Day 14, 11:20 AM

A red bead slides along the thread suspended about seven feet up in the air. It hits another; they merge before half of it drops to the ground. I’ve seen thousands die. I’ve probably killed tens of thousands. Two of my sons have died bloody deaths in distant lands, trying to impress me, and yet Gila’s feet sticking out of the bush make my skin crawl.

To me, this entire floor is a game. I can run through it, slaying monsters in a quarter of the time the group needs, but in my game, in letting kids experience life, one of them died.

“Griff!” Fred shouts, and I turn around.

The centipedes are pressing Lucy. She jumps, somersaulting midair, like she often does—

“No!”

The warning comes too late. I actually close my eyes, like a frightened child, trying to push against reality by not witnessing what’s happening. Shutting out my sight, opens up my hearing to Lucy’s anguished scream.

I look at her and regret what I see. Initial Emergency Treatment informs me she will die in a minute, and pass out in seconds. Lucy lands in the bushes with two distinct thuds, but the centipedes don’t even give her those seconds of peace. Fred is the only one alive, his pale flesh revealing capillaries void of blood.

I can save him.

I blur into motion, slaying the centipedes in moments, trying not to see what’s left of Lucy. The forest is silent, and I hear the rush of wind as the orb-weaver makes its attack. My staff whistles through the air, smashing it into a mass of limbs and gore before it manages to decapitate Fred.

The young man is staring in shock, unable to utter a word. His eyes wide and unfocused.

“Get out!” I point towards the exit, shaking with fury. No, it’s guilt, I know it. All my negative emotions come out as rage and anger, but I know what’s shaking me right now.

Fred jumps, his wild gaze focusing on me. “They’re dead?”

The words leave his mouth, almost sounding like a question. “Lucy and-and Gila, they’re dead.”

He just keeps repeating, “they’re dead.” I can’t take it anymore. In three brisk strides, I’m next to him and place a hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t touch me!” Fred swats away my arm or at least tries to, but hardly moves it. He looks at me like he’s seeing me for the first time. “You could’ve saved them! Look at how strong you are, but you did nothing! You-you killed them!”

He splatters me with spit, raving in my face. He’s not exactly wrong. Yes, I could have just cleared the floors myself, gave them the money, and let them have enough never to return here, but that wasn’t why they were here. Well, Gila was, she said in the bluntest words possible she just wants the money and never to leave the castle ever again. But Fred and Lucy were here to learn how to fight. To level up. To pursue their dreams with what they learned.

I notice I’m hyperventilating. I can fix this, but it comes at a terrible price, I may lose myself, I may go mad again.

“Fred, get out of here.” I tell him, but he glares death at me.

“No! You—” I slap him so hard he spins in place.

“Fred, I always liked you the least of the three. Your dream was the dumbest, least inspiring thing I’ve heard in a long, long while. You lack talent, you’re weak, and no matter how much you were pretending to be brave, you used the girls as a crutch and a barometer to gauge the situation. ‘If Gila can handle it, so can I.’ How many times did that thought cross your mind? Well, let me tell you, Gila was ten times more special than you are, but she’s dead and you’re alive, so suck it up.”

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I point towards the exit again. “The exit is that way, it’s free of monsters, get out of here, and be a laborer or something.”

He stands, staring at me like a fawn before the headlights.

“GO!”

He runs, my shout so loud it probably shook his bones, yet it barely vented five percent of my anger. I’m not angry with Fred, the incompetent little fuck. No, I’m angry with myself, the incompetent big fuck. What the hell was I thinking?

Too much rage has built up inside me, and I express it the only way I ever knew how, through carnage. I move through the fourteenth floor like a storm of limbs and ichor. Without the kids holding me back, my new body moves like my old one. My stats are a bit underwhelming, but inside is the same god of war the continent feared, the engine of destruction which years of peace had dulled, but not broken.

By the time I blow enough steam to calm down, I’m already slaughtering my way through the sixteenth floor, the light going out. I cleared it. I heave a deep breath and punch a tree so hard we both bleed.

“This is not how you handle problems, and you know it,” I say to myself. Manny would’ve told me what to do. It would have hurt her to say it, but she would have said it, I know she would have.

I have to Redo. I retch at the thought, the terror squirming in my guts finally bursting out.

“Just once, once. I will kick them out of the dungeon when we reach the fourteenth floor, and that’s it.” Maybe give Gila enough loot to work on her future, having someone as talented at leveling up owe me one can’t be a bad thing, since I plan to stay in this world a long while, a lifetime, if possible.

The only question is when to redo. I’ve been rampaging for five hours, and going back in the middle of talking with Edna is out of the question. She’s smart and perceptive, and if she notices something, I might be toast.

It’s the fourteenth day, around four in the afternoon. I can’t kill myself in less than five days, well, three, but better safe than sorry, Edna might have been monitoring me with magic somehow while I was outside the dungeon.

So five days. I have to behave for five days and not act too suicidal, and then I’ll plunge as deep as I can in this dungeon and see what’s down there. Edna said the spell which created the dungeons should have made it one hundred floors deep, with the wormlord buried beneath the final level.

That’s technically one hundred and one floors.

I don’t care about the loot, nor about anything else, so I head to the next floor. By the time I grow tired, I’m down on the eighteenth.

I can do one more before I rest. The darkness doesn’t bother me anymore. Confidence in my own ability and no kids to watch over, plus hunting down the spider silks while the visibility is good, means I’ve got little to fear after eliminating the monsters. Just in case, I retrace my steps to the exit, no need to risk stumbling upon a strand I missed.

I stand at the stairway leading down to the nineteenth floor.

Nah, I’ll do it tomorrow. I’m tired. It has been ages since I’ve last fatigued my muscles enough for me to feel like I need rest, but my eyelids are heavy, and I really need sleep, with adrenalin, or whatever courses through your body when you’re furious, spent.

I find a nice nook and crash, crimson nightmares gnawing at my soul. Fred is there, and I kick him in the orb-weaver’s path to save Gila. The spider decapitates him, then Gila, and I wake up with a scream.

I didn’t know I disliked Fred that much. I wipe the sweat off my forehead, and with zero appetite, I head down the stairs, ready to face the nineteenth floor’s horrors.

They were much the same as the seventeenths, and eighteenth, and twentieth. The sole difference was the number of bugs crawling towards me, but even that mattered little. Whether ten or fifteen swarmed you made little difference, at least to me. My staff moves as if it has a life of its own, and I focus on the blessed feeling of perfectly controlling the weapon, sensing what my fingers, hands, and wrists are doing.

I try to move differently, to decrease the efficiency, but the skill takes over, then I attack thinking about every angle, and feel the minute corrections. Hours pass and levels pass until there are no more corrections, my mind has caught up with the skill, and I believe I can replicate its effect even without it.

A wondrous feeling. I check BSD, and note that my class has changed.

A battle maniac? Fight for an hour without stopping.

That’s a tough level up condition just to escape level zero, but it’s not impossible. I just need a floor infested with as many bugs as I can find.

Wait! I should redo to the moment when I first met Fred and the rest, or at least before I level up sparring with him. Then, if I pick ax and flail skills, I’ll have flail proficiency, I’ll boost it with Blunt Weapons Master, and I can learn to wield the dagger on my own, making it easier to level up.

That means I have to get a hang of the dagger in the next few days before I redo.