The room was pitch black.

  {Unknown Star : Gauntlet of Observation}

  [Locked]

  The black sludge peeled from pale walls, drooling down, staining white floor black. The entrance area was a relatively small room, connecting out in identical hallways, each with identical furnishings.

  There were chairs, bookshelves, cabinets, and tables. All of it was white concrete.

  “Well?” I called, hearing only my voice as it echoed back through the empty rooms. “Hello?”

  [Locked]

  The entrance door was behind me, fixed into the wall.

  I pressed against it.

  [Locked]

  Interesting.

  Laughter echoed from the ceiling, cascading down hallways.

  There was no going back now.

  I checked my inventory.

  Ardenidi still had Crapshoveler with her, and I had only two full restore mana potions left. Other than those, I had two guard potions and just one counter potion. Fortunately, my stats were decent and I was a third of the way from becoming a silver. As long as I got good enough loot, I could beat this whole dungeon on my own.

  All this fighting had even cleared my mind a bit. I could probably summon something small if I really had to.

  The echoing laughter continued in earnest.

  I took a deep breath and turned left—immediately running into a dead end.

  So I walked backward, finding myself inside a room of empty concrete shelving. “Hello?” I asked, raising my fists.

  The whole room fuzzed around the edges.

  I waited for a little while. Since nothing happened, I headed toward one of the passage ways, suddenly snapping around to watch the room behind me.

  The starting room briefly flickered into view, then vanished in place of an infirmary. Half-formed concrete bottles snapped off thin shelves, smashing on the white floor.

  More laughter.

  “I don’t have time for this,” I muttered, creating a small orb in the center of my palm.

  The ceiling shattered apart in a bar of energy, raining dust and rubble into the room.

  I dropped my health to basically nothing, jumping effortlessly through the hole.

  This new room was identical to the empty main area, except this one had a hole in the floor and an unbroken ceiling.

  When I broke through the ceiling above that, I entered another room identical to the first and another after that.

  I gritted my teeth.

  Rather than go up, I went back down, to a room I’d been in only a moment ago. Except now, the hole in its floor was missing.

  “This whole place is some sort of a loop,” I muttered.

  So this was the Core of Observation.

  If I had to guess, it’d mess with me for as long as it possibly could, until I was so mentally and physically exhausted that I’d become helpless. Perhaps it would stall for the entire hour.

  So I sat on the concrete with my eyes closed.

  Waiting patiently.

  There weren't any sounds at first.

  And then—

  {Construct : Scientist}

  [Silver]

  [10m Hp 4m Str]

  [This unit is affected by {Unknown Affliction}]

  A concrete sculpture appeared out of the wall, shambling in my direction with both arms outstretched. It had metal glasses and a beaker in hand.

  “Is that seriously it?” I whispered. “What a waste of good stats.”

  Now that I’d built up an eighty-eight Radiant Echo damage multiplier, it only took a five thousand mana projectile to reduce the creature into a mound of smoldering dust.

  A mound of smoldering dust which didn’t drop anything.

  No stats.

  No Exp.

  Beyond that, my attack made no impact on the walls behind the monster. The shockwave of magical force just fell apart on contact.

  But when I gave the wall a kick, it splintered like drywall, revealing a room identical to the one I’d been in. But both rooms had pathways leading into the distance. Assuming they followed any sensible architecture fundamentals, the hallways should either lead to a room with different shapes or a room twice as large as the one I was in.

  I walked down the passage, entering an identical room. Identical in size and shape.

  Even though there should be hallways piercing through several of its walls, there weren’t. I glanced back, confirming its hallways were still there.

  Every room was new, with stark white walls and floor, all entirely made of concrete. They were also utterly blank.

  {Construct : Scientist}

  [Silver]

  [5m Hp 2m Str]

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  [This unit is affected by {Unknown Affliction}]

  A blank concrete face popped out of the wall, followed by a slender white body. I hit the monster once and it broke apart, revealing the second monster clambering behind it, requiring another projectile.

  Neither dropped anything.

  This wasn’t working.

  I concentrated, forming green orbs beneath my feet.

  The hallways connected to rooms in such a way that it was impossible to have a single, straight line. Even the most direct route from one room to another required a sharp thirty-degree turn.

  But I could do it.

  I shot like a rocket, twisting around the corner—

  My forehead cracked against a dead end, shattering the concrete.

  I staggered back and fell on my face having slipped on a black mud. This was a different, wider room with an unusually high ceiling. Unlike the other rooms, this one had actual lights in the ceiling, rather than the soft natural lighting caused by so much moving mana. There were tables and chairs, but those seemed almost undercooked, melting apart.

  Hands reached from the floor as concrete structures clambered over one another.

  {Construct : Software Engineer}

  [Brass]

  [100k Hp 40k Str]

  [This unit is affected by {Unknown Affliction}]

  “So that’s your game?” I asked.

  The monsters lunged. Each took a little over fifty thousand damage from a hundred and twelve orbs, each with thirty mana, just barely enough for the True damage to execute them.

  But there were much more than just a hundred.

  Tiny abstract monsters with less than a thousand health crawled in the mud like the rolling sea. Each blast was potent enough to kill several, but with so many piled on each other, the dead concrete bodies formed a shield for the ones behind. I couldn’t make strong orbs fast enough.

  Slowly, the monsters reached me, shredding my face and arms.

  12x{Grind : (-40k) 988.6k Hp}

  “Get off!” I shouted, detonating a hundred thousand mana projectile ontop of myself, blasting everything in every direction.

  All the monsters turned to ash. The walls followed, heating up under the roar of mana, breaking apart along straight lines of melted rock. Then, at once, the whole room shattered.

  I was falling.

  That blast had struck one of the mana channels to the room, causing the entire thing to crumble, revealing hundreds of identical rooms, connecting an extensive system of mana networks which snapped the rooms into place around me, creating the appearance of an endless dungeon.

  All those rooms shook, shifted by the blast of mana I’d just used.

  I unleashed Green orbs beneath my feet, rocketing over the floor.

  Stone pieces whipped around me.

  I crash landed into a puddle of black mud.

  Stony white trees with speckled black leaves towered high. Above them, concrete ground knit together, smearing rooms into bleached sky with fake black clouds.

  The grass rose to my knees, swaying gently.

  There was a woman standing in the middle of the field, tilting her head.

  When I moved closer, she took a step back.

  I took a step back and she moved closer. I tried glancing over her, finding nothing.

  “What are you supposed to be?” I asked.

  “A friend.” The concrete on her face snapped open, forming a mouth.

  I just ignored her, running my hands along the new room. Judging from the mana channels, I could only assume my mana was somehow feeding this core. It was a devourer-type, after all. By absorbing my mana, the core could modify its structure.

  The trick was then to deal irreparable damage to the dungeon itself without using a ridiculous amount of mana.

  “Hey!” The woman shouted, appearing again, only a few feet away. “Pay attention!”

  “You’re trying to harvest information,” I stated, kicking one of the concrete trees. Black concrete vines snapped off, shattering on exposed mangrove roots.

  This place was an exact replica of the swamp gauntlet.

  Even as I thought, the dungeon shifted state, adding minor details like birds and specific movement to the clouds. The woman had become a little shorter, gaining more definition on her face.

  “Your plan is to find some sort of weakness which you can exploit,” I said.

  The solution felt obvious. She shouldn’t bother with tricks. If the Core had the power to make silver-ranked monsters, it ought to be trivially easy to reduce their health, allowing them to move fast enough to actually kill me.”

  “You’re distracting yourself,” the woman giggled. “You’re trying not to think about this girl. How well do you know her?”

  “That seems to imply you have a sort of limitation,” I stated. “It must be rather glaring to keep your minions from adjusting their stats. Tell me, are you even capable of changing their ratio of health to strength?”

  “What’s her skin color?” The woman asked. “How tall is she? Does she smile a lot, or is she usually sad?”

  “Your power must be related to what you observe,” I continued. “So if you see an instance of a monster, that monster must be used in its entirety, stats included. You can modify the ratio of those stats, but only to a certain extent. This must also include the monster’s intelligence. For the nightmare, it could only use the intelligence of the smartest nightmare you’ve ever observed.”

  “Why isn’t she with you? Did she die?”

  Ripples crossed the monster’s concrete body, distorting her image to have thinner ears and a sharper face. Folds appeared on her legs, connecting into a dress with black stains down the sides.

  I closed my eyes, clenching my jaw.

  “That’s about right, isn’t it?” The Core asked.

  “You must be either young or stupid to not have seen faster monsters,” I muttered. “Likely young, given the rest of the basic information you lack. I can only assume your purpose here is to glean some monster’s build from my stats, hoping they’d be strong enough to stop me.”

  A slender hand poked my side.

  Sern forced one of my eyes open, laughing to herself.

  “Wow, you’ve got a lot of friends, don’t you?” The Core whispered.

  Statues appeared around me.

  Dexten and Cierin and Mall stood at tables, chatting with the union officials Leo and Harva while Ardenidi sulked in a corner, speaking with Irion's group in low tones. Music swelled and the citizens began to dance in the town square.

  Then they started dying. Dripping black and crumbling apart.

  Sern leered.

  “Such a man of vulnerability.”

  I clenched my fist.

  “And you’re strong, but your insides are weak.” The Core smiled wide. "Since you’re only as strong as your abilities, I'm afraid you’re borderline useless as a host. Sorry about that.”

  The monster’s arm turned into a lance, spearing me through the stomach.

  I sighed, waiting until the last of my friends and family had disintegrated.

  “You know, I haven’t visited them in a while.”

  Blood ran down my side.

  “I think I’m getting sick of all this fighting.”

  {Grind}

  [(-10000k) -99002k Hp]

  “Go on. Die now.” The Core staggered backward. She looked me up and down. “You’re not…you’re not dying?”

  I tossed the frozen screen over one shoulder.

  “I take it back,” I said. “Given how slow your attack was, you might actually be too stupid to control fast monsters. Of course, both possibilities could be correct.”

  The monster shifted back to normal, trying that fake smile of hers. “You have so many clever abilities! How does that one work?”

  I looked her in the eyes. “You’re not my daughter.”

  The monster’s face flickered. “Grind?”

  My full mana bar emptied in an instant as I nailed the monster in the face with a million mana projectile, vaporizing the fake elf, my fake friends, and the fake city beginning to unfold.

  {Gauntlet of Observation : (-1) 1 Hp}

  The wall snarled, enveloping the damaged core, pulling the monster to safety while the rest of the dungeon crumbled under the force of scalding transcendent damage, burning the insides of my eyes, cracking concrete with a deafening roar.

  I fell to the first floor with a thud, knocking against the pale entrance door.

  This wasn’t over. With its strength, the Core had at least another few forms—

  {Two-Star : Gauntlet of Observation : 1 Hp}

  Wait.

  Two-star?

  // {Notice} //

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