I woke Axel gently on the sixth day, and, still half asleep, he trudged after me downstairs for breakfast. It was clear from his expression he would rather be back in bed. But like a magnet, he was still stuck to me. I would’ve waited for him, regardless.

  Technically, it was my turn to make the morning meal, but it was more like preparation than anything else. Besides, it wasn’t like it would be anything fancy, just some muesli and rehydrated milk powder the party had looted. As Axel sank sluggishly onto a stool at the kitchen bench, a thought occurred to me. He’d always been a night owl. Early mornings were torture for him.

  I flicked on the kettle.

  None of the others had appeared yet, but that was par for the course. Tam would likely be having her insane cold morning shower, since we'd promised to conserve energy, so she wouldn’t be down for a little while. Wren had formed a habit of using the alarm clock that was already in her room, and she’d sleep until it went off; I was more than happy to let her indulge in a little sleeping in. From the sounds outside, Gigi was working on improving the shed out back, and I knew Jye was up outrageously early for their morning jog. I should’ve joined them, but I wasn’t all there yet. Not that that was any excuse when our lives were technically on the line.

  After the kettle clicked, I poured the boiled water, stirring the contents I’d added with a spoon, and then topped it all off with a dash of the rehydrated milk. I hesitated, unsure, thinking back to the past. Then, making up my mind, I headed back to the breakfast bench.

  “Black, no sugar, right?” I asked, placing Axel’s coffee down before him.

  The blond’s brows raised slowly, and he blinked at the steam wisping off the top of his hot beverage.

  “Huh?” he said. “For who?” He frowned, sleep clinging to him.

  I stared, feeling a little put on the spot. Was it so impossible for him to think that I’d make him coffee? That I wanted to show a little appreciation to him, after everything he’d done? Well, I guess I’d never done this before… Without a word, I slid the mug closer to where his arms rested over the lip of the bench.

  His eyes followed the movement.

  “For me?” he asked, drowsiness and confusion blurring.

  “It’s going to get cold.”

  Gingerly, his hands encircled the mug, and he let them rest there for a moment, as if unsure the drink was real, before bringing it up to his lips to take a small sip.

  Based on his preference for beer, I figured unless it was a boutique $20 per cup coffee, he was more inclined to bitter flavors. Given my family—a pang of loss hit me—had all been tea drinkers, I’d also had no idea if there were any more steps involved in making instant coffee other than adding boiling water. Surely not?

  Anxious for absolutely no reason, forcibly stopping myself from wringing my hands, I watched the blond’s reaction.

  He smiled as he lowered the mug. “Absolutely awful.”

  Heat flashed up the back of my neck.

  This fucking guy.

  “I’ll just tip it. Give it here,” I said, scowling as I reached forward to retrieve the mug from his hands. He snatched it off the bench from its handle, leaning back out of my range, grinning all the while, and then adopted an admonishing expression.

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t drink it.” He tasted it again, his face scrunching up, eyes shooting wide after, like he’d been hit in the chest. “I could learn to like bad coffee in the morning. Really wakes you up.”

  Simmering from his teasing, I let my hands fall—I wouldn’t win. He’d just keep going if I tried to defend myself. Well, at least he was fully conscious now.

  With a sigh, I returned to my own tea. Testing the heat with my lips, I then drank a mouthful, letting the soothing flavor of Extra Strong Bushells wash over me. Damn, I missed having a cuppa like this. Maybe I’d add it to our provisions for Dungeons. Axel nursed his coffee too, his expression only slightly blanching each time he took a sip.

  A touch of fondness breezed past me.

  “Teach me sometime, then,” I said.

  Coffee swirling steam before his face, Axel froze.

  “Say what now?”

  “How you like coffee. So I can make it.”

  For a second, he seemed surprised. Then his expression turned mischievous. “If I’d known crying would get coffee out of you, I’d have done it sooner.”

  I took a deep breath. Only Axel would reduce my actions into such a mundane summary. Not only that, but he’d missed the point entirely.

  “Just drink your damn coffee.”

  The CBD Gate to Bia’s Dungeon was abandoned.

  It made sense given we’d wiped out both its protectors and the man in charge of the crew. Hopefully whatever supplies the remaining team had gathered would last them enough time for them to figure everything out. On top of that, I prayed they didn’t get in our way again. I had far less grace to expend these days.

  Someone had visited the Gate recently to tear down the remaining fences around the black hole portal, so that it sat there alone in the cross section of the Queen Street Mall, as unnatural and distinct from Earth as it could look. Had it been Killian’s group? I knew they kept a close eye on the Gates in Brisbane. I hadn’t worked up the courage yet to return Adrien to his twin, but that was on the list of things to do after we cleared the next Dungeon.

  That’s right.

  Yeah, yeah, jumping the gun, whatever. What was it… They called it manifesting, right? If I believed we could do it, then we could. We’d clear the next Dungeon, easy.

  “Should I leave it here?” Wren asked.

  I nodded, and she pulled the parcel locker from her inventory, something Jye had taken from Bunnings, forming it front and center before the Gate. Inside were all the polaroid photos she’d taken. We’d hastily also silicone bonded a whiteboard to the inside door of it and included some markers on string too.

  This morning during breakfast, we’d spoken about the girl’s solution. It would be too time consuming to make a poster or pin each and every one to a bulletin board, considering the sheer amount of dead people we had in our inventories and too dangerous to let people know where we were. But using Wren’s photos as a starting point, we’d come to a conclusion that satisfied us all (but mostly me, I guess).

  We’d leave all photos in this box with a note system and check it periodically. Before heading to the CBD, we’d returned to the house where Wren had initially found the polaroid camera, in a suburb that Tam had picked out, in the hopes of finding more film, and we’d discovered boxes of unopened disposable polaroid cameras too. The quality of their photos was much lower, but it was what it was. All in all, we had some photography enthusiast to thank for the polaroid cameras that each member of the party carried.

  Before taking in any new bodies (or identifiable body parts), we’d take a photo first and note down their code on their skin with a sharpie. Despite the inhumanly detached process, like marking meat for sale, it was the best system we could think of.

  On the parcel locker itself, we’d carved four sentences into its front, filled in with black caulk.

  Include the photo code on the inside whiteboard.

  Wait for a check mark.

  They will be waiting inside the Gate.

  Do not clear the Dungeon.

  The polaroid photos had a string of five letters and digits on their backs, each a unique code we could use to identify the bodies: like some messed up kind of corpse catalogue.

  As long as no one trashed the parcel locker or destroyed the pictures, we could drop the bodies off inside the very edge of the Bia’s Dungeon. Since players could walk in and out of it, everything would remain as is, the corpses frozen inside. That was, if no one cleared it.

  And to ensure it remained safe for others, though it would grant us little reward, we’d agreed to return to Dungeon 11 and try our hand at a smaller group of mordexi during our three-day interim between clears. Gigi had insisted live combat was the only way to truly train with our abilities and would also serve as a measure of our progress too.

  Next time we went in, we’d drop some defensive measures around the inside half of the Gate. Jye’s [Cloak] had been cancelled on walking through this Gate, but when we’d left Nabu’s Dungeon, my [Thick Hide] had remained active. So, abilities didn’t persist when you entered, but they did when you exited—as long as it wasn’t reset. Once we’d finished up in New Delhi and had a day to rest, we’d come out to check the post box and clear Bia’s Dungeon agin.

  Setting up this delivery system was only a partial delay to our itinerary.

  I opened the Nexus for the first time and met the gaze of my party. The system formed a globe in front of me, each uncleared Gate a pulsing white dot, Nabu’s and Bia’s Dungeons a dull grey. Axel’s words were true. There were hundreds of uncleared ones now, most of them around the more densely populated countries. As I watched, a handful flickered out of existence, a tightness in my gut forming.

  We needed to grind.

  It was the only way to bring my and Axel’s parents back.

  To bring everyone back.

  Just to confirm my thoughts about abilities deactivating upon entering Dungeons, I slapped on [Thick Hide], and then, with grim determination, I selected one of the Gates closest to New Delhi.

  Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

  In a blink, we were elsewhere.

  Well.

  I imagined we were, but that was difficult to tell considering everything was pitch black.

  Pulling a dyno torch from my inventory, courtesy of Jye’s looting of Bunnings (of which I was growing ever more grateful with everything we did), I did a name call with the others, flashing [Echolate] as I did so. Unlike its base [Locate], which just generated silhouettes of living things, it developed a topological map of our surroundings. Around me, as they called off, the rest of the party stared blankly into the darkness. The remaining area in a growing sphere rippled outward from me, generating the biome in a blueprint, pulsing for a moment and then fading. I heard a hiss and assumed Gigi had done the same.

  Around us was a completely flat and empty plain, the ground unnaturally smooth, that continued into infinity in all directions.

  Uh, might be a bad time to say this, but I’m low-key scared of the dark, dudes, Jye said through the [Mindlink] that Wren had connected between the six of us. Though we’d agreed to send only crucial and strictly confidential thoughts through the ability, I really should’ve been expecting this. According to the ten-year-old, she could either cut and connect us depending on necessity, but it involved a lot of concentration to pick and choose. The more people she added, the more difficult it became to split and organise them. That Adrien had juggled all six of us and his own plans was testament to what a fearsome opponent he’d truly been.

  I started winding the flywheel on my torch and shone it into the giant’s direction as a way of reassuring them. Their pupils contracted, face squeezing from being blasted with the light. The illumination revealed nothing else, the glow of it swallowed once it reached a certain distance. Yeah, I should’ve expected that by now. Things making no sense was how life was. I shot Jye an apologetic smile and was about to say something when, on the edge of my hearing, a whisper slithered through the still air, a chilling breath against the nape of my neck.

  “Welcome.”

  Startled, I spun about, and in my shock, my hands stopped winding the torch’s flywheel.

  Darkness fell over us once again.

  “Your party level is insufficient to enter this Dungeon,” said the disembodied voice. It was neither warm nor cold and far too clear. However, the delivery had incorrect inflections, rising here, falling there, emphasis on the wrong syllables. Inhuman. A shiver crawled up my spine.

  “Insufficient?” I echoed back for clarity.

  Was this another Deity? They hadn’t said “my Dungeon” like Nabu. It could very well be another NPC like the Minotaur. But the NPCs existed inside the Dungeons. As far as I knew, we hadn’t entered one since my [Thick Hide] was still up. Was this some other place “between” like Twilight?

  A thought occurred to me.

  If this voice belonged to the being administering the entries to the Dungeon, could this be a Mod? We hadn’t run into Deities until we cleared their Dungeons, so it was unlikely this was the Deity who’d created the New Delhi Dungeon. Add to that, when Absalom contacted us, it was literally only his sponsorship invitation.

  Maybe this was how all Mods sounded. Or maybe it was just this Deity didn’t care how they appeared to players? Nabu’s and Bia’s voices, and their personas, had resembled other humans, even if their presences hadn’t aligned. But this being’s… it was like the second echo in a canyon of humanity. Something like a vocaloid trained off Siri; at least two steps removed from us.

  Still, if this was the Mod, and they were relaying this information about levels, it was likely true. I was sure they had better things to do while supervising the stream to the other Deities. Playing host to a party of LVL 5 players was probably not on their list of things they wanted to prioritise.

  Not to mention, the differing difficulty levels of Dungeons made a weird sort of sense.

  The earlier Dungeons were probably a lower difficulty. I mean, if someone had entered Bia’s and remained rational, the clear would’ve been a cakewalk. Wren had only seen a few of the mordexi when she’d first gone in. The first fifteen Dungeons must’ve been the kiddie’s end of the pool. Shallow to ease our way in. After all, once you cleared one of them, you got access to the Nexus.

  That all meant right now we were in some kind of purgatory lobby, waiting in queue.

  The voice said, “You may continue to proceed at your own risk.”

  “We can continue?” I repeated, hating how much I sounded like a broken record player.

  “Bro, who are you talking to?” Jye asked, their voice floating out of the darkness from some indeterminable position.

  I frowned, confused. Had the Mod singled me out? Could the others hear them speaking or was this part of Jye’s glitch? Irritated by the lack of vision, the weakness reminding me too much of my fight against Adrien, and troubled by not being able to gauge my party’s reactions, I summoned Gigi’s [Light Barrier]—it tasted like fireworks—smothering its brightness to about half its original luminance with Axel’s [Legerdemain]. The blond’s new ability felt slimy, as if goo were oozing out of my pores.

  He had conveyed the description to me during practice, and my prior assumptions had been correct. The skill could only be applied to one’s person and one’s abilities and imitate one’s self. I could only imagine how my fight with Adrien would’ve gone if it hadn’t been limited to those conditions.

  None of us would be standing here today.

  [Light Barrier] at half strength formed a solid bus-sized block in the air above us, illuminating the lobby like a divine incandescent tube. The electrical hum supplied in the back of my mind as an odd memory. The pupils of the party’s eyes shrunk into tiny black dots, adjusting to the now lit room, some of the members alighting a hand to their brows, as if in salute, to cut out the brightness. Like all down lighting, it cast less than flattering shadows over everyone’s faces. Somehow Axel still looked pretty, the otherwise harsh lighting only complimenting his high cheekbones. He really was frustratingly photogenic.

  Huh.

  It occurred to me then that this wasn’t the first time I’d had these kinds of thoughts.

  Wow.

  Could a man be anymore fucking oblivious to his own feelings?

  How had I ever… I really was stupid.

  Axel caught me staring and raised an eyebrow. Embarrassed, and my mind going nowhere useful, I redirected it, You guys can’t hear who I’m speaking to?

  As I waited, I cast a glance at my mana and stamina, a habit ingrained from when I’d been suffering from past stringent limitations and was pleasantly surprised to find I was absolutely fine. More than fine, I could almost convince myself I’d never be at a disadvantage again. Though that might be asking for it. The LVL 5 upgrade we’d been granted had really been insane. It wasn’t really much, but it was a lot at the same time.

  Babes, you been talking to yourself for the past minute.

  And none of you said anything? I asked, the tone of my thoughts just as incredulous as I felt.

  I believed it was part of your thinking process, Gigi admitted. Great, even the alien thought I talked to myself. I mean, I did. Just not often aloud and with others around.

  I’ve been hearing, like, a low buzz every now and then, chimed in Jye. Ah, there was the giant’s glitch. Classic. If they could audibly sense Deities speaking, could we use that to our advantage someday? I’d tuck that little tidbit into the back of my mind. Who knows if it’d ever be useful.

  Me being the only person to converse with the Deity must have been a party leader perk. Thinking about it, there were a lot of things that the party leader was privy to that the others weren’t. Only I could accept requests, though it sounded as though the others could see what they were. Not to mention, the rewards from the fulfilled requests went to me first, and I could kick other players… Could I hand over the position to someone else? Not that I had plans to, I was just curious. To add to that, if I died, would it transfer to someone else? Or would the party become unbanded? I hoped it was the former.

  “What party level is this Dungeon?” I asked the unknown Deity.

  “LVL 6.”

  Unsure if other Deities were already watching since we’d never been in between Dungeons and the real world (other than Twilight), and not wanting to risk giving the impression we were cowards (well, anymore than we already had), I decided it would be best to continue relying on Wren’s [Mindlink] for the privacy it granted, assuming they couldn’t read our thoughts.

  I said, I think there’s a Deity here warning us that the Dungeon is for LVL 6 players, but we can still do it. Should we go in?

  Axel scoffed. Like that’s even a question. I was about to comment, the smallest niggling of irritation that he was still acting so lackadaisical, despite everything, when his lips crinkled in reconsideration. Okay. No, it is a question. One I know the answer to is “Of course.” We’d kill a LVL 6 Dungeon.

  That’s almost double the total sum of experience points we’ve collected, I noted. It could mean the Dungeon was twice as hard as everything we’d done so far. Whilst that felt like it would promise great reward, the risk was also extreme. However, with the upgrade in regen, granting us more leeway in combat since we’d be able to use so many more abilities in succession, maybe it was doable.

  Shucks, dandelion, we gotta push, don’t we? We’ve got baggage, after all. And not pointing any fingers here, but we’ve burned too much time as it is for my tastes.

  I cast Tam a deadly glare, angry on Jye’s behalf, but also partly for myself too. It had been my fault we’d stayed longer than we should’ve. Actually, the blame lay on Adrien, since he’d killed Axel’s and my parents, but my comatose mental state was the real thing that’d held us back. Whilst the party didn’t rely on me, I’m sure if they had brought me along when I wasn’t ready, I would’ve just been a health hazard weighing them down. I more than likely would’ve gotten them all killed.

  I think we should do it too, Wren said, followed by: Makris agrees.

  Now, that was surprising. Makris didn’t like it when we put Wren at any risk. I mean, neither did I, but the ghost objected to everything I’d ever said, as far as I knew. Maybe this choice was more pivotal than I’d thought.

  Hesitantly, I reached out to the scourge. Makris, can you elaborate?

  Only silence greeted me. Okay, so the man in Wren’s head definitely reviled me. Fantastic. The next time Wren slept (and I had time), I’d be barging into her unconscious thoughts and giving him a piece of my mind. This couldn’t go on. And maybe I also disliked Makris on principle. I didn’t want to say that my initial innate negativity was based solely off his name being so similar to Mark, but that was possible. I’d actively avoided everyone with the same name my whole life since he’d been arrested and found guilty.

  Gigi nodded resolutely. If it were more than one level removed, I would hesitate to suggest taking the challenge, but I believe we should be able to bridge the gap with our current party skill.

  Only one person hadn’t voiced their thoughts. The giant was just looking about the empty boundless room with a curious gaze, their brows furrowed. Man, I had a dream like this once. Thought I was the last living Tasmanian tiger, and they were holding me captive.

  The party stared in silence, no one even forming a coherent telepathic thought back.

  Shrugging, they said, I’m more than keen to give it a go. Worst comes to worst and we can’t clear it or exit, we can, like, hunker up somewhere and camp out until someone else does. A huge grin split over their face. I’ve loaded a tonne of mordexi for the trip.

  Against our better recommendations, Jye had butchered several of the mordexi and had stored them in their inventory. It was hard to say if the giant genuinely liked the flavor—something between soap and shiitake mushrooms—or if they were desperate for more protein. It was likely the latter, to be honest. Tam and I had reluctantly cooked some into other meals, but sparingly, and Jye had taken that as our tacit consent to eat them without question.

  I’d heard them mumbling under their breath about losing gains. Though, if anything, the redhead looked even more jacked than they had when I’d first met them. If I didn’t know better, and I hadn’t seen them in awhile, I’d probably have made a snap judgement that they were taking steroids. But, just like everyone else, it was the system-introduced rapid progression they were experiencing. It was likely the giant just trained harder than anyone else.

  “I guess we’re going in,” I said aloud.

  “Understood,” came the Deity’s voice from everywhere all at once and still nowhere, and for the first time, their tone was colored by an emotion.

  Amusement.

  Yeah, I didn’t like that at all.

  The [Light Barrier] above us sputtered into nothing, darkness claiming the party.

  ~Gate Frozen~

  While that had been a good thing when we’d cleared Bia’s Dungeon, hearing it before we started one didn’t make me feel great.