good sign of cohesion, because those were generally meant for moments when things started to go wrong.

  Alastair would wrangle the monsters, keep them busy while fending them off with his shield, while Jessica and Ellesea would pick off the targets one by one. To their credit, the girls managed their threat levels very well, as Melia considered it, by not drawing so much ire that any one particular monster felt the need to stop gnawing uselessly at Alastair’s armor and attack the squishier members. The group of four [Gorblins] fell after roughly a minute and a half, making it slightly less than 30 seconds for each monster, if anybody was counting.

  Which Melia certainly was, because she had nothing better to do, and she found it fascinating to observe real-life adventurers at work.

  Once all four monsters were dead (bent and broken, scorched by the arcane, and peppered with arrows), the group sat down for a short rest. They inspected themselves for any sort of injury or unseen damage to their gear, and Alastair healed himself before taking a potion, keeping himself topped off.

  Melia supposed that the last part was a new addition to their routine, one they were still getting used to, now that Y’cennia was slaving away at her table, cranking them out. Beforehand, potions were a rare commodity and a valuable resource; now, Alastair always drank a potion, even if it seemed redundant or wasteful.

  All in all, one pack of monsters generally took [Sunrise] about 10 minutes to fight.

  This seemed incredibly slow to Melia, but she had to remind herself she was used to thinking in game standards. Here, in real life, especially without a dedicated healer to keep everyone alive, they needed to be much more careful. Especially as Alastair had come to the conclusion that, while his two healing spells were effective, he could not use them if he was otherwise preoccupied.

  If Melia could find one thing to be glad about after the fiasco that was “sparring”, it was learning that Alastair could not multitask healing with getting punched. Melia supposed that might actually be normal, since the game had no sort of feedback or pain simulation when taking damage. If a player noticed their health going down, all they had to do was slam a button for a potion or a spell, and it would go off.

  “Is this the normal speed for adventurers?” Melia eventually asked. Alastair was sitting on a rock, catching his breath. He glanced down at Jessica, who was using [Whalebane] to prod the dead bodies from a distance so she could check for loot without physically touching them herself.

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  “If anything, we’re moving a little fast,” Alastair replied calmly, eliciting a snort from Jessica.

  “These mobs are a little lower than us,” Ellesea explained, “So they only take a few hits.”

  “No, I see that,” Melia rolled her eyes. She [Inspected] the dead [Gorblin] Jessica was quickly relieving of its “valuables”.

  ?

  [Gorblin]

  Level: 248

  ?

  And then she turned to the [Mage].

  ?

  [Ellesea Barnes]

  Level: 333

  Class: Arcane Mage

  ?

  In the time that they had spent after reaching Lakeridge, Ellesea had gained a single level. Now, Melia didn’t want to say it out loud, because she knew her sensibilities were lacking, but that seemed very slow. She knew she was judging real people against her experience in a video game, where everything was truncated and condensed. In the early levels, before she got closer to endgame content, Melia could level a toon quite rapidly. From 1 to 20? It might take her a couple of hours. Maybe one day. From level 30 to 40? Again, maybe another day. It wasn’t until she hit the 50s or 60s that leveling took real effort and time, and not until the late 80s that each one felt like an achievement to gain. That last level from 99 to 100 usually took the better part of a week, and she had more time on her hands than most.

  This world was very obviously built on a different scale. Heck, Lakeridge alone was bigger. The lake itself was enormous, roughly 20 miles wide at its thinnest. Melia did some quick math and translated that to over 100 miles in circumference, and was very glad she didn’t suggest taking “a quick lap” around the lake, like she would have in the game. What once might have taken her 10 to 20 minutes now might take several days.

  If she didn’t simply turn into a dragon and fly around it.

  But Melia wasn’t satisfied with the current pace, even if she knew she didn’t have a right to complain. Jessica must’ve noticed her displeasure, because she eventually brought it up.

  “Alright, you can just say it, you know.”

  “Eh?” Melia asked, turning to stare at the [Hunter]. Jessica finally finished rooting through all the dead [Gorblin] loincloths, and she came out with two very large [Pearls] for her trouble.

  …suddenly, Melia didn’t want to think about where they came from, since she hadn’t seen any oysters.

  “You’re brooding,” Jessica sighed. She pointed a finger at her own face. “Your eyebrows do this thing where they scrunch together like you’ve got constipation.”

  Ellesea grinned. “You’re not exactly subtle.”

  “I was just thinking that it seemed slow to me, that’s all,” Melia slumped. She didn’t want to say it, but they asked. She wasn’t going to lie.

  Jessica raised an eyebrow.

  “Doesn’t everything seem slow to you?” she asked. “With your level, I bet all of this seems so incredibly pointless.”

  “No, not pointless,” Melia instantly denied. “I’d never consider what you do pointless. Not when it comes to bettering yourselves or keeping people safe.”

  Both Jessica and Ellesea gave her a particular look. The [Mage] eventually spoke first.

  “But you’re the [Destroyer of Worlds]-”

  Melia flared and instantly cut her off.

  “No,” she denied, managing to keep her temper in check. “I am me. I am not my class.”

  The two girls looked a little startled, but since the world wasn’t suddenly ending, they quickly recovered.

  “Life is precious,” Melia explained, “And shouldn’t be taken so lightly.”

  Ellesea gulped and nodded, while Jessica looked like she wanted to say something.

  “Okay,” Melia grinned, “Your turn to talk.”

  “Fair,” Jessica barked. “But fine. You say that, but you’re also suggesting we be more reckless in our work. It can’t be both, you know.”

  “In this case, I think it can,” Melia argued. “If you want to keep up the rate you’re going, I won’t stop you. You obviously know your business well, which is more than a lot of people can say. I just think that you guys in particular don’t have to settle for 20 kills an hour. And how long are you planning on staying out today? Your quest was only culling four camps, right? That was number three. Will you head back to town after the next one? We’ve only been out for three hours, and one of those was spent walking.”

  The girls looked thoughtful, but ultimately turned to Alastair. The [Paladin] sighed, knowing it was time to be the leader.

  “I’m asking this in the most honest way possible, I don’t mean anything else by it,” he led by preamble. “But what other choice do we have?”

  Melia tilted her head and pointed to herself.

  “You have me?”

  Jessica scoffed.

  “You can’t level for us. You can’t even join our party, and I don’t want to join yours. No offense.”

  “None taken,” Melia grinned. After the shock of her…unconventional party invitation, she couldn’t blame them. As far as she knew, aside from the initial system prompt, everything else was normal. Another average, everyday party…just owned by her.

  “We already know this,” Melia continued calmly, “But that doesn’t stop me from helping you powerlevel. Look at Y’cennia,” she added. “She’s going to hit 350 today, if she hasn’t already.”

  Jessica and Ellesea both took a seat, their eyes widening. They knew their [Alchemist] was determined, and they’d seen her unyielding resolve. They knew she was barreling forward with all the subtlety and determination of a dwarven steam tank, but having it thrust so politely in their faces was a shock. Ellesea, in particular, didn’t know how to feel about no longer being the highest-level member of their original group.

  Rank 3. Level 333. That used to be something she took great pride in, as a human, only nineteen years old. By all metrics, she should be considered something special, if not exactly a prodigy. Her peers in her classes were mostly rank 2, and other rank 3s were usually in their thirties.

  Now, due to Melia’s assistance, Y’cennia was probably going to hit rank 4 before she was twenty-three years old.

  “But, that’s so much different,” Ellesea said in a small voice. She was trying to rationalize it in her mind, lessening the sting of reality. But she also desperately wanted it to be false.

  “Is it?” Melia asked, and it was clear she wasn’t being sassy. Once again, she pointed to herself. “You have me. Use me. Not to kill things for you, but I can keep you safe. You’ve already got the tools and teamwork to do everything yourselves, so why not just…go a little faster?”

  “Go faster, she says,” Jessica grumbled, but Melia shrugged.

  “What’s stopping you guys right now is uncertainty. That last group you killed, you spent a lot of time watching, waiting, and analyzing. You made sure there were only four [Gorblins] before pulling them. That no more would suddenly come out and overwhelm you. What if you didn’t have to worry about that?”

  “You make it sound so easy,” Jessica scoffed.

  “For me, it is,” Melia said simply. Jessica’s frown slowly turned thoughtful.

  “Look,” Melia said gently, “For the next camp, let’s try something different.”

  ?

  ?

  The plan was simple. Alastair would do what he always did. He’d stand in the front, tank the damage, make sure his allies didn’t get hurt. The girls behind him would take the monsters down as fast as they could before anybody could get hurt.

  In theory, Alastair could do this all day. He’d raise his shield, block a few blows, and smack a few heads with his hammer. That was basically the extent of his duties, and it really didn’t take a lot of energy, if he was honest.

  Melia was right. If they removed all their worries and concerns, their safety nets and precautions, they could be moving a lot faster.

  But, as the age-old saying goes: “plans never survive contact with the enemy.”

  Alastair would be lying if he said he didn’t have his reservations. At first glance, without knowing the very specific gnome in this equation, he’d have written this idea off as insane, reckless, and suicidal.

  And Melia was currently proving that saying right.

  In their favor.

  She told the group to pretend that the next group of [Gorblins] was the only one around. Like no other monsters in the camp existed. Or, at the very least, like they wouldn’t attack no matter what [Sunrise] did.

  Alastair counted 15 monsters huddled around 3 huts. That meant they would likely face off against either 3 groups of 5, five groups of 3, or 3 groups of 3 with several independent unknowns. The second option was ideal. They could handle that, no question. The first option was worse, but they could work through it slowly. The last option filled him with doubt.

  A group of 3 of these monsters was done and dusted before he broke a sweat. But if one of those loner, patrolling monsters aggroed onto them in the middle of a fight, things would get dicey. He’d have to keep a keen eye out for who it latched onto, [Taunt] it if necessary, and pray that by adding it to the mix, all the others wouldn’t join also.

  Attempting to fight all 15 [Gorblins] at once was a quick way to die.

  But Melia asked him to trust her, and he was willing to try. Secretly, this was probably the largest single act of faith he’d ever taken…right behind putting his trust in Celestara. His life, and the lives of his teammates, were now in the hands of a tiny gnome, generally not famous for their strength.

  And then he remembered. She was level 3700. It was a number so ludicrous, it was easily forgotten. Now he would see it in action, and he would remember.

  Taking a deep breath, Alastair pulled the nearest mob.

  It is the only one, he told himself, this pack is the only pack.

  Relief was brief but fleeting. The pack contained four [Gorblins], meaning reality was closest to the third option. He needed to pay attention to both the monsters attacking them and the ones that might suddenly jump in.

  Despite the fact that Melia asked him not to.

  He narrowed his eyes and shoved his shield into the face of the closest [Gorblin]. It gave a nasty, squelching cry as the impact shattered its nose, flecks of blood showering everywhere. An arrow flew from his side, striking the monster through the eye, taking its life. A second monster fell to one of Ellesea’s spells; her time was not spent idly. Now that there were only two, it was only a matter of moments before they died to arrows and spells, or, amusingly in this case, to Alastair’s hammer. It was a rare occurrence when he got the killing blow.

  Four enemies dead, very little damage taken. In fact, most of the blood on Alastair came from the goblin’s nose, which he broke. For a second, he truly did forget about all the other enemies present, which surged him with a jolt of fear.

  But when he looked up, he found a shocking, mind-numbing sight.

  In the time it had taken them to kill those four [Gorblins], Melia had killed the rest. She was standing in a small circle of bodies, where they’d all fallen around her. Possibly in a single stroke. She had her two massive swords out, each dripping with carnage.

  “See?” she asked as Alastair stared out over the mess. “You don’t need to worry. But enough stalling. All that staring is wasting time.”

  Alastair was stunned. Melia was right. This entire camp was done.

  Technically, they could go back to town, turn their quest in, and call it a day. They’d accomplished their goals. They observed the town and got a sense for what was important in the area, which was, predictably, keeping their waters clean and safe. In a different time, back when his life was normal and sane, they’d dust their hands off and come back tomorrow. This would be their life for weeks, months, and possibly much longer.

  But right now…they could stay out longer. The focus for killing these mobs changed. No longer were they doing it for the town; they were doing it for themselves. The idea frightened Alastair. It was foreign to everything he knew. Yes, people needed money. They wanted to level. That’s why people had jobs. But a lot of people didn’t do what they did solely for money.

  And yet this…this. This was a task that had no other purpose than specifically pushing them to greater heights. He’d never considered doing what they did so…selfishly. But for some reason, it didn’t feel bad, like he imagined it might.

  He looked to the others, unsurprised to find them with thoughtful faces of their own. Eventually, Jessica took out her newly dubbed “poking stick” and was about to complain about rooting through dead bodies, but she froze.

  She opened her mouth and closed it. She stared at Alastair, then Ellesea, and finally her eyes settled on Melia. She broke into a massive, feral grin.

  “Holy crap. I just got a new skill.”

  Alastair’s eyes widened. Unlike [Mages], who generally picked up new spells from teachers or dusty old tomes, or even other [Paladins] who got theirs from studying scriptures and their faith, not everybody got skills the same way. Sometimes, skills came from seemingly nowhere, awarded by the system for reasons known only to itself. Usually it was deserved, and almost always well-earned. In this case, it was both.

  “I got [Looting], rank 1.”

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