The developers of Ebonvale named cities either through convenience of sets or because they followed a theme.

  Hammerfall followed the latter. The city started the trend of tool followed by action.

  A hammer that falls.

  Sickledrop followed the first rule, being a small settlement in a zone that needed to match the zone theme.

  In the living, breathing world there was lore behind both names, which Melia knew but couldn’t really be bothered with the specifics, since it was slightly angsty and edgy and had a lot of manufactured suffering.

  Hammerfall was originally a small town of craftsmen and farmers who, upon being accosted by bandits, took umbrage with the notion of “razing and pillaging”, taking up arms to defend themselves with whatever they had at hand. These were in the early days of the kingdom, long before the setting of the game, and the transportation and communication lines were much more primitive. Before the king could respond and send soldiers to defend his town, every man, to the last, had died. It was said they did not stop fighting until the last hammer fell, which was then taken as a sort of christening when the town was rebuilt as a military outpost, born anew.

  Sickledrop probably had much of a similar backstory, but it was never revealed by game lore, since it consisted entirely of 8 buildings, some closer to sheds than something somebody might live in. Real life showed that it was a community of farmers, mainly focusing on grains, so the name could also be attributed to bountiful harvests.

  The town itself was much larger than Melia expected, though it was not big enough to have its own warp crystal. There was an obvious flight platform built into the side of a hill where she could smell the unique combination of “large mammal” and “huge bird”…most likely griffins, though roc eagles and storm crows might roost there too. Though Melia had never visited any in her previous life, it reminded her of small “vintage” towns, deliberately preserved to retain the quaint, countryside vibe. There couldn’t be more than a couple thousand people.

  Her teammates were just waking up as the carriage pulled into the main square, and even though she hadn’t slept at all, Melia wasn’t feeling particularly tired.

  No, that wasn’t quite true. She could feel the exhaustion building inside her, like a bruise hidden by thick skin, and her hunger was ravenous, but muted. Just like when she first woke up that very first day, she could forgo many basic human essentials, but they would catch up with her, and fast.

  Still, she was the most coherent member of her team, so she gently steered them away from the street on their wobbly legs before retrieving any goods they left aboard and paid the man. She led them into a nearby eatery that smelled of fresh bread, and after they had a good, hearty meal of biscuits drowned in rich gravy, life seemed to return to their eyes.

  “Are you alive yet?” Melia asked from her perch on the bench. A waitress had kindly brought out a box that fit snugly on the corner of the seat, and after Melia bought four helpings of biscuits for herself, a plush cushion was added on top of that. Melia laughed at the thought of “preserving the rear end of a well paying customer.”

  “Yes, but how are you not dead? I’ve had one of these and I’m stuffed,” Jessica said pointing to her own plate, which she scraped clean. “It was delicious, but gods that was heavy. I might need to see a healer to prevent a heart attack,” she joked.

  “You just need more coffee,” Melia deflected, taking a sip out of a giant mug.

  This small town rarely saw visitors, and most that did come were human. There were no accommodations for small statured races, but Melia had enough stats to easily make do, though it was comical to watch. The mug she was drinking from was many times larger than each of her hands.

  For several minutes, nothing was said and they passed the time in relative silence, content to enjoy the breakfast and wake up a little more.

  “So where do we think the entrance to the dungeon is?” Alastair asked eventually.

  “Did the packet you got from the guild kit say?”

  Alastair gave Melia a sheepish look but said nothing. She laughed.

  “Don’t worry. If you don’t want to tell me, I don’t need to know. I don’t want to get you in trouble if you’ve got some kind of confidentiality agreement. We both saw how that receptionist reacted when she found out I wasn’t a member of the guild, and I don’t plan on becoming one either.”

  “Really?” Ellesea asked. “Not ever?”

  “Well, never is a strong word…but probably not, no. I gain nothing by joining.”

  A few of her party members looked taken aback, but they said nothing, having come to the realization that she was telling the truth. She looked back up at Alastair.

  “Does it really not say?”

  “No,” he groaned, “Only that the entrance was on the outskirts of town.”

  “Then that’s where we should start looking, right?” Jessica piped in. “The sooner we find it, the longer we have to explore.”

  “Or I could just show you the way?” Melia asked. The others looked at her, shocked. They obviously hadn’t considered that. “At least if it’s in the same place. Who knows? A hundred years is a long time.”

  Melia led them out of the diner and onto the main thoroughfare through the town. They headed southwest, and after a few minutes of walking, the nice, new buildings (mostly businesses and shops) gave way to homesteads and houses, which were older and more run down. Most were in good condition, some were even recently repaired, but it was clear to Melia that the town had seen better days. Was that why tindale started growing nearby? And what caused such a drop in population? At the very end of the road, they came across an abandoned square full of dilapidated old buildings with crumbling walls and rotted roofs.

  Melia’s heart skipped a beat.

  This was it. Sickledrop as she knew it. Exactly as it appeared in the game, with its 8 small structures, including the game model for the inn, a large home or a manor, a blacksmith shop with a dead forge, and a town hall. All of it empty and deserted. And, at the very back of it all, connected to the inn, was a very familiar, boarded-up storehouse.

  The unsuspecting, outer entrance that led from the street down into the forecourt of the dungeon itself.

  “Come on! This way!”

  Melia jogged ahead and waited impatiently as her teammates caught up. They were looking around and it was clear they didn’t believe a dungeon was hidden in an old shack, and Melia couldn’t blame them.

  If she didn’t know any better, she never would have gone snooping around in a musty old cellar.

  Once she was sure they were following right behind her, Melia gave the barn-style door a quick tug, and to her surprise, the big, rusty iron lock holding it in place instantly crumbled. She pushed the door open and walked inside.

  Melia felt the thrill of nostalgia wash over her. It was years ago when she first ran this dungeon, her very first one, but it felt like yesterday. She took a sharp left inside the storehouse and walked into what could have been a manager’s office at one point. Inside was a cracked and rotted desk covered in cobwebs, with a ladder running up into the loft. Melia climbed it fearlessly and found it to be quite sturdy, despite how everything else around it looked seconds away from turning into dust.

  Perhaps that was part of the magic of the dungeon? Did the world keep this part of town ancient and decrepit?

  She urged her teammates up the ladder, though they had to convince Ellesea that yes, it would hold her since Alastair made it up safely and she was half his size. The loft looked like any old attic: old canvas tarps were thrown over various old boxes and trunks, all of which were torn, ripped, and broken into, empty for years.

  But Melia wasn’t there for old boxes or cobwebs. At the back of the loft, next to an old suit of armor, was a trap door. The hatch was long since removed and the stone steps easily accessible, but if one didn’t know they were there, they’d never see them. Melia led the group down, past the level of the office, into a basement hallway, made of cold hard stone lining the floor, ceiling, and walls. Melia heard a sharp crackling sound and glanced back; Alastair had removed a torch from his pack and Ellesea lit it with a spell.

  “Oh, sorry,” Melia apologized sheepishly. She hadn’t even realized it was dark, her eyes automatically adjusted.

  “Damn gnomes,” she heard Jessica mutter, but there was no heat to it.

  At the end hall was a single iron door, and like the previous doors, this one wasn’t locked. Melia heaved it open and listened to the satisfying gasps of her teammates behind her.

  They all stepped into the basement proper, and there before them stood two things.

  One, a tall, daunting obelisk made of a strange, glossy black material etched with a single, incredibly complex rune, glowing whitish blue with an active enchantment.

  The Summoning Stone.

  And the other, in the center of the abandoned cellar, from stone floor to stone ceiling, was a swirling vortex of impenetrable midnight: blues, purples, and violets all colliding into a single point in a sea of inky black, a maelstrom of inexhaustible arcane energy.

  The entrance to [Astoria Boondocks], dungeon of Sickledrop.

  Melia stared at the portal to the dungeon long after her teammates disappeared inside. She tried to keep the surprise off her face as, one by one, they simply vanished from the world.

  Her new chatgem, which they had all connected to and tested regularly, went inert, signifying that it wasn’t currently linked to anyone.

  More distressing was the fact that the subtle pull in the back of her mind giving her the vague whereabouts and condition of her friends was gone, replaced by a very subtle worry for her “treasure”.

  Once again she had to remind herself that her friends were real people, not a hoard.

  And that itself was a strange thought to Melia. Not the hoard part. That was obviously wrong on so many levels that the mind that was once human couldn’t reconcile with its new draconic nature. It would take more than a week to wrestle with that one and make her peace with the weird sense and not let it own her.

  But…friends. Melia had friends.

  In such a very short time, they had integrated themselves into her life so completely that she couldn’t bear the thought of parting ways, never seeing them again.

  True, it had been mostly Melia latching onto them, but Alastair and Jessica approached her first. Invited her in.

  What would have happened if they hadn’t?

  If it was somebody else instead?

  Her new life, and perhaps the world itself would have been vastly different, but she didn’t even want to imagine it.

  They were hers now…and she was theirs.

  It was an important distinction for Melia to make that the relationship went both ways and she did not own them.

  Yes, she was thoroughly attached.

  Melia missed her friends from the game, but deep down a part of her understood that those friendships were superficial. They went as deep as relationships built inside a virtual space could, but outside of Brandy who was a special exception, there was never any chance for her to meet them outside the game. And since most players she knew went into the game to escape real life, many of them were reluctant to spend their precious hours in a fantasy world rehashing mundane problems.

  In some ways, those friends had been like real life npcs, the closest thing to living game characters that storytellers and developers tried to envision futuristic advanced artificial intelligence as.

  As much as Melia listened to their woes and laughed and cried with them, it was all inside a detached, virtual environment. She could not physically give them a shoulder to cry on. Any sort of touch was, while advanced for a video game, simply an extension of her mind interacting with a different sort of controller.

  Here, her friends were real. She could feel them in so many indescribable ways.

  When Jessica picked her up, she could feel the way the girl’s strong arms tensed and adjusted to hold the body of a small gnome. She felt the heat radiating from her core, and if she listened carefully enough, she could hear the rhythm of her heartbeat…alongside many other bodily functions Melia never would have dreamed possible.

  They had real emotions on their faces. Unlike the game, which may have had over a dozen preconfigured expressions and countless emotes, but they were, in the end, sterile.

  She only realized that once she saw Jessica smile, how every time her lips curled up, it showed her pearly white teeth, but never in quite the same way twice.

  Or how whenever Alastair rubbed his forehead in exasperation, the vein at his temple throbbed slightly.

  The way Ellesea’s eyes held more emotion than the rest of her face combined. How they managed to glow with joy when discussing magical theory or how they dilated and spaced out when confronted with facts or problems she never encountered.

  How Y’cennia was fun to tease, the redness in her cheeks when she got embarrassed or how Melia could spend days analyzing the constant movements and patterns of her ears and tail, which never stopped moving, even for a second.

  Yes, they were her family now, and Melia would do anything to keep them safe.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  At that moment, she was very much regretting not entering the dungeon with them.

  But even so, with how integrated her new party had become in her life, they could not replace Brandy, and Melia felt a tidal wave of sorrow crash into her, nearly drowning her. Her heart ached and her stomach felt sour; the light in her eyes dimmed and any trace of a smile slid off her face.

  She missed her best friend so, so bad.

  But she was gone, Melia was gone. She needed to move on, and maybe someday she could.

  For now, she needed to do something, anything, to keep herself from spiraling into despair and wallowing in grief.

  She also needed to keep her mind off her new friends.

  Melia spared a single last glance at the entrance portal. Waiting there wouldn’t do her any good anyway.

  The only reason her friends would come out from there was if they retreated, and she doubted very much they would. They were strong…for their level. Mentally too. They were more than brave enough to handle the unknown.

  That meant when they finished the dungeon, they’d leave through the exit, on the other side of the small mountain Sickledrop was built next to, in a hidden cove connected to the ocean.

  Or they would respawn, naked and shaken, at the closest chapel.

  But that would mean they died, and Melia wasn’t thinking about such a possibility, she wasn’t even considering it a little, so she left.

  She quickly climbed back up the storage house maze and exited into the bright, crisp morning air. The sun glinted down on her sharply and Melia frowned. She cast [Stealth] on herself and wandered far enough away from the already broken building to transform. She didn’t need her massive bulk destroying what was left of Old Town.

  As soon as she was a dragon, she quickly took in all the sights, sounds, and scents that had been muted to her, quickly brushing away any shock at sensational overload. Everything was sharper, more vibrant, more real and alive. The colors, muted browns and drab, earthy tones seemed so much more alive. The air, which was dry, suddenly stung her giant nostrils with the tang of sea salt and ocean breeze.

  She sneezed, letting out a gout of flame, and froze. She hoped nobody saw.

  Deciding enough was enough, Melia flapped her massive wings once and took off toward the coast.

  In the game, when walking on foot, it would have taken her one or two minutes to travel from Sickledrop to the beach.

  Here in life, still traveling on foot, it would have taken her party the better part of an hour, and that wasn’t even counting if Melia was walking at a slow, leisurely pace comfortable for her body.

  As a dragon she was four flaps and a long glide away, roughly 30 seconds.

  Melia had no idea how fast she could move if she really wanted to, but she guessed it was anything but slow. Doing some quick math told her it could be anywhere in the range of several hundred miles per hour, her gliding doing roughly 250.

  She was no physicist or biologist, so she couldn’t even begin to rationalize how something her size moved around like she did, let alone live and breathe.

  Melia touched down on a sandy slope of hearty dune grass and sun baked seaweed, the smell making her wrinkle her muzzle. She turned back into a gnome and thankfully, the stench went away…mostly. It was still there, and it still stunk, but she no longer wanted to throw up.

  But she wasn’t here to admire the view and contemplate rotting kelp, despite a weird sensation in the back of her mind telling her it would be good for [Alchemy] and she should grab some. She did, but only because she could, not because she was a hoarder. Maybe it would even help Y’cennia?

  Speaking of help, the reason she came out here in the first place. Gigantic, lion’s mane flying jellyfish.

  They followed the basic look and feel of those aquatic animals, but that was about it. They didn’t even seem to subscribe to basic beliefs about reality, such as how something that should only be found living underwater was doing just fine floating outside of it…in the air. Uncaring for gravity. Or breathing.

  Melia decided to not think about it, and if she could exist as a gigantic, hundred foot long dragon, anti-air jellyfish could do the same.

  Though that name left them feeling like they should be something very, very different.

  And they wouldn’t be existing for much longer. They were monsters, without the same rationality or feeling as sapient beings, and Melia needed to cull them.

  Rather, her party had taken a quest to cull them, and she figured she might as well help with that. Her teammates wouldn’t get any experience for killing the monsters themselves, but this was more of a backup plan she could spring on them if they took way too long in the dungeon and needed to get back to Horizon in a hurry and they wouldn’t need to abandon it.

  She was feeling nostalgic and needed to let out her stress. A little bit of grinding was exactly what she needed.

  Normally, in the game, Melia would have thrown on some music from a playlist and lost herself in a repetitive cycle, but she didn’t have a handy music player here.

  But she did have a way to feel like she did.

  Though she was not a [Bard]!

  She summoned up her [Portable Changing Room] and changed into her [Dancer]’s gear. She pulled out her chakrams and listened with a satisfied grin at the swoosh they made as they carved through the air.

  Yes, this was a good distraction.

  She didn’t know exactly how many jellyfish feelers her team needed to complete the quest, but she figured a few hundred wouldn’t hurt.

  Melia blinked, as if coming out of a trance. Several hours had passed while she was lost in the flow, humming and slicing her way through hordes of flying jellyfish. [Stinging Amoeba Nettles], they were called, which sounded entirely inaccurate. They did sting, she supposed, so there was that.

  She lost count of [Filamented Feelers] after harvesting 400 of them and only paused her massacre when the jellyfish stopped spawning on the outer reaches of the beach. Without realizing it, Melia had walked, or danced rather, nearly 10 miles up and down Gold Coast. The jellyfish were no longer on the verge of swarming out and remained pushed back in their original zones.

  Feeling a little sheepish for having lost track of time, Melia made her way toward the exit of the dungeon.

  Her friends were not there, but she wasn’t worried yet. Not any worse than she was before, anyways. She tested her connection to the chatgem, which still said 0 out of 4, meaning her friends were still inside the dungeon. If they had died, from a team wipe at least where all of their gear and equipment was destroyed by their instance closing, the connection to her chatgem would be deleted. And if they had re-entered the physical world, it would have said 4 of 4, or 3, or 2, depending on how many of them made it out in one piece.

  Sitting around did nothing for her nerves.

  Melia sighed heavily and focused her senses. Yes, it was strange, and it didn’t make any sense that she could do so, but the ability to track various gathering nodes had transferred over from the game.

  The system didn’t provide her with a map of any sort and she couldn’t physically see any indicators pointing her in the correct direction, but she got a twitchy little feeling that, when she thought of “plants”, told her exactly what she could find nearby.

  Such as the cluster of Daybloom growing behind a rocky outcropping several yards away.

  When she thought of “logs”, her attention was drawn to a little grove of beech trees on the crest of a small berm that would make prime woodworking material.

  Metals were no different, and she knew instinctively that there was a small node of iron deep inside the hill she was standing on, if she actually cared to dig 30 yards straight down, which she did not.

  The range was not unlimited, stretching as far as her eyes could see, which meant it was still substantial.

  It only let her sense what she already knew from the game world, which was also quite a lot, but tindale was not something she was familiar with.

  Melia spent the better part of two hours wandering back into Old Town Sickledrop familiarizing herself with the weed, finding it in cracks of paving stones and in the corners of overgrown rubble. She didn’t gather everything she could find, once she could sense it, but was satisfied when she had enough to fill the equivalent of two large sacks.

  Once again she checked her connection to the chatgems and visited the location of the exit portal. No change. To curb her rising anxiety and cure her growing curiosity, she decided she wasn’t going to put it off any longer. Melia made her way back around the mountain, into the storage barn, and entered the dungeon.

  [Astoria Boondocks] was something of a meme dungeon. From its name (a nod to the town in Oregon where the movie it took inspiration from was filmed), to the bosses (also referencing pop culture from the 1980s), to the general feel and layout, it did not take itself too seriously. Other dungeons in the world of Ebonvale were much closer to what players of the game would expect to find in a fantasy dungeon, built around the lore and history of their surroundings, but hardly anything in the [Boondocks] was original. The developers probably wanted to treat players with a gentle hand for what would be most of the playerbase’s first dungeon, and the love and care put into it was obvious.

  Though probably not for a native to Ebonvale.

  And the whole thing started with a bit of a troll opener. The first pack of monsters were hidden and didn’t spawn until somebody discovered the “hidden” path forward, which was very obvious even without the subtle clues. Melia was extremely familiar with this dungeon, so she wasn’t caught off-guard when she pushed aside the fireplace grate to reveal a ladder descending into darkness…only to be attacked by a swarm of bats.

  She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t the tiniest bit worried about getting attacked by elite dungeon enemies, even though she knew her level dwarfed anything found in here by several magnitudes. The bats screeched as they bolted out of the opening, flapping around her head and trying to sink their fangs into her flesh.

  Melia laughed. She hadn’t needed to change into her full plate armor after all.

  Despite their sizable claws and fangs, nothing they did could penetrate her skin, and their wings flapping around her face were little more than an annoyance. She watched in amusement as one large bat latched onto her gauntleted hand and gnawed impotently on the metal. After several seconds reminding herself that she was, for all intents and purposes, invincible, Melia grabbed her swords and did a quick [Whirlwind].

  The bats were obliterated.

  A glance at her status told her she hadn’t lost a single point of health and if she was going to have any worries in this dungeon it would stem from possibly struggling to generate enough rage for her powerful attacks.

  Not that she thought she’d need them.

  Melia was full of wistful nostalgia as she made her way deeper into the dungeon.

  She paused at the entrance to a section of sewer tunnels delvers needed to navigate to go deeper. It wasn’t a maze, not exactly, but it did have three or four side alleys one could go down and explore that all led to dead ends.

  A twitch of movement from the dead end to her left had Melia turning to face the first optional boss of the dungeon. [A Rodent of Unusual Size], it was a giant rat that wasn’t hostile unless attacked. The name, at first glance, was a nod to a different movie, but the mob itself was actually connected to a second set of optional bosses in the third dead end of the sewers: four party loving, pizza eating, martial arts training, teenage mutant ninja turtles. Legally distinct, of course.

  Players had a choice of killing the rat and turning the turtles hostile, allowing them to be fought for their loot, or they could ignore the rat, walk into the turtles’ hideout, get several lines of fan service dialogue, and eat some pizza, which would give them a combat buff that was powerful for its level. Though it did give anyone who had it the compulsion to add “dude” and “cowabunga” to their sentences when they talked.

  “Sorry Splinter,” Melia said to herself with a large smile harboring absolutely no remorse as she gave a quick [Whirlwind] and cut him down. She didn’t need a buff, she was more than willing to fight a few more bosses.

  Not that she needed the loot or experience either, but she was in full reminiscence mode and couldn’t be stopped.

  [Whirlwind] itself wasn’t a particularly strong skill on its own by the virtue that it didn’t have any additional damage multipliers. Where other abilities might add a percentage of strength on attack or have a flat damage increase, [Whirlwind] was simply an auto attack that hit every enemy in range.

  With a strength stat in the hundreds of millions, Melia didn’t need to worry about adding anything extra to her basic attacks.

  She made her way through the rest of the sewer section, killing a few mobs including a shark that had no business being somewhere like that, massacred the turtles with a [Whirlwind], and approached the first real boss of the dungeon, a giant squid.

  Sort of.

  It was a cross between an octopus, a squid, and whatever other horrors people misattributed to the squishy sea life.

  Case in point: the boss arena was entirely above water in the open air, though there was a waterfall at the back that would “shut off” after the fight was over revealing the path forward. The boss itself was stationary and didn’t move its main body, instead attacking with multiple tentacles. The fight didn’t have complicated mechanics and mostly taught players the value of watching their surroundings and learning to jump out of the way of large attacks. Melia [Whirlwinded] him too.

  The flow of water supplying the massive waterfall shut off like a closed faucet and Melia proceeded to the next part of the dungeon. A couple more packs of monsters got in her way, which she quickly dispatched as she avoided several hallways of pressure plate traps that dropped huge rocks from the ceiling.

  She never was too sure how those were supposed to reset “in real life”, but since dungeons didn’t have to follow normal rules about reality anyway, she gave up trying to rationalize it.

  The next boss was a skeleton wearing what looked like a bomber jacket and a fedora, simply named [Copperpot]. Once again this was a reference to the movie, but he was technically not an enemy. He wasn’t an ally either, stating that “You’re after my treasure! I found it first!”, with the “you” in question being the players delving the dungeon. He couldn’t be hurt by normal means, effectively impervious to all attacks, but the “fight” revolved around solving a puzzle with a slowly rolling cannonball that inevitably dropped into one of two slots.

  If the players succeeded, it opened up a trap door and [Copperpot] fell into a deep pit full of spikes, “defeating” him and opening the next door, while if they failed, the reverse happened to them and it was instant death.

  Morbid curiosity made Melia wonder if she would die if she failed to complete the puzzle, because in reality no spikes should ever hurt her from such a paltry fall, but she didn’t want to test it in case the dungeon simply zapped her with insta-death anyway. She listened to some of the canned lines the skeleton had and waved as he fell away with a comical “nooooooo.”

  From there the aesthetic changed from sewers and somewhat man-made areas into a proper limestone cave, with small stalagmites, stalactites, dripping water, and torches bolted into the wall for benefit to the player. It fit the theme of “secret pirate grotto with a ship full of treasure in a hidden lagoon.” Several more packs of enemies stood in her way but the path was very straight forward. The only thinking challenge in this part of the dungeon was the massive door leading to the final area.

  The door was about the size of a large barn door and had a large, ancient looking lock keeping it chained shut. There was no key to this door, the developers never made one. Instead, the player could open it in one of two ways: either they remembered to bring the cannonball from the last boss with them (or more likely for any first time players, needed to run back to get it) and then blew the thing to pieces with a conveniently placed (and somehow still functional) cannon…or they had a [Rogue] or similar class with them that could pick the lock.

  There wasn’t a real benefit to opening the door one way or another. If the cannon was used, it made a lot of noise and the next boss got alerted, causing a dungeon-wide yell telling some lackeys to check it out. For the rest of the dungeon, the monsters were all undead skeletons, the remains of the pirate crew that initially stole the fortune, which was cursed to turn them into the undead. Blowing open the door merely meant that the next two fights with monster packs were guaranteed and couldn’t be skipped, while if the door was opened silently players could then sneak their way to the next boss without triggering any encounters.

  Melia blew the door wide open. We’re under attack! She said the words she knew by heart along with the boss as she mopped up the last few mobs before engaging the massive skeleton of a minotaur. She did not give him a chance to improvise, ending the fight before it could reach a second phase by one-shotting him with a [Whirlwind].

  From there, the dungeon moved onto the pirate ship itself. Players could obviously see the massive ship trapped inside the underground lagoon, never to see the light of day again, but they could only board it by passing through the previous boss. There was only a single pack of monsters on the deck of the ship left before the last boss, the pirate captain with a legally distinct name of [William One-Eye].

  Melia wondered if the developers of the game even needed to worry about plagiarism when the movie they were ripping this from was made over a hundred years before the game was even thought of. She supposed it really didn’t matter now anyway, since this was an entirely different world and, supposedly, this pirate had really lived once upon a time before becoming immortalized in the form of a dungeon.

  But that didn’t really matter, as she triggered the final boss by disturbing his hoard of treasure, which as something of a collector herself, she scoffed at the pitiful pile of coins that wasn’t actually possible to take out of the dungeon. Sure, there were probably a thousand or so gold coins there, but it was all “cursed”…meaning it wasn’t interactable.

  Melia gave the boss a [Whirlwind], only slightly surprised that it wasn’t instantly destroyed like everything else. This boss had a scripted second phase, which lit the ship on fire and sunk it into the inky depths, all while the players had to do battle on the deck while swinging on ropes, dodging flames, and doing damage to the boss.

  Melia followed William to the top, amused at how the health bar refused to empty that last sliver no matter how many [Whirlwinds] she spammed, until eventually she reached the point where the dungeon unfroze his health and he died.

  The ship sank, Melia was left with a single, small treasure chest of loot floating on the remains of the ship’s deck, little more than a 10 by 10 platform where the dungeon’s exit portal formed.

  She stepped out of it and her happy, plucky mood plummeted into worry. Her friends were not there. Normally, that dungeon should have taken around 20 to 30 minutes to run in the game, and Melia breezed through that time herself because of her incredible stats. But, this was real life and she knew people who took the instance seriously would need much more time, if only because they’d need to walk the entire thing.

  Her friends had been inside now for over 7 hours.

  And to make things worse, when she checked her chatgem, it came back registering 0 out of 3 available.

  One had been destroyed.