After the End: Serenity

The second Trial turned out to be goblins. Individually they were more dangerous, because they wouldn’t just sit there waiting to have the core knocked out of them; instead, they would rush the first person they saw with a tiny, terribly made bone dagger. After a little practice, they really weren’t a threat. There was only one per room.

They hurried through the dungeon, careful to get everything including side passages. There were no real threats before the boss room, which turned out to be a horde of the tiny crazy dagger-wielding goblins.

Well, if 15 is a horde. It was a lot more than one.

It still wasn’t really a problem. Serenity and Lancaster took the brunt of the assault while Rissa and Echo stood behind them to hit the stalled goblins with their longer weapons. One decent hit would take out a goblin.

Lancaster took a few scratches from the boss. Serenity didn’t admit to his, because it turned out that the goblins weren’t actually strong enough to break his skin.

After the fight, Serenity turned to Sillon and asked, “How do people actually die in these Trials?”

Sillon looked sad. “You’re prepared to fight. I’ve seen groups scatter and each hide in a different corner after throwing their weapons away against hordes like this. The goblins aren’t strong, but if you don’t kill them, they will eventually manage to kill you. It’s … ugly.” He paused. “It’s almost always the boss rooms. The stuff before that is to give you an idea of what you’ll be facing, then you face a more extreme version. These are tutorial dungeons after all.”

Goblin Dungeon 0.1 Complete

4 Participants

Rewards increased for reduced party size.

Monster extermination: 78 XP

Horde Cleared: 62 XP

Total Extermination Bonus: 62 XP, 62 Ev

Dungeon Cleared: 62 XP, 62 Ev

It was finally time for lunch.

This time, Serenity didn’t try setting himself up at a grill. It would probably have worked just fine again, but he was simply too hungry to wait on the meat to cook. Instead, he found a small isolated room near the food storage - he suspected it was a staging area for when things were moved around - and wheeled the chilled steaks in. It didn’t take long to open and eat each steak, when he wasn’t trying to look human. He could simply rip large pieces off and swallow them.

He was able to eat larger pieces than he’d expected, and chewing seemed to be more or less optional. He made a note to check his mouth and throat to see what was going on … … after he finished eating.

He could feel his abdomen filling in with fat as he ate. It felt wonderful.

And then his “healing storage” filled up.

Finally, he did not feel hungry.

There were still a few steaks in the latest container, so he decided to eat them to find out what overeating did. It turned out that it wasn’t anything surprising. He put the meat on as weight. It was relatively easy to turn it into Ev. He felt like he was starting to get good at that.

When he looked down at himself he realized that he was a very messy eater. He looked as bad as when he’d walked out of the goblin dungeon - maybe worse. The remainder of the hour he’d set aside for lunch was spent cleaning himself and the room he’d eaten in.

Serenity was past level 10, and there should be some good Paths available -

Paths Available (Choice of Tier 0 or Tier 1 enabled by Tutorial)

Tier 0

Human

Tier 1

Not Currently Eligible

...what?

Not Currently Eligible

You do not meet the requirements to advance to Tier 1. This limitation is a result of your Altered Template. This limitation can be lifted during the Tutorial, once you discover why you are limited.

Joy.

Is Human really as bad as the guide said?

Human

The child’s path of an ordinary human.

Level 10: Basic Language Acquisition (Native Tongue)

Disabled due to possession of a native language.

Level 25: Growth (pre-stat acquisition)

Disabled due to having reached adulthood.

Level 50: Basic Tool use

Duplicates skills already demonstrated during the Tutorial.

Level 75: Basic Weapon use (First weapon)

Duplicates skills already demonstrated during the Tutorial.

Level 100: Personal Choice Basic Skill

Basic Skills available.

If anything, it was worse than the guide had said.

Serenity guessed he needed to figure out what his altered template had messed up for him. Otherwise, he wasn’t going to advance.

The best way to do that was to go out in the Tutorial and see what happened. Try a bunch of things, see if anything helped. He doubted the instructors would be helpful - and even if they could be, Serenity really didn’t want to reveal his Altered Template. It seemed like the kind of thing that could get him killed.

He knew Rissa was going to be off at classes. He debated going back for a solo Trial or going to a class himself, and decided he’d try both - one class, then back to the Trials.

This time, the class he sat in on was “Leadership and towns”. Most of it was stuff he knew, but he hadn’t set up an early town. Some of the requirements and possibilities caught him by surprise. He’d never even seen a Displaced Town Crystal, and he hadn’t realized that shop purchases were gated by more than just money.

When he went back to the Trials, Sillon was managing the desk. “I was thinking of doing a solo, but if you have a group that needs some help I can do that too.”

“If you’d been here right after lunch, we had a group then. That’s usually the best time to find a pickup group. If you want to solo, we can leave right now. Oh, and this one has a quest. It’s pretty straightforward - kill the boss. Everything can be avoided, even the boss, so we give a quest. Knowing you, you’re planning to kill everything anyway, aren’t you?”

Sillon clearly had him figured out that far. “Yeah. I need the XP.”

“Don’t we all.”

When he saw the first monster, Serenity knew what Sillon had meant when he said they could all be avoided. The monsters were immoble plants. Serenity felt a certain sympathy for them, but that didn’t mean he intended not to kill them. When he hit the first one and narrowly avoided being covered in a powder he was sure would do something nasty, his sympathy vanished. He’d probably have been fine if he were undead, but he was happier being alive.

Hitting them with a staff wasn’t going to work. And as for his handaxe - yeah, definitely not an option. If he’d had a glaive, maybe, but he couldn’t go out and get one now. Ranged weapons would have been optimal.

All of which meant he couldn’t depend on melee weapons. Serenity was pretty sure he could kill it by throwing his handaxe at it and carefully retrieving it repeatedly - if he could hit - but that was a method far better suited to a party, where someone could pull him out if he got caught in the dust. It was too bad that proper ranged weaponry wasn’t available yet. He missed his set of throwing axes.

Lancaster might have been able to help; in addition to his sword, he was still wearing his gun, and it was possible that would be able to damage the plants. As long as he had the rounds available, anyway. But Serenity was here alone, so none of those options would work.

It was time to turn to the old standby: Fire.

Or in Serenity’s case, his Plasma Affinity.

He concentrated, and a beam of plasma came from his left hand and cut through the plant. It cut through easily enough that he was pretty sure many Affinities could have been used against the plant. It was almost like this dungeon was designed to teach people the value of mages.

He looked at it in irritation. “It doesn’t have a core, does it?”

That was a question Sillon could answer. “Plant monsters generally don’t.”

“Yeah. And I don’t have any way to carry it. I bet the dust would be useful. If I could catch it.”

He had to pause a little after the second plant to let his mana refill. It filled quickly, but using an Affinity directly instead of a proper spell was costly.

The third one was actually in a room where he had to pass close to the plant after he killed it. As Serenity walked near it, he realized something smelled good and was making him hungry. It didn’t take much thought to realize that it was the plant.

He was grumpy enough about the lack of loot that he walked over to it, tore off a piece, and ate it. It tasted better than it smelled - especially the dust - but he actually found that the plant generated the dust in sealed pockets and managed to get himself to keep some of the unbroken pockets for use in crafting.

Even though he very much wanted to eat them all.

He even went back and scavenged (and ate) the first two he’d killed.

After the third one, he checked and realized the plant monsters weren’t adding to his Ev. Well, he didn’t plan to stop eating them; even if all he got out of them was an enjoyable meal, that was still something.

While Serenity was eating the fifth plant, Sillon commented, “This is usually the trickiest dungeon of the first set. A mage helps a lot, or an archer, if the group brings enough arrows. Most groups end up skipping the full clear.”

Serenity didn’t reply immediately. He needed to think about the implications of Sillon’s comment.

The sixth plant was only a tasty memory when Serenity figured out how to reply. “Can instructors set which Trial is next?”

Serenity could hear the smile in Sillon’s voice. “Yes.”

“Then I suppose I should thank you for giving me the hardest dungeon on my first solo run.” Serenity waved the plasma beam across the base of the seventh plant monster.

“This isn’t the hardest, it’s just less straightforward.”

Serenity conceded the point.

When Serenity was well into eating the next plant, Sillon noted, “I’m not sure where you’re putting those plants. You must have eaten twice your mass by now, and it’s only been an hour or so.”

Serenity paused to think about it. His healing reserves were full. They didn’t seem to be overstuffed waiting for him to be alone the way they had the previous night - in fact, he wasn’t sure the plant material was even making it to his stomach. “I’m not sure either. But they taste good, and there’s time, so why not.”

It was a terrible justification. Serenity didn’t really care about that, though. His past few days had been disturbing, and his entire view of himself was under assault - both from himself as he tried to make a new Path and from the realization that whatever his status sheet said, he wasn’t really human. Even as the undead monstrosity the Final Reaper had become, he’d clung to the thought of himself as “human” - but being able to evolve rather than deliberately altering himself or having events overtake him was somehow different. He’d had a hard line between “monsters” and “people”, and finding himself on the wrong side of the line was something Serenity was refusing to really think about. It was soothing to give in to his body’s demands, even though he hadn’t quite realized that was what he was doing.

He was disappointed to realize that the tenth plant monster he came to was the boss. As he’d expected, it was several times the size of the others. Fortunately, it wasn’t any more resistant to plasma, and he’d taken plenty of time to recover his Mana.

It turned out that the long part of this dungeon was the meals. He could easily have done a second dungeon in the time he’d taken to eat.

Dream Blossoms Dungeon 0.2 Complete

1 Participant

Rewards increased for reduced party size.

Monster extermination: 500 XP

Boss Killed: 250 XP

Total Extermination Bonus: 250 XP, 250 Ev

Dungeon Cleared: 250 XP, 250 Ev

Individual Dungeon Quest ‘Eternal Sleep Blossom Destruction’ Complete

Quest Rewards: 250 XP, 250 Ev

Soloing these Trials was really good XP.

“One more before dinner? I’m pretty sure you’ll have no trouble finishing in time as long as you don’t stop to eat all the monsters,” Sillon offered.

Serenity realized he probably shouldn’t have done that in front of Sillon … but they’d tasted so good. It had been worth it. It wasn’t like Sillon hadn’t seen other oddities from him. Revenge-eating plants wasn’t the worst thing.

“Yeah, one more sounds good.”

The fourth dungeon was undead. Basic skeletons. It was boring and basically danger-free (although the monster cores were the most attractive he’d seen yet). The boss was a minor Bone Golem, barely even necromancy at all. It was slower than even the regular monsters had been and he simply danced around it until he managed to hit the skull enough times to crack out the Golem’s core.

Sillon didn’t speak during the entire dungeon. He just watched Serenity grumble as he killed the skeletons.

Skeleton Dungeon 0.3 Complete

1 Participant

Rewards increased for reduced party size.

Monster extermination: 1000 XP

Boss Killed: 250 XP

Total Extermination Bonus: 250 XP, 250 Ev

Dungeon Cleared: 250 XP, 250 Ev