Chương 7: Congratulations!

Since the nanomachines injected into us to enable our tier ups can also collect data such as our attributes and skills, we have decided to rank the skills based on rarity. The ranks are as follows - Common if more than 10% of humans have it, Uncommon if more than 1%, Rare if more than 0. 01%, Epic if one in a million, Legendary if one in a billion, Mythic if fewer than ten had it in the history of mankind, and finally Unique if it is the first of its kind recorded.

Higher rarities would not necessarily mean the skill is more powerful or better, just that it is harder to obtain. Typically, the rarer the skill, the more specialized it is - From the memoirs of Takuma Inui, Third Head of the First Brain's Faction There was a version of getting used to pain, Kara had discovered, that was not the same as the pain getting better. It was more that the part of him responsible for registering alarm had simply run out of capacity for it, and had moved on to other priorities.

The distance to the lake. That was the priority. Everything else - the numbness spreading from his left shoulder, the thing currently dissolving part of his right boot, the general comprehensive wrongness of the last however-many days - could wait until he got to the lake. He had developed a system. Every hit, he made a mental note of the approximate direction and distance to the nearest lake.

Every hit, he made his way there - running if the legs worked, crawling if it didn't, dragging if crawling wasn't available. He had learned to walk on his hands somewhere around the fourth or fifth dungeon level, which was a skill he was fairly certain had no application anywhere but a dungeon and which he was choosing not to think about too hard.

Once in the lake, he would float until the damage reversed itself, think through what had happened, take a few attempts to let his body find the adjustment, and then move on. The creatures here were not fast. They were not particularly strong. What they had, in abundance, was patience and chemistry - ambushes from surfaces that looked like other surfaces, and poisons that ranged across a spectrum he had not previously known existed. Numbness was the most common.

Loss of function in one part of him or another came second. He had encountered things that made sections of him feel like they were dissolving, things that made him bleed more than the wound warranted, and one memorable instance of something that had made him so drowsy that he had fallen asleep mid-crawl and woken up in a different place than he had lost consciousness in, which he had decided, firmly, not to think about. The blade traps were different.

He had encountered three more since the first one, and each of them had extracted payment. There was no getting through a blade trap without leaving something behind. He had learned to find the rhythm, find the window, and commit - and he had learned that committing fully was the only variable he had any control over, because the blade did not negotiate. You went through or you didn't. The lake fixed what could be fixed. He owed Bodo a fruit basket. Possibly several.

The calming technique was the thing that had kept him functional when functional felt like a theoretical concept. In the moments before a blade jump, when everything in him was running on adrenaline and the logical part of his brain was lodging urgent objections, he would find the slow rhythm, bring his heart rate down, and the window would clarify.

He had done it enough times now that it had become something like muscle memory, which was either a sign of growth or a sign of what prolonged dungeon exposure did to a person. He was not entirely sure which. The dungeon had worked through his senses methodically. Vision first - the invisible undergrowth had been preparation he hadn't known was preparation.

Then touch, then hearing, then smell, then combinations of all of them in configurations that required him to sort signal from noise with progressively less of himself available for the task. He had come through each one changed in some small way, the body making its quiet adjustments, and had not stopped to examine the adjustments too closely because examining things too closely in the dungeon had a cost he couldn't always afford. That left taste.

He had been thinking about this as an abstract possibility for what felt like several levels, and had been unable to imagine what it would look like. A buffet, he had thought once, in a moment of lightness that felt very far away now. The current level had been a straight tunnel for what his body told him was close to two days. Nothing. No creatures, no traps, no visible threats of any kind. Just the tunnel, and the dark, and the grinding awareness of how long it had been since he had eaten or drunk anything.

He had stayed alert for the first day because the dungeon had taught him that the absence of visible threat was not the same as safety. By the second day, alert was a resource he no longer had enough of, and he had made the pragmatic decision to deal with things when they happened rather than spend himself anticipating them. The thinking had gotten difficult some time after that. It had slowed without quite stopping, like an engine turning over in cold weather and not catching.

He kept moving because stopping felt worse than moving. He was not entirely sure, toward the end of it, whether he was walking or some variation on walking that involved more of the wall and the floor than was strictly intended. The water trickling down the wall stopped him. He saw it before he registered what it was - a darker line on the wood, moving. Then the sound of it reached him, small and constant. He moved toward it and pressed his face against the wall and licked the drops from the surface.

The taste hit him immediately. Wrong - deeply, unmistakably wrong, in a way that bypassed conscious assessment and went straight to the part of him responsible for rejecting things. He kept going anyway, because the part of him responsible for making reasonable decisions had been running on reduced capacity for some time and the part of him that was simply thirsty had taken the lead.

He spent the better part of an hour on his knees after that, heaving out what little remained in him, which was not much and was now even lesser. When it finally stopped, he lay on the tunnel floor and looked at the ceiling and understood, slowly, that he had made the situation worse. There was a thought he needed to hold onto - something about the water, something important - but it kept sliding away before he could get a grip on it. He got up. He kept moving. More trickles appeared on the walls as he went.

He moved toward them each time out of a reflex he could not entirely override, and each time his body staged a protest that overruled him before he reached them. He hated his body. His body was being unreasonable. His body had kept him alive in a dungeon for what he estimated was a very long time and had earned some credit, but right now it was being unreasonable. He continued forward.

At some point both walls were sheeted with the trickles, a constant low sound of water everywhere, and his body had simply stopped registering them as options. He was not sure when this had happened. He was not sure about a number of things. He kept his feet moving because that was the one task remaining. The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. He became aware that he had stopped. Something in front of him. He blinked. Blinked again.

A wide block of wood, roughly waist height, and on it - he leaned forward to see better - dozens of small cubes. All the same colour. Whitish. He reached out and picked one up. It felt slightly like frozen jelly under his fingers. He brought it to his nose. Nothing. No smell at all. He put it in his mouth. Slightly salty. He swallowed it whole, which produced a cough that took a moment to resolve, and then his eyes refocused and the tunnel looked like a tunnel again rather than a smear of impressions.

The spot on the wooden block where the cube had been was gone - the wood simply absent, a small gap in the surface running till the floor. Gone, but the opening too small to let anything through. He took two more. One sweet, one sour. Chewed them this time. The block reformed. Then his stomach turned itself inside out. He doubled over and waited for it to pass, which it eventually did, and tried to assemble what had happened. First cube fine. Two more cubes, sick. He took another - umami, this time - and waited.

Nothing. He took another. Bitter. He was sick before he had finished swallowing it. After that, slow and grinding, running on very little, he began working through the combinations. Bitter made him sick. Sour made him sick. Sweet after umami was fine. Salty after bitter was fine, but salty after sweet was not.

He kept going, cube by cube, occasionally sick, occasionally fine, the block disappearing in sections where he took correctly and reforming where he did not, until the pattern emerged from the data the way patterns do when you have enough of them. He ate through the sequence. The block opened. He took a few more cubes for the road, because he had earned them, and walked through. The opening appeared ahead after barely a dozen steps. He knew what it meant.

He ran - an approximation of running, the best version currently available to him - and threw himself into the lake. The water received him the way it always did. He floated and let it work and did not think about anything for a while, which was the most restful thing available to him and he took full advantage of it. When he surfaced, he felt like himself again. More or less. He checked his hands, his fingers, the general inventory of his body. Everything present and accounted for.

He took a breath, dove back under, found the opening in the wall, and let the current take him. The tunnel was longer than any previous one.

He had learned by now to trust the dungeon's architecture - the opening always came before he was completely out of breath - and so when his lungs reached their limit he kept going, and when they went past it he kept going, and the darkness at the edges of his vision started closing in and he kept going, and the last thing that reached him before everything stopped was a voice, smooth and even: CONGRATULATIONS! Against all odds, you have.... Bodo was worried. He was not, as a rule, a worrier.

Worry required a certain relationship with outcomes - a belief that things could go wrong in ways that mattered - and Bodo's general experience of the world had not given him much reason to maintain that belief. Things had a way of working out, in his observation. Master had a way of ensuring that. The world was large and interesting and full of creatures worth knowing, and Bodo's approach to it had always been to meet it with the warmth it deserved and trust that the rest would follow.

The human calf had been in the dungeon for a very long time. Six months was not a long time by most measures Bodo used. He had been alive long enough that six months was a rounding error, a brief interval between one thing and the next. But the dungeon operated on its own scale, and the human calf was G-grade, and the dungeon had not been set to the lowest level out of any expectation that the lowest level would be easy.

The lowest level was what it was because everything above it was calibrated for things that were not G-grade, and even the lowest level had things in it that had ended beings considerably more capable than a fourteen-year-old G-grade human. The dungeon still registered as occupied. That was the one solid fact. Occupied meant alive, and alive was the category that mattered, and Bodo had been reminding himself of this at intervals that had gotten shorter as the weeks passed.

He had spent a great deal of time near the back wall of the treehouse. He did nothing there but stay close to it, because sometimes staying close is the only response left to you when you care about what is on the other side. Kite had not performed in some time. Tremble had been sleeping more than her usual eighteen hours, which was either coincidence or her version of the same thing, and with Tremble it was never entirely possible to tell.

Master was in his chair, and Master was always in his chair, and Master's face gave nothing away that Master had not decided to give away. Bodo had been with him long enough to read what wasn't in the face - and what was missing from Master's face right now was the settled calm that was usually there. Master was waiting in a way that was different from his usual waiting.

Bodo was thinking about going back outside again - the ground was cooler, and there was a stand of trees he had been finding useful for the purpose of having somewhere to put his attention - when the pond opened. It did not appear gradually. One moment the floor of the treehouse was floor, and the next moment it was a pond, and the calf came out of it with the momentum of something that had been moving fast and had stopped very suddenly.

He hit the surface and Bodo was already moving, crossing the treehouse in the time it took the calf to stop coughing, trunk extended, clearing the water from his airways with practiced care - he had pictured this moment more than once over the past six months. The calf breathed. Then breathed again, with more conviction. Bodo looked at him properly. The eyes were wider set, the way a face looked when something in it had shifted to accommodate a new relationship with the world.

The ears were longer, the points of them more defined, curving slightly at the tips in a way that caught the light differently. The nose was sharper at the bridge, the nostrils shaped for something more than they had been asked to do before. These were the outside things, the ones Bodo could see. He knew, from long experience with this dungeon and what it did to the things that came through it, that the inside things were more significant. The outside things were the body's notes in the margin.

The real work had happened somewhere that didn't show. The calf's eyes found him. For a moment he just looked, like a kid who had been somewhere for a long time and was not yet sure he had left it.

Then something in the expression resolved, and he reached up and grabbed Bodo's trunk with both hands and held on, and started crying in the way that had nothing to do with sadness - the kind that came from the body releasing something it had been holding for longer than was sustainable, relief finding the only exit available to it. Bodo wrapped his trunk around him gently and held him the way he had held him in the treehouse on the first night - all that strength held deliberately in check.

The calf's breathing slowed. The crying quieted. The exhaustion, which had clearly been waiting just behind everything else, moved to the front. He was asleep before Bodo had finished the thought that he should probably sleep. Bodo looked up. Master had a small smile on his face - small, and real, the kind that appeared rarely enough to mean something when it did.

Across the treehouse, Tremble had raised her head from her paws and was regarding the sleeping calf the way she regarded things she had revised her opinion of and had not yet decided how to express the revision. Her eyes stayed on him for a long moment. Then she settled her chin back down, slowly, which from Tremble was its own kind of statement. Bodo held the calf and listened to him breathe and felt, simply and completely, very glad indeed that he had come back.