I chose five days of staying relatively stationary for a reason, multiple in fact. The primary one was to regenerate energy. Using up everything right at the beginning left me in a constant state of depletion. A ranged attack didn’t exactly help if all my mana went towards feeding myself. The nature of my launch skill necessitated having more swords as well. Burning accumulated crystal seemed tactically unwise, as it increased the likelihood of previous circumstances reoccurring. Some runescribing to increase my physical speed appealed greatly too. Moreover, my bug-out bag lacked enough space to carry everything. Time was the only real solution.

  Waiting should have been an easy thing, but my nerves grated. Slowly rising anxiety paired poorly with the constant rush of the raging river in the background, further exacerbated by a complete lack of entertainment. Runescribing and contemplation helped alleviate the boredom, to an extent.

  Something had changed on the statlink front at least. Constant practice at scribbling lines paid off when the pattern pulsed for the first time. No epiphanies accompanied my achievement and whatever was class-optimal about this remained a mystery. Messing around with the portable forge for a smoke or two failed to illuminate any changes. There was no observable difference in malleability or anything else, but returning it to the original shape proved surprisingly easy, as if the material read my intent. Instead of repeating the pattern on the other four plates, my decision landed to continue on the same one. Doing so provided me with a clue. It was much harder to complete the second time around.

  Repeating the same motions ended up driving me nuts after a while, which led me towards trying to figure out how the crew managed to stockpile so much condensed energy. It was confusing as hell. The majority of it had to come from their trips to the northeast. Doing some math gave me a rough idea of their levels. Assuming they spent some while fighting combined with what they carried for refills and had left behind put the number around 15 or so. The additive nature of advancement was clear enough. It was definitely based on how much crystallized mana an Errant gave and followed the same pattern of improvement as statlinks and magical endurance did. It was something and little else of use came to mind.

  Thus the first few days passed uneventfully, even if a painstaking but proper wash qualified as a personal highlight. Finally, a second blade augmented my arsenal, along with a minor emergency reserve. According to Jack, the bonypedes weren’t much of a threat. He wasn’t wrong. It didn’t take long for me to find one after ranging down into the tunnels.

  It still scared me, but mostly because of its eerily insect-like appearance. This was where the consequences of the System’s empowerment manifested at last. The little shit simply couldn’t keep up, giving me full control over spacing. It would’ve been easy to melee it to death but my brush with infection had instilled a healthy distaste for putting myself in harm’s way. Telekinetics paid off however.

  The hallways allowed me to bar its path with dual floating swords. It was kind of funny. Refusing to charge headfirst into the pointy end caused it to shift aside, walking sideways like a crab. In an act of sheer bullying, my floating blades did the same. A few repeats stumped the bastard. It stood still. A dozen alternating legs click clacked as if running in place. Like the bone golem, it chittered relentlessly, and then I mind-stabbed it in the face. For some reason, it didn’t try to knock the blade aside or back off for more than a second or two.

  The excuse of a fight lasted for a couple more pokes. My swords cut through the Errant with ease. Once again the otherworldly feedback barely registered any resistance. It was highly satisfying, if also frustrating. Controlling both blades independently would have sped up the inevitable conclusion, but that turned out to be impossible. Whatever governed mindswording capability, I lacked it and was thus reduced to moving both at once in the same way. Any thoughts about how to improve were relegated to the backburner. Probably a long term thing anyway.

  My first victim was one out of one, but a two eventually graced my path while murdering my way south. Both north and east had been ruled out early. Going north was no different from backtracking and the east conflicted with my desire to keep on living. Bad things happened there, if my rescuers fates were anything to go by. Regardless, the two died much in the same way. Sheer curiosity picked the item and made me the proud owner of an ivory bone about the size of my shin and conspicuous green marbling throughout.

  The tunnels here seemed relatively unthreatening, but equally labyrinthine, as previous ones. While the interface compass compensated somewhat for my natural sense of direction, it barely helped underground. Scratched directions at every intersection served to warn future me of dead ends and such. If someone else ever ended up here, they’d find them useful too. Yeah, that’s why I’m doing this.

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  Delving was a welcome addition to my otherwise monotonous daily routine and helped to significantly alleviate some of my mounting anxiety. The improvised vandalism turned out to be especially wise. Refilling plastic cups on the fourth day illuminated the suicidal nature of traveling overland. Things were getting slightly out of hand outdoors. In fact, total fucking anarchy had erupted.

  First I spotted an unusual dinosaur across the river. It saw me too and rushed towards the bank but declined to cross the frothing stream. Large black muscular arms hung low like a gorilla’s, contrasting against the rest of its appearance, which equated roughly to that of a T-Rex. Shit just wasn’t the same post-Godstrike. Despite the intimidation factor, its unwillingness to breach the watery boundary left me secure in my safety.

  The feeling faded quickly when a small herd of deer loped out of the Forest of Death. Their abandonment of it had good cause. The reason even did double duty by scaring me shitless. A bundle of roots dropped out of a tree on top of the last fleeing deer. Flashing my interface confirmed its Errant nature while it conjured a spray of blood by slamming a tentacle into the back of the deer’s head, bringing down the critter.

  A moment later it got up again and sauntered back into the forest. Hopefully that wasn’t how the crew met their end. Things continued to escalate from there. The rest of the herd bounded across the tundra plains, only to be snatched up. Blue wormlike creatures the size of a damn railroad car with round toothy maws phased out of the ground in a dive, devouring them whole one by one. They leapt in diving motions, disappearing again just like that, without even churning the ground or leaving behind any other signs of their passing.

  My fawning ended, as did my trips outside the treehouse. Inspired by my underground defacement of otherwise pristine hallways, I drew out a map on the woody bits describing the surroundings in case anyone else ever had the misfortune of getting stuck here. After that, fear drove me to spend most of my time in the staircase itself as a precaution. Not for particularly long though. My estimate proved correct when midway the fifth day, the late trio’s stash of food ran out. The bug-out bag still held enough to sustain me for a while, which had thankfully kept well.

  A summoned meal heralded the start of a new journey, preventing my mana from overflowing. It sat at 90 now, supplemented by a crystal supply totaling to 140. Repeatedly poking bonypedes to death had increased my level to eleven and three swords rested in my sheath skill. My stats were at PP 10+1, PS 32+8, PE 21+1, MP 32, MS 10 and ME 21+29.

  Reasonable overland routes were clearly non-existent, which meant yet more underground traversal for the foreseeable future. Echoing footsteps and shifting shadows frayed my newfound confidence. The end of scratched arrows marked the beginnings of unexplored territory. As usual, dead ends and endless side-paths slowed down my progress and complicated maintaining a southerly direction.

  Things went well somehow, annoying bonypedes notwithstanding. At least, until a snag appeared. Trying to find a way around turned into a fruitless endeavor and the tradition of finding some monstrosities’ big brother or other continued unabated. This time, it was my old friend Deathtrap who made an appearance.

  Featureless smooth stone had been replaced by the ten-year champion of the tightest tiling competition, causing me to hesitate. The possibility of facing traps at some point hadn’t escaped me during the five day wait. Hence, my bug-out bag included forty or so carved wooden cubes, roughly the size of dice. Carefully expending a few provided me with some intelligence when they successfully triggered a spear trap. Upon closer inspection, a hip high round hole in the wall made its location incredibly obvious. There was another one further down the hallway too. My limited visual range made it unclear for how far the offers of free shanking stretched.

  This required experimentation. Smoking away a quarter of my remaining cigarettes helped me come up with a few things. The first of which was that quitting was going to suck. Some miracle of discipline made my pack last for an unusually long time but the end loomed. The second was a need to know the exact mechanics in play here. Leaving a cube on the offending tile and occasionally mind-tapping it with a floating sword taught me two things while further solidifying the benefits of extended staring.

  They didn’t trigger automatically from continued pressure, but did reset after a good while. Most confusing was how both pieces of information resulted from the same tile, which also didn’t show any signs of activation. It didn’t sink into the ground or anything like that. Next up was determining the prevalence of complementary stabbings and other gruesome prizes. My blorange jacket and mini forge were set aside while I rummaged through the purple backpack.

  I gathered a handful of dice, took a step back, cocked my arm and sent them clattering across the floor in an underhanded throw. The visual cacophony left me stunned. Sheer chaos made tracking individual traps impossible, once again reigniting my headache. This is fucking bullshit. Spears stabbed, blades sliced, rising tiles crushed in repeating waves of attempted murder. Implements mundane and clearly magical promised silent unavoidable death. And then it all settled down. A smaller scale repeat revealed the traps had an additional reset condition besides time. Setting off one rearmed the others. It explained the rhythm at least. Even so, my headache began to resurface.

  The only thing I could be glad about was that my naming sense had been on-point. It was indeed a fucking deathtrap.