Chapter 217

The man who appeared in front of the Bennet children did not much resemble the father from Luke’s memories. For one thing, he would have been about sixty years old at the time of his death judging by the journals he’d left behind, but Bill Bennet didn’t look to me much over thirty-five. His hair hadn’t grown back in, and what was left was graying around his ears and in his beard, but he was fit and healthy. His beer belly was gone, as was his perpetual slouch. He was alert and attentive.

Luke stomped up to him and punched him in the face.

His father saw it coming, of course. Luke hadn’t bothered to enhance his strength and agility like he’d done the other two stats, and Bill was more than capable of dodging it. He allowed the punch to land and let it throw him backwards.

“What the fuck, Luke!” Curt yelled.

“Read it in one of your journals,” Luke told his dad. “Seemed like a good idea.”

Bill laughed softly and climbed to his feet. “I deserved it.” He paused to wince as he touched his nose. “I’m sorry, son. I’m sorry for everything. I didn’t do right by any of you, and it wasn’t until I got here that I finally pulled my head out of my ass and figured that out. Too late to do any good, of course.”

Bill looked around at his family. “It’s good to see all of you again. But, how do you look so young?”

“What do you mean” Lizzie asked. “Why wouldn’t we look like this?”

“He was here for decades before he died,” Luke said. “He’s expecting us to all be around forty because he doesn’t know that time works differently here.”

“It does?” Lizzie and Bill asked at the same time. Curt just looked thoughtful.

“I’m not sure of the exact ratio, but it’s roughly a hundred years per month of Earth time, I think. Dad disappeared about eight months before I did. I’ve been here a year, so by Earth standards, it’s been like… seven or eight hours. I don’t know. Math isn’t my strong suite.”

“I’m just happy you’re all alive and healthy,” Bill said.

“Yeah, thanks to Luke,” Curt told him. “I’ve only been back from the dead for about five minutes.”

“You… died?” Bill asked, frowning.

“Goblins hacked me to pieces,” Curt told him. “Trying not to dwell on it.”

“Couple of assholes with spears stabbed me to death,” Lizzie added.

“Jesus. This is my fault. I should have closed the doorway permanently. I was so close…” Bill trailed off and glanced over at Luke. “I guess you succeeded where I failed. How’d you beat the dragon?”

“Used a bloodline skill to reset it to level 1, then put my mace through its eye and scrambled its brains,” Luke said. “Before we go any further, I still need to bring back Aunt Sophie and Josh.”

He shooed his family off to the side so he could finish the resurrections of the last of his lost family. Luke hadn’t been particularly close to his cousin, who was about ten years older than him, and though his aunt had always been sympathetic toward the children, she’d long since made it clear that she was out of patience for her brother, so they hadn’t talked much after Luke’s mom died.

From what Luke could tell, neither of them had made it very far. Josh had died at level 3 in Tenebrous Valley and Aunt Sophie had been killed at level 16 trying to escape. Those jumbo elementals had been around for a long time, and Luke had gotten lucky that a team from the church had ended up removing most of them for him as they tried to enter the valley to kill Luke. Someone had fucked something up there.

Once everyone was back and clothed, Luke used [Matter Generation] to create chairs for everyone, then said, “Okay, I have some stuff to tell you.”

“Can you start with why you’re level 1000?” his dad asked.

“Oh shit, for real?” Curt said. “That’s insane.”

“Curt,” Lizzie said quietly. “Could you just… not please?”

“What? That’s insanely high. And the XP scaling… how is that even possible in just a year?”

“Because of cheating,” Luke said. “You’ve all got the SysAdmin bloodline, right? Apparently, someone a few generations back came from this world and he was part of the gods building the system here. They had to leave him alive because he was like… a focusing lens for the system to work on people, but they didn’t want him around because he could do things to change the system, so they punted him to Earth.”

“Grandpa?” Sophie asked, shooting a look over at Bill.

He shrugged and said, “Probably. Or Great Grandpa. They were both pretty weird.”

“It doesn’t matter who,” Luke said. “Whoever it was had been dead a lot of years, but because we’re all descended from him, we can do it too. As best I can figure, something got through the doorway during one of its periodic openings and into the basement of the family home. I think Duncan killed it and ended up getting infected with XP.

“There’s something here called XP Madness. The more of it you have, the faster you go crazy. That’s because XP is actually a piece of divinity trapped inside the system, and it wants to come back together into one whole god or whatever. The time difference between our worlds meant that even though it was a really small piece, it drove Duncan crazy and he started throwing us through the doorway every time it opened.”

“He was acting quite strangely,” Aunt Sophie said. “I remember him wanting to show me something in the basement, and then I felt him shove me, and the next thing I knew…”

She waved a hand around vaguely at the wilderness around them while the others nodded. “He did that to me too,” Bill said. “But when it didn’t work, he ended up hitting me with a baseball bat to force me through.”

“I don’t even remember this happening,” Lizzie said.

“Hold up,” Josh cut in. “You guys are really going to blame all this on my dad? That’s such bullshit.”

“No,” Luke said. “Not him. The god trapped in the system here. It controlled him. Made him do it somehow. We need to get him through the doorway so I can pull that XP out of him. Otherwise he’ll stay sick forever. And then I need to take all the XP from you guys so you can go home.”

“When you say it like that, it sounds like you’re not coming with us,” Curt said. “Bro, you’re not thinking of staying here, are you?”

“There’s kind of a world-ending problem that needs one of us to fix,” Luke said. “I haven’t had a lot of luck with that, so I figured I needed to take a day off and get you guys back among the living just in case things go unexpectedly bad soon.”

“Let me guess, something to do with System,” Bill said.

“Mmm… kind of. More like one of the gods fucked over another one and things snowballed from there.”

“Jesus Christ, this is all so much bullshit,” Josh said. “Look, if you guys want to fuck around here, have fun. I am all for plan: Send Josh home ASAP. Luke, you do whatever it is you need to do and I will get out of your hair. What’s left of it, at least.”

“Josh isn’t necessarily wrong,” Aunt Sophie said. “This isn’t our world, and I don’t see why any of this should be our problem. Luke, sweetie, you’re a good kid, but don’t try to take this on your shoulders. If you can get us all back home and back to normal, do that and let the people who live here solve their own problems.”

“Uh… Yeah, about that… It’s really kind of one of those problems that can literally only be solved by one of us. Short version is a trapped god is about to break out of its prison and when it does, it’s going to kill everything on the planet that has even a single point of XP. Like I said, XP is pieces of its divinity and it wants them back. That’s another reason we need to get Uncle Duncan over here so I can remove his one XP. I don’t want this god thing following any of us to Earth and murdering us there just in case I can’t stop it from getting loose.”

“Don’t want to know, don’t care,” Josh said. “Just do the thing, send me home. Mom, I will see you on the other side. The rest of you guys, don’t buy into this crap. Just come home and let Luke play fantasy land hero if that’s what he wants to do.”

Luke didn’t remember Josh being quite so unpleasant, but in his cousin’s defense, there had been a mauling and killing by a wild animal in, what was to him, his recent past. Everyone was handling their own deaths remarkably well, something Luke wasn’t quite sure how to take. No one seemed to remember an afterlife, but maybe there was something and it had helped them cope.

He hoped Zea would be as mentally well-adjusted when he brought her back next. That was on his agenda right after getting his family up to speed and on the same page about the plan moving forward. Ironically enough, Josh was the one who was pushing hardest to move in the direction Luke wanted to go: everybody back on Earth with their status reset to show 0 XP.

“Okay, look, before we get going any deeper into this, we need to get Uncle Duncan over here and pull the XP out of him. Dad, will you go grab him for me?”

“I’m not going to lose my level when I walk through, am I?” he asked. “You, uh… you read my journals. So you know…”

[Omniscience] gave Luke more than enough knowledge about magic to understand how healers operated. Once Bill had been de-cancered with magic, it wasn’t coming back. His level had nothing to do with that. “No, you won’t. And no, it won’t come back when I do reset you to 0 XP later.”

“What won’t come back?” Curt asked.

“I’ll tell you later,” Lizzie told him.

“Wait, does Dad have… like Mom did?”

“Yes, Curt. Now please, we can talk about it later.”

“What?” Aunt Sophie said, her head whipping around to stare at Bill. “You have cancer and you didn’t tell us?”

“Can we talk about this later?” Bill asked.

“I think it’s pretty important to talk about this now, Bill,” Aunt Sophie said.

“Well I don’t. And I’m not going to. Luke, open the door for me please. I’ll go get Duncan and bring him back.”

“Okay, but just remember that time works differently there. You need to be in and out in under a minute. Even that will be hours and hours here.”

“Got it. As long as he’s in the house, I should be back inside of thirty seconds.”

With a nod, Luke accessed the system commands and triggered a manual scan through the doorway for the bloodline. The doorway opened, and Luke’s dad shot through it. A second later, Josh tried to scramble after him, but he bounced off Luke, who’d smoothly slipped in front of him from ten feet away.

“Can’t let you through until I remove your XP, cuz,” Luke said. “This’ll only take a moment.”

[XP Reset] stripped Josh back down to level 1, causing him to stumble as the few AP he’d invested into agility disappeared. “Alright, you’re good to go.”

“Uh, yeah. Thanks,” Josh muttered. As he was walking through the door, he added, “Fucking weirdo.”

“Aunt Sophie? You want to go next?” Luke asked.

She sighed and nodded. “Please don’t stay here, Lucas. This isn’t your world. Come home with us.”

“When I can,” Luke promised. Then he reset her level as well and sent her through.

Luke turned to Lizzie and Curt, who both shook their heads. “We’ve got some stuff to talk about first,” Lizzie told him.