Bethany came back with Umber in her tiny form wrapped around her neck like a choker necklace. She had loved them when she was a teenager since they made her neck look longer, and now she could wear whatever she wanted.

  “Look what I taught Umbi, she makes the most beautiful necklace.” Bethany said, a growl/purr could be heard from her neck in response to the praise.

  “Come here Umber,” Eli said, calling to her. She jumped off Bethany’s neck and landed in his hands. “We need to have a talk about this, you can’t go making Bethany more attractive. We have work to get to and it’s very distracting.” He said, fake admonishing her, but dropping the act at the end with a wink. Now Bethany and Umber were purr/growling at the praise, he had expected the noise from Umber, but hearing it from Bethany surprisingly turned him on and he put Umber on his shoulder and walked right up to Bethany and kissed her.

  “Eh, hem,” Stacy fake cleared her throat. “Look, I like watching as much as the next girl but there needs to be a time and place kind of thing going on.”

  “Oh shit, Umber, how old are you?” Eli asked. “We should check before doing things in front of her.” Umber flew up to be in front of him and Bethany then held out all 18 of her claws in front of her, then closed her hands, then opened them seven times until the last one was just 11 claws.

  “Is that young for a drake?” Bethany asked. She responded with something similar to a shrug.

  “What we are trying to ask is if you know how reproduction works? Are you old enough to have a mate of your own?” Eli asked. Umber shook her head yes then seemed to growl out an entire sentence of intelligible screeches and grunts while making gestures with her hands and occasionally pointing to herself and Eli. He nodded like he understood and petted her head when she was done.

  “What did she say?” Stacy asked.

  Eli looked at her with a scandalized expression, “I’ll thank you not to ask, it’s a little personal don’t you think.” He then lay back down in the grass and Bethany lay next to him. Stacy returned to the spot she had been in before.

  After a bit of silence that Eli and Bethany were enjoying, Stacy spoke up, “So the next step is the raid dungeon then?”

  “There are many steps before the raid dungeon, Umber needs to combat practice and some leveling, I still have a skill to improve, plus some other things.” Eli started by counting on fingers but just gave up at the end. He had a feeling something else was coming but he wasn’t sure if it was before the raid dungeon, it was the raid dungeon, or it would happen right after they got out. It was possible that meeting those five seemingly at random was the thing, but he doubted it. He was starting to get a feeling of when the system shenanigans were going to happen, it was always when he thought things were going well.

  “Wait,” Bethany said and sat up quickly, “Where is James?”

  “He walked off shortly after Umber’s summoning.” Stacy said. “I think he was trying to get his head around how amazing she is.” Umber had been curled up on Eli’s chest, but when she heard she was being praised again, she quickly stood tall and puffed up with her nose pointed up.

  “Should we go look for him?” Bethany asked Eli.

  “Umber, could you fly up and look for him? Better stay small so you don’t scare him off, just come back and tell me where he is. Can you do that?” Eli asked her. She waved her hand at him as if to say it would be easy and took off into the air.

  “While we wait, I have a few questions.” Stacy said. “About you specifically.”

  “Me?” Bethany asked.

  “No, about Ash.”

  “Fire away, I’ll answer them, but you might not like the answer.” he said, Stacy heard just the smallest bit of sadness in his voice, as if he already knew what she was going to ask and that she wasn’t going to like the answer.

  “What is with the fuzzy underwear?”

  “Well, I have other gear, but it makes me look a bit sinister. A white mask with creepy eyes and a cloak made of feathers that makes it look like I'm covered in volcanic ash. But mostly, I just like how it feels to be this underdressed, it feels more honest.”

  That was a way longer answer than she was expecting and since he was in a sharing mood she decided to quickly get to the next question. “What would I need to do to prove to you that I would make a good apprentice?”

  “Show me your resolve. We aren’t a bunch of highly trained martial artists. What we are, What I am at the core, is Sisyphus.”

  “Your what?” Stacy said, confused.

  “Sisyphus, is an old Greek myth about a king who arrogantly tricked the Gods. Zeus punishes him by making him endlessly push a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down each time.”

  “Could you speak plainly, joining you sounds like a lifetime type of thing so I don’t want riddles.”

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  Eli chuckled, “fair enough. The story is about how life can seem pointless, there's always another hill to climb. I read something somewhere that said ‘One must imagine sisyphus happy’. By embracing the endless pursuit of achievement in life, you can be happy by embracing the pointlessness.”

  “That wasn’t speaking plainly.” Stacy retorted with a bit of an attitude.

  “I’ll explain,” Bethany chimed in, “don’t mind his musings, I think his Demi-God…ness shook up his perspective a bit and it makes it hard for him to explain things. What he means to say is that resolve is what we are looking for. And to clarify, when we say resolve, we mean the kind of thing that makes people keep moving forward regardless of how well it's going. We want people who get up no matter how many times they get knocked down.”

  “I can see that being a desirable trait, but why is that the biggest one, or from what Ash said, the only one.”

  “I don’t fully understand it myself. He tried explaining it to me by using an analogy about copyright laws and the difference between owning something and having the right to alter it.” Both women shook their heads while Eli still lay in the grass, eyes closed just enjoying the conversation, he still wasn’t recovered. It was getting better but it was as if his bond with Umber was a marathon for his soul and he never trained for it. He was sore and not at 100%.

  “Anyways,” Bethany said again, “If you have the resolve, you can train your will, and that can make you special which we want in our group.”

  “Does will training hurt? My will fluctuates a bit but it's been over 100 since level 50.” Stacy asked.

  “I’ve done some, I should probably do more since my connection to Ash gives me a lot of power, but it's very tedious and boring. And the results are minimal at first.”

  “Whats your will?”

  “It was just over 400 before he became a transcendent and I became his High Acolyte. Now it just reads as four asterisks.” Bethany said.

  Before Stacy could even react with a shocked face, Umber came back, landed on Eli’s chest and started making screeches, growls and clicks. “Umber says he is headed to the safe zone, he will be there by morning. I think we have rested long enough, let's get closer to that raid dungeon.”

  Travelling at what Eli had called ‘Stacy speed’, they got to the raid dungeon when the sun came up. At least they were pretty sure it was the raid dungeon. They stood on the top ledge of this massive sink-hole, but it wasn’t empty, there was a forest inside it that was almost tall enough to poke out the top of the hole, but not quite. From a distance it would just look like a bit of grass, the trees and brush inside were so thick there wasn’t a single spot where they could see the ground. They spent an hour walking around the edge, they didn’t even get half way around since they weren’t walking fast, just observing to get a feel for the place.

  “You guys go down there and give Umber some practice and experience fighting monsters. I need to work on a skill before we start the raid dungeon. Umber you be careful and listen to Bethany. Stacy, I want you to focus on how your abilities can assist Bethany and Umber instead of trying to take something down on your own. I expect you to have a lot to tell me about how it went and what you learned.”

  “Bye love,” Bethany said and gave him a kiss before starting to walk around the edge looking for a good way down. Umber was small and flying at attention in front of him and gave him a solute, then flew over and landed on Bethany’s head gently. Eli was shocked that the little drake knew about saluting and stuff but he guessed that it was so ingrained in him, that there was probably some level of memory sharing going on.

  Eli went around the edge of the sink-hole as well, but stopped at a point between where they were and the safe-zone to the north. He reached for his will and his earth node and made something similar to a twenty foot tall stone teepee with a third of it open facing away from the sink-hole. It was empty inside except for a two foot tall and four foot diameter circular platform. He sat on it cross-legged, and began meditating. There was a question that his weakened state might hinder his ability to upgrade his cudgel skills rarity, but it needed to happen. He was having to put far too much magic into it when conjuring it to make it strong enough to withstand his abilities or even just a full strength hit.

  While pondering on how to get his skill to upgrade he came up with a plan, it was kind of a cheat since he would use his absurd will to force it. It also had the risk of just simply not working and his skill or node being damaged, but he felt like it was worth the risk. Hours passed as he prepared himself for this untested method, part of it was working up the nerve to possibly magically maim himself, and part of it was making sure that his magic was calm. He needed all of his magic calm for his focused will to have the best chance of success, so he was taking his time to make sure he got it right.

  After he got it all as calm as he could manage, and it stayed that way for over an hour, he then formed his idea for the new upgraded bone cudgel in his mind. He really wanted to keep with the death theme and magic in the cudgel and he also tried to tie it all together into a story to give the weapon more depth and focused purpose. He went with a pretty basic story about death as one of the riders of the apocalypse and his weapon being what Eli conjured. Changing the story to have him use a mace instead of a scythe was simple but he wasn’t sure it would work, so he took it a step further and imagined death on a horse dual wielding extendable semi-bladed maces and charging through planet sized armies.

  Splitting his focus he used part of it to keep his magic as calm as possible, and the rest was focused on playing the scene and story of death, the pale rider of the apocalypse and his maces. He kept this up for a full day, then all at once he attached that image and story of the weapon to his will and intent and shoved them into his death node and held them there. The experience was intensely painful, but required focus, so he forced the pain to the back of his mind and kept holding. He replayed the scene in his head over and over, imagining what the weapon would look like and how it would feel in his hand.

  Over the next day or so, the pain slowly subsided and Eli felt like he could relax. He was covered in sweat and his whole body hurt, this was a mix of his magic being shaken up and his soul still recovering. He just wanted to sleep for a week, but he knew that wasn’t a good idea, he could probably only get away with a day or two before the system would drop a meteor on him or something to get him moving again. He saw he had a lot of system windows, but he was too tired so he lay on the ground in front of his platform and fell asleep.

  While asleep he had dreams of the scene he had played over and over in his head, when they first started he was one of the warriors in the army that death obliterated. As it repeated the army got smaller and Eli got stronger, over and over this happened for what seemed like an eternity. Then it was just him fighting death, again there was an eternity of fighting and losing but he never gave up and never slowed down. After an endless existence of fighting, he defeated death and picked up one of his weapons. Holding it in his hand, death's tattered armor appeared on his body, his skin grew white and his body slightly taller and slightly emaciated. He had become death from his story.