Time to Level Collapse: 4 days, 21 hours.

The two left the Tutorial Guild together, now clean and fully equipped with their new gear. Ranma pulled up the minimap and checked out where they should go next. Most of the map was filled in with the “fog of war” as Maxwell described but the two could see a large blob of revealed map that represented their path through the dungeon since they arrived.

“Alright, Shampoo, which way do you think we should go?” Ranma asked.

“Hmm,” Shampoo hummed to herself as she hooked a finger under her chin and looked over her own map. After a moment she said, “I think we should go… that way! We have a big undiscovered area to the upper right of where we are. I think there might be different mobs that way.”

“Good enough for me, I don’t wanna see another bird for a long time. Stupid flying rodents,” Ranma grumbled.

“I agree, now let’s go on a date, Ranma!” Shampoo agreed then latched onto Ranma as they made their way down the tunnels, rubbing her cheek gleefully against his arm.

“Oh, c’mon, what’s date-like about any of this?” Ranma complained.

Shampoo had a gleam in her eye and held a finger up as if to lecture Ranma, “3,000 years of Chinese Amazon dating strategy, even the Emperors of China were in awe of it! When a Chinese amazon woman gives an outsider man the Kiss of Marriage they go on maaany kinds of Martial Art Dates like surviving in harsh wilderness or defeating hundreds of enemies together, then they eventually go back to the village and get married with a huge celebration!”

Ranma paused at “Martial Arts”, “Uh, what do ya mean, ‘Martial Art Dates’? Is that the kind of stuff you were always buggin’ me for back on the surface?”

“No, those were normal dates,” Shampoo said, shaking her head. “But we can’t have normal dates in this place, can we?”

“I… guess we can’t,” Ranma agreed, rubbing the back of his head as he was reminded once more of the state of the world outside of the dungeon.

Shampoo’s eyes sparkled and she grinned victoriously, “You said ‘we’!”

Ranma’s eyes bugged as he realized his mistake, “N-No I didn’t! I was just sayin’ it like- uh, whatchamacallit… rhetorically!”

“No take backs, Ranma! We are going now, no time to waste!” Shampoo excitedly yelled as she practically dragged him along by his arm.

“H-Hey!” Ranma attempted to stop her dragging him away. It was fruitless and soon the two entered some new tunnels, slowly expanding their map as they trekked through looking for anything that could fight.

As the two moved forward and Shampoo’s initial enthusiasm waned only enough to let Ranma finally get his bearings, he noted the symbol of a safe area further into their destination on his map as the two of them now walked more sedately side-by-side. Eventually, they came across their first set of a new mob type, nearly crashing into the mob as they rounded a corner in their haste.

“Whoa!” Ranma shouted, backpedaling away from the clumsy swing of the person in front of them and dragging Shampoo along with him to avoid the fist.

“Aiya!” Shampoo cried, equally surprised.

The person in front of them was an elf but they wouldn’t have been able to tell if it wasn’t for the ears on his head. The man was dirty and smelly while his clothes could be considered rags at best. Ranma and Shampoo watched as the grimy elf focused his full attention on them as he stumbled back up from his clumsy attack, the elf’s eyes twitched around wildly and a wide nearly toothless grin stretched over his face. The few teeth that remained were stained and black.

The elf let out a cackle as he pulled a shiv from the pocket of his ratty pants and held it aloft in front of him, waving it around erratically as if to threaten the two of them. Ranma eyed the way he held the knife and scoffed. He gently pushed Shampoo aside, “Let me handle this guy and watch out for anything else, I wanna get used to the new way my body moves. Man, we really need to set a time for some training.”

Shampoo crossed her arms and nodded, “I agree. Also, I get the next one.”

“Oh! Oooh!” The elf shouted, his voice shrill. “This bitch-boy thinks he can take me on, huh?! Not gonna hide behind your little bitch like a pansy?!”

“What did you say?!” Ranma yelled, turning his attention away from Shampoo and glaring at the annoying elf in front of them. Shampoo had her brow twitch in anger at what the elf had said about her.

“Oh, don’t like being called a bitch, huh? Bitch! Yeah, youse a little girly bitch!” The fouled mouthed elf went on a tirade of swearing, most of which were variations of calling Ranma a bitch. “Yeah you can’t handle any of this! I’m gonna gut ya and the boss’ll give me a bigger fix when I deliver him your corpse-yeow!”

The elf had been flipping his knife around like he was in a movie, throwing the handle from side to side and catching it with his hands. This time he had mistimed the catch and throw, ending up grabbing the blade as hard as he could with his hand. A health bar appeared over his head and went down a bit as blood dribbled on the floor.

“Alright, I’m gettin’ real sick of you,” Ranma said. He examined the elf, now quickly growing weary of dealing with the guy for much longer.

Trash Elf. Level 2.

Dirty, smelly, and hooked on every drug imaginable these elves are the lowest of the lot. Even below city elves and those guys are a bunch of crazy lunatics. In fact, these guys are so low on the elven totem pole that there is an active kill-on-sight order that every Elf must obey if they see one. Failure to follow through with this order is instant execution upon entering any High Elf controlled territory, no exceptions.

To the elf’s credit he recovered from the knife cut but after the description Ranma figured that was because the guy was on all sorts of drugs at the moment. He probably didn’t even fully register the pain other than it had happened. Still, the elf stared at his hand for a moment before he turned his head to glare at Ranma like it was all his fault.

“Oh-ho, you gonna get it now! Nobody makes me bleed my own blood!” the elf shouted, his eyes beginning to dilate as he spoke and his body trembling with random shakes.

Ranma drew himself into one of the martial art stances of his school and kept his gaze on his opponent. He remembered a small bit of dialogue during one of the times where he and Shampoo were exploring their menus in silence. The topic of experience and leveling came up and what exactly earned those.

Ranma was generally against killing on principle, it didn’t sit right with him, but he knew he’d be able to if his life or the life of someone close to him was in danger. So, the thought of killing a bunch of people, inhuman or not, inside the dungeon just to gain more power horrified him. As he explained what he felt to Maxwell the dragon-man was quick to refute that.

“What you might think of as people in this dungeon are actually created using repurposed biomatter. They are specifically created to be killed, reabsorbed, and repurposed inside this dungeon. Even if you don’t kill, say, a goblin on this floor it won’t matter because once the floor collapses that goblin will be dead either way and its biomass will be used for something else. Most likely another goblin on a different floor. Anything that isn’t a former crawler, or is an alien race acting as an NPC, is created, programmed or had their memories altered, and then set loose into the dungeon for the sole purpose of being killed or being a part of some quest. It’s against Syndicate law to alter the memories of beings that were naturally born. So, what I’m saying is, is that while its very fucked up there is not anything you can do about it. Focus on surviving, not on bleeding your heart out for every mob and NPC in the dungeon. It’s not worth it and honestly you’d be doing a lot of them a favor.”

Ranma was prepared to kill in this dungeon, but he didn’t have to like it. As Ranma cooled his thoughts and focused himself the elf didn’t wait any longer as whatever was happening with him finally finished and he rushed at Ranma with a crazed laugh. Foam dribbled on the sides of his mouth as he tried to stab forward at Ranma’s torso with his bloody and cut-up hand clutching the knife tight. Ranma grunted as he moved, weaving around the sloppy stab while slapping the forearm of the elf to push him out of balance. Then Ranma followed through and jabbed the elf as hard as he could in the ribs as he stumbled past.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

It worked, just a little too well. The elf practically flew as his momentum plus Ranma’s own strength and skills sent him slamming head-first into the wall. The health bar over his head wasn’t very far down since the elf accidentally cut himself but it quickly dipped all the way down as Ranma’s first punch connected solidly with the elf’s body and then said elf promptly had his head cracked open like a tomato against the wall. Ranma and Shampoo winced at the gory sight.

“Well,” Ranma said as the two just stared at the corpse, “that was not what I had expected outta this.”

“I hope that not all of them speak like this one did,” Shampoo commented dryly. “That’s going to get old very fast.”

Ranma examined the corpse as he drew near it and a loot window appeared hovering over it.

Lootable Corpse. Trash Elf. Level 2. Killed by Crawler Ranma by braining it’s head against the wall with a minor assist by Trash Elf.

Shitty Shiv.

Doggie Bag of Mystery Pills x2.

Cracked Bong.

All of it didn’t seem like it was worth taking but Ranma took the items anyway. He had infinite inventory so he didn’t see why he shouldn’t if these people were just going to give it to him. Ranma decided that this was what they were going to do when they saw things that they could take and insisted that Shampoo did the same. After all, it was important to use anything they could get their hands on to aid them in battle. Plus, for Ranma, using anything he could get to win a fight was a core component of the Anything Goes School of Martial Arts. This inventory system was actually the perfect tool for him and he knew several people that’d kill to have something like it.

“Well, I guess you get the next one,” Ranma said as he and Shampoo left the corpse behind, he got a pair of achievements and some bronze adventurer boxes for his effort but he wasn’t too thrilled at what he’d get from those. But in any case Ranma figured they’d have to fight a bunch of times before they fully understood how their bodies worked now so there was still a chance to earn more loot.

The two spent the next several hours wandering the new area of tunnels, often consulting their map to ensure that they had a good idea of where the elves were concentrated and to see if they could find anything else that was around the area. Over these next several hours they also picked off any elf they saw and grew more and more comfortable with fighting with their skills and their current stats. During one of the small breaks in between their battles Ranma felt the need to ask a question that had been burning in his mind since the first elf they found.

“Ya know, I thought that we can’t speak Japanese or Chinese anymore. How’d you say ‘aiya’ way back there?” Ranma asked as they stretched and took a small rest near one of the many bathroom entrances littered throughout the tunnels.

“Maxwell said that our native languages are still there but they are buried very far down in our heads, like a distant memory, so that this new alien language is something that we use naturally,” Shampoo explained, rolling her eyes as she said ‘naturally’. “It takes a lot of effort to use Chinese now and I wanted to preserve at least a little bit of my culture. Even if I have to use words from it like a catchphrase from an anime for the people outside this dungeon.”

Ranma briefly pondered on what she said and how he didn’t know that Shampoo even watched anime. It was a side of her that he hadn’t seen before back in Japan. He knew that she wasn’t stupid but sometimes it was hard to remember that when she spoke with broken and accented Japanese. Looking back Ranma really didn’t know much about her at all but, secretly, he was at least glad for the little bit of familiarity that Shampoo speaking some chinese words here and there brought.

“Hey, think about it like this,” Ranma said as he patted Shampoo on her back in an attempt to comfort her. “If it ain’t gone like these assholes want then you just need to use Chinese more often and maybe it will come back to you. Kinda like learnin’ an old martial arts move way back and practicing until you shake all the dust off!”

Shampoo blinked at the way he described it then just giggled and leaned into him with a smile, “Thank you, Airen.”

Ranma and Shampoo continued their journey through the tunnels. As they moved and defeated more opponents they ended up collecting a lot of those shivs and bags of “Mystery Pills” as well as cracked bongs of several different colors. Those three items seemed to be the main loot that was dropped by these guys but sometimes different types of drugs dropped like “baggie of shitty weed” or “baggie of laced cocaine”. Ranma was getting a bit tired of these useless drops but he still reluctantly took them all despite some mild disdain at the thought of handling drugs like these.

Eventually, they had circled around through the mess of tunnels to find themselves back at where Ranma had killed the first elf. Ranma blinked as the body was nowhere to be seen, only a splash of blood on the wall indicated that a body had been there before. He looked around and even examined his map to see if there were any red dots on it to indicate hostile mobs in the area. None were there and since he didn’t see a walking corpse anywhere like in those zombie movies Ranma was left a little confused.

“Huh, where’d the body go?” Ranma finally asked, dismissing his map and looking at Shampoo in confusion. She just shrugged and Ranma was forced to put the matter aside for now and simply continued on, “Whatever, let’s push a little further into the elf area to see what’s going on then take a break at that safe room we passed by a while ago.”

Shampoo grew a bit more serious and nodded, they didn’t know what was further in but she would stick with Ranma the entire time.

For a few minutes nothing seemed to happen until they rounded a corner and came into view with a small group of the elves. There were about six of them, two were fighting over a bag of cocaine while the other four were cheering them on. Ranma and Shampoo briefly eyed each other before nodding and rushing forward.

As they drew near and finally got the attention of the elves, Ranma activated one of his skills that carried over from his life, the Tenshin Amaguriken. It had been changed in the dungeon, turning into something entirely different. Before, it was just a training method meant to train and condition the user’s body into moving at high speeds. Now, it acted as more of an actual technique that one had to consciously use.

Tenshin Amaguriken. Level 2.

Upon use of this skill your dexterity is multiplied by 3 for 5 seconds. Your maximum use of this skill every fight is (the level of this skill / 2), rounded down. Current maximum uses every fight: 1.

Ranma didn’t like the fact that he was so limited in using the skill every fight, especially right now since the skill leveled slowly and didn’t give any returns until it reached level 4. If he ever was involved in a really long battle he’d have to be very careful about using the skill lest he’d end up needing it when it was needed most but not being able to use it. He wished that it still worked only on his body’s stamina and didn’t have some arbitrary limit per battle, that would have been a lot more convenient.

Ranma rained his fists down on the elves, taking two out almost immediately as their chests crumbled under the power of his repeated blows and flew backwards. Shampoo wasn’t far behind as she let out a war cry and slammed her fist into the face of another elf. The sheer force of her fist on the elf’s face indicated that she was using her Smash skill as the head she just struck exploded into gore.

The stump of the elf’s neck cartoonishly erupted with a spray of blood and the body fell backward in a heap. She followed through with another Smash into the side of the torso of one of the elves that was fighting over the bag of drugs that was a bit too slow to react to the situation, sending he and his elf opponent crashing into each other. The elf hit by Shampoo’s fist died as his torso was turned into paste. It wasn’t immediate as the elf’s health plummeted down from red to zero as he wheezed and gasped for a couple of moments. His unfortunate friend was only a little bloody and disoriented on the ground.

Ranma didn’t let his momentum fall and aimed to end the fight now that the group of elves were broken up and mostly destroyed now. He jabbed a fist into the stomach of the second-to-last elf, feeling something give way under his fist as he sent the elf stumbling back and clutching his stomach. The elf’s health bar dipped nearly halfway and Ranma quickly followed up and snapped his foot forward in a high kick, slamming it hard at the last elf still standing who was now trying to back away in fear from his vicious assault. A debuff appeared over the elf’s head just as Ranma’s foot struck the guy so hard in the throat that his head was ripped from his shoulders. Ranma twirled from the momentum of his attack and he used it to slam his fist down into the skull of the elf Shampoo knocked down that was now trying to get up from the ground. It was determined to be a critical hit by the system and the elf’s body rocked for a moment before blood splattered all over the ground. Ranma grimaced at the blood and gore that was now covering him, he shook his hands to try and get rid of it.

Shampoo was doing the same as she looted the bodies she had killed. She grumbled to herself about needing her weapons and Ranma didn’t say anything about it.

Ranma looted his own kills as well, mentally filing away the trash loot as unimportant as he went over a few notifications that he got during the short fight. Most of which were some of his skills leveling. Once done looting and going over their skill notifications they quickly looked around to see if there was any indication of where to go next.

“Over there!” Shampoo eventually said, pointing to a crude sign nailed to the dungeon wall that pointed down another tunnel that was still covered in the fog of war.

The sign read: Drugs are this way you idiots!

The letters were crude and barely fit on the sign. Ranma wasn’t sure if they were written in blood or paint and decided that he probably didn’t want to know. He shrugged, “Well, I suppose it makes sense. There were more elf guys in one group here than in the other areas.”

“Yeah, I guess we know where to go now,” Shampoo said.

“Let’s do that later,” Ranma said. He sighed and stretched, “Honestly? I’m beat and just want to sleep for a bit. Maybe eat something.”

“Today has been a long day,” Shampoo agreed, slowly nodding her head. She looked somber as she stared up at the ceiling for just a moment. Ranma didn’t say anything but he knew that he wasn’t the only one who had lost something… or someone.

“No, don’t think like that. She’s still alive, I know it.”

The trip to the safe room was in silence as the day finally started catching up to the two of them.