[Hells Breach] was painted with the blood of Tessa’s friends and loved ones. They’d suffered terrible violence and unbearable injuries time and time again, as they cut, shot, and burned a path through its infernal corridors. Despite dying more times than Tessa could count though them hadn’t stopped moving forward.

“Anybody missing any major body parts?” Lisa called out as she rested on her hands and knees and tried to regain her breath.

“Spleen number five seems to be in place still,” Tessa said. “Kidneys are mostly intact too.”

Her body was protected by armor that would make a billionaire philanthropist playboy jealous and shielded still further by [Soul Knight] and [Void Speaker] magics and she’d still needed to carry [Heart Fire] back to her own corpse more than a dozen times and regenerate it fully at the [Heart Fire] another nine or ten or something like that times after the absolute ruin the dungeon mobs had made of it.

“We need to find the dev who made this place and force him to run it in a paper bag for armor,” Rip said, screwing Matt’s head back on. “That boss sucked.”

“Ugh, thanks,” Matt said, his eyes regaining their lively glow as his spirit reentered his body. “And yeah, what was with that last attack? We had him killed dead! That was so cheap!”

“[Retributive Strike: Agony Lament],” Starchild said. “I’ve never seen an attack like that, but I knew it wasn’t going to be fun.”

“Lots of bosses do that,” Wrath Raven was disgruntled. Apparently watching her weaker self get blasted into a fine mist while she was forced to sit out of the fight didn’t agree with her.

“Not at this level though,” Lady Midnight said walking back into the room, fresh from the [Heart Fire], whole of body, and full of mp. “I can get everyone who’s still down patched up, but we may want to take a break for a bit anyways.”

“I won’t say no to that,” Obby said. 

Of all of them she’d died the least, only dropping a handful of times when the entire party wiped. No would argue that she’d suffered the least though. As the party’s primary tank, she’d been the front line in every battle they’d fought. At least half of the blood splashed along the hallways and up to the ceilings in the rooms on [Hells Breach’s] first three levels was hers.

“That’s not a bad idea,” Tessa said. “Once we move forward,” she nodded towards the slowly pulsing oval of light at the other end of the laboratory they were slumped down in, “things are just going to get harder.”

“I can’t believe we’ve gotten this far,” Rip said, resting against Matt, who was returning the favor by resting against her.

“New dungeon,” Wrath Raven said. “Always goes like this.”

“Really?” Rachel asked, glancing over at her sister for confirmation.

“Pretty much,” Lisa said. “It’s a lot easier when it’s just pixels and the only exhaustion you feel is from staying up till dawn.”

“Are we doing okay then?” Matt asked.

“Better than okay,” Wrath Raven said. “You haven’t quit yet.”

Matt laughed until he saw Wrath was serious.

“My guild beat this place back in the day, but we didn’t do it all in one run,” Lisa said. “In fact, two of the newbies quit from the raiding team after the first run.”

“Too scared?” Wrath asked.

“Too smart,” Lisa said. “They knew running through a meat grinder endlessly wasn’t what they wanted to do with their time.”

“That is smart,” Pete said. “My sister claims she’s not a serious end gamer, but she’s run a lot more of the high end content than I have. I try to say it’s because I tend to like making new alts too much, but the truth is, she’s just more hardcore than I am. She pulls her own weight and then some, where I’m usually at the bottom end of the dps curve.”

“You and Starchild are doing fine here,” Obby said. “It’s a clever build you have. Sort of the perfect off-tank.”

“Thank you,” Starchild said. “I’m only sorry we can’t share the burden equally.”

“If we could you wouldn’t be helping the dps as much as you are,” Obby said.

“Yeah,” Rip said. “Matt, Rachel, and I wouldn’t be cutting it without you. We barely outpaced the [Demon Alchemist’s] regeneration as it was.”

“That might be a problem going forward,” Lisa said. “We’re leveling up but it feels like the mobs are getting stronger faster than we are.”

“Could they be?” Rip asked. “Is this them leveling up too?”

“Floor Three seems a little early for that,” Lisa said.

“And the levels you folks have been seeing on them is right in line with what they should be,” Tess said. Despite her current body definitely not being the one she’d be wearing on Earth, she still didn’t have the built in HUD displays that the others, including Pillowcase, enjoyed, and couldn’t see choice bits of information data like the level of the foes. 

“That’d you’ve made it this far is amazing, almost a miracle,” Glimmerglass said. “You’re fighting creatures that would be wiping teams twice as large as you and you’ve pushed on past three level bosses in one run. When Tess and I did this, we ran out of consumables and had to retreat without even beating the first floor’s boss.”

“We got farther,” Wrath said. “But we bought supplies for a month before we came here.”

“I know you can’t leave to get more supplies, but you do have another option besides going onwards,” Glimmerglass said.

“We can’t quit now!” Rip said. “We’re leveling faster here than when you power leveled us. It just, you know, hurts more.”

“I know,” Glimmerglass said. “And I didn’t mean you should run away. Not when there’s so many perfectly viable foes right here waiting for you.”

“Oh, that is a good point,” Tessa said, grasping the point Glimmerglass was getting at and plotting a new route for them.

“But we’ve been clearing the levels as we go?” Matt said. “There’s no one left behind us. I thought that was important to make the boss fights safe?”

“Safer, not safe,” Lisa said. “We cleared the levels to build up as much as we could before the boss and so we didn’t run into any of the mobs while we were running back from the [Heart Fires].”

“What Glimmerglass is getting at is that all the demons we killed? They were all a part of the instance we’re in,” Tessa said.

“How does that help us?” Rachel asked.

“If we leave the instance, walk out of the castle basically, when we come back, we’ll be in a new instance,” Tessa said. “New treasure, whatever pitiful amount that might be, fresh traps, and all the demons that we’ve already killed back and waiting to be killed again.”

“So this castle has infinite demons in it?” Matt asked.

“Not infinite,” Tessa said. “If the instancing is symmetrical with how the game ran, there are a limited number of instances available at any one time. If we go in and out though, the old instances should be discard when a new one is generated. So, effectively infinite.”

“Don’t we need to get to the top though?” Rip asked.

“Not exactly,” Tessa said. “The twentieth level has the strongest monsters and the final boss, but they’re nothing special in the overall scheme of things. What we really need is to reach the highest power level we can get to here. It’s not this dungeon that’s important, it’s what it can do for all of us.”

“I’m liking this idea for another reason too,” Lisa said. “Each of the fights we’ve been in so far has presented unique challenges. We’re getting good at figuring out workable solutions on the fly, and that’s an important skill to have, but we haven’t had much chance for polish and refinement.”

“What do you mean?” Rachel asked.

“A lot of groups will rely on brute force and ignorance to smash through the problems they encounter, and that can work fine if you’ve got enough brute force on hand,” Lisa said. “Really good groups though work on things like coordination, and timing, and reacting to mechanics together. You go beyond ‘what the heck can I do here’, pass straight through ‘okay, what’s the best thing I can do here’ and learn to answer ‘what’s the best thing we can do here’. It’s complicated and it takes time, you need to be able to see not only what your options are but also what my options are, and what everyone else’s option are, and know which of them we’re going to use.”

“That sounds like a professional soccer team?” Rip said.

“It’s similar,” Lisa said. “I’ve heard it compared to a jazz orchestra too. Basically anytime you get a bunch of people together all working towards a common goal but with different capabilities and challenges, there’s some complex issues to solve.”

“We’ve got an advantage though,” Tessa said. “We can analyze ours with math.”

“Ugh, not math,” Pete moaned.

“What’s wrong with math?” Rip asked. “I’m good at math.”

“This isn’t the fun math though,” Pete said. “This is boring, fiddly math.”

Most of the group cast a skeptical eye in Starchild’s direction.

“My mathematical background is in flow rates and calculating positions and times from star patterns,” she said.

Tessa was momentarily surprised Starchild had any background in mathematics at all, until she remembered that [Druids] weren’t random forest dwellers but among the most sophisticated nature conservationists in the world. Their magics were intended to work with the natural world to the greatest degree possible, which meant understanding things like seasonal flooding, and weather prediction, and population growth and decline through multivariable analysis.

“You’ve got more or less exactly the skill set we need,” Tessa said. “There’s more variation in what we do here than there was in the game, but it still seems to center around the numerical means the game stats expressed.”

“I’m having flashbacks to freshmen year calculus,” Pete said.

“That’s not calculus,” Rip said. “It’s statistics. Did you actually take math at all?”

“Yes. Was I a terribly lazy student? Also yes. Should I stop complaining? Most certainly. I mean, you’re not wrong. We know all the top raid guilds have at least one total math head in them. If one of you can step up to fill that spot, more power to you.”

“My background is in CS, but there’s enough math overlap there that I’m used to parsing performance numbers,” Tessa said. “What I don’t have, is a good method of gathering them together, and doing the calculations in my head is going to be a pain.”

“We don’t need to start with the hard numbers,” Lisa said. “If we want to work on polishing our teamwork, we can start a lot simpler. We know the fights now. We know what we did in them last time. If we head back to the gate on floor 1 and start over again we can also start with a plan. We make one up, we step inside, we do our best with it, then we regroup, discuss what worked, what didn’t and what we want to try again. Then we step back outside and try it again.”

“Won’t things change as we level up though?” Rip asked. “I mean, I got [Thunder’s Echo] just after this last fight. That definitely would have been helpful with those first guys.”

“We won’t be ‘polished to perfection’, or anything like that,” Lisa said. “Even end game raiders don’t reach ‘perfection’ though since the game itself keeps changing under them and what was perfect last week is mediocre in the face of whatever new gear or balance changes just dropped.”

“That’s good news though,” Tessa said. “We’re not just doing this for ourselves after all. The path we’re clearing here? It’s one we need almost everyone we know to be able to follow, because we’re going to need a whole bunch of help if we’re going to save our worlds.”