With that out of the way, Bug turns her attention to her loot from the fight. Pulling a backpack out of her inventory, she looks it over and checks its contents…
Wait a sec…
She puts it back and looks at the three boxes that have bags in them…
In another box is a wooden bowl. She takes out both the bowl and a pack, putting the bowl in the pack before then storing it…
Just one box…
“System… Why the hell was this not covered in the manual!?” She screams at the ceiling.
Whoever the hell it is that wrote that manual, they need to be beaten over the head! Why is such a helpful way of saving space and organizing your inventory not covered in the manual, but yet, everything for how to optimize my settings and create a clean HUD setup is covered in great detail!? It didn’t even properly cover the Points Store! Seriously, who the hell is the idiot that wrote this damn thing. I want to strangle them!
“Haaaaah… Forget about it… Let’s just look through what I got and sell what I don’t need. I can strangle the Devs later…”
To start, Bug takes out two of the blankets and spreads them out over her bed of moss. They are scratchy and smell of age, but the two blankets add to her makeshift bed and make it much softer. Folding up the third blanket, Bug stuffs it with moss and makes a very basic pillow for her to relax her head on.
“Let’s see here, I got some bowls, a couple of sacks with hard bread and a few with nuts and berries, some really shoddy looking knives… Hmm, I guess I can throw these as weapons… What else? Some forks and spoons carved from wood, flint, for making fires, I guess? Some random junk like a hand carved necklace… What is this symbol for?
Putting it in her Inventory, Bug reads its description.
‘A poorly carved symbol of the Church of Light. Worn by followers of the Goddess to show their faith.’
“Goddess? Hmm, that guy did say that he swears to the Goddess or whatever… Meh, don’t need. Sell. Oh, it’s worth two points, nice.”
Dumping out packs, Bug continues to sort everything out until she has everything she wants to keep separated from the stuff she doesn’t need. Selling everything else, and notably some furs that she grimaces as she touches, Bug folds up the other two packs, stuffing them into the bottom of the best one out of the three, and then starts packing away everything that she doesn’t need immediate access to into the one pack.
By the time she is done, the first page of her Inventory is looking much cleaner now with only a few slots being used. Reduced to only being her mana crystals, two stacks of rocks, a stack of 3 shoddy throwing knives, a bundle of rope, a stack of a few hundred moss, some small sacks of nuts and berries and bread, a pack full of stuff, three human corpses [Regretfully do not stack.], and her handy dagger.
“Much cleaner now. Gonna put the corpses on page three, so I don’t have to look at them and they don’t get in the way… There, much better. Now for the weapons.”
Still sitting on the floor before her bed is an axe, a spear, a club, and a barrel lid shield.
Pulling them into her inventory one at a time, Bug gives their description a look over.
‘Wood Cutting Axe. Tool of choice for an aspiring lumberjack. Not really intended for use as a weapon, but there is nothing stopping you from using it as one.’
‘Foot Soldier’s Spear. A cheap, mass produced, spear intended for use by peasant levies on the battlefield. Just point at the enemy and stab forward.’
‘Rough-cut Club. A wooden club made from the branch of an old oak tree. Apply directly to the head for best results.’
‘Make-shift Shield. Hardly able to be considered a shield at all, someone would have to be very desperate to rely on this to protect them.’
…
“Yeah, about what I expected… Still, I’ll keep them in case they become useful. At the very least, I can use them to try and get their Skills. Pretty sure that I saw Spear Fighting lvl 1 and Axe Fighting lvl 1 in the store… Now then! Time to buy a new spell!”
Opening the Store, Bug sets her filters and heads into Spells. At the top of the page, Bug notices that a new message has been place there.
‘Due to your selection of [Death] as your primary element, your available selection of secondary elements has been modified.
You now only have access to the following elements: Death, Body, Soul, Ice, Nature, Darkness, and Time.
Please note that all spells you can learn have been modified to be [Death] infused. In order to fully utilize your secondary elements without being [Death] infused, you will require the Skill, Master Caster, found here, and the Knowledge, How to Fully Utilize Secondary Elements, found here.’
Curious, Bug opens both links and checks their prices.
“Sheesh… ten points for each of them. Expensive…”
Pushing aside those expensive looking things, Bug heads into the list of spells available to her and starts browsing.
“Cold Touch, Sharpen Claws, Evil Eyes, Slow Touch, Make Deadly Poison, Scary Shadow, Turn Undead…”
Hmm, not really much to pick from for just one point. The touch spells and Sharpen Claws are all close-range spells. Evil Eyes makes it so I can make enemies that look me in the eye become afraid. Make Deadly Poison is only useful if I can poison someone’s food or drinking water… I could use it to coat my weapons or splash it on their face I guess... Scary Shadow is useless. It is just a passive spell that doesn’t cost anything to maintain but makes my shadow look scary. And finally, Turn Undead. It makes undead that are weaker than me fall under my control. It could be useful later, but right now I don’t have to worry about fighting the undead.
Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.
“Hmm, right now I only want to be getting into close range if I can guarantee a kill. Cold Touch, Slow Touch, and Sharpen Claws are tempting, but I am better off just using my knife for now. I can see the uses for all three of them, but they just aren’t worth it right now. So that leaves Evil Eye and Make Deadly Poison…”
“I could poison my throwing weapons, but I have no idea how effective the poison is without testing it. And Evil Eye could be useful during a fight, but it isn’t a Passive. I have to activate it whenever I look someone in the eye for it to work. And I already have Inflict Pain… Alright, Make Deadly Poison it is.”
Clicking 'Buy' on the spell, a quick loading bar pops up and disappears. A slight tingle goes through Bug’s brain, but that is about it for the discomfort.
“I think I am going to save up three points next. I already know what spell I really want, and it should be worth the wait.”
With that taken care of and not much else to really do, Bug lays down in her freshly modified moss bed and pulls out a small bag of nuts and berries.
Her mouth is watering as she looks at the new food and she is quick to pop a couple into her mouth.
“Hmm, mmmm… Definitely tastes better than the moss. Thank you, stupid humans."
----------------------------------------
//Time 20:36
The First floor is much quieter now. It has been drawing more and more deathly silent as the day draws on. Most likely, the humans have already killed almost everything else on this floor and have all either left or have moved down into the lower floors.
During the seven hours that Bug had remained cooped up in her hidey-hole, she has only had a couple of guests come by this dead end of hers. A few Jellies had been drawn in by what Bug is guessing was the smell of blood. So now she has an extra three Jelly skins in her Inventory.
Besides that, there was one more group of humans that had come by, but there was seven of them and Bug really didn’t like her chances with fighting them. So, she remained hidden as she waited for them to leave. Thankfully, they didn’t stay long and were quick to leave once they found nothing of interest in the dead end.
The group was made up of a bunch of Human kids wearing the same clothes, being led around by an older human wearing a robe that was answering their questions and teaching them stuff. Which Bug found to be interesting. Probably some part of human culture or something. They eventually left after the old human finished a short lesson about dead-ends in dungeons.
Apparently, on the lower floors, the dead-ends are often trapped in some way or have monsters waiting in ambush from unseen crevasses. This isn’t a problem on the first floor though, he assured them. The monsters here are too dumb to lay an ambush, he tells them…
Bug had to hold back some giggles as she laid in bed and listened to this. The irony was a bit much.
Now, with the first floor of the Dungeon being blessedly quiet, Bug decides that it is safe to set out from her hole and further explore the first floor. Maybe if she is lucky, she will be able to find some stragglers that are weak and haven’t left the Dungeon yet.
Climbing down, Bug sets off. With no real course of direction, she decides that the best thing to do is to just fill out her map of the first floor. As she is about to take a turn away from her dead-end hallway, Bug makes sure to put a home marker down on the location for her hole. Just in case she needs a safe place to hide or sleep again.
Wandering about, Bug comes across a few places where fighting had occurred. She ends up finding many corpses of the mobs of the first floor. They are usually in pretty bad shape.
Many of them have been messily skinned for their furs, and all of the bodies are in different states of rapid decay as the Dungeon hungrily reabsorbs the bodies.
Whenever Bug comes across such sights, she sighs as she gathers up the corpses and sells them. Some of the corpses are so ruined that they don’t even earn her one point from the store, let alone the two that they are usually worth. Still, Bug needs the points, and she would rather sell them for her own benefit than let the Dungeon eat them. It can starve for all she cares…
Besides the corpses, she also makes sure to pick up and sell whatever trash that she can find and sells it all.
The humans sure do love to just dump their trash here, don’t they? I guess they figure that the Dungeon and the Jellies will eat it, so might as well dump it here… Oh, another point, nice.
Another hallway cleaned and mapped, Bug takes a turn into unmarked territory and continues her little journey. After a few more turns, Bug comes across a room and stops in her tracks as she finds a mountain of trash taller than she is. Which isn’t saying much considering that Bug doesn’t even reach the waist of some of the humans she has seen… Still, it is a lot of trash.
“Ehuu, I guess the humans really are using the Dungeon as a place to dump their trash… Smelly…”
Pinching her nose, she opens her map and checks it over.
Ya, getting much closer to the entrance… Hmm, maybe the humans chose this room as their dump because it is close enough to the entrance to be a short walk, but is far enough away that they don’t have to smell it or see it when they are coming and going? I think that makes sense…
Looking over the pile of trash, Bug picks out a few things of interest and looks them over. A piece of crinkled paper with rotting food on it has ‘Great Boar Tavern’ written on it in big letters, another thing is a broken broom, there is a broken stool, some shattered glass, a broken barrel, and half a deck of cards that is all soaked and water damaged. Besides those, everything else is just broken rotting stuff and food that has gone so bad that it guarantees a stomachache if eaten.
It takes a while, and Bug is very careful as to not get messy, but she eventually manages to store and sell all of the trash. Having used just one finger to poke and store stuff, she holds her hand away from herself as she leaves the room and runs to find a clean source of water. As soon as she finds one, she puts her hands in and scrubs them until they feel clean.
“13 points for that whole pile. Trash really isn’t worth much…”
Looking to her clock, the time reads as 21:25.
“Less than an hour until the Dungeon closes… Maybe I could go take a look?”
Getting up, Bug listens to the Dungeon, but it comes back deathly quiet.
"Sounds like this floor is empty. Should be safe.”
Heading towards where the entrance to the Dungeon is marked on her map, it takes about ten minutes for her to find her way there. The sight that awaits her is a single hallway stretching out until it reaches a pair of massive doors. For a human, they might be considered big, but for a Gremlin, they are massive.
Carved from stone, they are plain looking and hold very little ornamentation. On the floor is the marks left behind from where the massive heavy doors have opened and closed every day for many years. Bug’s instincts tell her that when closed, those doors are impossible to open. Even if someone could break stone with their fists, those doors will remain untouched.
Walking cautiously forward, Bug slowly approaches the doorway, ready to run away at a moment’s notice should a human appear on the other side.
Finally reaching the doors, Bug peers through the opening as she hugs the wall. Further ahead is a set of stairs that leads up, and from there, she finds light gently pouring down from outside. It is nothing like the light of the glowing mushrooms and is bright and warm.
Bug wants to touch it. To run her hands under the warm beams of light that flow from a yet to be seen Sun.
She takes a step forward and stops as a message appears before her.
‘Warning!
Dungeon Spawned Entity, do not step beyond this point. Without a proper connection to this Dungeon’s mana, your body will slowly fail and die.
At your projected stats, you will last approximately [2 Days, 11 Hours, 52 Minutes, 9 Seconds]
Advisory: Return to the Dungeon.’
Bug reads this warning over and over again as she stands mere inches away from the thresholds of freedom, the last rays of an afternoon’s sunlight beckoning her to walk forward into its warm embrace.
But she can’t. Her freedom would only further ensure her inevitable death.
“Even if I am a person now, at the end of the day I am still one of them… One of those things made by the Dungeon…”
To have her goal so close but yet so far away, held back by nothing more than a single step. This is the first time that Bug has ever felt such crushing depression in her short life. Even when she had run out of cookies, she had not felt this much despair.
“Haaah, huuuuuuuuuuu…….“ A deep breath in, followed by a long exhale. Bug comes to a decision as she watches the last few rays of light disappear and the stairwell goes dark. “Well, I just need to make it so I can leave. I just have to get stronger… And I have to get revenge on the one who made me.”