“Dad, wait!” Desaray hopped down from her father’s arms and ran over to a blue blob. She picked it up to see what would happen, and luckily it did not seem to try to attack her in any way. 

    “Desa, what are you?” Ricky was confused. He did not know why his daughter was picking a monster up.

“I promised to bring back a slime for Mike and Jake to kill. Although if I can only find one, then it will go to Mike as Jake has been… well, let’s just say that Mike, who was unconscious the entire time, was more manly than him.” Desaray replied while shaking her head. She hoped the kid was still alive. She knew Becky was getting sick of him. 

Ricky did not know what to say. He really wondered what this Jake kid was doing to make his daughter say this. “Alright, but let me hold the slime thing.” 

Desaray nodded and handed it over. Ricky took it and held it in his arms as the two slowly made their way through the rubble. They were already in the area of the terrace, but the flood of debris now covered the entire park. The art and statues that once stood tall were nowhere to be seen. It was just a layer of rubble. 

“Ah! Monsters!” A voice yelled out. 

Desaray and Ricky both looked over to see a middle-aged woman pointing at them. She fell back, shaking in fear. She was worse for wear, with her hair all over, covered in dust and blood trickling down from her wounds. There was a man and boy around eighteen next to her as well. Each looked quite beaten up. Desaray looked up at her father and asked: “Not going to help them?”

“Why?” Ricky asked, but instead of letting Desaray answer as he continued: “What is the point at this stage of the game? I have nothing to use to treat them, and even if I did, I would save it for you and your friends. Plus, she just called my daughter a monster.” 

Desaray let out a laugh as she held Ricky’s hand. She wondered how long it had been since she held his hand like this and looked up at him from her new height. The man who gave her the love and care of a family and was the same man who saved her when she could have died. She had always seen her father as a hero much greater than any of the superheroes in the movies. “Mmm… Our world is probably no more. I do wonder what will happen in the years to come.”

“All I know is that my heart will not be too good since I know we will need to level up. And that means killing monsters. It will be dangerous, and if you were to get hurt….” Ricky sighed. “But what needs to be done needs to be done. I will do my best not to hold you back.”

“We both have appraisal now, so we can check to see what level monsters are. As long as we do not try to fight anything too strong, we will be fin… Hold on, Dad, follow me!” Desaray smelled a familiar stench and ran over to a pile of rubble.  Ricky was a bit confused but hurried after his daughter, who began lifting whole building walls and tossing them to the side. He had to marvel at her strength.

As Desaray dug, the smell got worse, but she had a feeling that the smell was not something bad per se. “Desa, what the hell is that smell?”

“Dad, don’t be rude!” Desaray chided her father before finally pulling up a large chunk of concrete to reveal a body underneath. She held it up and called down to the body. “Claire? No… not who I thought was.” The body was definitely an undead, but it was not Claire who she had met before. Not caring anymore, Desaray dropped the slab of concrete and shrugged as she began to walk away.

“Desa, what was that!?” Ricky was even more confused now. He had seen a person under the rubble that looked like a zombie. They were moving, but their body was a twisted mess.

“I thought it was a friend I met earlier. She wanted me to kill her because she evolved into an undead and talked her out of it. I feel that with this evolution thing, we might have a chance to have a humanoid form once again. After all, I can walk on two legs just fine. If I evolve again, will I have a humanoid form? Or will I just turn into a bigger version of my current self? I think the same would go for an undead. A lich is quite close to being alive. In many games and manga that I have read, they were no different from a living human. They are just undead.

“ The more I look at things, the more I think things are more in-tuned to have something to do with our history and culture of fantasy and myth. What if the things we are turning into are the result of long-dormant DNA? DNA that has always been in us but never got the chance to be revived until now? What if this world is not what we actually thought it was?

“I have been thinking a lot about all of this. The system window. The races we are turning into. They are all fantasy races created by us humans. But where did the ideas for these races come from? Myth and legends have always talked about many races from now all the way to the dawn of humans. What if there was some truth to it all? I can’t help but think that maybe our world is truly different than what we are led to believe. Or it could just be my imagination, and some higher being is messing with us since they were bored. Either way, I plan to keep leveling up, growing stronger and stronger, so I will never need to worry about being afraid of dying. And so I can protect those I hold dear.” Desaray smiled as she held on to Ricky’s hand once more. “And you will need to level up to so my Dad can protect me, his daughter.”

“Haha!” Ricky let out a laugh and looked down at his daughter with a smile. When they reached 5th Avenue, they saw that the street was somewhat clear, but the buildings across were once more demolished. 

As soon as Desaray saw the building a few streets over where Becky and the others were supposed to be demolished, she began to worry. “Dad, let’s hurry! Becky and the others are in that  building over there!”