Pathbreakers: Multiclassing For Fun And Profit

6/18/24

Las Vegas, Nevada

1:31 PM

The Las Vegas international airport is the only airport I've been to that has slot machines. It's unnecessarily noisy, so I have headphones in and am listening to one of Brian's litRPG recommendations, Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman. The audiobook read by Jeff Hays, might be the greatest thing ever recorded. So I'm startled when Jose taps me on the shoulder and I turn in my waiting room chair to see what he's pointing at.

There's a group of six guys with guns. Scratch that, only four of them have guns, the other two are slinging spells. That explains how they got guns in here. Anyone with levels (those are called “Leveled” now) has an inventory system. The system lets you store a few items in an extra-planar, invisible space. Things in there are simply gone from reality until you pull them back out of your inventory. So you could, for example, walk into an airport unarmed and then pull weapons out of your inventory to hand to your crook friends. Personally I keep sandwiches in my inventory...And swords.

The guys with guns fire them into the air. One guy with magic shoots a flamethrower blast over the heads of the crowd. The other guy makes his fists coated in water. I take my ear buds out.

The lead guy is shouting. “Don't move! You TSA pigs put down your guns and we'll all make it home tonight! I want all of you folks here to gamble to cough up the money-”

I turn to Jose. “So should I just end it or you want something fancy?”

“Just end it,” he says, and turns back to his book. I think it's a Tom Clancy.

I stand up and snap my fingers. With a small flash of black smoke, a white domino mask appears in my right hand. I slide it over my eyes and with another flash of smoke I'm in my white Pathbreakers uniform. I see one of the gun guys spot me, but they're going to be too slow to stop me.

I call forth a Solar weapon, and a baseball bat bursts into existence in front of me. Orange solar flame spirals around the yellow-tinted, metal shaft like a snake before settling into a jewel in the pommel of the bat. I think this is all I need for this particular fight.

When it comes to stats, 10 is the average for adult humans. At 124, my Agility is 12 times faster than an average human. So I'm in the middle of the group of six before the one who saw me can even aim. My 162 Dexterity lets me quickly slap all four automatic rifles, and my Telekinesis lets me rip them out of their owner's hands and float them just out of reach overhead. The guy with the Flame Thrower spell turns to me and I see his hand glow red. My Reflexes are at 254 so this seems like it happens in slow motion. I punch him in the gut with my 150 Strength and he goes flying back ten feet. I hope he's not dead. He groans. Okay, he's not dead.

The other caster tries to hit me with his Fluid Fists but my 100 Toughness makes that hilarious and I ignore the punches. They make me damp though. I hope my earbuds are okay. I pull the sun bat towards me with telekinesis and block a couple of his punches by bunting. His big watery boxing gloves begin to boil from the heat of my bat and then they drop to the floor, like two buckets of scalding water.

“Give up?” I ask the group.

The lot of them begin to pummel me, but my Toughness combined with several abilities makes my skin effectively 30 times more durable than the average Joe's. So I turn my bat and swing it around, whacking into the side of each guy, sending them all sprawling and clutching at partially seared flesh.

“Give up?” I ask the group. There’s a smattering of groans. “I will take that as a yes.” I turn to the TSA agents who have their guns drawn. “Okay, you guys have it from-”

“Freeze! On the ground, now!” a TSA agent yells at me.

“Ma'am, I was just preventing-”

“ON THE GROUND NOW!” She's aiming her handgun at my face. I like my face and would prefer it not to be shot. I sigh and sit down on the ground next to the actual criminals.

The woman comes over and cuffs me. “If I'm delayed you're paying for my ticket, though.”

---

THREE HOURS later, I'm released and can't get a ticket to San Francisco, our intended destination, where my Dad and brother live. I sigh. I can run really, really fast, but I'm not great at distance running. So my only other option is renting a car. I check on cars. They only have small cars that can't leave the city. My team is already landing in San Francisco. Tomorrow is dungeon break day, so there's no flights tomorrow. I am officially screwed.

We (Mercy, Jose, Madeline, Quins and I) were supposed to be confronting my brother by now. Aaand accusing him of being in league with the people who caused the Dracosys and its horrendously high death count. Then I was going to either fight my brother or bring him into the CIA for interrogation, depending on how much he's leveled up from his super secret personal dungeon that he made for himself.

We discovered that certain people were behind the Dracosys, the god-like system now governing the world and making it all game-like. And based on the info we got, I think my brother is one of the top five ringleaders of the whole thing. So I have to confront him. Stop him. Ask him why. And, most importantly, I have to try and keep him from getting himself killed.

My team carried on to San Fran without me, so I get a hotel room by myself and contemplate the meaning of life. Then, after about 2.5 minutes where I discover zero secrets of the universe, I pull out my Nintendo Switch and play Smash Bros.

My hotel is on the Las Vegas strip. This room is available and cheap because tomorrow is dungeon break day and monsters will be coming out of the Luxor pyramid dungeon, which is just across the street. No big deal, just a horde of angry monsters coming to eat me in about 12 hours.

I feel like I should be scared. I should be worried. But I'm not, not even a little. I'm a Pathbreaker, and fighting monsters is what we do best.

I head down to the lobby because my room has no towels. “Hey, uh, desk guy? Can I get some towels? I've got none in my room.”

“Sure, sure,” he says nervously, and opens a cabinet behind him to grab me a fluffy white bath towel. “Sorry, we've been understaffed since, you know...”

“Oh sure,” I say with sympathy. “We were understaffed all the time at my previous job at a Get! store. Management cutting hours recently?”

“No. No, it's the dungeon. Nobody wants to work dungeon break days.” He glances around. There's hardly anyone in the casino. Just a few compulsive gamblers and an old lady who seems to be on vacation. “Nobody wants to be here on dungeon break days.”

On Wednesdays, the day of the week the Dracosys first arrived, dungeons across the world belch out monsters.

I take the towel. “Well, tomorrow will be different. How deep is the strip dungeon?” Each dungeon spits out monsters for a number of hours equal to the number of floors it has.

“Twenty five,” the desk guy says, swallowing with fear and trepidation. The front doors to the Excalibur hotel and casino were boarded up. They look like they'd been blown out by something in the recent past.

This was all the Dracosys's fault. This man's fear. The people abandoning places that were once flocked to. Over 18 million people dead, millions more displaced. People put out of jobs, out of their homes. Monsters stalking the streets until law enforcement or the military or impromptu militias can put them down. Fear. So much fear and desperation across the planet.

But I can do something about it. I have power now. And I'm going to use it to make things better for people.

“Thanks for the towel. You work tomorrow?”

“Yeah, but they let me stay upstairs so I don't have to leave during the dungeon break.”

“Well, tomorrow will be different than normal, I promise you that.” With that, I head back upstairs.

-----

Jun's Solar (fire/light) Spells

Ray Of Light

Exotic

It's regular light, in any color you choose. Even infrared or ultraviolet! You can make motes of lantern-like lights or flashlight beams.

Range: 30 ft (lantern) 75 ft (beam)

Cost: 1 Arcana Point/10 minutes

May be set to passive.

Proficiency: 19%

Solar Mote

Exotic

Create a mote of solar light, which hovers around you. You may direct the mote via Telekinesis. It burns whatever it touches.

Range: 20 ft

Duration: 10 minutes

Cost: 2 Arcana Points or 10 Points for an explosive mote

May be set to passive

Proficiency: 177%

Sol Arms

Exotic

Create a Solar element weapon of your choice. Your Telekinesis is automatically applied to it.

Duration: 10 minutes

Cost: 3 Arcana Points

May be set to passive

Proficiency: 721%

Prominence Burn

Exotic

Shoot a stream of solar flames at foes. This can be a narrow beam or a wide cone.

Range: 30 ft

Cost: 1 Arcana Point per second

Proficiency: 432%

Solar Barrier

Exotic

Create a large shield of solar light and fire. Your Telekinesis is already applied to it.

Duration: 10 minutes

Cost: 5 Arcana Points

May be set to passive

Proficiency: 250%

Star Fall Crash

Exotic

Coat yourself in solar energy to fly and slam into a foe.

Duration: 10 seconds or impact

Speed: 250% of running speed

Cost: 50 Arcana Points

Proficiency: 9%