Looking at the adventuring heroes, anyone could tell they were brave and strong. As they made their way towards the terrible mountain, their golden-haired swordsman took the lead. His black jacket caught a gust and fluttered around the glittering blade strapped to his back. This was Matt, the legendary swordsman who had cleaved a thousand foes and stopped a terrible overlord from his plans for world domination.

Following behind him was a beauty in a red dress, Natalie the Mage of Stars. She was a master of elemental magic, wielding ice, fire, and lightning with ease, even mastering holy spells and the black magic of the void. A wave of her staff could summon the stars from the heavens to destroy her enemies. It was even rumored that she was powerful enough to revive her fallen companions at a whim in the middle of battle. Still, their final companion drew nearly as many eyes as the beauty before him.

Garbed in a military green, their sharp-eyed marksman took up the rear of their marching order. A deadly rifle held ready to his shoulder, Lance the Gunner seemed ready to devastate whatever came to challenge them next. His brown hair hung low in front of his red eyes, perhaps trying to conceal the great evils that his glare betrayed. It was Lance that had tried to conquer the world with an army of mechanized soldiers, foiled at the last possible moment by his new companions. Was he there to atone for his misdoings or simply to make sure that he remained the greatest villain in our tales?

"Somebody actually wrote this junk about us?" Natalie had been reading from the newspaper that had been provided with their food, but she discarded it in disgust. The three heroes sat around a table in Town's tavern, far from the pretty picture the writer portrayed. The "legendary swordsman" sat with his feet up on the table and a can of soda raised almost vertical as he chugged it. A small pile of discarded cans was beginning to grow beside him. Meanwhile, Lance was fidgeting with some contraption and occasionally shoving a handful of food in his mouth while he worked.

The truth was that the article wasn't far off from what they had been a week ago. Ever since Natalie and Matt had given Lance a solid beating and destroyed a vast majority of his robotic army, the three of them had been seeking out even more powerful and dangerous enemies. They had fought wandering swordsmen, challenged dragons, even tangled with a beast from the depths of the seas. Still, when they had heard about some ancient power sealed beneath a dormant volcano, they should have known better.

They had walked in confidently, taking only a few hours of exploration to find the chained demon that was rumored to be in the tombs beneath the mountain. It had been a horrible sight, a shriveled figure with its eyes and body wrapped in bandages and then tightly bound in dark chains. Just being near it, they could tell it was still alive. They had chosen to poke the sleeping bear and test its strength against their own. In that instant, the world around them seemed to erupt. Each of them felt their strengths and powers drain away, the creature taking it as their own.

The group had blacked out and found themselves miles from the mountain they had been in, each with their prodigious powers stripped from them. Now they sat here, pigging out since they didn't know what else to do. Natalie prodded the vegetables on her plate with her fork. A hollow crunching filled the empty tavern as Matt crushed his empty soda can and tossed it with the others.

"What are you working on there, Lance? Looks fancy enough to sell to keep us going for a few more hours." Matt smirked as he reached over to get his hands on the machine the gunner was working on. Lance promptly reached for the sidearm at his left hip and snapped it up to point at Matt.

"Touch my things and I will literally shoot you in the face, turd," Lance growled. It was only a moment before Matt backed off. "If you were actually wondering what it is, I'm trying to figure out if we can measure how much of our supernatural strengths we can regain, if any. So don't bother me while I work on this." Of the three of them, Lance seemed the most oddly affected by the demon's attack. His weapons were based on his ability to channel his own power through them, so many of his weapons didn't even function properly in his weakened state. Disregarding that fact, he still considered his intellect a deadly weapon when wielded properly.

They sat in a tense silence until Lance's small machine began whirring and humming to life. Natalie and Matt slid their chairs closer to look at the device, which had a blue screen displayed. As they leaned in, Lance quickly snapped the device into each of their shoulders.

"Yowch!" Natalie felt a little betrayed at the stinging sensation of the device, though Matt's lack of a reaction almost stung her just as much.

"I just needed a sample to determine where we are all at." Lance seemed to mash a few buttons on the device and several boxes of text were added to the screen. "You two are lucky that I still had some data from back when you were fighting my loyal soldiers. This should be able to compare our current strength with that information." The look of disappointment on his face as he read the data told the others all they needed to know.

"It's not great, is it?" Natalie asked. She could feel the lack of magical power, feeling like she was just beginning on her magical journey again. She missed the sense of invulnerability that power gave her.

"I mean, it can't be that bad, right?" Matt chimed in. At first the numbers didn't make a lot of sense to him on the screen. Lance shook his head, trying to find a way to explain it to the meathead.

"Matt, you've played video games, right?" Matt nodded his head, not quite sure where Lance was going with this. "Well, let's say we were level 100 before we faced that demon, right? Maximum strength."

"So what, are we like, level 20 now?" Matt asked.

"Nah. If we were maxed out before," Lance sighed, "We might as well be level 0 now."