Pathbreakers: Multiclassing For Fun And Profit

6/20

San Francisco, California

7:45 PM

“You were right, chief,” says Quins, with his lower class British accent, between bites. “Nuffing like a Mission burrito.” The skinny brit looks like a scarecrow. When he uses a bow it looks like a bundle of twigs firing another bundle of twigs.

“It’s more cali than mex,” Jose Amarillo notes. “Not bad, but hardly authentic.” Jose is tall and muscular. Neither attribute is needed for being a sniper, but his wife doesn't complain. Recently he's had a short beard and mustache. The pitch black hair goes well with his light brown Hispanic skin tone.

“What, they don't put feta cheese and aioli on your burritos back home?” Madeline Diaz asks Jose. She's wide and muscular. A body builder's physique and an FBI agent's mind. Mercy convinced her to dye her hair flaming red.

“You mean Dallas?” Mercy Mahar responds, “they make all kinds of burritos there, some authentic, some not.” She and I live in Carrollton, one of the 800 suburbs of Dallas, TX. Jose lives down the street from us. She's curvy, deliciously thick and has short, white hair and dark brown Pakistani skin which I like to-

“Lick, I mean like, I mean I like these burritos but I like the authentic ones too.” I'm tall for a Korean, and now that my stats are ridiculous, I'm pretty lean and martial-artist muscular. My high Charisma even cleared up some skin conditions so I look younger than my 28 years. My hair is still short and black but I've been actually combing it since uhhh Mercy made me.

“So how was the Las Vegas thing?” Madeline asks.

“Exhausting, frustrating, dangerous.” I tilt my head back remembering the dungeon break. Was that just earlier today? Right afterwards I flew to San Fran and we went to see my father, so it seems like at least two days have passed since then.

I tell them about the waves, the losses, the Roman god showing up. They seem impressed, but not that impressed.

“Just making it through without rest is pretty impressive,” Madeline tells me. “The soldiers take shifts, right?”

“Yeah, I think I met like 100 soldiers, but never more than 60 at a time were fighting.” It seems like everyone but me is keeping track of all the news. I've been ignoring it until recently.

In the US, National Guard and Army troops are deployed around dungeons, ruins and now arenas as well, though there's fewer of those. The casualty rates are pretty horrible, but decreasing each week. This is both due to combat experience fighting the same monsters over and over, and system experience. The military has been making sure as many as possible go into dungeons, ruins or arenas to get classes and become leveled. The military has told its personnel to prioritize healing and defensive classes, but gaining levels is slow and dangerous.

“Gain more levels?” asks Jose with a suspicious eyebrow raised.

“Yeah,” I shrug. “I'm back up to 10 free levels to assign.”

Quins exaggeratedly complains, “the rich get richer, das what me ol’ gran used to say.”

I hate to admit it, but I have been leveling faster than most people do. Far faster. We Leveled get experience points for killing things (and humans are things, which certain crooks have discovered). So with 78 levels of Synergist (split between 17 classes), 20 levels of Doppelganger and 10 levels of Astral Pathbreaker, I should be gaining levels very slowly. Should be. But the system bases your leveling speed on your average class level which for me, with 19 classes, is rather low. And that was before I got an ability that made me “level 0” in any class I qualify for. That dropped my average level to around four.

I am almost certainly one of the strongest people in the world. And I still haven't really come to grips with that. Honestly, how does Goku deal with being Goku? He's an idiot, that's how. Okay, how does Superman deal with being Superman?... Probably depends on who's writing him this week. Friggin incohesive American comics.

“We have the Capitol Building tomorrow, but I want to go back and hit the Las Vegas dungeon before too long.” I pull out my calendar app. It's packed.

Mercy also has her phone out and says, in a pacifying voice, “we're booked until a week and a half from now. July 2nd. Dungeon break is the 3rd.”

“We haven't cleared a 25 floor dungeon yet,” Madeline reminds us. “My Phoenix team certainly isn't up for that task yet.” Madeline usually works with her own team. We formed it around her after it was clear that we needed to get more done and a second Pathbreakers team was needed. They cleared out the Grand Canyon ruin, which was no easy feat, so they're not green. Just not as leveled as my squad, team Lupus Rex.

“I can do the heavy lifting,” I say, and I mean it. I can probably solo a 10 or 15 floor dungeon by now. “I did just kill a god, after all.”

“Don't let it go to your head,” Jose says and flicks my ear like he would one of his kids.

“I won't,” I say, rubbing my ear even though it's literally impossible for him to have damaged me that way. “Besides, we could die in a nuclear blast at any moment.”

That shuts everyone up. Whoops. People outside of the media really don't like talking about the Ambrose Society's nuclear bombs. They'd gotten them from R-32, a dungeon and cave I had history with. Not a good history, either.

The Ambrose Society has, so far, only demanded that their agents remain unmolested by governments across the world. I'm not privy to how the whole “secondary global crisis” is going. I was a Ranger, not a spook.

“Yeah, well, at least Russia's finally out of the picture, eh?” Quins is an optimist. “First their Kremlin becomes a ‘undred floor dungeon, then spits out all kinds a monsters, then they get nuked by Ambrose hisself.”

Madeline, a pessimist, asks “You know there's not actually a guy named Ambrose doing this stuff, right?”

Quins just shrugged. “Yeah, but it's easier to say ‘ol Ambrose did it than a whole mess of people which might be 3 guys or thousands.”

I shrug and lean back on my chair. The small corner restaurant only seats about 20 people total, and is decorated in classic Americana style, with old road signs. Mercy has been at her laptop the whole time, and intermittently scrunches up her face with annoyance or aggravation. Wow, now that my Wisdom is above average I can notice people's facial expressions!

“What's up, Mercy?” I ask, not really wanting the answer. I know she's looking at my brother's files.

“There's four types of files,” she starts, and over her shoulder I can see she has multiple documents open and is typing furiously into one of them. “There's the conversation logs, which we already got. Then there's a Dracosys system structure log. Looks like an outline of the Dracosys features and settings. Third is personal notes and fourth is... I think it's a novel.”

“Ah, my brother's infamous infinite web novel. He said he'd written over a thousand chapters of it, but I'd never even looked at it. What's it about?”

She looks worried, as if whatever she says might upset me. “I've seen the worst of the world already,” I say to assuage her. “Nothing at this point could throw me off even more.“

She nods and says, “I think it's one of those litRPGs.”

“THAT ASSHOLE.” I facetiously exclaim. “He said he was writing fantasy, not science fiction!” I shake my fist at the sky to show my utter outrage.

“Oh this one is definitely a fantasy,” Mercy says with an eye roll. “Each time he beats a monster it turns into a sexy girl he then sleeps with. Oh, and the main character is named Hakkun, so the self insert is more than apparent.”

She begins to read:

Chapter 402, Titania Rising

I used my spacial magic to teleport me and my entire harem of 24 beautiful monster girls to Al-Kandria, home of the Shar-Al-Kand, whose powers over the Ilikiri are renowned across all of Tabraxia. In response to my growing force's appearance in their town square, the mayor came out and surrendered the entire city to me, and declared me the greatest-

“Please, for the love of God, stop,” Madeline says.

Quins gives us his analysis. “I've read some shite but that really is the bloody worst. I'd rather queue up for the one working pisser at the Wrexham stadium than listen to any more of that god's awful tripe.”

Jose just offers a review. “Two out of five stars.”

“You've read worse?” Madeline asks.

I quickly try to keep Jose from going off. “Oh do not get him started on The Reincarnationist Papers.”

Jose clenches his fists and a dark look comes over his face. “I told you not to speak its name. A book so bad that I felt cheated even though I listened to it for free on Audible. A book so worthless-”

“Yes, yes, we all agree with you Jose,” I say, not at all in a placating manner. “A very poor book written by a small minded man of very limited imagination.”

Jose slams his hand down on the table. “Putting a framing device in a story only matters if it actually reframes the story!”

“Aaaaaany ways, what's the deal with the personal files?” I ask, and can only hope that Jose's completely justified outrage over a shitty book fades away.

Mercy mercifully continues, “the files are mostly notes on how and why the Dracosys rules are the way they are. I don't think your brother actually understands how the Dracosys works or why it works. He was just told that it would accept a program.”

“Anything on the Etheric radiation?” I ask. That was mentioned in the conversation logs and has been bugging the heck out of me.

“He, your brother, seems to think the Etheric radiation is a byproduct, rather than cause of the Dracosys.” Mercy is a hell of a speed reader. I've known this for a while, since she tears through novels like most women her age go through cheap wine bottles.

“Any evidence of where he is now?” Jose asks.

Mercy skims more. It takes her a minute before she asks me, “what's the place with the best vistas? He says he put his dungeon entrance there.”

-----

Ochoa's Computer Resale shop is just down the street from my dad's house. “The best Windows Vistas,” I say, as I wave my arm in front of the store in a ta-da fashion.

“I'll go around back,” Jose says, and takes Madeline with him.

I peer through the plate glass window out front. Inside are old PCs, lovingly restored to as good as they can be. Dan Ochoa's is popular among gamers who want to play old PC games that aren't compatible with today's operating systems. He carries newer stuff too, but that's not nearly as fun.

The store itself is unfortunately closed for the night, and we have the white house thing tomorrow so we can't wait around for Dan to open up in the morning. As I contemplate breaking in, Madeline rounds the corner and yells at us. “Hey, dummies, we found it!”

Less than a minute later we're in the alley behind the shop where a chalk outline of a door has been drawn on the wall. In front of the chalk door is a dumpster, which, upon close inspection, doesn't usually sit there. Jose tosses a pebble into the chalk outline and the “doorway” ripples like water.

I stroke my chin in a detective-like manner. “So, if my 250 Intelligence is right, the dumpster used to be over here, but Hak-Kun puts it over here in front of the door when he's not inside. To move that he must have tremendous strength. And that means he planned this all out before the Dracosys started up. He knew he'd have the strength to move this thing when he was deciding where to put the entrance.”

“Sure, Sherlock,” says Madeline. “But why not at home? Surely this is inconvenient?”

I point up the alley. “This goes right behind my dad's house. Easy access. Plus, remember that they talked about plausible deniability in their conversation logs? A dungeon in your breakfast nook is a bit less than deniable.”

“Maybe he was worried about a dungeon break?” Jose asks.

Mercy chimes in. “He programmed this and the other custom dungeons as tutorial areas, so they don't have dungeon breaks.”

“Convenient,” Jose says, and starts sliding the dumpster out of the way. “We going in?”

I flip my wrist, my white mask appears in my hand, then with a swirl of smoke I'm in uniform and armed with plenty of wakizashis. “I am, but I want you guys to head to the airport, we've got flights tonight.”

“You want to confront him by yourself?” Mercy asks me, concern in her voice.

I think about lying, or making a joke, or saying a one liner. I reject those options, because I'm an adult now, goddammit. “Yeah, I want to talk to him before anything violent happens. He's still my brother.”