Ian knew he had screwed up as he walked towards the dungeon portal. His plans to hit level 130 had quickly come to fruition, which turned into plans to achieve level 140 on his way back to the portal.

  Up to that point, he had only added an hour or so onto his dive, but then he made the classic blunder of deciding to check out the second floor of the dungeon just to see what it was like. He had figured a little peek wouldn’t change much.

  On the second floor, he had discovered goblin brutes that were all around level 290, and that the bonus for killing mobs 100 levels higher quadrupled his experience gains instead of doubling it. This sent him on a euphoric spiral of murderhoboing his way through ever escalating leveling goals for the next few hours.

  Sure, he had hit level 193, but it was nearing midnight, and he was absolutely starving. Now that the excitement had worn off and exhaustion was knocking on his door, he remembered why he was planning on cutting his dive short. Claire was going to be pissed, and he was already dreading the messages he would find waiting for him when he left the dungeon.

  Then a second thought hit him, one that he had completely forgotten about during all the excitement. He willed the dungeon system to show him how many people were watching his stream.

  Notice: Your stream has been live for 10 hours and 31 minutes. You currently have 37,341,612 active viewers.

  Ian stopped two steps from the portal as he stared at the notification. He reread it half a dozen times before he began shaking his head in disbelief.

  “Well, this is embarrassing. I kinda forgot you all were watching me…especially since there are so many of you.” Ian said awkwardly. “Anyways, I’m gonna head out now, so…thanks for tuning in? Yeah, this is too weird, so I’m just gonna go find dinner and probably get yelled at.

  “Zero out!”

  With his last proclamation, he walked through the portal, thankful that to be out of the spotlight—only to find that the drones were no longer a concern. Instead, the roar of a crowd nearly deafened him, and flashes of light started to make his head spin.

  After blinking to get the stars out of his eyes, he saw a dozen AO personnel manning a cordon in front of him. They had rolled out barricades and were only allowing adventurers through the entrance and exit lines for the dungeon. Behind those lines were news crews and clan recruiters all trying to get his attention.

  Ian sighed in relief when he realized they couldn’t see his face, because he was sure it had been contorted in a stupid way as he tried to make sense of the scene in front of him. As he scanned the crowd, a man in an AO uniform walked up to him.

  “Good evening, Adventurer Zero. Keeper Withers just called and said she is standing by in the parking lot to take you back to the AO campus,” said the man just loud enough for Ian to hear over the crowd. The edges of the man’s mouth turned down ever so slightly when he continued speaking, “I am also required to inform you that there are clan recruiters here who wish to speak to you. If you wish to meet with them, I am to provide you with any assistance you may need.”

  Ian leaned to the side to look past the man. He saw quite a few well-known clans at the front of the group at the barricades. Letting out a quiet grunt, Ian returned his attention to the man.

  “What do I do if I don’t want to speak to any of them?” Ian said before adding. “I’d honestly rather step on a nail than deal with the clans.”

  The man blinked and gave him a confused look for a second before he started chuckling, “If that is what you want, then just walk past them, Adventurer Zero. You can answer questions or ignore them completely. Anyone who harasses an adventurer has to deal with the wrath of the dungeon system curator, and everyone over there has jobs that depend on the streams and images it provides. We are mainly here to make sure they don’t completely clog the dungeon, and to ensure you didn’t get mobbed when you exited the dungeon.”

  “Well, I appreciate that, and I’m sorry you are all out here this late at night,” Ian said, bringing his hand up to rub the back of his hood. “I honestly forgot I was streaming until a couple of minutes ago. Now I’m terrified to find out what crazy stuff I’m going to be embarrassed about tomorrow.”

  “Don’t worry about us, this is the most fun we’ve had in quite a while. Besides,” the man said, moving in close as he glanced at the crowd, “your stream was refreshing. Lately, everyone attempts to put on a grand show. You were just being yourself and showing the world an unfiltered view of what it’s like for an adventurer to enjoy the simple act of adventuring.”

  Ian nodded at the man, “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it, but I think you probably need to head on over that way now before they get even louder. People are trying to sleep in the buildings around here.”

  “Fair. I think I’m just going to head out to the car, so hopefully you all will be done here in a few minutes.”

  Ian walked towards the crowd as multiple clan recruiters started calling out to him as they got pushed from behind by reporters calling out questions.

  “Sorry, folks! The only thing I’m interested in is food, so pack on up and let these fine ladies and gentlemen from the AO can go home.” Ian said loudly as he started walking down the exit lane at a steady pace.

  The AO members he could see smiled at his words and gave him a nod. Ian waved at the crowd and walked straight past them. Just as he thought he was going to get away without issue, a man he recognized stepped in front of him on the path, holding out a business card. The entire crowd became quiet as they watched the world-famous recruiting and marketing head of the Peerless clan.

  “Adventurer Zero, my name is—”

  “I’m not interested,” Ian said as he ignored the card and walked past the man.

  The man quickly moved to put himself in front of Ian, “I represent Peerless, the clan with the greatest adven—”

  “Listen, Peter,” Ian said, turning to look at the man with his oily smile. “I know who you are and what you represent. I—” Ian paused to tap his chest twice with both hands, “want nothing to do with you. Ever. For any reason. Ever.”

  Ian continued walking past the man as Peter called out to him, “I’ll set up a meeting with your keeper to discuss your promising future within our organization!”

  “Peter,” Ian called over his shoulder without slowing down. “Get bent.”

  As he entered the parking lot, a man in the AO uniform beckoned him over to a parked sedan. As he got close, he saw Claire holding her face with both hands in the back seat as her shoulders shook.

  He made peace to take whatever punishment she decided to throw his way; he deserved it for wasting her evening. The driver opened the back seat, and Ian thanked him as he slid in.

  Claire burst out laughing the second she looked over at him. He just stared at her, shocked, unable to comprehend what was going on. When she finally calmed down enough to talk, she looked over at him with a huge grin on her face.

  “You…you just told Peter Dinkems—one of the most successful recruiters in the world—to ‘get bent’ on live stream. This may be the single greatest moment of my life.”

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

  Ian felt like his heart stopped. “That was live-streamed? I—I thought the streams stopped when we left the dungeon?”

  “All the live streams are delayed by about thirty seconds to ensure a smooth video and for the curator to determine the correct angles to use,” Claire said, still fighting her giggles. “It must have seen the crowd and decided it might as well stream the action if it was going to be showcased anyway. It literally cut off with a shot of the camera staring at your shadowy face with Peter in the background. It was right after you said ‘Peter, get bent’ with it capturing his face warring with itself to keep that slimy fake grin plastered on it to hide his outrage.

  “I’ve already saved it to watch whenever I’m having a bad day. It may just be the single greatest moment that has ever been recorded in the history of humankind.”

  Ian looked toward the driver and saw him chuckling to himself as they pulled up to the AO’s main office. The drive had been quick, and he thanked the man before walking around to open the door for Claire—who was giggling to herself again as she watched the clip saved on her tablet.

  After helping her out, they were temporarily slowed by a couple of news crews trying to stop and ask Ian questions, but he just politely declined and wished them a good evening. Food was the most important task on his mind at the moment.

  “Alright, let’s head to the cafeteria,” Claire said as they entered the campus proper. “I believe that you owe me a chat, and I’m sure you are starving.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that,” Ian said with a chuckle. “I kind of got caught up in the whole leveling thing. It was just so exhilarating to continuously meet my goals. I probably should have just left when I came back instead of going to the second floor.”

  Claire looked over at him with a grin and just shook her head, “You just did in a few hours what most people take months, if not years, to do without risking themselves. Not only that, but you also made it look easy. Your fighting skills are unrefined, but you were overpowering creatures that should have been far outside of your capabilities to defeat solo. More so, you were doing it all without any magic or attack skills to back you up.

  “When your stream went live, it drew nearly half a million people to check you out. In under half an hour, it was over a million, then two. If it wasn’t for a few of the teams up in the ultra-tier streaming, I think you would have broken the low-tier streaming record for concurrent viewers. Even then, you doubled what The Conquerors were pulling down, then halved their viewer count as they continued to switch to yours.”

  Ian was both intrigued and intimidated by that information. On one hand, he got to pull one over on his ex. However, it also meant a lot of people were watching him, and he had a tendency to talk himself through his thoughts when he was alone.

  “So…” Ian said as they neared the cafeteria, “How embarrassed should I be?”

  “Honestly, I think you did pretty good. Since you forgot you were being watched, it was filled with your natural reactions. It felt like you were a real person, instead of the show that a lot of groups put on.

  “However, it’s pretty obvious one of your inherent skills gives you increased experience, because you were talking through the math. For example, you were talking about how if your 200% boost from your skills was additive or multiplicative of the level difference bonuses—which my father says is multiplicative by the way.”

  “Nice!” Ian said with a happy nod, “But still embarrassing. I need to make sure not to use my real name.”

  “You seemed to be unconsciously trying to get used to referring to yourself as Zero. You kept saying, ‘Zero’ when you would ask yourself questions. At the beginning, it was almost like you were talking in the third person, but not quite.” Claire said before breaking into a giggling fit. “There are already dozens of threads on one of the prominent adventurer tracker sites with a metric ton of teenyboppers talking about how adorable it was. I think you’ve just become the world’s first faceless teenage heart throb.”

  “Ugh,” Ian said as he opened the door for Claire. “Now I really need a beer.”

  After signing in, they separated to grab food, which smelled phenomenal. Ian hadn’t realized how truly famished he was until the smell of the roast beef with potatoes and carrots hit him. It might not have been a fancy meal, but he was so hungry that the smell made his teeth itch.

  He grabbed himself a mug of dark ale and went to find a place to sit. When he looked across the room, he saw Claire had sat down at the same eating area as a party with a familiar face. Smiling behind his shadowed mask, he made his way over.

  “Well, if it isn’t the man of the hour, Zero!” called an obviously inebriated man sitting at the far edge of the group.

  When the rest of the group turned around, a green-haired woman with elf ears let out an excited squeal as she bounced out of her chair. Ian had just enough time to put his plate and mug down before his friend wrapped him in a hug while jumping up and down.

  “You did amazing!” Jen, in her elf form, screamed before letting him go. “We only caught the last hour of your stream, but you were destroying that place!”

  “And putting them damn suits in their place!” Came another woman’s slurred voice. “You would rather step on a rusty nail than deal with the clans huh? That caused quite a few debates with the other tables, though I say a lot of the naysayers should go sit on a cactus and spin.”

  “Hurry up and introduce us, Glade,” requested a man in plate armor.

  Jen moved past the two empty seats that separated Ian from her party members and began introducing them as she went down the line towards her seat.

  “Alright, Zero, we all know who you and Keeper Withers are, so let me get started. This armored gentleman here is James. He’s our tank, though that is probably pretty obvious with his tin man outfit.” She pinched his cheek when he started to object and moved on before he could comment. “This young lush of a fire mage is referred to as ‘The Burning Passion’!”

  “For the love of all that is holy, Glade, stop giving people my alias! I was 16, and well…I was 16,” the woman argued in her slightly slurred voice before she turned her attention to Ian. “Call me Wanda, unless you’re super hunky under that concealing skill, then maybe we could talk about revisit my namesake later.”

  Everyone laughed when the woman finished by winking at Ian.

  “Watch out for that one, Zero. She bites and isn’t afraid to admit it.” Jen laughed as she moved on to the woman who hadn’t said anything yet. “And Nexa here is our silent monster assassin! She doesn’t speak much, but don’t let the quiet act fool you, she is always ready to strike.

  “Finally, we have our two meat heads, Kibbles and Bits.” She said, pointing to the two obviously drunk men sitting at the end.

  “Ha!” said the original inebriated man who called out to him while the second one waved. “My brother and I help to fill out the party. We have the supporting skills. We both heal and provide different buffs while taking care of all the storage and logistics.”

  “With me filling in with a spear and a bow, we are the party known as Restless Hands on the leaderboard,” Jen said with a smile.

  “Now that Glade is finished working at that fast food joint, we can focus on longer dungeon sessions,” Wanda said.

  “And more often,” James added. “If we are going to even think about taking a chance on the tournament next month, we need to get as close as we can to level 500.”

  Ian’s attention moved between the different members of Restless Hands as they began to toss out ideas on how to increase their leveling pace. The only thing they seemed to agree on was how they should push to run at least five days a week until the tournament.

  Turning to Claire he asked, “What is this tournament they are talking about?”

  She held her hand up to her mouth and finished chewing before speaking, “It is a tournament that is held in a special battleground dungeon. It lets dungeon groups fight against each other without the fear of dying. Due to the essence cost of running it, we can only host one every ten or so years right now. So, we were under the legal viewing age to see the last one.”

  “So, parties fight each other? I’ve played competitive games, but the power differences in real life would allow certain groups to completely dominate.” Ian said, thinking about how status and skill differences could be extremely pronounced even within the same tier of adventurers.

  “We only have a couple of hundred adventuring parties worldwide in the ultra-tier, which is comprised of adventurers over level 10,000,” Claire said. “There just aren’t enough of them to pull out enough high-end essence stones to allow us to do more than one bracket per tier. So, level 101 adventurers will end up fighting level 999 adventurers. It is one of the reasons most people don’t join it solo.

  “A good team can make up level differences with skill, gear, and teamwork, but even then, it becomes really difficult. Normally, most teams never fight in battles they can’t win—especially those who are in the clans. So, many of the AO groups are banking on them to panic when faced with a real threat. Which, surprisingly, has historically proved fairly accurate.

  “Solo players are different, because many of them are crazy thrill seekers who risk themselves against weaker enemies just due to numbers. So, most people in parties don’t want to fight—”

  “Crazy battle junkies who won’t play their social media personality games or let them monologue?” said a deep voice, cutting her off.

  Ian turned around to see Jason standing behind them holding a tray and a mug.

  “Jason,” Ian said before motioning to the seat next to him. “Please have a seat!”

  “Jason!” came a drunken roar as all the members of Restless Hands saw the man.

  He just nodded and chuckled at the group before putting his tray and mug down. He sat and turned towards Ian with a huge, shit eating grin.

  “Ten hours and 47 minutes, huh?” he said, his grin never breaking. “Ten hours and 47 freaking minutes!” The man reached over and slapped Ian in the back—hard—before holding both hands up in the air and screaming out for the entire cafeteria, “Hell yeah! Fuck you, Peter! Get bent!”

  Claire was laughing as she pulled up the replay and put it on one of the displays in front of them. As she and Jason started to provide commentary, Jen showed up with a dozen shot glasses filled with some sort of amber colored liquor.

  “This calls for a toast!” she yelled, handing out shots.