A month flies by when you are mostly unconscious on a couch with a headset on.
**"Ding! Friend Request: RyuuMaster_Alex"** **
**Ding! Friend Request: xX_Sana_Xx**
**"Ding! Friend Request: Big_Tommy_420
I stared at the three notifications, one piled on top of the other, like a threat. My pals. They'd just gotten back from their family trips, just unpacked, and, judging by the timestamps, had logged on within four minutes of each other, which meant they'd definitely planned this over a group chat I'd been too deep in grind mode to check.
Yes I took all three.
**Ding! Party Invite: RyuuMaster_Alex**
I accepted that too and the world blinked and suddenly there were three familiar avatars standing in front of me in the middle of the field Dario and I had basically taken over as our personal grinding spot.KEN. Brother. What— Alex's character stopped in mid-sentence, making the universal gesture of someone reading a stat box. Level thirty-one?"Recently. Define recently," I said.I told you I wasn't gonna level up! 'You said we'd start together! I have the receipts, Ken, I have the literal group chat receipts—"--I swear I did trash quest for like an hour--AN HOUR.
Sana, however, had said nothing. She was looking at Dario, who was standing just behind me, as a man looks who has just realized that he is about to be cross-examined by strangers.'Who is this?' she said. 'Dario. Day one we partied up. "He's an assassin, he's the reason I'm not a permanent stain on some field somewhere right now.Wow. Replaced already." Tommy clutched his chest as if he had been shot. A month. "One month, Ken."Tommy, you were in Bali for three weeks, I saw the story posts."That's not the point."
Obviously it wasn't a real fight, we'd known each other since middle school, this is just how we talked, but I could feel something underneath the joking that was slightly more real. Level thirty-one was a big jump against their fresh level ones. I'd remembered exactly what that gap felt like from the other side, standing next to a level six Dario on day one, and it hadn't felt good even in a friendly way.Okay, real talk," I said, when the noise settled down. I'm not going to sit here and pretend the numbers aren't different. But I'm not evolving my class yet, I've been sitting on it for three weeks trying to unlock some secret path nobody's found. I'll slow-roll the main story stuff with you guys instead of just running ahead. I didn't do this so I could leave you behind. I did it 'cause I got baited into fighting a D rank boar four minutes into the tutorial and it kind of spiraled from there." ""A D rank boar," Alex repeated slowly. "On the *initial map*." ""It's a whole story.You bet you are. This evening. All of it. Every detail.
Sana was still looking at Dario, who had stopped talking in that way people stop talking when they don't know if they're being invited in or pushed out.'You're staying with the party, right?' she asked him, straightforward in a way I hadn't expected but was grateful for. 'Ken's clearly got to be left alone.'
Dario glanced at me. I shrugged, which apparently translated the animation perfectly in game, one of the few times where a real gesture and a game gesture matched up exactly."Yeah," he replied. "Yeah, I'm hanging around.
**Party: kenistoocoolforu69, Dario, RyuuMaster_Alex, xX_Sana_Xx, Big_Tommy_420**
Five names in a window. Honestly, it felt like the real start of the game. Not the tutorial, not the boar, not three weeks of quiet solo grinding. That.
I still had no idea what was it that flickered in the corner of my HUD every few hours. The third evolution path was still not unlocked. But for the first time since I'd put on the headset, it didn't seem like something I had to work out on my own.
*More to come...*