{Exhaustion VI : indefinite}

  I spat on the floor, panting hard. If I wasn’t clutching my knees, I’d have fallen down.

  Thankfully, exhaustion, as I’d been learning, was more of a general sensation than a hard limit. If you were mentally strong enough, you could ignore the fatigue encroaching upon your mind. That said, you couldn’t ignore it forever, but you could resist for a lot longer than you’d think.

  Which is all to say, I didn't understand the actual mechanics and stats of this game nearly as well as I thought I did.

  Regeneration, for instance, appears simple. You gain a static amount of flat healing, spread out over the body. But it has an accelerating property, where continued healing makes healing faster, while injured while healing substantially lowers to the rate, if not entirely halting it. If the regen couldn't out-heal a poison, then it wouldn’t do anything.

  I took a deep breath, and set off a brisk shamble down the hallway.

  Sounds of battle still rang off the dungeon walls, but they were distant, dwarfed by the eerie pulsating of mana.

  Somewhere, at some point, I’d taken a wrong turn and gotten lost.

  Worst of all, I hadn’t been able to find Sern.

  Logically speaking, Quin had to be keeping her relatively close, or she’d already be teleported over to me. Despite that, I’d been running around as fast as I could for a long while, and I still couldn’t find her.

  Or anyone, for that matter.

  As I walked, I came across one of the dungeon’s vaults, and—finally giving into a little looting—popped the lid.

  [ (+15) 132 Str]

  There was a common spear and some rings, both of which I took.

  ~Common Item~

  {Forest Tempest}

  [+10% AtkSp]

  [+5 Str]]

  I set the spear down, turning to the corners of the empty room.

  “This place sure brings back memories,” I whispered.

  There was a clicking noise, and a shadowed figure appeared behind me, swallowing the light in the room.

  “Hey, Grind,” Someone started—

  They cut off with a squeak, staring down Crapshoveler’s edge.

  “Grind, cut it out,” Quin said, with a bit of nervous laughter. “It’s me.”

  I frowned. “How do I know you’re you?---”

  Sern reached off his chest, pinching me on the cheek.

  I let out a sigh of relief, deflating a little. “It’s good to see you’re alright.”

  “Of course she’s alright,” Quin chuckled. “She’s with me, after all.”

  Me and Sern exchanged a look.

  “What?” Quin asked.

  “Where’s the other two?” I asked. “Bruce and Harva?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Quin said. “Harva healed up pretty fast, so she gave us an earful, and we decided to split up.”

  “You split up?”

  “Yeah, the Core’s busy with you guys, so Harva and Bruce were going to see if they can force the portal home back open. It’s just a two-star spell, after all, and Harva has a bit of the Core’s mana, so she seems to think it’ll be a breeze to pull off. I would have joined but I can’t get too far or the elf demon gets stuck in a bubble, and then I have to wait for you to get closer before I can move her again.”

  He hesitated. “Aren’t you supposed to be with everybody else?”

  “The dungeon Core can steal powers,” I sighed.

  Quin blinked. “Like any power, any power?”

  “I think so.”

  “Like time traveling respawn powers?”

  I gave a nod.

  “WHAT DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH STAIRS?!” Quin shrieked, grabbing handfuls of his frazzled blue hair with his one free hand. He took several deep breaths, which only drove him to further panic.

  “Yeah it’s pretty rough,” I admitted.

  “Pretty rough?” Quin scoffed. “You have no idea how bad this is, do you? We’re not talking dungeon-break-bad, we’re talking about a hyper-intelligent core who is a hop skip and a jump away from a power of apocalyptic proportions!”

  “It could be worse,” I said. “The Core’s currently occupied with the rest of the party, and they’re pretty strong, so it won’t be joining anywhere.”

  The Core smashed through the wall to my left, baring silvery teeth. Arrows and swords hung into its rocky skin, jutting out at odd angles. Notably, at least a hundred daggers, throwings spears, and spike had been jammed into the Core’s back, likely stolen from Cierin and Throttle’s comical supplies of assorted equipment.

  Quin swallowed. “That’s bad, yeah?”

  “Yeah it’s pretty bad.”

  Sern screamed, digging her nails into Quin’s chest, and the monster backpedaled, actually flinching backward. When it realized Sern wasn’t doing anything, it lunged—only to snag an arm on a metal pipe, jutting through the dungeon wall. He panicked, shredding the room, only exposing more metal to get bound up in.

  At best, those could last for a couple seconds.

  “Run!” Quin shouted.

  I grabbed him and sprinted, tearing off like a rocket. After doing a lot of running, I’d found the optimal amount of strength to be entering upon the floor.

  //25 Str//

  Quin had not.

  {Quin : //55 Str//}

  Quin’s foot suddenly caught, and he whipped into the floor, gouging paved rock. He almost tore his leg off, but managed to slip out of the divot, breaking into a run again.

  “What was that—?!” Quin screamed.

  His next step shattered the ground, creating another hole.

  “Lower your health!” I snapped.

  Quin stared at me, eyes wide. “Seriously?”

  “Trust me!”

  {Quin : //25 Str//}

  With the change, he went from puncturing the ground to making small cracks and dents. Because he wasn’t destroying the ground as he ran, he got a better grip. Since the dungeon varied in strength from area to area, you really had to assume the worst and use a strength that wouldn’t break the ground you were running on.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  Besides, speed wasn’t nearly so much an issue as navigation.

  After just a couple minutes, we were forced to stop at a dead end.

  I took deep breaths, adjusting my stats again.

  // 55 Str//

  “I think we lost it!” Quin shouted.

  The Core, as if on cue, shot through the air, over our heads, moving at the kinds of speeds that were just ridiculous, regardless of stat.

  “Me and my stupid mouth,” Quin groaned, one hand on Sern’s head. “Grind! What do we do?”

  “You’ve got a strength buff, right?” I asked, and he nodded.

  “Sort of.” Quin said. “Drains all my mana, though. And it's really, really short.”

  Too much strength made it far more difficult to run on fragile ground. But of course if you were strong enough, you wouldn’t have to run because you could just jump to any point in the dungeon.

  I tossed the two of them onto my back, and braced against the ground. “Hold on tight.”

  [Supercharger I : Next [physical] movement is quintupled in power (10s cooldown) (0:01)]

  ~

  [(5x)] //132 Str//

  I pushed my health as high as it would go, cracking, then flattening the ground beneath us in a sudden explosive force.

  Unfortunately, I wildly underestimated just how much power I had in my body.

  Instead of arcing over to another area of the dungeon, we just went straight up, punching through the fog, climbing higher and higher under the entire dungeon that had disappeared beneath our feet.

  “Grind!” Quin shouted, clutching to my shoulders like a drowning man. “What are you doing?!”

  “All part of the plan!” I screamed, putting on a convincing smile. “The Core did this…so…why can't we? It has to recharge somewhere.” Dull shapes were appearing in the ceiling, and I reached out, snagging onto a pipe. But we were too fast and too heavy. The metal wrenched, then cracked apart.

  For a stomach crunching moment, we began to fall.

  {Sern : //80 Str//}

  Sern planted her hands into either side of the rock, and we jolted to a stop. She held on, straining under our weight. Well, my tremendous weight. I’d increased my health to survive the landing, but it was only getting in our way not.

  I took a deep breath, then swung around ,piercing through a section of rock with a bare foot.

  //1 Hp//

  And just like that, my foot was stuck fast, and we dangled from the dungeon ceiling. It wasn’t very secure, but it was something.

  “Hey, guys!” Quin shouted, pointing up. “I think I see something!

  I turned, grasping onto pipes and cracks in the rock, pulling the three of us to the base of a stairwell.

  Hundreds of other stairwells dipped down from the roof, reaching out into the dungeon, before abruptly cutting off.

  “What is this place?” I whispered.

  Quin clambered off my back, with Sern still attached to his shirt. She started blinking, getting sleepy, and nodded off.

  “The little tyke’s all tucker out,” Quin chuckled. “I honestly didn’t expect to be that strong.”

  She was a lot stronger than that, but I doubt he’d appreciate the news, so I cleared my throat. “Where are we?”

  “How should I know?” Quin snorted. He scanned the cluttered dungeon walls, peeking around the jutting edges of stairs and exposed metal tubing. “This place is weird.”

  “What else is new?” I asked. The stairs came together to form misshapen tunnels, which was weird enough, but looking up, the tunnels extended on and on, tilting up into the sky, then twisting around and mixing with a complex web of other stairs and pathways. “Do you think there’s any good loot here?”

  “After all the trouble we’ve been through?” Quin scoffed. “There’d better be.”

  We searched through the stairways for a long while, before stumbling across a large room, with a massive metal vault. Quin and I did a quick scan for traps or tripwires, before figuring it was probably fine and cracking the lid.

  Quin gagged. “This is disgusting!”

  I took a dagger from the pile.

  {Wannabe}

  “This sword wishes it was better. It is not. And it will never be.”

  [4 Str 10% AtkSp]

  “What…is this?”

  Quin took one look at a weapon, before chucking it over his shoulder. “This is garbage, Grind. If it were stats, then at least that would be worth something, or maybe a little money, but these weapons are just so…so…” he sighed.

  Sern—still half asleep—made a series of complex gestures.

  “Yeah, what she said,” Quin huffed. “Seriously, Grind, hard dungeons always have better loot. Remember the dungeon of GoldHide? You got nearly a hundred stats! I want a hundred stats! Where are my one hundred stats?!”

  “That was from the Core.”

  “Core smore,” Quin mumbled. “Don’t you know anything? The difference between one-star and two-star is the difference between a noob and a union trainee. You got that? Cores use loot to attract adventures. Stronger cores use stronger—better—bait. There ought to be something here!”

  A thought came to mind, and I started checking the weapons.

  “Then these aren’t bait,” I stated.

  “What else would they be? They’re in vaults—”

  “Storage.”

  Quin blinked. “Obviously.”

  “They’re to store the loot of adventures the Core already killed," I said, with a sigh, turning over the handle of {CanOpener}. Besides the mace’s padded grip, there was a little heart chiseled into the wood, with a pair of initials. “Somehow, I doubt the Dungeon Core did this.”

  Quin rolled his eyes. “Of course it’s loot from the dead. That’s how all cores get items.” He realized something, eyes flashing. “How…many items are there in the dungeon?”

  Even assuming that several weapons belong to each player, there was enough gear here for a party of eight. And this wasn’t the only vault. Not by a long shot.

  Since the Core didn’t seem to be coming after us, we spent time crawling around through the upper layer of the dungeon, spotting no less than ten vaults, each filled with items, no rings, no orbs.

  Eventually, after hours of searching and counting, exhaustion caught up to us, and we collapsed in a heap.

  “She’s so quiet,” Quin whispered, supporting her with one hand. While she slept, her breathing was so shallow, it was almost imperceptible. “It’s kind of scary, actually.”

  I nodded. “She’s almost always quiet.”

  Quin sat down on the ground, letting out a deep breath. He frowned. “Grind? We need to kill that thing.”

  I sat beside him. “How many did you count?”

  “Including the three I saw on the first floor, that makes fourteen. And each vault up here had twelve to eighteen pieces of equipment.” He groaned, putting the numbers together. “It’s entirely possible that the Core has already killed over a hundred people, and that's without even knowing how many items it has in its husk.”

  We sat in silence, processing that kind of a number.

  “This place is insane,” I said.

  “What’s a monster like that even doing in the first area, anyway?” Quin huffed. “I’d like to meet the maker of this game and slap him across the face. Or her across the face.” He hesitated, then sighed. “Who am I kidding? I couldn’t hit a girl.”

  “I’d be happy to do it for you,” I muttered. “When I finally get out of here.”

  Quin chuckled. “You can’t seriously expect to leave before me, could you? Didn’t you see how fast I’ve been statting-up? Give me a few years and I’ll have this game eating out of the palm of my hand.

  I smirked. “You know that analogy doesn't make much sense, right?”

  “I’m too tired to say anything smart,” Quin huffed. “Exhaustion Seven."

  “Twenty-four.”

  His eyes bugged out. “---And you’re still alive?”

  I pulled it up.

  {Exhaustion XXIV : indefinite}

  “All I’m doing is sitting and walking, so it doesn’t make much of a difference,” I said.

  “If I hit exhaustion nine, then I fall unconscious,” Quin hissed. “I swear, Grind, if you applied yourself, then you’d be the strongest person in the world.”

  “If I applied myself?” I asked. “I am applying myself.”

  “That’s not what I mean, dipwad,” Quin chuckled. “I mean…really…what’re you doing here? The Core’s the most dangerous thing to face, so you could just break your neck and respawn, right? Then go punch a tree for a thousand years and you’ll be unstoppable.”

  “Sern would be alone,” I stated. “I can’t just leave you here to die.”

  “Yeah, I guess not.” Quin smirked. “You’ll really be holding yourself back, trying to keep the runts like us alive.”

  “I’m okay with that.”

  “Say, Grind, get some sleep, alright? I’ll watch the guard for the Core, but I don’t think it’s going to find us, in this mess of stairs.” He sighed. “Though even if we got caught, we’re in no state to run.”

  “You take a nap.” I said, repressing a yawn. “You’ve been lugging Sern around all day—”

  “Shut up and sleep, Grind, I’m helpless against that thing and you know it.”

  “Then why don’t we both get some rest?”

  Quin snorted. “I’m not tired.”

  “Goodnight Quin.” I paused. “—and thank you.”

  “What for?” He asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “You’ve been nice to Sern, like you promised. Thank you.”

  Quin scoffed, perhaps forcefully. “This little imp? She’d kill me if I said no, that’s all.”

  Sern gave him a groggy kick, and Quin laughed.

  Then my vision got fuzzy, and I drifted off into the depths of a dream.