Right, I guess zombies and spectres also would have hard time in that sunny weather outside. The door opened into a bog standard five by three room with 4 doors. The door gently closed on itself, while the door right in front of me opened up. I was ready for my first monster!

It turned to be a two headed dog, it was pretty large, coming to my waistline. It had a brown, mottled fur and long tongues quivering in both toothy mouths. Without further ado it jumped towards me with open jaws.

I had never been a big fan of medieval games, I had way more experience with first person shooting games set in space. I had expected that a game that could crown me a Monarch would be a space game. Still, I had this. I moved my shield in position and smacked that double headed monster down hard.

A text log appeared at the top of my view, it stated "You hit the Two Headed Jackal". I had clearly wasted time reading the message as I suddenly had one mouth biting me in my shield arm, and the other mouth chomping at my wooden breast armor. I could barely move my shield arm, and realized that I was in trouble again. The only move I saw possible was using the small wooden shield on my back to chop at the jackal.

The pain was real, I had to act. In one swoop I took the small wooden shield of my back and whacked at the head locked onto my left arm. "You have hit the Two Headed Jackal. Critical hit. You have stunned the Two Headed Jackal" Nice. No chaos storm to punish me. It also helped that whacking one of the heads got both of them stunned. I was  feeling much better about this combat. I tried a fancier move where I bashed the left head with my large shield while I chopped at the second head with the smaller shield. "You hit the Two Headed Jackal (2x). The Two Headed Jackal flees in terror" I got him! I confidence grew even further and I jumped on the Jackal. It was more crawling in terror than running in terror. I gave one more full strength shield bash and the Jackal died. "You have killed the Jackal. You have gained 2 experience points." I was curious how bad my wounds were. "Health status!"

"Hit Points: 8/11, Mana Points: 3/3"

Not too shabby, one at a time I could handle three, perhaps four of these. I was feeling good about this. With a more confident step I walked towards the room the Two Headed Jackal (who came up with these names?) had come from. Another bland dungeon room, except for a chest standing against the north wall. Remembering that finding traps was my worst skill, I decided to just open it.

"You have found your starting equipment"

Cool! No experience for that though. Another window appeared, more in my consciousness than in my view. It contained the following items:

* Demonic Spellbook [Lesser Pacts]

* Somatic Spellbook [Basic Chi Flow]

* 2 scrolls of Darkness

* 3 scrolls of Teleportation

* 1 scroll of Recall

* 3 scrolls of Satisfy Hunger

Excitedly I opened up the Demonic Spellbook to see what I could cast. The book felt odd, it seemed to wriggle and whisper with different voices. Inside the book, the old yellow pages revealed mostly unreadable scribbling except for the first page which had two spells. 'Unholy Strength' and 'Detect Evil'. Detecting evil seemed pointless to me, evil would probably be great at detecting me.. Unholy Strength sounded cool though.

"What is Unholy Strength ?"

A whispering, lisping voice emanated from the spell book, making it just that much more creepy.

"Unholy Strength is a spell found both in the death and the demonic realm. At your spellcasting level it will increase the to hit bonus by 12, protect the caster from fear, provide an extra 10 hit points. This comes at the cost of 3 mana points, and 5 hit points."

Shocker, another big trade off. Essentially this would take all my hitpoints, and pretty much half of my health. It still sounded better than Detect Evil though. I guessed I'd just have to find some healing resources to offset the damage from Unholy Strength.

"So I just chant this incantation and that's it?"

"No. You must declare your intent to learn this spell. I am in essence a magical symbiote, I will know when you want to cast a specific spell. Learning a spell will provide me access to your mana pool for that specific spell; I then cast these spells for you using your mana. At your current level we can only sync up on one spell."

Wow. A spellbook symbiote, that was cool. Even if it was a creepy, whispering, wriggly symbiote. He felt anticipation radiate of the spellbook, it wanted to bond with me. It wanted access to my mana pool, and now that I thought about it, my hit points. I would be feeding this thing for a long time, and I didn't care all that much really. I needed to win, that was all.

"I choose to learn Unholy Strength".

I felt what I could only describe as a tugging on the back of my mind, a door that had never been opened before was now opened for my spellbook. At least I did not feel physically weaker.

"You have gained 15 experience points for gaining a new spell."

I quickly checked my Somatics book, perhaps I could pull this off twice. Disappointment struck. I was not able to read anything in it. All I saw were circles pulsing and moving around on the pages. Just holding the book open seemed to relieve me of any distractions, providing a focus on what I needed to do next. There was at least that.

I checked the room one more time, but there were just 4 bland grey walls, a hewn stone floor and the emptied chest. Time to move back to the room I came from. This time there were no doors bursting open. I decided to use my excellent stealth levels and listened at each door. At both doors I heard what seemed a snoozing, snoring sound. I was guessing there were Two Headed Jackals behind those doors. I opened the first door as quietly as I could, to no avail.

The door screeched, I even had to put muscle into opening it. I entered what looked like a lair. It was an assault to my senses; it stank, it was littered with disgustingly half eaten carcasses, and more importantly it had a jackal piercing my ear with a primal scream. Another two headed jackal. A little bigger though. Instead of just jumping at me, it tensed it's body. The left head just kept staring at me in a calculating way, the right head was still howling so loud that it could wake up the whole dungeon. I felt a rage suddenly towards the monster. These were supposed to be beginner level monsters, a stepping stone to greatness, not an actual challenge.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

I screamed, jumped, and bashed into the left head of the jackal. It seemed the calculating head had not figured me out just yet, it yelped and tried to move backwards. The right head was going for my small shield arm, and bit me. We just went at it. I ignored the lines of text scrolling on the top of my view, I would not get distracted this time.

I had almost destroyed the jackal when suddenly I felt a sharp pain in the back of both of my legs. I didn't need to check the status messages to know that I now had two assailants. I could not win this, I had to retreat! I went over my available options with lightning speed. The only viable way out seemed to be the scrolls of Teleportation. I focused on them, and suddenly the game world seemed to freeze up. In slow motion I saw disappointed looks appearing on the jackal heads. I now had plenty of time to check my battle stats.

"Hit Points: 3/11, Mana Points: 3/3"

Not good, not good at all. Then, the world sped up again and I was in a different room. This had to be the last room. It looked like the previous room except that the door clearly had been bashed to pieces by a dog sized creature. I heard the jackals two rooms away. They were pissed, not giving up, and coming up my way. I needed more time and I only had two more scrolls of Teleportation. Maybe I could hide in the dark, I was good at hiding. I focused again, this time on my stack of scrolls of Darkness. The whole room and a good portion of the central went ink black.

I made an awesome discovery, I had infra-vision! The jackals had not, they could rely on their other senses, but it helped little. The stench of their lairs was overpowering so they could not smell me and I was moving around the jackals like a ghost. I crept closer to the jackal that was most hurt. One head had been completely bashed in, the other head was frantically trying to locate me. My small shield had seen better days, I guessed that one more hit would be the end of it. With all my might I heaved my small shield and bashed it into the second head and jumped away, not even checking whether I had killed the jackal.

"You have killed the Jackal. You have gained 3 experience points."

Three experience points! This game was ridiculous, leveling up would take forever.. The other jackal had turned around, staring intently at where the first one had died. My shield was still solid, and what's more, I started to feel a little better, so I checked my stats.

"Hit Points: 5/11, Mana Points: 3/3"

Awesome, I seemed to regenerate slowly over time. All I had to do was move around, never let the last jackal catch me. Moving around was boring, the regeneration was slow, and the jackal also seemed to heal. Possibly faster than me. Another thing was that I subconsciously started to avoid the deeper end of the lair, and started to notice that the jackal while searching for me also never went near the deeper end. Traps? I knew I was horrible at finding traps, but shouldn't I get a bonus when I expected there to be traps?

I started to make inroads into the deeper end of the lair, very slowly, very methodically. After what seemed like an eternity, but was probably more like a few minutes, I got a status message.

"You have detected a trap."

Awesome, I knew it. A blinking caret(*) appeared a few feet away from me, helpfully indicating where I had detected the trap. I still had no clue what the trap was about. Could it kill me? Could I use it to kill the jackal? No idea.I crept as close as I could to the blinking caret while still avoiding the jackal, which seemed easier than before. That thing really did not want to be around here.

"You have detected a trap. (2x)"

Three carets now blinked in my view, and they seemed to be clustered. I came closer, slowly, to verify my theory and five more carets appeared around an empty space. I could not see anything special about the empty place. Perhaps I needed light to tell the difference, perhaps I was simply not good enough to find the ninth trap. I was so tempted to just jump in the center of the traps and taunt the two headed jackal, but that would have been stupid. I knew now that dying was a very painful business.

I checked my stats and noticed I was fully healed now. It was time to change tactics. I grinned at the jackal, brandished my shields and started attacking. The jackal had issues with connecting with me in the darkness and I won really really quickly.

"You have killed the Jackal. You have gained 3 experience points."

Gah. I just couldn't get over the low amount of experience points, this Game would last forever. I took a look at the jackal carcass and wondered if I could use it to set off the traps in the back of the lair. I then dragged the corpse to about 3 feet away from the nearest trap and threw it straight into that trap. Something immediately shot out of the ceiling at a violent speed.

"You have disarmed a Poison Dart Trap."

I checked out the damage on the dead jackal, and saw indeed three poisonous darts stuck in it, making the jackal look even deader. I carefully plucked the darts and put them in my inventory.

"You have picked up 3 poisonous darts"

I chuckled, this game was way too verbose at times. I lifted what little remained of the jackal, stepped back again about three feet and threw the jackal into the mysterious center. Nothing happened.. With some reluctance I went to the center myself, and nothing happened to me either. I couldn't see much, the scroll of Darkness was still in effect. I hoped that my beginner equipment would not be so evil as to provide scrolls that could kill me. So I focused on my stack of scrolls of Light to activate it. I felt no pain, I guess only actual sun light could hurt me. The lair was lit once more, I was greeted again by a horrible collection of half eaten corpses.

I started to look around me, and after a few seconds I realized I that the tile I stood on was loose, I could lift the tile. Under the tile was what looked like a magic wand. I pocketed it without hesitation.

"You have picked up a triple plated wand".

"What does a triple plated wand do?"

Silence. It seemed that only my spellbook was still willing to part with information. Perhaps I just had to try the wand, I was more than willing to sacrifice a charge of my wand to know what it was. Information was a resource in games, and I needed more of it. I focused on the wand and immediately a grid was overlaying the lair. I instinctively knew that I just had to focus on a part of the lair to make the wand go off. I picked a spot, a good distance away of me, and a massive green and purple swirling ball of poison came out of the wand, scary but also kind of awesome. The ball flew towards the spot I had picked and lost all momentum there. It drenched the floor in poison, giving it a sickly sweet smelling odor of death.

"You have a wand of Wonder {Unknown}, you have gained 7 experience points."

A wand of Wonder, it seemed a bit overpowered. But I would take any advantage I could get. Plus extra experience points, though I still had not even hit level 2. It seemed I got experience points every time I tried something new. Maybe I should just cast my Unholy Strength spell now that I was completely safe.

I connected with my spellbook, it took immediate action and drained me of all my mana points and half of my hitpoints. I felt great though; fearless, dangerous, ready for action.

"You feel like a hero!

**Low Hitpoint Warning**"

You have gained 15 experience points.

Welcome to level 2.

You can learn 2 more spells.

You feel magically reinvigorated.

You are full!

The voice of Kobal booms out: Thy deed hath earned thee a worthy blade."