Everything hurt.

His joints, unnaturally chafing together with each movement.

His stomach, which seemed to only begrudgingly accept anything he fed it.

His lungs, with each wheezing breath grating against them.

And then worst of all was his skin. Somehow it managed to feel oppressively tight on his body, though he wasn’t sure how: He was certain he’d started to lose weight, so if anything it should be hanging loose. Worse yet, it had started to itch, perhaps a side effect of his recent transformation.

And what a transformation it was. Pulsing lines of light zig-zagged across his body like a second set of veins, or perhaps more aptly, a set of cracks. That was, after all, what he felt like nowadays. Like something cracked. Broken.

Indeed, it was fairly safe to say that Rock was having a bad week of it.

First he’d been painfully weak, losing the fight against the shades and forcing Hartha to sacrifice her class for him. Then once again against the priest.

After that, he’d died. The less said and thought about that, the better.

Finally, after coming back to life — something that should have been a miracle, by all rights — he’d rapidly begun to deteriorate.

Undeniably, something was wrong with Rock.

Presently, he walked through the forest, the dark veins in the trees making him feel distinctly out of place as his skin brightly announced his presence with every step. So much for being a ‘shadow.’ The natural camouflage of his people was now denied to him.

There were a lot of things that should have bothered him about the situation — a lot of things that did bother him. The fact that he was growing weaker by the day. That he’d — by his own choice, if incredibly reluctantly — had to relinquish his position as the shadows’ commander. That if he continued to grow weaker at this rate, he had a sneaking suspicion that his return from the dead would be fleetingly brief.

Funnily enough, none of that was what bothered him the most.

Instead it was that blasted girl, and her friends on top of it.

Oh, not her, herself. Not her as a person. (At least, not entirely. She was, in fact, insufferable in her own right.) Instead, however, it was what she represented.

Because at the end of the day, of the five people that had entered the dungeon that day, four of them had been rewarded. Tess had admitted to getting some sort of crystals that he was secretly assuming were skill shards of a sort. Doubtless they’d make her even stronger yet.

That blasted rock thrower had been given boons from both of the deities which gave him some sort of powerful buffs. He sighed. Shouldn’t disparage that one too much. Despite his flippancy, he did well by me during that fight.

As for the other two, it was an unpleasant affair that they’d been taken, but if the girl was to be believed, it hadn’t been done maliciously. From the sounds of it, they were busy getting personal apprenticeships. From gods.

And while all four of them had pulled ahead, growing stronger from the harrowing experience, what had he gotten?

Weaker.

And glowy.

If he were a more optimistic person, perhaps he could have approached it from a different side. He was resurrected! What boon could possibly compare to a second shot at life?

He was, however, not a more optimistic person. The only thing he could think about was that that girl had once again outclassed him, pulled ahead of him, grown faster than him. Even had he not been quickly falling apart, it was only a matter of time before he would be fully and completely weaker than some lucky brat that had been on the planet for less than half a year.

And worse than that… She was apparently a therapist, of all things. Weaker than a woman who spent all her days talking about her feelings.

Needless to say, it left him in a foul mood.

He knew he should have had a higher opinion of the girl. She’d been instrumental in saving the forest and halting the expansion of the deadlands. Begrudgingly, he did respect her to some degree. And somewhere deep within him, he was thankful.

Somewhere deep, deep within him.

Perhaps one day, if he didn’t die of whatever malady that half-assed goddess had given him, that part of him would rise up. In the here and the now, however, he had more pressing concerns.

If he had to lose his job, lose his strength, lose his dignity, at the end of the day, there was only one thing to do.

Rock was going to get wildly, shamefully, blindingly drunk.

The trees around him cleared, a two-storied wooden building coming into sight ahead.

Thank the gods for the honored dryad. Admittedly, he’d been expecting the forest spirit to help the tribe in quite a number of different ways — indeed, while he was putting it off (not out of fear; he wasn’t afraid) he hoped to soon consult her on his condition. What he notably hadn’t expected, however, was for her to facilitate him getting drunk. He was hardly going to complain, though.

As he entered the bar, despite the myriad of faces and races within, all eyes were instantly drawn to him. He could hardly blame them, after all: He looked like shit, and he was glowing.

He ignored the stares, managing to find an empty seat at the bar and stiffly depositing himself. An overly chipper woman approached him a second later, and he found himself feeling allergic to her very smile.

Although a lot of Charisma on that one. Doesn’t hurt to look at, for a human at least. Scrawny though.

“Hello unfamiliar face! Wine, ‘shine, or water?” She delivered the words with a practiced grace, reciting a phrase that she’d no doubt repeated over and over again in the preceding weeks.

“Wine,” he grunted out. He’d probably graduate to the harder stuff soon, but he’d been meaning to try the wine again after the girl had given him a sip. It had been improbably good.

“Wine it is, then.” With the speed that only a professional class could achieve, she poured him a drink in a heartbeat. Almost as quickly, Rock raised the mug to his mouth and took a long sip.

Bliss.

The drink seemed to skip his stomach, leeching straight into his bones and infusing him with a level of pleasant numbness he hadn’t felt in days. He could feel the color returning to his cheeks, and a layer of fog seemed to lift from his head.

“What the hells is in this stuff?” He’d meant to think it to himself, but he’d been so taken aback, it had slipped out.

Unaware of the question’s rhetorical nature, the chipper bartender chimed in. “Good, yeah? Elphaea makes it. Not really sure how she does it, mind you. No clue what type of grape, either. It’s just ‘wine,’ full stop.”

The honored dryad, eh? Well, that at least partially explained things. Hartha had once brought back some wood she’d looted from one of the dryad’s summons, and it had been infused with potent life mana.

Is drinking this essentially casting some sort of healing spell on me?

The alternative, of course, was that his liver was blown, and he was just getting drunk so quickly, his sense of pain had gotten dulled that quickly. Unlikely, though perhaps he’d order some of the moonshine. Just to be sure.

He was broken out of his ruminations by the bartender, who for some reason hadn’t moved to the rest of the patrons yet.

“Since you’re a new face, you might not know: Drinks are free, but if you’re hoping to pay, I’ll accept a story.” She beamed at him, displaying impossibly white teeth. “Not a requirement if you’re trying to drink in peace, although I’ll admit you look like you have some good stories on you. Those glowing lines some sort of class perk?”

He reflexively scowled, causing the girl to wince.

Some sort of class perk, eh? Closer to the mark than she realizes.

Rock pulled up his stat sheet, something which he’d been doing frequently as of late even though it never did him a lick of good.

Name: Rock, Age: 36, Race: e̸̡̽͝r̷̥̈́̒ṙ̸͚͈̑-̶̣͕͂@̵͕̈͝$̸̭́͋%̴̞̋%̷̙͊͜!̶̦͖̈́͠, Class: N̴͎̚ȯ̵̠̻̆n̶̠͆̎@̵̜̋̈́$̷̦̊̇@̸̡̺͋!̷̤̤͌̿

His class was gone. His sheet was in shambles.

His working theory based off the story the Protagonist had spun him was that his soul was scrambled. The goddess of light had apparently tried to heal it and ended up doing a bang-up job of it.

An unfair accusation. You have no idea how hard it is to fix a soul that got shredded by some arcane ritual, after all.

Still, it was undeniable she hadn’t put him back together completely in one piece.

He pulled himself away from his momentary glance at his stats, finding the bartender girl looking a touch uncomfortable at his stony silence. He sighed.

Not her fault. He couldn’t say he enjoyed the company of humans all that much relative to that of his own people, but he had no desire to take his bad mood out on her.

“Apologies. Your question brought up some unpleasant thoughts. If you’re not taking payment, I’ll make do with a story as per your request.” He couldn’t completely say that he was in the mood for it, but then again, telling her something might take her mind off of his problems for a while. “Is there a request for what sort of story you’d prefer?” He hardly counted himself a gifted storyteller, but he was — or rather, had been — in charge of training many of the tribe’s children. One didn’t spend that much time among kids without learning how to spin a tale or two, and in this, he was no exception.

The woman’s discomfort seemed to instantly evaporate, replaced by a boundless enthusiasm. “If you’re a fighter, a fighting story! Help me live vicariously a little — I’m never going to be much of a fighter, so it’s nice to hear about it.”

Without meaning to, he scoffed, the words seeming to spill out from him without a moment’s thought. “Says who? Think you can’t pick up a spear just because you don’t have a fighting class?” True, she wouldn’t have the right stats to be the world’s best fighter, nor would her class skills help her overmuch. Didn’t mean she couldn’t learn a few weapon skills. Just about everyone in the tribe did, after all, regardless of what they ended up doing.

Far from being offended by his words, the bartender laughed. “Let’s say I find a spear. You want me to just flail it around until I get the skill? You’d probably find me whacking things with the flat end. Although, hey, maybe that’d earn me the Clubs skill? Not sure how that one works.”

Rock frowned. A child. He paused, correcting himself. That’s perhaps overly unfair. An adult, but of a different sort. The human settlements have far fewer spiders, after all. Or so I hear.

He made eye contact with the bartender before looking around the bar, spotting a number of shadows along with a host of the foreign fighters. “No shortage of teachers, girl. You want to learn, learn.” Maybe it would have been a harder skill to level up back where she was from, but he had no sympathy for her if she couldn’t learn it here.

The woman frowned, her eyes staring past him for a moment before refocusing. “Huh. You know, I actually never considered that. What about you then? You offering to teach?”

The question managed to catch him off guard, eliciting a surprised grunt of laughter from him. Audacious. The human girl thinking she can get a commander to personally train her.

Although… He couldn’t say the idea sounded that awful. He was no stranger to teaching the inexperienced.

And truth be told, he was going to start missing that part of his job.

“Bah.” He wasn’t even sure why he was entertaining the idea. Couldn’t hurt to be on good terms with the girl, though. He’d certainly be seeing a lot of her if the wine was imbued with a healing spell like he thought it was. He’d need to.

“Ask me again in a few drinks,” he offered. “In the meantime… I suppose I owe you a story, then, don’t I?”