Path of Dragons - A LitRPG Apocalypse (BOOK TWO STUBBING AUGUST 15)

Sadie missed Dat.

It was such a simple acknowledgement, but powerful in its lack of complexity. For years, he had been her rock. The person she leaned on more than anyone else. He’d always been there, ready with a joke or a poignant bit of advice. He’d helped reign in her worst impulses while offering the support she so desperately needed.

And now he was gone.

Just like Lisa. Or her parents. Uncles and aunts. Cousins. Everyone was dead or so far away they might as well have been. Of her entire family, only Nico and her grandfather, Song Tianwei, remained.

They had made it clear that she was an outsider, too. Not in so many words, but it was blindingly obvious that something had happened while she’d searched the world for help with the Primal Realm. Sadie wasn’t certain exactly why or how everything had shifted, but she knew enough to recognize when her presence wasn’t wanted.

Not for the first time, she wished she’d simply gone with Elijah. He wouldn’t have complained, even if she knew she would have slowed him down. That was the thing about the Druid – for all that Sadie had plenty of power of her own, he was just different, and in ways that she couldn’t quite articulate. Part of it was strength. He had plenty of levels on his status and advanced cultivation to back it up. But there was more to it than that, though she couldn’t really explain the way it all fit together.

And against all odds, she liked him – probably more than she liked anyone else in the world. With Dat gone, that wasn’t a high bar, but the reality of it wasn’t easy to dismiss, either.

Was there a romantic future there?

Her mind told her that it was silly to even consider such an entanglement. Elijah came with complications. He was a good person – at least he tried to be – but he also had plenty of baggage weighing him down. What’s more, he looked at the world in such a strange way that Sadie feared that if they took it much further than the single kiss they’d shared, their relationship would become volatile.

But maybe that was what she wanted. Perhaps that was what she needed. For all her life, she’d made the right choices. She’d only dated people who had her family’s approval. She’d studied what she was supposed to study, and she had strived to embody everything she was supposed to be.

Maybe it was time she made the wrong decisions.

And for better or worse, that was what Elijah represented. A wrong choice. A bad decision. A relationship doomed from the start. But sometimes, that was what people needed, wasn’t it? Did Sadie want to keep going through life, always worried about how her current choices might affect the future?

No.

But also yes.

To say that she was of two minds on the subject – both in broader terms as well as specifically about her budding relationship with Elijah – was a vast understatement. So, to distract herself from a question that had no real answer at the moment, Sadie focused on something she’d been awaiting for weeks.

Her class evolution.

She had reached the appropriate level halfway through the Primal Realm, but without a Branch, she had been unable to take advantage and continue to progress. Now that she was back in Heaven’s Bastion, that was no longer an issue. So, she’d already visited the Branch and received her options.

At almost a hundred options, the number was a little overwhelming. Thankfully, many of those were lower-grade variations of the same class evolution, so they were easily disregarded. From Elijah, she’d learned that there were nine class rarities. In order, they were: Common, Uncommon, Exotic, Legendary, Mythic, Arcane, Celestial, Primeval, and Eldritch. For the first evolution, which marked passage from the Mortal Realm to Ascendence, a class could not exceed Mythic rarity.

She had not reached that mark.

In fact, her highest rarity option was graded as Legendary, and there was only one of those. The rest were a mixture of Exotic and Uncommon. Still, she had spent a couple of hours whittling them down to three options: