There were three things that Wip loved about killing monsters, in the following order:
One, they didn’t scream. And by the Emperor’s grace, he’d tried. He’d broken limbs, gouged out eyes, burnt them, electrocuted them, even made small talk! The monsters never reacted in the slightest. What could be better than guilt-free violence?
Two, their numbers were endless. Wip could have fought all day and he’d still be clobbering them into the ground. In other words, the fun never stopped!
Three, they dropped money. Well, kind of. There was a process for getting the money that wasn’t too fun but, hey, not having money was more annoying than acquiring it. That was just the way things were. Unfortunately, Wip was currently engaged in that boring process.
He grimaced as his fingers sunk into the dead monster’s “flesh”. He had always thought monsters must have flesh like people because they were, you know, alive. As it turned out, their insides were mostly a gelatinous goop with no bones in sight. And no, it wasn’t edible—his stomach had punished him for thinking otherwise.
His fingertips brushed against something hard and angular. Sighing in relief, Wip coiled his fingers around the object and yanked it out. Pinched between his fingertips was a small, clear crystal that ebbed a dull grey. His hand was covered in violet goop.
“Whew! Glad that’s over!”
Wip wiped his brow, but not because he’d worked hard for his quarry. Rather, he’d seen other people do it and figured the gesture was appropriate. He stuffed the crystal into a pouch at his side. Then, he turned back to the mountain of monster corpses behind him.
Violet tendrils of evaporating monster flesh rose from the mountain. The mist pocketed against the cavernous ceiling of the great Dungeon of Anypaxia. After a few seconds of being detached from its monstrous host, the evaporated flesh disappeared forever.
“Yep. Only another, er…” Wip scratched the side of his scalp where his hair had been burned off long ago. The reddened flesh itched from time to time, though that wasn’t the reason he scratched at it now. This was another of those adopted gestures. “What comes after twenty, again?”
Chittering echoed from behind Wip. He calmly turned to see that the grey walls of the dungeon’s first floor were writhing. Dark forms squeezed their way out of cracks too small for their bodies to fit through, then snapped into a familiar yet equally improbable form. They were ugly things: insectoid legs, a pair of forward-protruding arms ending in sharp scythes, and beaks harder than fuchite. A horde of them scampered down dripped-lime walls and charged straight at Wip.
The young man did his best to count them. When his efforts turned futile and he realised, instinctively, that there were far more of the creatures now than in the last wave, a semi-toothless smile split his face.
“You guys really like to play, huh?”
Wip knew they wouldn’t understand him—that experiment had produced a cut to his forehead a week ago—but still, he enjoyed asking them questions on the off chance they would answer.
“Well, I’ve been saving this one for just for you.”
His canvas backpack sat upright on the grey limestone floor. It was more than half as tall as he, and almost twice as wide, at least when it was full. Now, it was deflated. Its contents had been spilled all over the floor in his last fight: staves, firearms, assorted jewellery, swords, armour pieces, and all manner of inexplainable things. The magical objects, aftos, were wicked-looking and warped when he’d first procured them, but now they were distorted in a manner that defied all reason. Spent. Broken beyond Wip’s ability to salvage them.
The last of them was sitting at the bottom of his backpack. He fished out the small red bauble. Its once-smooth surface was now creased, and those creases spiralled towards a black pock on one side, as though the bauble was being sucked into itself like a whirlpool. It still had some of its fiery glow from before it started to warp. Wip thought he could get one more use out of it.
He held the bauble towards the incoming horde. He then slowed his breathing and dug deep into his core, past the rumble of his empty stomach, past sensation, past awareness of his existence. There he found his soul. He moved it, manipulated it, and from it drew enma—raw power that flowed through the world like a running stream.
His enma didn’t come freely. His soul resisted parting with it, like he was squeezing it through a channel. Once it left, however, it was wild, trying to burst out of his body. With sheer force of his will, Wip fed it through his arm and into the afto.
The bauble began to pulse a sun-kissed orange. Light licked off its surface like flames, which looped back into itself. The afto grew brighter and brighter as more power sunk into it.
Not satisfied, Wip pushed even more enma in. The glow engulfed the cave-like chamber at once, blasting the ceiling with mock sunlight.
More.
Orange veins creeped up Wip’s arms, along his chest, over his face. Where the veins took root, they burned. Reflexively, he cycled a little bit of enma through his body to quell the pain.
Even more!
The colour in Wip’s hideous new veins started bleeding outwards. Within seconds, his skin was the same shade as the bauble. Red electricity arced across his skin—not caused by the afto, but by him. The electricity coalesced around a black collar lined with glowing red studs that gripped tightly to his neck. Then—
Pfff!
The glow fizzled out. Wip blinked twice at the bauble, then realised the entire surface was now covered with black pocks and a confusion of swirls.
“Overkill!” he announced. “Aw, I keep breaking them.”
The monsters kept on charging, scythed arms raised high, beaks coiled back in preparation for a strike. With all of his aftos spent, Wip figured his crawl through the first floor was over.
“Well, it’s been fun, guys. Let’s play again tomorrow.”
He grabbed his empty backpack, pivoted, then leapt over the mountain of corpses. He ran in a direction he thought would bring him home.
*****
After two hours of backtracking through winding cave branches, Wip finally found the staircase out. Seconds after that, he was kicking down the door of the General Counting Room, just outside the fortified main entrance of the Dungeon of Anypaxia.
“Victory!” he shouted, causing everyone in the cramped room to jump.
He held both his hands up in a V formation to emphasise the awesomeness of his dungeon escape. His hands brushed the ceiling, ruining the effect. There was no fanfare, no congratulations, just a lot of confused stares. Unperturbed, Wip beamed an expectant smile at one woman in particular.
Lining one wall of the counting room was a row of countertops separated by paper-thin partitions. The woman Wip stared at distinguished herself from the crowd by her outfit: a black crop top, a frilly skirt from which protruded a furry black tail, and, to top it off, a headband fitted with cat ears that held back the bangs of her short, dark hair.
“Ah, congratulations, Mr. Wip, on your successful dungeon crawl,” she spoke mechanically. She was doing everything within her power not to show how absolutely mortified she was by Wip’s antics. “Please place your loot on the—wait, why are you pink?!”
Wip checked his arm. The hue had lightened from a mean orange to a sunburnt pink. For the last two hours, he’d been unconsciously pumping enma through his body and thus had felt no pain. As far as Wip was concerned, if something didn’t actively cause him pain, it may as well not have existed.
“Overkill, Stella,” Wip explained, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world.
Three of the room’s occupants, all fitted in pressed and steamed suits, eyed the cat-eared woman and snickered behind their hands. Upon seeing their reactions, Stella cleared her throat, straightened up, and forced a customer service smile.
“Please place your loot on the counter, Mr. Wip. Now,” she added through gritted teeth.
Wip jogged over, giddy to show off his achievements.
The cramped counting room was rather full at this time. Four of the five weighing stalls were occupied by suit-wearing administrators called fences. Between shooting Stella and Wip snide glances, each of them attended to their clients: colourfully dressed teams of dungeoneers wearing grim, grey faces after having just climbed back out of the dungeon.
Wip didn’t give the dungeoneers a second glance before barging his way straight towards Stella. The dungeoneers scrambled out the way at the sight of Wip’s pink skin, then sneered at him once he passed. Some even cussed him out. They were irrelevant to Wip outside of the space they took up.
Wip untied a pouch from the cord that held up his ripped pants. A scale was bolted to the counter in front of Stella. With a flourish, he tipped the contents of the sack into one of the scale’s trays and beamed a wide smile at Stella. Upon seeing the tray’s contents, Stella’s customer service smile slipped for a fraction of a second.
Stella raised her hands beneath her chin like they were cat paws and tried to smile. “A-meow-zing, Mr. Wip,” she said through gritted teeth. “As an E-class dungeoneer—”
“A solo E-class dungeoneer,” Wip corrected her.
Stella’s jaw tightened a hair. “Er, sure. For someone of your talent, this is quite a modest haul.”
Wip puffed out his chest. “I know! I killed mountains of monsters to get them.”
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“Wow, I don’t believe it!” Stella was being literal.
While this was happening, the other fences were finishing up their business and heading out the door, their dungeoneer clients leading the way. Unbeknownst to Wip, they were trying to get away from him and his pink skin. They didn’t want to catch it.
Each of the fences managed a peek at Wip’s haul. One whispered a little too loudly to her colleague, “What does she expect? She’s only going to get weirdos with that outfit.” Wip understood entirely. The last thing he wanted was for Stella to get stuck with an annoying client.
Stella appeared not to notice them. She clasped her hands under her chin in a cutesy pose and offered a honeyed smile. “Now, since you’ve brought back such a remarkable bit of loot, why don’t I bring out the special scales to properly measure this surprising—”
The moment the door closed and the two of them were alone, Stella’s expression morphed into a sneer. She hooked her fingers through one of the many chain links attached to Wip’s collar and dragged him down to eye level. Wip had to bend almost ninety degrees to meet Stella’s gaze.
“Am I a joke to you?” Stella hissed.
Wip hesitated. His eyes drifted down to her outfit. Despite Stella’s claims that her tail wasn’t real, at that moment it was flicking violently—a sign that Wip had come to recognise as, I’m about to commit a homicide.
“Well, the other fences laugh at your outfit so maybe…”
Stella bared her teeth and yanked Wip a little closer. The acrid scent of alcohol on Stella’s breath tickled his nostrils. “I told you already, it’s for marketing,” Stella growled. “Mar-ke-ting!”
“Is that a kind of monster?”
“What? No, it’s—” Stella slapped a hand to her face and groaned. “No, it’s a necessity after my other clients left—er, were poached by the other fences.”
Wip blinked at her. “Does that mean I’m your only client?”
“I—no, no!” Stella released Wip and held up her hands defensively. “You see, I’m, er, in between clients.”
“Oooh… That’s better than not having clients, I think. That must mean the sign is working!” Wip gestured downwards.
The sign in question was a piece of white card paper stapled to the front of the counter. It was handwritten, reading, STELLA’S SUPER DUNGEON ADMINISTRATIOn SERVICES. A-MEOW-ZING RATES!! The n in ADMINISTRATIOn was smaller because Stella had written the word so long that it bumped against the edge of the sign. To top it off, each corner of the sign featured lopsided doodles of cats.
“It means this!” Stella growled. She grabbed the tuft of red hair poking up from Wip’s skull then shoved his head into the tray. Crystals scattered out and clinked onto the countertop. “This is not enough. Nowhere near it. I charge four-point-seven percent for my services—lower than all the other idiots here! You brought me nineteen kin. Nineteen! I can’t even divide it by twenty.”
“I’m sure you can if you try really hard,” Wip said, poking up a thumb. “I believe in you, Stella.”
Stella clenched her teeth so hard that Wip was worried they would crack. “The point is, there’s no way I can survive if I’m earning one measly kin a day. So, since you’re my only—I mean, highest earning—client, you need to perform. Got it?”
“Got it!”
“And since I need to eat, I’m going to be charging higher for this pittance. Got it?”
“Got it!”
Stella narrowed her eyes at Wip for a few seconds before finally releasing him. The fence clicked her tongue and started filling out paperwork. Meanwhile, Wip kept asking questions such as, “How many more crystals do I need to get before I can go to the second floor?” and, “Is it true there are monsters as big as houses in the bottom floor?” Stella pointedly ignored him. She removed some crystals from the scale, then some more, and then some more. Slowly, Wip’s excitement faded. Once she was done, only two crystals remained.
Wip folded his arms and groaned. Stella folded her own arms and glared back at him. Wip groaned louder. Stella removed the tray from the scale’s arm and placed it before Wip.
Wip threw his hands up. “What happened to all the money!”
“Tax is what happened,” Stella said. “And my fee.”
“But it’s mine. I had to fight lots of monsters to get them. It’s not fair.”
“Listen. Standard tax rate is thirty-five percent, but I’m on thin ice here. If I go handing the city nine measly kin, they’ll take my badge in a heartbeat.”
Stella gestured towards a badge pinned to her skirt: a flat, hexagonal chunk of cloudy calcite built into a bronze frame. A scale was carved into its centre, its trays carrying a sword and shield.
Wip let out a whine. “I bet one of the other fences could do better tax math.”
“The other fences wouldn’t take you as a client in the first place. I’m all you’ve got, so deal with it!”
That only made Wip pout harder. Seeing his sour face, Stella sighed, took off her cat-ear headband, and straightened out its false fur. Her tail curled upwards and swished gently.
“Look, have you heard the saying, ‘There are monsters; thus, we fight them?’”
Wip nodded solemnly. “Those are my favourite words. My second favourite words are, ‘Good boy, Wip!’”
“Well, that’s—” Stella’s face twisted in disgust. “Okay, I’m going to need to drink that image away.”
She shook her head. “Anyway, the point is that the world is at war. Monsters can pour out of the dungeon at any time and we need to keep them contained. But worse, the Great Abyss, Morgul Gul, has never been plugged up like here at Anypaxia. If we don’t all chip in, those hordes are going to run through us like a grupp in a Sylexa shop. So, those who can help, must, and you don’t get a say otherwise. Unless you’d prefer to deal with the city guard, that is.”
Wip rubbed his chin. “I see.”
Stella’s eyes bulged once she realised what she’d just suggested. “That’s not an invitation, you fight-crazed moron! It means you have to follow the rules.”
“But I don’t care about wars and rules and stuff,” Wip said. “I want to explore the dungeon.”
“As long as you’re a solo E-class, I can’t get you a permit to go beyond floor one. Safety regulations and all that. If you want to crawl deeper and get better loot, you need a party. But nobody is going to want you in their party if all your aftos are busted.” Stella glanced at the deflated backpack hooked around Wip’s shoulders. “Seriously, what do you even do with all those warped aftos?”
Wip held up a pink arm and grinned.
Stella narrowed her eyes at him. “Also, you need to see a doctor. You’re not going to get a party with a curse like that.”
“Nah, it’s not a problem.”
“Your stupidity is going to get you killed,” Stella said, sighing. “But more importantly, it’s going to put me out of work.” She fixed him with a stern frown. “So, do you know what you have to do?”
Wip scratched at the skin around his collar. “I need to get a party, to get more money, to get better aftos, to get a party.”
Stella thrust a finger at him. “Just get a party together and you can crawl deeper, alright! I need to keep my job and you need to be less… pink. So just do it!”
Wip sighed, scraped up his measly two kin, and said, “Okay. I’ll have the best party ever by tomorrow.”
“And find some good party members, got it?” Stella shouted as Wip was leaving. “There are some bad people out there, and if something happens to you, I’m the one who takes the blame.”