[SS] Chapter 17: A look back and some introspection

My first Dungeon Monster. I hadn’t made any because my PTSD was still, well, pretty bad and I was focused on walls. Walls. Always more walls. I thought that shit was suppose to stay dead and gone but even killing a bunch of wolves, didn’t really make me feel better. To be fair, most of the killing of wolves had become, distanced. Almost all of them had died to traps and then I just sat on the corpses and ate them. And for very obvious reasons, I tried very very hard not to think about that. It got easier since I became an Acid Slime and ate so much quicker. The few times I had gotten into a real fight, it was an ambush and they died quickly. I… hadn’t really felt like I had “fought” anything. Blitzed might be the better word.

Anyway, right, first dungeon monster. I didn’t want to do this whole dungeon thing but now I felt like I was stuck doing one till this stupid year of isolation was up. Honestly, if things kept going how they were, I’d be totally fine with it. The problem was, that I was pretty sure they weren’t going to stay like that. I had already mentioned but my Dungeon Core was acting like a beacon for wolves. My biggest worry is that it may not end with wolves. Wolves, were, well [Wolf]. They were a monster species and they could evolve. And that was assuming nothing else lived in this hellish wolf forest. Seriously, seeing nearly two dozen wolves in only a few weeks had me spooked.

So I had decided to make a proper dungeon. That meant monsters. I could have summoned a slime for only a little bit of mana but that would have been both useless and unappealing. No, I was saving up for a Gen 1 monster. One that would actually be able to kill a pack of wolves.

A hob-goblin.

An important part of my dungeon is that it’s meant to eat people to grow stronger and the mana costs rise pretty fast. Spawning Gen 2 monsters, even bad ones, are out of the question. Killing a Gen 0 mob, like a wolf, gave like a dozen mana. Although it didn’t always seem like it, especially to myself, it was important to remember that compared to a wolf I was stupidly strong. I could probably kill an army of wolves with just my stats alone. The problem was my durability, always. That meant a dungeon just starting out would take a long time to get 1000 mana. And all of it wouldn’t go to just one mob. I could abuse this to do something special.

I could summon strong monsters. Now, arise my Hobgoblin! Arise!

I was expecting some incredible magic or some crazy feat of insanity, but instead, a Hob-goblin just appeared in front of me. Oi! Dungeon Core! Do you have no flair for the dramatic?!

I shook my slimy head. I had been here for only a few weeks and I was already going crazy, trying to talk to my Dungeon Core. I looked at the Hob-Goblin in front of me and shivered horribly. Oh, it had all the features of life. But it was completely lifeless. Even though it was surprisingly, uh, built? It certainly seemed buff. Thankfully, it seemed to have come with a loincloth and a club. I was expecting worse honestly. A nasty looking, well, Goblin. And they were definitely a Goblin, well, Hob-Goblin. But besides the horrible uncanny valley of them seeming alive and me knowing they weren’t, they looked fine to me? I don’t know, I guess that was just racism on my part. Maybe Goblins looked worse?

Either way, I couldn’t stand looking at this lifeless robot. I mentally ordered it to go out into the yard. I’d have to pour some mana into the Dungeon so I could open the wall and send it to the front of the tunnel. I was curious just how well it could do against a wolf.

That bit of excitement done for the day, I turned to go back to my training and grimaced.

No.

I hated being Dungeon bound. I hated this whole situation. I wasn’t going to waste away my new life building a dungeon for thousands of years. I wasn’t going to stick around here all day every day and bunker up for a whole year either. That was just letting fear overtake me. I think it’s about time I explored this forest I was stuck in.

With slight trepidation, I walked outside to go exploring, ordering my Hob-Goblin to drag any wolves it kills into the tunnel.

.

.

.

I felt, lost. Not literally, I had a 15 mile map of my Dungeon Domain. No, I felt lost internally. Everything had just, happened so fast and been so much. Where do I even begin? My death is always a good beginning and I’ve been trying to make peace with that. But it’s hard. The pain, the fear, the terror, the nightmares, from feeling my blood drain away, at the shock of seeing so much red geyser out of me, all mixing together with my second death from claws and heat and a blinding pain and a terror that gripped the soul, trying to prevent a third.

That was all, so much. That’s how I would define the last month or so of my existence. Overwhelming. Training without anything happening for the last few weeks had been a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it let me relax and focus and ignore everything that was going on, everything that had happened. A curse because now it was time for me to really stop and think and consider.

I sat down on the grass. Well, more just stopped rolling. I didn’t think or say anything for a while, just letting myself breathe. Letting my thoughts drift. I felt, melancholy. Sad. Lonely. Stricken with grief in a way. It wasn’t just the pain or memory of dying that was affecting me. Those were terrible and it was a miracle I wasn’t having a panic attack every time I saw a wolf. No, I was also in mourning. It felt weird to mourn your own death but it wasn’t really me I was mourning. I had been ignoring it since I arrived here but, it hurt. It hurt so much.

David Wilson

Martha Wilson

Roy Smith

Alex Averci

Jessica May

My family and friends. No brothers or sisters. No pets. These were the five people I was closest to. The people who were going to be traumatized by finding my dead body. The people who I prayed would find solace in the message I had left, that would laugh at it in their time of need. That wouldn’t always remember me with pain in their heart.

These were the people I wasn’t going to ever see again.

I never wanted to be a God.

I stared out at the forest for a while.

I never wanted to be a God. I never wanted to do this challenge. I never wanted to die. If I could turn back time and instead live my life out in full, even if it meant dying of old age and never experiencing any of this, I would. Who cares about immortality or Godhood or magic?

I just wanted my friends and family. I just wanted, to not have died. I wanted to roll over and have the bullet miss me, for it to be a funny story to tell my friends and family. For me to go to work and make an okay amount of money. For me to get a nice coffee and play some video games with my best friends. To watch a movie and consider getting a dog. For me to meet a nice girl or guy and have a real relationship with them. Have kids, maybe adopt, grow old together. Smile and laugh. I’d give up everything for that world. That perfect future.

And it had been taken from me, by pure bad luck. I wish I could feel angry about it. I was lucky to even be able to feel sorrow about it. I had died. I was lucky and blessed that my consciousness hadn’t ended, that my last moments hadn’t been me dying laughing. And yet, I was still, fucked up. The Gods truly didn’t understand people. How could I just, let go of everything and be okay with all of this? If I had more time to think while I was, well, dead, I would have begged them to just bring me back to life instead.

And now I was here. Alone. With a bunker made out of fear, eating wolves while trying to ignore their fleshy bodies melting underneath me, ignoring how cool and horrifying it was to have my whole body change over night, to ignore how creepy it was to have a dead souled husk guarding my dungeon. My lair. I would have had a panic attack a million times over if not for a certain skill that makes me used to my new body. But even if it did that, my mind still knew. I was a fucking slime. A, a blob of slime made sentient. Gelatinous, closer to jello than anything resembling a human. I had no organs, no brain, no skin, no eyes or ears, I was so inhuman it hurt. It didn’t bother me and the fact that it didn’t bother me, bothered me.

It felt like my inner self had been massacred and I was just, reacting and picking up the pieces. I wasn’t murderous and yet I kept murdering. It wasn’t even much of a thought to me. That wasn’t normal. That wasn’t natural. How could I kill so many creatures and just, not even consider it? Not even think about it? It wasn’t like I pushed a button from some far off distance. I had killed and eaten them. I had rolled over their bodies. Seen the blood. Felt them melt underneath me. Watched the blood spread across the grass as some of them turned into nothing. Heard the sizzling. I was a monster, that was for sure.

And I just, I locked it away and down and out of my mind, along with everything else. There was going to be a reckoning if I continued like this. I was working toward strength, towards being the strongest monster I could be, to being a God. But why? Why did I desire strength? Why was I working so hard? Because it kept me distracted from the truth. That I wasn’t A-okay. That not everything was alright. That I was alone in an alien world, in an alien body, killing things, barely surviving, stuck in a forest, with so much shit going on over my head that I felt helpless. If I kept going on like this, I’d either eventually crack like an egg or become a murderhobo without a conscience. Hell, I already was becoming that.

So, I’d acknowledge how I was feeling. I’d let it all out. I wouldn’t shy away from everything I had been running away from. I was going to be stuck here, and I was going to kill, and I was going to evolve and be forced to be a King and a Ruler and I was going to suffer. And I was going to do it all alone.

I felt some of my slime come off me as I cried and screamed into the void.