Chapter 3

Never have I been so anxious whilst waiting for my elven wife to appear online. The moment the in-game chat lights up with a message, I click on it to see a message from Rebecca saying that she just got online.

Teleporting to my spouse, I smile when Rebecca hugs my character, excited to see me. “Sir Griffin! I’m so h-happy to see you!” She exclaims, her pink hair draped about her shoulders. “Rebecca, it’s nice to see you. I trust you got home safely?” I ask, not like anyone could do anything to Beck anyway; he’s too intimidating.

She blushes, fluttering her eyelashes bashfully. “O-oh I did thank you, I hope you didn’t get lost again,” she says with a completely serious face, but I bet Beck is laughing at me. Huffing, I make my character flick his long white hair over his shoulder.

“I’ll have you know that I don’t normally get lost; today I was merely surprised. And no, I didn’t get lost. I actually wasn’t lost earlier either,” I try and convince Beck, but Rebecca only looks at me patronisingly. “I-I’m sure you weren’t lost,” she laughs gently, and I frown at the floor.

“Anyway, are we doing the dungeon today? I heard it’s pretty hard, but I think we’ll be fine,” I tell her confidently, trying to keep up my cool persona. Beck now knows the real me, so Rebecca’s opinion of Sir Griffin has probably plummeted anyway.

Not sure why I care so much about what Rebecca or Beck thinks about me, but whatever.

I think why I’m so aware of Rebecca when I wasn’t before, is the fact that I never looked at her like a potential partner, if that makes sense. I mean, she’s a girl. But Beck - well he definitely isn’t a girl. And Beck is Rebecca. So now my brain is just confused about what to think.

“I-I think we’ll be fine; I just upgraded my weapons anyway, and I have all my s-spell slots free,” Rebecca says cheerily, getting up the user interface and scrolling through the currently available missions.

Going into my inventory, I check out my different weapons choices. I have a bow and arrow, but that one needs me to actually be able to aim, and I’m pretty trash at long-range. I have some twin swords though, they’re cool but useless at long-range. I also have a great sword which is pretty handy, among some other random weapons.

There’s this javelin Rebecca is in the process of enchanting for me, so once I have that I’ll have a mid-range thrown weapon. The enchantment she’s putting on it means that it will always come back to me, and I control it with my mind or some other fantasy shit.

I don’t really get how the magic system in this game works; it’s too complicated. That’s why I never dabbled in it, and one of the reasons Rebecca and I got married - she is one of the best mages in the game, and is also a super high level.

Beck has been playing this game for like; forever.

I’m a pretty high level too, but that’s through doing difficult missions which offer higher XP. Rebecca has mainly done easier missions, and a lot of them.

“Did you get your staff fixed?” I ask, turning to the elf in question. She glances up at me from the mission description, nodding. “Yes, it was only a s-small crack luckily, and I had the necessary crystals to repair it. I h-had to re-enchant it though, so that took a while, but it should be fine now.”

I smile, nodding approvingly. I have to say, I really respect Beck. He knows how to play the game exceptionally well.

“I can teleport us to the mission if you’re ready to go then?” I ask, my magic teleportation crystal at the ready. Rebecca nods, closing the mission instructions and taking my hand. She stands close to me as I get a firm grip of her waist, holding her to me as I activate the crystal.

We’re shown a fun loading screen telling us different facts about the game until we load back in, in a dungeon this time. The creepy yet dramatic music instantly informs us to the fact that we’re in danger, suggesting that an ambush is imminent.

Stepping away from Rebecca to give her room to cast her spells, I equip my great sword for now; I can always change to my twin swords if we encounter fast-moving enemies. Some goblins run out of the cave; their bodies all green and slimy.

That’s how you know what’s evil in this game: if it’s ugly, kill it. Not sure why fantasy RPG games always do that, but hey. It makes it easy to tell what’s an enemy. You physically can’t make an ugly avatar in this game, the art style is gorgeous and I could make a character look like a brick wall and it’d still be a sexy brick wall.

Rebecca casts some simple fire spells to incinerate the goblins; they make some fun dying sounds to reassure the player that yes, the goblins are dead. I slice another one in half, and it dissolves into dust like the rest of the goblins Rebecca killed.

“Cool, let’s keep going. Left or right?” I ask my elf wife, and she thinks for a moment, before pointing to the right hand tunnel. I nod, walking in front of her in case we get ambushed again. I have significantly more HP than Rebecca, due to being a warrior class rather than a mage.

She suddenly grabs my hand, pulling me back. “My p-passive, enemies inbound, picked up on three enemies nearby. I don’t know the distance or anything else, so just be wary,” she warns, and I pat her hand reassuringly. “Nice, thanks for the heads up.”

Rebecca has one of the best passive abilities in the game applicable to all scenarios: she can literally tell the number of enemies in her vicinity. It’s super helpful for working out ambushes, however, it takes a while to establish itself after coming to a new area, hence why we didn’t know about the goblins after we’d teleported except for the handy music.

My passive, heart of the dragon warrior, is pretty shit in comparison. It can be super powerful, but is also useless in 99% of situations. My passive is literally that for all the damage I take from dragon attacks, half of it comes back to me as healing. It also heals party members around me.

It’s kinda like a tokémon move, to be honest, that seed move the bolubasawr can do.

But yeah, if we ever fight a dragon, which I haven’t ever, we’ll be sorted. The cool thing with passive abilities, however, is that they can be levelled up. The higher level you are, the better your passive gets. Hence why Rebecca can tell how many enemies are around her. When she first got her passive upon loading into the game for the first time, all she could tell was that she was in danger.

Mine to begin with was that like 10% of the damage came back as healing, whereas now I’ve levelled up enough times to bump that up to 50%.

“S-sir Griffin, watch out!” Rebecca yells as I glance up from my character info tab. Running straight towards us, are two lesser rock demons and a cave gremlin.