Chapter 02

“Always keep your core tight!”

Barely two days earlier, Michael was training in his dojo, struggling to properly hold the most basic of katas for more than a couple of steps before falling back into his old patterns of moving. The latest batch of instructions coming from his sensei were really doing a number on him, making him feel like he was back to the early days of training.

“Now, turn!”

Together, the five people turned as one, their movements synchronized almost perfectly. To the untrained eye, at least. Michael was struggling to keep the pace though, his thoughts alternating between wanting to be perfect and wondering just why he was putting so much effort into a hobby.

The rest of the biweekly hour-and-a-half of training passed in a blur of katas, ending with the usual conditioning session that never failed to send them all home battered and bruised. It seemed that Michael had drawn the short end of the stick today, being paired up with a literal mountain of a man. The guy was an attorney by profession but he was of the freelance kind, who carried around more anger and resentment than was healthy for someone to carry, and often needed an outlet to vent their pent up emotions.

Michael was going to be that outlet today.

“I hope you are ready, chosen one.” He said, wicked grin and all the other bells and whistles on his face. Michael knew that face, if only by experience.

Usually, Michael would have been fine with some bullying, as it was only against hard odds that one got stronger. Angry lawyer-guy always pushed him hard enough to really make the flaws in his techniques show, and being made aware of them was the first step towards fixing them. But today was not one of the good days, and it wasn’t like there were any flaws to be pointed out while doing conditioning work anyway. You had to adjust to the level of the other person, and hope he did the same for you. Attorney guy was not going to do that.

On top of that, Michael wasn’t really feeling like taking the larger guy’s snide remarks silently. Too bad that the man hit like a smith, as they said, and was better and more conditioned than Michael was, as there was no silencing the man with simple brute force, also known as the caveman way. Funny that a lawyer would only listen to violence perpetrated by someone stronger than he was. Not funny that Michael was not that someone.

“Come on, man, you know sensei only calls me that way as a joke.” Michael said, and immediately regretted it.

“Sure he does, chosen one, like when he convinced master Taiko to make you skip a belt at the exam we all studied much harder than you for. Or like when he focuses on you for a whole hour, leaving us to just figure shit out alone.”

Michael shrugged. “I didn’t ask for it. Not my fault I’m a natural.”

What followed was a beating to be remembered. One of those conditioning sessions where the hits came at a slight angle so that they not only hit where they should—bruises there were fine—but also where the tenderized flesh took days to heal without any benefit for the suffering. Michael made sure to pay the man in kind, but the size was working against him. It was worth it, though. Michael hoped the man would keep accumulating stress until his heart gave out one day, then he would go to his funeral and say nice fake things about him to all his family and friends while secretly having the last laugh.

Or. His other plan was the slow and methodical sort of plan, but at least one that didn’t rely on luck and medical conditions. He planned to become larger and stronger than him so that he could finally show him how it felt to be taught techniques with brute force, without a hint of actual technique.

He had put on ten pounds in the last few months, while the larger attorney was only large in virtue of his belly. The fat in his arms made him look huge, and his strength was born of having to move the huge slabs of meat he had for arms every day, but slowly Michael was inching towards his level of strength by following a much healthier path.

Then it was over. Michael skipped the usual small talk in the changing room, too many naked men for his tastes. While chatting with the people there had been interesting at the beginning, when they were all new, now it felt more like a chore, especially since it was clear that it would never progress into a friendship, even with the more friendly of them. They were just too much older than he was, and they all knew each other since forever. He was the latest addition, even though it was almost two years now, and being called chosen one by sensei Stephan had not helped.

***

The feeble light of the phone’s torch barely lit the room to its halfway point, leaving more than half the space shrouded in impenetrable darkness. There was a faint sprinkling of dust suspended in the air that made it hard to see, and the sloping, uneven floor made it difficult for Michael to navigate the treacherous terrain without keeping his eyes glued to the ground. There was no sound, save for the oppressive cacophony one heard where there is absolute silence, and Michael was feeling it like a physical pressure pushing against his eardrums, while his mind struggled to latch onto any kind of noise. Not even his footsteps lasted long enough, the sound waves swallowed by the walls of the dungeon.

Any doubts he might have had about where he was, about the nature of the place he was in, and about its dangers were gone now. After he had healed up, he had taken some time to rest so that he could think and contemplate his situation before heading into the second room, coming to terms with his predicament. He had been worried that he was taking too long to get out at first, but the worry that Josh might leave without him was nothing compared to the fear of death. It was only after he was well rested, once again full of mana, as magic was called, that he had decided to head to the next room.

Its danger was immediately apparent. Not only was the dungeon telling him that this was the second room via a message, unlike with the first room which Michael was now convinced was used to lure in unsuspecting travellers, but any doubts about it disappeared when he heard the stone slamming the entry shut behind him. He was stuck here.

He swept the room in a wide arc with his torch, immediately finding what he was looking for. There were two goblins this time, and they were slightly taller than the one he had been attacked by in the first room, slightly more muscular as well. But, almost as if the dungeon was adapting to him specifically, they were unarmed and mostly unarmoured, their grimy skin barely covered by a loincloth to hide their private parts.

They jumped him as soon as he entered the room, trying to capitalize on the distraction of the stone slab slamming the entrance shut. Michael met them with a grin he didn’t even know he was wearing on his face. Hard odds made for the best growth.

He sidestepped, performing a perfect circular block at the same time. Arm trapped; all it took was a hard yank to make the first of the goblins lose his footing. A kick sent him sprawling to the edge of where the light of the phone reached. Then the other goblin was on him, attacking with a wild strike from above. Once again, very predictable. Michael blocked with his forearm, meeting the descending blow with his own strength in a move he had practiced thousands of times in the dojo. Then he trapped the arm and used his other arm to strike at the neck of the goblin.

His training was coming in very handy. He grinned wider. The goblin was stunned, almost as if he was not expecting Michael to be able to block his wild, predictable strike. The creature was met with a punch to the face, but then pain blossomed in Michael’s mind. It was the first goblin. Michael had lost track of him in his retaliatory strike against the second foe. Now his side was throbbing, but he didn’t recoil from the pain. Lawyer-guy hit harder than the goblins did. Instead, he turned around and kicked the offender again.

The goblin fell on the stone, hitting his head with a sickening crunch that sent shivers up Michael’s spine. It did not get up.

The surviving goblin, seeing that his brother was killed, snarled in rage. Now he was trying to hit Michael with all it had, kicking and punching wildly. It was hard to create distance, but Michael managed to step back enough to catch one of the kicks in an arm lock and send the goblin to the ground.

That’s when he made a mistake. The lock had not been perfect, and his wrist was throbbing in pain. Instincts born of a lifetime lived without healing magic made him pause, trying to assess the damage he had sustained. For a moment, he thought he had broken something. That he could not use his right arm to write, or to play games, or—

Then he realized his mistake. The world spun, and he was on the ground. The right side of his head felt light, and wet, and cold. It was tingling. Half of his body was burning instead, having hit the sharp rocks. He got up, all woozy, and saw that the goblin was trying to finish the job with a large rock. Fortunately, he had picked a rock that was too large for him to handle. It made the goblin slow and cumbersome. A kick in the balls was enough to make him fold, dropping the rock… on Michael’s phone. The light died with a puff of smoke he could not see, but the smell assaulted his nostrils. Burnt plastic and battery acid.

He felt the lump on the ground that was the goblin, using the groans the monster was making as a guide. Then Michael threw himself on top of him. His whole body was in pain, but the adrenaline was keeping the edge off for now. The worst of it would come later. Now, they wrestled for a moment, but finally Michael’s hands were around the monster’s throat. He did what most fighters always thought about but never could do in the outside world. He squeezed with all his might.

The goblin’s throat crumpled under Michael’s strength. His hands had been big enough to squeeze the neck like it was an orange, and his grip strength was nothing to scoff at. With the martial arts training and conditioning and all of that.

Then the body was gone. The fall from a single foot of height after its sudden disappearance brought all the pain Michael was not yet feeling to the forefront of his mind. Ignoring the brief flash of light that had lit the cave for the shortest of moments, he sat up and tried to heal.

Then he threw up. Vomiting to the side, and it was fortunate that he had the presence of mind to turn to the side because at this point, he didn’t think the day could go any worse. It took an hour to heal back up to the point where he was no longer feeling any pain, at least if he sat still. He had run out of mana many times while healing, waiting until he had enough to activate the skill before going at it again and again, the ghost fear of brain damage and of a broken wrist demanding that he healed his body as soon as possible.

He feared that, had he waited, he would have healed wrong. That he would have sustained brain damage. That his wrist would have hurt for the rest of his life.

It didn’t help that, while healing himself, he was forced to relive all the pain the wounds had caused. Only that when he healed it was not all at once, but it was constant, piercing, sharp. Worth it, though, as it was the kind of pain that meant things were going well, and that he was healing.

Then came the hunger. Of course healing would make him hungry. Images of his body consuming itself to death in an attempt to heal itself up flashed in his mind, and he cancelled the skill immediately. He was not okay, he was hurting and his vision was full of stars where there should have only been darkness, but he felt at the verge of fainting from undernourishment and could not go on. Perhaps it was panic again. They said a man could live for two weeks without food, but how did using a healing skill factor in the calculation?

Michael sat, contemplating things for a while, while pangs of hunger made him wish he hadn’t vomited earlier. The stench was… wait. The stench was gone. He was sure he was smelling something else rather than puke, but at this point he was sure it was just the hunger. His phone was gone as well, as was the plastic smoke.

He sniffed the air to make sure, catching a whiff of something. Then he remembered the flash of light coming from somewhere around the centre of the cave. He made his way there on all fours, opening at least two gashes on his legs against the sharp rocks. At least he wasn’t walking and falling on them.

Then he reached the location. One hand gripped a cold, hard stone. Colder than the rest of the rocks in the cave, likely a skill stone. The other a bundle of something. That’s where the odd smell was coming from. Opening it up, he realized it was some sort of jerky, old to the point of almost being rotten. But potentially edible.

His stomach churned at the thought of food. The jerky was in his mouth, and he swallowed before his rational brain could stop him. He almost groaned in pleasure when the food reached his stomach, and his body greedily absorbed the nutrients within it. Soon, he could finish healing again, going by how much jerky there was.

In the back of his mind, he felt like he could hear the dungeon laughing at his suffering. Watching as he struggled against weak monsters like unarmed goblins, forced to fight with his hands, forced to eat rotting meat to survive. Next time, if there was a next time, he would bring a gun. He would show the dungeon the power of technology. He would completely tear the goblins up.

Michael turned his attention to the stone he was gripping with the other hand. As expected, a message popped up.

He immediately used the skill stone. He did not even wonder whether it had been the dungeon who had decided to help him, or just luck, and he did not care. He would dwell on philosophical things once he was safe and no longer in the dark.

A snap of his fingers, purely for the effect, and a small dancing flame appeared right where he expected it to appear. He squinted at the sudden appearance of light hurting his retina. Barely half an inch above his index finger, the flame was only as big as that of a match, but strangely enough its light reached all the way to the end of the room, where the bright and orange glow faded to almost nothing. Behind him, his own shadow danced with his movements, and next to it was the rectangular silhouette of the opening that led into the next room of the dungeon. It was utterly dark even when he tried to get close, as if the light could not reach inside unless he went in himself.

Eventually, he had to do it. Armed with nothing but his fists and a tiny flame, he stepped into the darkness.

His jaw dropped. For some reason, he was expecting the dungeon to have five room on the first floor, as if it was a video game area. He was not prepared to be proven wrong.

Standing at more than seven feet of height, the boss of the first floor of the dungeon was a hulking figure. A goblin covered from head to toe in muscle, completely naked, with eyes gleaming with a dark and sadistic sort of intelligence. It roared at Michael in challenge, and the very air was shaken by its might.

Then it charged.