Tom signed as they drove back towards Hopkins. They had spent the entire day going from one settlement to the next, killing the lair boss and clearing out the regular monsters. Not to say it hadn't been worth it. They had all reached level 20 and had gotten a not-small mountain of skill experience.

  <[Pro-Gamer] Class has Reached Level 2>

  <[Pro-Gamer] Class has Reached Level 3>

  <[Pro-Gamer] Class has Reached Level 4>

  <[Tactician] Class has Reached Level 2>

  <[Tactician] Class has Reached Level 3>

  <[The Pen is Mightier than the Sword] has Reached Level 29>

  <[The Pen is Mightier than the Sword] has Reached Level 30>

  <[Words Will Always Retain their Power] has Reached Level 21>

  <[Words Will Always Retain their Power] has Reached Level 22>

  <...>

  <[Words Will Always Retain their Power] has Reached Level 25>

  <[Thirst for Knowledge] has Reached Level 17>

  <[Bright Arts] has Reached Level 28>

  <[Bright Arts] has Reached Level 29>

  <[Art of Life] has Reached Level 21>

  <[Art of Life] has Reached Level 22>

  <[Earth Arts] has Reached Level 12>

  <[Earth Arts] has Reached Level 13>

  <[Earth Arts] has Reached Level 14>

  <[Water Arts] has Reached Level 12>

  <[Water Arts] has Reached Level 13>

  <[Water Arts] has Reached Level 14>

  <[Nascent Guild Leader] has Reached Level 12>

  <[Nascent Guild Leader] has Reached Level 13>

  <...>

  <[Nascent Guild Leader] has Reached Level 22>

  <[Leadership Ⅱ] has Reached Level 17>

  <[Leadership Ⅱ] has Reached Level 18>

  <...>

  <[Leadership Ⅱ] has Reached Level 24>

  <[Raider Ⅰ] has Reached Level 16>

  <[Raider Ⅰ] has Reached Level 17>

  <...>

  <[Raider Ⅰ] has Reached Level 20>

  <[Coordinate Ⅱ] has Reached Level 11>

  <[Coordinate Ⅱ] has Reached Level 12>

  <...>

  <[Coordinate Ⅱ] has Reached Level 21>

  <[Logistics Ⅱ] has Reached Level 13>

  <[Logistics Ⅱ] has Reached Level 14>

  <...>

  <[Logistics Ⅱ] has Reached Level 19>

  <[Spell Trap] has Reached Level 2>

  <[Spell Trap] has Reached Level 3>

  Unfortunately, this was also likely to be the end of their leveling frenzy. Grabbing ten levels was relatively easy—most people could do it in a day. Level twenty took maybe an extra week if they took it easy. But after that, anyone who wasn't actually trying to level would start to stagnate. Pushing up to level thirty would take actual work and effort, giving them a chance to raise their skill levels.

  Tom was going to take some time tonight to combine his [Scribe] and [Pro-gamer] classes into the [Exorcist] Class.

  Tom looked back at the Major and the rest of his group. The police, swat, and turnout gear looked like it was going to fall apart. The actual people looked ready to pass out and were covered in blood and gore. Some of them needed to be resurrected during their excursion today, and all of them had needed major healing at one point or another. On the plus side, they were all at least level 10 now. So, he considered this to be an acceptable form of training for them. Of course, they would have been at a higher level if they hadn't insisted on going in groups of ten. At least Major Adams had grabbed a leadership class. Of course, it would have been better if he had picked [Second Lieutenant] and focused on upgrading that instead of jumping straight to [Major]. More upgrades. But the situation was what it was.

  And that was to say nothing of the loot.

  They had also gathered a bunch of other settlement loot. Unfortunately, those items were a mix of redundant, too dangerous to use, too incompatible with his long-term plans, or just too low quality to justify the expense of using them. He had already decided that all of the rooms needed to be at least in the (Historic) rarity. So he was going to sell them all back to the system for a giant pile of settlement points.

  He already had seven hundred and four settlement points from the last two levels up, so now he could actually fix up some of the settlement. When they arrived at Hopkins, Tom was surprised. The parking lot was stuffed full of cars, and he thought he could see horses milling around as well. He could also see people in chainmail walking around with moonstone spears.

  "What the hell is going on now?" Tom wondered aloud. "I know we didn't get invaded; I would have gotten a notification."

  As they stopped the car, Abaddon got out first, covering them as they approached the group of armed and armored men at the front entrance. Major Adams and the rest of his team also approached with their guns at the ready but pointed downwards. None were threatening, but they were ready for a fight.

  "Who are you guys?!" Abaddon asked as he towered over the guys in armor.

  Despite Tom's expectations of Abaddon intimidating the shit out of them, the guards in armor only seemed mildly rattled.

  "Um, we're the larpers from Newton. Are you people, Lance, Alex, Skippy, and Abaddon?" the guard asked.

  Abaddon cracked his knuckles as Skippy, Alex, and Tom got ready for a fight.

  "Who's asking?" Tom asked.

  "The bloody asshole who maintains your gear, you filthy animals!!" the familiar voice of Coffee House, Duncan, called out.

  Tom's eyes went wide as the large man with blond hair and glasses walked out of the school, followed by the familiar form, Travis, the Lizard Wizard.

  "Dudes, you're alive!" Abaddon cheered as he hugged both Travis and Duncan, lifting the two guys in a bear hug like they weighed nothing.

  Major Adams and his men relaxed.

  "Tom," Major Admas began. Are you okay with us leaving you guys for now? The Newton precinct is calling for all of the first responders and anyone with any militia experience to call in. We need to go if for no other reason than to share with them what you told us. Are you sure you can deal with this?"

  "Yeah, we'll be fine, Major. Duncan's a friend. We've been playing Legend of Noralon together for almost six years."

  "Well, Abaddon, I'm glad to see you've joined the ranks of scaled superiority," Travis said as he patted Abaddon on the shoulder.

  "Let's get inside first," Skippy said. "We have been clearing settlements all day, and I need a warm meal."

  Major Adams and the rest of his team turned and left as Tom's group moved inside.

  Duncan & Travis gave them all a proper look over their eyes, nearly popping out of his skull as he examined his old guild mates.

  "Um, sure, skippy. Oh, add us to the guild." Duncan said.

  Tom added Duncan and Travis to the guild without a thought as they wandered inside. Hopkins was getting crowded at this point, but he could smell food. He started to explain to Duncan what had happened.

  "We went through character creation on November 30th. The character creation was a little weird, stuck on hard mode bullshit. We got some free stuff, [Storage], [Mapping], [System Wiki], and a [System Token]. The tutorial was also rigged. It was set up for pro players, but I'm not sure if anyone who didn't play Noralon hardcore could have survived that. On the plus side, we got a ton of settlement loot from the tutorial. When we beat the tutorial, we blacked out and woke up on December 1st, and we woke up as our characters." Tom said with a shrug. "What about you guys?"

  "Well, as you know, I stopped playing The Legend of Noralon a while ago to focus on my engineering courses. I woke up on December 1st with the notification that the world was a system now, blah, blah, blah. Despite not having logged in, I woke up in character creation, picked up human, used [System Token], and picked up the Bloodline of the Arn Battle Cyborg." Duncan said.

  Tom didn't remember the bloodline, so he brought up the information with his own bloodline.

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  DING!!!

  "Anyway, I went back to basics, grabbed [Arcane Awakening], and then gave myself the [Settler] class." Duncan kept talking, snapping Tom out of his musings.

  "Not very useful in a fight." Alex pointed out.

  Duncan shrugged. "It worked out for me."

  "Hold on a second. I thought you weren't going to be online for the tutorial, but you got the beta-tester title. Did you go online?" Tom asked.

  "Nope," Duncan said, shaking his head. "I went to bed and woke up in character creation. I couldn't log out, so I just played the game."

  "Ok, so what? Anyone who played the legend of noralon ended up in the tutorial?" Alex asked.

  "Looks like it," Tom said.

  "Well, there is one thing that's different," Travis cut in. "I was awake, passed out when the clock struck twelve and showed up in character creation. I used my token for the Bloodline of Ether Wyrm."

  "Ow, wow, what a surprise!" Tom said sarcastically. "You've only taken that bloodline every single time for the past five years."

  Despite his screen name as the Lizard Wizard, Travis was not actually a proper Wizard. His preferred playstyle was an [Arch Magus]. He would dump most of his mana for heavy-duty attacks up front, and then he would get in close and use [Mana leech] to rapidly recharge before teleporting back and nuking his target again and then starting the entire process all over again. Because he was so in love with his own style of fighting, he had found a perfect bloodline for him. The Ether Wyrm Ate magic. Like bite into a ley line and suck on it. Tom suddenly realized his mind was wandering and returned to the conversation at hand.

  "We had goblins spawning at the university grounds, and people were freaking out. Duncan and I were pushed to limit keeping them alive." Travis said. "Do you know how hard it is to fight without a tank?"

  DING!!!

  "A regional quest?" Tom asked.

  "Yeah," Duncan said. "We've all got it. I'm guessing we're in competition with the Goblins for the area. Hence the quest."

  "Great," Tom groaned. "Now we have more shit to do."

  Further discussion was halted as Luke's party walked up to them.

  "Good to see you're back," Luke said.

  "What is Luke doing here?" Tom asked as his friends also sat down. Except for Abaddon and Skippy, those two immediately headed towards the school cafeteria.

  "Luke actually found us and about two thousand larpers," Duncan said, placing a hand on Luke's shoulder.

  "We went looking for our friend Issac's body. We got attacked by monsters and ended up near Duncan's group." Luke said, clearly hiding something.

  "He was critical in helping us get everyone out, and more importantly, he gave us your address. But we can talk about that later. Right now, I want to talk about goblins," Duncan said.

  "How bad," Tom asked.

  "We got pushed around a lot until we ended up at a high school near Highway 10. We got waves of a couple hundred goblins," Duncan explained sullenly. The goblins were gathering slaves at that point, and we dug in and tried to save as many people as we could. We mostly ended up with a lot of kids who managed to hide from the first wave of raiders."

  "We found some escaped slaves from Kwantlen," Alex said. "Mostly women. According to them, the two other beta-testers who attacked us attacked Kwantlin as well. A lot of slaves used the opportunity to escape."

  "That's great!! We had to accommodate so many people when we left that I was afraid we wouldn't see anyone again," Duncan said quietly.

  "Unfortunately, we don't know where most of them are. We've only been getting small groups since I set up the beacon. Speaking of how did you get so many followers?" Tom asked nervously.

  "They call themselves the larpers. These are people who played a lot of video games, DnD, or just read system apocalypse stories before this all happened. So when the notifications appeared, they knew what to do. Duncan and I were the tentative leaders, though I suspect that may change in the future now that we aren't under constant attack." Travis started. "Speaking of which, we have a problem. The goblins are well on their way to conquering Newton."

  "What?!" Tom asked in astonishment. "According to Penny, they didn't have any shamen or even a troll. How are they conquering Newton?"

  "When we were still in Newton, an albino drow showed up. His name was Seraphel. I only know that from identity. He didn't say a word, but he was good, very good. He would have killed me if we didn't outnumber him the two times we fought. On top of that, the first time I met him, he had a bloodstone and was able to rally the goblins into pushing us out. I don't know where the trolls, shamans, and orcs came from, but the larpers started encountering them the next day. I trust you can understand what I'm suggesting."

  Tom felt like his heart was encased in ice as everything clicked together.

  "Um, I don't. What are we talking about?" Luke asked, completely confused.

  Alex also understood; her face was a cold mask as the realization came to her.

  "What Duncan is suggesting is that the lair boss for Kwantlin was this Seraphel. And he somehow brought a bloodstone with him, which he is now using to summon not only more goblins but also orcs, trolls, and shamans from his place of origin." Tom said

  An all too familiar Ding accompanied his words!

  DING!!!

  "And there's the confirmation, this is bad, very bad," Tom said.

  "Perhaps we should summon Major Adams?" Alex suggested. "Let him deal with it."

  "He just left to go to the Newton precinct," Tom muttered. "See if any of the cops here will go after him or, better yet, call 911, do whatever you have to do to warn them."

  Alex quickly opened up her phone and started snapping off texts.

  "Do we finally have a council set up?" Tom asked.

  "We should be able to manage something the others have been going through our population and seeing who's interested and who can do the job, though, with the addition of the larpers, we may need to do some additional shuffling," Alex said.

  "Gather whoever you need, and make sure to grab Penny and her friend. We might as well deal with some internal settlement development at the same time. Duncan, Travis, Grab anyone you trust or has skills a new settlement might need as well. We can meet up in the library to discuss our options. We meet up in thirty minutes. I want to get some food before we do this," Tom said.

  Alex nodded. "Alright, I'll micromanager this shit."

  Luke was about to follow but spoke up.

  "Duncan didn't mention this, but we've got a lot of dead people in our inventories. When can we expect them to be brought back?"

  Tom signed: "I'll start the mass confirmation after the meeting. Make sure to remind me and inform everyone who has any dead in their inventory to wait in the large gymnasium."

  Luke nodded and wandered off.

  Skippy and Abaddon finally came back with the food. Tonight, it was an entire mountain of cheeseburgers on three separate trays. They were clearly from some fast food restaurant, but Tom didn't care right now.

  He grabbed one of the burgers off of one of Abaddon's trays and started eating, shivering in pleasure as the grease touched his tongue.

  "What was that all about?" Skippy asked.

  "Kwantlin is overrun with goblins, and we were going to have a council meeting," Tom said as he snatched his own dinner from their pile.

  "First event of the new expansion?" Skippy asked.

  "Pretty much," Tom said as he bit into his burger. I wonder how Chloe's doing?

  You may skip to the next chapter.

  Base

  Personal: +4 PER +4 WILL +3 INT +3 CHA

  Racial: +3 WILL +2 CON +2 CHA +1 SPIRIT

  Bloodline: +5 PER +5 INT

  Level Bonus: +2 to all Stats

  Mini-Character List

  Tom: Our main protagonist, the party healer

  Alex: Tom's best friend and the group's wizard

  Skippy: The Parties foul-mouthed swordsman

  Abaddon: A lizard man and the Parties Tank. he had autism, in case you forgot.

  Major Adams: The current

  Luke: Tom's ex-friend.

  Duncan Coffeehouse: A founding member of Awoken Myths, primarily a guild crafter.

  Travis the Lizard Wizard: An original member of Awoken myths. A lizardman who specializes in anti-mage tactics.

  AN: