“Are you still thinking about what I said at dinner?” George asked after he had finished the latest healing session with Nate.

“Yeah,” He replied in a distracted if somewhat tense voice. Healing the meridians and core inside one's-body was not a pleasant experience. “I agree with what you said, that it’s better to avoid doing anything against them, and the why. It just seems…” He shrugged helplessly.

Even as the person behind the dungeon, and apparently the one who was causing their downfall, it all felt anti-climactic. There was no sense of revenge, or even like he had done anything. Everything that had happened had been done by others. He hadn’t really been involved.

Granted, his desire for revenge also wasn’t as strong as everyone else thought it would be. Even then, it still felt hollow. These people had still hurt the original Nathan of this world, and while he was grateful that he could see his parents again, that didn’t make what they did right.

“I know,” George nodded, completely understanding what he was trying to say. “That’s just how life works out sometimes.”

“Life sucks,” Nate joked, not really meaning it. He loved being back with his family again. Sure, this version of Earth wasn’t all gumdrops and roses. It was dangerous, he already knew that, but it was interesting.

“Sure, it does, kid.” George tousled his hair and stood up with a grin. “How are things going with you and Angie, or are you going for Lindsay? You can tell me. Come on.”

He chuckled and began stretching some of the pain inside his body away. “We’re just friends?”

“You sound uncertain. Either way, when I was younger, I had a few girls who were just friends too, if you know what I mean.” The old man chuckled and corrected his form as he stretched.

“I do know what you mean, and I just don’t know what we are, I guess. The entire ‘friendship’ sprang up out of nowhere because of you. It just seems like one of those things that needs more time to become real instead of surface level, I guess.” He straightened up and looked George in the eye. “Besides, you might be surprised to hear who showed up at our school.”

“Oh, do tell?”

“Jace McFadden, the boy she would have been engaged to if he had stuck to the agreement they made with her mother. He transferred into our school and is now hounding her constantly.” Nate shifted to a different pose and continued. “I think something must be going on with their family. This seems like more than him just trying to claim what he believes to be his.”

The older man clicked his tongue. “That is…” He sucked in a breath between his teeth and held it for a few seconds. “Worrying, might be the best way to describe his sudden change in behavior. That’s a rather obvious change for him, one everyone will notice once they start looking. Someone like him doesn’t change that easily, and families like that require an even larger large push than their spoiled scions would.”

George walked toward the door, a sense of purpose suddenly in his step. “I’m afraid you might have found yourself on the fringes of something rather interesting. I should be going; it seems I need to meet with the Chrightons and discuss a few things.”

“Stay safe out there,” Nate called out after him, his body pleasantly aching after the healing and stretching session.

George chuckled and waved as he walked out.

Nate waited another minute before changing and climbing into bed. He had a lot of damage to the dungeon he still needed to go through and fix.

The first thing he did though, was pull up his updated status information on the wrist computer. This was the fourth time George had healed him, and the damage numbers had continued to shrink.

Nathaniel Holmes

Age: 17 years

Realm: Unawakened Mortal (Damaged Core, and Meridians)

Core: Grade ??

Strength: 7(-2.3)

Speed: 6(-3.1)

Constitution: 6(-3.0)

Energy: 5.1

Meditative Art: ??

Energy Skills: None

Attack:

Support:

Companion Beast: None

Dungeon Creation - Current limit 1

Dungeon Interface

Dungeon - 1

Avatar

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Equip

Don Avatar

Items

Storage

It would still be a while before he was back to full health, but it was nice to see it quantified like that.

With that done, he selected ‘Don Avatar’ and closed his eyes.

Nate opened his eyes inside the core room of the dungeon and sat down with all the screens pulled up. He was ready to keep redoing more of the traps and seeing what did and didn’t work.

After what he had heard at dinner, it was unclear if the cultivators would be back, but he would be ready if they did.

At least he could work on rebuilding all the traps while in his avatar form. There were a few downsides to doing so, but he was less concerned with those at the moment. It was more important to get them back up and running than it was to worry about those rooms going dark for a while. The traps had already been destroyed in them; they couldn’t get any more useless than that.

For the next while, Nate ignored the various beasts and monsters that would appear as he rebuilt everything. Finally, around an hour later, he had finished the basic rebuilding process. He still needed to go through and upgrade them all, but the traps were back.

He hadn’t been able to modify them quite as much as he had originally intended, but that was life. By using the menu to quickly create them, he had still been able to make some changes to each room as he went.

The last thing Nate did before leaving the core room to begin upgrading the traps was to modify it. He already had a new design for the room in mind, and it involved hiding the core behind another wall. There was going to be a treasure chest after the first fake wall in case anyone ever broke through.

He sent through the build order and the entire dungeon shutdown as the room went through its modifications. Luckily it was only down for a few minutes this time.

A small part of him still thought it was overkill, but after what had happened this last time, he was fine with that. If the cultivators had been even a little more diligent in their efforts of destroying everything, he could have lost the dungeon.

That wasn’t a risk he was willing to take a second time.

Along that same vein, he needed to get stronger, so the kukri blades stayed in his hands as he walked from room to room. He was determined to familiarize himself with their weight and handling before doing anything with them. After his last attempt to fight with them had turned into a disaster, he was starting from the basics.

Nate thought his body might remember some of what it had learned through all the training sessions. And maybe it did, but he still needed to know his weapon. Only then could he begin to figure out what his muscles did and didn’t remember.

All he knew is that he needed all the help he could get.

And that meant pretty much starting from the beginning and guessing his way through a training regimen. With his parents starting their new company, they wouldn’t be able to afford the expense of a personal weapons trainer for him. That left his only real option as learning under pressure.

At least inside the dungeon, he couldn’t permanently die. They would be painful lessons, but he would have the chance to learn from them.

As he walked through the corridors of the dungeon, Nate kept one eye on the screens hovering above his wrist. He wanted to know where any beasts and monsters might be at all times. The other eye he kept trained on the two blades in his hands.

He wanted to keep the kukris in his grip this entire run. It was only by holding them and using them that he would be able to familiarize himself with their weight and how they handled.

Maybe he had read too many fantastical stories before he died, but he did remember reading once that it would help. Since he was already making up his own training style, he thought he might as well go all the way and cherry-pick the things he thought would help.

There was nothing that said he had to keep them around if they didn’t help.

It was in that manner that he slowly passed from room to room, upgrading the traps anew after they had been rebuilt.

It was a process that worked well for several hours. He could feel himself growing more comfortable with the knives, and the swings he would take with them were smoother and less wobbly. It was progress he could see, though maybe not helpful in a fight. It was there.

Then he reached the portal room, and a beast came through when he wasn’t expecting it. Ever since the group of cultivators had come through and destroyed everything, the portal had been letting things through more often.

The previous schedule had been thrown completely out the window. He hoped it would return to normal, but it was hard to say when he didn’t know how it worked. Had the timing changed as a defense mechanism, or because it had judged the dungeon was too weak?

There were a number of options, and those were only two. All he could do is finish fixing it and hope for the best.

For now though, he needed to focus on the beast in front of him.

Nate resisted the temptation to take in a deep breath as he turned around and fled. The fish monster had a particularly nasty fishy smell to it that would cling to his tongue if he breathed it in. The beast ran after him on its four legs, the webbed toes creating a sucking noise with each hurried step. The long, froglike tongue it used as a weapon and for additional mobility barely missed him as he ducked out of the room.

With his strength in its weakened state, he didn’t think he could force the blades through its armor-like scales. That left him with two options, a lucky blow, or using his trusty traps to kill, as he had already been doing. It was sad he wouldn’t be able to use the kukris for this, but that was the sad reality of his current body.

Decisively, he slipped the blades into their sheathes and concentrated on running away. If the new trap room designs worked the way he thought they might, then taking out this stinky day-old fish would be easy.

Of course, he did need to make it past the room he had just started the upgrade on. That room was currently useless and couldn’t help him in the slightest. In fact, it was probably the area where he would be in the most danger. A wide-open space like that was where the agile tongue of the fish monster could really shine.

The only way he made it across is by keeping both eyes on what it was doing and keeping constantly on the move. He would juke and jive out of the way each time it even so much as twitched in his direction.

It took him far longer than it should have to make it through the room and by the time he had; he was covered in cuts from close calls. The fins and scales on that thing were no joke.

Still, even with those difficulties, he somehow managed to survive long enough to get to the next room. This one had active traps, and with everything now divided into sections, he didn’t even need to worry about going through the entire room first. Or at least that was the hope.

If he could depend on the traps activating while he was still in the room now, then taking care of these monsters would be easier. The hardest part before had been escaping the room, so the traps would activate. With the sectional setup, that would no longer be a concern.

The fish followed him into the new room and the traps at the entrance immediately activated, piercing through it.