When the seal breaks, the scroll lifts from my hand and unfurls by itself, revealing a shining diagram that spreads white light over everyone. The rats squeal in surprise, and blink, momentarily blinded. I smile, antecipating my victory. The weird light of the spell starts moving like a living thing, touching the walls and the rats and me and my stuff. In a second, glowing words appear over my staff, my sports bra and my shorts. Hmm, some sort of equipment buff? I'm disappointed it wasn't a fireball or something like that, but if this repairs my staff, it's gonna be pretty good. I touch the word hovering over the staff, and the light all gathers around it, apparently infusing the staff with magic. As I hold the staff together, I'm giddy. Just you wait, you rats. With my staff buffed, I'm gonna wipe the floor with you! My mana bolts will stop going astray and I'm gonna...

Wait, what's happening? The magic is leaving the staff, doing nothing about the crack. It's still broken, nothing changed at all. The magic gathers in the air above the staff and... it... I can't believe this. It forms a bunch of words. Words! Is this some kind of information spell? Who cares about information, stupid spell! I can't even read whatever you're saying! I bet it's something like "broken mage staff, completely useless, haha, you're dead".

I'm scowling at the spell, and the ratman snorts. Uh-oh, he noticed the spell is useless. Fast as I can, I smash my body against the wall to dislodge the rat on my shoulder, and I swing the staff at the rat on my left leg. That's my good leg, you fucker! When I hit it, a piece of the staff breaks off and flies away towards the ratman, who dodges with another snort. He squeaks, and the rats start attacking again. I keep swinging my staff, but it's too short and light to be a real weapon. I hit the larger of the three rats, and it just ignores the damage and grabs my hand with its claws. As I try to pull back from it, I feel another spike of pain from my previous wound, and I stumble. I feel a weight hitting me from behind. I see myself falling in slow motion. The big rat pulls me and bites my arm, and the fast rat jumps on my face. I bring my arm to defend myself and I fall on the wet stone floor with nothing to break my fall. I've lost count of how many rats are attacking me, focused as I am in keeping this one away from my face. I feel bites all over though. I'm fighting them by flinging my bare hands and legs, but they keep grabbing my limbs, holding them, and more rats jump over them and scratch my vulnerable torso. The fast rat bites deep into my wrist, and I see the blood flowing. That's... that's a lot of blood... I'm getting a little light-headed. I also start feeling a strange acceptance of my situation, like, "this might as well happen", you know? I guess this is a cool enough way to die, in violent battle with strange monsters. I never really wanted to live to an old age. It's just... I was so sure I was gonna beat whatever this world threw at me. That I was gonna grow stronger, and level up, get awesome magic powers, beat this dungeon, become a hero. Maybe I could have my own army of rats like Ratman here. Make myself a badass Queen of the Rats. Found a Rat Empire, conquer the world under the flag of Rats. I would squeak and they would charge into battle like a furry flood. And when the battle was won, I would ride a giant rat into the sunset...

At some point in this reverie, I realize I'm dreaming.

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I feel cold, and there's no blanket to pull over me. That's what wakes me up. The stone floor is too cold for sleeping. I'm sore and unconfortable. I was having this really bizarre dream about a kingdom of giant rats that had magic powers and could spit healing water...

Wait, wasn't I fighting rats? Last thing I remember from yesterday, I was pretty sure I was dying. I check myself, and there are no wounds, no blood, no sign from the battle. Even my clothes are clean, and my Havaianas are laying next to my feet. I'm also wearing my shirt, which I had taken off. Huh. It's almost like none of that even happened. I look around, and I find I'm back at the small room above the stairs. My backpack is here, along with my notebook and my phone. That's extremely weird. Was everything after I went down the stairs a hallucination?

This thought makes me sick. In any circumstance, I'd rather believe my own senses, not assume I'm going crazy. If I can't trust my own senses, than what can I trust? If my reality is not real, nothing means anything anyway. It's not worth it, worrying about this sort of nihilistic possibility.

And besides, I remember being saved from certain death by a winged magical angel. If magic is possible, than a bunch of other things suddenly become a lot more likely.

I open my notebook, and after a few pages of algebra and logic, I find two words written in the strange script from the floating parchments, next to a hastily scribbled note: "Cancel/Ok?"

I let out a deep breath. Good! This means the floating parchment actually happened! Not that I ever seriously doubted. I'm just relieved I don't have to start. Although, I'm not sure how to take the fact that my clothes and body are in perfect condition. Well, as least as "perfect" as it was before... I've never been exactly the healthiest student, to be honest. And my shorts are a little tattered, but that's because I've been wearing them nearly every day for over a year. The point is, I seem to be back to the exact same condition I was when I first got here, (aside from some soreness from sleeping in the stone floor), but since the floating class selection parchment definetly happened, I think the more likely explanation is that I did actually fight a bunch of rats, and then I was magically saved and transported back and healed and... my clothes were healed too? But only up to the condition they were when I entered the dungeon? You know what, it might sound a bit farfetched but I'll take it. It's the best explanation I have and it doesn't require questioning my reality or my memories.

... It also means I very nearly died twice in the same night, and was only saved by magic. The memory of being nearly eaten alive by the rats is way too vivid for me to not take this seriously.

I move my right foot around, revelling in my ability to bend my ankle without any pain. If it's all the same, I'd rather not get my leg mangled again. Ever. But I think I was doing better after I figured out how to use my mana. Huh. I wonder if I can use mana now?

I focus on what I came to think of as my mana muscles. Trying to feel your own muscles is hard, when you're not used to using them. I think the mana potion and the staff might have helped access those muscles somehow. I think they're there, but I can't really move them like I want. Uff! This is hard. Usually when you're trying to learn to use new muscles, you can put your hands over the muscle to help feel them. But these "mana muscles"... well, I'm not even 100% sure they're actually in my body. It's hard to explain.

So no immediate magic powers for me, I guess. Maybe with another potion, or staff, I can do it. But it's also possible that choosing the mage class gave me magic powers, and now that I'm back here, I lost them. I guess I need to go downstairs again to test.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

I look to the stairs, and shiver. I'm in no hurry to have anymore near-death experiences.

So what do I do now? Since I don't want to try again just yet, maybe I can make an effort to find another exit from this room. It's dark, but I could use my phone lantern. I pick up my phone and... it's dead?! But, wasn't it fully charged when I left the library, only a short time ago? Ah, come to think of it, I was asleep for a while, so I don't know how much time has passed. That, and the phone might have been trying to find the network service. Usually when I'm travelling and the network is umavailable, the battery is drained in an hour or two. I feel a little stupid for not having checked it there was signal in here, and for having left my phone on.

No matter. I have a battery, so I'll have me lantern in a little bit. I plug the phone to the battery, and decide to take some notes in my notebook while I wait for it to charge. I end up writing down everything that happened to me since I crossed that street in front of the bus. When I'm finished, I take the time to make a summary of important things I learned:

Good stuff

Rat-Spit fountain: healing water? Heals rats too

Lemon potion: mana or mana regen

Scroll w/ red seal: identify? information? NEED TO LEARN THE LANGUAGE. break to cast

Mage staff: Mana Bolt (blue light, damage, knockback), Melee Mana Bolt S Mana Bonk (bonk enemies while casting Mana Bolt, very strong much damage wow) (note: try not to break the staff. cracks mess with the mana flow)

Enemies

Giant Rat: a rat the size of a dog. color and size varies. some are stronger, some are faster. variable XP? the kill notification isn't always the same

Ratman: looks like a rat person, wears clothes, has a knife. Intelligent. Screams to attract more rats. Commands rats to attack.

I'm not sure how strong the Ratman really is, because I didn't really fight him. I'm also not sure what will happen when I go down again. Will they be waiting for me, to ambush me? Do they think I'm dead?

I finish by sketching a rough map of the dungeon. It's annoying how fast I finish. I only saw two rooms and a corridor, and only one room had anything in it. I didn't even explore the dark corridor. Maybe next time I can use my Mana Bolt as a light. Or maybe the useless information spell.

I'll worry abiut that later. For now, I think my phone is charged enough; time to check around the room. I turn the phone on, and confirm it has no signal. I put it on airplane mode to save on battery. The clock tells me it's 8 in the morning, which means I must have slept for several hours. But then I notice the date is a whole day later than I expected. Did I sleep for over 24 hours?! I make a note of the time in my notebook. Then I turn on the flashlight, and turn it around, illuminating each part of the room.

There's nothing special about this room. It has stone brick walls, and no windows or doors, which is weird, but no distinctive features. The floor is also stone and mortar. The roof is made of a dense grid of wooden beams and rafters, under a cover of tiles that might be clay. I take a picture, thinking if I get out of here, I might need proof it was real. With a little bit of effort, I climb on the beams and push against the roof. Unfortunately, the roof is very well-built, and doesn't budge. I'm not a construction worker, I have no idea how to deconstruct a roof from the inside. But it would be nice to have another plan that just going into the dungeon again. Eventually I give up and turn off the latern.

I rest a little, eat some biscuits, drink some water. I pick up my phone and look at the pictures I took with it, grounding myself in my memories of my real life. After a while, remembering the life I had makes the current situation seem much harder to accept. I feel like a prisioner. The light coming from the stairs is like a trap, tempting me with the illusion of escape. But at the same time, staying here is claustrophobic. And yet, now that I thought about it, I can't stand the thought of staying here. Trying to escape is better than not trying, even if it might be a trap.

Besides, this room has no food, no water, no bathroom, not even a decent light source. Staying here is not an option.

I decide to plan my next foray into the dungeon. First priority is getting the best starting equipment I can. The class-choosing magic removed my backpack and the stuff in my hands, but not the clothes on my body, so there's probaboy some wiggle room there. I put on my hoodie: assuming I can keep whatever I'm wearinh, it will give me a little bit of protection against scratches and bites on my arms, chest and back. I also put my water bottle in my pocket, as a test. Second priority: learn the freaking language. I open my notebook in the next blank page, pick up a pen, and step into the stairs.

The same large floating parchment from before unfurls in front of me. This time, I carefully transcribe the whole message into my notebook, thinking if I end up here again, this will help me learn the language. I pay special attention to the names of the classes. All three end in the legged fish symbol, but each has a different beggining. The warrior begins with a kind of knot, followed by something that is either a crown or a mountain range; the mage has a symbol that looks like an 8 with an extra loop; and the ranger has a slanted triangle with a hat followed by a squigly line. These mean nothing to me, yet, but I look from them in the rest of the text. I see the squigly line in the beggining, the slanted triangle near the end, and the legged fish a few times here and there, but I have the feeling they don't mean the same thing when separated.

The next thing I do is touch the mage picture, and transcribe the pop-up text to my notebook. I notice the symbol from the mage word, the triple-loop eight, appears a few time in the blurb, and also in the words next to the potion and scroll. Not the staff though, so it's probably not just "this item is magic so it has the word for magic in it".

Onto the next test: I click the glowing word on the left, which I thought might mean "cancel" or something. The parchment is rolled up and vanishes, leaving me with the larger parchment with the three classes. I touch the warrior class next. Another pop-up parchment appears, with a different text. I notice the whole word for warrior appears a few times in the blurb. The warrior too has three items, it seems: a sword, a shield, and a potion. Looking at the words next to the drawings I realize that all the words I've seen so far have one, two or three symbols, so this is probably not a phonetic alphabet. I'm kinda treating it as a logographic language like kanji, but it could very well be a syllabic writing like the japanese hiragana, or even, I guess, a phonetic alphabet with the vowels omitted, like hebrew. I also notice the word for the potion here is different. Does that mean it's a different potion? Comparing the two words, they have the same ending characters, a spiral followed by a fancy lowercase gamma. But the beggining is different: while the mage's potion begins with the triple-loop, the warrior's potion begins with a downwards triangle over a line, followed by an upside down T. Curiously, this sequence of the triangle and upside down T appears on the text as well. I have no idea what that means, but it's good to recognize something.

Finally, I close the parchment and select the picture of the archer class. The archer has four items: a bow, a quiver, a knife, and a little bar that I can't identify, and has a long name. No potion, huh? I wonder what is the idea behind this class. Maybe a focus on skills? I transcribe everything, and close the parchment again.

Now, what class do I pick? My first impulse is to choose the warrior, if only for the sword and shield. I'm kinda curious what the potion is gonna be, too, but mostly I think having a shield is gonna be great and that a sword is not gonna break when I bonk a rat in the head with it. On the other hand, mage and archer have long range attacks. Although, I'm not sure I have any talent with a bow. There was an amateur archery range at an anime convention once, and I failed pretty badly at hitting the target three meters away. I do already have some experience with the mage staff, and knowing what I'll get is it's own advantage. But then again, getting different things will probably give me more information on the language and logic of this place. Each option has pros and cons, I guess. And even if I might die again in a few more minutes, I think I have to make a choice I might be okay getting stuck with.

I take some time to think and review the options. But not too long. I make my choice, and then, the magic light envolves me.