Peter’s fist hit its mark well but a few seconds after it had landed, it was undoubtedly Peter who had taken the most damage from it. As whilst the party’s leader looked completely unscathed, Peter’s hand was now numb and throbbing, and he was pretty sure that he was feeling a massive concussion coming on for some reason.

“Dammit!” He heard the party leader shout before Peter felt his knees buckle out from underneath him and he blacked out.

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Peter writhed pitifully on the cold hard ground of one of the rooms within his new squatting spot as his consciousness returned. He was not in pain, far from it in fact as all he felt was a swirling unceasing ecstasy as delirious thoughts coalesced in his mind to explain the even more absurd hallucinations he was having.

Occasionally he heard voices speaking around him, but in his heavily intoxicated state – he could barely register his own desperate screams, let alone make out the words being spoken around him. However, at some point, a drop of a particularly viscous liquid had been dripped onto his exposed tongue, bringing the world into sharp uncanny focus for the briefest of moments before he vomited everywhere, and the delirium began up again.

Strong arms held him firmly against the ground, but that didn’t really matter as he had long ago given up resisting – his willpower and sanity having disappeared shortly after he started seeing the vague form of his parents walking away from him in his peripheral vision. He had cried and screamed as he watched them leave, again, and then everything had once again gone black.

He zigged and zagged in and out of consciousness many times over what felt to him like an eternity, until, at last, when he awoke for the 13th time – he just about felt normal again. Certainly, his body and mind were exhausted, his thoughts were almost painful to have, and every movement of even the smallest of digits made him cry out in pain, but other than that, Peter had finally recovered the ability to focus.

He couldn’t quite rotate his head yet, but Peter did his best to look around him regardless. It looked like he was in one of the rooms of the house that he’d been squatting in, and recalling them all, it seemed he had been placed in the smallest one.

Peter didn’t need to be a master detective to know that the door to the room had been altered from its prior regular state as it positively glowed with a layer of mana. The purpose of the magical enchantment also seemed clear to him, to keep him enclosed in the room until one of the party’s members could deal with him.

Though, for what purpose the group had kept Peter alive he didn’t know, and he wasn’t quite sure he wanted to find out – especially now that he knew firsthand the limitless capacity the strong had to hold bad circumstances over the heads of those weaker than themselves so as to make themselves feel better and to satiate their own sadistic desires.

Peter wouldn’t allow himself to be entrapped a second time.

However, in his current state, it didn’t really matter what he would or would not allow, he wasn’t strong enough to impose his will at this current time. His body was beyond weak after what it had endured, and there was therefore absolutely no chance that he’d be able to break out of his make-shift prison cell if the enchantment on the door did what he thought it did.

The thought of what was to come almost made Peter fall into despair. That was until he noticed in the corner of his vision that he’d received a number of system prompts whilst he had been tripping on whatever it was that he had been tripping on. Instantly, his focus was located elsewhere than his miserable situation.

Your assigned bot has completed its task!

Skill: [Detect Objects]’s level is now 2!

Updated Description: When activated, objects within a 1.5m x 1.5m x 1.5m area are made known to you directly.

You have gained the [E] rank trait: Resilient Mind

Description: Your mind has endured much psychological punishment and has been made stronger for it.

Effects: +5% chance to completely ignore [Mind]-targeting status effects

You have gained the [F+] rank trait: Pain Tolerant

Description: For one reason or another, you have endured a great amount of suffering in a very small amount of time and yet you do not relent.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Effects: All forms of pain are now 1% less physically and mentally debilitating

Peter had no idea how long he’d been writhing on the floor of this room but all he knew was that it had to have been for more than a day, as his system bot upgrade had finished, which meant that he likely was in for one hell of a punishment from Sadi should he not show up to whatever dungeon he was sooner rather than later.

However, thoughts of that bastard and his needs were quickly pushed aside in favour of thoughts about what Peter wanted to use his system bot to upgrade next.

Peter momentarily considered upgrading his strength stat to help him feel that he was resisting his current situation, but he knew that the upgrade wouldn’t be done in time for him to make any good use of it – so another stat it would be.

And, after considering each stat carefully, Peter realised that the only stat that lying at the source of every single one of his current problems was one undeniable and objective fact – he had a miserably terrible Luck stat.

There was no other explanation for why all of a sudden, his catastrophically poor but otherwise tolerable life had suddenly turned into a remorseless cycle of terrible events resulting in shit personal circumstances that led to further terrible events in less than a fortnight. At the beginning of the cycle had been his receiving of the system, and that drastic a change had to be the result of the most mystical of all system stats – the Luck stat.

So, with no hesitation, Peter mentally assigned the bot to upgrade his luck stat and a system prompt appeared in his vision – confirming his assignment.

You have assigned 1 system bot to increase Stat: [Luck], to [F+]!

Time remaining until assignment completion: 6 days, 22 hours, 19 minutes!

A few minutes later, Peter grew tired of sitting in complete silence and stewing on his misery, and so closed his eyes and drifted off back into unconsciousness – though unlike every other time recently – this rest was somewhat peaceful.

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Katie sheathed her newly acquired sword upon having finally slayed the last pathetically weak skeleton warrior that the miserable excuse of an undead dungeon would throw at her.

‘Only 392 skeletons and I still got 6 levels huh?’ She thought to herself as she mindlessly dismissed the hundreds of system notifications that had appeared in the periphery of her vision.

“Oh, to be this happily weak again.” She mused to herself in a chipper tone, the memories of how she had gotten her first levels in her former life playing on repeat over and over again before her mind’s eye.

Though, as usually happened when she allowed herself to recall her life in the former timeline, her mind quickly wandered into a dark and murky place – where memory and prophecy became one - so her mood soured quite quickly.

Suppressing her conscious thoughts, she opened up her void storage and pulled out a magical item that she had made prior to entering the dungeon – a special kind of magnet.

Flooding the former fridge magnet with the entirety of her remaining mana pool, Katie couldn’t help but laugh as thousands of bones and monster cores flew towards her at an incredible speed only to then disappear from existence as they were all sucked into her void storage for safe keeping.

Katie shivered as she recalled that around about this time previously the world had not yet discovered the [Loot-Magnet] enchant and so adventurers needed to manually pick up every bit of loot from the dungeon, and just the mere thought of wasting precious time like that was enough to make her glad that she had spent some time learning how to enchant particular items back in her former timeline.

With everything with any value now safely stored away in her void storage, Katie began making her way over to the dungeon’s exit. She was beyond elated that now all of her objectives had now been completed, and she could finally leave the dungeon.

It had been about 5 real days since she had entered the crypt and now that she’d obtained every possible bit of loot and experience that she could from this dungeon, she desperately hoped that she would never have to spend even a single second longer in the dungeon. Just these few days, necessitated by the fact that the hidden monster wave of the dungeon only appeared after that long of a time period, had made her outright sick of fighting with skeletons, and oh how she had longed with her heart to feel the true sun beating once again down on her skin and to breathe the outside word’s fresh air once more.

Then, an amusing thought popped into her mind.

‘I wonder how that slave boy is doing?’ She thought as she took the final step into the dungeon’s exit portal. She pondered the question for a few moments as she once again appeared outside the dungeon’s entry, but her mind quickly dismissed any thoughts of the young boy.

As the question was a well and truly pointless one as though she was aware that the present timeline that she was in was going to be fundamentally different from the one she had lived through, as that was her explicit intention, she didn’t know of anyone matching the boy’s characteristics who’d ever made a name for themselves in her timeline and thus doubted the boy’s fate would be dramatically different.

As, at the end of the day, those who had what it took to become great were few and far between and judging by the fact he hadn’t shown himself to be among them in her former life, Katie felt absolutely no reason to lose sleep thinking about the boy any more than she already had.

That was until, as she walked past a burly muscle mountain of a man, her super sensitive hearing picked up the unfamiliar-looking man mutter under his breath, “Damned lazy rat. I can’t wait to see the look on that rat’s face once I hand him over to Jeremy and he has his way with him.”

Katie felt the sudden urge to impale the man with her sword but resisted the urge. After all, she had no logical reason to assume that the man and she had the same kid in mind, nor any logical reason that the man was referencing the famed criminal and savage slave trader, Jeremy Foram. But that being said, she had the unsettling feeling that if she didn’t at least try to find out whether or not the man and the kid were related, the kid would be in trouble. And despite it being an extreme inconvenience to her plans, her conscious wouldn’t allow her to simply handwave away her supernaturally honed instincts and not try and help the boy – even though she wasn’t best pleased about it.

“I’m sorry Mark,” She thought to herself, “I’ll find you and the others soon enough.”