I'll spare you a lot of descriptions of me slaughtering Dungeon baddies that would, frankly, include a lot of repeats, only hitting some highlights along the way.

I waited a few days and got contacted by Harry's lawyer, who transferred $280 million to my bank, and also handed over three skillbooks that Harry had intended to give me on the day I'd left Armand Bayou with Merry--books that had been a part of the deal he'd cut with someone when he sold the Devil's Tail that I'd gotten in my last level-appropriate jaunt through Pearland. Since I hadn't asked at the time, now was my first chance to know exactly what skill books I'd gotten.

I was bemused to find that one of the books I'd been offered was Telekinetic Sense--something that, at the time Harry had received it from the buyer, I hadn't had yet, and I guess Harry didn't know you could unlock it from Telekinesis proper. Since my own copy of the Skill had been devoured, I was eager to get it back, but when I tried to use the skillbook, it was blocked--Merry took a look at the mechanism and said it was one of those irritating rules from above that she couldn't find a way to edit or remove, apparently keyed to the fact that I had destroyed the skill of my own accord.

Second was Human Sage--a skill I'd heard of but wasn't entirely sure that I wanted to spend the time to play with. If it did for people what Skill Sage did for skills, it was probably a more formal and more limited version of what they called cultivation. I activated the skillbook and took the skill regardless, figuring that it would enhance my ability to sense and manipulate things inside of me, but I figured that I wouldn't have the time or the inclination to really do a deep dive on it.

The last skillbook was "Disintegration Aura" and I snapped it up immediately. It did pretty much what you'd expect, and with my class feature to wrap skills into my manifested weapons, well, suffice it to say that brought my damage up by a fair bit. Well, the Aura extended to my weapons anyway--only using it on the weapon itself was more of a cost-saving measure than anything, though I imagined I'd find a way to make it more intense with practice.

That said, I was beginning to really get sick of the Executioner's Blade, and I went out of my way to find a much more normal longsword of an appropriate rarity and level on the marketplace, one I would still be able to absorb in a reasonable time--unlike the Slenderman equipment. I definitely wanted that armor, but I'd have to grind for it.

And grind I did, after absorbing the longsword and a few other random bits.

I started off going back to Armand Bayou. The guards there let me through, which surprised me on two levels--that they were still letting people in, in general, and that I apparently wasn't on any kind of shit list after the stunt I pulled. Less surprising was that I was apparently whitelisted to get in without a party of three; honestly, the party restriction didn't make a lot of sense once we knew what was killing dungeoneers and where, but apparently they didn't see a reason to rescind it yet.

The nostalgia of the dungeon wasn't particularly intense, though the first time through, I'd been eager to get my first taste of a new dungeon, and also... I'd been distracted crushing on Louise, and distracted by Brock. So yes, the first biome--the shifting maze with the zombie pygmy dire boars one--brought me back a bit, mostly just thinking about how I'd upstaged Brock's stupid dumbassery. And then the supergiant boar... ugh, the name was the worst thing about it, but it had me thinking of Jenna.

I'd like to say "The less said about the harpy biome the better" but that might imply that something weird happened. I just... I don't. I ended up with Louise's voice rolling through my head complimenting how I was handling cocks, and although it made me smile and miss her, it was mostly just a little distracting. The actual harpies, though, hadn't been all that much of a danger to me the first time through, and now I was... different.

I ended up with a bunch of Harp Harp Harpy Harps, of course, which was something I'd intended to go back and get a new copy of after Louise took--I mean, after I gave mine to Louise. I also was tempted to go after the Harpsichord Harpy just to say I'd done it, until I remembered exactly what the loot drop for that fight was.

When I came back around for the Hurricane Harpy boss fight, I was surprised to find that it automatically kicked me into the variant fight I'd been through before. I preferred it that way, of course, but I was willing to accept that it would have been a one-off.

When I reviewed my loot for the fight, I realized something odd--I knew I'd received the Gassy Pants on my last attempt at this fight, but they'd gone missing. Either I'd left them somewhere, or they'd been stolen--and I'd never thought of them again afterwards. Considering they had an active ability to send me ethereal... I frowned, wondering if the ninja guy from Mel's party had taken them, but it didn't seem his style. I'd had things on my mind, certainly, but it was an odd thing to just up and disappear. I absorbed this pair while in town, and also took the time to absorb the other loot from this fight just so that I could turn some of the junk enhancements into Forge Points--all except another copy of [ B.J. Smokin Hot ], which I figured I'd have to sell. I didn't have room for two adorable mini-phoenixes in my heart, and honestly, I knew I'd get a good price.

After that was the Barbarian Librarians, the Barbarian Caesarians... and the hidden library.

I had the thought, since I was there, to see if I could exchange Telekinetic Sense for something better. That, as it turned out, was explicitly something I could do. She'd said something before about returning books, and so I could just exchange one book for another. I spent a long time pouring over a very detailed list of skillbooks, but eventually settled on something pretty obvious: [ Blink ], a psychic version of a short-ranged teleport. Considering my Vampiric Cloak could do a tiny bit of teleportation, technically, I figured I'd eventually merge the two, but it seemed entirely appropriate to have the real thing.

With both being able to teleport and go ethereal--when properly equipped, at least--that was a significant boost to my survivability if I ended up back in Galveston Wharf, which was ultimately what I intended to do. In the meantime, I spent the experience I'd gathered, trying to improve my stats naturally by making myself into my own ideal instead of just pushing buttons on an interface, and I had to admit I ended up feeling a bit better. I hadn't really kept on top of it enough to keep my level from going up at all, but I still had a ways to go before I hit Armand Bayou's level cap.

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Anyway, the Barbarian biome continued for a bit, eventually coming to the optional "Lord of All Chairs" fight that I'd skipped the first time... and I skipped it again, because I didn't see any reason to go breaking innocent, presumably harmless chairs just so that I could have a fight with an innocent, deadly chair and its barbarian caesarian minions. It seemed to me a lot like the assholes who looted towns in Galveston Wharf for their resources--even if the dungeon's "punishment" for bad behavior was a fight that I honestly wanted and could definitely win, being a dick and getting away with it because I was strong was all the bad tastes in my mouth together.

I did stare at the big, opulent chair as I went past, though, wondering exactly what the hell I was missing. In a way, though, that was better, wasn't it? I was on the inside of so many things, so one little mystery just gave me something to daydream about, without also having some end-of-the-world or gods-and-administrators level consequences attached. Would the chair transform into some other monster? Or would the chair legs just be rubbery like an old Looney Tunes episode as it chased me around like a dog? What about the loot? Would I get a fucking solid gold chair or something if I beat this fight solo? I could just deliberately choose to never know and it would stay here forever. Other people would know, and I would just wonder silently.

What came shortly afterwards, of course, was the first major difference when compared to my last run of the dungeon: the Gargantuan Atlantean Barbarian Thespian Marionette.

Now, I recognize that to a certain degree, it was still hubristic as fuck to go in for a kill on a hundred-story tall wooden doll, one who--as far as I could tell--really did have the mass and strength necessary to grind stone under its feet to dust. That meant a little bit less after the Slenderman punched the dungeon floor to pieces right where I'd been standing and then threw two-hundred-pound stone blocks at me rapid fire, but then, the Slenderman had been trying to keep me alive--and he'd proved it several times in the fight. The Marionette would probably give me plenty of rope to hang myself with, no pun intended, but I assumed it would definitely hang me with that rope if I did the dumb thing of actually going full battle maniac on its giant wooden ass.

So I went full battle maniac on its giant wooden ass and just tried not to get hung.

The arena was as it had been before--a Mediterranean city in ruins on an island hung in between two labyrinths with a gravity-flip mechanism that I'd completely ignored. I entered the arena on top of a castle, and turned to watch the giant wooden doll do a superhero landing, rise from that into a wicked dab, try to catch its trident and fail, then pick the weapon up while spinning and scattering rocks around the arena.

This time, I hadn't moved, so when it turned to where I spawned, I was still there, watching it. It somehow spun the trident in its off-hand as it crouched down into a shonen-anime-protagonist battle stance and gave me a come-hither hand gesture despite its hands having no joints past the wrist.

I flexed the Vampiric Cloak and floated up into the air, then spent some of the accumulated weight to pick up stone blocks and, as an experiment, threw them at the Marionette.

Now, honestly, that took more energy that it sounds like, and I know it sounds like a lot--because the Marionette was damned far away. I had to pitch a good thousand pounds worth of stone at a reasonable chunk of the speed of sound. I'd never gone full Major League Baseball with my power before, much less with giant rocks, so I could justify playing around with it. My accuracy wasn't great, with maybe three out of ten chunks I threw being close enough to qualify as a hit on a target the size of a skyscraper.

About that whole baseball metaphor thing, though.

The Marionette's trident twisted in its hand suddenly, and the 'come hither' forehand went back to grasp the shaft of it, and I'll be damned if the sonofabitch didn't take the one chunk that passed through its strike zone and blast it back so fucking hard I definitely heard either or both of the trident or stone breaking the speed of sound. The trident, being made of some fuck-off super dungeon metal, didn't bend or break, but did resound from the hit like a gods-damned trio of tuning forks. And the stone itself...

Well, it wasn't aimed at me. It was aimed for a goddamn home run, and it got that. It soared off into the sky in what would theoretically have been left field--I couldn't tell you if it would maybe have been out of bounds, I don't play baseball, but everyone in this country knows the basic gist of it, and damned if that puppet didn't clear the whole island and then some. It didn't even shatter into a million goddamn pieces, which it definitely should have. It was like the Administrator herself had decided to replace it with rubber mid-flight, except I didn't detect the Matrix glitching like it did when she changed up the Harpy boss fight.

Anyway, then the boss dropped its trident and ran an imaginary set of bases while waving its hands in the air like a wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube man, because it's a goddamn Thespian joke boss, not a full on murder boss.

I sat there and watched it, mostly in shock, partly in recognition of the stupid joke that was its whole character, and in part because two of the giant stones I threw at it had hit and did trivial damage that the monster didn't even notice, and that took a little while to really sink in.

The marionette paused when it got back to "home base" and doubled over like it was out of breath, then stood up, stretched, bent down to pick up the trident again, all while mostly still facing away from me. Then, all at once, it spun around, the trident coming up to rest on one shoulder, while the other hand pointed directly at me in what was obviously supposed to be a dramatic challenge.

I considered it, staring at the giant thing. My Vampiric Cloak was a skill designed to make me use magic the way I had in my head back... before, when I was just basically making everything up as I went along because there was no magic except whatever made ghosts real. The imaginary weight of the cloak and its flexibility to become several different tools depending on the circumstances made it ideal for a lot of one-on-one duels, but this was a set piece fight the likes of which I'd never dealt with. Whether I could win this fight by cheating with the skill, or whether I could win it on a technical level by cutting the marionette's strings or something, I had a hard time believing that I was supposed to be able to win it as a straight fight--but winning it as a straight fight was the only way that fighting it was really going to help me. Like the fight against Slenderman or the Devil, what I needed and wanted most now was a fight where I had to pull out all the stops. But was that really this fight?

It didn't take me very long before I decided to try anyway, especially because the exit was open and I knew it.

"Alright," I told the giant puppet. "I'll take you on." It would be difficult, and probably very silly, but especially with the Slenderman gloves and armor, I was relatively sure I could win, and almost positive I could survive.

The Marionette's head tilted back like it was looking down its nose at me, and it casually flicked the trident to pound it against the ground twice like a club, the strikes creating house-sized cracks in the ground and sounding the entire island like a bell. The meaning was clear--challenge accepted.

I grinned at it, and I felt like the faceless monster was grinning back.