Wow. Okay. Uh.

I float, my ethereal presence once more in the void between my last life and the next. The vague shapeless form that I am, just a massless ball of thoughts drifting through some black ink, outside of the plane of the living. Anyways, uh, moving on from that.

Uh.

Yeah.

Hmm.

I’m trying to gather my thoughts here, okay? I mean, I guess thief-girl was always pretty intense but uh… hmm. Yeah. Yeah…

  I float, not quite sure what to say honestly. I mean, that was pretty extreme. So… uh, she’s fun. That was fun. What a great girl. We should spend more time together, I feel like I could really learn to let loose a little more from her, you know? Really dig my heels into the insanity that is the dungeon.

That’s a joke, obviously. I’m making a mental note here and now, thief-girl scares me. She has those crazy eyes, you know? Yeah, you know.

  Silently as I float, I think about all of our past encounters. At least the ones I can remember. She’s always been obsessed about hunting me down. I guess because… she doesn’t want me to leave the dungeon? I’d say she made that pretty clear, honestly. A little too clear for my pure, summer-virgin heart, but… hey, everyone has their own way of living and it’s not my place to judge them for it. I mean, if she wants to jump my bones then I’ll have to make a hard-pass just out of the morality of it all. But… it’s flattering?

I don’t really think about stuff like that anymore. Not since that time I was a slime-girl. Not since…

Ah nevermind, you don’t care about that, guy, right? Let’s keep on track here.

  Then again she did slit my throat and uh… her own. But that’s life in the dungeon. It can happen, you know? Communication and cultural barriers can be really tricky down here. One hundred floors and easily twice as many different kinds of trash-mobs and things get complicated fast. Not including the humans and elves and all of those types. Ah. Still. I’m going to leave the dungeon. I’ve set my heart on it so… sorry thief-girl? I guess? It’s not you, it’s me.

Also, sorry Georg, I hope you keep your eyes.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

I float.

  These last few lives have been pretty… intense. Is it just me or are things getting weird lately? Then again I guess things have always been weird. Hmm. Even now as I float I can’t get her strange expressions out of my mind. Her strange gazes and strange ramblings, her strange deranged laughs. She smelled nice though, like the forest. So that was neat. Is that a creepy thing to say?

I feel like things are getting a little blurry here, ethically speaking.

Anywho, I’m going to go out on a limb here friend, stay with me okay? I know this is going to sound weird but… well, I think thief-girl is just a little eccentric. Maybe a little bit kooky, you know? A few droplets short of a slime, if you will.

Hard to believe, I know. But I think she hasn’t, uh… well, she hasn’t held up as well to the whole respawning forever and ever situation we have going on here. Then again, maybe she has? Maybe it is me? Maybe I’m in the wrong here with my… passivity.

Maybe there’s something to embracing the nihilism of it all. If you’re going to spend all of eternity trapped in the dungeon, you may as well have a good enough time to make a cult of demon worshiping zealots jealous, right?

But that’s not what I am, I remind myself. I can get out. I know I can get out. I just need to keep going, to climb higher. To leave the dungeon. I can get out and… I don’t know. I don’t know what happens after that. I don’t know what happens when I escape. But…

I think about those frenzied green eyes that had gazed so deeply into my own. Those eyes that want to stop me. That want to keep me here forever for some reason I haven’t deciphered just yet.

But that’s what I want.

I want to get out.

That’s what I want to live for. To keep living for. To keep dying for. For that day. For that day when I get out.

When I get us all out.

I wonder if when this is all over, if we can stop this whole thing? If we can just… coexist. You know, not like in the sense that we do now where we spend our days stabbing each other. No, I want it to be the exact same but… without the stabbing?

  Bet the hero is fun to talk with. Oh man, I wish I had run into some of the others first. I really want to talk to them now that I think about it. Maybe we could work something out? I’d be all, hey, don’t kill me? And they’d be all, yeah, sure. The exit’s that way. Then I’d say thanks and wave goodbye and we’d all go our own ways.

That would be nice. But I bet it isn’t going to happen.

If she doesn’t want me to leave the dungeon, I bet she won’t be thrilled about me trying to… well, do exactly that.

  Visions of the menu window return to my mind’s eye now that I have a chance to breathe, metaphorically speaking. A friends list? Does the menu have something like that? Are we friends? Is uh… is that something friends do to each other? I always wanted a friend, so that’s good news? I guess I have one now.

I wouldn’t know, honestly. It’s a serious question though.

  I guess it does exist, the window, I mean, we all saw it, right? Is that how she keeps finding me? How she always finds me? Because she has a menu with me on it? A window that tells her exactly where I am? That seems unfair in a way, tell you what. Then again I could add her to my own if it’s like she said. I could always tell where she is then too. It was even her idea, though… I think she meant it differently than I mean it. Then again, why am I already on her list but she’s not on mine?

It was purple though. It was purple like mine.

The hero-party doesn’t have purple menus, guy, remember?

The hero-party I know and love has golden menus.

  So why is hers purple, like demon-miasma’s? Like the lance-hero’s? Did his party have purple menus? She said we decided on it together, so… was one of my past lives part of lance-hero’s party? Was she? Or is it just a happy coincidence? I guess there are only so many colors. Good ones at least. Then again… I don’t know how uh, well, a menu is made. If that makes sense? I feel like today was full of answers, but… I just have more questions than ever.

Isn’t that how it always is?

I wonder if thief-girl will maybe just want to talk things out next time without all the stabbing and cutting and attempted blood-seducing. I kind of hope so, but I doubt it. Ah, oh well. We’ll cross that bridge when we get th-