“I might just love myself a little too much,” mumbled Roan. “Maybe it’s just self-love and not narcissism.”
Sighing to himself, Roan aimed his gun at his target—a large boulder out in the middle of nowhere, on an island he accidentally found while exploring the multiverse. Pressing the trigger, a bullet shot off into the air, drilling deep into the large rock.
“Hoo, damn…” He rubbed his right shoulder and swung his arm. “That should be enough training. I’m pretty darn accurate enough.”
Humming to himself, Roan placed his gun on his holster, grabbed his bag, and glanced at the time on his phone.
“Around ten pm on Earth One,” mumbled Roan. If he sensed correctly and the time dilation he approximated within this reality was right, then he could spend well over five to six hours inside Dungeon One—the first dungeon reality he entered—and only an hour or two would be in his home reality.
Contemplating deeply, his thoughts raced, and he calculated the time he could safely spend and get back home in time.
With guns, this shouldn’t be too hard, right? Roan rubbed his chin, sighed, and white sparks coalesced around his figure.
I’ve spent too long training. It’s time I test out my marksmanship in real combat and uncover the secrets that dungeon hold.
As of right now, with my lack of access to fantasy, xianxia, or sci-fi-esque realities, this dungeon is the clearest path to gaining more power.
As the white sparks erupted with a blinding brilliance, Roan once again returned to the void between realities. In this nothingness, the young man was greeted by sights the human mind could barely describe.
Incomprehensible sights, impossible geometries, objects stacked across infinity and at one singular point at the same time; everything was directly presented to his eyes, creating a cacophony of both never-ending chaos and absolute order.
He followed a familiar ‘path’ across the void and swiftly approached a strange, mortifying reality cluster.
The reality cluster was a strange clump of fleshy halls, beating hearts, and writhing veins. Viscous blood flowed from one hall to another; eyes opened and closed, bulging outwards from pink fleshy lumps like tumors; veiny tentacles extended outwards in the void, grabbing nothing but emptiness.
It was as if this reality cluster itself was alive, taking on a form that would send chills down the spines of any onlookers.
Roan suppressed his innate fear and disgust and urged himself to fly forward, the thoughts of greater power empowering his will. He ‘gritted his teeth’ despite being a mass of what he assumed to be energy, and dived right into the dungeon’s fleshy halls, beating hearts, pulsating veins, and blinking eyes.
The moment he entered, he felt his body phased through a strange barrier. An icky, eerie something brushed against his very existence, touching his ‘essence,’ and establishing a link.
Now that he was calmer compared to before, he managed to barely notice this strange sensation but soon ignored it. He unconsciously suppressed the questions that surfaced in his mind, and instead, he stared at the familiar room he landed in. A pile of spears, rotting corpses of horned rabbits and goblins, sat in the corner, along with a leather chest plate.
Putting on the leather chest plate, Roan fastened his katana to his waist, grabbed his handgun, and smiled.
“I’m back.”
…
Compared to the Roan five days ago, he was now much more prepared when he first arrived in this dungeon. He was certain in his ability to escape, had done plenty of preparations to assure his safety, practiced his traveler abilities and marksmanship extensively, and even had the firepower of tier two weapons.
Right now, he was many times more composed and stronger, which gradually eased his initial anxiety.
Inside a similar hallway compared to the other hallways in the dungeon, Roan stood opposite of two goblins with the faint scent of blood lingering in the air. The originally glowing dark green boss was tinted red, and the blood of a dead goblin pooled beneath its corpse.
The two goblins stared apprehensively, warily raising their spears.
Roan smirked, cocked his gun, and pressed the trigger. A bullet whizzed through the air, shooting the frontmost goblin through the head, leaving a hole as it tore through its skull and flesh. The goblin dropped to the ground, while the other goblin screeched out in fear, reflexively tossing their spear forward.
The young man disappeared in a burst of white light, reappearing right behind the terrified goblin. Embedding his gun right at the back of the goblin’s head, Roan whispered softly, “I feel so fucking cool right now. Is that why those teleporters love to teleport behind their enemies so much?”
While mumbling some nonsense, Roan pressed the trigger, and another bullet tore through another poor goblin’s head.
Chuckling at the bloody corpses beneath him, Roan kicked a goblin in the head, and muttered, “You’re not so scary now. How the tables have turned indeed.”
Reloading his gun by switching magazines, Roan casually strolled deeper into the hallway, encountering a prismatic gate, and walked right through.
Oh? Roan raised his eyebrow in surprise when he entered the room.
Calling it a goblin camp rather than a room might be more appropriate because, inside the room, a group of four goblins were busy huddling around a rudimentary campfire. Roasting atop the fire were skinned rabbits, while their horns were being embedded onto the tips of wooden sticks.
They’re cooking and making weapons? Roan was mildly intrigued, but his interest in searching for answers wasn’t that great.
Observing for a little longer, Roan eventually got bored with their mundane actions and raised his handgun.
Bang bang bang bang!
Four resounding gunshots echoed across the cavernous room, and the four goblins dropped to the dead.
Well, that’s what he thought, but one of them was only hit in the abdomen. After sensing the impending danger, they managed to dodge it at the last moment, but that only delayed their impending doom.
Roan whistled with a mocking gaze and walked up to the bleeding goblin. The goblin clutched a spear, staring angrily at the intruder that had just killed all of its comrades.
The goblin screeched, growled, and readied to attack.
The young man ignored the goblin, grabbed one of the roasting rabbit corpses stabbed with a wooden branch, and smiled. “You guys sure are advanced. You even learned how to skin horned rabbits and create fire?”
“So, time still passes while I’m outside, huh?” Roan cocked his handgun and gazed at the goblin curiously. “And you guys require sustenance just like any other creature. If I spent enough time outside, would a full-blown goblin civilization start here?”
Wait… Roan squinted his eyes. Why do I believe this reality is a dungeon? What if there’s a whole world above? What if this is just some cave that’s—
No, this should be a dungeon, right?
Roan’s mind elapsed for a moment, allowing the goblin an opportunity to lunge forward. It raised its spear, ready to stab Roan, but the young man swiftly took action, raising his handgun.
Bang!
A bullet pierced through the goblin’s open mouth, shooting out of the top of its head, and it died, falling to the ground with lifeless eyes.
“Where do these goblins even come from in the first place? Or the horned rabbits? Wait, where do their feces even go?” Roan hummed, inspecting some of the loot the goblins had gathered.
Ranging from herbs to fur belonging to horned rabbits, spears made with the horns of horned rabbits, and even leather armor that was strangely made for humans, Roan squatted down and observed the items he had set side by side on the ground.
Herbs. Pelts. Weapon crafting… Roan calmly analyzed, making various conjectures in his head. Assuming one couldn’t escape this dungeon, is crafting going to play a vital role in one’s normal progression?
Not to mention the fact that weapons have durability on them, I think I passed by ores before, so maybe mining is even a core aspect of the gameplay loop? Are ores required to repair weapons?
You gather herbs to maybe craft potions, hunt monsters, and mine ores to craft better equipment. This should be the general game mechanics.
As he silently stored the herbs and tucked the weapons aside, casually inspecting their stats, and putting on the second piece of his leather armor set, Roan glanced at his status.
Roan Peregrine
Power: 35 (17)
Health: 100%
Energy: 92%
Status: Normal
Thirty-five power…
Roan hummed.
“It’s definitely many times stronger than a normal human, but how good exactly is it? Considering most of that ‘power’ stems from a weapon, maybe I’m not even qualified to stand toe to toe with an entity with thirty-five power.”
“If I assume it’s the summation of my ‘strength’, then most of my power is skewed to my lethality. I clearly lack the agility, vitality, and even the physical strength to match with beings at this level.”
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While nerding and conjecturing, Roan continued on to massacre more goblins.
He blitzed through numerous hallways and rooms, finding more and more developed goblin camps. They were creating more advanced weapons, extending out to more than just spears and even making slingshots and blowpipes.
Their camps had sleeping areas, rudimentary crops where medicinal herbs were growing, pastes made out of herbs, and pens holding horned rabbits in captivity. It was as if he was witnessing a rapidly growing civilization with his very eyes, indicating the lifelike, no, the undeniable intelligence and growing wisdom of these monsters.
More questions arose in his mind the more he saw, and when he was in his seventh room… Roan saw something strange.
Huddling around a certain part of the wall, the goblins let out screeches of joy as they watched with unnerving gazes. The wall they were staring intently at contracted and pulsated, and the light of the dimly glowing moss on the walls pulsed along with the wall’s rhythm.
It was the same rhythmic beating of hearts and veins.
The light of the glowing moss flowed from the outer edges of the room to a single spot. The walls contracted further and further and gradually turned from a rocky gray to a pinkish hue. Steam seeped out of the hole gradually forming on the wall, and the rocks stretched inwards, forming an appearance eerily similar to a woman’s vagina.
Then, as if the changes had reached their peak, the walls stretched even further, and the head of a goblin popped out, covered in a disgusting transparent mucus. From the head to then its body, the goblin popped out of the wall, and soon enough, the wall regained its rocky, solid texture.
The goblins surrounded the newly born goblin, crying out in joy, and Roan, the spectator of it all, glanced at the walls, floor, and ceiling, deeply traumatized by the sight he had just seen.
“Holy guacamole…” Roan let out a barrage of curses in his mind as he almost jumped out of this reality and returned home, but held back those urges.
Calming down his racing thoughts, he aimed his gun and released a series of bullets whizzing through the air.
The goblins dropped consecutively, and the newly born goblin, just breaking out of its layer of transparent mucus shell, cried out in pain, a bullet lodging right into its head.
Blowing the smoke from the tip of his handgun, Roan entered the room, ignoring the wall to the right where the horrific event had just transpired. He instead focused on the loot he could gather in the room, killing the horned rabbits in the pen, and stacking whatever he could find near the middle, away from the blood and gore gathering to the side.
For the most part, the most valuable items he received were another piece of armor for his leather armor set, a pair of horned rabbit knives, a health potion…
And this.
The young man squatted down and used the tip of a horned rabbit spear to touch a rolled-up parchment on the ground, with its edges soaked by scarlet red blood.
His right eye took on a vibrant red color, and words floated up in the air.
Scroll of Upgrade - Tier I
Use to upgrade Tier I items.
What? Roan was surprised. I can ‘upgrade’ weapons?
However, thinking deeper into it, he realized that he was just being stupid and he should have expected a similar mechanic. Considering a spear has twenty power and a handgun only has a hundred power, then there should be a clear lack of attack power with the general trend he had in mind.
However, scrolls? I thought weapons would be upgraded using ores and minerals in smithies. Roan grabbed the scroll and rolled it open. Inscribed in the middle was a series of arcane runes glowing green, forming an upward arrow symbol with a plus sign at the bottom right.
Unable to comprehend the runes nor the scroll’s intricacies, he sighed and used it. He’d rather upgrade a weapon, and test out the scroll’s effects than hoard it for later and lack insightful info into what seems to be one of the game’s most important progression mechanics.
The scroll fragmented into motes of light that floated upwards with a mere thought, and Roan instinctively pulled out his most powerful tier one weapon, his katana, and aimed it forward. The motes of light seemingly noticed the katana’s presence, and they all drilled downwards, fusing with the metallic body of the sword.
When the light show finally receded, Roan observed the katana’s new and improved status.
Katana (Lvl 2) - Tier I
Attack Power: 100
Durability: 99%
Effect: None
What the hell? Roan was flabbergasted the moment he saw the attack power his sword held. One hundred?! The same as my handgun?!
That couldn’t be right. How is that right? How did that even work? How can a simple sword hold as much power as a gun?
“Or maybe it is?” Roan swung his blade, which carved through the body of a goblin with such ease that he basically cut through butter. “A sharper edge?”
He tested it in more depth, stabbing the goblin, and testing out how tough the blade had become. In the end, Roan had come to the conclusion that the katana had received an overall improvement, with a clear focus on its lethality.
How is the attack power even calculated? Roan wondered but placed those questions for later. He could even barely comprehend the fact that potentially everything in this dungeon originated from flesh and blood, much less the underlying equations behind everything else.
Roan was never the scientist type. He would much rather accept the craziness of everything, take it all in stride, gain more power, and hopefully have fun on the way.
Maybe Ethan would be busy trying to figure out how everything is calculated. Daniel would probably be min-maxing as well.
Sighing, Roan sheathed his katana, subconsciously placed more importance on a new type of consumable, scrolls, and continued on his journey into the dungeon’s depths.
The deeper he went in the direction he was going, the more goblins he found patrolling the corridors and the denser the population was in each room. It appeared that due to the periodic creation of monsters in his absence, goblins had overrun the place and began building themselves tiny hubs of civilization, farming horned rabbits, using herbs and plants to feed their domesticated animals, and trying to craft weapons from the horned rabbits.
Unfortunately, Roan was a merciless slaughterer who beat up innocent men and women when they tried to stop him from robbing a convenience store. He would even beat up a kid if he had to, much less monsters that were far from the same species as his.
I wonder if I’ll puke and all that stuff when I have my first blood on a fellow human? Roan wondered to himself.
Would I hesitate to kill a fellow human? Roan wondered absentmindedly. I’ve killed so many goblins at this point that I’m desensitized, but humans…
Whatever. He shrugged his shoulders. I’ll cross that bridge when I have to.
As he looted the room, he coincidentally found the last piece missing from his full leather armor set, a leather helmet. Putting it on, he found that it perfectly suited his head shape; it was neither stuffy nor tight and was just the right size. It was such a nice, snuggly fit that it barely felt like he was wearing anything on his head.
Strange indeed. In fact, the rest of his armor was the same. They were all made just to suit his needs. They were neither bigger nor smaller than his body and were perfectly made for his size.
Well, if I was a dungeon, I might as well make it convenient for my players, right? Roan once again didn’t ask any questions over the strangeness of the matter and went on his merry way. He had the sneaking suspicion that he was getting close to the heart of this place, as the previous settlements he raided were getting bigger and bigger.
Luckily for him, he was quite prepared.
In the blink of an eye, the ninth room was cleared, with him passing through rooms he had previously explored in the process, proving his theory that the rooms were in one big interconnected web. This leaves only a couple of rooms left unexplored, or maybe this world did stretch on for infinity and there were an infinite number of rooms in this place.
As he prepped himself up and approached the end of the hallway where a prismatic doorway stood, he could vaguely feel the pulsations of life coursing through the walls of the cavern. The moss pulsated at rhythmic intervals, like veins carrying blood from the lungs to the heart. It thumped like a heartbeat, edging him to move forward and enter the room.
Just like before, he braced himself for impact and took a peek inside.
“Nope.” Roan quickly pulled back, his figure reappearing right inside his base room, where he then promptly pulled out bottles of alcohol stuffed with white cloth. “That’s a whole ass village of goblins.”
By his count, there were at least twenty of them. They all wielded spears and appeared far more experienced than the others Roan had met. They’re probably the first generation of goblins to have spawned in this place, though Roan might not be sure since nobody knew just how long this dungeon had been running.
I’m gonna need explosions for this one, shameless hit-and-run tactics.
Roan was no valiant warrior who would go fight on the frontlines. He was an unscrupulous hunter, one who knew his strengths and weaknesses. While he could potentially take them all out by going in guns blazing, teleporting all over the place, and killing them one by one, he had a more efficient plan in mind.
He grabbed his Molotov cocktails, and his shotgun, and readied himself for a massacre.
Once again, he transformed into a humanoid figure of white light, flew into the largest room he had seen by far, and readied to light the whole place on fire. There was only a single gate leading to that place, so it would be pretty easy to trap them all, but one thing did caught his attention in the room.
Stairs?
In the very middle of this large cavern, barricaded by a series of fortifications the goblins had crudely set in place, was a dark staircase leading down into the depths of the ground. Moss on the walls dimly lit up the stair’s entrance and its depths, but its end couldn’t be seen.
Roan couldn’t help but gawk upon seeing the stairs, but right now, he had more pressing matters to attend to.
In a flash of white light, he appeared right in the middle of the room, unnoticed by all the busy goblins. He lit up the cocktails, with the white cloth burning with a bright orange flame. He grinned maniacally as he pulled back his hand, and swung the burning bottles of alcohol into the air, aimed straight at the only entrance and exit of the room, and the staircase in the middle of the encampment.
“Have fun burning.” He disappeared in another flash of white light and hopped into existence right outside the entrance of the large room. He swiftly pulled out the shotgun from his back, aimed it straight at the prismatic gate, and waited.
Soon enough, panicked screams and horrified shouts echoed from inside the room as goblins tried to put out the flame to no avail. Water barely existed in this place and they clearly didn’t have access to buckets, so there was only one way they could avoid burning to death.
They had to run straight through the fire and hope to weather through it.
The staircases did exist, but it was much harder to run down some stairs than through a straight line. Left with no other choice, the group ran madly, burning their skin and stinging their eyes.
But they held on. They endured the hot air and fiery heat, and emerged from the gateway victorious; they had successfully escaped the maws of death… only for another one to appear before them.
“BANG!” Roan barbarically shouted out the same sound his shotgun made, exploding the head of the goblin who first walked through the gate. They appeared so happy, so proud of their precious survival, that the despair in their eyes to see the end of Roan’s gun brought untold pleasure for the man.
It was… it was indescribable—to lord over someone’s life or death, to dictate their survival with complete control. That was probably what it felt like to be a god living among mortals, and Roan enjoyed that feeling with utter glee.
Soon enough, he kept shooting and shooting, killing one goblin after another as he took their short-lived happiness and crushed it under the barrel of his gun. This was power. This was strength. This was euphoria.
When everything finally came to an end and the faint sound of crackling flames disappeared, Roan walked into the room and was met by ashes and darkness. The moss lighting up the area had fully burned, turning into ashes, providing nearly zero visibility for Roan if not for the existence of the prismatic gateway illuminating the area around it.
Taking out his phone from his pocket and turning on the flashlight, Roan examined the remains of the goblin encampment and didn’t find anything that new. There were stored horned rabbit meat, stone spears, loin cloth, etc.
However, there was one thing that caught his eye, since it was literally shining amidst the darkness of the room. Atop a naturally made shrine of stone, erected at the far-left end of the room, was a backpack, or maybe a satchel, that shone with iridescent light. It was an eye-catching spectacle and was impossible to miss, even if the moss were there to provide lighting.
Roan slowly approached it, his eyes glancing at the backpack to try and discern information from it. His right eye shone red, activating his power.
But nothing.
No words floated into the air. No text was scribbled to be read. There was nothing.
His power, one that had worked without fail, had finally failed.
So, this is either a bug, or not a normal item, or maybe it’s on the same level of power as the eye? Roan calmly stretched out his hand, the tips of his finger barely an inch away from the glowing bag.
This wasn’t the first time he touched something freaky, and look where it got him. He gained the ability to travel the multiverse, to discern strange info, and now he was touching a glowing bag. If ever, this might probably even benefit him!
A shockwave of energy erupted the moment his skin came into contact with the bag. It disintegrated into fragments of swirling light, just like the eye, and the scroll of upgrade. It created a vortex of light around Roan, illuminating the dark room with esoteric powers beyond his comprehension.
He squinted his eyes as he felt a strange power seep into his skin, into his flesh, into his bones and veins. Roan grunted and arched his back, his eyes glowing brightly with a prismatic glow. When the light show finally ended, Roan snapped back to reality, with sweat dripping down his forehead.
Damn… Roan patted his chest, and looked up at the empty air before him, which showed a series of grids and lines that formed boxes. It’s an inventory.
Roan immediately recognized the thing for what it was and stabbed his katana into it. As expected, the screen absorbed his sword, and an icon for his blade appeared on a box.
I have an inventory now.