Zeltran: Arc 1.1i

“Do we HAFTA sit here and do nothing all day?” Ayano asked for the eighth time that morning.

“I already told you, we don’t have a choice,” replied Tai for the eighth time. “Laughing Coffin’s in town, and we don’t have the levels or skill to get past them.”

“It’s so boring doing nothing.”

“Deal with it, sis.”

“Fiine. But I hate sitting here.”

“You think I like it either?” he snapped. “You’re right, it’s bullshit that we can’t go outside. But I’d rather stay locked in here for a couple days than get KILLED.”

The next two days passed painfully slowly. The two sprinted outside and ran in circles around the square as soon as they were sure LC was gone. “Where should we go?” he asked his sister.

“I don’t know, somewhere good,” she said absently.

“What’s the deal? You’ve been complaining nonstop for two days about being locked up, and now you don’t care that you’re outside? You’re weird.”

“I FEEL weird. And why wouldn’t I, with your cooking?”

“Hey!” They chased each other around the courtyard for a few minutes, then went off to get some food from a cook with a level that was much more respectable than Tai’s miserable attempts at lunch.

That meal was the last time he had seen his sister. The next day when he woke up, she was gone. At first, he’d assumed she had just gone for breakfast; but when he couldn’t find her anywhere in town, he became frantic.

Two days later, he had learned the truth. She had gone out at night to join a group of friends who were going to make a run at the Floor 51 field dungeon. The entire party had been killed by the same group of Laughing Coffin members who had just passed through their town: they had been contracted to kill a player who was going after the dungeon, and his sister’s low-level party had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

That whole incident was just a pile of shit luck from top to bottom. And his sister was dead because of it. He knew it wasn’t his fault, but that didn’t stop him thinking about what he could have done to stop her leaving even though he didn’t know she was planning to.

Feeling depressed, he decided to end it in battle-suicide. XP farming to reach assault team standards took far longer than he wanted it to, but he did it diligently. When he finally reached a high-enough level to join the assault team, he teleported to the Floor 59 dungeon and charged blindly up and down hallways.

Little did he know this action would set in motion the chain of events that would change his life forever…