Another night had passed, but unlike the ones that had passed prior to this one, the door of Vaile’s room (the newest one) had not been accosted by enough banging for someone to think that Riverdance was being performed on it. He had indeed done what he had done to his other room, fortifying it with enough stuff to make a certain yellow and red armored giant with a thing for heavy fortifications proud.

Plus, he had probably made another few institutions and groups from different fictional settings equally as proud, as the number of enchantments and other such things that lined the interior of this new room were just as if not more numerous as the ones in the first room. At this point, he figured that he might as well get into the business of preparing these kinds of things ahead of time, as who knew when he would need to do this whole song and dance again?

Still, he now had an entirely new area to explore and map out. This would take time and effort, especially since he had been forced to use paper maps. Under normal circumstances, his minimap and the greater map system that it was a part of would have been more than enough. However, this was not one of those ‘normal’ situations, and not one by even the most insignificant margin.

The minimap feature worked, that much was absolutely true without a shadow of a doubt. The problem lay with the fact that the rest of the mapping system did not work as it should have. Any part of the greater map that was filled out by his minimap was ultimately erased from it mere seconds after he had moved on, making the act of using the normal mapping system an exercise in futility. Thus, he had no other option but to make more physical maps and use his minimap to help only in that regard. By this point he had amassed around forty pages of nothing but maps that lay in his item box, eagerly awaiting more of their kind to join them.

And, if he had to be brutally honest with himself, Vaile estimated that he would have at least two hundred pages, if not much more, by the time he finally got out of this hell. Well, it was time to get out and start the process all over again, but first, he would head back to the initial area he had arrived in and finish mapping that place. He still had a few streets left to go, and hopefully, they wouldn’t keep him for much longer.

After all, a part of him was getting the feeling that staying even one more night in that particular inn was a risky, if not outright suicidal idea.

…

“Fuck.” Vaile cursed. He had neglected to pay as much attention as he should have to the passage of time and was now very short on it. He couldn’t go back to the second inn and get to safety there, not with the time he had left and his broken as fuck stats not performing as they should have. He didn’t feel good about it, but he had little to no choice other than to disregard his gut and risk using the first room again. He hoped that the defenses would still protect him, but aside from that, he wasn’t sure what he was feeling so anxious about.

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He managed to get back to the room’s entrance before the last few seconds of normalcy began to ebb away, and hurriedly opened the door ajar, entered the room, and slammed that fucker behind him as fast as he could, allowing the defenses to activate once again. He slowly backed away from the door, his back facing towards the majority of the room. Soon enough the usual noise assaulted the one door that seemed to be so unfortunate as to be a vertical stage for a hundred-man strong tap-dance performance mixed with twenty people on jackhammers.

The door refused to budge, and it seemed that the defenses held firm. This raised the question as to what exactly his gut had been trying to warn him of, and why it was currently screaming at him to just abandon the place and bail out the window. That question was answered as Vaile turned around to look straight at the face of… well, what he was looking at had no face.

There were no words in any language that he had ever heard of to describe what exactly he was looking at. It was… dog-like? But even that was a flimsy thing to say at best. Even calling it dog-like was akin to trying to explain to a blind and deaf man what colors looked like and how sounds… sounded. His vocabulary just kinda put some random shit together, and after that, it just decided that it couldn’t deal with this shit.

Equally, his eyes could not really understand what they were looking at either. The thing in front of him could be said to have a vaguely shape-like form, but given how ambiguous that description was and how even that didn’t come close to describing what was in front of him, Vaile’s mind just decided to give up and accept that something was in front of it, but that it would not try and describe what was there.

What it did tell Vaile was that this thing, whatever it was, was obscenely dangerous, and that he had no goddamn chance in hell of taking it on with his current abilities. Now, if his busted stats were working properly, then he knew that he would be able to crush this whatever the hell this thing was like a bug, but as he was now that was an entirely impossible feat. It was at this point, the three ‘Fs’ of stress took over and played Rock-Paper-Scissors to decide what needed to be done.

Fight? No, that was entirely impossible. This thing would rip him to shreds before he even managed to lay a finger on it.

Flight? No, that was also impossible. The defenses seemed to lock it in place, but anything he did could end up breaking those chains. Trying to escape from the room would simply seal his fate.

Freeze? Yeah, that was the only option available right now, so his body locked up and eyed the threat with a mix of abject fear, terror, and horror (yes, those are technically different things).

And so Vaile eyed the beast inside the room with him until the stress finally caught up with him. He tried to fight it, but the exhaustion and stress were too much to fight, and it was off to dreamland for our poor little MC. And… well….

His sleep would not be nearly as peaceful as it had been for some of the other nights that had passed….