When she woke up, for a moment, she was confused about where she was and how she had gotten there. Then, it all came back to her.

Oh right, she thought.

She wanted to cry again, but it seemed all her tears were spent. She just lay as she was for a few minutes until her attention was drawn to the System notification from before, which was still hovering in front of her.

[You have survived an encounter with, and inflicted a wound on an attacker whose level far exceeded your own. Lvl 4 -> 14]

[You have unlocked the skill {Charm}]

[You have unlocked the skill {Ensnaring Roots}]

It was the silver lining to a terrible situation, but it didn’t make her feel any better. It was as though the System was telling her “Congratulations! You were hopelessly outmatched, and watched some of the only people you knew die before your eyes! Here’s some experience points.” She dismissed it and lay for another few minutes in silence until she had dissociated enough to think about it rationally.

She hadn’t known that experience could be earned without killing her target. On top of that, she had clear confirmation that it was hurt. She wasn’t sure how severe it was, but the fact it was hurt at all was promising. If she could injure it in her current state, if she leveled up just a bit more, she might be able to kill it.

That thought surprised her. She had never had the desire to kill before. But as she thought back to the warg attack, and Sylvanna and Corwin’s lifeless bodies on the floor of the once-cozy cabin, the desire only grew stronger. They had been good people. Good parents. Sophie was probably devastated. And she hadn’t known Nick and Bianca for long, but she was sure they were too. It wasn’t right that the warg could just break into their house, and kill them for no reason, and get away scot-free. Whatever injury it had taken from falling down the cliff was a good start, but it wasn’t enough.

She sat where she was, stewing in sorrow and rage until thirst compelled her to move, then she followed the tunnel back to the main chamber she had found the last time she was there. She took a long drink of water from the underground river, before turning to the glowing mushrooms that grew on its banks. They still smelled just as delicious as before.

Though tempted, she had wisely not given into hunger last time she had seen them. Everyone knew that the last thing you wanted to do when lost in the wilderness was eat strange mushrooms. But if the warg was still above ground, she didn’t have much of a choice. She needed a food source, and they were the only thing edible in the vicinity that she knew of.

She walked to the closest one and took a hesitant lick. It tasted like dust, mostly, with a trace hint of mushroom. She wasn’t sure what else she expected.

After half an hour, when that little taste showed no ill effects, she took a chance and had a small nibble. That tasted less strongly of dust and more strongly of mushroom, and was delicious. Not as good as grass or carrots, and a bit of a disappointment compared to how they smelled, but better than nothing.

That small bite also had no side effects, so she decided it was safe to eat the whole mushroom. She didn’t end up making it all the way through, as it was very dense.

System, she thought once she had finished eating.

“Hello, Elise! How can I assist you today?”

Tell me a joke. She had been feeling so grim that she was hoping to lighten the mood.

“What did the Kraken eat for dinner?”

I don’t know. What?

“Fish and ships!”

Elise stared blankly for a moment, then started laughing. The laughter morphed into tears and the emotions of the previous night came flooding back. She was better prepared for them though, and this time, it only took five minutes to push them aside. She had no time to wallow in sorrow. Sylvanna and Corwin had died, but Sophie was still alive. She had been teleported to who-knows-where, and Elise still needed to figure out how to escape the forest, but those were solvable problems.

Elise was alive. Sophie was alive. The wolf was alive. Those were facts, and that last one needed to be corrected.

It had taken risking her life and using a cheap trick to even damage the thing, and there was no way it would fall for the same trick twice. She couldn’t think of another way to defeat it though. Not in her current state. But, she was only one level away from her next evolution, and she had already unlocked some new skills.

Filled with new resolve, she set to experimenting with her new skills. That didn’t last very long. {Charm} required a living target, and the other, {Ensnaring Roots}, was the same one that Corwin had been using against the warg, and she wasn’t quite comfortable with that yet.

Once she was satisfied she at least knew what the skills were, she decided it was time to explore. She looked at all the tunnels around the room, her eyes intentionally skipping over the one that led to the hill by the cabin until she decided on one at random to look down. All of them were identical, aside from their locations, and there were no markings indicating where they might lead, so she figured that it didn’t really matter which one she looked down.

The first one she chose followed a level course, never straying up or down, and only curving ever so slightly to the right. There were no offshoots, no caverns, and no rivers; nothing but smooth tunnels for miles. Literally.

At some point, Elise realized that based on the unchanging curve of the tunnel and the complete lack of any indication of future deviation, this might be a waste of time, but sunk cost kept her on the path all the way until she was back in the main chamber, this time on the opposite side. She sighed, and set to marking them as already explored. The dirt was packed so hard it hurt her paws to dig into, so she instead picked a few small mushrooms and placed them at the entrances of each of the tunnels she had already explored.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Next, she tried a tunnel that went steeply downhill, past the last layer of loose dirt to the levels where the tunnel walls were hard stone. This one thankfully was nowhere near as long, and only half as much of a waste of time. After a few hundred feet or so, the tunnel opened up into a cave so big that Elise had trouble believing it was real. She was no structural engineer, but she was pretty sure that roofs that high and that wide weren’t supposed to be able to maintain themselves without support. The mana there was certainly denser than it was up at the higher levels, but there was nothing indicating any kind of magical support, so maybe she was just wrong.

Elise would have loved to explore the cave further, but unfortunately for her, aside from the small dry bank where she stood, the cavern floor was completely covered in water. Well, perhaps not the entire cave, but she could not see to the other side, and she was not a strong enough swimmer to risk finding out. Besides, who knew what could have been living in that water. It was completely still, and she saw no signs of fish, which only unnerved her more.

When she returned, she dropped a few more mushrooms by that entrance and tried another. This one went down for a time, then ended in a small chamber where apparently the Wyrm had gotten stuck. The far wall was made out of some kind of black stone that Elise didn’t recognize and when she tapped it with her nails, even lightly, it left her with a slight twinge of pain.

There were two unexplored tunnels left, and Elise was beginning to get nervous. If they were both dead ends too, what was she to do? The only two ways she knew to get back to the surface were also the only two places she was certain the wolf prowled. If it was waiting near either hole– which it very well could have been, if it was tracking her scent– she would be dead. It wouldn’t take its time and play with its food like it had before.

The Wyrm had to have come from somewhere, right?

That was the thought that had gotten her searching the tunnels so confidently, but doubt had seeped into her mind.

Maybe it didn’t come from anywhere, she thought. Maybe it just appeared down here one day, like that slime.

She pushed those thoughts aside telling herself that it had leveled up high enough to evolve, so even if it had appeared, it must have been getting experience somehow, but even that wasn’t totally reassuring. What if it got experience from eating dirt and stone or something? What if that giant loop was just its way of farming experience so it could evolve into something stronger?

The next tunnel she tried, like the lake tunnel, started out going steeply down into the layer of solid stone, but after a time, it mostly leveled out. It was still angled down, but so little that she barely noticed. The tunnel went on and on, and though it was subtle in the beginning, at some point, Elise noticed that the ambient mana was getting denser, even more so than the lake tunnel. She didn’t know when it had started, but while she hopped along, she suddenly realized that the mana in the air was twice as dense as it had been when she entered.

Excited, she started moving faster, but soon slowed, as rationality caught up to her and she realized that this might actually be a bad thing. More mana meant faster mana regeneration, which meant more skills could be used, which meant more experience could be earned using those skills. Surely she wouldn’t have been the only creature to notice that, and she wasn’t really equipped to compete for territory. Especially if something as powerful as the Wyrm thought it prudent to build its home so far away.

She maintained her slow pace, but kept moving forward, keeping her ears peeled for any signs of danger. Nothing sounded particularly alarming, but as she got further, there was a faint droning sound that got louder the further she went. A hundred feet later, she realized that was the sound of a waterfall, and a big one too, as it was getting loud, and she still could not see the tunnel’s end.

Or maybe not. It was only a hundred more feet before she learned why she could not see the tunnel’s end. It was obscured by an impenetrable cover of hanging vines. The vines ranged in thickness from the size of thread to the size of a tree trunk, and they were layered on top of each other and woven together so neatly that no sign of what was on the other side could be gleaned, but the sound of the waterfall roared in her ears from just beyond it.

While thick, they were still hanging vines though, so Elise only had a little bit of trouble forcing her way between them to see what was on the other side. When she did, her jaw dropped.

The lake cave was nothing compared to this one. She could barely even see the ceiling, let alone the other side of it, and this cave was illuminated. Huge branches with red leaves and bulbous glowing white fruits hung down from above, shining light on the beautiful, terrifying sight before her. It was like she had stepped into a whole other world.

There were trees, but not like any other trees she had ever seen. They were like oaks, but with red leaves and black bark and spikes covering their branches and roots.

There was grass, but it was neon blue, and its blades were as wide as her paws and as coarse as sandpaper.

The vines behind her were red too, and though they had felt dry when she pushed through them, they had an odd sheen about them that made them look slimy and gross.

Only the water there looked normal, as it crashed down from a hole high above her head into a small pond to her left and exited through a river leading toward the center of the cavern.

Elise stared in awe for a few minutes until she heard rustling in the trees and realized that as a pure white rabbit, she stuck out like a sore thumb to a toddler, and quickly moved to hide herself. There were no bushes around, so she dove back toward the vines covering the tunnel, and hid herself halfway in. She wanted to be able to escape as she pleased, but she would rather know what sorts of creatures lived down in the cavern.

A few seconds later, a pair of big cow-like animals emerged from the treeline and went to the pond to have a drink. They were definitely not cows though. For one, they were furless and their skin was royal purple. They also only had one single red eye in the center of their head, and their tails were more like cat tails than anything else, the way they stuck up and moved around.

They were still the size of normal cows– Elise had only ever seen live cows from a distance, but they didn’t look abnormally large– and didn’t look like anything too dangerous though. Their horns weren’t that big, and looked fairly ordinary. They still weren’t anything she wanted to get on the wrong side of though.

She watched them drink for a while, but she was growing restless. Cows were herbivores. They probably wouldn’t attack. And though she was no expert, she was pretty sure that animals typically didn’t fight at watering holes, even if they didn’t like each other much. After a few minutes, she decided to take a risk. She emerged from the vines and slowly made her way to the pond, as if to take a drink. If the cows showed any sign of aggression, she would simply turn back and return to the tunnel.

At first, everything seemed to be going well. They looked at her, but did not otherwise react as she hopped toward them. When she reached the bank of the pond, they lifted their heads, but still did not make any moves.

She just needed one more hop to get close enough to inspect the nearest one. She took it, used inspect, and realized she had made a mistake.

[Omnivorous Cyclops Cow, lvl ???]

[Inspect has leveled up, lvl 25 -> 26]