Ray stayed in the recess with his sword angled toward the wider corridor, breathing shallow enough that his ribs didn’t punish him for it. The click he’d heard could have been a claw against rock, or a drifting pebble, or something testing his patience. He counted breaths until the urge to spring up dulled, then counted again until the chamber felt like a safe room. The green grooves along the edges gave a faint spill that made the corners feel safer. He felt his eyes could track any potential movement. He kept his eyes on the corridor for another minute and then forced himself to look away, no point in being afraid of monsters in the dark.
He drank from the shallow depression until his throat stopped burning, then set the water aside and did the boring checks again. Stone stacks. Loose rock line across the entrance. The smaller corridor mouth. The ceiling. The cracks that weren’t wide enough for a shell but were wide enough to hide a rat, or a hand, or whatever else this place decided to grow. He found a flat piece of chitin in his pack and set it beside his knee where his left hand could grab it without searching. He placed the dark hook of chitin near the sword hilt too, he needed to make sure he had options.
He closed his eyes and went back to the windows.
The first attempt hit him with pressure behind the eyes, the same stubborn resistance he’d felt when he’d forced the status panel into shape. He didn’t shove. He didn’t demand. He treated it as training. He worked with the new system inside him. He listened to the beats of Arkus Gaia. Calm pressure. Clean intent. A frame. A place for information to sit. He pictured the outline of the character overview panel he’d managed to summon before, and he held that picture steady until the flicker began.
The panel formed in stuttering pieces, text smearing for a beat before snapping into place, edges trembling with faint green seams.
Ray held the panel steady with will and breathing, jaw clenched, refusing to let frustration turn his hands into fists. The window wasn’t clean. It wasn’t stable. It stayed up longer than last time, and that alone felt like a win he couldn’t celebrate out loud. He memorised the parts that mattered, then let it fade before it collapsed and took his focus with it. He was also happy to see that his class was now properly registered.
He didn’t chase more windows straight away. He stood and did a short set instead, three slow sword swings in the confined space, feet placed with care, shoulders kept down. He followed with bracing practice against the stone wall until his arms started to shake and his chest began to throb in warning. He stopped before his body forced him to stop, sat again, and went back inward.
Status first. He found the tug behind his eyes and pulled.
Seeing 56/410 again made the ache in his chest feel heavier. The number put shape to the damage in a way pain couldn’t. Fifty-six meant he still sat close to the edge. One bad stumble, one pinned breath, one mistake in a corridor, and the dungeon would take its next victim. Seven an hour meant time could fix it if he didn’t throw it away. He kept the panel up long enough to burn it into his mind, then dismissed it and sat with the sword across his lap until his breathing settled.
He slept in broken blocks, constantly waking from paranoia. Every time he woke, he checked the stone stacks and listened to the corridors until his ears stopped lying to him. When the quiet held, he drank, then forced another short set. When the pain rose too fast, he sat and replayed the crab fights in his head, trying to learn patterns. Weight shifts. Pincer timing. The way the bigger crab’s joint seam had been tucked deeper. The way the second crab had backed away when the ridges punished it enough. For some reason it irritated him that he couldn’t hear the old System mocking him. It irritated him more that he missed it.
A soft pulse touched the back of his awareness while he braced against the wall and held tension through his core.
[Training recognised. Body +1.]
Ray blinked once, then exhaled through his nose. “Right,” he muttered, and went back to work.
The first day blurred into a cycle of listening, moving, forcing his windows into shape, then backing off before the pressure behind his eyes turned into a headache that made him sloppy. He didn’t venture out. He didn’t chase loot. He didn’t go hunting for fights to prove something. He stayed in the safer chamber with one entrance and made it his, because he needed a base more than he needed pride. He built a second warning line inside the corridor, a string of small stones arranged so a heavy body would knock at least one. He dragged a flat slab of rock into his recess to act as a crude barrier at knee height, not a wall, enough to force anything entering to step over and announce itself. He found a long shard of chitin and wedged it into a crack above his head where it would scrape if something tried to crawl along the ceiling.
He closed his eyes and kept pushing on the broken fragments inside him. Finally, something started to click into place. It wasn’t enough though. Sighing, he checked his status again.
Ray studied the numbers. The increase in his body had increased his health at the same rate. The fixes were working. He hadn’t lost anything; it was just corrupted. He drank, ate a small piece of whatever dry ration he had left, then went back into motion.
On the second day he pushed the windows harder.
He sat with his back against stone, closed his eyes, and pulled the character panel into being again. The edges jittered less this time, and the “Rebuilding” lines stopped smearing long enough to look like they belonged. Ray held it there, then focused on one thing at a time. He didn’t try to stabilise everything. He picked a single stat and fed the window structure, the way you reinforced a weak joint in a frame before you tried to hang weight on it.
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His forehead beaded sweat from the strain. His teeth ground together. He kept breathing anyway. Finally, the familiar chime hit his mind, true progress.
[Interface patch applied. Body stabilisation improved.]
Ray opened his eyes and the panel flickered, then steadied.
Ray kept the panel up until the pressure behind his eyes started to sharpen, then let it fade on his terms. The number stayed with him even after the text vanished. Thirty-two. Stable and just as he had expected. He could control this and he could rebuild. He sat back in the recess, rolled his shoulders once, and waited until his pulse stopped kicking against his ribs. The urge to push further was still there, the same hunger that had driven him into worse fights than this, but hunger had almost killed him twice already. He forced it down and reached for the one window that mattered more than pride.
The second day followed the same pattern, only cleaner. He pushed windows in short, controlled attempts, then broke off and trained, then rested, then checked Status and made decisions off the numbers instead of mood. He slept in blocks that were long enough to matter, waking with his hand already on the sword hilt, then forcing his grip to loosen once he’d checked the stone stacks and heard nothing but drip and distant silence. Each time the paranoia rose, he gave it something practical to do. He widened the base of his warning stack. He adjusted the low rock line so it would scrape if anything heavy tried to step over it. He moved loose stones out of his recess so he would not kick them in the dark and mistake his own noise for a threat.
This continued for days. Focus, train… Focus, train. He waited until the chamber had been quiet for long enough that his nerves stopped inventing movement, then he finally left the room.
He didn’t go far. He picked the narrower corridor and moved in careful steps, sword held close, carapace shard on his left forearm, eyes taking in everything that could be used against him. The dungeon air tasted of dust and old iron. The walls sweated in places. The floor changed texture every few metres, ridges becoming smoother stone, smoother stone becoming grit, grit becoming wet again. He stopped often to listen, because the most useful warning he had wasn’t a window. It was sound.
He found the corpse a short bend later, slumped against the wall where the corridor widened into a small pocket. It wasn’t fresh. Cloth had rotted down to a dark smear. Bone showed through at the ribs and hands. A pack lay half-open beside it, leather stiff with age. Ray stayed still for a full ten breaths before he moved closer, because corpses in a dungeon could mean traps, could mean bait, could mean the thing that made the corpse was still nearby. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed. He crouched and searched the pack with quick, precise hands.
He found a waterskin with a cracked seam, useless. He found a bundle of dry ration hard enough to hurt his teeth, still edible. He found a small coil of cord. He found a plain ring wrapped in cloth, dark metal, heavy for its size. No prompt appeared. No name floated above it. He turned it over anyway and felt the weight, the density, the sense that it had been made with intent. He left the bag, it had rotted with age. He had turned to leave, when something glinted from under the corpse. He pushed the corpse, basically just bones to the side and found a set of daggers. He tried to identify them. At first, pain flooded his mind, but eventually, the skill gave way.
====================================
Identify: Steel Dagger of Torment (x2)
====================================
Well crafted steel daggers used by torturers to cleanly cut limbs. Extremely sharp.
Quality: Uncommon
Rank: F
Attributes:
-
- Physical Damage +10
Enchantments:
-
- Keen edge causes increased bleeding from wounds.
====================================
Nice. Finally, a weapon that suited him. He had trained with Teddy, using daggers and only took up the sword because it was better than what he currently had. These were a huge upgrade. He turned and left.
The corridor didn’t stay empty for long. Ray had only taken a dozen careful steps before a faint scrape carried through the stone, low and deliberate, followed by a measured clicking that made his shoulders tighten. He stopped with one hand on the wall and listened until the sound settled into shape. Not two, not a cluster, one set of legs pacing slow, confident enough to come closer. Ray slid the sword lower on his back and drew one of the daggers instead, testing the balance in his palm. The handle sat clean. The edge looked ordinary in the dim, but the air around it felt sharper, as if it took less effort to convince the metal to bite. The clicking rounded the bend and the crab emerged into the pocket of corridor light, smaller than the broad-backed ones that had forced him into desperation, still armoured, still heavy, still built to crush. It angled its shell toward him and clicked once, pincers opening in that slow promise of force. Ray didn’t wait for it to rush. He stepped to the side and let it commit, then drove in, tight and close, where its pincers couldn’t swing cleanly. The dagger struck the first leg joint in a short, brutal stab, not into shell, into hinge. The blade sank with a sickly ease that he hadn’t felt with the sword. Dark fluid welled instantly, thicker than blood, and the crab’s weight shifted wrong.
It tried to correct, tried to shove forward and pin him with bulk, but Ray was already moving to the next joint. He didn’t dance. He didn’t trade. He carved. The second stab went deeper, the keen edge biting through the fibrous band with a wet pull, and the leg buckled hard enough that the shell dipped and scraped stone. Ray used the dip. He slid behind the line of the pincers and struck again, then again, each hit short and precise, taking a hinge and moving on before the creature could turn its mass into a weapon. The crab snapped once, pincers clacking on empty air, and lunged sideways in a desperate shove that would have broken ribs if it caught him. Ray let it miss by inches, stepped in under the shell lip, and drove the dagger up into the softer band where plates didn’t meet clean. The crab shuddered, legs twitching in uneven rhythm, and when it tried to retreat its damaged limbs refused to coordinate. Ray ended it by taking the last working joint, then held still for a breath with the blade up, waiting for a delayed surge that never came. The corridor returned to drip and silence. His chest still ached and his lungs still burned, but the fight had been simple in a way nothing down here had been simple so far, and the simplicity left him almost angry.
He didn’t waste the kill. Ray worked fast, keeping one ear on the corridor while his hands did the practical job. He pried at the underside where the armour softened and cut away chunks of pale flesh that didn’t carry the same sour rot as the undead, packing what he could into the least ruined cloth he had. The meat was cold and metallic, but it was still food, and food meant days he didn’t have to gamble on another corpse pack. He wiped the dagger clean against stone, sheathed it, and went back the way he’d come with the weight of the crab pulling at his side. In the safe room he reset every warning the way he always did, then dug out the smallest pieces of dry kindling he’d been hoarding and built a fire that was more ember than flame, tucked low in the shallow depression where the drip kept the stone cool. He used a flat shard of chitin as a crude shield to keep the light from spilling too far and to push heat inward. The smoke was thin, but it still made him watch the corridor between every breath. When the meat finally began to sizzle, the smell hit him hard, rich and salty and real enough to make his stomach tighten. He ate slow, forcing himself to chew properly even when hunger begged him to rush, and the warmth that spread through him wasn’t healing magic or a potion burn. It was the dull relief of protein and heat, the kind that made the next day possible. He cleaned the daggers again when he was done, laid them beside his sword, and sat back against stone with his eyes on the entrance, letting the fire die down until the chamber returned to green spill and shadow.
He reset his warnings and sat with the ring in his palm, no matter what he did, he couldn’t seem to identify it. He tried to bring up an item window the way he used to. He found the old habit and pushed on it gently, then harder, then stopped before the pressure behind his eyes turned into pain that would make him sloppy. Nothing appeared. He didn’t throw the ring away. He placed it back in his inventory. Perhaps it would come in handy, perhaps it wouldn’t, no loss to keep it.
He spent the next days in a rhythm that felt brutal because it was boring. The exact same he was already doing. Heal. Train. Patch. Sleep. Repeat. He tracked his health every now and then, making sure he would be ready for a fight. Opening and closing the screens constantly had slowly rebuilt the connection and soon enough, he could see his full status window again.
All in all, over these days, since he had last been able to see his full status, he had gained
+5 Strength
+3 Body
+3 Agility
+2 Mind
+1 Intelligence
+1 Luck
Yes… He’d even gained a point in luck somehow. He was walking and slipped over on a rock. When he fell, he had landed on a small creature, killing it instantly. It was the first time Arkus Gaia had seemingly laughed at him
[You fell fortuitously. +1 luck… Keep it up]
By the end of the week, everything was back to normal and his health was full.
Ray rested his head back against stone and let his awareness brush the bond thread for a brief moment. The direction was still there, faint and thin, tugging at him from somewhere far above. Miu was alive. It gave him a target without giving him comfort. He opened his eyes again, checked his warnings one more time, and tightened his grip on the sword until it stopped slipping in sweat.
It was time to start clearing this dungeon and making a place for himself. In time, when he was strong enough, Ray would get his revenge. The only individual he could trust now was Miu, and that was enough.