“W-What? Known what? Hei, I don’t understand! You’re not making any sense!” Yin seems to pick up on my rising panic. “What’s happening?!”

“Mandatory System Events will brutally punish those who don’t participate. However, this is a Citywide Secret Dungeon. At our level, it shouldn’t appear. Ugh…it all makes sense now why I don’t remember this city. Listen...” Suddenly, I stop talking. Wait, I have a way out of this. What if I just killed myself right here and now? I’d have to go back…do everything over again. It would be awful after coming so far. But I don’t know if I even have a choice. I mean, we’ve essentially entered a dead end!

Seeing her scared eyes, it’s obvious I can’t tell Yin what I know. It’d only freak her out.

“Hello? Hei?” Yin asks, darting in front of my face while holding the ginger cat in her arms. It hisses, still staring at the place where the pillar of light disappeared. Thinking it over, I make my choice. I’ll go inside and check it out. Maybe it won’t be as bad as I think. It’s better than just giving up and resetting. Who knows if I’d even come back? Or if I’d make another mistake when falling on my blade and accidentally set my zombie on the world? No, it’s safer to keep living until the end.

“System Punishments are basically death traps. The survival rate is so low it’s usually not measured in whole percentages. We’ll need to participate in the dungeon to avoid the punishment. There’s no knowing the difficulty of this System Event unless we check it out.” I explain robotically, trying to keep Yin from hearing my inner turmoil. She can’t know the truth. There’s no way anyone could think straight if they knew.

“I…see. And the odds of surviving are greater for System Events than System Punishments, usually?” She asks, some of the fear leaving her face. I gulp, hiding my expression behind a hand as I nod.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Y-Yea. Usually…the System wants you to participate.” I say, and then start walking. “Come on, we need to get there before the timer runs out. Every Hunter in the area is going to be heading to Tiendas City. As a matter of fact, if I’m not mistaken, even regular people who enter the area of a Mandatory System Event will be automatically promoted to a Lvl. 1 Hunter. So it’s going to be crowded. We better hurry!”

“Ah! Wow, that’s crazy.” Yin bites her lip, struggling to keep up with me as I take big steps to hide the indecision in my heart. Did I make the right call? Do I even want to know what this Mandatory System Event will do to us? Can I bear to let go of this future we’ve finally made together? “Hei, are you…okay? Your shoulders are rolled up and you look so tense again, you’re not hiding something from me, are you?”

“My secrets are mine, Yin.” The words I say to cover up my indecision are harsh. I can hear Yin’s breath catch and while I’m pretty sure there might be tears in her eyes right now, I don’t dare look back to see. This Yin is starting to know me too well.

She might figure out the truth from my face.

The thing is…Tiendas City, now I remember it slightly. In my memories, it’s nothing. A ruined place full of the dead and not much else. There’s no mention of a Mandatory System Event, or a Citywide Secret Dungeon. As a matter of fact, according to the official records, the first Citywide Secret Dungeon didn’t appear until someone hit Lvl. 35. Which can only mean one of two things.

One, if we’re lucky, my memories are wrong. This timeline is different, and the Calamity is just behaving differently than in my past life. That’s a possibility. But I doubt it. The other option is probably far more likely.

Two, if my memories are correct, and Tiendas City really was just a smoking crater, and there was no record of a Citywide Secret Dungeon spawning until Lvl. 35, then every single Hunter who entered this place died. Whatever the Mandatory System Event was, it was so difficult and so brutal that no one survived either the System Punishment, or the Mandatory System Event. Out of the countless people in the entire region who saw the pillar of light…no one managed to escape to tell the world.

Damn. What kind of sick person designed this?