Now that he’d spent several hours traveling through a world within the Fragmented Ruins, Jayce became even more curious about what these fragments actually represented. They couldn’t possibly be real places plucked out of history. If they were, the fragment he was in was just too illogical. Currently, they had only found three large rooms within a maze of tight corridors, and that was counting the room they started in. The largest one held that monster flower and was hundreds of meters wide while the other two were only around the size of a sports field. There were no signs of intelligent life or civilization, aside from that raised platform and the circle of stairs surrounding it.
Rather than something built by a lost culture, it looked more like an infinitely generated game world. A few rules and parameters guided the construction of an endless number of corridors and rooms, all regularly spawning monsters to be killed.
On the other hand, the aged stone bricks, creeping moss and variety of fungi gave the entire fragment a certain mood. This mood made Jayce feel like he was only seeing a very small part of a much larger whole. Because of this, he hesitated to write this place off as a thoughtless, machine-generated product.
“I’m tired. Let’s end the day here.”
In a particular corridor, Mize stopped and waved her hand. Instantly, the two sub-heads of the centipede who had broken off from the main body curled up and died. Their heads slowly melted into their bodies and they turned into a pair of green lumps, which the main body hastily devoured. Two minutes later, the main body had grown a noticeable amount, but not as much as Jayce would have expected. Mize brought it into her bracelet while the feathered dragon remained beside her.
Mize glanced at the rough stone wall and frowned.
“Sit over here.”
There was no need to clarify who she was talking about because she quickly followed up with a soundless order. Jayce moved to the wall and sat down. Then Mize dropped herself into his lap as if it were the most natural thing in the world. She yawned, leaned into his chest and wrapped his arms around her like she’d done in that hazy blue room. The feathered dragon stood nearby, vigilantly guarding the hallway.
While Jayce was cursing internally, the young girl’s head drooped. In this dark and hostile environment, she fell asleep in less than a minute. Jayce could hardly believe it, even while he felt her chest rising and falling in a steady rhythm. Soon, he even heard her light snoring.
A chill crept across Jayce’s spine and he looked to his left. The space beside him seemed empty, but Jayce could see the light twisting a little when he squinted. More importantly, he felt someone’s ice-cold glare penetrating him like two frozen daggers.
‘What are you glaring at me for? I can’t move even if I get a cramp.’
Mize’s commands were as meticulous as he’d come to expect. Jayce could barely move any part of his body while she slept. Although Mize was soft and light, and the milky scent from her hair was a much-appreciated change from what he’d been smelling for the past several hours, Jayce could still confidently describe his situation as tortuous.
Narrowing his eyes, Jayce felt it was quite strange. Mize didn’t seem to hold him in any regard, so she definitely wasn’t doing this out of affection. He didn’t sense any feelings of lust either. If anything, this physical contact seemed to be a way to make her feel at ease. Despite sounding confident, Mize was stressed enough to need a comforting ritual before she could sleep—was the theory Jayce eventually settled on.
Five hours of agony later, Mize’s eyes fluttered open.
“Mmn. I’ve thought things through.” She muttered while leaning into Jayce and stretching. “I want you to cooperate with me in an experiment. In exchange, I’ll give you more information about classes.”
When he heard that, Jayce’s mind went blank. Mize turned to look up at him and he stared down at her, not reacting in the slightest. What she said was simply too far out of his predictions. Jayce was sure that she was angry with him and wanted to assert more control as his master. He couldn’t fathom why she would suddenly switch from ordering him around to making a transaction.
“Answer me.” Mize snapped.
“I’m willing to.” Jayce answered honestly.
There was no point in worrying about what the experiment was. If Mize wanted him to do something, even if she wanted him to die, there was nothing Jayce could do about it. With that being the case, he may as well collect whatever benefits she was willing to give him.
“Good.”
Mize stood up and brushed herself off. She ran a hand through her hair, which hadn’t lost an ounce of its luster, before flattening her other hand. A small brown sphere appeared in it out of nowhere. Mize ate the thing that looked like a chocolate ball and then pulled out a sealed glass vial out of thin air. When the vial appeared, the surrounding air immediately changed. The silver liquid inside the clear vial seemed to be radiating pure lifeforce. Jayce felt he might live longer just by standing next to it. Mize irreverently broke the seal and drank it in one gulp.
“Your actions yesterday caused me to rethink my strategy a little. The way you received the Marksman class was out of my expectations. I had always planned for you to have Marksman as your second class. I also know which secondary classes I want those two to have. What’s strange is that you were the first among my slaves to unlock a second class, even though your level is currently the lowest. At first, I thought this was because you were mostly relying on your artifacts and not stimulating your main class. Now, after controlling you more rigidly, I’m almost positive that the issue was my orders. I think there’s a chance you’ll gain levels more efficiently if I let you act on your own.”
Jayce’s brow twitched as he suppressed a more violent facial expression. Apparently, Mize hadn’t been angry with him at all. She had only been stricter with him because she was experimenting. Of course, from her perspective, informing him beforehand would have been a waste of breath. She only let him in the loop after she slept on her decision.
“So, basically, making decisions on my own gives me more experience than being ordered around?”
“Experience?” Mize cocked her head. “I understand what you’re saying but it sounds like you have the wrong idea. Raising your class’s level isn’t about gaining experience, it’s about finding the correct stimulus.”
Something clicked inside Jayce’s head.
“Then, you had me kill those flesh blobs with my own hands because that would stimulate my Bloodrager class?”
“Yes. Bloodrager is a brutal class that focuses on attacking without care for injuries. The simplest way to stimulate it is to fight while being injured by your opponent, but that isn’t efficient with your weak body. Instead, I had you kill an enemy at close range while leaving yourself defenseless.”
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Jayce nodded. Although he’d figured Mize had a reason for making him kill like that, he hadn’t realized it was for his Bloodrager class. The RPG games Jayce had played on Earth mostly had characters level up by killing monsters and gaining experience. In this world, it seemed there was no intrinsic reward for making a killing blow. How one fought was much more important than the final result.
“By the way, a Marksman strives for efficiency in ranged combat. In other words, you should stimulate it by shooting accurately and targeting weak spots. I’ll teach you more during breaks. For now, I hope you’ll coordinate with me as much as possible even without my orders. Other than that, today’s plan will be the same as yesterday.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Though he still wasn’t living on his own terms, Jayce was relieved to feel the invisible shackles on him slacken. He sensed that he could have even spat in Mize’s face and refused her offer, though he likely wouldn’t have lived very long if he did.
Mize brought out their team’s A-Rank centipede and it fell into formation along with the feathered dragon. Jayce also quickly moved to the position that he was familiar with. They got about three steps before a gout of flame erupted from the ground ten meters in front of them. Red flames spewed upwards and formed a familiar flag-like shape. Trapped within those flames were an uncountable number of images, each flickering by like blinking fireflies.
Before Mize and the others could react, another flame appeared behind them. This one was pure white and glowed with an inviting light. Jayce felt an indescribable aura of safety from those white flames. While the other fire tempted him with countless mysteries, this one promised him safe haven.
“Oh, a revolution has passed.” Mize observed calmly. “Every 27 hours, we’ll get a chance to enter a new fragment or leave the dungeon.”
“Is that based on your planet’s revolution?”
“No. The Nexus system has its own timekeeping method. You could say it’s the standard in the Upper Bound, but every world manages their own calendar system and time zones. Nine revolutions make up a cycle. We’ll be spending a total of one and a half cycles in this dungeon.”
Jayce didn’t need to do the math since Erilin had already told him they would be staying for approximately two weeks. He knew that people on Mize’s planet measured time in different increments than he did. Generally, the system would translate everything to Earth hours, days, etc. Sometimes, Jayce would even hear multiple translations for the same sentence. Two weeks was 1.5 cycles as well as X weeks on Mize’s planet. These definitions crowded his mind and disoriented him somewhat.
On the opposite end of the spectrum were words that didn’t have any equivalent Earth definition. When Jayce heard these words, time seemed to slow down as he waited for the translation to catch up with reality. However, Jayce had come to learn that this wasn’t a fault of the system. It was actually his own mind that was lagging as it struggled to match these words with concepts that he understood. That was how ‘a space where mana regularly transforms into monsters’ became a
Jayce shook his head, sending a silent prayer of thanks to the system for its hard work.
“Do you hear something odd?” Mize suddenly asked.
“…Yea. What is that?”
The two paused as they listened carefully to a faint clanging sound that echoed through the passageway. The noise came with mechanical regularly and it carried an ethereal quality that made one unsure if they’d heard anything at all.
“It’s coming from the flame gate.” Erilin’s voice nearly made Mize and Jayce jump. “There seems to be something wrong with the gate to the next fragment.”
Jayce scrutinized the red flame more carefully. Now that Erilin pointed it out, it seemed obvious that the sound had been coming from there. The flame was fluttering more erratically than the large one he’d watched Mize enter, but Jayce couldn’t sense anything else.
Mize backed up a little. “Stay on your guard and wait for the gate to close. It’ll vanish in less than ten minutes.”
“Do you know what’s going on?”
“No.”
To their surprise, Erilin spoke again.
“I’ve never seen or heard of such a phenomenon. As your guardian, I’m allowed to suggest that you avoid actions that would risk the true goal of this competition. Of course, the decision is ultimately yours, my lady.”
‘The true goal? Entering that fragment might cause them to fail at their goal? Is that related to how they need Mize and the others to leave this dungeon alive?’
“Of course we’re avoiding it. Every fragment we enter will scale to our team’s current level. I want to stay here until the level difference starts slowing us down.”
Ten minutes later, the two gates vanished and the mysterious sound left with them. That strange moment passed without incident and so Mize’s team could only ignore it and move on.
---
A couple days later, inside a large room within the world fragment.
At the bottom of the stairs leading to a familiar platform, rainbow-colored feathers flew through the air. These feathers would force anyone who looked at them stop and admire their beauty, but they were just a backdrop to the violent battle that was happening around them. The feathered dragon fought furiously against a horde of monsters. Sometimes, their attacks would touch the dragon’s body and pass right through as if they were fighting a mirage. Other times, their blows would strike true and a new stream of blood would flow from the beast. Nevertheless, its attacks only grew more brutal over time while the horde was growing thinner and thinner. With the dragon’s feathers hanging in the air, preventing it from being overwhelmed by numbers, the outcome was inevitable.
On another part of the stairs, Jayce was running with Seeker in his hand. A bloody flesh blob approached him, and he resolutely pointed his barrel at it, nearly placing it inside the creature’s quivering bulk. He pierced the core in two shots and kept moving. Above him, several ghostly white mushrooms hovered in the air. They ‘flapped’ their caps like jellyfish while the eyes hiding in their gills stared greedily at their escaping prey. On the bottom of each stalk was a gnashing mouth that was partially covered by thin, rootlike hairs.
Pivoting, Jayce shot down a few of them and then turned to run before they caught up with him. He’d seen what happened when those monsters latched onto an enemy with their teeth. Once their jaw was locked in place, their ‘beard’ would burrow into the victim’s skin. When the feathered dragon had been bit, the mushroom stubbornly remained rooted on it even while the centipede ate it alive. Fortunately, they weren’t very fast flyers and Seeker’s bullets tore through their light bodies like wet tissue paper.
Jayce had to be careful though. Seeker couldn’t shoot fast enough to kill them all at once, and there were plenty of monsters on the ground for him to run into. The mushroom beasts that didn’t fly had also inherited a large maw from the aspects of hunger in this dungeon’s mana. They slunk across the stone bricks like snails and were even slower than the flesh blobs and flying mushrooms. Despite their lack of mobility, their dark brown caps would dart out like vipers when prey entered their deceptively long range. Unlike the flying mushrooms, these ones weren’t mushroom sized at all. Most of them reached above Jayce’s knees while some grew higher than his waist. They were arguably the greatest threat to him in this area because they could easily cause him to trip and become overwhelmed.
All the while, he was carefully rationing his mana. Both Seeker and Keen Eyes drew from his mana reserves, and he need to enhance his eyes to track those ghostly flying mushrooms. Fortunately, he didn’t need much of an enhancement and Seeker was a very efficient weapon. Mana was the least of his problems for the moment.
On top of the platform, Mize and the centipede were dealing with the source of all this chaos. This was the first time they had entered a large room with fungi monsters and the area's ‘boss’ had ruined plan A almost immediately. The monster resting at the top of the platform was a fungus beast in the shape of a dog. It had many eyes all over its body and each exuded a powerful fear effect. Jayce and the feathered dragon simply couldn’t look at the creature without losing their wits. Even Mize’s commands couldn’t free them. Ultimately, the fern centipede was forced to deal with the fungus dog first, leaving the horde of monsters Mize had gathered to Jayce and the feathered dragon.
Jayce felt both blessed and cursed that his teammate was immune to the fungus dog’s eyes. That centipede simply couldn’t process the emotion known as fear, and that, coupled with its voracity for all forms of flesh, gave it a huge advantage in this world fragment. However, if it didn’t have such an ability, Mize would have stepped in by now and killed the higher life order monster herself. Then Jayce could stop running for his life.
Breathing heavily, Jayce turned and fired at the flying mushrooms again. While he worked, some part of his brain kept wanting to laugh at how absurd his life had become.