"Pitiful woman." The Alpha Dungeon Monster's booming, inhuman laughter echoed through the dark cavern. He advanced on her, torchlight glittering off the hard planes of his muscular form, and seized her by the throat with one massive hand. "Did you truly believe that you could challenge me ?"
"I... did not... return... to fight... you," the Heroine gasped out as she was lifted bodily off the floor.
Each monstrous, clawed finger was like an iron band tightening around her neck, but she made no effort to pry them loose, even when her vision began to fray at the edges.
His curiosity aroused by her refusal to struggle, the towering Dungeon Monster relaxed his grip slightly, drawing her in closer to him instead. The burning glow of his gaze scrutinized her, searching for the signs of deceit he knew must surely be present.
"You lie," he said.
She did not reply, could not reply, yet her gaze implored his trust.
"Humans are all the same. Always you seek to destroy me, to conquer my Dungeon, to claim my treasures for yourself."
Yet even as these cold words left his mouth, she knew that a seed of doubt had been planted deep in his monstrous heart. Although he could not yet accept her feelings, the creature had felt her love, a love made all the more powerful by its forbidden nature –
The alarm clock went off, its strident blare shockingly loud in the previously-silent tent. Sharon, with one hand holding the book open and the other trapped between her thighs, jerked in surprise and nearly rolled off the cot.
With a groan, she marked the spot in Bound by the Dungeon Master where she'd stopped reading – carefully inserting a bookmark, not creasing the page's corner like some barbarian – before pushing herself up to a half-sitting position. The first rays of morning sunlight were peeking into her tent between the tied canvas flaps. She fumbled around blindly for her glasses, then blearily squinted at the obnoxious device. From its digital display, the red numbers 6:30 A.M. flashed back at her.
And she hadn't managed to get even a wink of sleep.
Today, she realized, was going to be one of those days.
"Good morning, Sharon." Raid Captain Kaneko was waiting to greet her when she shuffled out of the tent a few minutes later. With a grin, he handed her a tin mug full of what she expected was probably going to be truly vile camp coffee. "Sleep well?"
"Professor Rinzler," she automatically corrected the man for what felt like the hundredth time. "And no, I didn't sleep well at all. I, um... don't think that this lifestyle agrees with me."
That definitely sounded better than "I lost track of time and accidentally stayed up all night reading monster smut, again", didn't it?
She blew on the coffee to cool it, took a sip – it was just as bad as she remembered from the night before – and let out a heavy sigh.
God, she thought. I really need to get laid.
Raid Captain Kaneko – he asked me to call him Ken, she reminded herself – was still hovering nearby. Wearing a designer suit different from yesterday's and his customary pasted-on smile, he hardly looked like someone who had just climbed out of bed. She considered the man out of the corner of her eye as her scrambled brain finally started running through its coffee-powered morning boot-up routine.
He was handsome enough, and obviously took good care of himself. Rich, powerful, a genuine celebrity with the sort of connections most people could only dream about. Literally a Hero. A snappy dresser, if you cared about that sort of thing. Charming, certainly. Polite, understanding, easygoing, reportedly quite generous with his friends.
Although she didn't really understand why he was interested, he'd made it more than clear that, if she let him, he'd be on top of her in a heartbeat.
Unfortunately...
...ay, there's the rub...
...unfortunately, he just wasn't her type.
And yeah, even in the privacy of her own head, it sounded incredibly superficial when she phrased it that way. They'd probably use it as an epitaph on her tombstone. IN LOVING MEMORY OF SHARON RINZLER, it would say, SHE DIED A VIRGIN AT AGE ONE HUNDRED AND TWO. Then, below that, "HE JUST WASN'T MY TYPE."
But it was the truth. She looked at Ken Kaneko, one of the world's most eligible bachelors, and she felt... absolutely nothing.
His excessively-glib personality wasn't what put her off. It wasn't any deficiency in his physical appearance, either. Even his reputation for being a bit of a playboy didn't bother her. Under other circumstances, she thought, that aspect of his character might have actually been appealing.
No, the problem was that he was a human, and humans bored her.
(Jeez, that admission sounded even worse than the last one.)
She sighed again, louder this time.
Her coffee mug, she noticed, had at some point emptied itself. That was a problem. But, unlike her love life – or lack thereof – it was at least a problem she could fix.
Fifteen minutes later, she finished the last dregs of her fourth cup, and decided that she was about as awake as she would get.
Enough moping around, she admonished herself firmly. The pity party is over. I should be a lot more excited right now.
Today was going to be a monumental day for Professor Sharon Rinzler. A day of firsts!
Even though she'd awakened as a Hero – technically – years ago, today would be her first Dungeon run. Her first chance to test out her theories about Dungeon Monster sentience in the field, too.
Of course, it wasn't going to be the day for her to experience that other particular first she'd been lamenting earlier... probably. But who could say what might happen in a Dungeon?
"Are you feeling okay?" Ken put his the back of his hand on her forehead. "You look flushed."
"I'm fine, I'm fine," she waved him off. "It's nothing."
"That's a relief. We need everyone at a hundred percent for this!"
He gave her what she'd labeled his number-three smile, the one that was supposed to be disarming, and she had to fight back the urge to snort. Sure, the DragonFire guild's Raid Captain Ken Kaneko needed the help of a Level 1 Hero who still hadn't completed her first Tutorial Quest. And if you believed that, Sharon had a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
Hero: Sharon Rinzler
Level: 1
Experience: 0 / 100
Power: +0
Speed: +1
Agility: +0
Vitality: +0
Resilience: +0
Core Slot 1: Human (Rank F)
Core Slot 2: [Locked]
[…]
She glanced at her Status, and despite the monumental day she had to look forward to, her thoughts once again returned to that old familiar rut.
"You're so lucky to have awakened as a Hero!" That's what everyone had rushed to tell her when it happened. Like she was blessed by fate, and should be thankful for it, rather than having been made the butt of some giant cosmic joke.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
A Rank-F Core.
What percentage of humans awaken at Rank F? She'd actually studied that question as part of her doctoral dissertation, even managed to obtain provisional access to the classified Selective Service System database. Apparently, the government was as interested in the topic as she had been. And the answer? Less than two percent of the population, it seemed. Getting a Rank-F Core was what statisticians called a three-sigma event.
Talk about beating the odds!
...but she'd beaten the odds in the "get struck by lightning" way, not the "buy a winning lottery ticket" way.
Sharon had imagined what it would be like to awaken as a Hero, of course. Who didn't? Waking up one day and discovering that you've suddenly become more than human, then being called to defend the Earth against extradimensional invaders – there was a certain romance to the whole thing. It felt like the premise of a comic book, or a video game.
That just made her own awakening all the more painful, because she hadn't discovered that she had become more than human. She was, in fact, just as human as she'd been the day before.
An F-Ranked Core came with zero base Attributes. Zero. In other words, a Hero with a Core like hers would need to reach Level 5 just to match the starting Attributes of a Hero with an A-Ranked Core that awakened yesterday. And that was assuming it was even possible to reach Level 5 in the first place!
Oh, she'd tried. The Hero certification courses didn't even take Heroes with Cores below Rank D – too dangerous, the government had decided. She knew, now, that the statistics backed this decision. In the first years after Dungeons started appearing, when it had been more of a free-for-all, the casualty rates for Heroes with E- and F-Ranked Cores had been appalling.
But the younger her hadn't known that, and wouldn't have cared if she did. Sharon Rinzler was going to be a Hero.
So she'd dieted, run, and lifted weights. Trained to fight with weapons, and trained to fight unarmed. She'd studied every available bit of information about Dungeons and Monsters and the system – which, incidentally, had been what led her into her current career. Almost certainly also what led to her developing some rather strange tastes in leisure reading, but that was neither here nor there. For years on end, if it was something that a civilian could do to improve their chances of obtaining a Hero license, Sharon Rinzler had done it, and with a smile.
Fate can go fuck itself. She was going to be a Hero.
The first time she took the Hero certification exam, the proctors been encouraging. "The best performance we've seen in years, from someone with your... disability," they'd said, like that was going to make her feel any better about her failure. "Maybe next time."
It hadn't gone any better the next time, though, or the time after that. By the fifth attempt, they weren't trying to encourage her anymore.
"If at first you don't succeed," W. C. Fields was supposed to have said, "try, try again. Then quit. There's no use being a damn fool about it."
That lesson had taken her a while to learn.
She'd thought she was over it, that those wounds had long since scabbed over. Not so, it seemed. All it took was one little glimmer of hope to tear them all right back open again.
They wanted an expert on emergent physics – the pretentiously-named catch-all category for weird system-related things that conventional physics couldn't yet explain – who could accompany an expedition into an abnormal Dungeon. Which meant a top researcher, in a very new and very niche field... that also happened to be a Hero, in addition to the other requirements, willing to risk life and limb to chase down a very dubious lead. It was as if fate had crafted the job opening just for her.
Sharon wouldn't allow herself to believe, not again. But... maybe she could dream, just a little.
Lost in thought, she went through most of the preliminaries for the run on autopilot.
The members of her project team were already waiting for her in the staging area – a collection of bright, criminally-underpaid grad students and postdocs she'd be relying on to handle most of the grunt work. None of them had a guild officer who'd wanted to chat them up in private, so instead of taking a private jet, they'd all been forced to fly commercial from Washington state all the way to Argentina. In coach, of course, since they were traveling on the government's dime. Apparently the trip had been almost two days, once you factored in all the various layovers, and the young men and women uniformly looked even more jet-lagged than she herself felt.
Nevertheless, they'd carefully laid out and checked over all the test equipment and recording materials she'd need once she was in the Dungeon: exotic tools like the RF/EMF meter and the radiation dosimeter, the cassette tape recorder and the harness for her video camera, all the way down to the utterly mundane items like her clipboard and pen. That was the limit of the assistance they could provide, until she had some data for them to input and start crunching; none of them were Heroes, so they naturally wouldn't be able to accompany her inside.
The guild officers had picked which party would go first using rounds of rock-paper-scissors, if you could believe it. Privately, she suspected that Ken must have cheated in some way to ensure his own group came out ahead of the rest, but if so, she had no idea how he'd managed it. She'd tried to ask about in a circumspect way – purely to satisfy her own intellectual curiosity – and he just grinned smugly before replying that he was naturally lucky.
Prick.
Not that it really mattered which party she would be accompanied by. She was confident that all of the international guilds' Heroes would be more than competent. They might each have their own little idiosyncrasies, when it came to their goals and their recruiting methods, but none of them tolerated weaklings or freeloaders. If an organization like Fortune Days or Memento Mori felt willing to stake their professional reputation on the claim that they could protect her Level-1, No-Attribute-Having self in a Category 2 Dungeon run, then she was inclined to take them at their word.
They'd find out soon enough. For what was probably the thousandth time, she glanced up at the active Quest notification, which she'd had open since their arrival in the country.
Active Quest:
Complete "Tutorial Quest – Stage 1".
Objective: Enter a Dungeon.
Reward: Experience
Reward: Item, Weapon (Choose)
(Additional Quests and features will become available when all Tutorial Quest stages are completed.)
Not long now, she told herself, trying not to get too excited. Not too long now.
The party assembled in the formation that they'd use inside the Dungeon, and final checks began.
Weapons and armor came out of Inventory. All of the Heroes in the team (besides her) were at least Level 10, which meant they should have enough Inventory space that they wouldn't have to pick and choose which Items to bring, and which to leave behind.
Ken had withdrawn a long, curve-bladed saber with a basket hilt, and gave it a few test swings before holding it up to look along the edge for any warps or nicks. It wasn't a particularly pretty weapon, but it was made of Wrought Iron – a Tier 4 material – and he seemed to handle it well.
"Fifteen minutes, people!" he said, then laughed before adding, "Last chance to hit the bathroom before we head in."
In the opposite corner of the fenced area, Naomi was sorting through an impressively large pile of cheap low-Rank daggers, knives, darts, shurikens, and various other sharp Items clearly intended to be thrown. Occasionally, one of them would pass whatever mysterious criteria the party's thief was using to evaluate them, and be slotted into the next open spot on the canvas bandoleer she had slung over her shoulder.
Naomi glanced up, seemingly having sensed her scrutiny, and smirked before returning to her task. Sharon didn't like her. There was something about the (literally) snake-eyed woman that seemed off, although she couldn't put her finger on exactly what it was. Thus far, she'd done her best to stay clear of her.
Beside her, Sean – the party vanguard, her husband, not to be confused with nearby strikers D'Shaun or Shawn – was slowly and deliberately buckling on his armor. For a Power-focused Hero, he had quite a lot of it, which would undoubtedly make his movements inside the Dungeon slower and more clumsy than they might otherwise be. Privately, Sharon thought that was a suboptimal development path, but she kept any thoughts of that nature to herself. Nobody wanted to hear opinions from a Level 1 virgin on how to distribute their Attribute points.
And even if he did listen, it wasn't like he could change them now, right?
The other two Shawns were similarly equipped, in spite of their wildly different body types and builds. One had a halberd, the other some sort of polehammer, and both seemed confident enough when handling them.
At the center of the clearing, the Dungeon Portal flashed from red to blue.
"Alright," Ken said, stepping into the front of the group before spinning around to face them. "Now, remember, we're just going in for a quick look around. Stick together, tight formation –" he stared at Sean "– and no crazy stunts. Capisce?"
The man grumbled something inaudible and probably offensive. Ken held his eyes, though, until finally he gave a grudging nod.
"Great." He turned towards Sharon and raised a questioning eyebrow. "You ready, team leader?"
Had that been sarcasm? She hesitated for a moment, then firmly swept away the lingering doubts.
"Yes. Let's go."
The expected eternal instant of disorientation followed, and then they were through the Portal and emerging from the other side. For the first time in her life, Sharon Rinzler had stepped inside a Dungeon.
New Message:
Transit successful.
You are now entering a Dungeon!
Dungeon: Netherworld Manor
Level: 10
Next →
Inside, the space was every bit as dim as books and movies made it out to be, but even a documentary film couldn't quite capture how weird it felt in person. The chamber they stood inside was roughly square, with evidence of the crude tools that had been used to hew out the walls still evident. Faint lighting with no discernible source fell evenly over the room. And what it showed...
She took a pace forward, then another, barely noticing the way the echo of her footsteps on the polished hardwood floor broke the silence.
There were carvings on the walls. Not just any carvings – there were words.
Words in English. And, below, in Spanish, and French, and what she was fairly certain was Latin, and some totally unfamiliar character set that vaguely resembled Amharic.
Her heart skipped a beat, and she checked to make sure the camera she wore was recording. Careers were going to be made today, she thought. Hypotheses about the system's nature that had been absurd speculation yesterday would become textbook teaching material tomorrow.
MY NAME IS DAMIEN LEMAIRE, began the first line as it traveled across the wall.
MI NOMBRE ES DAMIEN LEMAIRE, said the next beneath it, and then below that JE M'APPELLE DAMIEN LEMAIRE...
"...oh, shit," Naomi muttered.
"Oh. Shit," Sean agreed a moment later.
She turned to face the two. What was with that reaction?