160: Floor 18, The Deep Mine_A Gamer's Guide To Beating The Tutorial

I appear in the lobby, carrying both a strange weight in my chest, alongside an even stranger emptiness. A kind of heavy weightlessness, as paradoxical as it sounds.

Sixteen positive responses.

…But I didn’t completely clear the stage.

Should I pull out my hair or pray to sixteen gods at once?

your inventory has been sold

for 42 points.>

152 033 points.>

…Or I could curse a hundred gods all at once. That feels more plausible considering my own skills, I think. Hmm, I wonder if a ritual using blood and organs might work better than simple thoughts and curses? Only one way to find out!

I don’t know how offensive pentagrams would be to these non-Earthly gods, so it’s probably more offensive to draw the Christian cross, which is what I’m doing. In my own blood. Because what else is there to use? Let’s see here, big cross, and a cool pattern surrounding it… Maybe stick a few goblin skins here and there, I’m sure they’ll dislike that…

And then, for maximum offense, I put myself—their greatest opponent and hater—right in the middle. And now, we wait for this dark ritual to gain power.

Oooommmm. Ooooooommmmm…

Hm. It doesn’t seem to be working. Do I need to do a hare krishna? Ah, but I don’t know how it goes… I knew it once, but then I forgot it, because why would I ever need to use the hare krishna in my day-to-day life, Mr Davidsson?

…Yeah, that’s what I thought, teacher-I-haven’t-seen-since-Swedish-middle-school-equivalent! Oh, if only he could see me now…

Anyhow. My ritual is a bust, so I cover up my mistake with a bit more blood, also returning the goblin skills to their pokéballs, ergo my tum-tum.

And from there on, you know the drill. Before I’ve even had time to properly test the true limits of my little toe in blood-stew-making, the next floor opens.

Do you want to enter?>

Poke. ‘Yes.’

Hell Difficulty Eighteenth Floor:

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

The Deep Mine.>

<[Clear Condition]

Save the unfortunate miners from

their cruel oppressors.>

The world shifts and what strikes me is a sudden and overwhelming sense of boredom. Is it too much to ask to not have two cave floors right after each other? I mean, come on. First we have a circular cave, and now this? Well, at least I can see an orange, fire torch in the distant tunnell, so I won’t have to tear my eyes out to avoid the murderous blue lights of those magic crystals.

Anyone who says they prefer blue light over orange light is a liar whose brains have not been subjected to evolutionary psychology. In other words, they are monkeys and ought to be treated as such.

I’m no monkey, though. I am a proud ape, so I head towards the wonderful orange light.

And in the light of that light, I meet a goblin. An orange goblin who takes one look at me before running off in such a hurry that he actually drops his pickaxe. Acting purely on gamer instinct, I pick up the axe of pick and put it into my inventory. Just in case. I doubt it’ll sell for basically anything, but it’s still nice to have.

Then, I head into the same tunnel the goblin went down.

So, to make a long story short, this floor has a lot of goblins. It’s a big mine, and it’s full of goblins. Unfortunately, I can’t smell any nearby natural gas deposits, so I couldn’t take care of the whole thing in one fell swoop like that. Rather, I had to do it one by one, which took much longer.

But eight days should have been enough. I’ve handled a much higher amount of these things in a much shorter amount of time, so this shouldn’t have been an issue. Might have been hubris on my part, but once I got it in my head that I could surely clear the whole floor in eight days, I went at it. The first days were kind of relaxed, I didn’t want to cause an uproar or whatever, but then time got tight, so I dropped that whole plan. Take out the larger base camps, defeat the smaller mobs as quickly as possible, spend as little time as possible on the much more high-leveled whip-carrying red goblins, wonder about the level discrepancies, consider whether or not the normal goblins are actually meant to be defeated or if they’re optional like the beast was, disregard thoughts since they simply stall me, and on it went.

But it all worked out in the end, because now I’ve got the final boss goblin at my feet, and I’ve got plenty of time to loot all the goblins I left to fester before. As I found out only a day or so ago, you don’t actually need to join the tutournament straight away. You’re actually allowed to take your time and join on your own initiative! Neat, huh? So, that’s what I’m doing.

The final boss goblin is breathing heavily in the corner and I’m walking around the large dining area I poisoned a few days back, and everything is okay. Every few steps, I bend down to butcher and loot the little bodies strewn about. One little goblin hide, two little goblin hides, three little goblin hides…

“I… curse… you… demon…!”

I look back at the big boss goblin, mostly in surprise. Wow, it can still talk with only one lung? Impressive! Though, of course, I barely need lungs to talk, so it still has a long way to go. Not that there’s much left for it to—

will now begin.>