My funeral rites weren’t premature. I assumed so since no one had come back. I had a lot of time to think while waiting, so I did everything in my power to avoid that. My days turned into a complex routine of rune scribing practice alternated with bonypede murder. I managed to complete the patterns this time around. The first success taught me I had a long way to go if I wanted all my plates covered with them. At least, such had been my original intent but some reconsideration ultimately led me to the decision of keeping the other metal rectangles clean, in case I found a different pattern at some point. The monotony of it didn’t seem so bad anymore, all distractions were welcome. I would’ve killed for some TV – the post apocalypse was dangerous, weird and fucking boring. Music would’ve been nice too, the rush of the raging river slowly drove me crazy.

I was a bit stumped. I tried to put together how Jack and the gang saved up so much portable energy and was met with utter failure. The majority of it probably came from their trips to the northeast. I was confident in the assessment since I earned comparatively little by going down and exploring the endless labyrinth. Even so, my supply totaled 140 - a nice round number. My mana sat at 90 once I spawned in something to eat, which meant it was midday. I set out in the morning with three swords hidden away in my sheath skill. My stats were at 11, 40, 22, 32, 10 and 50, with my level at eleven.

The bonypedes scared me because they were eerily insect-like but otherwise unthreatening. I outran the little skull faced shits easily and adamantly refused to get into melee combat - didn’t fancy my chances against another infection. I chopped at them from range, happy I’d waited for another sword to play with, and barred their path in the narrow halls by keeping a blade between us.

They’d try to shift aside and I moved the sword aside. They’d back up, and the sword went forward, always pointed at their face. They’d stand still, alternating legs click clacking like they were running in place. It was an important lesson I’d learned about sword fighting, always stab the other guy in the face. Once I got used to them, the fights became kind of funny. Nevertheless, I didn’t play around and went straight for the kill.

They probably could’ve knocked it aside but didn’t try and chittered like the bone golems instead - possibly with good reason because my swords were insanely sharp. They cut through my victims like butter. With three under my control it turned into even more of a one-sided slaughter than before. The fuckers deserved it, the only thing worse than an Errant was an insect Errant. At least I got better at controlling multiple swords at once, but I couldn’t do much more than have them follow the exact same motion. Independent control of each failed outright, so I stopped trying. It worked for the most part, as long as I didn’t get too fancy. No idea how I was supposed to improve when it came to ‘thinking at swords’ so I figured it a long term goal and continued onwards.

I also killed a 2/3 while ranging south, far south. I refused to head east because I wanted to keep living, and didn’t have any intentions of going far to the north either for similar reasons. Fuck those places. Driven by sheer curiosity, I picked the item and was now the proud owner of a big green bone about the size of my shin. Not sure what I’d expected there, then again, I could never be sure of that.

I needed an escape path. I scratched directions on the walls at every intersection I came across - so an arrow with an E above it pointing towards the staircase. While the interface compass compensated for my natural sense of direction or rather lack thereof, the markings eased navigation of the maze-like corridors – this way I’d only have to backtrack from each once. It might help someone someday too. Yeah, that’s why I did it. It was important to figure this stuff out beforehand, in case anyone ever asked.

Then again, I’d actually have to make it somewhere else first, without dying. My prospects looked increasingly grim however. I’d been very glad that I’d set out to wash my stuff while waiting for a second sword. I blockaded the winding path with the makeshift stair hatch as a precaution because shit was getting slightly out of hand outside - so total fucking anarchy.

First I spotted what looked eerily like an Allosaurus across the river on the forests edge. I knew a fair amount about the Jurassic period, I’d seen the movies and everything, but I was fairly certain those didn’t have big muscular arms, nor were they supposed to be black. Shit just wasn’t the same post-Godstrike. I’d taken to naming everything that happened after the end of the world as such. Seemed appropriate.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

The second escalation was more of a precursor than something to worry about. A small herd of deer abandoned the forest for some reason. The cause followed shortly - both for the critters leaving and starting to worry - when a bundle of roots dropped out of a tree on top of the last fleeing deer.

The bundle conjured a spray of blood as it slammed a tentacle into the back of the deer’s head and then the animal went down. A moment later it got up again and sauntered back into the forest. I hoped that wasn’t how the crew met their end. Naming conventions had to be adapted, so the woods were now the ‘Fucked-up Forest Full of Nasty Fuckers and Death’. I scrawled a little map on the stone tree house floor. It proved surprisingly difficult to think up different variations for ‘certain death’ – every direction needed one. I also wrote down ‘Map courtesy of Gabriel van Reyn, from NL’ since I couldn’t have someone else stealing my credit.

And it was absolute annihilation in every direction. The tundra might’ve been the worst. There were blue phase worms out there, massive ones the size of a damn railroad car with toothy maws. The rest of the escaping wildlife succumbed to them. The bastards just dove out of the ground, snatched ‘em up and disappeared back in again as if nothing had happened, didn’t even churn the ground. I refused to leave the tree house anymore, no matter how bad the squalor got.

Instead I spent most of my time in the staircase as a safety precaution, and to escape the smell. That worked out quite well, but my food supply dwindled. Technically I still had a decent stash in my bug-out bag, which had thankfully kept well, but today I had to admit the crews’ old stockpile was well and truly depleted. Firewood had been used up too - although the cold didn’t bother me anymore. Scant comfort, since I wouldn’t be spending much time in it.

Because reasonable overland routes were non-existent, I had to give traveling underground a shot. I travelled far to the south amidst the echo of my own footsteps and scouted out the various side paths, dead ends, and endless hallways to find a proper route which led as straight south as I could go. This went well somehow, annoying bonypedes notwithstanding. At least, until I hit a snag. I found a viable path, in fact it was the only path, but it wasn’t the ‘waltz right on ahead’ kind. In keeping with the tradition of finding some monstrosities’ big brother or other, I came across a relative of my old friend, Deathtrap.

The featureless, unnaturally clean gray stone and shifting shadows had been replaced by the ten-year champion of the tightest tiling competition again, and I hesitated. Wearing my blorange jacket, purple backpack and carrying the mini forge didn’t exactly make for the height of mobility, but I didn’t want to leave all my stuff behind. At least I came prepared, so aside from a bunch of tinder for starting fires I’d also taken the time to hone my fourth grade arts and crafts skills - to make forty or so wooden cubes with sides as big as my thumb nail.

In the best case, I’d pass time by turning them into dice at some point. In the worst case, I’d use them to test for traps and as expendable markers. My first test worked, thank the System. But I wasn’t done yet because I valued my life and decided to gather some more intelligence. It was a spear trap. So all I had to do was step on the tile and I’d receive a free shanking on the house. At least a hip high round hole in the wall made their location incredibly obvious and I spotted another one down the hallway. I smoked away a quarter of my remaining cigarette supply while waiting. Quitting would suck, mostly because I didn’t want to – it was one of the few normal habits I had left.

I had to know if the trap was a one-off thing, or, more likely, how long it would take before someone became eligible to win a complementary stabbing again. I left the cube on the triggering tile in the hope it would go off automatically. I occasionally tapped the offending tile with a mind-controlled sword to make sure I wasn’t waiting for something which wouldn’t happen. This didn’t turn out to be very productive in the end, as ten minutes passed without any results. This annoyed me slightly, I gathered a handful of dice, took a step back, cocked my arm and sent them clattering across the floor in an underhanded throw.

There were a shit ton of traps here and triggering one reset all the others. They reset by triggering again. I was lucky none of them shot anything down the hallway or I’d be dead right now. The entire path was three tiles wide and too long, since I couldn’t see the end. The visual cacophony of traps going off left me stunned. The sheer chaos of it all made tracking the individual traps impossible, and I could feel several different types of headache coming on at once – tension, migraine, cluster... There weren’t enough types to describe the level of sheer fucking bullshit going on here. At least the resets weren’t indefinite. There seemed to be a cascade to it. After a little while the blender calmed down so I did what I did best and stared, hoping my problem would disappear on its own.

The only thing I could be glad about was that my naming sense had been on-point. It was indeed a fucking deathtrap.