Peter’s whole body was bruised, battered, and exhausted. The early morning beating had been less severe than the day before, but they happened with more frequency and by the time it came time for Peter to scan the dungeon floor for material once again – his body was already nearing ready to give out on him.

Every muscle in both his arms and legs contracted to drag the heavy bag full of loot felt as though it was being ripped and torn with every metre that Peter traversed. It was after realising that the man had intentionally spread out his kills so that it was as time-consuming and laborious as possible for Peter to collect the loot together into one bag that Peter began to just call the man Sadist (or Sadi for short).

Due to Sadi’s brutal scheme, it was closer to sundown than noon when finally, the man gave Peter his assent so that the two of them could, after almost 12 hours of torture, leave the dungeon. Then, after giving Peter a sadistic smirk and once again walking off with all of the precious loot, leaving Peter completely empty-headed and broken physically, Peter simply dropped to his knees and wept.

He’d put on a tough face in front of Sadi, as there was no way that he would let that man see him cry, but in all honesty, he was both physically and mentally devastated. His muscles felt like they had been shredded and his mind felt as though he had dumped it into hot magma. In other words, he felt like shit, and he briefly wondered how in the hell he’d survive through the next few months.

Then his focus happened to wander back up to the top right of vision where a countdown that had begun less than a week ago was slowly trickling down to zero, and he felt his strength rally slightly. As sure, right now he might be susceptible to the man’s torturous schemes but given enough time – he would grow his own strength until he was able to repay this humiliation tenfold.

Peter wasn’t quite sure how long he sat in silence outside the dungeon’s entrance before something or more accurately, someone, disturbed his epicentre-less concentration – a girl.

“What are you doing sitting outside the dungeon, slave?” Her voice said in a haughty and entitled tone that did not match the quality of her clothes, which seemed no better than the rags he was wearing.

Peter rebutted her, “I’m not a slave. I’m legally a part of the [Copper] social class.”

The girl, who looked to be only a year or so older than Peter, looked him up and down once more before scoffing and saying, “I don’t believe you.”

Peter scoffed, “Who gives a shit about what either of us do or do not believe about one another? I am a part of the [Copper] class, just like you, I don’t see why you wouldn’t simply just accept that fact and move on.”

The girl seemed offended by this rebuttal and said, “If you are not a slave why do you swear and speak like one, slave? Don’t you think you should at least try and do right by your professed class if you wish to join the ranks of the free?”

Peter looked up at the girl and took in her full form for the first time. She was a simple-looking girl, standing an inch or two smaller than Peter, with long flowing blonde hair, and though her skin sheened with dirt – it was remarkably clean – he’d give her that. Though, her clothes were enough to give her away as a fellow slum rat – albeit one he had never met before.

Peter thought it ridiculous that this girl thought that she had the right to call him a slave and so he said in rebuke, “Do right by my class? That’s stupid – the [Copper] class has no code of honour or conduct that I could theoretically or practically do right by. We’re at the bottom of the social ladder because we’re pretty much all powerless and weak, not because we don’t wear fancy clothes or because we generally refuse to speak in ridiculous fake accents and not swear.”

The girl, seemingly unfazed by this rebuke, retorted, “Your ignorance is alarming and blatant, but I guess that is to be expected of a male slave. Though it is otherwise below me, I shall deign to show you the glaring flaw in your argument.

“Think, if you are capable, of the Office for Social Advancement – the government office responsible for updating your registered social class in accordance with the law – in addition to that most solemn of duties, is also the only legally licensed agency within this country with mages capable of initiating the very system rank advancement trials that are necessary to undergo if one wishes to progress from the [Copper] system rank to the [Bronze] system rank.

In other words, if you do not appease the people at the Office for Social Advancement, it is impossible for you to become sufficiently strong enough to warrant that class promotion that you so obviously and desperately seek – at least, that is, unless you wish to become the most heinous type of criminal, the system fraudster, despised by the good and fair everywhere.”

With her lecture concluded, and Peter stunned sufficiently into silence, the girl who seemed to know way too much about how social advancement worked raised her head in satisfaction and without any hesitation marched straight up to the door of the dungeon and placed her dirty hand upon it. And, a few seconds later, she vanished from Peter’s sight.

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However, Peter hardly took note of this development as his mind was too caught up thinking about the bombshell that the girl had just dropped on him – her words single-handedly causing all of his somewhat thought-out plans of infinite unimpeded growth to implode underneath the weight of these startling new revelations.

Although Peter was pretty certain that his Idle Progression perk would increase his system rank as advertised, this new information about an aspect of the law he had no idea about made him realise that going ahead with a system rank upgrade without taking the proper precautions would be disastrous for him. As, if he ever got caught with a higher system rank than he was permitted to have, then he had no doubt in his mind that the government would nip him in the bud really quickly.

Peter wondered why he hadn’t been told about this sooner and then realised he had probably never heard of this particular part of the law because he’d never talked to anyone above the [Copper] system rank and thus he knew no one who’d ever undergone a rank upgrade and or who’d ever thought about such a thing.

However, this rationale didn’t make sense of how the girl, who looked no better off than he was, knew about how one increased one’s rank. Such knowledge was not common, hence why Peter hadn’t known it, but that raised the important question of how in the hell she knew of it.

Such questions raised doubts about her credibility. Yet Peter couldn’t quite bring himself to doubt the girl’s words too much as they did go a long way to explain a lot of important things about why society was the way that it was.

It first of all explained the unshakable stubbornness of the social class system. Now that he thought about it, it didn’t make sense that such a rigid system could be maintained when every citizen within it had access to such a volatile and powerful tool in the system.

However, if the government regulated access to the means through which one became strong enough to put up meaningful resistance against one’s social betters, then that explained why there hadn’t been a revolution to overthrow the current elite and bring about a freer, less ridiculous regimented society.

As Peter further reflected on this thought, he realised that this revelation also shone a light on Sadi’s attitude problems. There was no doubt in Peter’s mind that the towering man stood at the very peak of the [Copper] rank in terms of level, and yet he hadn’t progressed his rank – which would be odd if everyone truly had the ability to progress to the next system rank freely.

Perhaps the man had been stuck at the peak of the [Copper] rank, unable to progress, because he had such a rotten personality and or had, in his youth, made an enemy out of someone from the Office for Social Advancement and the bad personality had developed over time in response to being denied the ability to fulfil his potential.

Peter shook his head clear of such thoughts. It didn’t really matter to him why the bastard was a cruel sadist, what mattered to Peter was that he was a bad person right now and that in the future Peter would enact his vengeance against him.

Yet this desire for revenge would have to wait to be satiated, as getting revenge would be impossible for him until he was strong and that, it seemed, would be impossible for him until he learned more about the whims and fancies of this strange government agency.

But how would he go about learning more about this body?

He, first of all, eliminated Sadi as a potential source of answers, as either the man would know the implications of what he was asking and just wouldn’t tell him out of cruelty, or he wouldn’t know, and Peter would have then unwittingly aided a man he hoped one day to punish. With both likely scenarios resulting from this decision being bad, Peter thought it a no-brainer that he shouldn’t ask the towering brute of a man for help.

With his cruel master eliminated, that left only one known entity capable of helping him further. His body physically cringed as he came to the realisation that if he wanted to grow stronger, he would have to figuratively, if not also literally, grovel before the girl who had just entered the dungeon and ask for her help.

His sudden change in attitude towards her would undoubtedly reinforce the idea in her mind that he was nothing more than a runaway slave, but he didn’t care about things such as pride as of now. At the end of the day, there was but one thing that mattered to Peter in the final analysis, the thing that Peter wanted more than anything in the entire world: power.

Peter knew from the centre of his very core that he’d do almost anything short of outright evil to ensure his ascent into the ranks of the strong. And, albeit humiliating, a bit of light grovelling was far from the boundary of what he thought unacceptable – after all, he’d done far worse in the past to keep himself alive and at least this time he had much to gain from it rather than something to lose.

Thus, Peter decided to wait for the girl to leave the dungeon so that he could beg her for help when she eventually emerged. However, as minutes turned to hours, and a storm began to gather in the heavens above, Peter’s dedication weaned slightly. Unfortunately for his body, his lust for power won out over his concerns for his own personal health, and so he stayed put sat where he was in front of the dungeon door despite the torrential rainfall drowning the nearby area in freezing cold water.

Night quickly descended upon the world and yet still there was no sign of the girl that had entered the dungeon.

‘Was she dead? Or just messing around in there for heaven's sake!’ Peter thought to himself bitterly, as he could already feel the cold that was building within his lungs. Tomorrow’s dungeon dive would probably prove far worse due to it, and if the girl didn’t make it out of the dungeon, then the pain he’d endure wouldn’t even be worth it.

It was probably nearing 3 hours till midnight when Peter’s resolve finally shattered as a terrifying amount of lightning began to rain down on the landscape nearby – his childish fear of them being enough to finally put his desperation to get out of the storm at the very forefront of his otherwise power obsessed mind.

Yet as he arrived at his newly discovered squatting spot, a mile or two away from the dungeon’s entrance, he couldn’t help but feel slightly pathetic for having run away. Though, he reminded himself, the fact that the girl hadn’t left the dungeon after almost half a day meant that in all likelihood she was beyond dead – a wrench in his newly concocted plans for sure.

‘However,’, he thought melancholically to himself, ‘at least I’m now dry.’