Chapter Twenty Six – A Player’s Wrath

“Look, I get that the little mob beat your stones in, Boldy, but there’s a reason for that. It's probably time to face facts. Beastmasters suck. You can be a dps or a tank, but you’re shit at both. It’s pretty well documented. You have to get stupid lucky with that class and find like, an epic rare mob, and then actually catch it, to even be worth dragging on a raid. Like a fairy, or a drake. You should just reroll a new character and start over.”

“Fuck you,” Half Bold replied succinctly. “I’ll reroll your face!”

The man laughed as if that had been funny.

What the hell was he doing back here? I glared at the boyish character, my freckles glowing a deep red. This wouldn’t stand.

“Just saying, man. Epic level mob or bust,” he said with a shrug.

“And what exactly did you think I gathered you all here for?” he asked. “I had an epic level mob. It was fucking stolen.”

“Yeah we know, we know, a talking two-shot electric Jelly...Fae,” he said with a tone I hadn’t heard often, and held up the first two fingers on each of his hands, bending them in a way that seemed mocking.

Good. Half Bold should be mocked.

“We hit the safe zone and the dungeon is a few miles that way,” Half Bold said while pointing directly at the path I’d run from last night. Dungeon Home.

‘That jellybastard!’ I thought, wishing I could hit him with my shocker without becoming visible.

Something told me that was another one of those words I apparently wasn’t supposed to say, even though I actually sort of knew what it meant. An illegitimate child didn’t really sound like an insult though. It just sounded sad.

It seemed to fit now, though. Maybe I should change his name to Half Bastard? No… Amy might get mad at me again. A solution sprang to mind as I stared at him. Half Bast. Yeah. That sounded good.

I looked at him and was a little surprised to see the name hadn’t changed. Could I only rename something once?

“Don’t forget to set your home points,” Half Bold said. “The mob is fast, and its shocker paralyzes you and can drain damn near half your health in one hit. From what I’ve read, not much else in the dungeon is worthy of note, and it doesn’t look like anyone other than me ever found the Jellyfae so it might be a rare spawn. Got that?”

“Hey! This is Thorn’s home point! Huh. Guess she found the dungeon first,” one of the men said, seeming to actively ignore Half Bold as he pressed buttons on screens I couldn’t see.

I blinked. Thorn’s home point? Did they mean Red Thorn?

I shook myself. Red Thorn was a problem for the future but Half Bold was here, right now. He had to go. I could worry about Red Thorn later. Unfortunately, they continued talking about her.

“Have you seen her vids? She’s fuckin hot,” said a bald orc wearing a light vest that exposed most of his arms and chest. I needed to be wary of that one. The less armor invaders wore, the more dangerous they usually were.

“It’s a video game avatar. Everyone’s hot,” Half Bold said distractedly, staring off towards Dungeon Home.

‘Video game avatar?’ I thought, confused.

“Yea but not everyone’s got style. The Thorn is rising up the ranks. Some people think she’s just naturally talented as fuck in the real world and is actually overcompensating for a pretty normal Dexterity stat. Some of the shit she does is fucking unbelievable man,” Bald Fist said, waving his arms around emphatically. “Did you see her solo that Mountain Ogre in the Siege of Telruk by running up its fucking tusk?”

I frowned. That… sounded like something Red Thorn would do.

“Red Thorn is a hack. She probably cheats, just like The Wanderer did with his Intelligence and that fucked up class he found,” said a caster type who was dressed all in blue. He was a bit shorter than Bald Fist, but he was human. I named him for his most prominent feature; the ridiculous-looking sand-colored pointy hat he wore.

It seemed to work just fine. Perhaps I could only name something once. Strange.

Half Bold, Pointy Hat, and Bald Fist were the only ones who had spoken so far. The other two remained quiet. One, the only girl as far as I could tell, held a bow that looked beautiful. It was an ornate thing made of a white wood with ornate shining silver inlays. At least, I thought it was wood. The closer I looked, the more I thought maybe it was made of bone, like Skeleton was made from. I couldn’t tell which. It was shaped into something breathtaking to behold though. Paradoxically, she was one of the plainest adventurers I’d ever seen. Plain leather trousers and a brown robe-looking thing were all she wore as far as I could see. I named her Dull Beauty.

She didn’t expose much skin but something about her told me she was by far the most dangerous of this group.

Why did they always seem to come in groups of five? The thought hit me while I was looking at the last member. A healer, definitely. Boring white robes like almost every other healer. He was also a Halfling, which was at least a little unusual, but there was nothing special about him. Brown hair with a blue streak down the middle that I could swear I’d seen before, along with a tattoo on his face that I’d also seen before, though neither feature had been on a halfling.

Strange…

They finished their screen touching and continued on, jabbering back and forth at each other as they did. Fucking invaders, acting as if all their slaughter was barely even important. Why couldn’t they be more like Amy or Iron? What was so appealing about going into my home and killing the people there?

I moved to follow them as silently as I could from the trees, but hesitated as crippling fear overtook me.

Half Bold probably wouldn’t recognize me like this. But what if he did? What if they killed me and found out how… useful my body was? All of that, stacked on top of the fact that I probably couldn’t really do anything to help Bugbear and the others anyway. If I entered now, they would attack me, too.

I should just stay here where it was safe.

I should… But I couldn’t.

What if Half Bold decided to take Bugbear? I could never forgive myself if I went back one day to find a way to free him and found him gone, stolen by that fucked up Halfling.

No. They weren’t going near that cave. I would make sure of it.

How to do that though? I no longer had the advantages I had as a true Jellyfae. Instead I was huge, but not huge enough, fast, but not fast enough, and… bluish. I still had my shocker, but that was all. I didn’t even have the bugbears or Ghoul as backup!

None of that mattered though. I was going to protect Dungeon Home. Even… if it wasn’t my home anymore.

I tore off into the trees, ignoring the warning that flashed in my peripheral vision about leaving the safe zone.

It was time to kill some invaders.