We spent the better part of the next six hours putting as much distance as possible between us and the Loot Arcade, all while maneuvering through mostly empty shopping mall corridors and not-quite-so-empty storefronts. The Compass of the Catacomber made the trip as quick and painless as possible. Though, to be fair, there was still quite a bit of pain involved. Spelunker’s Sixth Sense helped me avoid more traps than I could count, but there were still runic pressure plates, magical trip wires, and enough mimics to fill an Olympic swimming pool.

And those were the easy traps.

We stumbled across one hallway shrouded in deep shadow, though the gloom was pierced by thin shafts of light that streamed in through an overhead skylight. Unerring Arrow ushered us through the passageway, but it led us along a path that curved and zigzagged, avoiding each of the beams of illumination. Once we cleared the obstacle, I took out a coat from my storage space and tossed it directly into a shaft of white light out of curiosity more than anything else. Razorblades of concentrated sunfire condensed and sliced the jacket into a hundred smoldering pieces.

It wasn’t hard to imagine what would’ve happened to the oh-so-frail human form.

There were cursed mirror chambers that would ensnare anyone with a weak Grit score in a world of crystalline glass—stranded until you invariably starved to death or died of thirst. We also discovered two temporal distortion pockets, which would suspend unlucky souls inside a bubble of frozen time for a hundred years or more. Victims would survive the cruel process only to find everyone they’d ever known was dead and gone. We even found one of the Gravity Inversion Wells near a pastry shop called Cinnaholics.

That we stayed well clear of, since I was currently enjoying the use of all my limbs.

But seeing all those traps did get me thinking.

One of my new abilities, Surveyor’s Mark, allowed me to mark my path and even make small superficial changes to the Backrooms themselves. I’d learned firsthand that it wasn’t powerful enough to do any meaningful structural damage, but what exactly did small superficial changes entail? Back in the Lobby, I’d used my Sharpie to leave rudimentary directions for myself, but the corridors had quickly dissolved my handiwork. Now though? Now, with a little will and a trickle of Mana, it turned out I could imbue the Sharpie with enough power to leave notes on the walls.

Which is exactly what I started doing.

Shadow Gauntlet: Do NOT touch the beams of light. – Dan

Gravity Inversion Well: Will literally rip all your limbs off. – Dan

The gray bench on the right is a Mimic. – Dan

Cinnaholics is only okay. The pastries are stale. Lot of calories. – Dan

The Sharpie wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to see from a distance, so Croc and I performed a smash-and-grab on a craft supply store called the Funky Fresh Art Mart. We were in and out in less than two minutes, grabbing as much spray paint as I could get my hands on before the store’s artists in residence could drown us in ink or slash our throats with folded origami swords.

The spray paint made marking each of the traps all the easier.

There were also Dwellers to deal with. Lots of Dwellers.

Even with Unerring Arrow to guide us and the map to show us when there were hostile creatures lying in wait, we couldn’t avoid them all. Nor did we want to, truth be told. In order to take over the MediocreMart, I needed to get stronger and level up, and to do that, I needed to hunt.

Unfortunately, the line between hunter and hunted was often a blurry one.

More than once, Croc and I had to haul ass to get away from horrors that were way the hell outside of our respective weight classes—especially when we ventured through the shops themselves. Similar to the dungeons that populated games like those in the immensely popular Titan Realm RPG franchise, most of the shops had lower-level “mobs” and one significantly more powerful “overseer,” which on this floor were typically labeled as “Store Managers”—though Croc assured me that changed based on the theme of each individual floor.

Those Store Managers carried the best shit, hands down, but were not to be dicked around with unless running away wasn’t an option. Still, so long as we didn’t get pinned down or backed into a corner, running was almost always an option. The Store Managers were viciously territorial and would violently eradicate anything inside the bounds of their territory, but once we got outside the confines of their stores, they seemed reluctant to venture out into the mall.

And thank sweet baby Jesus we didn’t stumble across anything even close to as lethal or powerful as the Murder Muncher from the Arcade.

There were plenty of other things that lurked in the common spaces of the mall, however, and the only way to shake those assholes was to kill ’em outright. We tangled with a couple of the Carnivora Rex plants and a lone Wandering Mall Janitor, who bore a striking similarity to the Janitorial Handyman from the Lobby bathroom—though instead of a toilet for a head, it had a mop bucket.

The most common mob, by far, were the seething packs of Mall Rats, which were vicious rodents each the size of a Rottweiler.

They were mean as hell and dealt a disease debuff that lasted for twenty minutes if they managed to land a clean bite. Most of them were low-level, but they traveled in groups of ten or fifteen. One pack was even accompanied by a level 11 Mall Rat King, who looked less like a rodent and more like a mangy werewolf with a bald, pink tail. The Rat King had been wearing colorful boardshorts and a puka shell necklace, which undermined his authority somewhat.

Still—even accounting for the boardshorts and the necklace—Croc and I hadn’t been able to beat the Overseer on our own, so we drew him off to a hallway strewn about with limb-ripper snares. Turned out the Dwellers were just as susceptible to the traps as anyone else.

That might even have explained why so many of the creatures were reluctant to leave behind the safety of their tiny fiefdoms.

I ended up with a score of shallow cuts, painful lacerations, a pair of deep puncture wounds on my bicep—courtesy of the jaws of an especially ambitious Mall Rat—and a broken hand for my trouble. And that was with the map and the Unerring Arrow to guide us. But, if there was one good thing about this place, it was that even the most severe wounds healed at sharply accelerated rates. A broken hand should’ve taken six weeks to fully recover from. The pain had faded within the first hour and by the third, it was almost as good as new.

I also earned heaps of experience points for all the kills—2,325 to be exact, which pushed me up to level 9. Croc and I only earned partial experience for the Rat King, since technically the Backrooms themselves managed to land the killing blow, but the sheer volume of wandering Mall Rats had added up to just over fifteen hundred points. That was enough to push Croc up to level 10, which the mimic dog seemed especially pleased about.

Along with the experience came a small fortune of Shards, Relics, and Artifacts. Unfortunately, most of them were absolute garbage and everything else ended up being duplicates of absolute garbage, which was somehow even worse. There were Relics that caused uncontrolled hiccupping and others that caused unpredictable lapses in memory. Even one that resembled a portable Walkman which, when equipped, made the wielder speak entirely in boyband lyrics.

That one was the worst by a country mile.

There were two notable exceptions.

The first came from the Wandering Mall Janitor and took the shape of a bright yellow triangular folding sign which had a red stick figure man flanked by the words Caution Wet Floor on top and Cuidado Piso Mojado on the bottom. It was a Common Relic appropriately named Slippery When Wet, which allowed the user to conjure a thin sheen of extremely slick water that would cover a ten-by-ten section of floor. Not the most devastating spell in my arsenal, and certainly not on par with Bleach Bolt, but I figured it might have a few practical uses.

I added that one to my Core, bringing my total Relic count to eight.

The other worthwhile Relic came from a level 5 Delinquent Mall Rat—bigger and nastier than the Common Mall Rats, but not quite as deadly or revolting as the Mall Rat King. It looked like a pair of pitted brass knuckles that had seen better days. The effect was a common physical ability called Sucker Punch, which dealt additional physical and emotional damage when striking an opponent first.

What exactly emotional damage entailed, or how it was calculated, I had no idea, but it had a nice ring to it.

I would’ve added Sucker Punch to my Spatial Core without batting an eye, but it happened to have synergistic resonance with the Camo Kit I already had equipped. Croc had mentioned that it was possible to combine Relics with similar effects, creating more powerful or unique spells and abilities in the process. The problem was that when forging Relics, you never actually knew what you were going to end up with.

It was all one big crapshoot.

In theory, you could wind up with an ability that was rare and badass, but there was an even money chance it would be shitty. And after seeing exactly how shitty some of the Relic effects could be, I understood the hesitation.

Turned out, I had an ace in the hole.

When I pulled the Camo Kit from my Core and held it in close proximity to the Brass Knuckles, I felt the two items begin to hum and vibrate in my hand like a struck tuning fork a second before a prompt appeared.

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Synergistic Resonance Detected!

Would you like to Forge Sucker Punch (Common – Level 1) and Basic Camo Kit – Camouflage Spell (Common – Level 1) into a new Relic?*

Yes/No?

Right below that, like a footnote tacked on at the bottom of a textbook page, was a much smaller line of text.

* Run Researcher’s Codex Compatibility Analysis - Yes/No?

Finding two Relics with a Synergistic Resonance got my blood pumping, but it was the footnote that left me drooling at the prospects. Maybe forging was less like gambling and a bit more like chemistry—and I happened to have the teacher’s study guide stowed away inside my soul.

I mentally selected the Analysis option, and a new box replaced the first.

Researcher’s Codex Compatibility Analysis

Based on historic data sets and extensive Forging models, Sucker Punch (Common – Level 1) and Camo Kit – Camouflage Spell (Common – Level 1) have an estimated 92% resonance compatibility, meaning the number of possible Relic Iterations is Low. The most probable outcome is Mall Ninja’s Strike (Uncommon), or a closely adjacent derivative. Would you like to view additional report records for the Mall Ninja’s Strike ability? Yes/No?

I selected yes once again and quickly read over a brief and extremely dry analytical report of the potential derivative. The changes were significant, but there was also a certain logic to them. Almost as if the forging process served to amplify the best qualities of each Relic, while also making those qualities narrower in focus.

First off, Mall Ninja’s Strike nerfed the duration of the camouflage spell—cutting it in half from one minute to thirty seconds—while also jacking up the overall Mana cost by a factor of ten. The payoff was that the camouflage portion of the ability was vastly more effective. Although I wouldn’t be invisible, I’d gain an active effect during the duration of the spell called Mall Ninja’s Veil, which would allow me to seamlessly blend into surrounding shadows.

Mall Ninja’s Strike also had a more limited function than Sucker Punch but made up for it by packing a much greater… well, punch. It would allow me to deal three times my normal damage, but only if I attacked preemptively while simultaneously shrouded in the Mall Ninja’s Veil. The greatest benefit, though—and the bonus effect that made me decide to forge the two Relics into one—was that the Mall Ninja’s Strike damage bonus applied to spells as well as physical attacks.

The possibilities for a skill like that were endless.

When I finally Forged the two Relics together, there was a tremendous flare of heat accompanied by a blinding, though brief, flash of golden light. When the light vanished, the two items were gone and a cheaply manufactured mall wakizashi rested in my palm, its handle wrapped in faux-silk fabric from several different anime shows. It didn’t look like anything special, but then neither did the Compass of the Catacomber. I examined the new Relic description, confirming what the Compatibility Analysis had already told me.

Mall Ninja’s Strike

Uncommon Relic - Level 1

Duration: 30 Seconds

Cost: 20 Mana / 10 Stamina on Strike

Embrace your inner Mall Ninja as you channel the power of shadow to hide from your enemies… and also from all the people who are actively judging you for buying a mall wakizashi, you nerd. You couldn’t even spring for the full-sized katana? You should be ashamed of yourself.

Once activated, Mall Ninja’s Veil envelops you in an aura of darkness and secondhand cringe, making you seamlessly blend into the surrounding shadows. Your enemies won’t see you coming, but they’ll certainly feel your presence when you shank them right in the kidney! While they were out partying, you were studying the blade, and it shows…

While under the effects of Mall Ninja’s Veil, your first preemptive strike—whether magical or melee—becomes a devastating surprise attack, dealing three times normal damage. Just make sure to exercise caution. You wouldn’t want your Klingon bat’leth to get caught on your tactical fanny pack and ruin your grand entrance.

I grinned in satisfaction.

The added ability to predict the likely outcome of the forging process would be a huge benefit once I got the storefront up and running. I’d be able to collect junk Relics then manufacture them into Uncommon and Rare abilities, which I could sell at a steep markup. Honestly, I was a little sad to lose the versatility of the Sucker Punch ability, but Mall Ninja’s Strike was the better technique, and it wasn’t even close.

I also earned another research achievement for forging my first Uncommon Relic—Easy Bake Oven. The description was as condescending as ever, but it came with five Copper Forger Loot Tokens, so I didn’t give a shit.

As for the rest of the Relics…

I ended up sacrificing fifteen of them to bring my Bleach Bolt spell up to level 4, although the process wasn’t nearly as quick or easy as forging the two Relics together had been.

Croc guided me through the ritual, which wasn’t at all intuitive. I sat on the floor, legs folded beneath me, and arranged five Relics around me in a rough circle with my body at the center. Each of the objects radiated a strange warmth and a subtle aura of authority and otherworldly power. I meditated on the Bleach Bolt Relic, nestled inside my core, then reached out with my will and mind, drawing the generative power of the assembled Relics toward me.

The objects began to glow with spectral silver light, and after a few seconds, the five Relics crumbled to fine motes of dust and the colorful essence contained within each of the items flowed toward me, sinking through my chest and into the Relic I held in my mind’s eye. As the energy settled, the Relic level ticked up, moving from one to two. The whole ceremony took about ten minutes from start to finish and left me weak and shaky, but those feelings passed quickly enough.

I repeated the process twice more, laying out the Relics each time and funneling their preternatural energy into Bleach Bolt. The spell description remained the same and so did the Mana cost, but the damage output jumped dramatically from 15 points of Corrosive Damage on contact to 24 points on contact, and it now dealt 5 points of additional Corrosive Damage per minute for five minutes. In short, it was almost twice as destructive as it had been before the upgrade.

That left me with five unused Relics left to my name—one extra Tinfoil Hat of Mind Shielding, two Gremlin’s Groin Guardians, and two Basic Camo Spell Relics. All of those I left in Storage along with my ever-growing stash of Common and Uncommon Shards. Eventually, I’d forge those into even more Relics, but that could wait until later.

I also earned a wheelbarrow’s worth of Artifacts from the various skirmishes but, by and large, they weren’t much better than the Relics.

Most of them were like the Greater Rage Elixir I found in the supplement store. Sort of okay but offset by a host of horrendous—often crippling—side effects that vastly outweighed any potential benefit. I found a wicked looking machete that caused you to teleport to a completely random location within line of sight every time you landed a blow against an enemy and a metal bracelet called Jinxed Fortune, which minutely altered probability against the favor of the wearer.

Why would anyone in their right mind want something like that? I wasn’t sure.

The best Artifacts were the ones that tended to have no active effects at all, but rather empty Effect Slots just like the barbell I’d looted off the Roid Gremlin Overseer. I picked up a few more Lesser Healing Elixirs—they were all Zima—and two Mana Elixirs that took the form of the iconic ’90s soda of choice for teens everywhere, Jolt Cola. Those I added to my tool belt so I’d have them on hand for when things went sideways in the worst possible fashion.

Worthless garbage or not, the Artifacts all went into Storage until I could figure out what in the hell to do with ’em. I was starting to get a little worried about my Storage weight capacity. Two thousand pounds sounded like a lot, but little things could add up quick, I knew.

When MediocreMart finally populated on my map after what felt like countless hours of walking, running, and duking it out against the mall’s many inhuman inhabitants, I took a little extra time to track down another Progenitor Monolith.

I was anxious to raid the off-brand Walgreens and claim my first strip of Backrooms real estate, but I needed to be smart about it. This was a two-star threat, I reminded myself, which meant the Store Manager waiting within was level 10 or above. The Mall Rat King had been level 10 too, and we’d only managed to kill that dickhead by drawing him into an indiscriminate death trap. I doubted that was going to be an option against whatever called the MediocreMart home.

The truth was, if I rushed in there with metaphorical guns a-blazin’, I’d end up dead long before the Monarch ever had a chance to flay the skin from my body.

I’d made it to level 9, and the twenty extra Personal Enhancement Points I now had could be the difference between a long, fulfilling life as an interdimensional real-estate tycoon and a bloody death that left me in a shallow, unmarked grave just like all the other Delvers Croc had tried to help over the years. But I was chomping at the bit to get my ass moving, so I didn’t dwell on things overlong.

I still wasn’t entirely sure what Blight was, but it sounded like I wanted to catch it about as much as a case of Super Gonorrhea, so I added two more points to Preservation just to be on the safe side. Bleach Bolt was still my single greatest weapon, so the more of those I could cast in quick succession, the better off I’d be. Working under that assumption, Resonance got seven extra points while Perception ended up with three, significantly raising my Mana. Three points went into Athleticism and the last two went to Toughness, which boosted my total Health up to 40 and my Stamina to 24.

Dan Woodridge

Specimen Biotag ID #03A-01-B00R7T569C

Variant Assimilation Level: 9

Race: Human, Archetypal

Current Experience: 7,630

Next Level: 8,250

Personal Enhancement Points: 0

__ __ __

Health: 40

Health-Regen/Hour: 1.75

__ __ __

Stamina Reserve: 24

Stamina-Regen/Minute: 1.85

__ __ __

Mana Pool: 58

Mana-Regen/Minute: 4.5

Individual Adaptative Stats

Grit: 6 (5 + 1 Enhanced)

Athleticism: 8

Toughness: 8

Perception: 13

Resonance: 22

Preservation: 5

Spatial Core - Active

(C) Tinfoil Hat of Mind Shielding – Level 1

(C) The Gremlin’s Groin Guardian – Level 1

(C) Force Multiplier – Level 1

(C) Slippery When Wet – Level 1

(U) Mall Ninja’s Strike – Level 1

(U) Psychedelic Light Show of Minor Distraction – Level 1

(U) Bleach Bolt: The Unidentified Stain Eradicator – Level 4

(ME) Compass of the Catacomber (Fully Tempered)

Current Titles – Passive

Out of Your League, Deathwish, Marked for Death, Weapon of Opportunity, Legend in the Making

The physical changes took effect within minutes. It was a genuinely unnerving experience.

My skin crawled as the muscles beneath flexed and swelled. Fat melted away from my midsection like water evaporating from the surface of a hot pan. Raw strength surged through my limbs, and it felt like someone had stripped years off my joints and lower back. Right hand to the Good Lord, it was the closest thing to a miracle I’ve ever experienced. A host of old aches and lingering injuries, which I’d collected through a life of hard living and manual labor, vanished in the blink of an eye.

I’d grown so used to all those chronic pains that I hardly even noticed them anymore, but the sudden and immediate relief was almost enough to make me cry.

Instead of crying, though, I laughed.

In the back of my head, I’d been starting to think that someone up above must’ve hated me something fierce to sentence me to this hellhole, but maybe I’d been all wrong about this place. Were the Backrooms deadly? Sure as shit. Were they horrifying? Without a doubt. Could they kill you in a second if you weren’t careful? Does a bear shit in the woods?

But the Backrooms might also have been the best thing to ever happen to me.

Feeling like I was twenty years old again and in the best shape of my life, I turned away from the Monolith and headed toward the MediocreMart with my hammer in hand, spoiling for a good ol’ fashion ass-kicking.