“Overnight dive?” asked one of the guards.

  “Yeah. Took forever to find the boss room,” I responded.

  “Yeah, that’s rough. It took my group a full week to find it the first time. Did you go in alone?”

  “Yeah. I’m already high enough level to go down to the lower floors, but it was my first time in this Dungeon, so I just soloed the first floor.”

  “That’s fair. Since you’re here now, and you don’t seem injured, I guess it went well?”

  “Yeah. No problems other than finding the damn boss room.”

  The guard nodded. “Well, you’re probably pretty tired. Don’t let me keep you here. Have a good day.”

  “Thanks, you too,” I said as I walked past him.

  The outside of the Dungeon was much livelier when I emerged than it had been when I entered. Despite the early hour, there were already dozens of adventurers standing outside the Dungeon, preparing for their own excursions. Most were adjusting their armor and checking their supplies, but a few were calling out to the crowd.

  “Looking for an Earth mage for a 3rd floor dive!” shouted one man.

  “Level 28 Scout looking for a party!” said another.

  "In need of a ranged fighter! Magic or Aura both work!" said a third.

  As I weaved through the crowd towards the road back to the city, most of the adventurers paid me no mind, except for one man who did a double take when he saw me.

  “Hey, wait,” he said.

  I stopped and turned to look at him. If he weren’t taller than me, I might have thought he was a dwarf. He was thickly built, with arms wider than my neck, and he had a large, bushy, brown beard that hung down to his protruding gut. He was wearing heavy plate mail with a huge shield strapped to his back and an ax hanging from his waist. I thought he looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t figure out exactly where I had seen him. He stood next to a petite woman dressed similarly to myself including the mask and a lanky young man carrying a bow who were currently arguing with each other about something.

  “You’re the one took the rank up exam yesterday, right?” he asked. “The one who got impaled?”

  “Yes, yes I am. And?”

  He nudged the woman who was standing next to him. “Hey Chris, check it out. It’s the girl I was talking about. The one that Alyona ran through.”

  The woman, Chris, looked at me, and then snorted. “Is that why you’re out here at the Dungeon? Got impaled and failed the exam, so now you need to actually put in the work for your rank?”

  “I didn’t fail,” I said, annoyed. “And I let her impale me. I stabbed her too.”

  She laughed loudly while the young man snickered. “Yeah, sure. You ‘let’ her impale you. And there’s no way you stabbed her back.”

  “I did!” I protested. “She didn’t even heal it off either. You.” I pointed to the not-dwarf. “You were there. You should have seen her bleeding.”

  “Uh, well, both of you had a lot of blood on you. I didn’t really think too much about it. I was mostly distracted by the hole in your clothes.” He turned to his companions. “I told you about that, right? Her clothes were totally torn up in the front and the back.”

  “Yeah, you did tell us. At least 5 times,” said the archer.

  “No it was definitely closer to 10,” said Chris.

  “I did stab her,” I said. “And I passed the exam and ranked up twice.”

  “There’s no way,” said the archer. “I heard that Alyona is over level 80. There’s nobody in this whole city that could lay a finger on her.”

  “It’s because she let her guard down. I let her stab me, and she was so shocked that she couldn’t block my knife. Not fully at least. It still only went an inch in, but I drew blood.”

  “You let yourself get impaled, just to get her to let her guard down?” said the woman incredulously.

  “Yes. I knew that there was no way I could beat her otherwise, and I also knew that she wouldn’t actually kill me, so I decided that it was the best option.”

  The bearded man whistled. “Damn, that’s ballsy. Though I guess if you already knew she could use healing skills, it would be doable. Still, I bet it hurt like hell. I could never do that, even if I knew I’d be healed up right afterwards.”

  I nodded, but didn’t respond.

  “Was she mad about it?” asked Pierre.

  “A little, but I think she was angrier about me getting impaled than she was about getting stabbed herself.”

  “Damn. What rank did you get?”

  “I went from rank 6 to rank 4, but she said that I could get rank 3 without taking another exam if I went back and demonstrated that my skills had leveled up a bit.”

  “Nice,” said Chris. “That’s pretty impressive. We’re rank 3 ourselves, hoping to get rank 2 within the next couple months. I’m Christine by the way.” She held out her hand for me to shake.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said, taking her hand. “I’m Lucy.”

  “I’m Alphonse, but you can call me Al,” said the bearded man as he shook my hand with an iron grip.

  “I’m Pierre,” said the lanky archer.

  “Would you like to join our part- Ow!” Al’s sentence was cut off by a cuff to the ear from Chris.

  “Sorry about that,” she said apologetically. “We’re going down to the 4th floor today, so we can’t have a newbie, even if you are good.”

  “Hey! I wasn’t asking about today,” whined Al. “I was gonna ask about the future. Once she gets to rank 3.”

  “It’s alright,” I said. “I actually just came out of the Dungeon, and I was gonna head back to the city to rest up.”

  “Wait, but didn’t you take only the rank up exam yesterday?” asked Pierre.

  “Yeah. I came here right afterwards,” I said.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “You got a sword shoved through your gut, and you still went into the Dungeon right afterwards?” asked Christine.

  “Yeah. I was all healed up, and I wanted to see what the Dungeon was like.”

  “But what about your aura? Did you go in without recovering it?” asked Al.

  “I don’t use aura. I’m a mage. And it’s super easy to meditate and recover [MP] here by the Dungeon.”

  “You’re a mage?” asked Pierre. “I thought you were a scout. ‘Cause, y’know…” He gestured vaguely at my clothes.

  “No, I just like these clothes.” When I said that I realized that, unfortunately, that was the truth. I mentally cursed Jacques. “And the mask is because I have some scars I’d rather not show others.”

  “Ah, that makes sense,” said Pierre.

  “Well, if you’re a mage, then we could definitely use you in our party once you’re high enough level,” said Christine. “We’ll have to check your skills ourselves, but our party is currently without a mage, so there’s definitely room for you if you’re up to our standards.”

  I thought about the offer for a few seconds. It wasn’t a bad deal. And I would need a party if I wanted to explore this Dungeon any further. I had gotten lucky in finding the boss room that time, but the lower you went in the Dungeon, the larger the floors, and it took longer to find the boss room, and since everything down there was undead, blood would be in short supply. I would need to travel with others if I wanted to be able to find my way back.

  It came with some risks though, since I didn’t need to eat or drink, and I could get caught if I spent too long underground with them. I had come up with a solution to hide my lack of food and water consumption though. If I used [Inventory] as I put food in my mouth, and then pretended to chew and swallow, then I could probably get away with it. As long as we weren’t out too long. It would also give me [Inventory] levels as an added bonus.

  “Thanks for the offer. I was planning on doing some solitary training for a couple months, and then going to get my rank 3 registration. Once I do that, if you’re okay with it, I might come to take you up on that offer.”

  “That would be great!” she replied. “Don’t take too long though. Once we clear the 5th floor, we're gonna move to Claude to start raiding the bigger Dungeons.”

  “Ah, I was thinking of doing that too once I finished up here,” I said.

  I hadn’t made a firm decision on that yet, but the Lyon’s offer was a very good one, and if I negotiated the deal properly, there was a good chance I could stay under the radar for long enough that the paladins would no longer be an issue. With [Vampiric Superiority], I had the stats of someone twice my level, so once I hit level 50, I would have the stats of a level 100, which was thought to be the limit for humans.

  “Oh, maybe you could join us,” said Al.

  “Maybe,” I said. I’ve got some friends there already though, so I might go with them instead.”

  “Oh, well that’s fine too,” he said, looking slightly disappointed for some reason.

  “Al, we don’t even know if she’ll be joining us at all, don’t get attached yet,” said Pierre.

  “Yeah, sorry,” he said sheepishly.

  “Well, you said you just came from the Dungeon, so you’re probably tired. It’d be rude to keep you here, so we’ll let you go,” said Christine.

  “Ah, thank you. I would like to get back.”

  “Have a good rest. And good luck with your training.”

  “Thanks. Good luck with your dive. I’ll contact you again if I can.”

  “Alright, see you later!” she said.

  “Bye,” said Pierre.

  “Have a good day,” said Al.

  I continued on my way down the road, sometimes passing by another adventurer or three. After the encounter with the adventurer trio I had just spoken to, I realized that I might have made a bigger impression on the other adventurers than I thought I had with my rank up examination, so I used [Obscure] on my face so that no one else would recognize me. Occasionally, one of them would give me a strange look, probably because my face now looked like it was censor-blurred, but none of them stopped me like Al had.

  I made it back to the Guild without trouble, where they had my permanent adventurer license waiting for me. Calling it ‘permanent’ was a bit of a stretch, since I was planning on advancing and upgrading my license before I got much use out of this one, but it was better than the piece of paper that I currently had. It was small copper badge with IV written on it and a logo featuring a dragon that I assumed represented the Adventurer’s Guild. Then, I was then directed across the street to a general store where I could sell my cores. The smaller, normal zombie cores netted me two gold, while the zombie knight cores were worth a gold, overall quadrupling my funds.

  I had nothing else to do in the city, so I immediately started heading out to the forest to train, this time going toward the northern gate. However, before I left, I stopped by Anatoly’s because it was on the way. When I walked in, his shop was empty, and he was sitting behind his desk, writing something down. He looked up when he saw me, and greeted me with a smile.

  “Ah, you’re back already. This is unexpected. Did you forget something?”

  “No, I was just on my way out to do some more training in the woods and figured I’d stop by to let you know before I disappear for a couple months.”

  “Well I appreciate the information,” he said “Speaking of information, I hear you stabbed my great granddaughter yesterday after you left.”

  Despite his ominous words, his smile never faltered as he said this, and his eyes remained warm.

  It took me a second to figure out what he meant. “Alyona is your great granddaughter?” I said.

  “Yes. Most half elves are, actually. My grandson is… prolific.”

  “I see…” I said. “I didn’t know you ever had any kids. Are you married?”

  “I was,” he said, his smile vanishing.

  I quickly tried to change the topic. “So I was just down in the Dungeon, and something happened in there that you might find interesting.”

  “Oh? And what’s that?”

  I double checked to make sure we were alone in the shop before speaking again. “The Dungeon didn’t recognize me as an Adventurer.”

  “What do you mean?” he said, leaning forwards in interest.

  “Well, it’s a Dungeon full of Undead. And I’m Undead. So it thought I was one of them, and it trapped me. It kept shifting all the passages while I was in them.”

  “That is interesting. I’d heard that the Vampires had the deepest knowledge on Dungeons, but I never knew why. Did anything else happen?”

  “Yeah. None of the monsters were aggressive. I was only on the first floor, so it was only zombies, so it might just be that the zombies were too stupid to realize I wasn’t with them, but none of them attacked me. Only the ones in the boss room were aggressive. Also, at one point a group of zombies spawned practically on top of me.”

  “You got to witness a spawning? I’m jealous. I’ve only seen it secondhand from recording devices.”

  “Yeah, I guess it wouldn’t really be possible to witness it firsthand for anyone else.”

  “Yeah…”

  There was a moment of awkward silence.

  “Oh,” he said. “Lady Lyon wanted me to let you know that you can purchase any book you’d like here on credit, and she’ll pay for them. If you want to pick out a couple non-educational books to entertain yourself with while you’re not training, you can grab a few while you’re here.”

  “Wow. That’s very kind of her. I’ll have to take her up on it.”

  “She also wanted me to remind you that her offer is still on the table, and that she would be happy to negotiate any terms with you to help seal the deal.”

  “I was actually thinking about that earlier. I think that I will negotiate with her once I clear this Dungeon. Not before though. Let her know that I’ll meet with her when I’m ready.”

  “She’ll be happy to hear that. Then at least one of her endeavors will have been successful.”

  “I can’t believe she’s still asking you to help her with whatever she needs help with. She’s really persistent. It’s been over a month. Shouldn’t the daughter of a duke have more important duties than recruiting old booksellers?”

  “It’s been two months actually. I must admire her persistence. And her family believes that the matter that requires my attention is of utmost importance, so they are willing to wait any amount of time for her to convince me to come.”

  “Will she ever succeed?”

  “Not normally, no. I’ve begun to grow fond of her though, so I may head over anyways, if only to do a favor for a friend.”

  “Yeah, she is surprisingly likable. I expected her to be more stuck up, being a noble and all.”

  “She is quite unusual in that regard.”

  “Yeah…”

  There was another moment of awkward silence.

  “Would you like to take a look at some of the books then?” asked Anatoly.

  “Yeah sure,” I said.

  Once we started talking about books again, the conversation began to flow more easily. We went through almost 100 books, with Anatoly giving me a short summary of each, and what he thought about them. I ended up getting another dozen books, mostly biographies of famous historical figures written by Anatoly himself, as well as a massive mythology anthology, and a couple cheesy romance novels.

  It was still only midmorning when I finally said goodbye and left the shop, and by the end of the day, I had found a suitable spot deep in the forest to the north of Bizet where I could start my training. For the next four months, I spent most of my days practicing magic and hunting and leveling up my skills.