What they found when they got out of the city gates did nothing to reduce Kaldalis’ disillusionment.

The Fossirianoles were fat green-scaled lizards about four feet long and two feet wide at the shoulders, with big forelimbs that ended in giant digging claws. Periodically one of them would sit up and puff out a sack under its jaw, inflating like a big red balloon. Despite the groundskeeper’s insistence that they were trashing the local farmland, they were very clearly not doing that.

They were milling around in a small cordoned-off stone pen, from which the burrowing animals couldn’t escape. There was even a Baimer city guard posted nearby. As she spotted them, she waved for them to get to work on the penned-in animals.

The Fossirianoles weren’t the only creatures thus contained. There was a nearby pen holding a bunch of boars with long snouts filled with multiple layers of sharp tusks. Just beyond that was an aviary filled with tiny feathered bipeds, each about twice the size of a chicken, but bristling with sharp claws on every limb. The whole affair felt uncomfortably like a theme park.

They still had to kill ten of the Fossirianoles. They would have had to kill ten each, but because it was a kill quest and not a gathering quest, partying up meant they only had to kill ten all together. Kaldalis didn’t know if he could stomach it if he’d had to kill ten of them himself. They were weak, docile, and easily dispatched, but each one felt more like slaughtering livestock than exterminating vermin.

This wasn’t adventuring. This was a massacre at the petting zoo.

The guard accepted the quest turn-in for killing the chubby burrowing lizards, and gave them a follow-up quest to cull a dozen Scrofagators. She had some story about them becoming a threat to the city’s youth if their population got out of control. It all felt hollow, though, seeing as they were contained in a muddy wooden pen. They at least put up a little more fight, but a swipe of their tusks did less than sixty total damage to Kaldalis, while his strikes in return dished out over three hundred and fifty damage. The job was done in only a few minutes.

Despite how boring it seemed to Kaldalis, Reno and Ess were having fun. Reno stood outside of the pen and started harassing the monsters with arrows, drawing a crowd of them at the edge of the pen. Once there were four or five gnawing on and shouldering against the wooden fence penning them in, Ess would jump in behind them and employ Sweeping Strikes to clear the whole group out in a few quick strokes. He found himself feeling jealous of them again, but realized that this probably did seem to be a step up for them.

At the very least, there was something to be had for Kaldalis’ efforts. As he was level 15 now, he got his spear skill rating up to 75, unlocking the next ability. It was another movement skill, and while it was unimpressive at first, he quickly realized it was meant to be used in tandem with Jump, and not taken as two separate abilities. The new skill was Slow Fall, and would reduce his fall speed for 60 seconds, with a two minute cooldown. It was just as long as his maximum continuous uptime for Jump, with a lower cooldown to boot. Fall damage was a thing of the past, now, as long as he had a spear at hand.

He wondered how Nyxlas’ Augment would interact with it, but he didn’t want to find out now while hanging out with Reno and Ess. If it worked the way he thought, it might stop him altogether up in the air for the full duration of it, and he didn’t want to be relentlessly teased for jumping and getting stuck the entire rest of the trip.

They weren’t alone out here for long, either. It seemed they got out here during the lunch break, and as they were coming back with their kills on the Scrofagators, a dozen other adventurers filtered out of the gate. It was obvious that only three or four of them were here on the same tutorial quest, as the others just seemed to be killing the trapped monsters relatively indiscriminately to grind experience points. Kaldalis couldn’t tell how the creatures in the pens were replenishing their numbers, but there always seemed to be more.

“So do we need to go kill a bunch of those chicken things now?” Reno asked the guard as they got their quest completion reward.

“If you want,” the guard said with a shrug. “I’m not your mom. Do whatever. Quest is over. You’re not my problem anymore.” She hooked a thumb over her shoulder back towards the city. “If you want more work, head back to the castle and ask around.”

“We should probably find something more interesting to do,” Kaldalis said. “Now that we’re done with the tutorial.”

“Aw, come on,” Reno said with a laugh. “You’re just saying that because you’re an adrenaline junkie.”

“It is a bit less exciting,” Ess said, giving Reno a gentle nudge on the shoulder. “But it’s kind of nice to not be in mortal peril all day long.”

“Alright,” Kaldalis admitted with a smirk at Reno. “I’ll admit that I might like a little more danger than this to feel like we’re really adventuring. And I’m not going to complain that we’re several more minutes farther away from a gruesome death than usual.” He crossed his arms with a sigh. “But you have to admit that it’s hard to want to devote more time to this grind, now that the quests are gone.”

“There should be more back at the castle,” Reno said, patting Kaldalis on the shoulder. “And maybe that quest will lead us into certain death. Would that make you feel better?”

“Maybe,” Kaldalis said, fake pouting. “Though I think a dungeon might be a more self-destructive use of our time.”

“You think there’s a dungeon around here somewhere?” Ess asked.

“There’s been one near every town we’ve been to so far,” Kaldalis said, gesturing vaguely at the city walls above them. “This is a big fucking city now, but it wasn’t always, right? Someone had to found it at some point. It had to be a camp first, and then go through some upgrade event after the nearby dungeon was cleared.”

“What makes you think that?” Ess asked. “This is the starting city. Maybe Monsoon just fucking built it. Plopped it down without regard for the rules they were going to make later?”

Kaldalis felt himself flush. He didn’t know why he didn’t think of it that way. The systems in this game were so alive he really thought that there was a time when this hillside didn’t have a giant city growing out of it. The way Cotanaku had been formed and grown had given him the impression that the whole world had the same degree of interactivity.

“Okay, how about this,” Kaldalis said, “there should be a dungeon around here, so that people can do a dungeon tutorial and know how they work. Is that better?”

“Much more reasonable,” Ess said with a nod. “But why would they be any more dangerous than this? Maybe they’ll be trimmed down for baby’s first dungeon tutorial.”

“Because NPCs can’t die in dungeons,” Kaldalis said. “Dungeon tutorials can be as dangerous as they want because the NPCs respawn like we do in there. Taking the teeth out of the tutorial makes sense, because they don’t want to be actively killing off their prospective adventurers, but in a dungeon they’ll just get right back up.”

“Alright,” Reno said with a shrug. “We’ll find a dungeon so that we can get some experience points and Kaldalis can get himself killed. Then we’ll all be happy, right?”

“I’d rather he not die,” Ess said, “but if that’s what makes him happy, I offer my full emotional support.”

“Thanks,” Kaldalis said, tipping his head back imperiously, “I was hoping to get embroiled in a conflict of epic proportions and somehow wind up in the middle of it fighting for my life against murderous hordes of over-leveled monsters. You know, my usual Thursday night. But I guess a dungeon will have to do instead.”

“Yeah, yeah, come on, drama queen,” Reno said with a dismissive wave. “Let’s find you a dungeon.”

The guard at the gate was shockingly helpful when Reno asked about a dungeon. She just vaguely pointed in a direction inside the city. It wasn’t much to go on, but considering what happened last time he asked for directions from a guard in Baimer - when he first arrived - any information at all was a surprise.

They travelled that direction for a few blocks before asking another guard for more specific directions. They got a more expected response there - being blown off entirely. They tried again with another guard who just named a part of the city: the North Hill neighborhood. Without any information about where that was specifically - their map menu didn’t have any area of the city labelled with individual neighborhoods - they had to keep asking.

“Alright,” Kaldalis said after the third consecutive time a guard was an unhelpful asshole. “I give up.”

“Are we heading back to the castle, then?” Ess asked. She pointed, and as before, they could clearly see the castle from here. Even if the roads were a bit winding, they would be able to find their way there eventually just by looking up periodically and angling their course appropriately.

“No, I’m taking an alternate route.” Kaldalis grimaced and shook his head. “I hoped it wouldn’t have to come to this, but I guess there’s only one way to get around in Baimer.”

“What’s that?” Reno asked.

“Don’t worry, I’ve done this before,” Kaldalis said before turning towards the nearest narrow alleyway. “Excuse me, sir?” Kaldalis called, his eyes picking out a slumped figure in the shadows. “Can I ask you a favor?”

The man was a balding Finnian whose metallic-sheened skin was wrinkled and sun-damaged to the point that his face looked like a flattened soda can with eyes. His clothing was very worn and stained, but still a few weeks from being reduced to rags. He didn’t respond verbally, but he looked up at Kaldalis, struggling to his feet with a quizzical expression.

“We were told there’s a dungeon somewhere in the city. In the North Hill somewhere?” Kaldalis said. “Can you help us get there?”

The man started to silently gesture, pointing and banking his hands in a way that indicated that he was giving directions, and Kaldalis held up a hand to stop him.

“I was hoping it wouldn’t be too inconvenient for you to take us there directly,” Kaldalis said, reaching for his purse and producing a half-dozen Crescents. “I’m terrible with directions.” He explained with a smile.

The man stared at the money with open hunger. Despite the obvious desire, he still seemed to be in absolute disbelief when Kaldalis tipped his hand and dumped the crescent-shaped coins into the Finnian’s palm.

Just as before with the Talsar who had led Kaldalis on a strangely chaotic but direct route to the docks, the Finnian took off at a pace that seemed unreasonable for the man’s age. Kaldalis and his friends found themselves struggling to keep up as they cut through tiny alleyways and strange stairwells.

In under a minute, they emerged from the darker routes through the city into an open courtyard. In the middle of it was a glittering chrome statue of an adrogynous figure in armor standing on top of a giant dragon head, holding a spear that pierced the dragon’s skull. The figure had two giant S-curved horns that swept back from their forehead and then up again at the sky. There was a cafe at one end of the courtyard, where a string quartet filled the air with a lilting, relaxing melody.

The statue itself was slightly off from the exact center from the courtyard, and at its feet was an unlit stairwell that vanished into darkness. The old man pointed at the stairwell with a smile.

“Thank you kindly, sir,” Kaldalis said, dropping two more crescents into his hand, making it an even eight - two Full Doubloons worth. “You’ve been such a help.”

The man made a couple of deep bows with a broad grin as he backed away quickly and scurried back towards the nearest alley, as if afraid Kaldalis might snatch the money back at any moment. Kaldalis knew that the man probably would have been perfectly happy with the six crescents he’d handed him at first. And that the six was probably overpaying already. But the last thing he wanted was to try and short-change someone who was leading him into the underbelly of the city where he could easily get lost for hours.

“How the fuck did we get here?” Reno asked, looking back at the alley they’d emerged from. “What just happened?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Kaldalis said. “It worked. I don’t need to understand how.” He gestured at the dark stairwell. “So how about we get to it?”