Chapter Two
New Experiences
To deny that I was in a real, living, breathing world was to deny common sense despite how illogical it seemed.
Every single one of my senses was firing with new sensations.
The damp musk of the cave filled my nostrils, the sound of dripping water and birds chirping outside reached my ears, the flickering flame of my torch felt warm against my exposed skin, and the sword in my right hand felt heavy but familiar.
I never experienced anything even a quarter as realistic in a dream before.
That meant something a little concerning.
I was in danger. Real, actual danger. It wasn’t like a game where I could simply respawn… not that I ever relied on respawning since I preferred playing with the optional permadeath setting, but still. Without that setting on, dead characters respawned back in town.
There was no telling which “setting” the real world had.
One small mistake and I could die. Or maybe, I could make as many mistakes as I wanted to and respawn countless times.
I didn’t know. Seth said I'd only get one try and to make my choices matter, but I had no idea if that only applied to my class selection or everything, death included.
For all I knew, just because I was locked into my choices didn't mean that I couldn't respawn.
Even so.
I was excited.
So damn excited that I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking.
I was walking! Walking! And I was in the world I spent so many years in love with!
Sure, I felt a little bad about whatever was going on with Seth since he sounded like he was in trouble, but he gave me this gift. Not only that, but—
You need to learn to be a little selfish.
If the person responsible for saving my life thought so and even created an entire universe based on the world we loved for me to start over in, then alright.
I’d do my best to be selfish.
That meant surviving and clearing every single last dungeon that the world had to offer me. Even within the game’s lore, it was said that there were hundreds of other dungeons waiting to be discovered, so I was going to discover them all in the real world.
First, I had to defeat the opponent who just showed up in front of me.
My first battle.
[Falling Cave Snail]
[Level 1]
It was one of the first enemies that I defeated so many times before.
A large, dog-sized snail with a sturdy shell that fell from the ceiling onto unsuspecting adventurers when in the dark.
Thanks to the torch lighting up the cave passage, though, the snail dropped down ahead of me rather than wait for me to pass beneath it.
I always loved seeing people complain about getting the snail as their first enemy.
After all, it was resistant to piercing and slashing damage types, and most people figured they had to use the starting sword to win against it.
Some people even quit the game, suspecting the rest of the game would be unfairly designed against them.
Those people were too stupid to realize the game started them off with two weapons.
I swapped my torch with my sword since I was better with my right hand. The snail moved cautiously but still approached me.
If this world was just like the game, then dungeon monsters were more or less objectively evil.
Cruel, semi-immortal, respawning spirits given physical form whose only purpose was to try and kill adventurers within the dungeon.
They couldn’t be reasoned with. They could be forcibly controlled by a few classes, such as Beast Masters, Necromancers, Card Collectors, and more, but even then, they were forcibly controlled rather than domesticated.
There was no reason to feel any guilt about killing an evil monster who would happily kill everyone.
“Alright,” I said to myself. “Time to earn my first experience points.”
I wasn’t sure what to expect. While yeah, I played Custom Dungeon World more than anyone else did, I had a useless body up to just a little bit ago.
A body that couldn’t even get out of bed unassisted.
I was only ever in one “fight” and that fight was what ruined my body.
Not only that, but I didn’t even land a single blow back then.
And now, I was going up against a monster with killing intent.
Yet, I felt confident. Confident in myself. Confident in my experience with the game. Confident in my ability to defeat the foe in front of me.
No, it was more than that.
I felt the combined confidence of every single dungeon-clearing character I ever played combined.
Every character who met their end trying their best. Every character who cleared the hardest content in the game. Every joke character I made just for fun.
They were all mine, and now they were all part of my experience.
I charged forward, unable to hold back the smile curling my lips.
The snail lashed out at me with a tendril that extended out from within its shell, but I was easily able to parry it using Rusty for defense as I closed the distance to strike at the snail’s shell with my torch.
Realistically, a torch probably wouldn’t make a great weapon. In this world, it was the starting blunt weapon that might have dealt only half the damage of the sword but came with a bonus effect.
[Burning]
The status effect popped up over the snail’s body alongside its usual icon of a person covered in flames.
The snail mimicked the icon pretty quickly as flames rapidly covered its body, causing its health bar to deplete at a rapid rate since it was only a starter mob.
The actual number for its health would show up after I killed enough of them, but I knew it only had fifteen health, and the Burning debuff was doing three damage a tick, so it wouldn’t be alive for long.
In the meantime, it tried attacking me again, but its movements were far too slow to catch me.
And while watching its health bar deplete, I remembered something pretty important.
I needed to focus on getting class prerequisites.
Classes were locked behind clearing certain prerequisites and I had no idea which ones would carry over from my time in the game, if any.
For example.
The Hero class, which was pretty overpowered in every way, required beating the game’s hardest dungeon (on release) before it was available on all characters afterward.
Then there were classes like: Barbarian, unlocked by defeating multiple enemies without bothering to avoid taking any damage in any way; Witch, which required gathering and consuming mana-infused mushrooms as well as finding a broom to equip; and Thief, which required successfully stealing from NPCs.
Those were the main requirements for each one, at least. They had more.
And there were tons of other classes with their own sets of requirements, too.
And it just so happened that one of my favorite classes had a prerequisite for defeating enemies while letting damage-over-time effects deal at least 60% of the damage.
That was why, rather than attack again to finish the snail off sooner, I let the fire do its job.
The debuff lasted for fifteen seconds and DoT effects ticked every three seconds, then there was the damage dealt from hitting the snail in the first place, so it went down pretty quickly.
The flaming snail lashed out in one final attempt to strike me before falling dead before it could reach me.
A couple seconds later and its corpse turned into fading particles that only left behind its drop. All I had to do was walk up to it and grab the item left behind for it to teleport straight into my inventory.
[Snail Shell Fragment added to inventory.]
The popup for this text showed up at the bottom right of my vision. That aside, there was something immensely satisfying about looting my first real drop, even if it was just a piece of a broken snail shell.
I also figured I should find out how to access my inventory and whatnot, so I experimented for a few moments before discovering that I simply had to think, “Info,” to open it.
What looked like a holographic tablet appeared in front of me that I could manipulate with my hands to scroll through all my information as well as select different tabs and items.
[Information]
//Name: Sev
//Race: Human
//Level: 1 (17%)
//Class: None
//Subclass: None
//Dungeons Cleared: 0
[Status]
//Health: 50/50
//Mana: 10/10
//Defense: 5
//Vitality: 0
//Intelligence: 0
//Strength: 0
//Wisdom: 0
//Dexterity: 0
//Charisma: 0
//Luck: 0
Everything looked normal there.
Then there was my equipment, though only my weapons mattered since everything else was just basic starter clothes that only offered a point of defense each.
[Equipment]
//Rusty Sword
//Type: Weapon [1-Handed Sword] (Common)
//Requirements: Level 1
//5 – 7 Damage (Slashing)
//An old sword that still has enough of an edge to perform its purpose.
//Torch
//Type: Weapon [1-Handed Club] (Common)
//Requirements: Level 1
//1 – 3 Damage (Blunt)
//50% chance to inflict Burning (Deals 3 Fire Damage every 3 seconds for 15 seconds)
//A light in the dark.
Everything looked good still, just as I hoped.
Now then.
It was time to go hunt some more snails. I needed to kill five more still if I wanted to level up, and I really wanted the satisfaction of leveling up for the first time.
It took about ten minutes of walking around, but I managed to find the rest of my prey and took them out, letting each one not-so-slowly burn to death with the last one currently burning.
I was actually accomplishing the prerequisites for a few different classes by doing this, but the two I had the most fun with back in the game were Pyromaniac and Afflictionist. Pyromaniac was a class all about fire damage, obviously, while Afflictionist specialized in damage-over-time effects.