“Mina! Mina, please wake up! Oh my God, Mina, please tell me you’re okay! Oh my gosh, you have a baby, what the fuck is wrong with me letting you walk into this crazy fucking hard Dungeon mode without getting you to at least clear the first two modes first? Why the fuck did I even think xenomorphs were a good idea for Dungeon monsters? Who does that? I’m such a fucking asshole. What the fuck is wrong with me?”
Mina woke to the sound of Carol moaning, crying, and cursing herself out in obvious distress. The caterwauling emanated from the walls all around her.
“Wha—oh, my gosh…” Mina shook her head lightly.
“Mina! You’re okay!”
Carol’s voice felt shrill and piercing, and Mina covered her ears for a moment until Carol quieted.
“I think I have a little headache,” Mina said quietly. “Could you, um, lower the volume a little, please?”
“Of course,” Carol said. It sounded like a whisper from right beside Mina’s ear, which was much less unpleasant but had an unexpectedly creepy effect.
“How long was I out?” Mina asked. She looked down at her body carefully. There was a big hole in the Perfect Skinsuit, baring her midriff. She could see her belly button and, just below it, a tiny red hole.
I guess I healed it pretty darn perfectly, she thought. I’m not dead. That’s nice.
She wanted to go to sleep and rest for twelve hours.
“A few minutes,” Carol said. “Just long enough for me to freak out and start wondering what my afterlife would be like.”
Mina nodded and shook her head with a small smile. She and Carol both knew exactly what the Dungeon Core was talking about.
“It feels like I was out longer,” Mina said. “I’m still very tired, but I would think I’d be feeling worse. I should check how much Mana I have left, since I’m not completely healed yet…” She gestured at the little hole in her stomach.
“Oh, Mina, I hid a potion on this level!” Carol said excitedly, her voice rising to an irritating level again.
Mina pulled her armor away from her head and shook out her long, dark hair.
“Where’s the potion?” she asked.
—
“So, that’s what happened,” Carol finished.
“I see,” said James, teeth clenched. “Well, I’m glad she survived. Sounds like it was a pretty close call.”
“Um, yeah. I’m not going to lie, it was scary.”
“So, is Mina back outside yet?” James asked.
“She took a potion that was hidden in her Dungeon,” Carol said. There was a long pause. “And she said she wanted to fight the final boss on the last level of hard mode.”
James bit his lower lip so hard that he drew a little trickle of blood that rolled slowly from his mouth down into his goatee.
“She’s already decided that, has she?” he finally asked, once the urge to curse had faded.
“Not exactly,” Carol said. “She was about to go right around the time you asked about her, but I think she felt bad, knowing that you might not want her to go. I don’t quite get it, but maybe that’s why I never had any long term partners when I was human. I told her all about the final level, so she could have all the information she needed to fight and win—or to decide she didn’t want to continue. She told me she wanted to go. Then I told her that you were asking about her. And after that, she said that she wanted to know what your feelings were. She says she’s determined to go and get stronger. It’s really only one more monster for her to fight. But it almost felt like she wanted to get your permission—or your blessing?”
“My wife is a very stubborn woman,” James said with a bittersweet smile. “She is trying to get me on board before she does what she wants to do. If I tell her no, there’s about a ninety-five percent chance she’ll do what I want, but she probably won’t be happy about it. But she wanted me to know that she thinks she can do this. Maybe the main reason Mina phrased it the way she did is that she wants to know if I think she can do it.”
He wasn’t sure if he was happy or angry that she would jump into risking her life in this way, after she had been so severely injured on the previous level.
On the one hand, it made him feel that she was like him—and he found this particular similarity attractive. He had always known he married a fighter, someone who would never turn her back and run if someone threatened the two of them.
It was an essential quality in a wife, in his mind. She had to be strong-willed and sort of tough. Brave. Without courage, a person could not have any other virtues.
On the other hand…
I really wish she would be willing to turn and run sometimes. One of us has to survive and take care of James Junior…
“So, what should I tell her?” Carol asked.
—
“All right, I’ll continue on, then,” Mina said. “Thanks for letting me know what he thought.” She lowered her face, trying to hide a blush from Carol’s view, which Mina imagined came from a vantage point above her.
It’s sweet that he’s worried about me. But he still understood what I wanted and supported it. She wanted to kiss her husband.
“Okay, I guess,” Carol said. She sounded worried, like she still thought that she ought to do something more to boost Mina’s chances of survival.
Mina couldn’t imagine what else Carol might try. She had already told Mina everything she could possibly want to know about the final level.
“Thank you for your help,” Mina said.
“Of course,” Carol said, still clearly nervous. “Happy to be of service.”
Mina started taking the Perfect Skinsuit off. She would replace it with another that she had Looted from one of the nearly two dozen dead creatures in this level.
On the last level, she probably would not need the protection, per Carol’s explanation of the challenge that awaited her, but it never hurt to be prepared.
“I’ll just go back to observing James while you change,” said Carol as Mina’s suit peeled away from around her shoulders.
Mina almost felt as if she could sense Carol’s presence dissipate, as if Mina had been talking to a ghost rather than the creator of the entire structure that Mina occupied.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
She was left alone to think through her game plan, though she already knew it would be a simple one, thanks to Carol’s detailed description of the final level.
As she peeled the nearly skin-tight armor off, Mina wrinkled her nose. The material clung to her thighs and underwear, stuck on the semi-congealed blood she had shed on this level. She had to apply some elbow grease to begin getting the legs unstuck.
Despite her advance knowledge of the upcoming challenge, the slowly unfolding sight of her lower body encrusted with her own blood made her question whether what she was doing next was really sane.
Who would choose to go into the third level after having the experience I just had? she thought.
But she already knew the answer.
Someone who wanted to prove to herself that she could have been a help rather than a hindrance to James if she had gone with him into the expert mode levels.
Mina still wasn’t sure about that, given how the second level on hard mode had nearly killed her.
She pulled the suit down her calves to her feet—still struggling against the syrupy, semi-congealed blood that seemed to have seeped all the way to the bottom of the suit and turned her whole lower body sticky—and finally managed to yank it off. The material separated from her feet and ankles in one last quick tug, with a little sucking sound as it peeled away from the adhesive blood.
Mina looked down at her bare legs and shook her head. She looked like she had just come from wading in a pool of blood and had forgotten to towel off.
Yep, I’m crazy. I just conducted a practical, hands-on experiment to find out how much blood there was in my body, and now I’m ready for a repeat.
She conjured a small amount of water—fortunately, the potion Carol had hidden in the level was a pretty powerful one, which restored her to full Health and Mana—and manipulated it into a little river that rotated around her pelvis, legs, and feet, to rinse her lower body off.
Then she dressed in one of the non-damaged Perfect Skinsuits she had obtained from Looting the other dead monsters, and she walked down the stairs.
Mina did not allow herself to hesitate now that she was ready for the final battle. James wouldn’t have hesitated.
I have every possible advantage, she reminded herself as her feet mechanically found the next step and the step after that. I know everything about the final boss that there is to know.
And as she walked, she poured Mana into her wand, preparing the most powerful attack she had ever launched—the move that should guarantee her immediate victory.
Still, when she reached the bottom and set eyes on the final level and its resident monster, the sight made her shudder. She couldn’t help seeing the image of the beast that had almost killed her, superimposed on this much larger version of the creatures.
Everything the other creatures had been, this monster was almost the same, but larger. The same bug-like black body, exoskeletal form covered in what looked like an external rib cage and ending in a long tail that Mina could not see from the entrance.
Differentiating it were two extra limbs that looked clumsily slapped on, and the fact that the giant black head was not quite as phallic-shaped as the previous monsters’ heads had been. The top of this one’s head was molded to look more like a crown rather than a blimp.
And, of course, as Carol had mentioned, this creature was female.
The proof of it lay on the floor between Mina and the monster.
Hundreds of eggs, which Carol had explained contained the Perfect Parasite creature Mina had killed on the first level. They would attack anything that entered the final boss’s territory.
“How did the bat manage to defeat the boss?” Mina had asked, exasperated.
“I actually hadn’t made all the adjustments to hard mode that I’ve made now by that point,” Carol admitted, sounding slightly embarrassed. “I thought that since she cleared all the levels, I should make the monsters more dangerous—more like the movies. I figured that someone like Evangeline had managed to mostly keep her distance while she killed them, so I increased the number of monsters on the second level, and I gave them the acid blood…”
Mina sighed and shook her head at the memory. She supposed she understood what Carol was doing. She was fine-tuning. The hard mode Dungeon had only had one other challenger before Mina, and it had seemed too easy. Now, hopefully Carol understood that she had deviated too far in the deadly direction.
She tore her eyes away from the imposing sight before her—the hundreds of eggs that began only a few feet away from the final level’s entrance, and the giant insect that took up almost the entirety of the room besides the floor space devoted to the eggs.
Mina looked down at her wand. She judged that she had charged it with enough Mana.
She hoped it would be enough. It was almost all she had. The wand gave off an intense orange glow that almost hurt her eyes when she looked directly at it.
Mina stepped into the Dungeon, just setting one foot into the space.
The boss stirred, tossing its giant head with a hiss. Some of the eggs nearest to Mina began opening, surfaces peeling back like flowers opening their petals.
Mina launched her attack. The largest single burst of fire that she had ever seen exploded out of her wand, and it was all she could do to control the direction of the enormous blast.
Blow up everything in the room in front of me, she thought. Kill it all.
The flames moved faster than her brain could process the movement, incinerating the nearest eggs in a fraction of a second and briskly moving on. Mina only got a good look at the aftermath, the ashes and dust that littered the bottom of the cave.
The explosion made it all the way to the back of the cave, and Mina felt resistance. Physical resistance from the only strong entity in the room, the boss monster.
It felt like the thing was trying to shove the fire back—trying to push Mina back, as she was the one controlling the flames, pushing the explosion forward with her mind.
The boss’s skin was much tougher than the eggs had been. It burned anyway. As the creature’s limbs began to char, and the flesh below was singed, the physical resistance gradually evaporated.
Mina pushed the explosion onward until it struck the far wall and pressed it down and out, leaving nothing to chance—purging the whole room. It was the closest thing to a nuclear blast that humans could achieve in this post-technological world.
She felt it when the flames could find nothing more to burn. The feeling of emptiness, hunger that could not be sated. She sagged slightly, her Will relaxed for just a moment, and the flames disappeared.
The notifications began to stream in.
[You killed Perfect Parasite Lv. 10! You gained 120 exp!]
[You killed Perfect Parasite Lv. 10! You gained 120 exp!]
[...]
[You killed Perfect Predator Matriarch Lv. 30! You gained 2200 exp!]
[Witch of Thessaly leveled up!]
[System-Boosted Human leveled up!]
[You killed Perfect Parasite Lv. 10! You gained 120 exp!]
[You killed Perfect Parasite Lv. 10! You gained 120 exp!]
[...]
The Perfect Parasite notification repeated a hundred more times, interspersed with levels for Witch of Thessaly and System-Boosted Human, and Mina felt repeated surges of power hit her as she leveled multiple times.
[A Race Evolution is available. Review? Y/N]
[Congratulations! You have cleared Hard Mode of Dungeon: Carol’s Place!]
[Your score was 18,079. See Leaderboard? Y/N]
[Sufficient experience accrued. Witch of Thessaly leveled up!]
“Yes!” she exclaimed. She pumped her fist, but both the movement and her voice were a bit lifeless.
Mina felt strangely tired and exhilarated at the same time. Just like when she had come near the brink of death earlier, she had used up nearly all of her Mana with this last attack. But with all the kills powering her up, her reserves had bounced back. Now she felt like she had more energy than she knew what to do with—and also like she could fall asleep if she laid her head on a pillow.
She ignored the offer to look at the Leaderboard. She did not want to see that she was in second or third place after all that effort.
I have so many Free Points to distribute, she thought. She had acquired so many levels at once. And Race Evolution. She remembered that had come at a pivotal moment in James’s journey. When he killed the Spider Queen, the first leader of a species he had slaughtered.
Mina had replicated the experience a little artificially, using every bit of assistance available to her to ambush the leader of a species Carol had generated, but maybe she was starting to catch up.
I need to check my Status out. Have to distribute the Free Points. I’ll talk to James about this Race Evolution thing before I do anything about it. And then…
Mina yawned.
Well, before all that, I wonder if I have time for a nap…