After Andy left, the group just stood around silently as they waited for the messages to spam them. It took only a few seconds for them to qualify as “out of danger,” but that was long enough for it get awkward. At least that’s how Allen saw it. The situation was mostly just gross with them being surrounded by green blood and sliced-up ogres, all in various states of dead.

  The moment eventually passed, and Allen heard Ty and Camila both groan when the boxes lasered themselves into their brains.

  “Oh boy, that’s a lot of levels,” Allen told himself, bracing for impact. “I guess I wasn’t expecting something so small to be a lair.”

  “Well, that’s more than I expected… Let’s never do that again.” Allen fumbled around with his System Display before intuitively pulling up the Settings page. After scrolling down for a bit, he found the ‘Merge Level Messages’ option and set it to ‘ALL,’ thus making sure all the level-up messages would combine in the future.

  Allen didn’t spend too long in the Settings; he knew what most of the normal options did, but the advanced ones scared him. He chose to keep that menu collapsed and out of sight.

  With a sigh, he looked back at his group. “I got to level fifteen,” he said.

  “Huh, I got to fourteen,” Ty replied, shouldering his shield. “Prolly ‘cause you two got beat up so bad,” he continued with a smug laugh.

  Allen nodded. Despite the sarcasm, the Defender was right. Ty had gotten just a little less of the experience in his category because he hadn’t tanked all the damage that his teammates had taken. “Still, he still must have gotten a lot of experience for holding back the hordes of incoming ogres.”

  The System was still a mysterious force to Allen, even after a decade of living with it. He was used to working along though, so there was little need to understand all the inner workings of the contribution categories. He had also never tried out any of the non-combat classes, so he knew next to nothing about how, say, a healer actually got their experience.

  “I have also reached level fifteen,” announced Christopher. “I will probably choose the Psychic job. Though Seer could also be useful, I don’t think it will provide any skills that could improve our communication.”

  Allen shook himself out of his thoughts. They would all have time to choose jobs and skills on the walk back to… wherever they were going. He cleared his throat. “I’m not sure,” Allen admitted. “The Seer tree is fucking cool but he’s right; it doesn’t have any telepathy skills that I know of.”

  “Why not?” Christopher asked, his voice non-confrontational.

  “Well…” Allen began, gathering his thoughts. “Seer is probably more useful for support. Mind mages usually focus on mental attacks which wouldn’t fit with your role. Then, once we get to the higher levels, everybody will have some form of telepathy ward anyway. I just think it would be better to wait to see what the higher tiers have.”

  Christopher cupped his chin and grunted in affirmation. “I see your point…” he said in a low and thoughtful voice. “I’ll think about it then. Perhaps I can come up with a more subtle long-range communication method. I’ll need to do more research on arcane wave resonances and the stability of mana transference threads.”

  “Right, you do that.”

  “Maybe some kind of code?” Amelia suggested. The healer had taken noticeably longer than the others to go through her messages, most likely due to her settings.

  “I’ll have to show her how to change that. She probably had to scroll through over sixty messages. Yikes.”

  “That could work for now,” Christopher said, still looking at the ground with his head resting on a hand. “It will require a fair amount of development, but I think I should be able to device a code using—”

  “Agh FUCK! Can we get the hell out of this dump!” Camila groaned loudly as she hefted the Chieftain’s morning star over her head with immense effort before letting it fall onto an ogre corpse, smashing it to paste with a wet crunch. “There’s shit ogre blood EVERYWHERE!” she continued complaining, “It’s in my socks, my hair, and my—”

  “A’ight Camy, we get it… We’re leaving now,” Ty said, turning to leave before even finishing his sentence.

  “The fuck you just call me?” she spat back. The Berserker trudged after Ty, the morning star disappearing into her inventory, likely taking up at least half of the space.

  Allen and Christopher both sighed in unison. If nothing else, they were entertained. “Alright, we go back to the town, resupply and move on to a bigger city,” the professor said loudly enough for everyone to hear.

  “Maybe our stuff is still around?” Allen absently suggested. He was, of course, referring to all their possessions they had left behind when Andy summoned them.

  He received a non-committal nod in response.

  Amelia wordlessly moved into place behind Christopher’s wheelchair to push him along after the other two. Allen quickly fell into pace beside her, appreciating the comfortable silence. Well, between him and her that is; Ty and Camila were in the middle of an argument over who could refer to who with what nicknames.

  Allen helped lift Christopher over a pile of dead ogres that was blocking the path. After that, it only took a minute for them to follow the paths out of the camp. The sun was still relatively high in the sky, and the wind blew the smell of death and fire behind them. The town would probably be thirty minutes to an hour away through the fields

  Allen looked over at Amelia.

  “Ah, she only got to level twelve,” Allen thought. He decided to ask her himself. “Amelia?” he started, waiting for the healer to look over at him. “Do you have any idea how your experience is calculated. You should have gotten more levels, being the only healer.”

  Christopher expressed his interest with a look but didn’t say anything.

  “It um…” Amelia began. “I only get experience from healing injuries. I get more experience for worse injuries.”

  Allen’s brows knotted. “Wait, so you don’t get any experience for group kills?”

  “Only from the monsters that hurt you… um, before you kill them, and I heal you. If you don’t kill the monsters then I only, um… I’ll only get the base experience for healing.”

  “Ah, that makes sense,” Christopher said, nodding. “…Wait, what happens if the monster dies before you do any healing?”

  “Huh?... Oh, as long as the System thinks I’m part of the group, I can heal your injuries after. I’ll, um, get two messages.”

  Christopher rumbled in understanding, nodding again.

  “So, we have to get injured by something for her to get experience from it,” Allen realized. “I guess that makes sense. It would be pretty stupid if she could just heal a scratch and get all the experience from a hundred monsters.”

  The group continued on their trek through the flowing green fields. The air was clean again, which was, by far, the most pleasant part. The temperature was dipping a little as the evening set in, but it was still warm enough. The breeze was slightly chilly though, especially on Allen’s abdomen.

  He absentmindedly looked down at himself only to find the hole that the pyrokinetic had burnt into his clothes. The fire had gone through his hoodie and his shirt below, leaving his thin and not-at-all muscular abs showing.

  “Ah fuck. Forgot about that.”

  Ty had been dressed in tough working clothes and Camila was wearing jeans and a leather jacket. Though still torn up and not really useful anymore, their clothes had held up significantly better than Allen’s.

  Amelia giggled to Allen’s side as he tried to cover up the hole somehow. It was obviously not going to happen. Instead, he took his hoodie off and tried to tie it around his waist with the sleeves, only to realized that one of them was missing.

  He sighed, not letting his embarrassment get to him.