A deluge of information greeted him the second he stepped into the corridor.

You are now in Delver’s Alcove. This is the first floor of a dungeon.

This first floor is a training zone. Do your best to survive and grow stronger. You will need it in your coming trials, and to excel against your peers.

This dungeon cannot be cleared at your current state. Your mission for today is to return alive back to the platform before the subway departs with your return fare of ten iron coins. This is your final warning: missing the train back will likely result in death.

Only the top ten on the leaderboard will be granted an audience with the sponsors’ representatives at the end of this dungeon. Do your best to place high on the leaderboard. Various metrics will be taken into account during scoring, including clear time, feats of strength, shows of cunning, entertainment value, discovery of secrets, among others. You must impress to reach a high score on the leaderboard.

Additional rewards will be administered at discretion for exceptionally impressive displays.

Zack grinned. So not only were they meant to survive here, they needed to show off to thrive. Well, he welcomed the challenge. Here he was, just a regular guy off the street who died so much he was no better than a side character, given the chance of a lifetime by a god to make something of himself.

Time to see what this dungeon’s got. Oh, and it seems like there are meant to be a lot more crawlers than myself, but I got here first.

He grinned again.

Not gonna hold back. Finders keepers.

He walked forward in the corridor, his torch flickering. The walls and corners of the room were covered in intricate tapestries and engravings, which had been hung and pieced together to form a thick and tangled curtain. A damp mustiness hung in the air.

Not long after, he came across the first point of interest. An iron clad door made of interlocked granite brick, with no handle. It was the kind of stone slab door that had to be pushed to open, and could not close afterwards. Every part of Zack’s body screamed danger, and something told him that what lay beyond that door was never meant to be tackled by one man alone.

But he had to be brave. Here we go. With a heave, he pushed the granite door, which surprisingly dissolved into the wall after a bit of exertion.

Walking forward tentatively into a circular room with runes etched into the center, Zack saw something move in the corner.

It had black, beady eyes, the face of a lizard, and a spear in its hand. The barest glimmer of light reflected off its spotted skin, its axe-shaped teeth flashing.

The lizard humanoid opened its mouth, as it began to speak a dry, broken language.

“Human?”

Zack blinked, bewildered.

This monster can speak?

He did not have any time to process that surprising revelation. With a shrill shriek, the lizard humanoid ran straight towards him, its ragged spear in hand. Zack pulled up his steel pipe in a batter’s stance without missing a beat, determined to hold his ground.

As the lizard approached, white text appeared on top of its head.

[Angry Kobold– Level 1]

And with that, the fight began.

The lizard-faced five foot tall monster hissed at Zack while thrusting forward with his decrepit spear.

Now Zack had been in a fist fight or two back in the day, something that came with growing up in a rough neighborhood. Some went well, some not so well. At least he never lost a tooth. But all of his collective combat knowledge so far did not include fighting with weapons.

He did, however, play a bit of scrap pipeball. That’s what they used to call it back in elementary school, since there were quite a few discarded metal pipes laying around the ship junkyard that were free for children to pick up and play with.

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Sometimes, those ball sessions got a bit rowdy. Bobby got his left thigh punctured by a pipe once after Timothy made a questionable call that led to an all-out brawl. Typical junkyard rat stuff.

Zack wasn’t exactly proud of his lower class upbringing or the fact that people used to refer to his kind as junkyard rats, but at the very least it toughened him up and made him who he was now. If he could survive in the jungle that was the ship junkyard they used to call a playground, he could survive here.

He swung as hard as he could with the steel pipe in his hand, feeling the beam connect squarely with the kobold’s face. But an unfamiliar sensation scorched him in his left shoulder simultaneously.

“Dieee!!!” the kobold screeched.

Blood spurted from his left shoulder, and Zack realized that the decrepit spear had buried itself into his muscle.

He wanted to recoil in pain, but now was not the time to show weakness. The kobold wobbled slightly, concussed from the blow to its head. It would recover with time, something that Zack was not willing to let happen.

Jumping onto the kobold and knocking the green creature onto the ground, Zack brought his steel pipe to its neck and stabbed downwards, puncturing the lizard creature’s neck as it gargled out blood.

Before long, it ceased to move, and Zack had gotten his hands truly bloody for the first time in his life. A slight hint of guilt lay in his heart for bringing the end of another living thing, but that was nothing compared to what he mostly felt– an overwhelming, exhilarating sense of relief. He had survived.

—

“He’s not doing too bad,” Berndith chuckled, a stream of blue smoke coming from his nose. The old man with a grizzled white goatee tapped his cigar against his office table as the crystalline screen showed the human in shorts standing bloodied and victorious over the kobold. It was a rare solo victory for an initiate’s first battle.

Moments like this were what he enjoyed so much about his job overseeing the initiation. He never knew what was going to happen next, and he had a front row seat to the intergalactic action that even rich sponsors could only dream of.

It was unfortunate that this coveted front row seat came with such scrupulous constrictions to his personal life. Hell, he couldn’t even step outside to take a piss without filling out paperwork.

“Well this is certainly unexpected,” Ifrim replied sulking, his hooked nose pointed downwards at the sight of Zack Baker’s back still inhaling and exhaling. “How many progenitors survive the first room anyway?”

“Most survive if they’re in a group,” Berndith responded. “The Right of First is a strong early boost. The progenitor from seven cycles ago was the only one I can remember that died in the first room with a party. Poor girl got impaled in the heart… But things get trickier when you talk about the entire first floor. Only half of progenitors survive the first floor, exactly the same survival rate as the other initiates.”

“But how? The progenitors must have an advantage over the other initiates with the Right of First!”

Berndith sighed. “It’s because they get too careless, relying on their power instead of learning how to survive the right way. Not everyone is cut out for this kind of thing, and progenitors are just normal initiates. The only difference between them and other initiates is that they’re the first suckers to run into an Entrance.”

Ifrim gnashed his teeth. “Well, at least I didn’t lose any zed betting on his death yet. Maybe it’s a good thing this is all hush hush until after the Airing Day. I’ll get to practice a bit more, hee hee!”

Berndith shook his head. The imp race was quite eccentric to say the least. Them and their accursed hee hee’s.

At least I used to be human before my ascension, Berndith thought. Unlike this ascended imp riffraff…

—---

Zack kicked at the kobold’s corpse, flipping it over with his foot. He felt a bit squeamish from the blood leaking out of the freshly slain corpse, but kept down his sickness by remembering just how unlikely it was for him to survive this whole ordeal.

“Sorry buddy. It was either you or me,” he muttered. The small monster spoke to him earlier, a sign of intelligence, but intelligence or not Zack was not going to just lay down and let it skewer him to death out of misplaced empathy. The world was a tough place, and he had to look out for himself.

He had to steel his heart to survive, even if his next opponent happened to be human. The cargo ship incident changed how he viewed humanity. His dad never talked about how he lost his left arm, but Zack found out– the dock coworkers told him the real story, about why his dad kept so silent, and it made him livid just thinking about it.

Sometimes, humans could be the real monsters. Like Bobby Finch, chief executive officer of Finch Ports. That fat pig had it coming for him one of these days.

Congratulations! You have slain an Angry Kobold.

You have defeated an enemy that is above your level. Additional experience has been distributed.

Angry Kobold has dropped the following loot.

A ragged spear.

1 iron coin.

Looted items will be automatically placed into your inventory.

New Achievement! First blood.

You have slain an enemy.

Reward: You have unlocked your status menu.

Sweating, Zack wiped the blood off his shoulder. That bastard really did a number on him. He still remembered a bit from hunting and survival lessons with his dad. They used to go camping all the time before the cargo ship incident, getting away from the industrial churn of the inner city.

Dad always taught him that he needed to patch himself up before anything serious like gangrene took hold. The ragged spear tip on the kobold’s weapon looked quite grimey as well, so he’d have to disinfect the wound before it got infected.

In normal circumstances, something like this would call for antibiotics and an alcohol swab. But Zack had neither of those. What he did have were a few magic healing potions in his inventory that he was dying to try out.

Accessing his inventory, he reached forward and took a lesser health potion from the first occupied slot, next to the ragged spear and iron coin occupying slots two and three. The red sloshing liquid filled flask felt cool to the touch in his palm.

Am I supposed to rub it on the wound or drink it?

Examining the flask, his question was answered when he saw a rune written on the side of the flask with one word. Drink.

He opened the thin flask and downed it in one go, the cool liquid sliding down his throat with a pleasant taste like a mild juice from a fruit he had never encountered before.

His precariously hanging health bar instantly began to refill itself, a cool sensation washing away that feeling of blood and grit.

“Ahh,” he said, finishing off the health potion with a content look on his face. He glanced down at his left shoulder and was amazed to see that even his shirt had mended itself. Apparently, healing also included clothes. This felt surreal.

Grunting, Zack got back onto his feet and stretched, feeling wholly refreshed. He was ready to tackle the next room. But right as he wanted to move forward, his vision began to blur.

Offering completed.

Reward: Stellar memory fragment.

You have gained access to a fragment from another time.

His vision went black, and a moment passed.