“How are you not drunk?” was the first thing that came out of my lips. I really needed to put a leash on those things. They would get me in trouble some day.

  Roland laughed. It was the sort of laugh you would expect from a roller coaster operator watching a nine year old girl screaming her head off as the ride slowly pulled out of the platform.

  “Oh, that?” he said between gasping breaths as his diaphragm calmed down from its fit, “General detox potions are rather cheap. It’s the specific poison antidotes that get expensive. Quality over quantity, if you will.”

  General detox potion, also know as a universal poison antidote. I was so stupid. Why hadn’t I thought of that? I worked at a glorified convenience store, after all. They were some of the more expensive items that we sold, but then again, I wasn’t dealing with the average customer. I would have to get used to that. The people entering the Great Dungeon either came from a moderately to obscenely rich family, like Roland here, or were sponsored by one, like me.

  I didn’t begrudge the rich families their wealth. Somewhere back in their lineage, someone had worked very hard to set up their foundation and make sure their children had the best the world had to offer. Then the children took that start and built on it until the wealth snowballed. It was the nature of things.

  No, that wasn’t a problem. But did it skew their view of the world? Yes, yes it did. Which, now that I thought about it, was very funny. Either Roland’s family had arranged for him to be carried to the highest level they could and he would be killed on the real battlefield, or he would have a very rude awakening as to the worth of money when he entered the dungeon. Each way would be a shock to him, but one would have just a little bit less of a chance of dying. I knew which one I would choose if I were them.

  Amusingly enough, I was in a better position than him, even with less knowledge. For the first few floors, at least.

  “Come on, the dungeon will be letting people in here soon.” Roland said, putting an arm around my shoulders and dragging me forward.

  We continued down the pathway, until we reached yet another courtyard. Well, less of a yard and more of a large stone platform where about a hundred people gathered. They were milling about in front of the mouth of the dungeon, which I now saw had a translucent shield over the mouth of it.

  When I remarked on the strangeness of this, Roland smiled. “The dungeon opens every day at seven in the morning, and it closes at seven at night. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know. It’s a slow day, though. Usually there’s at least triple this number of people waiting in the mornings, sometimes even more. Everybody wants into this dungeon, and the entrance ticket is cheap compared to the benefits you’ll get out of it.”

  “About that, why did you decide to sponsor me in the first place? If you don’t mind answering, that is.”

  Roland shrugged. “My parents decided it would be good for me to have a team, and that was that. Their word is law. But they didn’t tell me who was to be on my team. I took a chance on you with that coin, though it isn’t a lot of money. I also wasn’t as drunk as I looked. I’m extremely good with alcohol. So what do you say? Want to be on my budding team?”

  I blinked. That was frighteningly flawed logic. What if he had just taken the coin and ran with it? What then? He’d have just been down a coin, that’s what. But it had worked out for him in the end. And you know what?

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Fantastic! Welcome to the team! There’s nobody else at the moment, but I’m sure we’ll find others eventually. My parents said I’m on my own for this dungeon and they’ve pretty much cut me off. So I can’t bribe people onto our team, but that’s probably for the best. Blah, blah, blah, loyalty and all that.”

  You know, the more I heard about Roland’s parents, the more I started to like them. They weren’t coddling him, and he seemed to be a fairly reasonable guy on the whole. At first I had feared he might be like some of the other rich kids I’d heard about. Those platinum-spoon brats with no self control and hyper inflated egos.

  “So how much longer until the dungeon opens?” I asked, then immediately felt stupid for asking as I spotted a clock tower off to the left.

  Roland nodded to it. “About fifteen minutes. That clock is set once a week to match the exact moment the dungeon opens. It was just wound yesterday, so it’s quite accurate. It’s surprising the thing’s still working given its age.”

  “Is there anything you know about the dungeon itself?”

  He paused for a moment, considering. “That depends. I know a great deal of the history behind it, the people who make it all the way, and a small amount of what it means to complete it. But in terms of actually useful knowledge? Not much. I do know that the first floor is basically a freebie. It’s the place where all the shops and stuff are for the first ten floors, and they keep it fairly clear of monsters.

  “That means, though, that the second floor is all the harder as you’re jumping from level 1-2 monsters to level 3-4. Its a big jump, especially for the early levels, but not nearly as hard as the later floors when the difficulty grows exponentially and the distance between neighboring levels widens considerably.

  “The average drop-out floor in the dungeon is floor eight, given the amount of participants who haven’t experienced hardship before. But for those who make it past that, the furthest anyone has ever progressed apart from the four natural Paragons, is level 92. And he dragged himself out the door a bloody pulp, hauling the corpses of his fallen team members along behind him. It was quite the sight. I hear it took an armada of lower-level healers to keep him on this side of the veil.”

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “Any clues about the skills or classes or anything else?” I asked, trying to pry out any bits of knowledge he might have that he didn’t recall immediately.

  “Classes are tailored to you and your strengths specifically by the system, that’s all I know about them. For skills, all I know is that when you gain a class, you immediately receive five skills. You have your class skill, of course, and four other skills built for your class archetype. There are five archetypes: Warrior, Tank, Archer, Healer, and Mage. You know what those are, I assume.”

  I nodded. They were fairly simplistic classifications for different rolls in a party. You had your damage dealers, both magic and physical, your healer, and the damage sink.

  “I hope I get a spear class, like Hades.” I said. “That sounds cool.”

  Roland grinned. “It does, doesn’t it. But Hades was a bit of an outlier. There wasn’t a single special thing about him. He was just… different. Nobody knows how. But that spear-work of his? I saw a video of it once. They had to use the world’s fastest camera to do so, but they caught it, and they compressed it into an actually watchable video.

  “His spear-work was off the charts impressive. I haven’t seen anything like it before. Every move was smooth and precise with no excess energy used. It was, to use an absurdly overused simile, like watching an artist painting with the blood of his enemies. Beautiful to watch.”

  “Aurelia was better!” someone called.

  I turned to see the speaker. It was a red-haired woman of average height and build wearing athletic shorts and a loose shirt tucked in around the waist. She waved to Roland who frowned slightly.

  “How do you know?” he asked.

  She stopped in front of us, hands on hips. “For one,” she said, “The fight between the three of them wasn’t a good matchup. The three of them kept getting in one another’s way, which allowed him to exploit the chaos. In fact, individually they would each be better than him. Aurelia and Dimitri because of their ability to attack from an unclosable distance, and Castor because of his unstoppable nature and nearly impenetrable armor.”

  By the way she talked, I could tell the had had this conversation many times before. Great. I was going to bear witness to yet another fruitless conversation. I hadn’t had enough of those in my six years of working in customer service. Not nearly enough.

  But to my surprise, she turned to me and asked, “So who’s the new guy? He looks interesting.”

  Roland just sighed. “Felix, meet Rosa, my sister. And Rosa, this is Felix, my first official party member.”

  “You know it’s not a good idea to form a party before you get your class, right? Otherwise, some of your party members might have overlapping jobs.” She shook her head at him.

  “I know.” Roland said, “But I got a good feeling about him. Like he might be an important addition.”

  “Where’d you find him?”

  “At that bar this morning. The one with the actually decent rum. You know, I might just have to go back there after the dungeon. It was pretty good.”

  “Seriously? You picked someone off the side of the road to go dungeoneering with you? Are you that desperate for friends? Cause I could introduce you to a couple of mine. I’m sure you would get along great with them. They would fall all over themselves—”

  Roland held up his hands in surrender and backed away slightly. “Alright, okay, I get it. I just had a good feeling about him, okay? And you don’t have to keep pawning me off to your friends. I took one of them out for dinner once, remember? Do you remember how well that went?”

  Rosa winced. “Yeah. You know what? Never mind. You can have him. Just don’t come running to me when he dies on floor four from blunt trauma.”

  “Girl,” I said, “Do you realize how much blunt trauma I suffer on a daily basis just banging my head against the counter after conversations like this one? If there was a blank wall within a hundred yards of here I would be doing so now. Your niggling is causing more pain than that ever did. I’m my own person, thank you very much. It was as much my decision as his.”

  I held up my hand before she spoke and continued, “And I’m not a drooling idiot, you know. I realize the importance of a strong party. But I would rather have a lopsided one than team with someone I don’t like. So deal with it, okay? And go stick your head in the sand elsewhere.”

  The two of them stared at me like I had grown a second head. Alright, it might have been a bit much, but they really were starting to give me a headache with all their arguing.

  Rosa looked appalled, and a moment of genuine shock crossed her face. Then she smiled. “I take everything I just said back, Rol. You chose perfectly. Now you’ll have a substitute older sister—”

  “Younger, by two minutes.”

  “Older in mind.”

  “Quit it, you two.”

  “That’s not a thing.”

  “Yes it is, it’s called maturity.”

  “I said quit it.”

  “You’re the one who’s arguing.”

  “Hypocrite.”

  “No, you.”

  “No, you!”

  “I SAID SHUT UP!”

  The two of them went silent and stared at me yet again. And I got the distinct feeling that I had interrupted yet another sibling ritual argument. Did all brothers and sisters have this kind of relationship with one another? Cause if they did, I was sure glad I didn’t have one.

  “You two are going to kill me with your bickering. If you can’t just settle down and agree with one another for five whole seconds, I will find a pair of dirt clods and stuff them down your pie holes. Thank goodness you two won’t be in a party together.”

  A meaningful glance passed between the two of them.

  “Oh you’ve got to be kidding me. Really?”

  Roland spoke up. “We came to an agreement that if we had compatible classes at level ten, we would be in a party together.”

  “I can’t believe this. I’m going to have to put up with this bickering for the rest of my career. I only just met the two of you and this is already getting old.”

  He just shrugged. To be fair, this must be an everyday occurrence for him. My appreciation for his parents went up another notch for being able to put up with the sheer idiocy that this was.

  “Oh look, the dungeon’s opening.” Rosa said, pointing as though she hadn’t seen this several hundred times before.

  I turned. And there, at the mouth of the dungeon entrance, the shield began to shimmer. It gained an iridescent sheen and ripples began to emanate from the four corners, converging in the center where the negative interference canceled them out. Then the rippling stilled, and the barrier just faded away like the stars at dawn, which it was, as the sun chose that exact moment to breach the horizon and cast its rays announcing the beginning of a new day.

  “That’s always amazing to watch.” Roland said.

  “What, dawn breaks at seven every day here?” I asked.

  “Yep, our family’s whole estate is covered by an enchanted artifact that makes it look as though the sun rises the moment the dungeon opens. It doesn’t change the actual sun, just casts a massive illusion over this place. The sun runs its circuit just a little bit faster, too, such that the sun sinks over the horizon just as the dungeon closes. It was quite expensive to procure.”

  I’ll say it once, and I’ll say it again. Rich people.

  Together, the three of us walked forward, trailing behind the mass of people rushing into the doorway. We took our time, knowing the entrance wouldn’t close any time soon.

  The excitement was killing me, though. This was it. This was the point beyond which my life would never be the same. It would become a life full of pain and difficulty and fun and friendship. But most importantly, it would be more of a life than a dead end job in a mini supermarket. And more exciting too. Much more exciting.

  I just hoped I didn’t die. That would suck. Badly. But it was worth the risk. It was always worth the risk.