[NEW ABILITY] [MINOR CURE]

Removes minor status-ailments from the target. Efficiency is a percentage based off of the user’s WIS relative to the ailment-strength-level.

Success Chance(%) = (WIS * LVL)

“You really do scream a lot,” says Alleluia, her voice traveling down the long pipe, which he runs his hand along as he walks down the tunnel. After he had finished hacking up the monster’s blood that had filled his lungs, he ate another couple of nibbles of the corpse before getting up and walking the other way.

At first, it was a little awkward, because he had to hold his entrails inside of himself while his body grew itself back shut. But he found that, despite it being, in theory at least, traumatizingly disgusting, that after a minute or two of holding his bulging, meat-filled intestines in his own two hands, that it became rather uninteresting with surprising speed.

Sure, it hurt. But really, he was too busy licking the blood off of his mouth to notice. He hums as he walks, noticing that he is smiling.

“Actually, you just make a lot of noise in general,” observes the girl, a tone of wonder in her voice.

He looks at the pipe, getting ready to flick it again, but then stops himself. “You’re pretty talky yourself for someone who wants my help.”

“Canta,” says Alleluia with a sudden resolution to her voice, as if having come to a decision. He can hear a dull ‘thwack’, as if she had hit her fist into her palm.

“Huh?” he asks, not understanding what she wants.

“Canta,” she repeats a moment later. “You wanted a name, right?”

He shakes his head. “Not rea -”

“- I’m going to call you Canta,” interrupts Alleluia in an affirming tone. “It means ‘to sing’, you know?”

“I don’t sing,” he sighs, watching the darkness ahead of himself, as he listens to the soft whirring coming from the pipe.

“Screaming is close enough, Canta,” says the chiming voice. The moment she finishes her sentence, a window appears before him. “Besides, I just heard you humming a second ago.”

~*+- PROFILE -+*~ HP: ----- "Canta" SOUL: 16/16 ↑ LEVEL: 2 ↑ [https://dmrhodes.com/gallery_gen/da0af1edcafffa11f8f7f41747ab9d53.png]

EXP: 0/24

CLASS: [Sin-Eater]

STATUS

HUNGER: You are full

THIRST: You are not thirsty

SUB-CLASS: None

RACE: ???

OBOLS: 0

STR: 06 WIS: 12 ↑ LUK: 07 DEX: 11 INT: 12 ↑↑ LOV: 03

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

[Note: Sin-Eaters do not use HEALTH and rely solely on physicalized DMG]

[Note: Sin-Eaters can only gain EXPERIENCE from eating sins. The stronger the sin, the more EXPERIENCE it is worth.]

“Canta…” he says as he rubs the back of his head before swiping away the window. Well. It’s a name. Whether it’s a good one or not, he can’t say. The one thing he does know is that he must have gotten a level-up from that fight. Well, no, apparently not from the fight, but from that strange, dream-like experience that came after it.

‘Levels’ are the measure of someone’s ability and talent. The higher a person’s level is, the stronger they are in both the physical aspects of their body and mind. Also, a higher level person has access to more abilities and perks, as well as different, more advanced life paths.

“Charmed to meet you, Canta,” says the voice, taking on a stiff tone as if she were some high-born person about to engage in a formal curtsy. “My name is Alleluia.”

He looks at the pipe, wanting to make some snide remark about already knowing her name. Instead, he takes a deep breath to calm himself back down. Then, lifting a hand, he flicks the pipe and then keeps walking in the same direction as the sharp echo that rings through the metal tube.

The voice on the other end lets out a slight yelp again a few moments later. He can’t hear her clearly, but he is pretty sure that he hears a single word being uttered a few steps away from her end of the pipe. “Jerk…”

Rolling his shoulders, feeling a lubricated smear of slick blood between his hairless arms and chest, he shakes himself out a little as he walks forward in an attempt to get some of the blood off of himself. It’s slowly starting to dry and to become sticky.

Not a minute later, Canta finds himself at another crossroads, the dungeon corridor splitting off into two directions, left and right, as before. The pipe follows the right-hand path, so he follows that one. It has to lead somewhere eventually, right?

He spends a while walking, perhaps an hour, just following the strange corridor and the pipe. Despite the fact that he always sticks to the right-hand side to stay with the pipe at every turn that comes, the tunnel never seems to turn back into itself, which is what he expects it to do at the very latest after the fourth right. Instead, it just keeps on going, with no trace of the passage that he has left behind. He can’t really wrap his head around it, but he also doesn’t really care enough to try.

“So, how long have you been here?” he asks Alleluia, pressing his head to the pipe to wait for her answer. It comes a few seconds later, together with the soft chiming sound of a music box being wound up.

“I do not know anymore. A long time,” replies the almost musical voice.

“What happened to everyone here?”

“They died,” replies Alleluia. Canta rolls his eyes, having already gathered that much.

“Did you kill them all?” he asks suspiciously. He listens, pressing his ear closer to the pipe, as he hears an indistinct muttering. But he can’t really make out the words. Closing his eyes, he tries to focus.

*DIIING*

Canta lets out an agitated yelp. Jumping back, he clutches the ear that was pressed against the pipe. “Fuck!” he swears under his breath. “That’s really loud,” he mutters.

“That’s what you get for being rude,” remarks the voice defensively.

“Why should I want to save you again?” asks Canta, pulling his hand away to listen to the slight ringing that is stuck inside of his ear. Continuing to mutter and grumble to himself in annoyance, he keeps walking, receiving no answer from the voice in the pipe.

Another hour passes. There is nothing here. There are no monsters. No traps. No people, treasure, or anything of the sort. It’s just a series of long stone corridors that occasionally branch off into two directions.

Sometimes, during the journey, he finds a door to a room. But then, looking inside, he sees that, in most of them, there is nothing inside. There is no furniture, no decorations, no giant throne of skulls, or piles of mangled corpses.

– Nothing.

It’s like everyone and everything in the dungeon had just packed up shop and left, carrying everything on their backs. It is desolate. Barren.

Sighing, he closes the door and keeps going, passing another destroyed and dry fountain on his way.

“So what killed everyone?” asks Canta, resuming their conversation now after two hours. “- If it wasn’t you?” he adds on, half-sarcastically at the end.

There is a whirring as a mechanism springs to life again. “The dungeon dried up.”

“Huh?” asks Canta, looking down at the first disturbance he has seen in a while. A body. A skeleton, wearing a set of scale-mail armor. He tilts his head, looking at the dusty corpse that sits here all by itself.

“The dungeon-magic,” says Alleluia. “It all dried up. So everyone dried up along with it.” There is a whirring. “Dungeon-magic is the thing that dungeons run off of. If dungeons were a river, then dungeon-magic is water. No magic. No dungeon.”

Canta looks at the pipe and then at the dried, lonely skeleton sitting here on its own. The final request of the wendigo’s soul returns to his mind. He gets up, waving the skeleton off, as if to tell it that he can’t be bothered. Him? Carry a whole body from down here all the way to the surface? Just to bury it? Technically speaking, by having died underground, Maschif is already buried.

“Not my problem,” he says loud and clearly, dusting his hands off as he walks down the path for emphasis.

“Huh?” asks Alleluia.

“Oh. Not you,” says Canta, looking at the pipe. But he stops a second later, turning back around to look at the body.

His eye twitches as he stares at it for a moment. “Fuck,” he sighs to himself. Walking back to the ancient corpse, he bends down and rubs his thumb over a thick smear of the dried wendigo blood that still coats his small chest. “You’re lucky that I’m such a softy,” mutters Canta, pressing his thumb against the skull to smear some of Yashira onto Mashif. It’s not a burial. But as far as he sees it, it counts well enough. It’s just as symbolic as one, right? At least they’re reunited together, in a sense. “If you get to the other side, tell them to cut me a break, okay?” he says, getting up and dusting his hands clean of the matter a second time.

“Who are you talking to?” asks Alleluia.

“So, the dungeon dried up, huh?” he asks, ignoring her question.

“Yes,” she responds, a slight winding of a chain audible behind her voice. “That is why everything is so empty,” she explains. “Most of the monsters and a lot of the things were made by the dungeon-magic. When it went, so did they.”

Something rattles in the darkness behind him. Canta turns around, looking at the crumbling skeleton, watching as it falls apart into a heap of dust. Everything is silent as he stands there, just watching the body fall into itself, the single red smear of color vanishing into its collapsing form. He is sure that it was solid enough when he touched it a second ago?

Canta shakes his head and keeps on walking, pushing into the lightlessness of the underground, which only seems to grow deeper and darker the further he walks, with only the sounds of his bare footsteps and the mechanical whirring of some roaring, distant mechanism to accompany him.

It’s probably best to just not worry about it.