I shot up with a start. I took a quick account of my surroundings and my own body. I mentally called for Jenna, ‘Jenna, are you alive? You’re alive, right?’

I heard silence as a response. No, literally, I heard the word ‘Silence’ resound in my head. I felt immensely relieved while responding, ‘What do you mean by ‘Silence’, Jenna?’

‘I’m sorry the one you know as ‘Jenna’ is gone. This is now, uh, Senna.’

I looked toward the core of the dungeon, in slack-jawed amazement. Jenna added on, ‘And Senna doesn’t talk to idiots who try to abandon their partners and die.’

‘I was just trying to make sure you, I mean, Jenna, made it out okay!’ I shouted back, indignantly. I didn’t appreciate Jenna, er, Senna, ignoring my efforts completely. ‘I was never sure our little door would actually work!’

‘Well it did, so maybe you should have a little more faith! I’m sure you wanted to protect me, but just as you don’t want to see me gone, I don’t want to see you gone! You’re my only friend!’ Senna shouted back. ‘We’re partners, right? So don’t make such dumb decisions without me! Your original plan was to run away if things got scary, but you looked ready to dive in and disappear.’

I honestly had no response. I had already given up because of my estimations of the strength of the bandits. I had unilaterally decided that the only way the dungeon would survive was if I died for it.

‘I was never partners with someone named Senna, though.’

‘... Shut up, idiot.’

I then switched topics. ‘But that door actually worked, huh?’

‘Yep, they all stared at it for a while before celebrating and leaving,’ Jenna informed me.

‘Celebrating?’ I asked.

According to Jenna, once they arrived at the door, they all raised a shout and cheered. They then turned heel and left the dungeon. I could only assume that dungeons were a valuable source of income. Thank you, aimless reading.

‘Wait they’re already gone?’ I asked, surprised. It took them a couple days just to reach where I was hiding. Did they move faster on their way out?

But that seems to not be the case. I had actually been out for three whole days. I was very much taken aback by this information, but, I had taken a lot of damage. My body must have shut down so that my bones could repair. I checked my status.

Name: Ozzy

Race: Sapient Skeleton Hunter

Level: 7

Variant: Earth

Stats –

HP: 50/50 (+28)

MP: 29/29 (+28)

Attack: 25 (+12)

Magic Power: 20 (+14)

Defense: 16 (+6)

Resistance: 9 (+5)

Speed: 30 (+18)

Dexterity: 33 (+20)

Skills -

[Hiking Lvl. 16] [Presence Detection Lvl. 7] [Blunt Weapon Mastery Lvl. 5] [Stealth Lvl. 12] [Climbing Lvl. 8] [Trap Making Lvl. 4] [Dagger Mastery Lvl. 9] [Tracking Lvl. 10] [Dismantling Lvl. 4] [Earth Magic Lvl. 5] [Self-Regeneration Lvl. 1]

Titles -

[Dungeon Fairy] [A Unique Existence]

Equipment –

[Cloak of the Hunt] [Bone Knife of the Undying] [Bloodstone Necklace]

I have grown quite a bit since the last time I had checked. With several near death experiences, it seems that I have now gained a skill related to regeneration. How convenient! More skills are always better. But, I was no match for those bandits. My first fight with humans was close, and I almost died, but I still beat them when it was 2 to 1. Of course I used some sneaky strategies, but… What is the average strength for humans in this world? Is it closer to those men I fought before evolving? Or closer to that of the recent invaders? How strong was I?

These questions were rattling around in my skull, but because I couldn’t really answer them at this point in time, I put them aside. There was a lot I still needed to check up on. I wanted to take a look at the ‘puzzle door’ we created, so I started walking back towards that gap in the cliff face.

Well, I call it a puzzle door, but in reality, it doesn’t really live up to the title of puzzle. It’s just a door that requires keys. On the bright side, it’s cheap and plays into this dungeons biggest strength, the size.

Simply, it required three different keys, in the shape of small square tablets with the images of a sun, a moon, and a cloud on them. The keys then had to be arranged in the correct order in three vertical squares that sit about human eye-level. The door reads, “Welcome to the Great Jenna Forest. If you wish to proceed further within, challenge the skies and reverse the heavens.” The keys then go in accordingly, sun, moon, and then cloud, from lowest to highest.

Tangentially, the moon on this world acts about the same as the one from mine, to the point that it’s boring. It’s still white, it’s only slightly larger than the moon that I know, and it’s smooth. No interesting craters, patterns or other such things. The phases are also the same and take around a month to complete. I feel like it’s lazy.

Well, that’s neither here nor there. The puzzle would effectively be solved the same on Earth.

We then hid the keys at various points far away from each other in the forest on stone pedestals like the one that Jenna resided on. The keys were replaced about every half hour and broke apart upon leaving the dungeon. They also required that all members of the party pour some of their magic power into the key while they were removing it from the pedestal. This way the door realized who had earned the right to pass, and who didn’t. It also made splitting up a non-viable option, as the party was required to have their magic power on each of the keys when opening the door to gain access.

It seems that the dungeon system has evolved to better cover for these ‘bugs’ as adventurers conquer them, to make sure that the puzzle barriers are completed as intended. Dungeons are really something.

The door opens for me, and I go towards the lake to check on Jenna, and the boss of our little dungeon. We chose the strongest of the monsters within the dungeon, myself excluded, to become the boss in case worse came to worst. The strongest Bobcat of the pack was chosen to become the boss. She evolved two stages in one go, and we named her. She seemed to be tainted by my ‘undead’ nature, and she evolved into a Mountain Nekomata. Nekomata are a type of youkai from Japanese lore, and they are cats that transcend death and become immortal. This species of cat grows a second tail and obtains red eyes. In this world specifically, it seems that the Nekomata can summon one skeleton guard each day by sacrificing a tail. The tail then grows back the next day. The guard is only a simple skeleton, which means that it doesn’t have a weapon. However, the guard remains until it dies. The nekomata cannot summon more than one at a time, as summoning another automatically destroys the original guard. But, the longer the guard lasts, the stronger it can become. We named her Feleen, and because our monsters are loyal upon birth, I can trust her to be a final line of defence.

Although she was currently stronger than me, the problem with a boss is that the dungeon cannot station any other monsters in the room, unless the boss ‘makes’ them. I also cannot fight together with the boss. Against a strong group like those bandits, it's a guaranteed loss. The skeleton would be a poor distraction, and is too weak to kill any of the invaders.

The doors to the boss room opened slightly to let me through, before sealing behind me with a dull thud. I walked into the boss room slowly taking note of the changes surroundings. What originally was not much larger than a small pond had grown into a large lake with a sizable island in the center, forming concentric circles. The radius of the island was only about a third of the size of the radius of the lake. The island was dotted with a few evergreen trees and what remains of a small, stone temple, covered with moss. The rest of the ground was covered with the pink orchids, giving the whole area a mystical appearance.

I crossed a series of rope bridges that were connected with wooden platforms that rose above the water to reach the center island. Although it pained me to make the journey that much easier for those who were aiming for the heart of the dungeon, we couldn’t move Feleen to the boss room otherwise. She refused to go into the water at all. This series of rope bridges was slightly more expensive than if we just erected a long line of wooden planks that stretched over the lake, but the presentation was important. The ruins on the island itself followed a similar theory, though it was also supposed to act as cover for Feleen to use strategically.

As I headed towards the ruins, I passed Feleen who was fishing at the water’s edge. She meowed at me listlessly without looking up from the lake to acknowledge me. Her utterings meant something like, “Good work out there.” Because Feleen was a boss, I could understand her to some extent. She didn’t talk to me much, though.

I headed further in towards the ruins, where Jenna’s core was resting. The temple looked something akin to the Parthenon, only on a much smaller scale. A rectangular plot of land was smoothed out and replaced with stone bricks. There was a small staircase led up to the stone platform and stretched across the northern face (the side that pointed towards the entrance). The remains of broken pillars littered the area around the temple making it appear as though a large battle had taken place here a long time ago.

The only other undead of the dungeon, Feleen’s summon, was robotically swinging a cheap sword iron through the air, in a small attempt to have it learn the skill. I passed by the hardworking skeleton and made my way onto the temple proper.

The stone was cracked and covered with moss and hardy grasses. A lone sapling peeked through the floor. On the platform, large boulders that used to be part of the roof are scattered about haphazardly, but the back end of the temple still had its roof suspended. A solitary altar, a perfectly rectangular block, laid at the furthest end of the ‘holy ground’, with the only wall to its back. A top this altar, affixed snugly in the table, was Jenna’s core. I looked at it for awhile as if confirming that everything was indeed okay.

‘What are you staring at? Pervert.’ She clearly was still upset with me.

‘What anime are you from?’ I quipped.

‘What?’

‘... Nevermind.’

I quietly sat down in front of the altar, taking in the scenery outside, although Feleen’s servant kind of ruined the perfect scenery. The waterfall crashed down somewhere behind me, muffled by the wall to my back. A warm breeze blew through my body. After a long period of silence, I finally ended up muttering, ‘I’m sorry, Jenna.’

‘I shouldn’t have thinking I needed to die to save you. I should have trusted our plan a bit more.’

‘Haaaaa, Ozzy, it’s fine, I just don’t want you to do that again. Just as you want to protect me, I want to protect you. We need to work on both of us making it out alive, alright?’

‘Alright.’

Another long silence followed. It was slowly dawning on me that we were partners, equals. I wasn’t her knight or saviour, and she wasn’t just a home I came back to. We were in this together, and we had to do things together. No secret plans, no risky gambits.

‘Promise me.’ Jenna said.

‘Promise what?’

‘Promise me you won’t do something like that again, okay? Promise me we do stuff together now.’

‘Okay, okay, I promise. I’ll be there for you, and you be there for me. Are we good, partner?’

‘We’re good.’

I smiled as I stood up to practice the new earth spell I ended up using suddenly during the fight. I was considering calling it [Sandscreen].

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I woke up with my head pounding. The gang went a bit wild last night when we returned from the dungeon. Yes, the dungeon. Selena, Gordon, Zayl, and I had all confirmed it. We were pretty confident once we had actually gotten inside. The familiar feeling of being watched, coupled with the fact that monsters that would usually be predator and prey were fighting with each other had us very sure. We had just wanted to go as far as we could to scout out the dungeon. The door we ended up coming upon was fantastic news. It clearly meant that that path was the only way forward, the floor guardian was probably beyond it. But, that also means that the huge amount of forest around it was going to be relatively safe. And considering the monsters we did battle with, the difficulty of that forest is not particularly high.

We have basically happened upon a trove of infinite resources. We can hunt year-round and gather year-round. We don’t have to rob in order to survive anymore. We don’t have to keep moving to survive anymore. We don’t have to live in fear of retaliation anymore.

So we enjoyed ourselves tonight. Selena has big plans for this place. But those will take some time. Well, I just got to do what I’m told. I’ll keep training, I’ll keep getting stronger, and soon, we will have our own city, away from those that cursed us. The majority of us never wanted to become bandits, but we needed to. This is our new beginning. This is our rebirth.

I picked up my body, and grabbed one of the axes. I was chuckling to myself, monologuing about such cheesy things. I began cutting down the trees in our area. We were going to be staying here for quite a while, but I figured we should get started. We needed defenses, housing, and space for fields. My head still hurt, but taking my mind off of it was for the better.

This was going to be a city for Bandits to return to their old life. Committing one crime wasn’t going to end your life.

Selena decided to name it Haven. And we had all thought that it was a great name. Figures the leaders of the group would only agree when it comes to Selena.

I chopped the first tree down with two swings, as I was trying to take it easy. But when it hit the ground with a dull thud, the rest of the camp was roused.

“Ah,” I muttered. I had forgotten that last night would be much worse for the rest of the group.

They complained a lot.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I trudged down a darkened hallway with a letter containing some very irritating orders. “I can’t believe they are wasting my time with such idiocy!”

“My Earl, I wouldn’t be saying those kinds of things about a Duke, even in private.”

“!!!” I quickly whirled around towards the voice. But, fortunately, it was a familiar face. “Ah, Kent, huh? You shouldn’t play games like that with me. At the end of the day, I pay your bills.”

“Yes, sir!” He shouted sarcastically. “So, what is in that letter? They used their seal of authority, right? So it must be important.”

I sighed, “The Duke is ordering me to track down a group of bandits that disappeared from this territory. A group called, ‘The Queen’s Brigade’, I believe? I just sent most of my troops to help at the border, what kind of terrible timing is this?”

“Yours truly is still here,” Kent shrugged. “And so are those dancing twins. If you bring us along, and a fair amount of the remaining troops, we should manage, even if the guards left are all the talentless old folk.”

“Mah, I’m not worried about this ‘Brigade’ that much. It’s just that they are presumed to be beyond the Maklan Mountains. This will take time. And I’m not sure why the Duke is so interested in some group of bandits.”

I passed the letter to Kent, I wanted him along anyways, so I figured it fine to pass him the information. His eyes scanned the paper. “They want to make sure the leaders are alive, heeeeeeeh? I’m sure you could hold this over their heads. Do those bandits have something the Duke doesn't want anybody to find?"

“That’s a risk I’ll think about taking when I get there, but you’re quite right. Maybe this will be a more fruitful journey than I had anticipated,” I grinned.

Fine, if they want to waste my time with some brigands in the Circlet, I’ll make sure the Campania family will pay me… appropriately.

Their status may do.

Kent seemed to read my mind. “Do you think those twins would go along with this plan of yours?”

“No, this will stay with us, and a few men I know will help me.”

Kent picked up his staff and left my study. His blonde hair shone in the moonlight. His tall stature made him all the more impressive. If he wasn't smart like I was, I never would have hired this pretty boy. “I'm looking forward to this endeavor,” he called back.

‘He thinks himself clever because he can gossip with the maids around my estate,’ I thought. Well, it matters not. I began to laugh to myself in solitude. “You know, I'll take it back. Thank you for wasting my time with your idiocy, Duke Campiana! AHAHAHAHAAAAA!”

This is the rise of Earl Burgons!