I slept after that, the world fading into a sweet oblivion without dreams, without thoughts, without anything but the mending of the parts of my body that no one would ever see. The flow of time seemed halted here below the ground, without sign of sun or stars to light the passage forward. All that I had was my own internal rhythms, and they had been thrown awry by the heat of battle and the draining of my energy.

When I awoke, I ate and drank heavily, thankful that the corpse of the salamander did not rot in the same ways as normal animals. I tried to keep my gaze away from it, tried to keep my thoughts away from it, and the slowly fading erg of the corpse did make it slowly but surely become more a part of the background than something that stood out on its own. I imagined seeing it under the sun’s light, pale scales and eyeless head, something that should not see the sky, but here it was part of the stone, part of the world. Dead.

I couldn’t afford to be wasteful, despite my desire to move on. I examined the deposits and found them to be water attuned ore, which made sense considering that amphibious nature of salamanders. This place had been formed around its affinities, bleeding out into the stone and the metal. My drill dug through rock to get me access to the metal and I mined the deposit until my mind went numb.

Again, time disappeared, though this time the simplicity served as the meditative focus. Thoughts attempted to enter my mind, but I simply cast them aside, letting them bleed away into the surroundings while I continued to fill my inventory. I did let in wonderings about what water themed tools could accomplish, I knew that particularly concentrated streams of water could cut through material as firmly as a laser, but I didn’t know if that’s what it would impart to weapons made from it. On the other hand, it might be better at self-cooling.

I saw the ways that this metal could be incorporated into internal systems, how it might make something like my drill more efficient, or able to spin at a higher rate without risking destruction. My mind wandered from the present task into ways that other elemental ores could be used in conjunction with different specific constructions, like using wind ore in the spikethrower and fire ore for the spikes themselves. By customizing each particular section of a piece of equipment, I could yield much more powerful effects than simply using the same kind of material universally. The schema lessons started making even more sense now.

Only by having the fundamental understanding of why the things I made worked the way that they did would I be able to make this sort of fundamental level customization that was necessary to bring out their maximum effectiveness. I suspected that I would have struggled to internalize the schema to the degree that I did if I hadn’t had my backing in non-system based mechanics and engineering, only through the combination of the two schools of thought was I able to achieve the results that I had.

Slowly, I tapped out each of the deposits in the chamber. Each was significantly smaller than the one in the crater, and between the five of them, I wound up with only five ore. Since I had yet to discover any use for ore besides turning them into ingots, I went ahead and set them smelting in my internal processor. I gave a tentative surge of erg to the muscle fibers in my harness, testing that they were ready to be used again. Seeing that they had fully recovered, and finding myself in a better mood and a bit more energized, I made my way to the next tunnel.

There was clearly something artificial to the construction of this place, it had to have been generated by the system. Which made sense, after all, it was a dungeon, and those things aren’t exactly naturally occurring phenomena, but it seemed that rather than simply encompassing an already existing cave system, that this dungeon had been created with significant alterations. I even had a sinking suspicion that the entire dungeon had been built from scratch. These tunnels were just the perfect size to keep chambers separated after all, and the salamander was a perfectly balanced first fight.

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Thus, it was with trepidation and care that I emerged from the tunnel into the next chamber. Here, I noticed earth themed ores buried in the walls, sticking out thanks to the faint sparkles of brown in the blue that they radiated. Beyond that, though, nothing really stood out to my vision. The room was a little brighter than the previous one, but that was about it.

So, I approached the nearest deposit and began excavating the wall to get at it. I was interrupted, though, when a hand suddenly surged out of the wall from my left, wrapped itself around my throat, and then lifted me off of my feet. I kicked at the air, instinctively trying to free myself by throwing my body around. My instincts were not very good, I really should have learned not to listen to them.

Once I realized to listen to my intuition, instead, I brought my drill around and carved through the decidedly rock-like arm that had grabbed me. It crumpled beneath the touch of the whirring bit and dropped me to the ground, just in time to see dozens of vaguely humanoid shapes emerging from the rock. They were formed from stone and were limbs joined together, lacking much in the way of a torso or anything in the way of a head. Despite that lack of a head, they seemed to identify my presence readily enough, and those stone legs didn’t slow them down at all.

While I rose to my feet, I fired off a spike, which punched through one of the rock-things, sending it tumbling into a pile of inanimate stone.Thankfully, they weren’t that tough, considering how heavily I was outnumbered. I kept my left hand back to let it reload while bringing my right forward, using my drill bit to lunge at any of the rock-things that got too close, but they kept closing in. I was forced to back up to maintain that distance, and even then I stabbed at a few of the ones that got close enough that I could get an attack in without overextending myself.

Then, they surged forward and I swung wildly, taking out a few of the rock-things, but there were just too many. I was shoved back against the chamber’s wall when suddenly bands of stone emerged, wrapping around my torso and legs and my right arm, pinning me in place and keeping me from getting an attack out. Slowly the bands tightened, but my armor proved to be sufficiently resilient, at least for now. Meanwhile, the rock-things closed in and launched stony punches against my body and my face, bruising me and sending my head rocking back against the stone. I strained against the bands and the blows, trying to regain my freedom, but I could feel my armor slowly beginning to crack and I just wasn’t strong enough.

My left arm was not captured though and my next spike loaded into place. I would only have one shot, so I had to choose carefully where it was going to go. With all the force I had, I shoved forward with that arm, clearing a bit of space around me, before bringing the spikethrower up and aiming it at my imprisoned right arm. I let the spike fly forth and it shattered the stone before piercing through my armor and into the meat of the arm. A primal howl of pain escaped my lips, but I moved swiftly to tear apart my restraints with the drill. Then I turned my attention to the rock-things, who were closing back in.

For a moment, reason fled me, fear fled me, doubt fled me, all that remained was the pain, from their blows, from my self-inflicted injury, from the gnawing in my guts, from my weakness, from my failures, all that remained was pain and I wished to redirect that pain outward. Shards of stone flew through the air as I fell onto the rock-things, dismantling them in a wild flurry of strikes, my drill echoing the chamber. They soon surrounded me again and held my drill at bay with dozens of hands, so I simply used my left hand to rip out the spike from my arm and use it as a knife to carve away these hindrances.

I smashed and I broke and I savaged my foes, thankful they were not living things in the same way as the salamanders. No, these were constructs of the stone and all I had to do was kill and break and destroy and shatter them to pieces before my pain, let them understand what it meant to know decades of suffering, to know the world’s ending, to know all the things that I had learned in the deepest crevices of the dark and preserved from world to world as it all fell apart around me, I had to make them hurt and hurt and hurt and hurt and-

I pulled back then, knowing something was wrong, something was tearing at the insides of my mind and trying to use me as a puppet. I grit my teeth and found a center of focus inside of me, reminding myself of the simple things, the mortal things, the living things, the times spent beneath dappled trees in the arms of my lover, the long hours of study, the joys and the failures, the simple human things. I separated out myself from this other and grasped the other like a snake in my mind’s hand. It writhed within my internal vision, then slithered free, slipping from my mind and out into reality.

I saw the mental intruder like a cloud as it flew from my mouth, filling the air with luminous erg before slipping away, heading down the tunnel to the next chamber. The rock-things were thankfully still and I was able to regain my breath, enough to mutter out, “what the fuck was that.”

Then a wave of dizziness hit me and I flopped down into a seated position, the blows to my head assuring that I needed some rest.