That, predictably, got no reaction. But I wasn’t really there to banter in the first place, so I didn’t particularly care. Instead, I stepped forward and slammed a punch into Dalia’s face. I missed, as she sidestepped at the last minute, but I did manage to hit her shoulder and spin her sideways.

  Where her foot had previously been burned a glyph of some kind. Mangle, it read. The next was burst, and the one after that was… rend, maybe. I couldn’t quite tell. Either way, I did not want to deal with that. I already had a destroyed arm; I wasn’t going for a destroyed leg as well.

  Despite being four levels higher than I was, Dalia may as well have been cardboard for all the defense she had. She was a mana-based class that specialized in traps and prepared defenses, not personal toughness. I, on the other hand, looked to be leaning heavily in the “take a face full of damage and keep on trucking” kind of class, though I couldn’t find out until level ten. I still thought it was unfair the NPCs got classes before we did. It made things a whole lot harder than they had to be.

  A silver rune flared as I hit her, letting out a small, shaped charge directly into my good fist. It popped something in there, which hurt, but it wasn’t too debilitating. My foot, however, had it worse when I shot a kick out at her. Another shaped charge crumpled my pinkie and ring toes and blasted my shoe straight off. The poor thing landed a couple yards away in tatters, burning shreds of cloth and rubber scattering haphazardly. Great, now I no longer had a right shoe.

  Even more of a problem was the limp I was now forced to walk with. My foot no longer supported my weight fully without excruciating pain, so… yeah. If you’ve never broken a toe before, you wouldn’t really understand what it felt like in the moment. Of course, it didn’t come anywhere near my powdered legs from the first time I encountered the treant.

  Speaking of which, I wondered how Angel and the others were doing on that front. I couldn’t take the time to crane my neck and look for them, but I hoped they were doing okay. If they weren’t, it wasn’t as though I could do anything about it. I wouldn’t get there in time, and the fight with the witch took precedent. It was a cold but necessary outlook on things, I’m afraid. Probably not the best for my teetering sanity.

  Back to the task at hand, I was having a grand ole time punching and kicking away at Dalia while she backed up and took the hits. She was looking a little rough around the edges at the moment, but so was I. In fact, you could say I was in a worse position, what with my all-but-mummified arm and the constant barrage of shaped charges into my fist and feet.

  Now you may be wondering at this point, ‘Why are you weathering a storm of damage you could easily have avoided if you had just hit her with a sword or something?’ And first, I didn’t see any weapons just lying about on the ground to be picked up and swung around, do you? Didn’t think so. And second, shut up. Don’t make me spoil anything. I don’t care if you didn’t say anything out loud, your thoughts are loud enough for me to hear from where I sit writing this by candlelight. You’re making my ears itch just thinking about it. Now let me get back to the story, will you?

  Thank you.

  Ahem.

  It would be enough if I kept on like this—just throwing punches and the occasional kick. Barely enough, but still enough. I didn’t have to come out unscathed, I just had to kill her. Killing was easy.

  And then I stepped on a landmine.

  Well… not quite a landmine. It was one of those sigils left behind after every step Dalia took, but it may as well have been a bomb for all the good it did me. The ground imploded. Yes, imploded. I wasn’t entirely certain about the physics behind it, as physics had been thrown out the window for quite some time now. All I knew was that my right leg was suddenly dragged down by a force about thirty times that of gravity.

  Tendons tore, ligaments shredded, muscles were pulled to their farthest extent, and the bones cracked and warped. My leg was ruined in less than the second the trap lasted.

  Pain flared hot and bright. It was like someone had just placed a full-leg branding iron on my skin and pressed down firmly. The pressure was unbearable.

  Ya know, I hadn’t expected to find anyone with knowledge of Exponential Gravitational Modules—EGMs for short—in the dungeon, though I supposed getting the gods involved would be a good way to find yourself out of your depth. EGMs were a specialized field of study in the outside world, having to do with transporting high-tier people and items safely and efficiently. It was also one of the few ways we could subvert space entirely and bypass the speed of light. It was known as the Inverse-Lorentz effect, having to do with some some old science wizard named Einstein’s theories of relativity, and reversing the time scale and material polarity in a localized area of proto-liminal space. At least, that’s what the textbook had said on it. I hadn’t the slightest clue what any of that meant. Something about making it so we could travel to distant worlds with minimal time loss in between. Science stuff.

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  All this to say, I was caught supremely off my guard when something akin to an uber-mini black hole sprung into being when I stepped on the rune. It didn’t have the same devouring effect, but hoo boy did it hurt to have my leg stretched and warped like a piece of spaghetti for about a quarter inch.

  With my leg suddenly unusable, I came to a standstill. I had to come up with a better plan. I could stand on it for a little bit, but it didn’t respond naturally and doing so caused a lot of freshly forged nails to bite into everywhere between my knee and hip. Everything below that was just numb. Not a good sign.

  The problem was, I couldn’t think of anything better. I was tired. Exhausted. I hadn’t gotten any sleep last night, my wounds from my battle with the An Dreores—and even further back, the treant—had not finished healing. Even though I had leveled up and was closer to them in terms of raw stats, my innate healing just wasn’t quite enough to keep up with the beatings I had received. One of my lungs had been punctured in my most recent fight, and the scarring had likely been torn open by the explosion. My ribs were battered and broken, my arm was as good as gone, my leg was now ruined—things weren’t looking so good.

  And now, as I watched, a rune lit up on Dalia’s body. It was on her left shoulder and it was one of many. There was a line of about ten of said runes running up each of her arms that I hadn’t noticed. They were cleverly hidden with some kind of other ritualistic inscription bound around her neck.

  The rune glowed a soft white. It wasn’t a particularly new thing, being one of the three shades used by Dalia’s magic until now, but this somehow felt different. It felt gentler. The difference was along the same lines of being able to tell between a glare and a smile without the altering of the posture or face. I wasn’t certain how I was able to tell, but I could.

  Dalia… even now I’m not entirely sure how to put this. She was made whole. It wasn’t healing; I would be able to tell if it was anything but the most advanced healing magic anybody had ever seen. All the same, whether healing or not, she was alive and well. There were no cuts or bruises on her body, no gashes, no broken bones. It was honestly pretty creepy.

  Seeing this, that little voice deep inside of me began to panic. I was broken and she was whole. That gave her a major advantage over me. Not to mention the hideous spectre of madness I could feel looming over my shoulder, drawing closer every second. I had managed to avoid it for the past few minutes while beating up on Dalia, but now I didn’t know if I could manage even that. My movement was crippled beyond repair.

  Was it time?

  Was it time to throw away my sanity once again in favor of survival? I could certainly do it. All too easily, in fact. But was it worth it? In that state, I wouldn’t remember what happened, and I most certainly wouldn’t be able to dictate my actions. So far, my madness hadn’t acted against anything that wasn’t trying to kill me or another human, but that didn’t make it always the case. Under the right circumstances, anyone could get hurt. Even myself. Well, I didn’t necessarily care about that so much as the others that could get injured or killed.

  I looked around, for the first time in the fight taking my eyes off of my opponent. We had moved about thirty yards from where we had started fighting. Thankfully, we had moved in the opposite direction of my newly made friends, who I saw were standing there watching me with mixed opinions plane on their faces: Harald with a touch of curiosity, Mark with concern, and Angel with mild apathy.

  I also saw the Shadow. It was about five yards behind me and off to the right. It, too, had stopped and was now watching me. That was probably because it could sense the bubbling madness just barely held back by my strength of will alone. And that will was slipping. My hold on my sanity was diminishing ever so slightly, little by little.

  Looking back, I believe this is the first step I took on the path I knew I eventually must walk. The dungeon was an inevitability. I had always wanted to enter it, even since I was a young child, and I hadn’t lost that desire in the yawning years since. Perhaps that was because of my wish to follow in the footsteps of my father and gain the strength to stand against the interminable hordes; perhaps it was because I looked around at all the suffering the war was causing and wished for it to end. I do not know. All I know is that entering the dungeon was not the first step I took. This was. The choice to accept the darkness, forge myself in it, and push through to the light beyond was the beginning of it all.

  As I stood there, thinking on what I should do, I saw the trees trembling in the distance. The witch had called, and the treant had answered. It was in its way, and while I could put my trust in my new comrades to delay it, I did not know how long they could hold it off for, or if they could even kill it. I would likely have to come help at some point. Either that, or if they did manage to kill it, they would be exhausted and completely unprepared for Dalia’s strength should she manage to kill me. They wouldn’t just be killed, they would be coldly murdered—slaughtered in cold carelessness and callous disdain. I could not allow that.

  I made the decision. I allowed my mind to recede from the fore and placed my actions entirely in the hands of the one thing I would come to love and hate the most the entirety of my life: my instincts. And before I left, I gave them—or it, or him, or perhaps me—one final command.

  Kill.