“Sadie!” Hunter called out as he ran through the school halls. “Sadie!”

  She hadn’t been in her history class, which was her first period, but nobody had been. They’d come back from the tutorial and apparently all left.

  She hadn’t been in the cafeteria where a lot of students and staff were gathering, either. Now he was running through the halls, tracing the path from her locker to his, from her class to his, hoping that he must have just missed her.

  He tried not to think of the worst case scenario. More than a few other students just… hadn’t returned from the tutorials. Friend groups had reassembled in their first period desks, all of them wearing tutorial-granted gear, but with some of their seats simply… empty.

  “Brent!” he called out as he passed another student he recognized, a stockier boy who now wore a long chainmail hauberk and carried a maul. “Have you seen Sadie?”

  Brent flinched as Hunter’s attention fell on him, and he frantically shook his head and stammered out a no.

  Hunter blinked.

  Then he realized why Brent had cowered at the sight of him. He’d had so much tunnel vision on his loved ones that he hadn’t even thought of the people he should hate.

  It had been a year, but it had felt like so much longer. Yet in real time, Brent had been making him suffer just that morning.

  Humiliating him. As usual.

  None of the curses that Hunter had ever tried to lay on his rival had worked. His felt a warmth spread through his face, his blood rising.

  “Something wrong, Brent?” he asked.

  “No, man!” Brent said. Then, when Hunter didn’t take his attention off him, he swallowed. “Hey uh, about all that stuff….”

  “What stuff, Brent?” Hunter asked coldly. “What stuff, specifically?”

  Brent grew paler. “Uh, you know, how we’d, like, mess around and stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  “Uh….”

  “Be specific.”

  Brent blanched.

  “Say it.”

  “You know,” Brent said quietly. “How I’d like, joke around and call you a, a….”

  Hunter cocked his head, waiting.

  “—Beta bitchboy,” Brent whispered, his voice squeaking.

  Hunter reached for Brent, and he flinched. Then, clearly surprised that nothing had happened, he looked up as Hunter patted him on the cheek.

  “You mean nothing to me, Brent,” Hunter said. “Not anymore.”

  Then he turned and began to run back down the halls. “Sadie!”

  * * *

  Hunter returned home a few minutes later, teleporting through the front door because he didn’t want to rifle around in his strap-mounted pouch for his house key.

  He was immediately greeted by his eight-year-old sister, Raven, running into the entrance hall with a black witch’s hat on her head. “Hunter!” she cried. “Hunter—look! I’m a witch!”

  {Raven Wolfhard — Level 12}

  “Cool!” he said, picking her up and giving her a hug. “Do you have magic spells, too?”

  “Uh-huh! Mom and I went to a tutorial and I used my spells to fight slime monsters.”

  “I’m glad you’re okay,” Hunter said, squeezing her tight.

  His mother appeared at the end of the entrance hall, rushing forward to pull them both into an embrace.

  They were fine, but he’d largely expected they would be on account of the easier tutorial. Ashtoreth had explained everything during their stretch year.

  Parents almost always got placed in the same tutorial as their children. This may have been because the System had a sense of compassion, but Ashtoreth had suspected it was because parents would always be motivated to fight and get stronger if their children’s lives were on the line, whereas parents whose kids were dead would probably just give up altogether.

  And just as Hell gamed the System to ensure that it had the most difficult tutorials, other civilizations of the inner realms had done the reverse and cultivated entire areas that the system could recruit as tutorial zones for the weakest inductees into the system: children.

  Just as it was tolerant of all Hell’s machinations to make itself more deadly, the System was tolerant of this easy lower bound. A variety of hostile plants, slimes, animals, and minor elementals meant that it still functioned well as a tutorial by introducing its occupants to the different types of creatures and attacks that one could find across the realms.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  What was more, it even recruited the lower level dwarves and elves onto the side of the humans so that they could give guidance.

  Raven and his mother had been given the easy-mode tutorial, the one where elves had likely helped her kill slimes and animated pumpkins. As such, mom hadn’t had any trouble keeping her safe.

  But the tradeoff was that she was level 22 and mom was level 31. If they didn’t find stronger allies, the invaders would rip them apart.

  “Sadie hasn’t come by, has she?”

  “No!” Raven said.

  “No,” said his mother, shaking her head. “But come on, Hunter. Now that you’re here we’re going to get in the car and get to your uncle’s house. Those things—”

  “No, mom, I have a better plan.”

  His mother’s face darkened. “Hunter, this is not the time to be arguing with me. Get in the car—”

  “Mom,” he said.

  “Hunter!” she said warningly.

  “Mom. I’m level 300, see?”

  “I don’t care what level you are, there’s demons running amok and you will listen to your mother—”

  He set Sadie down. “I’m a [Twinfang Assassin of the Shadowflame Dragon], mom,” he said. “I met some friends and we’ve got a plan to save the Earth.”

  “Oh you do, do you?” she said, standing back from him and looking cross. “They can figure out how to save the earth, but they can’t get you a spare shirt?”

  “Mom—”

  “And what happened to your turtleneck?” she asked. “I got that on sale, you know. That was normally a fifty dollar turtleneck—it was a nice shirt.”

  “It was, but it was engulfed in shadowflame as I unlocked my hidden power, mom. Now if you just—”

  Her shoulders sagged. “Don’t tell me you ruined that nice shirt I bought you,” she said. “Hunter, really?”

  “I can’t help it!” he said. “The power of my [Embrace of the Shadowflame Dragon]—”

  “You’re too old to be ruining these things, Hunter—now go get something else on. Get your wool sweater that your auntie knit you.”

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “She’ll be happy to see you in it when we get there—”

  “Mom! I can’t. My tattoo sheds shadowflame when I use my abilities, especially my most potent abilities. And I sprout wings sometimes.”

  Raven gasped. “Hunter has wings?”

  He grinned. “Yeah, you want to see?”

  “Not in the the house, Hunter,” said his mom. “Just… just bring the sweater and we’ll see if we can find a way for you to wear it. You auntie—”

  “Mom, we’re not going!”

  “Hunter, don’t you start with me.”

  “I have a place where you two will be as safe as any humans alive. I can teleport us there once my friends are ready, okay? But I have to help defend Earth.”

  “Can I help defend Earth?” Raven asked.

  “No,” they both said, turning to her.

  “Okay…” she said, wandering away with her head hanging.

  “You need to stay with me,” his mom said. “We need to stay together. Those demon-things…”

  “I killed almost all of them on the way here,” he said. “And I closed the rift they were coming from.”

  But his mom was still shaking her head. “Hunter, I don’t want you out killing demons, you understand? It’s dangerous. And I don’t want to… to teleport anywhere, you understand me? I want to go see my brother. He’ll know what to do….”

  He looked at her, and for the first time he saw the fear underneath all of the fussiness. He lay his hands on her shoulders. “Mom, just take a few deep breaths, okay? Everything’s gonna be fine. I just spent a year doing tutorials.”

  She peered at him, then looked him up and down, seeming to really take him in for the first time. “A year?” she asked quietly.

  “A year,” he said. “And I’m a [Twinfang Assassin of the Shadowflame Dragon], mom. Killing demons is my job, so don’t worry about me. I want to teleport you to be with my friend Frost, all right? He’s a police officer, and he’s also level 300. He’s better at protecting people. In his aura, you could drop a building on yourself and you’d survive unscratched.”

  She hugged him. “I don’t want you going out and fighting,” she said quietly.

  “I’m level 300, mom,” he told her. “Against the enemies I’ll be fighting, I’ll be invincible. And I’ll have the help of my friends.”

  She pulled away, still holding him by his arms. She looked incredibly tired. “You’re going to catch a chill, Hunter.”

  “Mom, I have thousands of [Defense]. [Defense] blocks harmful temperature exchanges, so I’ll be fine. Even if I wasn’t fine, I could warm myself with the heat of my shadowflames.”

  “But you look so ridiculous, Hunter. I can’t believe you went and got a tattoo.”

  “It wasn’t my choice!” he said defensively. “It happened when the bloodline manifested. Somewhere in our ancestry there’s an ancient shadowflame dragon, and that granted me powers.”

  “Bloodline?” she asked. “So how come your sister didn’t get any powers?”

  “The bloodline doesn’t manifest in every member of a family,” said Hunter. “And bloodlines manifest during adolescence, anyway.”

  His mother looked at his sister, who was unplugging the router and plugging it back in, hoping to get the wifi to work. “Well, it’s for the best, I suppose. I don’t want your sister walking around shirtless with a dragon tattoo.”

  Hunter nodded, still looking at Raven. Some things, he thought, should stay in anime.

  “You sure you can’t wear your nice wool sweater?”

  “It will be destroyed by my unbridled power, mom.”

  “Mom,” asked Raven. “What’s an assassin?”

  But at that moment Hunter felt Frost reaching out with telepathy. We’re ready, here, he said.

  “Come on,” Hunter said. “Get close and I’ll warp us you to our safe zone.”

  His mother grimaced. “And then what? Then you’re going out fighting, aren’t you?”

  Hunter shook his head. “Not fighting. I’m a [Twinfang Assassin of the Shadowflame Dragon], mom,” he said. “Once you two are safe… I’m going out hunting.”