Alastair sat in his room, pretending to read, as if he could actually do such a thing at a time like this, while he awaited the inevitable knock on his door.

  Moments later, several soft thuds rattled the heavy wood, and his normally energetic roommate let herself in, mostly drained of her fiery spirit.

  “Can we finally talk about tonight?” she asked as the other two girls followed her. Alastair remained seated on his chair by the lamp, while the other girls shuffled in and lined themselves up on the bed. Jessica didn’t wait for an answer and cut straight to the point.

  “I’m going with dragon.”

  “I don’t know, Jess,” Al said slowly. He himself looked decidedly unsure. “That’s…that’s a lot to say.”

  “You’re right, as usual,” Jessica sighed as she flopped down onto her back and stared at the ceiling.

  Y’cennia and Ellesea shared a look. The evening recap was one of their team’s weird quirks but they accepted it. All of them, at one point or another, had been the one to initiate it. They’d been a team for 5 years now and it was tradition. Especially after long, hard to process days. They were both pretty sure what the other two were talking about, but better safe than sorry.

  “Mind filling the rest of us in?” Ellesea asked. Y’cennia had been distracted ever since the bonfire lighting ceremony, and…that dance. Ellesea recognized the thousand yard stare of somebody incredibly invested in their status, she’d seen it too often among her classmates at the academy. She was surprised the cat beastkin wasn’t bouncing off the walls or straight up passed out. One extreme or the other.

  “Melia, obviously,” Jessica sighed dramatically. “We’ve been discussing it for the last two days.”

  “Is she a dragon or is she not a dragon?” Alastair supplied, a little more helpfully.

  “Is that even a real question?” Ellesea asked skeptically. As a graduate of general studies now working on her specialization in arcane magics, she had seen a thing or two. More than the rest of her team, anyway. When each of her teachers was above level 500, it was hard to get excited about a little show of power elsewhere.

  Now, having said that…

  “Oh come off it,” Jessica scoffed. “Of course it’s a real question. Didn’t you see that dance? Those…hoop…saw…things?”

  “Chakrams,” Al supplied, earning himself a double-finger gun-point in his direction.

  “Chakrams. And whatever magic it was that made the fire come to life? I swear it was like watching a real play!”

  “I saw,” Ellesea replied calmly. “I’ve also seen Archmage Donnelly cut a hole in reality to create a portal from Horizon to Deepholme.”

  The rest of the room fell silent. Teleportation magic was tricky, high level stuff and portals were the ultimate expression of that. Ellesea had lamented many times, which her team well knew and agreed with, that she wouldn’t even be able to begin learning how to teleport herself until she reached level 400, minimum. Portals? That were stable enough to allow multiple passages? 600, not a level lower, and she’d only be able to keep it open for a scant handful of seconds.

  It wasn’t an exact correlation, the dance and her instructors, but it helped illustrate her point: being powerful did not by nature make one a dragon.

  “Okay, but what about the buff?”

  Everybody turned to Y’cennia, who they thought wasn’t paying attention. Everybody paused to pull up their own status, where a bright and shiny new buff drew all of their attention.

  [Bolero of Fire]

  An otherworldly tale dedicated to a hero that transcended time.

  You’ve witnessed what few have and lived to see another day. A deadly dance performed with conviction, pristine accompaniment and flawlessly executed. By fire be purged.

  Rested: earn double xp.

  Invigorated: all resource generation and recovery doubled.

  Inspired: breakthroughs in class advancements are 50% more likely to occur.

  Blessing of Might: attack power increased by 25%

  Blessing of Magic: spell power increased by 25%

  Rarity: Exotic

  Source: Melia the Magnificent

  The group was silent. The buff was ludicrous, and before today, just a few hours ago, if anybody had told them it was remotely possible, even as a thought exercise in theory-crafting, they would have laughed in their face.

  The buff had five parts. Five. Two of those, no one in the group had even heard of being seen before.

  A buff that allowed easier breakthroughs in class advancement? Impossible. Kings would fight wars over the person who could create such a buff.

  And that wasn’t even considering the fact that each and every one of those parts to the buff would have been a highly desirable buff on their own. And the worst part? The part that made Ellesea want to tear out her hair?

  It didn’t have an obvious time limit.

  Normally a buff’s timer was incredibly visible so the person affected by it could plan on how to use it best for its limited duration.

  She actively had to mess with her status and risk dispelling it to find out that the buff would last a full week.

  Not a day. Not 30 minutes like most normal, sane buffs.

  And, after finding out that all of them had the buff, they quietly concluded that everyone watching the dance got it too.

  Over a thousand people suddenly had an unlimited parameter, double experience buff that was going to be active for the next seven days.

  “I vote dragon.”

  The words spilled out of Y’cennia’s mouth, but each one of her companions could easily have been the one to say it.

  “But, she’s a gnome,” Ellesea said, trying to remain the voice of reason. It was a powerful argument, and the others nodded in agreement. It was well known that dragons, arrogant as they were, even in disguise still chose forms emphasizing size and strength, equating it to power. Most chose human, elven, or demon forms. The four party members could only think of one dragon that chose to be a dwarf, Khazrudin the Black, who was said to be responsible for laying waste to the lands between Horizon and Deepholme, instigating the creation of the Ashlands.

  “And nobody in their right mind would ever go around telling everybody they are a dragon,” rationalized Y’cennia.

  “Do we know she’s in her right mind?” Ellesea countered. The silent atmosphere grew grim. Nobody wanted to consider if she wasn’t.

  “She’s clearly high level,” Jessica spoke everyone’s thoughts out loud. “And everybody knows it’s an unspoken rule that to get to those high levels…changes people.”

  Rarely did the death, destruction, and loss of close teammates not change a person. People had to really fight to go above rank 5. Each level above 600 was a fight for their life, proving to the system that they were more than merely exceptional. The group knew several of the local 600s, and were somehow on friendly terms with one of the kingdom’s 700s, who had taken a liking to the kids and occasionally acted as a mentor.

  All of them, without exception, had their quirks.

  Perhaps Melia, who had nearly died and lost a century of life, was…unwell, mentally. Wracked by survivors' guilt? Addled in the brain from one too many close calls? Any of a dozen explanations could fit.

  And maybe she used the excuse of “being a dragon in disguise” to hide her pain?

  The simple truth of the matter was that none of them had ever met a dragon before, and as fun as that sounded when they were kids listening to stories of knights and heroics, they really weren’t prepared to face a creature that only saw them as insignificant insects.

  “Not a dragon,” they all chorused.

  “What level do you think she is?” Y’cennia eventually asked. Her mind was still preoccupied with the buff and what it meant for her class. Her sour mood from earlier when she learned her companions were going to pull away from her even further eased, but now she was worried how to use her time the most effectively.

  “Higher than I could see,” Ellesea answered. As the group’s highest level, if anybody had a chance at telling, it was her. That meant the gnome was, at bare minimum, level 413, passing the 100 level gap for [Inspection].

  “I think she might be higher than Baron Greymantle,” Jessica mused. The others turned to her and she explained. “What? You saw the way he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Look, when a man’s got his eye tracks all over you like that either he’s planning to marry you, already married to you, or treating you like you’re the thing that’s going to end his life. And it’s very well known how much the baron loved the late baroness.”

  “True,” Y’cennia smirked, but became serious. “But that would put her in the high 900s”

  She added that last part in a whisper, as if stating it aloud was somehow taboo. Not that there was anybody around to eavesdrop, even with how much better a person’s hearing got at that level.

  Jessica and Al shook their heads. Not because they disagreed with Y’cennia, but because the thought of someone getting to level 900 was ludicrous. The baron was a legend, known across the kingdom, and the only reason he wasn’t higher ranked nobility was because of his brutally honest and curt nature that left him extremely ill suited for politics. Someone that level should really be a duke.

  Strictly speaking, they would more than likely have the power to form their own kingdom and there was little anybody could do about it.

  Without sending an army of their own after them, that is.

  It wasn’t like there was a directory or listing, but the four adventurers could only think of maybe a dozen names of people who had made it past level 800, out of the maybe several thousand known in the world. As for higher than level 900? A handful at most. Perhaps the king, definitely the dwarven king, and the queen dowager, who had left the spotlight years ago, but was rumored to be level 1200.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  If that was true, it made her one of the top 5 most powerful mortals alive.

  Yes, their new friend and possible-but-probably-not-likely newest member was strong, really really strong, but there wasn’t a chance she was stronger than the White Witch.

  In one of the highest towers of the Horizon Citadel, in a bleached white spire of rugged stone overlooking the crystal clear bay below, sat a delicate young woman of 19 summers.

  If appearances were to be believed.

  Which they most certainly were not.

  Moeldywn, Melody to those who knew her, was also known by many other names.

  Once upon a time, she was Princess.

  Then she was Queen.

  Then, when she outlived her husband and yet seemingly refused to age, she was granted other names. Some kind and some less so.

  The Queen Dowager.

  The White Witch.

  She was a human, though some were starting to doubt her race despite her well documented heritage, because in the last 100 years, she only appeared to age 1 for every 10. Whispers spoke of dark magics and rituals meant to cheat death and attain immortality. Melody only scoffed whenever she heard that.

  And she heard everything.

  Not simply because her outrageous stats increased her hearing, despite being entirely dedicated to the magical arts. Yes, her title of Witch may have been given with…less than kind praise, it was certainly true. She knew more about most magics than all of the so-called Archmages at the academy.

  It did not hurt that she could physically see the magic if she activated certain skills.

  But for the moment, that was not important, because it wasn’t magic that she wished to see, but a report.

  “Do you have something for me?”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  If anyone heard her voice for the first time, it fit her image perfectly. That of a young maiden in the flower of her youth, perhaps pining at a window for the love of her heart.

  Not simply bored of the current politics bickering about in her grandson’s court. Anyone listening would have also been surprised, because she just addressed the thin air of an empty room.

  With a nearly undetectable vooosh of a figure de-[Stealthing], what appeared to be a maid materialized out of thin air. Clad from nearly head to toe in a servants’ livery, one would also be wrong to assume her one of the lowly, serving classes. Her poise was perfect and her bearing was immaculate. Not a single ruffle or frill of her ankle long dress was out of place, not a spot to be seen. She made not a sound when she moved, undetected and unseen.

  And yet she was easily identified by Melody.

  The Royal Spymaster.

  It was a title she had taken by accident, after her retirement started to bore her, but she realized she could not entrust the safety of her lands entirely to her descendants. They were…good, and they tried, but they lacked the spark that came along with weathering the storm that was the Age of Upheaval.

  Truly, they didn’t make people of iron character like they used to, and Melody couldn’t decide if that was a good or bad thing.

  The maid, or spy, or investigator, or collector of stories, to use the more colloquial name for people in Melody’s employ, silently approached and handed over a sealed scroll.

  Melody did so love a good story. She was quite known for it in her youth…which is what probably damned her to this life she lived in the first place. She had many names and many titles.

  Not all of them were known.

  There was one she kept very, very close to her chest, one she didn’t even tell her beloved Philip until the very last moments of his life the day he passed. The reason she was “cursed” to be forever young, which also gave her the immense magical proficiency and aptitude she was feared and respected for.

  Because, ironically, all the stories were right.

  Dragons love princesses.

  It’s like they are irresistibly drawn to them.

  Something Melody found out long ago, to her surprise, delight, and eventual sorrow, when her dragon disappeared without a trace, leaving behind only memories and a title.

  A title with a description Melody couldn’t even read, despite it being granted by the system and on her own damn status! Curse that dragon, why did it have to be in gnomish?!

  It took her a full decade to learn the complex, confusing, and downright stupid language, and when she did, her head was both relieved and filled with dread upon learning what it said.

  [Crown Jewel], was the title.

  You are the most precious treasure of a terrifying beast who has claimed you for her own. Woe be unto those who try and separate a dragon from her hoard, even death itself.

  That damn, silly, lovable dragon.

  Over the years, Melody had used her “collectors of intriguing tales” to try and find any hints or clues or anything pointing to the mere existence of her scaly friend. One day, she simply vanished, and it was like she was scrubbed from the world. Of the few reports she gained, she formed a web of lies, none of which could be true. Dead, missing, bored and wandered off.

  The gnome was far too high level to be dead. When she first encountered the gnome and invited her to tea, the little [Warrior] was already over level 2000. Melody doubted it was possible to kill the creature. She thanked the goddess every day that the dragon masquerading as a tiny gnome enjoyed life, friendship, and mischief over what her real class demanded. Melody might be the only one alive who knew the truth about the [Destroyer of Worlds].

  Bored? No. The gnome did not get bored. She could literally create relief from boredom with one of her many, many professions, or her overwhelming mastery of the arcane.

  Wandered off?

  …Melody could see it, and if, goddess forbid, something did manage to hurt her, perhaps she lost her way or simply forgot. Melody figured she would never know, and she had spent countless nights lamenting the loss of her friend.

  So every decade or so she got into a mood and decided to send her agents out and collect what information she could about dragons, their whereabouts and their schemes. Most were content to keep themselves to the World’s End, which was perfectly fine by her, let them be their own problem. But there was never, not once, a hint of her old friend, Meliastraza Obsidianheart.

  Until, just possibly, three days ago.

  Which was why the White Witch was sitting in her tower, brooding.

  She too had heard the dragon’s roar.

  A dragon so close to the heart of her kingdom was unwelcome news, since she had been following their more outgoing members and none of the draconic diplomats mentioned anything about a whelpling leaving the nest.

  Not that whatever made that roar was a whelp.

  Her agents were scrambled and cast out into the kingdom to ascertain the source.

  And this report should be it.

  Melody impatiently broke the seal and unfurled the scroll, being careful not to tear it in her haste.

  As her eyes rapidly poured over the immaculate writing, her brow furrowed.

  Hope…but also not.

  Deep inside, she had long given up ever seeing her friend again, and letting her hopes go any higher always meant they crashed down hard in the subsequent days.

  And the report she was given didn’t contain enough to even get them that high.

  The roar, as close as her agents could place it, came from the impassible mountains several miles to the east, on the border of Abbyton and the Ashlands. Close enough for any sufficiently high level dragon to be heard, much less the Destroyer. But that brought up another concern.

  The Incinerated Spire in the center of that molten crater was known to be a nest of dragons, of the monstrous sort. Spawned by magic, they were not the sapient, yet nearly as chaotic, sometimes friendly dragons that the system counted as “people”. If a dragon of the spire grew too powerful, it could mean dark things for her kingdom.

  …her grandson’s kingdom, she sighed, thinking that the lovable fool probably hadn’t given it a second thought.

  “Send out a few scouts,” the White Witch declared. “This situation bears watching.”

  Melia was starving.

  She even managed to eat a huge dinner before the start of the festival! But dancing had really taken it out of her, so much that she barely heard the roar of the crowd after it regained its senses when she finished her dance. She didn’t have time to inspect anyone to see what buff they got, but from how ecstatic they were, it had to be good. Sadly, Melia had her hands full with other things.

  Such as not instantly reverting to her true form and eating everything in sight.

  No, she was not losing her sanity, becoming a mindless, savage beast. She would have held her wits about her even as she ate literally everything except the people: homes, wood, a cart, the bonfire, small chunks of metal…everything. The fires in her belly were hot enough to melt it all, unless some level 1000 left their sword lying around, but even that would probably get digested in time, Melia thought. Though it would probably give her indigestion.

  Melia loitered around for the barest amount of time to be polite, accepting praise and thanks from those daring enough to approach her, before she dragged her new team, almost forcefully, back to the inn. It was late, but the kitchens were open and they said they could prepare something for her, but Melia knew it wouldn’t be enough. Their entire inn wouldn’t be enough.

  So she took whatever they had in hand with her great thanks, exuded herself from her team for a “brisk night walk”, which was met with dubious disbelief, but they didn’t try and stop her. The [Alchemist] in particular had been in a daze ever since the dance ended, so maybe they weren’t in any sort of headspace to try.

  Melia returned to her room briefly to change, slipping back into her [Reverie], cringing once again at the thought of being a tiny goth gnome, but it was better than wearing harem pants, if only by a little. Mostly because it was her only black outfit, everything else was bright and mostly pink or purple, which would be much easier to spot as she made her escape.

  And she didn’t want anybody following her.

  Not that she was about to do anything illegal. In fact, if the local guild knew what she was doing, they’d probably reward her.

  But they would also positively lose their minds if they saw her do it.

  Because she wasn’t about to try and feed herself in any other form except her true body, it demanded no less.

  Once again dressed more stealthily, Melia [Stealthed] and slipped out of the inn, making her way to an empty field.

  In the game, these fields were generally in the 10 to 20 range for levels, and Melia was starting to see the correlation that this world liked to multiply that by 10. Everything around her was instead at the 100 to 200 range. Melia wondered if that was the case everywhere, but she had time to find out at her own pace.

  The Hammerfall zone in the game was made up of several small farmsteads, which in reality turned into many farming communities. Instead of there only being 4 big barns across the whole map, they were everywhere. Fields, full of grains and grazing grounds for cattle, were serene and undisturbed.

  A single, huge, mechanical thing that looked like a roided up hybrid of a linebacker and a scarecrow lurched as it lurked in a field.

  Melia smirked and used [Identify].

  [Harvest Reaper]

  Mechanical Construct

  Level 171

  So far it checked out. The game had several symbols it used to let players know what they were looking at when they selected something, and the system here seemed to adopt the same technique. Next to “Mechanical Construct” was a symbol of a cog, meaning it was mechanical, and a little human shaped “pip”, like the icon on the children’s board game “Life”. This meant that the creature she was looking at was more than a simple tool and the system recognized it to some degree, hence the cog, but it was not spawned by mana, hence the human icon.

  If it were a true monster, like any of the wolves, vultures, or boars Melia was about to hunt, there would be no cog or human icon. Instead, there would be an open, fanged, snarling mouth. Once upon a time Melia would have said a dragon’s mouth, but now that she knew better, she guessed it was probably a wolf’s.

  Melia was interested to see that not all animals were mana-spawned monsters, especially most domesticated livestock. Cows and sheep were still normal “critters”, but there were a few exceptions where particularly ambitious and enterprising individuals built their farms and pens around specific spawn points. One pen full of Wololols gave an example of that.

  Melia found it somewhat ironic that now that she had the freedom to do whatever she wanted, quite free from any restrictions, limitations, or even the ability for anyone to tell her what to do, she was almost bound by chains of hunger. Her body, huge and powerful and magical as it was, needed an astronomical amount of sustenance, and even if she was able to sate herself and be satisfied without eating for several days like she hoped, most of her time would still probably go toward keeping herself fed.

  Like some sort of animal, she thought numbly as it struck her, only concerned with waking up, eating, and sleeping.

  No, she would not let that dictate her entire existence, even if she had no control over parts of it. She would find a way to become a normal, functioning member of society before getting stuck in another cage.

  She set about roaming the fields and hills, plucking a sleeping boar here and a surprised vulture there. It was weirdly like wandering through the aisles of a grocery store, or what she could remember of it when she went with her mom so many years ago. She didn’t exactly have the luxury of being picky though, so she didn’t pick up a boar and turn it over like an orange, setting it down and going to the next one. She ate them all. After an hour, the hills were decidedly more silent, and Melia was starting to get the feeling that, yes, she could eat animals whole, popping them into her mouth like she’d been doing, but it was inefficient. Her body used up a certain amount of energy processing the inedible bits like bone and hair.

  If only she could prepare and cook the boars, she’d get so much more energy out of them…

  Melia drooled at the thought of roast pig but laughed at the image in her mind supplying her giant dragon form hunched over a tiny campfire with a pig on a stick, looking like a cherry tomato on a toothpick.

  Yes, cooking her meals was definitely in her near future, both for taste and efficient processing. Now she just needed to figure out how to do it without causing a ruckus.