A dark place.

  A glowing line of Lightstones spiralled out into the black and briefly illuminated two humans, a wolf, and a donkey with the wind of their rapid descent whipping through their clothes and fur.

  At Henry’s instruction, Dan a Lightstone below them, the glowing dot shrinking before striking ground with a tap half a kilometre below.

  “Figures,” Donkey Bro hee-hawed. “Just as fortune shines upon me, I am plunged into the abyss.”

  “We’re fine.” Henry swapped some of the Spelltomes in the chest-straps he’d equipped as soon as they had begun to fall.

   200 metres ahead of them, he used a tome with high Vitality to endure the impact. Gathering a Flora charge, he shot a at the wolf, then used a Miracleworker on Dan and a Water-spec Shaman on the donkey.

  All three of them landed without harm.

  A few of the Lightstones he'd thrown out had struck wall. This underground chamber had a tall but narrow design like an inverted skyscraper. Aside from a few supportive pillars made from the same reinforced clay as the walls, there were no extra architectural features, furnishings, or carvings to indicate the identity of the builders.

  “Big Bro, there’s a dead boss!”

  One of the Lightstones lay atop the dust-caked corpse of a monstrously-huge longhorn beetle. Larger than five mammoths tied together by rope, it had two antennae as tall and thick as utility poles.

  “Quiet, Alfgrim.” Henry stopped the wolf who’d sniffed the truth from barking its warning. “It’s not dead, Dan. It’s trying to lure us into approaching it. That’s the hidden boss, Kabit The Green, a.k.a. The Mammoth Beetle.”

  “Oh, like the name of these dungeons – The Mammoth Beetle Temple.”

  “Indeed, it was the sect’s ruling deity.”

  Henry guessed that The Tyrant of Sokgyemant had locked it down here after dethroning it, maybe for conducting experiments, maybe for a laugh.

  “Wow. It must be tough!”

  “Let him have a go at me!” Donkey Bro puffed out its muscled chest, which, with the fading of , suddenly returned to its shabby shape. "In 5 minutes."

  "I suspect,” said Henry, “that its physical strength has weakened after being locked here; otherwise, it would have attacked immediately. However, since it was a Tier-10 Smallgod during its reign, if its cognition is intact, it'll pose an extreme threat.”

  The minds of Gods worked far faster than humans. If The Redeemer hadn’t been senile, it would have smoked Henry.

  “Since we can’t be certain,” he continued, “we’ll take a conservative approach. At my signal, you three will beeline it to the wall behind us. Donkey Bro will begin building an exit tunnel—“

  “More manual labour? I object!”

  “Or he can stay here and get crushed into glue by one of those giant antennae; his choice. If he decides to build the tunnel—which I’d advise him to do upwards within the reinforced walls to avoid a collapse—your task, Dan, would be to protect its back. Capeesh?”

  Dan smiled handsomely. He enjoyed the protective role. “What are you going to do, Big Bro?”

  “The same thing I always do, Dan. Beat up the boss, collect the loot.”

  For battling a former God, his skill with the forms was still too clunky, so he used the randomiser from his Overdream training to select one of the seven martial arts he’d learned so far.

  That should be a fair challenge, he thought.

  The Art of Sword and Shield was not a supreme art form; it had no obscure origin, no enlightened manuals, no overly-demanding execution. In fact, it was the basic style taught to noobs. Henry’d studied it to lessen the chance of being caught off guard by their unpredictable, Neanderthal thought processes.

  He thrust out his hand towards the handsome meathead. “The arming sword I lent you, please.”

  Dan, being polite, returned the sword by its handle. “Do you want the shield?”

  “Nah, this is a sidequest, let’s not loiter for too long.”

  Pressing his non-sword hand to a Spelltome with pumped up STR and VIT stats, he began a sequence of one-sword drills. These came from the Sword Solo sub-tradition preferred by melee-orientated Spellcasters and Cutthroats.

  His movements, as he slashed, stepped, parried, stepped, feinted, stepped, and stabbed, were direct and simple like a boiled potatoe.

  During his warm-up, he sniffed a complex chemical aroma, which, when tested with , revealed a lengthy message from the monster God ‘muttering’ to itself.

  “Must I feel disappointment at the prey detecting my trap? I claim, no. There is a famous line in Goxoak’s The Paradigm of Discontent. ‘The size of the baron’s treasury is the poverty of his heart.’ By this, he refers, of course, to the tired cliché of the penny-pinching ruler, whose enrichment arises from the mistreatment of their subjects and so on. I contend, however, that Goxoak was correct in a secondary but—you will forgive me, for this betrays my Hckarrian hysterics—more essential sense. For those of us blessed with sapience, the magnitude of a thing is determined not by its so-called 'objective value' but by the relative emotional value that is a function of one’s desires. Because of the baron's impoverished heart, he expands his treasury at the cost of the citizenry, yes, but also, the treasury is in an immaterial sense enlarged BY his greed. Assessed according to this analytic framework, the flirtations of my prey, their decision to prolong their demise through a method that will no doubt shrink their bodies through the expenditure of calories and so on - these, paradoxically, I claim, INCREASE the size of the meal.”

  Henry groaned.

  A mad, verbose, imprisoned, weakened monster God...these lazy game developers were always reusing their archetypes.

  “Dan, Donkey, go now. Alfgrim, follow them.”

  While they skedaddled, he gathered a Fauna charge for to boost his Strength further, his jaw sprouting a beard with its activation, then addressed the monster directly. “Sulid, Berde Kabit! Hinunoa, pinaagi sa dugo pakig-istory!”

  The monster swivelled its gargantuan head to face the human and released a curious spray. “From your understanding me and speaking in the ancient Katawahana tongue, I surmise that you’ve mastered . This achievement, combined with the arrogance with which you speak to a God, leads me to conclude that you suppress your might. In that case, I, Kabit The Green, feel no humiliation in swearing my eternal and humble servitude so long as I'm freed from this brutal imprison—”

  It paused when the donkey tore a hole through the walls it’d itself been unable to scratch.

  “I did keep a bit in reserve,” replied Henry, watching the three slipping out of sight into the tunnel.

  He drew a vial from his pocket and swallowed its contents. As a warmth suffused throughout his blood and nerves to purge away any debuffs, it unsheathed the keen edge of his senses from the scabbard of intoxication.

  He repeated the warm-up drill. The difference this time was a subtle, but one who’d mastered The Art of Sword and Shield would recognise that his feints weren’t missing their intended target by centimetres anymore, and then they would be stunned as he performed the pattern again at double speed.

  Kabit saw nothing it couldn’t handle. “To quote Araknavia The Quiet from his Parables of The Web, 'The fly struggles, the hunger grows.' Then, I must apologise for transitioning us to the sanguine dialectic of barbarians. After my victory, do not find it improper of me to commandeer your companion for my escape; isolation makes one rude.”

  The monster lifted itself up onto its six feet and shook its multi-mammoth-mass, throwing off the dust of the millennia to reveal its emerald exoskeleton beneath.

  One of its antennae, creaking like a ship mast, was raised high, its tip passing into the dark beyond the illumination range of any Lightstones.

  When it came crashing down, Henry side-stepped, moving the exact distance necessary to dodge, and slashed.

  The antenna slamming the ground where he’d been was severed cleanly in two, the trunk gushing green haemolymph until the dismembered section could be fused back via self-healing.

  He noted that Kabit had the health pool and durability of a Level 20 500-man boss.

  “Do not celebrate prematurely,” sprayed the monster. “What you witness is merely the exordium of my thesis.”

  From the crown of its head, eight extra antennae exploded forth.

  Henry wasn’t surprised. The monster’s abilities had been recorded by its enemies, although he was uncertain which of them it would have retained.

  Jogging towards the monster, he dodged, weaved, and slashed through the storm of antennae. With each passing moment, the assault became harder to evade, as Kabit used its enhanced God cognition to devise ever trickier combinations.

  Within a few seconds, the monster had deduced the main limitation of The Art of Sword and Shield. Its most complex distribution was a basic scheme of pulsing once every 0.5-seconds. This forced Henry to pad out his footwork with micro-steps to land his blows with the proper timing.

  Nevertheless, due to the unwieldy weight of the antennae, they could not change direction fast enough to catch him.

  When he reached Kabit, it enclosed itself in a 2-metre thick blanket of corrosive gas. Henry, though, confident that he could heal through the damage with his enhanced stats, dove right in and climbed on top of the monster so that its attempts to whip him would hurt itself.

  Kabit’s next play was to sacrifice a chunk of its health points to form hundreds of pustules around its shell. When these popped, an army of smaller, pig-sized longhorn beetles crawled out and swarmed after their foe.

  To combat them, Henry switched to The Art of Sword and Shield’s sub-mode Against The Many. The simply-titled mode was arguably the martial art’s most complicated.

  It was divided into four stages, each more mentally-demanding than the last. In the first, the practitioner envisioned a sphere-sized zone around each target corresponding to their maximum attack range, which they then avoided entering except when delivering their own attack. In the second, the shape of the avoidance zones was reduced to correspond to the opponent’s attack range at the moment when the practitioner would be near the opponent. In the third, the avoidance zones were treated as phasing in and out based on the opponents’ cooldowns and resource usage. And in the fourth, the zones were envisioned with their damage numbers and effects; the practitioner, rather than avoiding them all, constantly calculated an optimal path, perhaps accepting non-critical blows in order to achieve a greater goal.

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  He’d mastered Stages 1 to 3, but the 4th was beyond his skill level. Such calculations required either the enhanced mental speed of the game's Gods or an amount of experience he’d yet obtained.

  Regardless, Stage 2 handled the longhorn swarm with ease. When Kabit revealed a new ability it’d developed in its isolation, telepathically possessing a minion, Henry ramped up to Stage 3 to fend off the constant covert stabs.

  Kabit, realising quickly that the human was unbeatable directly, commanded half the swarm to chase after his companions.

  Henry, in response, into a Grey Wolf, leapt down from the exoskeleton, and sprinted to head them off at the tunnel.

  Reaching it first, he positioned himself outside the entrance, the inside being too cramped for dodging manoeuvres. He then rushed to gather Flora charges, while his focus flicked back and forth between the giant antennae extending high again and the thousand-strong longhorn swarm converging upon him - a clicking, emerald tide.

  As they collided, some longhorns aimed at him, others threatened to slip past into the tunnel. By splitting in this way, they restricted his usable space and made total avoidance impossible.

  As the world slowed down around him with activation of bullet-time, he took a bite to his shin, but in exchange, he beheaded the longhorn that Kabit possessed. Half a second later, he received two stabs to his chest and one in throat; in return, he evaded the slam of a giant antenna that splattered a cluster of longhorns and manoeuvred into a second-long breathing space, where he mended the damage he'd taken with and sneaked out a Flora charge. The next half a second, he accepted a stab to his groin to deliver a single stroke through another giant antenna and two longhorns.

  Although he could only maintain it for the duration of his Boost gauge, for a while, he'd reached the 4th stage of Against The Many that was reserved for the Gods.

  "Very impressive, human," sprayed Kabit, "but now, we arrive at my thesis’s peroration."

  Henry's eardrums rang with a piercing sound, and his eyeballs began to vibrate.

  Both exploded.

  “Damn it,” he swore, the sound of his voice lost in the ringing of his ears. “Beaten like a noob...”

  It was over...

  He threw down his sword in defeat, two stabs hitting him before it could even clang off the floor.

  Blind and deaf, against this thousand swarm, against the giant antennae guided by a God with many more lifetimes of experience than himself, he could never have hoped to win.

  Not using this trash beginner's martial art.

   into a stone golem with The Cloak of Wind and Stone that he’d equipped when he'd noticed the swarm splitting off, he blocked up the entrance way, and the piddly antennae slams and longhorn beetle stabs clinked harmlessly off his hardened granite skin.

  When the debuff faded, he cancelled the form with a sigh and blasted the swarm to pieces with his Spelltomes that made this low-level fighting a trivial snoozefest.

  A giant antenna struck the ground with a squelch, joining the other nine that’d been chopped off. From the monster’s head, which’d slumped to the floor, the beetle no longer having the strength to sustain its weight, Henry jumped down.

  He stared into The Mammoth Beetle’s defeated face, its features smeared with rivulets of haemolymph seeping from the ten bleeding stumps around its crown. Although he saw no movement in its compound eyes, he felt it looking back at him, analysing him coldly.

  -Danontherightwing: We broke the surface, Big Bro. We’re back in the temple.

  ‘Anyone see you emerge?’

  -Danontherightwing: there are some people, but they’re all passed out. Drunk.

  ‘Sweet. I’m almost done here.’

  “It’s been fun,” said Henry out loud, “but I’ve got to go now. If you have any last words, keep them brief.”

  The Beetle sprayed him with the scent of forfeit. “I notice you are in possession of my jailor’s ring, although your strength was far less, so you mustn’t be he. Since no one would gift such an artefact voluntarily, we can deduce that he must have returned to The Cycle. For at least giving me the knowledge of his demise before my own, I thank you.”

  Henry raised an eyebrow. “That was remarkably concise compared with what I’d expected. Good on ya’, mate!” He began to collect Celestial charges.

  “Wait, wait," continued Kabit, "for your conscience sake, you must answer the essential question. Tell me, what was my crime to be brutally executed without trial after laying down my arms?”

  Henry rolled his eyes.

  Here we go...

  “For daring to rule man as a beast? You humans, you know, your native social arrangement is more hierarchical, more brutally oppressive of the individual, than the society of the ants. Yet, paradoxically, you retain the delusion of freedom through a cancer of the mind - ideology. ‘I must follow this man’s injunction because he possesses wisdom beyond my feeble reckoning, because he builds the universities, because he risks his armies in the wars, because it is the writ of the law’, and so on and so on. It is not enough to obey out of self-preservation under a tyrannical authority, who will crush you for rebelling. No, you must passionately love your oppressor. So tightly wound are the ideological chains that when you imagine freedom and whisper of it to your peers in a private place, do they reply, ‘yes, we understand, but we mustn’t speak of it, for the king’s ears are wide and his responses cruel.’? No, even when secrecy is assured, they beat you and declare you ungrateful for his generous protection! The Vhivin political theorist...’

  Henry fanned his nose to get to the point of the message.

  “...My dominion, I claim, was a liberation from this mental perversion of ideology. The citizen of my kingdom, when he looked upon my visage, could not deny the true power relationship between him and king. ‘Ah, I am ruled by a monster.’ He is free to be unfree. What have you to say of my observation?”

  “Tai. Sure. Pag.” Henry stretched out his hand, a ball of starlight condensing in his palm.

  “Stop, you brute! There is more in my defence, but I must be given the room to formulate a proper thesis. Please, please—damn it! Blughagh.”

  Kabit vomited up a man-sized object that intercepted the and absorbed its damage.

  With a clunk, a statue of a tall, thin figure hit the ground, landing in an upright position.

  “A God Statue,” Henry remarked in pleasant surprise. “Is this how I get my Legendary? That's convenient.”

  He’d thought he'd have to rummage through Kabit's innards.

  His expression, though, soon soured when he discerned the statue's features through the coating of Kabit’s gut goop.

  Flowing locks, a pair of antlers, and two pointy ears...it was an Elf God.

  He despised elves.

  The energy of his , which had continued to swim around the statue's skin, condensed into an offering cup in the statue's grip. A moment later, its eyes began to glow and an androgynous voice emerged from its stone mouth.

  “Kabit, Kabit, is this where you ran off with my stolen statue? Why didn’t you contact me for thirty millennia? If you were alive, you should have recruited new followers. Since the last ones were wiped out, I can’t compete with the other deities. Hold up, why are you in such a battered state?! Did this human do that to you?’

  The beetle released a petulant scent summarising their encounter, the statue’s nose glowing to translate it.

  “Insolent leaf-eater, how could you abuse my commander for a handful of human lives. I, Lāmōphyāna The Generous, Earthfriend of The Thirteenth Branch, order you to commit suicide!”

  "Elves..." Henry sighed.

  The Elves in Saana's lore were militant carnivores who looked with contempt upon omnivores and herbivores. The developer Hannes had assumed it would be a novel reversal of their usual nature-loving depiction, but it ended up making them insufferably obnoxious - awful game design. Henry was glad that they didn’t exist anywhere in Saana III but an isolated island.

  Ignoring the Elf God's command and the swearing that followed, he regathered his Celestial charges.

  Once in the Cosmic Plane, Gods could only interact with the normal world by expending God Energy, the same type used by Karnon to summon a tidal wave. This was given to them by their followers, and since this Elf God apparently had none left, its threats were hot air.

  “Wait!” The Elf God switched to a begging tone. “I’ll be—you’re an Earthfriend, you can speak with monsters! Spare him, and I’ll grant you a taste of my power!”

  Speciality classes were acquired by swearing allegiance to Tier-12 or higher Gods that’d ascended to the Cosmic Plane. The specialisations were broken into three ranks of increasing rarity, Common, Rare, and Legendary. Power-wise, Common specs were stronger in niche roles than standard classes but weaker overall, while Rares were equal overall - in this sense, both types were balanced. Legendaries, in contrast, had no limits, the player potentially growing to rival an empire if they gathered enough God Energy with their transformed God Body.

  What’s more, this 'Earthfriend of The Monster Horizon Path' specialisation synergised perfectly with the monster ar—

  “Really?” Henry frowned. "The Legendary was a Legendary Class? What a waste of my time.”

  The cost was that the player’s character became ‘a part of the lore’ i.e. it lost its immortality and would be deleted after one death. Moreover, the game would treat Legendary players like a boss NPC, offering bounty quests for others to hunt them down. For most people, this made for an exhilarating 15 minutes of fame. For him, though, he would lose his precious Civilian Class methods, including the through which he activated his shabby gear and entered The Overdream.

  Someone would have to lobotomise him before he accepted.

  “Salad-brained leaf swallower! In your speck of a lifespan, when will you—“

  “One sec,” Henry interrupted it. “I’m messaging someone else to ask if they want it.”

  ‘EMERGENCY CALL! PLH! WAKE UP, WAKE UP, WAKE UP, WAKE UP! CHECK OUT THIS EARTHFRIEND SPEC!’

  Peaceloveharmony, his hippy friend and fellow Project Aevitas participant, invented the ‘Fuzzy Friendship’ meme back in Saana II, having a zoo of befriended monsters that escorted him everywhere. When Henry’d grouped with him, it’d been quite annoying because their party always had to stop to hold funerals for the monsters that’d got gasplammoed by random stuff. Henry figured that guy might enjoy being able to give his ‘fuzzy friends’ immortality and his fans could save him from the bounty hunters.

  -Noah Bassett (Nulato, Alaska): Takezo? Do you know what time it is here...

  ‘Want it?’

  The other end was silent for a minute, PLH reading the description and giving the proposal serious consideration.

  -Noah Bassett: Man, I bought three new hens for the flock, and my organic beets...no.

  PLH had been so addicted to the game when he'd played that he’d neglected his real-life. Thus, these days he only logged on for the occasional meet-and-greet with his hippy fans.

  ‘You sure?’ replied Henry. ‘I’m about to lose the opportunity to get the class again.’

  Another pause followed, the Elf God and Kabit screaming as Henry extended his palm at the latter.

  -Noah Bassett: Well, if it’s going to disappear, then I guess it would be a waste...right?

  ‘I’ll message you the coordinates.’

  -Noah Bassett: Hahaha, alright, I’ll be right—Damn it, no! I refuse! Good night!

  ‘Fair enough. Night, dude.’

  “No!” screamed the Elf God. “Cease your impertinence at once. Stop. No! No! NO!”

  A pleading scent cloud emitted by Kabit was ignited by a flashing through it on the way to the monster’s head.

  -Danontherightwing: Nice one, Big Bro!

  Before the Elf God could berate Henry further, he slapped the offering cup out of the God Statue’s hand, severing the connection.

  To dispose of the statue, which was near indestructible, he had Dan bring back the donkey in exchange for a promise of food. With the meathead’s handsome arrival, a ghost of the first boss appeared from the scimitar Dan was swinging, despite ghosts being incongruent with the game’s reincarnation lore. It pointed out in plain English the location of its real swords and thanked them for defeating its family’s mortal rival, who—

  “We’ve got the coordinates; cheers, mate, rest in peace. Donkey Bro, eat the statue already so we can move on from this noob PVE episode.”

  Back up at the crowded ruins, Henry paid a Village of pet-minders to babysit Alfgrim and Donkey Bro. Meanwhile, he and Dan purchased Mithril gear, Henry modifying the equipment to fit, then they met up with the Byzantines who were in a sorry state after their hardships with the Slothasaurus Rex.

  The rest of the evening passed uneventfully as Team Friendship Forever ran dungeons. Their best speed-run placement came to a pathetic 1,148 out of the fifty-thousand competing teams. Nevertheless, they made many gains in other areas. Their teamwork, accuracy, and spell coordination were slowly refined through the PVE battles that never seemed to pause because their Earthfriend kept ‘misfiring’ at patrolling monster packs.

  After the dungeons, Henry bid farewell to his friends, then—killing the pet-minders who’d taken the donkey and the wolf hostage in order to extort him—rode back to the West Bank Autonomous Exclave where the reconstructions that would topple The Slum Empire were underway.

  At the private forest, the Grey Wolf pack huddled around to inspect Alfgrim’s evolution and hear him recount his adventure.

  Henry, satisfied, logged out for the night.

  The seventh-floor apartment on the headquarters of his digital empire.

  The Tyrant of Saana took a bubble bath, changed into some comfy pyjamas, then threw his exhausted body on his mattress without a bed frame.

  Amongst his well-worn library books and scraps of paper scribbled with plans for a day very different from the one finally coming to its close, he entered a sleep filled with sweet dreams of the morrow.

  One day down; thirteen more to go.