“You have got to be shitting me.”

It was unbelievable, but there it was. Kana was half-tempted to hit ‘accept’ just to see what would happen next. His finger hovered over the button, right below the words Menic has sent you a Friend Request. Of all the things he’d expected to find when he logged back in, this was not one of them.

The worst that could happen if he added Menic was that the berserker used the information he got from his friends list to track Kana down and get his rematch. He could unfriend him whenever he wanted, and to be honest, Menic had been a surprisingly good sport about his loss. Kana hit accept.

The unexpected benefit of accepting that friend request was that he now knew that the crazy berserker wasn’t online. Presumably that meant Kana was safe to keep working on the range walkers quest line, but he found that he’d completely lost any motivation to do it. Finding out exactly what was going on in Istrius had ended the need to explore every little corner for abnormalities.

His new priority was to reach max level as soon as possible so that he could access the beta test server. That meant he needed to reprioritize his time. Kana didn’t know how to get to level 50 in a hurry, but he knew a guy who did. And Spiral was offline for the day anyway, so Kana wouldn’t have to listen to him whine about it. No doubt it would be costly, but he had the drol to spare.

Hey, we started at the same time, even killed the last boss of the training zone together. How much will it cost me to have you show me how you got to max level already?

He spent some time doing character upkeep in town while he waited to see if Exodus was going to reply. Surprisingly, he got a response a few minutes later.

I don’t think you can afford my rates, lucky-spear-guy. Not unless you’re willing to sell that 5-star weapon.

Kana rolled his eyes. Then he sent a message back.

You get me on the right path, coach me for one day, I’ll give you 30k drol.

Where’d you even get that much cash, noob?

That was barely the tip of the iceberg. Kana had bankrolled his first 100k already, and he hadn’t even kept track of how much he’d spent on gear. Very little of what he’d equipped were things that had dropped for him. Instead, he had chosen to let Valit sell off rare drops and used the returns to finance a selection of some of the better optimized pieces for a dragoon.

Half now, half at the end of the day.

They haggled a bit, but eventually settled on 50k, with half up front. Exodus shot him a party invite and five minutes later, they were meeting outside Aldur’s bank. Kana handed over the cash and said, “Alright, what’s first?”

Exodus took a good look at his gear, then shook his head and sighed. “Swear to God, if you’ve been abusing exploits to get this much money and I get dragged into that shit show again…”

Technically, Kana supposed that was true. What Paul had done to tweak his character’s hidden luck stat was kind of an exploit. He’d already decided it was better if no one knew that though, and he didn’t see any reason to change that policy. It wasn’t like Exodus was going to see what drops Kana got from anything they killed while they were grouped up.

“Here’s how it works,” Exodus told him, “You’ve got to know what’s worth spending time on and what’s not. Avoid zones with a lot of travel time between quests, avoid side quests that have crappy spawn rates for the items they want you to collect or the mobs they want you to kill, and avoid quests that you can’t handle without having to hunt for people to help you. If someone’s there when you show up, great, reap the rewards, but otherwise ignore group quests. That’s time you could be spending doing something else.”

Exodus talked as they made their way to the central teleportation spire, mostly describing a pattern of almost scary efficiency cutting across five different zones, plucking the low hanging fruit and moving on. He mentioned the quests that gave rewards that were generally worth the hassle for the gear upgrades, but then nixed almost all of them when he compared them to what Kana was already wearing.

“I think, for you, we’re going to focus on a straight XP burn. You’re already geared well enough to start playing at max level, which is ridiculous, by the way. We just need to get you there. With me helping you, I’m thinking a day to level 40, then another day to 45, and finish up the last 5 at the Crimson Plaza when it opens up on Saturday.”

Of course, that would mean 150k drol for Exodus to accompany him the entire time, which Kana didn’t have. If he got enough good drops and Valit flipped them fast enough, he just might get it though. He couldn’t care less about the money. If Paul wasn’t completely full of shit, they had at best two months left to take care of the Puppet Lord AI.

They started in some sort of forest zone with guerilla warfare style nature elementals that were all kinds of annoying until Exodus told him the trick to spotting them. Even once he knew, they were still difficult to see unaided, but there was a cure for that. Kana had missed a quest line early on to gain detection as a skill that made it so things like hidden mobs and items stood out more against the background.

That, however, was something he could go back and do on his own time. They were busy playing both sides of the field as they assisted both the defending elemental and the encroaching humans in simultaneously saving and destroying the forest. In a spectacular display of amoral mercenary work, Kana switched sides no less than six times and gained four levels in a little over an hour before they abandoned the zone without ever finishing the quest line.

According to Exodus, the end quests were too time consuming both in terms of how much cinematography there was and how small the rewards were compared to the effort. If they’d been interested in the gear, that would have been a different story, but the gauntlets Kana was wearing were already better than what he’d get.

The assassin had encyclopedic knowledge about Istrius, pointing out weak spots in enemies to hit for extra damage or stun debuffs, rattling off the steps in quest lines as well as the rewards before they even got to them, and explaining proper dragoon rotation techniques to achieve what he called “maximum sustained damage” for longer fights or “maximum burst damage” for when an enemy was weak enough that Kana could bring it down in a few seconds.

They moved on to a new zone, something on the other side of the world that was an icy tundra bisected by literal rivers of magma. “We’re not going to stay here too long,” Exodus told him. “There are lots of quests, but it takes way too long to run back and forth between objectives. There’s just one little village near the teleportation spire that’s got a nice, thick cluster of side quests.”

The general theme of the village was survival. They wanted meat and pelts for food and warmth, they wanted predatory animals killed, and they wanted a guy found who was supposed to be transporting medicine but hadn’t shown up.

“Yeah, he’s dead,” Exodus said. “Eaten by a yeti. It’s not worth the effort to go into the cave to retrieve the cargo unless the rare spawn is up, in which case you might get some good loot.”

By the time they were done harvesting elk venison, killing a man-eating polar bear, defending against a yeti ambush, and saving one random penguin from a hungry sea lion, Kana was up another level.

The next few hours went by just like that. Exodus dragged him all over the world, abusing the teleportation spires mercilessly to hop between quest hubs and harvest the fastest, easiest XP. Throughout the whirlwind tour, he kept up an endless series of lectures about combat theory, practical application, and synergizing with other classes.

Kana got to watch him take out elite mobs single-handedly on three separate occasions as Exodus explained what he was doing in real time to control his victims’ movements and reactions by taking advantage of its pre-programmed combat routines and its AI protocols designed to modify them. He told Kana how the game spawned the mobs with the same set of base instructions and how it built new reactions based on the stimulus it received.

“And almost every single time, these dumb things decide the appropriate response to being stunned is to do an area knockback attack as soon as they come out of it. They never take into account the terrain, so it’s really easy to get the hits in while they can’t fight back, duck behind cover as soon as they start moving, and avoid the ‘unavoidable’ area-wide retaliation.”

He demonstrated on two giant stone golems, then sent Kana to practice on the rest. Once they’d finished clearing out the base level of the old temple they’d agreed to clean out, Exodus led him up to the altar.

“This is one of those guys you’re better off ignoring if you’re playing solo. We can take him out easy together, but if you were on your own, he’s got a lot of control abilities that will shut you down and let him pick you apart.”

They proceeded to do just that, although the boss mob, some sort of voodoo ritualist named Danbrand the Heretic, put up a good fight. Kana spent almost the entire time being held in place with magical restraints, or tumbling through the air in altered gravity loops, or being cursed with 90% reduced movement speed. Meanwhile, Exodus managed to somehow effortlessly avoid being nailed with any sort of impairment and quickly dismantled the boss’s five HP bars.

It didn’t seem fair to get 7000 XP for that fight when he’d done almost nothing besides acting as a lightning rod for Exodus, but Kana was past caring at that point. He had no doubt that even if they were the same level, the assassin would run circles around him. What was more interesting to him was that he’d gotten a second piece of 5-star loot.

It was a piece of armor called Valkyrie’s Rise, which sounded familiar to Kana, but he couldn’t remember where he’d heard it before. He decided to say nothing to Exodus and just left it sitting in his inventory for the time being. If there was anyone he’d met who’d notice the sudden appearance of a second piece of artifact level equipment, it was Exodus.

“That’s everything here,” Exodus told him. “Next, we’re going to…”

------

Six hours after they’d started, Kana was level 39. Exodus got his other 25k and dropped group, telling him to get in touch if he came up with the cash and wanted another session. Kana had twelve 2-star drops, eight 3-star drops, five 4-star drops, and one new 5-star drop. He didn’t have a clue how much it was all worth, but he was guessing Valit would get him at least 50k for it, not even looking at the new artifact armor.

He sent her a message asking if she was around to take in a shipment of merchandise, then swung by her market stall to drop it all off. He picked up his cut from the day’s sales from her, another 14 in profits, and then returned to his house.

Simply put, he was exhausted. Kana had no idea how Exodus played the game at that pace non-stop, and if he was being honest with himself, there was no doubt he’d slowed the assassin down. Exodus would have done it all even faster if he wasn’t explaining everything the entire time.

Still, it had been worth it. The sheer amount of new knowledge regarding playstyle, group tactics, and exploitable enemy weaknesses was overwhelming. Kana doubted he’d remember even half of it by the time he logged out, but what he did remember would make the game so much easier.

He decided to call it a night early. Tomorrow, he’d meet Paul in a scripted encounter, though he was now admittedly too high of a level to really be in the area they were supposed to pretend to bump into each other at. Spiral wasn’t supposed to log on tonight. And he was just drained from everything.

He logged out, and the real world faded back in. Jon commenced his nightly ritual of stretching and going to the bathroom at the end of a session, then sent his son a message wishing him a happy birthday.

------

Derek’s HUD lit up with a notification from his dad, but he ignored it in favor of finishing his pizza. His mom chattered away about college essays and getting scholarship money, but he ignored that too. There was really only one thing that could pull him away from the plate full of cheesy goodness he was working on.

The notification light in his HUD flashed again, and this time he stopped to read the message.

Thanks for coming to see me today. It meant a lot to me. Hopefully soon I’ll be able to see you, too. Happy birthday!

Derek’s mouth curled up into a smile when he read the message. His mom stopped and quirked an eyebrow. “Who are you talking to?” she asked.

“What? No one,” he said.

“Is it a girl?”

“No. Shut up. Just some old joke memes about World War 4 from the group chat.”

“Protesting a bit hard there, Derek.”

“Mom!”

His cheeks were red. He could feel it. And he knew she had noticed. She just smirked at leaned forward. “What’s her name?”

Derek took another bite of his pizza instead of answering. He chewed slowly, but she was patient. When he didn’t answer, she hooked a finger under his plate and pulled his food away.

“Fine, Mom! Yes, it’s a girl. Her name is Kelly. Are you happy now?”