We continued grinding and building Oli's levels for the next month. We'd meet up in the morning, head outside the town, and find mobs for him to build experience on and for me to help him with navigating the systems and new abilities he had.

  Which turned out to be pretty easy, as it happened. Oli was quite the gamer in life, after all. He was pretty adept at levelling himself up, if not so much his skills and magic, and inventory management came easily to him. Unlike me, Oli didn't have an unlimited inventory, but he was really good at planning what he needed when he wanted to be. The one problem was he didn't often want to be, preferring to get right into the thick of things.

  "I guess I was always a tank kinda guy," Oli explained. "I liked jumping in and letting things go on the roll of the dice, y'know. Kept things lively."

  "Huh, I get that," I said thoughtfully over our cups of coffee. "But those were games, and this is a bit more than that. If you die here, you don't get to roll a new character, you know."

  "Sure, and I do take it seriously, always have. I guess I just get wrapped up in the fantasy of it all."

  "I can get that. It's a lot."

  After the first week, breakfast got added to the morning meet up routine, and Oli would come round and we'd chat, talk about what we'd go hunting for, what kind of things he wanted to work on or I thought he should work on. I kept insisting he needed to use his skills and magic more, Oli would say he would. He never did.

  Sometimes Meph would join us. Griff almost always did, liking to curl up on Oli's lap as we chatted over cups of coffee.

  After a while, we didn't just talk about the challenge ahead anymore.

  "I loved them all, man. Final Fantasy, Persona, Baldur's Gate, Warcraft, Clair Obscur," Oli was scratching behind Griff's ear as we talked about our favourite games we grew up on.

  "Oh, I loved that one. Really tragic story, but the gameplay was incredible." I blew the steam rising from my cup.

  "Oh, I dunno. I thought there was a bit of hope in there too. And I didn't just keep it at video games either. I had three DnD groups running, so I was always knee deep in swords and sorcery. I guess this all just feels like the most epic game to me now, even despite how I got here."

  I smiled, but didn't probe. Truth is we were getting closer, but we still hadn't asked each other much more about our lives before, or more specifically, how they came to an end. It felt...too personal still. Too raw.

  We let the moment sit between us.

  "Oli," I said, finally breaking the silence and settling into a grin over my coffee cup. "Are you trying to tell me you were a massive nerd?"

  Oli laughed. "Oh, dude, I was the biggest! You know, Variety once did a whole article about it. Basically all about how weird they thought it was I went to the gym and was also a huge geek. Shows what they knew. There were tons of geeks at the gym!"

  "Wish I'd known that when I was alive," I laughed back.

  The ease between us settled in pretty quickly, and only continued to build the more time we spent together. I had to admit how wrong I was about the type of person Oli would be: he was charming, I already knew, but he was friendly, sweet, caring and genuinely enthusiastic, and when he needed to, he took things quite seriously. He was also just inordinately chill, and rarely rose to anger, even in the heat of battle.

  And yeah, he was a nerd, like me. Not just gaming, either. He loved sci-fi and fantasy novels too, and we often wound up talking about the ones we'd read. He was an avid reader too, and I let him borrow books from my infinite library selection, which he read through even faster than I did.

  But, of course, a great deal of our time together was spent going out on the grind. It felt pretty standard, with nothing too unusual for most of it, but I did notice a few more examples of oddities with the mobs.

  I wasn't too concerned. After all, Oli was actually handling himself really well. But also, the quirks often seemed to work out in his favour.

  One time, we went to the caves in the north, and I was shocked to find us stumbling across a drake. The small dragon-like creature shouldn't be in this part of the world during the current season, but here it was just waiting deep in the cave.

  I almost had Oli flee, but then I saw that the creature had almost no Intelligence, so it wouldn't have any of the spells I'd associate with the creature. Essentially, it was just a big lizard.

  As a result, Oli was able to kill it after a somewhat longer than usual fight, finally finishing it off by straddling the creature at the neck, and squeezing his thighs together tight as he double fist pounded it in the head until it passed out.

  I, err, may have felt a slight tingle at the sight of that, but I waved that off as it'd been a very long time and Oli has very thicc thighs.

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  He got some great loot from it too. Some alchemical ingredients, like drake fangs naturally, and a sizeable pile of gold, but also an Ice Lance spell. At Level 18. That was way out of the norm, and I wasn’t even sure he’d be able to use it right away.

  I tried asking Xandra about that and the other peculiarities, but she didn't call me upstairs. I guess she wasn't too concerned about it.

  “You need to parry it!” Oli grunted at me as I threw advice at him from the sidelines, ducking under a wide swing from the opponent.

  A few weeks had passed since our maiden venture out into the woods. Mobs continued to spawn, but they were progressively becoming weaker in comparison to Oli’s rising level and proficiencies. He was already a surprisingly capable fighter, though he was struggling to improve his Druid class skills as despite choosing that class himself, he tended to lean towards other solutions rather than what that afforded him. Well, apart from his Animal Speaking skill - that was advancing in leaps and bounds, judging from the lengthy conversations he seemed to be having with Griff.

  However, he was still very much a brawler, and before he left me, I wanted to see if I could get him to be more thoughtful in his approach to fights.

  Case in point, this mob was something different, and unusual. I was told that more complex creature types wouldn’t generate too close to the town, but this mob had approached the town from the woods. If it hadn’t been for the red tag in my map, I would have thought it was another Player. The mob was decked out in fine armour, head to toe, shining steel plates and dark leather armour pieces combined, in a hodgepodge assortment that looked like a design from a darker fantasy game. No element of the form of the creature was visible underneath, and when I saw what it was, I suggested we go out to meet it.

  Meph had assured me that it wouldn’t enter the town, that it was a safe zone, but he’d also said that this kind of mob wouldn’t generate near the town, and here it was, marching straight at us. It didn’t feel right, so I thought it best to head it off. And I wanted to see how Oli would handle something that would be able to offer a fight back, more than random goblins, wolves and the odd slime had been able to manage. As such, I decided to keep the truth of what the mob was away from him, and see if he would work it out.

  Quickly, I saw that Oli was again diving into the fray, trying to land an immediate overhead blow with his ax after he launched himself into the air towards the mob. That was how the fight started, and how it was continuing. Rarely did Oli rely on his magic attacks, and none at all of his Druid skills, instead preferring a hands on, face-to-face melee.

  It was quickly becoming apparent that Oli had chosen a Druid class for the look, rather than how it would help his play style.

  The mob, now, continued in an arc, one foot planted on the ground as it swung the other around, aiming to sweep Oli’s footing from under him. To his credit, Oli leaped over the attempt, knocked the stitched together knight back and tried another swing that missed again.

  The mob rose again, bringing its sword up in an upward slash, that Oli sidestepped with ease.

  “Parry it!” I yelled again as I watched.

  “Alright, alright, Maelle,” Oli snapped back.

  I was momentarily startled by the callback to a game we both enjoyed, and I couldn’t stop the smirk playing at the corner of my mouth. Then he sent an honest-to-god emoji in the chat in my display, and I groaned aloud.

  Oli still saw this all as a fun game. It was like he refused to focus on the importance of it, of what this meant for him and his future. On the one hand, I respected that, that ability to go with the flow and enjoy his new position in life, or death; on the other, I was supposed to be training him to find his true reward, I needed him to take this seriously,

  The mob made another attack, but this time Oli stood his ground, and he caught the blade of the sword on the haft of his battle ax. In an almost too quick a motion for my eyes to follow, he loosened his grip allowing the ax the fall, until the sword blade was caught under the head of the weapon, then he renewed his hold, twirled the ax around, and pulled the sword from the hands of his attacker.

  In a fluid movement, Oli spun and brought the ax into the abdomen of the mob, splitting it in two, the torso flying off into the air trailing green ooze.

  “Yes!” Oli yelled in triumph. “You see that? You see that, Rusty?”

  “It’s a Plasmoid, dumbass!” I yelled back, arms crossed and eyebrow arched.

  “What?” Oli looked back in time to see the Plasmoid reform its mass now into two opponents: one with the armour and helm on but two translucent, slick legs forming below the torn leather segment of the armour, the other a pair of armoured legs, a green, muscular mass atop them, the day’s light shining through. It formed a new ‘head’, a solid core within that spun around until it was (presumably) facing Oli again.

  The bottom half Plasmoid slung out it’s thick arm, stretching it until it was like a wrecking ball at the end of an elastic band, slamming into the ground where Oli had been had he not quickly jumped out of the way. The torso half reached down and retrieved its sword, and lined up to make its own attack.

  Oli’s momentary surprise shook away as he run back into the fray, his swings becoming faster as he peppered attacks between the two forms. These attacks would do nothing.

  “Oli, that’s not going to work. You need to use your head!”

  “I’m a bit busy using my ax!”

  I sighed. Despite this, he was getting better. But he wasn’t fulfilling the maximum potential he had, not with the amount of spells and skills he already had, this early in his journey. I would need to drill that into him.

  As Oli vaulted over the bottom half Plasmoid, he lost sight of the torso. It took advantage of the oversight, and cracked Oli in the back of the head with the hilt of the sword. Oli fell sprawling forward, tripping over the armoured feet of the half he’d been focusing on, and eating dirt.

  He spun, looking in surprise as the two halves of the Plasmoid awkwardly reformed, an oozey middle connecting the two armoured halves of the mob, as it held its sword aloft, ready to impale the half-ogre.

  It was going to beat him.

  If I didn’t hit it with a half dozen magic missiles splattered it across the road, and then ignited the puddles of goo with a fire spell.

  I stood over my Player as he looked up at me, panting, eyes wide.

  “That could have gone very bad,” was all I said.

  “You wouldn’t have let the happen. You didn’t,” Oli breathed out.

  I just looked at him for a moment, before I sighed. I offered him my hand.

  “Of course I wouldn’t. But I won’t always be there. You need to fight with your brain, as much as your big, sexy muscles.”

  Oli got to his feet, a smirk playing on his face. “You think my muscles are sexy?”

  I spun around, my back to him as I walked to Durrilan proper. “Very funny. Come on. It’s off to the Training Grounds for you.”

  “Awww, but I just finished a fight! Can’t we get a beer?”

  I stopped at the gate, pointing towards the Guild Hall. “Prove to me you can fight like an actual Druid first. Then beer.”

  He marched passed me towards the Hall, shoulders slumped like a big child throwing a strop. I couldn’t help but smile.

  I sent him a tongue sticking out emoji in the chat.