Looking back on it later, Michelle Takoyaki would consider it to be her saving grace that she didn't see this Jerry Applebee guy as a hero. Powerful and clever, maybe, but she she didn't just completely trust him, not yet. If she had... what followed would probably have been fatal, and who knows how much worse it got after that? There were all kinds of rumors about this guy. Yes, he'd saved her before, but... well, it's hard to know exactly what he was thinking. There was something off about him, and she just wasn't sure what.

For now, he had taken up residence at the edge of the area, the look on his (a little handsome, maybe) face suggesting this wasn't really something he had to pay close attention to, and he waved her towards the coffin in the center of this fucking trap crypt that he'd dragged her into, apparently, when it was obvious that the coffin was the biggest trap, the most deadly one in the entire space. If she trusted him...

Well, she didn't. She didn't trust him, or that... that black, thorny halo over his head? What even was that? But also, she moved forward to open the tomb and spring the trap, because she couldn't see another way forward.

The crypt itself was dusty, made of a lot of little bricks, and there was a haze of dust in the air around the tomb, which was a large stone sarcophagus laying alone in a beam of dim light from above; the light was definitely brighter than the dim atmosphere of the graveyard above, but Chelle had long since understood that the dungeon was a theater, and they just did that sometimes, breaking the laws to make everything look a certain way. In the same way, the tomb itself was carved with hundreds of pictures and thousands of words, and she could connect the dots in what was drawn and written on it easily: this was the tomb of a hero, and those who defiled it would suffer.

She traced the sigils with a finger, spending a long minute reviewing everything that the stone said about the man... no, woman inside. One hint in particular irritated her more than she would admit:

Beware you, brazen one, for what you find within is only yourself, but greater than you shall ever be. They have what you need, just as you someday will, but your haste leads you only to death.

She doubted that Mr. Applebee had chosen not to open the sarcophagus out of fear, but she also... doubted herself, on that. Maybe he was afraid, and was just sacrificing her, or maybe he was just playing games. Maybe as soon as she opened it he would kill this copy and laugh at her, as her team had done before. One way or another, this was obviously no simple challenge, and she was not going to treat it like one.

She pushed at the stone cover and dodged back, to find that it hadn't budged. Irritated, she moved forward and pushed harder; it still didn't want to open. Drawing her sword and jamming it into the crack between the lid and the coffin, she finally got it to move, a little. With more and more effort, she slowly, carefully managed to slide it just a bit aside, just enough to look in.

Scared and wired with adrenaline, she peeked in, to see a bandage-wrapped face--a mummy. After only a moment, although there should not have been one in the skull, an eye opened and looked back at her.

It was only her distrust of Jerry that had her throw herself backwards, as the mummy, with a simple motion, threw the stone sarcophagus lid not only up off of the coffin, but through the packed dirt ceiling and a hundred feet more into the air. The mummified hand that grasped the side of the coffin cracked the stone just by squeezing it, and her legs smashed through the sides as she scrambled out of the tomb and to her feet.

"Remember," said Jerry's voice to one side, and Chelle glanced at him to see him still sitting calmly at the side of the room. "Your number one job is to stay alive."

The mummy reached into its coffin and drew forth a dazzling sword of white metal, one that made her heart ache to look at it. Beautiful, regal, perfect... and as the coffin's inscriptions had said, it lit up from within with holy light as the mummy grasped it. Chelle's eyes, for a moment, moved up to the species ID above the creature's head, and she almost fainted.

Vengeful Mummified Kensei, Lv 100

This dungeon capped out at level 30. Even knowing that monster levels were a little less significant than those of Dungeoneers... this was an unwinnable fight.

The enemy lunged at her, and she felt Jerry push her aside--and good thing, because she was still too in shock to have reacted. But, she decided there and then, she wouldn't trust him, wouldn't depend on him. He was no hero.

There were no heroes. She was going to die here, and nobody would save her.

Chelle's sword lit with light and she parried an overhead slash from the enemy kensei. In an instant, two things disappeared: her sword, and all of her mana.

Her Kensei aura had defended the sword with every point of mana she had, and the creature had still been strong enough to cut through it.

"Survive!" shouted Jerry, as though that meant anything.

She dodged away, but the creature was so fast, too fast. She dragged out another sword--at first, her best, but then she thought better of it and took her first, weakest piece of equipment. Defending against the strike had cost her a sword, but it had worked--for a moment. Her mana slowly started to refill, but it would still take a few seconds before she could output an Aura even for a moment. So, she ran.

She was going to run at Jerry, but thought better of it. No doubt, he had a way to escape, and would only laugh at her. She put the coffin in between her and the Kensei, however briefly, and was disheartened when the creature just cut through the stone like butter. It strode confidently into the ruins of its previous home and screamed at her. Chelle felt her mana dropping again, as her passive defenses against fear or... something protected her against an attack that should have been beyond her ability to resist.

And then, the stone coffin lid fell out of the sky right onto the mummy's head.

Jerry, for his part, laughed. Chelle was tempted to laugh, too, as she processed what happened, but she lost all sense of humor when the undead monstrosity stood back up. To her dismay, Jerry didn't stop laughing, even as the monster, in fury, stalked towards her again.

Chelle, desperately, moved towards the creature, thinking perhaps it was close to death, and her sword sung in her hands as she swung...

Jerry knocked her aside again, as the enemy's sword cut through where she was supposed to be.

"Ha... oh god, Michelle, that was... okay." Jerry shook his head, barely registering as Chelle went back to running scared from the monster. "Seriously, though, your first job is to survive. Don't try to approach it when it's ready to strike. You can only attack when it's defenses are down."

Michelle only barely heard him and didn't process what he said for a little while, as she screamed at the top of her lungs and cried tears of rage, knowing for sure that it was her fate to die, here.

She tripped, sprawling out on the stones, and rolled, bringing her sword up to block. Again, although she just had a moment's worth of Kensei Aura to put into the sword, she did successfully block the strike--at the cost of another sword.

She scrambled to her feet and ran.

"Survive first," said Jerry, "and second, look for openings. You can win this, Michelle."

She didn't want to listen to him at all, and suddenly, a part of her found that odd. But there was no time; she had only two swords left, and she drew out the weaker of the two, her brain just slowly starting to process what Jerry had said.

When the creature's defenses were down... Chelle looked back over her shoulder at the creature, but it was a bit further back. She had almost expected to die before she got to her feet, but blocking had given her a moment of respite. But... since there was no way she could defeat the enemy in one shot, that was too little.

The mummified monster thrust her sword, and Chelle dodged, this time trying, through her tears and despair, to see if there was an opening.

And there was. When the sword hit nothing, the creature stumbled, paused, and in what seemed like slow motion, turned its head until it was locked on to her again, and started moving.

Michelle paid attention as best she could, though she was horrified and terrified and more than half convinced she was crazy even to try, but when she baited the creature into attacking and dodged, which was an accomplishment all on its own, there was definitely an opening. And since she didn't need to use her kensei aura to block the attacks, her mana was slowly increasing, even as her sanity dwindled.

All common sense said that this was a fight that was unwinnable, and that her every effort to survive this was a laughable, stupid waste of time and energy. When Chelle finally both dodged a strike and landed a counter in the same motion, she still, somewhere in her heart, believed that common sense.

The fact that the damage was almost nothing only reinforced that.

The mummy didn't flinch from the attack, and Michelle dodged backwards, feeling her hopes and sanity dwindling further. "This is too hard!" she shouted, scrambling through the ruined stone that had been the coffin. "There's no way to beat this--"

"If I weren't here," said Jerry, somewhere off to the side, "this would be forever dead. If you die and I don't go out of my way, it will be the end forever. Are you really okay with that?"

"I don't want to be here!" she shouted, fear gripping her, and she paused in her running long enough to turn to face Jerry.

He pushed her away one more time as the Kensei cut where she had been, and Chelle scrambled to her feet again and ran.

"I won't save you," she heard Jerry say, and her heart ran cold. "But I will give you the choice, Michelle. There are three ways out of this. Either you fight this thing for hours and win by the skin of your teeth, or you die forever, or..." he paused, and Michelle wondered just what was running through his head, even as she dodged another blow--and, just to be perverse about it, she used her sword to counter-attack in that brief window, and then immediately scrambled away.

He wasn't kidding, she realized--this fight would take hours, if she could survive that long. If she could dodge every strike, land every counter, even if he kept giving her nudges to save her when she made a mistake, she would be trapped here for... really, it seemed like forever.

"...or, if you don't want to die forever," said Jerry, his voice sullen and low... dangerous, she thought. "When you die I can steal your soul and make you my puppet. Up to you, though."

Her heart clenched, and she ran away. The exit to the room, she finally noticed, had collapsed, probably when the fight started. And the hole in the ceiling... no way, that was too far up. Jerry might have been able to jump up, or throw her with whatever he was using to knock her around, but there was no way out.

No way out. Die on that Kensei's blade or die from a thousand cuts trying to oppose it. Every moment that she struggled against this fight, she felt her heart dying; the act of fighting itself felt like death. It felt like what she was doing was going against the will of the heavens, the will of fate itself. She was meant to die here.

Forever, or to become his puppet? What the fuck kind of choice was that?

She didn't respond, and she felt a cold, certain despair flowing through her. The mummified kensei's movements started to seem faster, but she knew that it was the opposite--she was starting to give in. And in that moment when she was too slow, when she knew she couldn't dodge the Kensei's blade, her heart started to war: did she accept his proposal? Was this really what he--

Jerry pushed her out of the way, again. Something snapped in the air, and she looked over to see his halo had disappeared--and he was angry. "Survive!" he shouted at her again. "Idiot, your first job is always to survive, before anything else!"

The cold was still there, but it stopped advancing. She turned her eyes to the mummy, and instead of running, stood there and dodged the very next sword swing. In the moment that she had, she countered, and took a couple steps to the side. The mummy, slowly, turned until it was facing her, and then attacked again.

She hadn't even really noticed just how it was slow to turn, even as it was fast to advance. Dodge, counter, side-step... was it just that simple? She watched it, too nervous to think straight, but twice, three times... four times... five... the pattern held.

And yet each strike was a paper cut. Sometimes--not every time--she could put her kensei aura back into the sword for the strike, but even if that doubled the damage, it was not enough to turn the tide.

She found herself hyperventilating, and took control of her breathing. She saved up mana and tried making her kensei aura denser--she knew that was possible, but had never really seen the need. It took her two dozen tries to get it right even once, but all those strikes were still an insignificant fracion of the thing's health--the falling coffin lid had done the only appreciable damage so far.

When she did get it right, and the kensei aura gathered densely and dangerously on the edge of her sword, she guessed she did maybe four times as much damage--for maybe time-and-a-half mana usage. Vastly more efficient. She tried too keep her breathing even, tried to keep her footwork steady, tried not to let her arms or her legs shake from fear or exhaustion, tried to focus only on what was possible, and not to dwell on the horror.

But all too soon, the adrenaline started to wear off, and she almost couldn't stop the shakes--she just wanted to collapse in a pile. Her footwork suffered, her bladework suffered, her control over the aura suffered... she just couldn't keep going the way she had been. She'd been depending on adrenaline-fueled instincts, and now everything was falling apart.

She made a mistake, stumbled, and was pushed aside, again. Saved, again.

As she got up, she glanced at him. Chelle didn't have the same immediate sense that Jerry was so definitely not a hero, and some part of her suddenly, overwhelmingly, wanted to run to him for help. She was so tired; she just wanted this to be over. And without that black halo over his head, she could almost think that he was really there to be an ally, a friend. She suddenly felt like all of her insistence was--

Jerry frowned, and the halo reappeared. And, suddenly, she felt it, again. He wasn't a team member; he was a cold, pompous jerk who was enjoying watching her suffer. She grit her teeth, and was forced to keep focus on the enemy, as it came in again. After another few exchanges, in which she ran away a few times, stumbled a couple times, and barely was able to keep up, again, she found she had lost her entire train of thought, and didn't pick it back up again.

Still, she found herself much too tired to continue. It had been more than a half hour, and she was just over a quarter-ways through the monster's health, if that--mostly from the stone coffin lid. Was she... really okay spending another couple hours trying to maintain this edge, this focus? Dying would be so much easier...

No, her thoughts immediately drifted back to what Jerry had said, and boy it suddenly just felt like an enormous insult. I can steal your soul and make you my puppet.

Sadistic fuck. He would torture her and then he would make her his plaything. Mentally, she eyed her Kensei Aura ability; if she could deal enough damage with it, enough to destroy the mummy, maybe she could even fight him. As confident as he seemed... maybe it was impossible, but if she was going to die either way, she'd go out fighting.

She spent her time dodging, countering, side-stepping... and trying to grasp the true nature of the Kensei. To be a sword saint meant to grasp the true sword--the ideal sword, more sharp than any mortal sword, perhaps more sharp than sharpness itself--a destructive power that was more magic than truth, powered by her soul, by her will. She tried, time after time, to do more than simply cut the mummy.

If she could, then perhaps she'd survive not only this stupid mummy, but also him.

She thought she was close, once, and then again, but it just didn't work. She grit her teeth and tried reaching deeper, flexing her will more. And then... and then something...

...broke. Not a dam, letting power out. Something just... broke.

The sudden pain in her head left her stumbling, and she knew that this was going to be the end. The timing was wrong; it took her long enough to get back to her feet that it should have been over. And yet, everything seemed to be in slow motion. She staggered, trying to recall that feeling, trying to find her True Sword in the depths of her power, trying...

The mummy's sword was about to cut clean through her heart when it stopped in midair. Jerry was there, but he didn't strike at the mummy. In fact, he turned his back to her, as though he didn't even care, and just imprisoned the thing. And... Chelle blinked as she thought she saw something flying in the air towards her, something that couldn't possibly be.

And that impossible thing landed on her head, and she could feel it in her mind--feel her in her mind.

It was a tiny little roman gladiatrix in tiny little bronze armor, with two little thin webs over her forearms, and... she could almost convince herself that there were sword-patterns in her little wings, though she wasn't sure. But the little fairy-like creature was suddenly there, in her head, grasping at... some kind of mental arms, or something.

Hey, uh, I'm Merry, she introduced herself quickly, and... nervously? We need to get that fixed real quick or else you could end up damaged like Jerry was. The thing you just broke... you can fix it, but you need to understand, okay? Calm down and take a breath or something, and I'll try to guide you.

Chelle took a breath, enraptured by the small thing and its adorable little costume, but also trying to follow the foreign thoughts as they guided her towards taking the damaged... something... and put it in... something... so that the broken pieces were correctly broken, and then she rebuilt them, just a little bit.

And then she rebuilt them just a little more, and a little more, based on her understanding of what she was supposed to do, mixed with what she knew the Kensei aura was supposed to be.

In her mind's eye, it started to take shape, although it still felt beyond her--the True Sword of the Kensei, the sword that was ideal. Sometimes, yes, it was a power of absolute destruction, but sometimes, it was a shield, unyielding as any other power tried to cut through it. And sometimes, it was a more flexible tool--not like her physical, dungeon-granted blade, this could be any size, if she wanted it to be, and it could look like any sword... or perhaps, anything she wanted it to be.

The true sword inside of her was...

Some part of that insight slipped away from her as Merry left her mind, but there was no question that Chelle held on to most of it. And, more than that... she looked down at her sword, which she had dropped on the ground, and picked it back up only to throw it in her inventory, and finally pull out her other, better sword. It was not ideal, but it would help.

The fairy flew up to Jerry and disappeared, and the man turned to look at her, still trapping the mummy in place. As far as she could tell, its health hadn't dropped at all. "Are you ready?" he asked, and the calmness in his voice felt surreal to Michelle. But, she nodded, and found her feet falling into... not a stance, exactly, but a ready position.

Jerry stepped aside, but it looked more like he threw himself out of the way. The mummified Kensei started to turn towards him, but Chelle took advantage of the opening, calling on her True Kensei Aura, and dived in, cutting a chunk out of the creature.

Its health dropped by a much larger amount, and she grinned, though the grin felt a little... off, maybe. Even as she thought that the fight might still take a half an hour... no, at least an hour, maybe two... it seemed doable.

The fight after that was not trivial. She had confidence she hadn't had before, and she had power that she didn't have before, but she still had to keep dodging, and she had to keep struggling against her tired limbs. It was... different, though. She felt... unarmed, going into this fight. She had no weapon against such a monster, and now she did. It wasn't... no, her old instincts wanted to say it wasn't enough. She still only cut tiny pieces of its health away with each strike, but it was no longer thousands of strikes--it was merely hundreds. Too many to count, but... not countless. She could count them, if she had the attention to spare.

Still, she held her breath as she approached half the monster's health. If it went into an even more dangerous form at the transition point, even all of her insight into her Kensei ability might not be enough. Although the tools that her Dungeoneer nature gave her were imprecise, she could still estimate, roughly... three strikes, maybe, now two... after this... she gave the creature a last cut and then dodged away, making sure she had enough room.

The mummy fell to one knee for a long moment, and she studied it, wondering. And then... and then the bandages started to fall off, but there was no mummified flesh underneath.

It was skin--familiar skin. Her skin. The mummy was no ancient hero; it was her, naked but for the sword in her hand. In every way, she seemed identical; hair, posture, even her face... but that face suddenly twisted into a mockery of her own, filled with insane rage and malice, and the copy-her leaped at her, summoning its own True Kensei Aura, and screaming at the top of its lungs.

Michelle didn't block it, but dodged; there was no reason to ever try to defend against that. She aimed for a counter-attack, and hit, but the copy's recovery was much faster than the mummy's. Michelle almost lost everything as the copy, with her vastly superior sword, aimed for her head.

But she did dodge it, and she didn't need Jerry to tell her what to do next. First, stay alive. Second, find an opening.

Copy-Chelle was fast, and many of her patterns were unfamiliar, but there were also obvious gaps in the copy's tactics, gaps she was sure were not her own. Michelle took a few rounds to learn without trying to counter--she needed to learn, first, like she had learned the Mummy's pattern. It only made sense.

The copy did have a pattern--three or four light attacks before a heavy one, and the heavy attack was the one with the long recovery. Her defense was much lower than the mummy's, so when Michelle landed a hit, it hurt a lot more, but those hits were further between. Michelle noted, though, after three or so hits, that she had time do more than a single slice after each heavy attack, and that sped it all up. She started by making two quick cuts in that time... and by the end of the fight, had managed to make it up to four cuts, though she was far more comfortable with three.

And the fight did end. She didn't dare hope, didn't rush the end, just kept at the pattern, knowing when it would end. It wasn't so much because she died to the Flame Lion by rushing--she just knew, from how dangerous the fight was, that rushing here was a recipe for death. Whatever she had been before, a lot of that had died when that something inside her broke, and she had become... different.

But as the copy of her vanished, she found that huge weight mostly lifting off of her. And... although she wouldn't have believed it, the loot didn't drop. It went right into her inventory.

He really hadn't dealt the creature a single point of damage; she had killed it solo, and earned the rare drop. And--no surprise--it was the sword.

She drew it from her inventory without looking at its stats--she didn't need to know, or not now. The sword was made for her; the beautiful whitish steel, the carefully crafted guard and pommel, the weight, the balance... it was more than perfect. She had seen the blade in her copy's hand and known that it would be perfect in her own, and it was.

And in a zero-to-thirty dungeon, it was level 75. An impossibly perfect weapon for an impossible fight.

And Jerry just looked at the ceiling and said, "Okay administrator. Give it to us again."

And the room snapped back to the way it was, a stone coffin in a sunbeam surrounded by drifting dust, and Jerry looked at her, expectantly, as though it was obvious what came next.

And she... she... she didn't understand what she was doing, or why, exactly, but the walked up to the stone coffin and, with every bit as much difficulty as last time, in spite of gaining many levels in a single fight, pushed the lid aside.

Without resting, without any real hesitation, without even checking the stats on her weapon; she knew that this fight would be different, and it was.

Michelle Takoyaki was no longer unarmed, and she never would be again.