Chapter 8: Just an ordinary player?
The smile stayed on his face anyway.
A woman leaned out from behind the short man’s shoulder. She said something close to his ear, her voice low enough that Leon couldn’t catch it, her eyes moving between Leon and the still-burning column of golden fire above them while she spoke.
The short man’s expression shifted.
Something came into his eyes that hadn’t been there a moment before, sharp and interested, and he straightened up and cleared his throat once like he was resetting the register of the conversation entirely.
He looked back down at Leon.
"You look terrible," he said, and the disgust from before had been replaced with something that was doing its best to sound casual and not quite succeeding. "Why not come with us?"
"Huh."
The word came out of Leon before he’d decided to say anything, genuine surprise pulling it loose as he looked up at the short man standing over him with what was now clearly an offer on the table.
He turned the situation over in his mind for a moment.
Without Excalibur sitting in his grip, the immense pressure of power he’d felt moving through him in the dungeon was completely absent, pulled back with the sword the moment it stepped into the inventory.
That version of himself — the one who had reduced six people to ash and taken down a dungeon with a single swing — existed only when the blade was in his hand.
Without it equipped, he was back to being exactly what his status screen said he was, a level three player with unremarkable numbers and clothes that smelled like the bottom of a pig pen.
Just an ordinary player.
Orat sighed, looking down at him with the patient expression of someone explaining something they felt was fairly obvious.
"You’re only level three," he said, his eyes moving briefly over Leon’s ruined clothes, "and you’re lying on the ground looking tattered and stinking like this. I’m sure you took damage from that blast as well."
He shrugged one shoulder. "Why not just come with us? We could at least get you healed."
Leon looked past him at the rest of the group. Seven faces looking back at him with varying degrees of curiosity, wariness, and interest.
None of them had the particular quality of expression that Ran’s party had worn, that calculating hunger that had nothing to do with the person in front of them and everything to do with what they thought they could take.
He pushed himself up off the ground and stood.
"Fine," he said.
Orat reached out and patted his shoulder once, brief and practical, the gesture of someone who didn’t make a performance out of small things.
"I’m Orat," he said. "What’s your name?"
Leon paused for just a moment, something automatic and cautious moving through him before he answered.
"Leon."
And like that, he walked with them.
The group moved through the trees at an easy pace, the golden glow behind them fading gradually as the mushroom cloud finally began to lose its shape against the sky.
Nobody pushed for conversation and Leon didn’t offer any, settling into the rhythm of their movement and letting the night air work at clearing his head.
After a while, Orat glanced sideways at him with a smirk sitting at the corner of his mouth.
"You came out of that dungeon, didn’t you?" he said, and it wasn’t really a question. "What happened to the rest of your party?"
Leon kept his eyes on the treeline ahead of them. "Unfortunately," he said, "they all died in the explosion."
A beat of silence moved through the group.
Then one of the two women in the party made a soft sound, somewhere between surprise and interest, her head tilting slightly as she looked at him. "Hoh," she said. "What caused that explosion?"
Leon sighed.
"I don’t know," he said simply, and left it there without decoration, without anything added to invite further questions on the subject.
There was no version of the truth he was going to share with these people.
After all, he couldn’t tell them that he was the one responsible for bringing the dungeon down around itself from the inside.
Or that the so-called explosion they kept glancing back at had originated from a single swing of his arm, that the six people who had gone into that dungeon alongside him were now ash under collapsed stone because of what he had done to them.
He couldn’t even call himself a member of Ran’s party to begin with. He hadn’t been on the official member list.
There was no formal record anywhere that placed him inside that dungeon as anything other than someone trailing behind them at a distance, carrying whatever they didn’t want to carry and absorbing whatever entertainment they decided to extract from him between encounters.
His eyes drifted upward to the floating tab above Orat’s head as they moved through the trees.
[Player Level: 15]
He checked the others without making a performance of it, letting his gaze move from one to the next at a pace that looked like he was just watching where he was walking.
The levels across the group ranged between ten and fifteen, distributed across seven people who moved with the easy confidence of players who had put real time into understanding what they were doing out here after dark.
They were underestimating him. He could feel it in how they were treating him.
From the way Orat had said level three with that patient, slightly indulgent tone that people used when they were being kind about something they found a little pitiful.
However, he kept his expression neutral and kept walking.
’They weren’t exactly wrong,’ he thought, which was the part that sat with a particular kind of dark amusement in the back of his mind.
Everything about the picture he was presenting to these people right now was accurate on its surface, except for one thing.
And that was because there was a legendary sword waiting in his inventory that had swallowed an entire dungeon in golden fire less than half an hour ago, and not one person walking beside him had the faintest idea it existed.