“You’re defeating the opponents so quickly that no one can even react!” Bernice chastised. “That’s the exact opposite of what I told you to do!”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to! He just caught me off guard and I reacted in kind.”

I was starting to remember that I wasn’t a gladiator, I wasn’t a competitor, and I wasn’t a fighter. I wasn’t even a warrior or a soldier. I was a dungeon diver. It was do or die. Even a soldier could be resurrected, but when you were in that dungeon, it was your life or there’s. There was no such thing as throwing a punch, and there was no such attack that aimed to do anything less but incapacitate or kill your opponent. Even when I was taming monsters, the attacks I was using on them were near lethal. Of course, once they submitted, I could always heal them, but that didn’t mean I slouched at all.

It looked like I was going to have to learn how to ease up. I had practiced these kinds of skills in the past, but all it took was being stuck in a life and death situation, and I started developing those bad habits once again. I began to realize that this was a pretty good means of practice. Of course, my winnings continued to shrink as I blew through the bottom ring of the underworld, but by the time I beat the fifth and final guy, sometime early in the morning and just before the sunrise, I was able to last five moves before pummeling him into the ground.

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As I collected my winnings, a combination of the bets I made and my victories, a man dressed in some fancy-looking suit came out and stopped me at the exit.

“You will be coming back tomorrow?” He asked.

“Is that alright?”

“Hehe… what stamina young ones have these days. I look forward to it. We use metals to order our people. We have Iron, Copper, Steel, Silver, Gold, and Diamond matches. You’ll be fighting in the Copper matches tomorrow. I have a mind to move you straight to Silver, but rules are rules.”

I gave a nod. “I look forward to it.”

He gave a cold smile and then turned away. It wasn’t until I got outside that Bernice grabbed my arm and pulled me close to her.

“This isn’t good!”

“Huh? What?”

“You’ve gotten the notice of the underworld’s kingpin.”

“So?”

“It’s usually not a good thing. If he’s noticing you, then there is probably something he wants, and it’s only going to create trouble.”

“You do realize that I’m an Earl, right? We control this city.”

“You don’t realize just how much trouble he can cause for you! Chalm doesn’t have an underworld, but this city exists on layers, and the foundation of those layers is the criminal underbelly. He probably has half the guards in this city on his payroll, and just about every successful merchant owes him a favor or two.”

“That sounds really troublesome.” I frowned. “However, it doesn’t sound like there is much I can do about it. For the time being, we’ll just have to continue as we are.”

It was just one more problem I’d have to hold in the back of my mind.