Brady was leading his team back to town. They had gone out to take care of a Nine Tail that had been driving the wildlife away. It hadn’t been that hard of a fight, especially since Jen managed to trap it in an illusionary maze.
Graham was in front of the party, taking Brady’s usual spot in clearing the way back. Brady had been the only one who could carry the Nine Tail, so his hands weren’t able to do much else. It made him grumble some curses at the asshole who wanted it as untouched as possible. Usually, they would have cut it up on site to make carrying it easier.
Hannah was in the middle of the group, chatting with Jen about whatever the two girls usually spoke of. Brady often tuned them out. However, as he didn’t have much else to do, he had been listening to them talk about how they could use illusionary duplicates to confuse their enemies. It was probably why he didn’t feel the ground give way at first.
He did, however, notice what was happening after a brief heartbeat. The rest of the group managed to jump out of the way, but with the Nine Tail weighing him down, Brady couldn’t get far enough away.
He let out a brief shout as he fell. He let go of the Nine Tail so he could try and catch himself, but there was nothing for him to grab onto to stop his fall. He fell a good 30 meters before he hit the ground.
He felt something in his leg snap as the dirt rained around him, and stars filled his vision. He cried out, writhing in agony for a moment, before he managed to collect himself. His group mates called down for him, asking if he was okay.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Think I broke something when I landed. You guys might have to run back to town to get help. I had the only rope, and it’s now buried under a few feet of dirt. I’m in no condition to be moving.” He tried to reassure them that he’d be fine.
After a bit more back and forth, they decided he’d be okay for the few hours it would take to finish the trek back to town and get back. With a sigh, Brady leaned back against the mound of dirt behind him. He was good with waiting.
It had only been an hour when he saw it. It looked like a common Burrow Worm, if not for the slight reddish tint to it. He watched as it slowly made its way over to him. He reached out a hand and let it crawl up his arm.
Things went south when it reached his elbow. Faster than he could react, it dove at the inside of the joint. Searing pain rocked up and down his body as it slowly burrowed its way into his limb. He tried to yank it out, but only succeeded in tearing it in half.
The half that remained in his arm burrowed deeper, leaving a burning pain as it traveled deeper. The half in his hand wriggled a bit, before it turned and started to burrow directly into his hand. He held back a scream as the burning pain rocked up his other arm.
A quick glance at the original half, which he could see moving through his skin, revealed that it was growing longer the more of him it ate. He fumbled for the knife at his waist, letting out a whimper as the pain multiplied with each movement.
Knife out, he tried digging the worms out. Unfortunately, every time he yanked at the worm, it would tear in half, effectively multiplying. At this point, a few had reached his chest, and each breath he took burned.
He felt one wind its way up around his neck, burning as it did. Each breath he took stung as the late autumn air hit the burned flesh at the back of his throat. Something in the back of his throat burst, and he watched, cross-eyed, as the worm crawled out of his mouth.
He tried not to bite down, as that would inevitably lead to it multiplying again. He was forced to watch as the worm found its way up his face, settling right under his eye for the briefest of moments, before it dove in.
The last thing Brady felt was the searing pain of his eyes being melted before he blacked out, never to wake again.
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Graham, Jen, and Hannah returned a few hours later with Corbe, one of the strongest adventurers in town, and a coil of rope long enough to reach the bottom of the sinkhole. However, when Graham reached the bottom, he didn’t find any trace of Brady.
He couldn’t find the Nine Tail’s body, or Brady’s backpack either. It was as if they had all just vanished, as there weren’t even any drag marks for if they had been dragged away. Something had happened here, something that nobody would be able to predict.
After a few minutes of searching, Graham found the entrance to a cave system. He stopped outside it, before heading back to the rope, climbing back up, and reporting what he had and had not found.
Everyone agreed to head back to town and make a report before attempting to find whatever had caused everything to vanish. With one last look back into the hole, the group headed back.
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He would be laughing his ass off if he was physically capable of laughing, or even having an ass to laugh off. He had taken almost too much joy in watching his custom Burrow Worms devour the hunter who had fallen. At least, he was assuming the man was a hunter. After all, most of his gear, and the corpse he was carrying around, suggested as such.
That did make him wonder why the hunter hadn’t just skinned the animal earlier, but he got a new creature out of the whole deal, so he wasn’t complaining. He hadn’t ordered his worms to devour the Nine Tail, as he had come to find out it was called.
One of the options he had invested in was for the Burrow Worms to multiply once they reached twice their original length. They gained barely a hundredth of what they ate as extra body mass, making the whole thing inefficient, but a hundredth of a human can still make a lot of worms. He gained almost another hundred worms for absolutely nothing.
He wanted to see if there was a counter for how many Burrow Worms he currently had, so he opened his menu up to take a look.
Name:
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
Level: 2 (+)
DP: 2,410,776,175,041,383,250
Affinity: Fire - Water - Earth - Air - Light - Dark - Cybernetic (artificial)
* Dungeon Mobs
* Dungeon Traps
* Dungeon Rooms
* Dungeon Management
* Dungeon Catalog
Irro Days (15 days until next Irro Day)
He was quickly distracted, however. Firstly, he thought he deserved a level after that, so he mentally pressed the (+) to level up.
Would you like to level up? Y/N
Selecting Y, he experienced leveling up for the first time, as he had been a bit out of it the first time. A small pulse of energy coursed through him, leaving him refreshed. Up until it reached that weird lump he had felt earlier.
The weird lump swelled, before he felt a familiar cracking feeling. Panicking, he went to level up again, hoping it would fix him this time as well. The same rush of energy coursed through him, almost healing him back up before the lump swelled again, widening the wide.
He pressured agreement, plasma swimming, clot largening. And over. And repeat. And anew. Again and repeat and over and repeat and anew and againandoverandreapeatanewoveragainrepeatanewagainover-
With a final mental snap, everything swirled back into focus. His mind was reeling over what had just happened. He doubted that was supposed to happen every time he leveled up. He might have to hold off on leveling up if things continued like this.
Curious, he turned his mental gaze onto himself. Things made a tad more sense, unfortunately. Growing out of himself was a strange lump of flesh. It pulsated in sync with the colors that shone out of the crystalline part of him. It looked like what you might imagine a tumor to look like.
There were faint lines of crystal winding their way into the flesh lump, proving that it was a part of him now. Judging by the fact that the crystalline part of him was the same size as it had been when he first was reborn, he could almost assuredly assume that the fleshy part would eventually overtake the crystal part.
He…might want to stop leveling for a while. Level…24?! Holy shit, he hadn’t realized he had leveled that many times. Either way, level 24 seemed good enough for now. That quick glance at his menu had also managed to distract him, reminding him that there were other things he had wanted to do before he had grown a flesh tumor.
Trying to distract himself, he clicked on the Dungeon Catalog tab.
Dungeon Catalog
* Mobs
* Traps
* Skills
* Attributes
That was…underwhelming. Skills and attributes seemed the most interesting though, so he selected the Attributes tab. Bottoms up.
A massive list appeared, offering things from damage bonuses for undead type dungeons, to allowing delvers immortality while in the dungeon. He didn’t want either of those, as the damage bonuses also had a negative multiplier on the opposing dungeon type, and he wanted actual consequences for the delvers. No second chances for them.
There were only two choices that really drew his attention.
Dungeon Catalog -- Attributes
* The Tiniest Hero (10,000 DP)
All mobs spawned in the dungeon will be capable of growth. With their growth, they may also gain sentience and/or rank up.
* Creative (50,000 DP)
Creativity is a dungeon’s most powerful tool. Creative dungeons are able to create their own mobs, either from scratch or by combining other mobs’ traits.
The Tiniest Hero just seemed like an obvious choice. He wouldn’t have to manually upgrade his mobs if they did a good job, and sentient mobs are always better. There was another attribute that allowed him to grant sentience manually, but he didn’t like that. He wanted the mobs to earn it.
Creative just seemed awesome. Images of Griffons and Chimeras flashed through his head. He had always loved the idea that you can mash different creatures together to make something even better. Besides, he already had a few ideas, and he only had two mobs to create so far.
With his choice made, he purchased both attributes. There wasn’t any physical change that he noticed, so he decided to move onto the skills list.
The same thing happened with the skills list as what happened with the attributes. There was a veritable wall of skills to pick. Eventually, however, he saw a skill he knew he just had to have.
Dungeon Catalog -- Skills
* Avatar (100,000 DP)
This skill is a core-only skill. It will manifest a spiritual body to serve as a conduit of the core’s soul, allowing for interaction with others.
Sure, he would have preferred a physical body, but he already considered himself lucky after all. The god had said he’d be lucky if he could interact with the world at all, and he could interact a hell of a lot.
He quickly purchased the skill, and put off browsing the remainder of the catalog in favor of testing the skill. He closed the menu, and activated the skill.
He watched as a faint mist exited his core. It slowly started to expand outward, before it stopped. It looked as if it had hit a wall. He felt a slight tugging, coming from the strange flesh tumor growing out of him.
It looked as if some of the mist had been trapped inside of that, instead of flowing outwards with the rest of the mist. He watched as all of the mist that had been expelled slowly moved back inwards, coalescing in the flesh lump. He watched as the flesh lump pulsed, slowly pulsing faster and faster.
Then, something happened that he had forgotten he could experience. Pain. It was like every single part of him was on fire, despite the fact there was no part of him that could catch on fire. He watched as the flesh slowly grew.
The lump grew slowly. Oh so slowly. But he watched as it grew. He watched as a face formed, with the crystalline core as one of his eyes. He watched as a torso grew from the neck that had formed just moments before. He watched as limbs grew, starting out as small little nubs, before becoming fully-fledged influence-noodles. And he watched as hair grew from his scalp, settling at around waist-length.
He lay there, feeling the cold stone beneath his bare body. He simultaneously stared up at the ceiling and down at his naked body. Only one thing was going through his head at that point, something he felt the need to voice with his newly formed body.
He opened his mouth.
“Why the fuck am I a girl?”