Well, at least the surroundings were familiar.

Fan-fucking-tastic. More bamboo thicket.

There was definitely a zone thing going on here. The last time I’d stuck low to the ground and just went for a bit of shiny stalk before bugging out. A part of me wanted to brave the endless hallways and avoid acclimating to a new environment, however, the dungeon design committee neglected to put any fountains there and fighting all day made me mighty thirsty. Stairways were another unique selling point for traveling below the surface because solo camping out in the open probably wouldn’t go all that well.

My armor plate supply threatened to burst my backpack so energy crystal had become the priority loot. As a result, it only took five mana to kill a daggerclaw. While alright at a glance, complications arose. I hadn’t seen any daggerclaws below 5/5 but suspected the situation had already changed. Threes or fours might even die to a single shot, which would be peak efficiency. Sadly, I expected ones, maybe some twos if I was lucky and predominantly fives. The resulting net losses might quickly spiral out of control and deplete my meager reserves before another stairwell appeared, and then I’d be dead. Melee was out of the question too, had to lean into my strengths. Especially because my left arm retained its injuries and further ones were likely to spell out the end of my journey.

In short, I was a bit fucked. Thus, the unknown beckoned.

It wasn’t all bad though, most logic hadn’t survived the apocalypse, but plants usually meant water… Somewhere. If only all this crap didn’t obscure my vision….

The bamboo was roughly half again taller than me, so a little over two and a half meters. The staircase clearing allowed me a bit of a view but not nearly enough to navigate by. It didn’t take me long to embrace my inner weed whacker and start spinning swords around, shearing everything at the edge of the circle. It only took an hour to properly grasp the mental shenanigans involved. Manual labor didn’t exactly appeal – too sore, too exhausted.

My best impression of a lawnmower was actually quite good from the looks of it. I pruned myself some line of sight. It was nigh impossible to open my interface now unless I kept my eyes low. A mountain ridge reached from the far south-east all the way to the north as the only other feature of the distant landscape. At least the evil trees looked less dense towards the south than the north and I had high hopes gamblers fallacy would pull through once again.

There were magnificent Errant trees in the distance which towered above the thicket in a manner reminding me of redwoods, with short but sparkly dark branches. So far my track record excelled at avoiding hopeless death matches and one-on-one fights with things a hundred or more times my size fit the criteria pretty well. A moments curiosity had me wondering how the whole monster-on-monster murder fusion thing worked with static stuff, but I didn’t care about it all that much because I had more pressing concerns, like black tinted bubbles.

They were everywhere, quietly resting on top of the yellow growth while waiting for a breeze to carry them away on some whimsical adventure, or for a passing survivor to disturb the reeds and funnel them down the vertically inclined shrubbery.

When the cool wind blew, a rain of reflections drifted away from the hostile flora. I’d been captured by nostalgic child-like wonder and longed to touch a lone one gently floating towards me. I reached out and immediately regretted it with a yelp as the bubble popped and somehow slammed a car door on my right index finger, now heavily bruised and quite possibly broken. After five minutes of swearing and wondering if the throbbing pain would ever stop, my wits gathered themselves for some experiments.

I could displace, but not burst, the things with cut stalks. My sword popped them with an unfortunate side-effect of chipping it. Bad way to lose a very expensive blade. My sheath skill held two more, so it wouldn’t be immediately fatal even if shattered, but it would make for a good start.

Some more testing shortened a sleeve on my winter jacket as a ball-shaped disintegrating effect added its own flourish to the design. My hopes that nothing would happen as long as it wasn’t too close to me were dashed. They also exploded upon touching the stone of the stairway, it made some sense in retrospect or there’d just be a big pile of bubbly doom collecting here. The ones which reached the dirt just waited there like little landmines.

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I heard rustling and the undertow of a gust failed to send my grimy hair into a windswept swirl. However, the breeze did succeed in sending me into the stairway as an effervescent wave inundated the clearing. Some head scratching and an intense mental struggle, no smoke, not yet, later and I had a decent idea of how to proceed. It would involve manual labor, and a lot of it. Just the thing I wanted to avoid.

The plan was to make a bundle to sweep the top for bubbles like a broom, shuffling them into gutters, cut out on the sides of my chosen path. Said path would have to be fairly narrow, with roofing painstakingly built out of snipped stalks. Couldn’t judge the distance worth a damn even the trees thinned out towards the south, but the sun soared in the sky so time was on my side at least. Worst case I’d have to backtrack to the stairwell and pick up where I left off tomorrow.

It was grueling work characterized by lots of reaching high, then low, then high again. Like push-up jumps but worse, since those were usually avoided when one had bruised limbs. My control skill took some off the work off my hands, lucky or this wouldn’t have gone on for long. A silver lining appeared once a light bulb went off in my head. I sliced bamboo into strips and squeezed out pathetic droplets which might as well have been gifts from God, wetting my parched throat one drip at a time. The exercise sparked a rumble in my belly too. I was burning through jerky at an alarming rate but refused to spend precious mana on food.

Better hungry than dead.

The slow going didn’t bother me as much anymore. A secured water source meant the tunnels became a viable last resort, reserved for a day or two from now. That scenario promised food issues, but hey, maybe daggerclaws were edible.

Fuck.

I’d gotten a little lax and now a particularly persistent minor gale blew bubbles through my makeshift roofing. They forced me to block with a sword but it felt like trying to dodge the rain. They just kept coming and coming. My chipped weapon ended up dissolving into smoke after enduring who knows how many of the things. My left shoulder and chest were hurting badly from all the ones which made it through my panicked dance.

Thankfully the damage had been spread out. Somehow I found a moment of clarity during the chaos and used it to notice they were doing minimal damage to my clothing - so only four or five round holes the size of my fist. My second sword sported some serious cracks all across, like a piece of glass about to shatter. Luckily, the wind died down before it too broke.

My instincts screamed at me to curl up and whimper for a while, but it seemed somewhat suicidal. I’d been too confident in my own rationalizations. The roofing needed far more reinforcement to withstand longer periods of extremely mild inclement weather, unfortunately building it slowed my pace as well. A repeat incident occurred not long after, but this time my impromptu construction held. At least there weren’t any other Errant around - the glistening grenades were probably responsible for that.

Nightfall closed in and I had made a goodly amount of progress, even if I wasn’t out of the woods quite yet. Another circular sweep confirmed there were only a handful of Errant trees left to pass towards the south. Backtracking at this point might be feasible if I managed a fast jog for three or four hours. ‘T was a shame it wouldn’t be realistic. There was a long stretch where the roofing had almost certainly come undone by now. My brand new road was booby-trapped, most likely ridiculously so. Never mind the fact my smokers lung couldn’t take the trip, supernaturally improved or not.

Mindless determination really wasn’t my thing. I’d been so focused on ignoring soreness, just pushing through the pain and trudging onwards, that all this had escaped me. All sense of time faded during the construction of my very first tiny-house, made out of nothing but light brown sticks. It worked out better than expected in the end. I wasn’t done yet, excruciating hunger and maddening thirst demanded my attention next, exhaustion be damned.

I ended up eating nearly all of my remaining jerky and squeezing split strips together in the darkness for hours upon hours – even scraped out mulch into my portable forge and ground it with the hammer to create sad bowls of pulpy water. At least the old traitor, my circadian rhythm, had gotten its shit together and decided to let me sleep without issue for once. A mending fixed my sweater, while the jacket would have to wait.

Early morning set the scene for my awakening, and I ended up having a nice breakfast of slightly moist plant mulch. Hopefully pulp had some nutritional value, didn’t feel like it though. My extensive bruising had gone down some but the injuries were still tender, while my middling beer belly slowly made way for the physique of my early twenties. Bit hard to be too happy about it, the change happened in just over two weeks, which made it an early warning sign of starvation. My calorie intake didn’t exactly keep up with the burn. Mana had gone up to 35.

I suffered seven heartrending, backbreaking, chest-splitting hours of hard labor before finally making it out of the goddamn thicket. My body demanded rest which forced me to backtrack and relax for a while, needed to hydrate again too. Something prodded my subconscious but the sun had passed its zenith a little while back and it was high time to head out once more…