“You still with me, son?” came a distant voice.
Ian began coughing, pushing himself onto his side, and spitting something out on the ground.
“Woah! Take it easy there,” said the voice. “I made a quick call to the AO, the Adventurer’s Office, and they will have someone out here soon.”
Ian’s eyes finally focused enough to make out the blood he had just spat out, along with what appeared to be a few of his teeth. Instinctively, he ran his tongue across the back of his teeth to find all of them were present. Not only that, but he could tell they were considerably sharper and straighter than they had been before.
He took a deep breath, causing the entire world to come into focus. He knew it was well past midnight, but he could still see the area around him as if it were midday. He could make out the fencing that created the barrier around the portals and the little guard shack that the AO representative spent their time in.
“No, I don’t need the AO, but thank you,” Ian croaked as he went to push himself into a sitting position. “How long have I been out for?”
“Just relax and stop trying to get up,” said the man that Ian could now make out to be the representative who usually worked night shift here on the weekends. “You’ve only been out for a couple of minutes, but your body looked like it was trying to tear itself into pieces. Did you unlock a berserker skill or something? Your muscles were rolling around like crazy, and you look quite a bit bigger than you did just a few minutes ago.”
Ian looked down to find that his clothes appeared a little small on him all of a sudden. They felt kind of tight on him through the shoulders as well.
“What the actual…no, this is fine,” Ian said as he looked himself over.
“Not sure what is supposed to be fine about it, you're covered in your own blood,” chuckled the man. “I adventured for decades before my wife and I retired. Gotta say, I’ve never seen anything quite like what just happened to you. It was kinda crazy. You even appear to be a couple of inches taller, and that crooked nose of yours now looks like it’s never been broken. Your shoulders also got wider, like you hit a tanking growth spurt or something.
“If I wasn’t used to you coming around here every weekend, I wouldn’t even know you were the same kid that went in,” the man exclaimed.
Ian grimaced at that. “I’m sorry I bothered you, but I really should be getting home though.”
“Nonsense,” said the man, putting a hand on Ian’s shoulder and stopping him from pushing himself up.
Ian looked at the man and realized that he really was a higher-level adventurer. Ian couldn’t even budge, and the man wasn’t even pushing. The bonuses from the dungeons didn’t directly carry over to the outside world. Only extremely powerful adventurers could maintain a portion of their enhanced strength outside of the mana-rich environment of the dungeons.
“Listen,” said the man with a serious voice. “I know who you are, and I know you’re trying to hide from everyone. However, I’m a pretty good judge of character and looked into you over the past year and a half you’ve been coming here. The main reason I haven’t switched my post to a daytime shift—even though my wife is telling me that it’s about time—is because I have been hoping you would overcome whatever has been holding you down.”
Ian just stared at the man with disbelief. He didn’t remember having any long conversations with the man before now. Just a few words here and there, and thanking the man for advice on the few occasions he’d offered it. If Ian was honest with himself, the conversation felt like some sort of trap.
“Stop looking at me like I’m out to get you,” said the man with a snort. “My job is to ensure everyone is taken care of, and I know you haven’t been. I know the AO hasn’t assigned you a Keeper to meet with, as they never expected you to hit 100 or even know you’re leveling. However, we both know how wrong they were, don’t we?”
Ian’s eyes got wide. Have people been monitoring him? He hadn’t been evaluated in over a year, so there is no way they should know what level he is. Besides that, only a handful of people in the entire world had the ability to analyze other people without equipment.
“How did you know?”
“Lucky guess mostly,” said the man with a knowing look. “Inherent skills are different, and only happen at the thresholds for the different tiers, such as 100 and 1,000. I expect there are more beyond the 10,000 threshold that gets you into the ultra-tier if you go higher, but no human has reached the next one yet. Since you suddenly hulked up when leaving the dungeon, I figured you had hit level 100 using the dungeon bonuses. Pretty ingenious way to get around your leveling problem if you ask me.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
“Besides, I have quite the soft spot for those who claw their way out of the pit. Everyone likes an underdog story, especially when they were dragged down under completely false pretenses. Either way, I’ve got someone coming here to pick you up and take on the role of your Keeper. She’s a bit of a handful but will help keep you safe from the sharks until you can grow your own teeth.”
Ian just blinked at the man for a moment. He opened his mouth to speak as a car screeched to a halt in the parking lot next to them. Both he and the older man looked over to see the driver's side door open on the black sedan and a woman in comfy-looking purple pajama pants, a green hoodie, and exaggerated monster feet slippers hop out.
“What are you doing?” asked the woman in a tired voice. “If you’ve started assaulting newbies, I swear to the curator I’m going to have mother beat you black and blue.”
“Well, that’s just rude,” said the man with a smirk.
“Can it, Dad,” said the woman. “What did you call me out here for?”
The man stood up and looked pretty pleased with himself as he pointed to Ian, “I’ve found you an adventurer to take on.”
The woman just grabbed her head with one hand and sighed, and began mumbling to herself. After a few moments, she looked back at her smiling father. The glare she gave him was less than pleasant.
“Let’s not play games, Dad. It’s the middle of the night, and I have to be at work in six hours. Explain why I shouldn’t just get back in my car and go back to my warm bed.”
“He has the potential to easily surpass what your mother and I were able to accomplish over our careers in the next year or so.”
The woman’s face lost any sense of annoyance. “No bullshit?”
“No bullshit, Claire.”
The woman, Claire, looked from her father to Ian before her eyes squinted and flashed a dark, glowing green.
“You have to be kidding me…Ian Spelling?” She said angrily before looking back at her father. “Do you realize how much effort Peerless put into ensuring everyone knew what he did to Avra when she made her debut? Have you been living under a rock, old man?”
Ian pushed himself to his feet while Claire yelled at her father, controlled anger simmering inside. He went to dust himself off and realized there wasn’t any point, this shirt would probably need to be thrown away. He didn’t have enough money to buy the supplies to get this much blood out, and it would probably be cheaper just to buy a new one than clean it anyways.
Taking a deep breath to calm himself, he let his anger bleed away as the two continued to argue.
“Can we please stop?” Ian voiced in a tired plea. He gave the old man a nod. “Thank you for trying to help, but it just isn’t meant to be. I do appreciate the thought and the effort, but I can’t say I fully trust anyone who works over at the AO. I’m sorry.”
The man just gave Ian a smile before patting him on the back. As Ian turned, he saw Claire give him a withering look, but he chose to ignore it and began walking past her towards the train station.
“Really?” Claire loudly asked with anger in her voice as he reached her. “Those of us at the AO take our jobs very seriously. We each spend thousands of hours a year, including our off-duty time, helping newbies and veterans alike reach their full potential, and you have the nerve to say that you can’t trust us like we somehow let you down? Someone who made adventurers seem like awful human beings? You’re pathetic.”
Ian just snorted and kept walking.
“See, you don’t even have anything to say for yourself.”
Ian stopped and turned around to see the anger on the woman’s face. It was one he had seen so many times before, but what were the options? He could either argue with them and get nowhere, or he chose not to, and they assumed they were right. Honestly, Ian was too tired to choose after working a full shift, running an entire dungeon, and having his body practically remade.
“What do you want me to say?” he asked quietly. “You’ve already made up your mind without even putting in any effort to figure out what happened. There is no winning for me. Any avenue or path I take with people like you just proves that Beth took everything I had to give, and continues to take everything I can’t afford to lose.
“However, there is one thing that always bothered me about what happened,” Ian said, his voice going cold as the night’s events pushed his anger past his self-control. “Where were the lawsuits for stealing all of her money from her—which was an ironic claim because she never held a job before becoming an adventurer. Where were the fact-finding missions to uncover all these apparent women I slept with? Where are all of these recordings and police reports that said I used to beat my girlfriend until she could barely move? Where were the ramifications from all of the horrible things I had supposedly done? Stuff that should have resulted in a huge public trial.
“Or more importantly to you,” he growled, seeing the shocked look on her face. “Why hasn’t the AO taken my license from me for breaking the adventurer’s code of conduct?”
Ian just stared through the woman as he shook his head, a sense of hopelessness pushing away his anger. It didn’t matter what he said, and he knew it. After dealing with these people for so long, he knew things would never change.
“Which leads to the most important question for me,” he said before taking a breath to fully regain his self-control. “Why didn’t the AO step up and help clear my name when they discovered it was all false?”
The woman just stared at him, mouth hanging open. Deciding it wasn’t worth it to stay, he waved to the man, who returned the gesture as he resumed walking towards the train station.
“Hey, catch!” The old man yelled from behind him.
Ian turned and caught the old man’s coat out of the air. When he looked back, the old man just pointed at his shirt and made an exaggerated grimace. Ian looked down at the giant blood stain and realized that he would probably get arrested if he had walked around without it being covered.
“Just drop it back off tomorrow night,” the old man hollered to him.
His breath caught for a second as he waved to the old man in thanks before turning back towards the train station. Yeah, life sucked, but he guessed there were still a few good people out there. Or maybe he was just tired and needed to get some sleep before figuring out what to make of the night’s events.
