Bug grits her teeth and curses as she runs through the halls of the dungeon. Her broken arm hugged to her chest as she follows her map and quickly makes for her marked home.
Looking over her shoulder, she doesn’t find anyone perusing her. Her plan must have worked. The humans must be busy dealing with the poison.
Bug doesn’t know how effective it is, but as long as it manages to slow them down and distract them for long enough, then that is fine.
Coming to a stop at a boulder, Bug collapses as she catches her breath. She had run until her stamina was nearly drained and is sweating profusely. Looking back the way she came; Bug spots a small trail of blood.
Shit, they’ll be able to track me! The Dungeon takes about two hours to absorb blood off the ground… I need to stop my bleeding!
Looking down at her arm, she cringes as she looks at the bone sticking out of her flesh. The laceration running down her arm is hardly pleasant to look at either, and being able to see the insides of her own muscles is making her sick. She wants to throw up at the sight of her own arm, but she fights down the queasiness and the shaking in her body, a cold sweat running down her back from shock.
“How do I get the bone back in my arm…? Do I just-? NnnnNnnnshh!”
She winces, clenching her teeth as she wants to scream. Touching the bone is definitely not a good idea, and doing so had sent a shock tearing though her body. For a short while she is left seeing white.
Bug slowly pulls herself back together and opens her system. “Has to be something that can fix this… No, no spells or skills, I can’t afford those ones yet… The Point Store! Yes, there has to be something in the shop!”
Filtering the shop to only show items for medical use, Bug quickly scans through the list of available options.
Basic medical kits, bottles of disinfectants, a sewing kit, a basic splint, packs of My Little Centaurs Band-aids for children, bottles of The FlintGolems brand Chewable Vitamins, and an assortment of different types of pills and injections that all have scary names that Bug can’t even begin to understand.
“What even is all of this stuff!? I don’t know how to use any of this!”
She keeps searching until the list brings her to potions.
‘Basic Healing Potion. Good for healing cuts, bruises, and mild burns. 10 Points’
‘Basic Antidote. Good for curing most poisons and venoms, be it natural or magically made. Ineffective against highly specialized poisons and venoms. 11 Points’
‘Healing Potion. Good for healing lacerations, bruised organs, third-degree burns, replenishing missing blood, and even regrow a pinky toe or a lost piece of ear if necessary. 30 Points’
‘Antidote. Good for curing any poisons and venoms, be it natural or magically made. This does not apply to poisons and venoms that are infused with curses. [Example: Basilisk venom.] 33 Points’
‘High Healing Potion. Good for healing large lacerations, damaged and destroyed organs, torn muscles, nerve damage, extreme burns, broken bones, replenishing lost blood, regrowing lost fingers, toes, ears, nose, eyes, and can even regrow lost hair/fur. [Warning, only use if your required healing is covered by this list. Excessive healing may result in extra material and energy being forcibly expelled by the body. If you don’t want to shit your pants, don’t drink this unless you actually need it! We are still working out all the kinks for the higher tiered potions.] 50 Points.’
...
“This one!”
There are other potions listed in the store, each one with their prices soaring even higher and higher, and each one having warnings labeled on them, but Bug disregards them all as she purchases her potion.
There goes most of my points… Now I only have eighteen left…
Pushing aside her regrets for having to spend so many points, Bug goes into her inventory and pulls out the High Healing Potion. Ripping out the cork using her teeth, Bug spits it out and immediately downs the whole bottle of red liquid.
Tasting her lips, she blinks as she admires the flavor. “Huh, tasty…” She pulls up the bottle and reads the label.
‘High Healing Potion. [Strawberry Flavored!]’
Below the name is a list of everything that it can heal, which Bug mostly ignores as she scans over it. On the bottom of the label, she finds a warning.
‘Warning! For children or races that are smaller than the average human adult, please portion out your consumption of this potion accordingly. This bottle is intended to be one serving size for an adult human male. As an example, if you are half that size, then please only consume half of the bottle…’
What follows is a list of symptoms for over consuming potions that is all written in fine print…
Bug licks her lips as she looks at the now empty bottle. “Shit… Why wasn’t this covered in the item description in the store?”
…
The potion finally sets in just as the realization hits her, suddenly, her entire body is overcome with an incredible heat as her body warms up and a red light shines under her skin, her belly feeling like it is full of fire. She watches as her broken arm glows and the bone is forcefully snapped back into place. Bug screams as the pain hits her, the senses almost knocked out of her from the violent mending processes.
Covered in a cold sweat, Bug watches as the flesh of her arm quickly mends and sews itself back together, a scar forming which is only visible for a spare few seconds before fresh, brand new, fur grows in to cover her arm. Through the rest of her body, Bug can feel as her soreness and bruises from getting thrown around and hit disappears, pains that she didn’t even know she had because of the aching of her arm, simply vanishing like they were never there.
With her body quickly and quite honestly, violently healed, the warmth of the healing potion slowly fades and disappears. Through it all, even as her body was feeling like it was being cooked alive, Bug's Death Core had remained ice cold in her stomach.
The sensation of healing finally passes, and Bug looks down at herself. “I’m all healed! I feel SO good now! Definitely worth the fifty poi- “
~~~GGGGrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiEEEeeeeeeeeee……….~~~
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Bug immediately shuts up, her hands flying to her stomach as it lets out a horrendous gurgling rumble, forced to double over as she clenches her gut, her intestines doing a horrible dance under her hands. Bug’s eyes go wide as she realizes exactly what is about to happen next.
Sprinting off from her rock, she unequips everything on her bottom half just as she manages to make it behind the cover of a big bolder on the other side of the hall for some much-needed privacy.
“Holy shit!!! AhhhHHHhhh! Why!? Fucking System Devs, why can’t you just do your jobs right!?!?!?!”
----------------------------------------
Laying in her hidey-hole on a freshly made bed, Bug clutches her stomach as it continues to protest the unjustness of existence. Bug has already had to empty her bowels three times since drinking that potion and she is hating her life right now. The day is already coming close to an end, and the Dungeon will be closing again soon.
Out in the Dungeon, it is drawing quiet now, but earlier, there was a hell of a commotion as what sounded like a ton of humans were tearing through the Dungeon. They didn’t sound particularly happy, and Bug was in no condition to do anything about it, except lay in bed and suffer.
A couple of parties had come by her dead-end, but thankfully no one had thought to check the crack in the wall that is up by the ceiling. Instead, they would just leave after complaining or joking about somebody using the Dungeon as a toilet.
Bug would just lay in silence, stewing in her embarrassment as she wished that the Dungeon would be faster about cleaning up stuff like that…
//Time 22:00
...
Bug lets out a sigh of relief when the Dungeon finally closes for the day. For the next two hours, she is perfectly safe.
With her stomach still complaining, but thankfully free of anything else to expel, she drinks some water from her canteen and then tries to get comfortable in her makeshift bed. Besides getting knocked out a couple of times, Bug has yet to have a proper sleep since her birth. Her exhaustion is finally catching up with her.
It takes a little while, but eventually, Bug manages to fall asleep. She does not dream, but her sleep is restful. Even the wave of energy from the restock washing over her isn’t enough to force her awake as she sleeps for several hours.
----------------------------------------
//Time 6:27
…
Bug stirs awake to the noise of mobs being loud and obnoxious outside. Cursing, she checks the time as she runs a hand over her face, her mouth feeling dry from a long sleep. “Why are there mobs out there? Have the humans not gotten here yet? She asks herself drowsily.
Crawling out of bed, Bug looks out of the opening of her hiding spot and sees a group of six of them messing around in the dead-end. In the corners of the dead-end and along the wall, are the remains of some birthing pods.
“Lovely, they just had to born here. Damn noisy neighbors… Uh, I’ll kill them later…”
Crawling back inside, Bug sits on her bed and does some stretches after drinking some water. Her stomach is finally feeling much better, but now her body is sore from laying around for so long. It certainly doesn’t help that her bed is nothing more than a couple of blankets on a bunch of moss. It really doesn’t make the best of places for a restful sleep. Oh well, Bug will just have to start saving up her points again.
Working her muscles back into shape and pulling her body in every direction that she can until she feels it burn, Bug limbers herself up, letting out a moan as she stretches her back and her legs until something pops, releasing some built-up tension.
“Oh, so much better~ Haaaaa…”
Her stretches finished, Bug drinks from her canteen again, and then collapses onto her bed, finally ready to start dealing with a new day.
Checking over her notifications in the corner of her HUD, Bug confirms that the Dungeon has gone through its restock, and then finds an interesting message.
//Killed lvl 6 Human – 30 exp gained!
“Huh…”
The level 6, that was the big guy, right? Did my poison kill him while I was sleeping or something? Well, I’m not going to complain. If anything, I’m glad that he is dead. That puts me at 91/100 experience. Just a little bit more to go…
Bug turns to the group of mobs hanging out outside and shrugs.
Well, might as well go get it really quick. Can try for a new skill while I’m at it…
Pulling herself up, she heads to the entrance of her hole and climbs out. Not trying to be stealthy or anything, they do end up noticing her as she climbs down, but they don’t really do anything except watch. Maybe they are curious about why it is that one of their own was up in a hole in the wall? Meh, in the end, Bug doesn’t really care what they think. She already knows that there is hardly a single thought actually going through their heads anyways…
Alighting to the ground, Bug pulls out her spear.
I still need to get the skill for this one. Hopefully six targets should do…
One of the Mobs reacts to her pulling out the weapon and charges her. It doesn’t really seem like he is attacking her as an enemy, but more along the line that he just saw a spear magically appear out of thin air and now he really wants it for himself.
So, Bug gives it to him…
//Killed lvl 1 Gremlin – 5 exp gained!
With the spear ran clean through his chest, only stopped by the guard on the end, Bug pulls up on the spear and tosses his body aside, removing it from the spear and hitting a wall with a splat. At her current level of strength, lifting one of the mobs is no longer an issue for her.
With the first one dead, the rest immediately register her as an enemy. Surprisingly, unlike most groups, none of them decide to run away. Instead, the remaining five all charge at her with teeth and claws bared, ready to tear into her if they can manage to grab her.
Bug steps forward to meet them and strikes, lunging out with the spear as she buries it into the throat of the front most target. He doesn’t die immediately, but he is out of the fight as she rips the head of the spear out of his throat, and he drops like a puppet with its strings cut.
Bug’s heightened Dexterity makes her fast enough that by the time the soon-to-be-corpse has hit the ground, she had already struck twice more at the charging mobs. One takes the spear to the center of the chest and gets thrown back as his ribcage shatters. The second gets stabbed clean through the eye, piercing his brain.
The one with the spear in its face dies first, shortly followed by the one with the pierced throat as it lets out a bloody cough.
//Killed lvl 1 Gremlin – 5 exp gained!
//Killed lvl 1 Gremlin – 5 exp gained!
The one with the broken rib cage is writhing on the ground as it fights to breathe. No longer a threat and can be ignored.
As those three get taken out, the remaining two close the distance. Bug takes a step back as she pulls the blade of her spear free from the corpse's face and swings the shaft towards the one on the right. The spear smacks him in the side of the head with a loud 'Thwack!', leaving him stumbling, dazed and confused.
Stepping forward again, Bug meets the remaining attacker and holds the spear before her body defensively. He jumps for her, and she meets him with the shaft.
When his hands grab hold of the weapon, Bug pulls back on it hard, drawing him in closer, and then delivers a kick in-between his legs. He immediately keels over, both hands holding his crotch as he lets out a cry of pain. A second kick to the face sends him stumbling back as he falls over with a broken nose, blood and tears spraying into the air.
Turning to the other target, who is slowly recovering from getting thwacked on the side of the head, Bug quickly stabs him in the side as he is just about to try and rejoin the fight. He doubles over as his lung gets pierced; the breath quite literally robbed from his body.
Ripping the blade out with one smooth motion, Bug moves on the crying mob, raising the spear and stabbing down, finishing him off quickly.
//Killed lvl 1 Gremlin – 5 exp gained!
//Killed lvl 1 Gremlin – 5 exp gained!
//Congratulations! You have earned a Skill!
//Spear Fighting lvl 1 unlocked!
Two? Oh, the one with the broken ribcage just died, he isn’t moving any more. Regardless, doesn’t matter. I got the skill now!
Bug moves over and finishes off the last one as he is fighting to breathe on the floor, a bloody hole in his side quickly forming a puddle of red under him. Ramming the spear through the side of his head finishes him quickly and puts him out of his misery. Bug feels bad for making him suffer like that. She knows what it is like to suffocate, so she resolves herself to get better at killing them more quickly and efficiently. No matter how much she hates these soulless things, it isn’t as if they ever asked to be born or chose to be like this. A quick death is a mercy, and it is the least that she can do for them.
//Killed lvl 1 Gremlin – 5 exp gained!
//Congratulations! You have reached lvl 9! – Your stats have been increased!
//You have earned 3 Free Stat points!
//You have earned 1 Skill point
…
Good, finally reached level 9. Just one more to go…
Looking over her new stats, Bug dumps her Free Stat points into Dexterity, Magic, and Intelligence. Her body heats up a bit as the stat changes take place, but after everything that had happened yesterday, she considers it to be hardly even painful. It passes quickly and Bug smiles as she looks at how her numbers have grown.
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Stats
Name – Bug
Age – 0
Race – Gremlin
Class – None
Level – 9
EXP – 21/150
Free Stat Points - 0
Heath – 72/72
Stamina – 23/33
Mana – 160/160
Vitality – 12
Endurance – 11
Strength - 11
Dexterity - 16
Magic - 16
Intelligence - 16
*Luck – N/A
*Note: Luck is a work in progress stat. Points cannot be put into this stat at this time.
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