[ Assignment Received:

Finish painting the unfinished portion of the Art Room.

Time Limit: 2 hours

Reward: Power Paint Bucket ]

Alissa inched closer towards him before whispering in his ear. “Did something just happen?”

Her eyes darted between Rek and the strangely unimposing fifteen-foot-tall monster looming over them. He shot her a victorious grin.

“Accepted a quest.”

“What? I didn’t see a screen. No, more importantly, there's quests in the System? What am I saying. Of course there are.”

“Mhm. Visible only to the quest-taker. Called assignments here.”

“Right. School theme and all that. Wait. Wasn’t one of the Dungeon Laws about assignments?”

“Yep. Finish on time.”

“And what’s the time limit?”

“Two hours."

“Oh. What happens if you don’t finish on time?”

“Punishment. Usually bad. Very bad.”

Alissa glanced at the monster, worry creasing her brow. “Will I get punished if you don’t finish on time?”

“No. My quest. My reward. My punishment. Unless-” Rek turned to the teacher and raised his hand.

“Another question, student? Ask away. Questions are the path to true understanding.” it rumbled. Rek suppressed the urge to roll his eyes.

“Can I include this other student in my assignment?”

The monster smiled widely, the motion shedding droplets of paint onto the floor from its oozing body. “Why not? Art is always more fun with friends.”

Alissa yelped a moment later. She stumbled, her arms raised defensively before she laughed nervously and shot him an embarrassed smile. “Didn’t expect the screen to just pop up in front of me like that.”

The woman stepped back; her gaze focused as her eyes danced across the screen visible only to her. She then looked to Rek, sighed and swept away a strand of her auburn hair.

“Is it worth it?”

“Yes.”

It was hard to tell with dungeon rewards, but quest rewards were usually always something valuable.

“Fine. I'm not so sure about this but you’re the expert, so I’ll defer to your wisdom, o small green one.”

Rek merely grunted his gratitude. He didn’t like her use of descriptors, though. It drew parallels to a famed science-fiction character that he’d rather not be compared to.

[ Assignment Updated:

Finish painting the unfinished portion of the Art Room.

Time Limit: 1 hour

Reward: Power Paint Buckets ]

“Did the time go down because I joined?” asked Alissa.

“More hands. Less time.” Rek quickly plucked out a phone and set a timer with an alarm. The System wouldn’t warn them when they were nearing the end, so it’d fall on them to keep track.

“Great. So, what’re we painting?”

Rek eyed the jolly monster, who raised an arm towards one end of the classroom. One moment, he saw nothing there except for paint splotches and shambling [Art Students]. The next, a hole had opened in the wall, revealing a swathe of stark white space. It was almost dizzying, the transition from the riot of colour around it to the bland monotone of the new area.

Approaching closer, they noticed that thin black lines divided the area into patterned segments, with each segment labelled with a word. Rek spotted ‘beige’, ‘aquamarine’, ‘fuscia’ and more before he realized that the labels spoke of colours.

“It’s a colouring book the size of a room.” remarked Alissa with a worried look.

“And we will fill it.”

The woman swallowed thickly. “We have to paint all that in an hour? With what paint?”

A pressing question. Querying the teacher-thing for supplies only earned him a jovial smile and a remark about making-do with what the universe provided. Scanning the room revealed several tables and shelves scattered about which the two split up to search. Or rather, Rek spent time searching whilst Alissa divided her time between searching and then running back to the hallway for some fresh air and back again.

It took them ten minutes before they realized that they were no paints to be found. They found other things. Turpentine. Paint thinner. Palletes galore, and empty canvases.

But no actual paint.

“How do we paint then?”

Rek sighed, the question prodding at his brain. There had to be an answer. The quest wasn’t impossible. They just had to – he stepped out of the way for one of the shambling students to pass by – puzzle out what the solution w- Rek blinked.

He stared at the passing student, and then eyed all the others in the room. Alissa followed his gaze, her brow raised until she caught up to his line of thought. “No. Really?”

Rek nodded. “I think so.”

“How? Do we like... lead them? Dip into them? Is that safe? Won’t that... trigger them?”

“Maybe. Only option. You have a better idea?”

The woman’s face made it obvious that she didn’t. She groaned, but made no further complaints as the two began to stalk towards the white space. Studying the segments on its outer borders, they noted the colours that they needed and then started to scan the room for the matching monster.

A problem that immediately made itself known was the usage of specific shades that Rek wasn’t able to identify. “What is a fuscia?” he asked, his nose scrunched with irritation.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“I think it’s a pink. Like that.” Alissa pointed at a shambler, its body dripping neon-bright pink paint. Rek’s nose scrunched even more at the sight of the garishly bright colour.

“That pink? Or that pink?” he asked, gesturing at another monster wearing another shade of pink that was only slightly lighter than the other one.

“That pink. I’m certain. Mostly. Kind of. Look, I use painting as a medium for communication with some of my students, okay. I’m not an expert, but I know something. Right now, my guess is our best bet.”

Rek couldn’t disagree. “Test with a monster near the door. Easier to escape, just in case.” he told her.

They’d have a decent chance of bolting out of the room if everything went wrong, at the very least. The Hall Monitor would be another issue if they had to gun it. He didn’t think that the rule against running applied to teachers, so the art monstrosity could freely give chase without trouble too.

It was just worry after worry, but that was the nature of an Induction. Rek swallowed back his apprehensions, locking it up in the same place he shoved his fears before every battle. A calmness set over him then, and he slipped on his Goth Mask. The extra agility might prove useful, if needed.

Alissa nodded. Together, they surrounded a grey-coloured student nearest to the door and cautiously grabbed at its paint-free, human-like hands. To their immense relief, the creature showed no outward reaction, even as they started to redirect its aimless wandering wherever they pleased. It was a difficult task, nevertheless. The stupid thing kept trying to change paths every so often, and they were forced to balance corralling it back with not being too pushy or aggressive with their actions.

Greens were passive, but Rek knew from experience that that very same passivity often made them easy to set off, and he had no desire to test how the teacher would respond to an aggravated student, or the rest of the monsters in the room, for that matter.

With their idea certified correct, they jogged to the fuscia monster and guided it into its segment. The challenge then became a game of pushing it along the interior of the lines as carefully as they could manage.

“It’s working!” exclaimed Alissa, slightly teary-eyed with joy, but mostly from the paint fumes.

Rek matched her tooth for tooth. It was working. The paint dripping from the creature was seemingly being absorbed by the blank floor, the colour spreading evenly across the white whilst somehow still staying within the borders. The radius of the spread was limited, and it became obvious that at the pace that the monster had set, it would take at least ten minutes to finish the segment. And they were working one of the smaller segments.

Some quick mental math after counting the segments that remained revealed that they would be out of time before they’d even finished half the space.

A realization that Alissa too had come to. The two shared a glance, communicating without words that something needed to be done. Rek glanced away, studying the room. There had to be something. An aid. A push of some sort. The System was tough, but fair. He narrowed his focus, picking apart every object and item they’d seen or come across.

The puddles. The tables of supplies.

Every item on it.

Every-

He paused.

The paint-thinner.

He turned to Alissa, brilliance on the rim of his lips, when he found her a distance away, walking towards him, a plastic bottle in her hand. “Hey, you think this stuff might work to speed them up? They’re made of paint, right. Figured that this would be like death to them.”

She held up the bottle of paint-thinner to his face. He blinked. Well.

As a teacher-of-sorts, he supposed that he could take pride that his student had come to the same idea that he had. At the same speed. Her victories were his own, after all.

“Might.” he said softly.

“Yeah, but will it trigger anything... unpleasant?”

He eyed the shamblers. Wasn’t that the million-dollar question. Would their idea end up turning the whole room against them? Rek wasn’t sure. With a dungeon, it could go either way, but they hadn’t the time and a risk was all the options left to them. The punishment for failing a quest was never the preferable choice.

“No choice. Risk it.”

Alissa tensed, but nodded and handed him the bottle.

"Near the door again.” he said.

Together, they grabbed the nearest student and gently guided it towards the entrance to the room. They made it to just a few feet from the doorsill before the monster refused to take another step, struggling and pulling against their grip like an irate child.

The two of them let go, and Rek glanced at the teacher. It was studying them, an eerie all too calm smile on its lips. Rek frowned. “Close enough.”

He uncapped the bottle. With the stink of paint supplies already thick in the air, he could hardly pick apart the chemical stench of the paint thinner. He was about to step closer with the bottle held out to see if he could earn a reaction from the monster, when he froze. The [Art Student] was still, its eyes fixated on the bottle for a scant second before a low moan escaped its lips. It immediately turned about and started to shamble away at thrice the pace it’d set before.

Rek watched it flee and then quickly studied the rest of the room. Many other students had noticed the bottle and similarly fled, but it wasn’t them that he was worried about. The [Art Teacher] shot them a kindly glance. “Ooh. Be careful with chemicals now. We don’t want any happy little accidents here, do we? This is a safe space after all.”

Rek grinned. That was about as close to a green-light as he could expect. The monsters were still green-named and the teacher remained yellow. Rek capped the bottle. The students immediately stilled, glanced his way and then calmed like children tired of their tantrum. They quickly resumed their mindless, slow shambling without much fuss.

“It works.” remarked Alissa breathlessly.

“It does.” It wasn’t a guarantee of success, but it gave them a much better shot than anything else. They quickly herded the fuscia monster back and then set themselves a role. Rek would guide the monsters whilst Alissa tactically capped and uncapped the bottle to speed them along.

It was a rough plan, but as the minutes passed, they quickly found that it worked to a tee. The monster had thoroughly covered the entire segment in hardly two minutes. Rek smiled, and Alissa whooped with glee. They had the means. It was now only a matter of getting the work done.

With no time left to waste, they set to the task, manoeuvring the monsters into their segments and slathering the floor with their paint. The only remaining worry was in getting the correct colours onto the correct segment, though that problem was mitigated when they discovered that the segments only accepted the right colours, with any incorrect paint dribbled onto its surface seemingly vanishing into nothing.

With that problem transformed into a game of matching the correct monster to its segment, the time limit became their primary focus. Like ranchers chasing after runaway cattle, the two rushed about the room, pushing and pulling and scaring and painting.

Every now and then Rek would glance at his phone and estimate how long they had left. The minutes ticked down like a guillotine inching towards their neck, but Rek played it calm. They were making good progress. Twenty minutes left?

They would make it unless – no. He wasn’t the superstitious sort, but when it came to The System, there was no need to tempt fate. They would make it, and that was that.

Soon enough, twenty minutes became ten, and ten became five. His alarm blared its warning, though it was of little point by then. Rek was pure focus bundled in a small, green figure, whilst Alissa had employed her powers to help her maintain her calm. Together, they were an unstoppable force of decorative painting, and eventually, they covered the final inch of the last segment.

Rek immediately pulled out the phone. A smile crossed his lips. “Three minutes left.”

Alissa didn’t celebrate, though that might’ve been due to the influence of her power. She did flash him a subdued smile.

[ Assignment Complete

Finish painting the unfinished portion of the Art Room.

Earned Grade: B ]

[ Level Earned! 6 >> 7 ]

“A B? I thought we did much better than that.” remarked the counsellor with a questioning look.

Rek just snorted. “Good enough for now.”

The grade was fine. The level was better, and he didn’t doubt that Alissa had earned one of her own.

“Congratulations! Look at all the happy little trees you’ve made.” declared the [Art Teacher] with a grandiose sweep of its arms that sprayed paint around it in a dozen little streaks.

Rek studied the stretch of room that they’d remade. His eyes narrowed. Well, he supposed that some of the shapes could be called trees, if he squinted hard enough. It was all certainly very... abstract.

Alissa had a less charitable opinion in mind if her expression was any indication, though she wisely kept her mouth shut. Together, they approached the teacher for their reward.

It grinned, and Rek had to shift away to avoid a globule of paint from smearing his head.

Its arms descended down towards them, palms facing upward, and from its hands emerged a sealed bucket of paint each with a pair of large, hard-bristled brushes on top.

Radiant Red and Generous Green read the labels.

Rek and Alissa grabbed one each. It was surprisingly light-weight despite the size of the bucket.

“I hope this experience fostered a love of the arts in you two. Self-expression truly is a wonderful thing, is it not?”

Rek gave it a shallow nod before turning away. Alissa followed soon after.

Neither of wanted to dally in the room for a moment longer.

The [Art Teacher]’s flowery soliloquy about the joys of painting echoed in their wake.