The light thinned the farther I went, as if the dungeon dimmed the room to watch. Roots veined the tile in blue and the tunnel shouldered downward, one shallow step at a time. The air got colder. I breathed through my mouth and tasted pennies and mold.
Level Two it felt like a slightly better jacket. Grip felt surer. Feet felt quicker. The duct-taped kitchen knife still looked like a joke, but it sat in my hand like it was willing to try. Inventory hovered if I thought about it—pack, broken mace, half-ripped guild patch—proof I could show someone if I made it back.
"Be boring sexy," Mara had texted. I was trying. The dungeon had other plans.
The tunnel kinked left into a wider platform with broken benches and a root-webbed map board. Something padded over tile with the confidence of rent day. Three somethings. Dog shapes at first, until they hit the glow—iron-gray hides layered like shingles, shoulders too big, muzzles armored. Not wolves. Armored hounds. E-rank dungeons didn't spawn these.
They saw me. Heads lifted, ears flattened. The first charged in a straight, happy line. I backstepped, let the momentum kiss past, and slashed for the neck. The blade skated and bit shallow. The hound jarred me with a shoulder like a thrown cinder block.
The second smashed into my thigh. Something cracked and my leg buckled. I hit the floor just in time to see the third leap, mouth full of toolbox teeth. I threw my forearm up because I didn't have anything else. Its jaws clamped down and bone shattered like a snapped broomstick. White noise filled my skull.
[Absolute Regeneration Activated]
[Major trauma detected. Radius/ulna fracture. Temporary cooldown: 5s.]
"I know, I know—ow—ow—" I screamed, because my arm was still broken while the system calmly gave me the medical report. Blood sealed, skin crawled shut, but the bone just sat there wrong. The hound shook me until I jammed the knife into its jaw hinge and twisted. It yelped, let go, and I rolled under the bench as the first barreled it into splinters.
The cooldown ticked in my vision like a passive-aggressive microwave. 3s. 2s. The second lunged and teeth clipped my ankle. Pain lit the joint, bending it sideways. I kicked anyway, heel cracking into its snout, and clawed myself up on the bench frame while the joint screamed every step.
[Absolute Regeneration Restored]
[Injury recovered: radius/ulna fracture, ankle ligament tear]
Heat surged through me like liquid fire. Bones scraped, then shoved back into place. My forearm fizzed as the fracture zipped shut, muscle fibers knitting like worms. My ankle snapped straight with a rubber-band crack.
I gagged and braced on the bench. "Jesus Christ—don't list it like that! Just say 'all better' or something!" My stomach heaved at how alive it felt, nerves sparking back to life one by one.
I went low, let the first rush past, and slid the blade up its foreleg seam where armor met meat. It screamed and face-planted. I jumped the snap of the second, caught a pillar with one palm, and used the spin to drive my boot into its ribs. It wasn't pretty. It was desperate. My knife shaved sparks and the duct tape squealed like it wanted to resign.
[EXP Gained: 18]
[Level 2 Progress: 18 / 200]
The wounded hound tried to shake me. I clung, hauled the knife free, and stabbed for the eye. It shuddered and went slack.
The last two circled, swapping angles. Of course monsters learned. I backed toward the map board, heart chewing my ribs. A stupid horny thought flashed anyway—Mara pressing me to the wall, shirt sliding—and I hated my brain and also loved being alive enough to have it.
They came together. I threw myself sideways. One clipped my hip; the other hit the map board in a crash of glass. I landed hard, rolled, felt a bite take my calf. Hot pain blew out my vision white.
[Absolute Regeneration Activated]
[Major trauma detected: femur fracture, quadriceps tear. Temporary cooldown: 6s.]
"Great genes," I gasped to nobody, because lying under a dog with knives for a mouth felt like the right time to practice stand-up. My thigh burned, bone warped wrong under the skin, every pulse of blood a drumbeat of nope. I jammed both hands on its lower jaw, shoved up to clear my leg, and kneed it under the throat. It gacked; I swung the knife in a messy arc and buried it to the hilt.
The last hound limped, blood slicking tile. It looked at its dead friends, looked at me, and chose badly. It lunged high. I dropped, came up inside the bite, and drove the steel straight up into the roof of its mouth. The weight crashed down on me, twitching, then went still.
[EXP Gained: 27]
[Level 2 Progress: 45 / 200]
I lay there, sucking cold air, thigh screaming every time I twitched. The cooldown timer ticked in the corner of my eye like a smug metronome. 2s. 1s.
[Absolute Regeneration Restored]
[Injury recovered: femur fracture, quadriceps tear.].
I gagged and shoved the carcass off me, clutching my thigh as the pain blinked out like a bad dream. "I don't think I'll ever get used to my bones snapping back together," I muttered. The words sounded small in the empty platform.
I looked at my leg—whole again, stronger than it had any right to be. What was I even turning into that this was possible? Yesterday I was F-rank trash, a loser with a broken knife and rent overdue. Now I had a skill that erased injuries like they were typos.
For a while I just lay there on the broken tile, staring at the ceiling roots glowing faint blue, listening to my breath rattle. The system wasn't just saving me. It was rewriting me, piece by piece. Bones, muscles, me.
I laughed once, sharp and lonely. "Don't think about it," I told myself, because the alternative was panic. I hauled myself upright on shaky legs, wiped blood off my knife on the hound's hide, and checked the tremor in my hands. Still there. Not the cold. Just me.
The platform ended in a stairwell half-choked with roots. I took it slow this time, knife out, every step careful. The glow of the gate was gone completely now; only the dungeon light painted everything in aquarium colors. Down one landing. Then another.
A low corridor opened into a maintenance hall with doors on either side. I checked the first—locked by age. The second hung open. Inside: a locker room mummified by dust. Metal lockers, a bench with a melted soda can, a poster of a smiling hardhat telling me SAFETY IS SEXY. (True. So is survival.)
Something heavy scraped in the hall. I killed my breath and slid behind the door's shadow. Footfalls, thick and steady. A shape crossed the doorway—green-gray skin, leather straps, rusted plates, a jaw full of tusk. Orc. Not the fantasy kind with braided hair and a tragic backstory. The kind grown wrong in a dungeon and fed hate for breakfast.
I looked down at my knife that might as well have been a butter spreader. My other hand opened on instinct. "Inventory," I whispered.
Icons blinked up. Broken mace. I dragged it and the weight thunked into my palm, handle rough, head cracked but still ten pounds of problem. I eased out as the orc paused at the end of the row, sniffing. It turned back toward me just in time to take a desperate human with a mace to the face.
The crack sounded like a dropped cinderblock. The orc reeled, then roared. It came on in a straight line like a train that had never read a safety manual. I juked left; it caught my shoulder with a backhand that sent the room sideways.
[Absolute Regeneration Activated]
[Major trauma detected: three rib fractures, bruised lung. Temporary cooldown: 4s.]
I hit the bench, skidded, and dumped behind it, ribs burning every breath. The orc vaulted the wood. I threw the broken mace's head up two-handed and the tusks hammered sparks off steel.
The mace head finished cracking and snapped loose, skittering under lockers. Of course it did. I smashed the stick across the orc's face anyway and it barely blinked. Its hand closed around my throat and lifted. The world narrowed to a tube.
Stars pinwheeled. I stabbed blind. The knife dug under a plate seam at the armpit and the orc made a forklift death noise. It dropped me, grabbed for the blade, and I kicked its knee sideways with everything Level Two had. The joint went wrong. It fell forward; I rolled with it, knife sawed deep, and hot stink flooded my hands.
[EXP Gained: 41]
[Level 2 Progress: 86 / 200]
[Absolute Regeneration Restored]
[Injury recovered: ribs fractures, bruised lung.]
Air filled my chest clean again, sharp and cool. The fire in my ribs went out like someone killed a switch.
I crouched there, listening for his friends. None came. The locker room stayed quiet except for the drip and my pulse. I looked down at the knife—nicked, gummy with blood. The duct tape was starting to slough like old skin.
"Hang in there," I told the tape.
I checked the orc's body out of a habit I was suddenly forming. Leather pouch, a handful of coins that looked like they'd dissolve if I spent them, a bent ring. I waved them at the screen and they slipped into Inventory. The mace head glinted under the lockers; I crouched and fished it out, then stuffed it into the box too.
The hall continued, ceilings lowering, painted signs counting down toward maintenance levels I'd never see on a commuter map. 3B. 3C. 3D. The walls sweated. Blue roots pulsed like veins under skin.
At 3F, a door hung open with deep scratches chewed into the frame. Inside, a supervisor office had been turned over—desks upended, glass spiderwebbed.
A smell crawled in and set up camp. Copper and sour. The next room was a butchered break area. Two bodies lay across the table—hunters in torn armor, faces chalk. A third lay half under a vending machine, hand outstretched to nothing.
I didn't step on the tiles their blood had dried into. I didn't say anything clever. I pulled up Inventory and dragged the pack with the name I'd taken earlier into the open. I propped it where someone might see it. I took the half-ripped guild patch and stuck it to the table with tape like the world's worst memorial.
The system didn't give me points for that. Good.
The air went tight. A sound rolled down the hall like a drum being hit from the inside. Then again. And again. The tables shook a little each time.
I backed into the doorway in time to see something large fill the corridor. An orc, but more. Taller by half, shoulders plated with scavenged metal, a chest harnessed in chain. In its hands, a hammer made from a jack post and a welded slab. It didn't sprint. It didn't need to. It walked like the hall belonged to it.
My knife felt like confetti. Level Two felt like a participation trophy. My body did the stupid thing and thought of Mara's fingers in my hair, the way she'd said good boy. Not helpful, brain.
The orc's head tilted. Its eyes found me. They were small and patient, like a butcher looking at an animal that hadn't realized yet.
[Identify]
Target: Orc Warden (C-Rank variant)
Estimated Threat: High
Advice: Retreat recommended.
"That would be great!" I told the screen through my teeth. "Door locked. Stairs on fire. Whole thing very recommended." I backed another step anyway.
The Warden's hammer kissed the floor once. The tile dented like clay. It lifted the weapon again, easy as a man lifting a newspaper. Dust fell from the lights.
Behind me, the break room had no other exit. The hall forward was now mostly Warden. Options: zero, or pretend zero meant one. My knife handle squirmed under my grip as if even the duct tape wanted to leave early.
"Hey," I said, because my mouth talked when it should pray. "I'm Level Two."
The Warden blinked slowly, like a mountain considering wind. Then it came on, all weight and inevitability.
I ran to meet it because sometimes you choose the dumbest option on purpose, just so the world doesn't get to choose it for you.