It took god knows how long to rearrange my kitchen enough to make everything fit around the brand new fridge. It would’ve been easier if I was willing to move the “Dungeon Fridge”, but I was worried that if I moved it even a bit that might affect the portal. That just wasn’t something I was willing to risk. I did unplug it though, and to my relief that didn’t seem to do anything negative. Now that it was no longer wasting electricity for no good reason, I moved all of the stuff out of the freezer and door into the new fridge. After that, I made a run to the grocery store to stock up.
If my mother came to visit and found my fridge completely empty, she’d have a fit. I’d never hear the end of it. Knowing her, she'd probably head straight to the store and come back with a truckload of stuff for me. God bless her. Remember folks, hug your mothers.
A few hours (and a much lighter wallet) later I had myself a fully stocked fridge with all the essentials a man could ever need to survive. Bacon, eggs, alcohol, other things. If I had to buy even half this much before the cash cow appeared, I’d have probably just starved instead. As the sun was setting I wrapped up my evening with a delightful meal of spaghetti and meat sauce with plenty for leftovers the next couple days, then I tended to my pets. I ended up finally going to bed around 11pm.
And then I woke right up at 4am, unprompted. My alarm hadn’t sounded. My cats were in the other room. My dog wasn’t nosing me to go outside for a early morning tinkle. For no discernable reason I had snapped awake. And I felt just fine. It felt like I had slept for nine hours instead of only five. Just awake and ready to go.
I tried to go back to sleep anyways, but found I was unable to so I started my morning routine a few hours early, to the great confusion of my pets who weren’t used to me being up and around at this hour. My dog begrudgingly went out into the crisp morning air, walked around a bit, and then demanded we go back inside.
The cats were more than fine with being fed breakfast early though.
Oh, did I mention how much I was itching to get inside the dungeon?
It was all I could think about while I ate breakfast, or while I fed the dog, or used the toilet.
I still needed to get a new set of plates, and a new rifle, at the very least. Yes, I know that I have more than one AR-15 that I could grab and use beyond the one that got trashed. I just didn’t want to confront a second ogre with only 5.56 at my disposal. My AR-10 in .308? Too heavy, and far too overkill for the goblins. And I didn’t have much ammo on hand for it.
Maybe a short scouting run wouldn’t hurt…
I at least made sure to restock on flares and glowsticks, strapped my helmet on, donned my vest, slung my shotgun over my torso, and walked into the dungeon.
Only to find that it had changed.
I had become intimately familiar with the first hundred feet or so of the tunnel, since I had seen it so often, but it was now totally different. It used to be about twenty feet wide, consisting of rough mushroom covered stone that stretched a distance before splitting into other tunnels. Random pieces of worked stone here and there.
Now?
The portal exited into a rectangular room, with perfectly flat floors and walls. Four large blue crystals inlaid in the ceiling provided just enough light that without my NVG, I’d still be able to walk around without running into the wall. In the northeast (deciding that facing away from the portal was north made it easier for me to navigate) corner was an archway that led to what looked like a hallway that split in two directions, going north and south.
I went north first, and followed a long hallway, lit along the wall with one of those blue crystals every couple feet. At the end of it were two stone doorways leading north and south again. I went south, into a square room where four goblins sat around a fire pit. They reacted before I did, and one chucked its spear at me, which sailed wide left of my head and splintered against the wall behind me. I responded to his message with a blast to the chest, while two of them rushed toward me. The fourth one backed up to the wall opposite of me, and raised up a wooden staff, the end of it started to glow.
Oh fuck that.
I backpedaled into the hallway, the goblins barreling through the door after me. One of them tripped over his own feet and went face first into the stone, while the other swung at me with a makeshift hatchet. I swung my shotgun’s stock at his head, clocking him in the side of the nose and sending a spurt of blood onto the floor. He recoiled back, and was sent back further when I planted my boot in his chest. He fell backward onto the floor, and I canoed his face with a blast of 12ga. The other goblin tried to get up, but his arm collapsed underneath him, torn off clean at the elbow with another blast. I shot him in the back of the head as I passed by, poked my head into the room again.
I pulled my head back just in time to avoid a fireball, which splashed against the wall and exploded. Flaming chunks of granite pelted me and I patted away any smoldering pieces that got caught on my vest. I could hear the goblin shriek with laughter, but that turned into a gurgle when his vocal cords were violently replaced by buckshot. I cautiously stepped into the room, sweeping the room with my muzzle. In the corner to my left was a stack of chests, and a rustling noise picked up on my ear-pro.
Something was hiding back there.
I gave that stack a wide berth while I picked up the staff the goblin “shaman” had dropped.
Lesser Staff of Firebolt (Common)
Charges 4/5
Launches a bolt of fire which ignites the target. Staff is rendered useless after all charges are expended.
The moment I picked it up, I could feel instinctively how to use it. Just hold it by the handle, aim it, and will it to function.
So I pointed it at the crates and let it go.
The goblin that had been hiding went up like a bonfire when the bolt struck it, and it shrieked until I put it out of its mercy.
Lesser Staff of Firebolt (Common)
Charges 3/5
I decided I’d keep it. I strapped it to my backpack and collected my XP gems (Soul crystal was just such a mouthful, sorry System) and my gold.
Gained 5 Soul Energy, 19/40
There wasn’t a lick of treasure in the room, so I turned my attention to the glowing crystals in the wall. I could tell right away, now that i was looking closer, that they were not XP gems, being a different shade of blue and with less of a glow. I touched them to see what the System said.
Blue Abyssalite
That’s all it would give me? Fine, keep your secrets. I needed to figure out something anyways, so I took aim at a chunk of the abyssalite across the room and shot it. The chunk shattered into pieces, falling from its nook in the wall to the floor. I watched it until the glow dimmed, then extinguished entirely.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
So, I could turn off the lights in the dungeon, if I just hit them hard enough to break them. They didn’t explode, so shooting them would work just fine for me. Waste of ammo? Maybe, but I had NVG’s and was gonna fucking use them. Sue me.
There was another door on the west side of the room, which led to a short hallway, then another small room. It was about-
I was interrupted in my assessment by a large green hand that swung from the left side of the door, grabbed my vest, and pulled me into the room before tossing me against the far wall. I slammed into it with my right shoulder, which hurt but it didn’t break a second time. I turned to face my ambusher.
He stood over seven feet tall, with green skin much darker than the goblins. His eyes were nearly entirely black, and they were full of hatred. Thank god it wasn’t an ogre this time, but I think being cornered in a tiny room by an orc still didn’t sound like a good time. Even less of a party since he was armed with a stone bladed axe. I quickly aimed at his face before he could close in, and fired.
Maybe my timing was just bad, or he was very lucky. Maybe he sensed his impending death and moved to prevent it, but whatever the cause, just as my finger squeezed the trigger his head tilted to the right. Instead of his face being replaced by a hole, he got only a few deep gouges along the side of his head as the pellets grazed him. He roared in response, and took a swing at me.
Ability: Minor Speed activated
If it wasn’t for that boost, I don’t think I’d have dodged the axe in time. I moved just enough that instead of being disemboweled I instead got a ruined vest. Two pouches split open, the shells inside cut cleanly in two as gunpowder and lead trickled to the floor.
Aura: 0%
In just two attacks, he had reduced my Aura to zero, and now there was nothing protecting me from that axe. I dove past him into the hallway, landing and rolling onto my back to put a shell into the back of his knee. He buckled, and then turned to face me, his eyes bulging. Froth began bubbling in his mouth. I put two more shells into his stomach and chest, and when he didn’t fall down I rolled back over and got to my feet. Just as I moved out of the way, his axe came down and split the brick beneath me in half. I ran out of the hall and into the room with the firepit.
I would’ve stood there and faced him, but when I started to turn to confront him, he tackled me from the side. The two of us went right through the door, across the hall, and into the north room. I couldn’t see them, as my gaze was focused on the orc, but I heard the goblins in the room squeal in surprise at our sudden arrival. Some of them must’ve decided to join in, because a hatchet clattered on the floor next to my head, hitting the orc’s hand.
He roared in rage, outraged at the interference of our one-on-one. He got off of me and rushed the goblin, grabbing it by the throat and strangling it, before breaking its neck with a final squeeze. The other three goblins fled out the door we had come in from.
It was honorable of him, I suppose, but it gave me the perfect opportunity to get up, place my shotgun against the back of his head, and scramble his gray matter with buckshot.
He could operate with his organs shredded and visible from the two fist sized holes in his torso. He could catch up to me with his leg almost amputated at the kneecap. He couldn’t keep going when his brain was put in a lead blender.
Ability: Minor Speed deactivated
Aura: 1%
Stamina: 85/100
That had been another close one. I was reloading my shotgun when the goblins regained their courage and returned. I didn’t let them have another chance to flee.
I picked up the XP gem from the orc, it was quite a bit bigger than the goblin’s but not nearly the size of the ogre’s.
Gained 5 Soul Energy, 24/40
I was conflicted. On the one hand, five whole SE from one gem was nice, but that one big fucker had tanked four blasts of 00 Buck, and took another to the skull to finally go down. Ten times the risk, five times the reward. Yet another reason I wanted a 7.62x39.
Gained 4 Soul Energy, 28/40
I gathered up the gold and the smaller XP gems, then searched for whatever the orc had actually dropped. There laid a blood red gem about the size of a quarter.
Gem of Berserker Rage
Much like the Gem of Lesser Restoration, the Berserker Rage gave me no functional description, but based on the orc’s refusal to die, I suspected that using this gem would be like injecting myself with meth and painkillers. An absolute final resort type of item, in my opinion. Maybe it’d be useful at Walmart on Black Friday. I put it in my pocket anyway, just in case.
Then I did an inventory of my supplies.
Five of my shells had been cut in half, along with a few of my glow sticks. My vest was ruined. I had only thirty shells left, plus the nine in my shotgun. I had only two glowsticks, and a flare.
That meant I could kill about thirty nine goblins, or a lot less orcs if I ran into more. From then on, I decided that headshot would be critical, you can’t berserker rage if you don't have a brain anymore.
Looking around, it looked like the room I was in was a perfect mirror of the one to the south. Right down to the door to the west, and the hallway that led to a small room. I didn’t get anywhere close to the door this time, instead I cracked a glowstick before tossing it in, rapidly backing up into the bigger room.
I heard the orc inside roar, then its feet stomping on the stone floor as it came for me. I ducked near the side of the door, my shotgun leveled at about head height.
Ability: Minor Speed activated
The orc was effectively clotheslined by a shotgun blast to the side of the head. I held my aim on it until the body started to dissolve, making extra sure it was dead.
Ability: Minor Speed deactivated
Gained 5 Soul Energy, 33/40
I pocketed the other Berserker Gem as well, then inspected the room the orc had been hanging out in. In the corner was a chest.
I loaded my shotgun, and had an idea.
I tried to move the chest, but it was firmly attached to the floor. So much for my plan to move it into the larger room. Alas, I had to open it in a broom closet.
I braced myself for the coming attack as I popped the lid.
The hinges didn’t squeal. I still aimed my shotgun at the door and counted the seconds, and nothing happened.
Not a single goblin.
I must’ve stood there for five minutes at least, until I was certain that nothing was going to stab me in the ass, then finally opened the chest.
Inside sat a pair of thin leather gloves with small gems embedded over the knuckles, which I picked up.
Sleight of Hands (Uncommon)
Allows the wearer to stow small items inside the glove, to be retrieved at a later time.
No fuckin way.
I tore off my mechanix gloves and put on the Sleight of Hands. Then I held a shotgun shell in my left hand, and thought about stowing it.
The shell disappeared in a puff of smoke, and the gem on my first knuckle glowed dimly.
Worn Equipment:
Head: ᕕ´›æ´˘≥ œ˘¿›˘ı (Stats unknown)
Eyes: ᵛ˘ɲı˘≥ 𝖡æ𝖡𝖡¿˘ϐ (Stats unknown)
Arms: µææ≥°˘ (Stats unknown)
Hands: Sleight of Hands
Torso: ”¿Әı˘ ˆӘ´´°˘´ (Stats unknown)
Legs: 𝈇¿¢˘ ±˘Әɲϐ (Stats unknown)
Feet: Boots of The Traveler, -5% Stamina drain, +5% Stamina gain
Underclothes: ı-ϐµ°´ı (Stats unknown)
Inventory: Sleight of Hands (Limited)
Accessories: None
Inventory:
Sleight of Hands: ϐµæı𝖡¢ɲ ϐµ˘¿¿ x1
Now for the real test.
I thought about retrieving the shell, but nothing happened. Then I thought over the menu, and focused on the glitched text in particular. It appeared in my hand suddenly.
“Fucking gamechanger!”
My shout echoed in the small room, and I reached into my pockets for more shells. I learned in the next few seconds that I could store four in each glove, and with a few minutes of practice I could retrieve one and load it with ease. I filled them up with shells, and moved on. My head was already swimming with ideas on how I could use them.
I nearly sprinted all the way back home through the dungeon halls.
There were things to try after all.
Oh so many fun things to try.