I sprinted through long hallways and caverns, giving a whole new meaning to the phrase as I continued running train on the little bugs. Perhaps my first visit to this place had really pissed them off, but the shits just never stopped coming. It didn’t matter to me either way since I needed to stretch my legs regardless.
Time passed as I got into flow, ignoring the nibbling at my ankles as I splattered their corpses on the fleshy walls, trying not to notice how greedily the pinkish scenery consumed their remains. It was gross, making puckering and sucking sounds as small mouths opened up in the walls to guzzle my kills. Would I have to kill the walls too if I wanted to close the portal? Was the entire dungeon alive?
Hoping to find an end eventually, I kept sprinting until the bugs stopped coming after me. I almost didn’t notice with how focused I’d been on my task. I couldn’t even look around and count my kills to estimate the time I spent on it since the environment was cleaning them up for me. Convenient if I wanted to move in, annoying for accounting purposes.
I sat down on a recently sterilized area and tried to get a feel for how much improvement I’d made since I started, but I nearly choked after pulling up my stats.
Lawrence Schlager
Classes
Brawler: 3
Ability Scores
Health: 182/990
Strength: 81
Agility: 94
Resilience: 99
Awareness: 12
???
Passive Skills
Infinite Scaling
Unarmed Combat: 25
Pain Tolerance: 14
Masochist: 11
Active Skills
Dimension Tearing: 6
Jab: 1
Fear grabbed me first, worrying that I’d accidentally lost track of time and spent days in here just running around. Not needing to eat or sleep while being in a place without sunlight had allowed me to accidentally spend months on training despite thinking it had only been weeks. The idea of falling back into that state was more than a little worrying.
The second thought was more insidious. What if I hadn’t blown through a week in this sprint fest? What would that even mean? Either way, I couldn’t figure anything out while staying in my castle of flesh, so I made my way back outside.
The glaring sunlight forced me to hold a hand up for shade, unprepared as I was for daytime considering when I’d headed out here. Once I’d adjusted, I gathered up my belongings from my secret stash over by the left portal. It took a while, but it was easy enough once I lost all respect for the grass. There were only so many patches that needed to be kicked up before I found my clothes.
The pants were still ripped, much to my dismay. I’d totally forgotten about that. The upside was that torn pants wouldn’t slow me down, so I just sprinted back to town after throwing my clothes on. I also didn’t really have to care about dirtying them with all the bug viscera my legs had gathered over the night or however long I’d been out there. Maybe the guards could help me on that front.
“Halt!”
Speak of the devil.
“Howdy, friends. I’m a recent addition that got a head start on the whole dungeon crawling thing and sort of lost track of the time. You wouldn’t happen to know what day it is, would you?”
The armored men seemed to relax slightly, but they only fully calmed after they saw me fish out my little dog tag. I really needed to get a chain or something so I could keep this thing around my neck. Maybe then people would stop freaking out just because walking is too damn slow.
“So you’re the demon we’ve been hearing about. You look a lot more normal than I expected with all those rumors. Figured you’d be a head taller and covered in blood.”
I barely resisted the urge to taunt the man, especially since he hadn’t answered my question. A little prodding got him to open up a bit more, but it wasn’t terribly helpful.
“It’s Masonsday.”
As if I knew what the fuck that meant.
“Then could you tell me when you heard about me? I have a tendency to lose track of time and wanted to make sure I haven’t been gone too long.”
Now he seemed to understand, though it looked more like he’d just matched his expectations against reality.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
“You’re not that different from what I heard, then. They warned me about you this morning, surprised you’d been out all night. It’s already nearly time to change shifts, so I’d say you were gone for two full shifts, nearly twenty hours.”
The relief hit me so hard that I barely registered the strange phrasing.
“Wait, twenty hours is two shifts?”
The man smiled at me, revealing shockingly good teeth. It seemed that the advent of sugar did more harm than I thought if the ages before toothbrushes still had better hygiene than most of the people I knew on Earth. What a sobering thought.
“You really are from a dungeon then. We’ve got thirty hours in a day, buddy. Takes some people a lot of getting used to, and the surprise on your face tells me you’re no different. Just try to remember to eat and bathe before you go stepping foot in proper establishments. You look and smell like death.”
That was discouraging. Not the smelling part, that didn’t matter at all to me, but the idea that even time was different here hadn't even occurred to me. I really was on a different planet now, just how many other obvious questions did I need to ask and didn’t even know? Was gravity different? What about the seasons? We must have a different planetary rotation and the moon looked different, so did they even have the same kind of weather as Earth did?
I was so out of my element that it wasn’t even funny. Obviously, the guard could tell.
“Hey man, you know the alliance will give you all kinds of basic information for free, right? It would be kind of crazy to welcome all sorts of different races here without expecting them to be confused and surprised. A little good will goes a long way.”
That fucking receptionist scammed me and withheld information. She was joining my shit list right next to the great bearded fuck in the sky. Who knew that sitting next to god on someone’s tier list could be such a bad thing.
“Well then, that’s very good to know. You wouldn’t happen to be able to give me any other helpful bits of information would you? Maybe a quick guide on what is and isn’t worth a silver? I’ve been scammed a lot since getting here and will probably end up destitute in short order. I’m Lawrence by the way, but my friends call me Law.”
The guard smiled again, giving me the feeling that he was used to this sort of situation. He had the good natured attitude of someone who joined the force because he actively wanted to help people rather than just oppress them. Honestly, it was such a nice change of pace compared to how horribly things had gone since getting here.
“Happy to help, Law. I’m Jim. Now, let’s start with the price of simple information.”
This world was so awful that even the good people were scammers.
----------------------------------------
Jim had been helpful and actually pretty cheap. He ended up off duty not long after we started talking, so I bought him dinner and some booze at his favorite establishment in return for a fuckload of basic information. Not the kind of stuff that the alliance would or could tell me or even anything that could help me level, but things like “a set of clothes should cost about 27 coppers unless it’s incredibly high quality.” If only I’d met the friendly guard before losing nearly three quarters of my money.
Jim also gave away some helpful tips for easy money. Apparently the people hanging around the alliance building did so to convince classless people to pay for a dungeon escort. Depending on if they wanted levels or just wanted entrance, they’d charge accordingly. Apparently everyone was classless until they entered a dungeon and then paid for access to the big stone thing.
Each week was six days long, and most people took the sixth off. Seasons also seemed to be colder on average since this place is considered warm but their winter equivalent still gets some snow. Still, there were only the four and a year still managed to be longer than I was used to, clocking in at four hundred and eighty days, a hundred and twenty per season. At least in theory. The Rift Plains were in the south, meaning it was actually warm enough to get weather. Some places in the north apparently didn’t ever see the ground, just living in a constant state of snow. I’d pass on that.
The off duty guard and I chatted our way into the night before he left to find a warm bed. I learned a lot, like how there wasn’t any toll for entering or leaving the town, named Woodsedge, so long as I was just dungeon diving. It should be the same for all the other cities in the Rift Plains, or so I was told. With that handy bit of information under my belt, I decided to get back to work.
My stats had exploded, but Jim made it clear that it was less than twenty hours that provided that kind of growth. If that was the case, then something was influencing the rate to make it so fast. My guess was the monsters.
Before last night, all of my training had been done in the relative safety of my pocket dimension. With the exception of fatal errors or me being flat out stupid, I wasn’t in any danger of dying there. However, running through bugs and taking damage the entire time was totally different. If I could keep this pace up, then I’d be able to get really ridiculous stats in no time at all!
My plan was perfect and flawless, but as usual, it didn’t survive first contact.
“Where are all the bugs?”
I stood inside my favorite fleshy caves, clothes waiting for me outside as I prepared for the tidal wave of insects. They never came.
Dungeons apparently didn’t have respawns.
“That is such a disappointment. I finally find the perfect exploit, and it doesn’t even last a day. Just my luck.”
I ran through all the caverns looking for more prey, making plenty of noise as I did. That part was easy; I just had to vent my frustrations. When even my loud mouth couldn’t get their attention, I started pummeling the flesh walls while running circles through the place. If the dungeon was still open, then that had to mean something else was in here. Unless the entire cave system and its fleshy walls counted, that meant there was something to fight somewhere. I just had to find it.
Another hour or so passed, but I still had no luck. At this point, I started practicing my brand new active skill on the biggest target around. Jabbing the walls was like hitting a wet punching bag. I’d really rather it didn’t make a squelching noise after every attack, but it was still great practice. After a little bit of work, I discovered that the flesh had a stopping point before it turned into regular stone. Meaning the flesh wasn’t the entire place, just a pulsating, wriggling, living mass that grew on the walls.
“I changed my mind. I don’t need the money that bad.”
With that discovery out of the way, I decided to try my luck with the next dungeon.