Being kind and benevolent is a virtue. Forgiving your enemy and lending the other cheek if one of yours was slapped constitute the core values of a top-notch gentleman. Consideration, generosity, kindness – without these, our world would not be quite the same.

But, it’s a shame that I am not a gentleman.

“Ha? Ye wanna get a bite out of this guy? Eat this spell, nerd!”, the stone lance I fired was so fast and powerful it immediately destroyed the lower part of the body of the undead minion that was rushing towards me.

“Hahaha! Try running at me this time you sucker!”, for good measure, I fired two additional stone lances which made fast work of the remaining intact parts of the unfortunate creature.

“...”

“… that was... something”

“Yeah. Let’s forget that this episode ever happened”

“Agreed”

I turned my head to the middle of the arena, which was dominated by silence after such an ugly showing of my vain and faulty nature.

“I am truly sorry for behaving like this. Please find it in yourself to forgive this undignified and disgraceful display and forget it ever happened”, realizing how silly I looked I couldn’t help but lower my head to the hordes of undead enemies that were cautiously looking at me from afar. Seeing how their leader, the undead tiger was baring its teeth at me with a threatening posture, it seemed that my breach of etiquette was not pardoned.

“It seems that this episode will become a stain on my good reputation after all. Then please excuse me for acting out in the best interests of my public image. You see, I cannot allow for any loose ends to go unattended. For obvious reasons, any matters of living or undead witnesses would have to be silenced. No regrets”

If you haven’t caught it yet, this was the beginning of my battle with the boss of the first floor of the dungeon.

Last time it was a dangerous fight that almost cost me my life and it had taken a lot of work and pain on my part to come out more or less unscathed. This time it was an act of slaughter. The fight was so anticlimactic that I was contemplating skipping it altogether but, in the end, I agreed to narrate its general flow after being bribed with a cup of hot chocolate by a certain demon.

Before I get to the description of the battle, it is only just that I refresh your memory of the conditions of the boss battle. It happened in a circular arena that was as large as a football field, my enemies consisted of a single undead tiger-like creature that had absolute control over a troop of fifty or so humanoid undead monsters that were about three meters tall each.

My spells were significantly more powerful than before and they could even damage a monster that was more than a hundred levels above me, so the undead were cut like weeds by a scythe.

The undead tiger didn’t take any chances and used its huge minions to tank the damage and constantly moved away from my line of fire while directing waves of monster my way.

I took caution not to damage or kill the minions as I did with the first one in a ham-fisted attempt to enjoy my newly acquired power. The living specimens would come in useful for me in future. I only used spells to disable their legs and, sometimes, arms and soon a small hill of crippled undead bodies was erected in front of me.

If you think about, to take out the legs of fifty or so undead would require me to use at least a hundred stone lances. While my mana pool was sizable, considering my level, it was not nearly enough to individually craft and fire so many in a short time. Which is why I cheated and used a buffed-upped version of the spell matrix that I came up when I first changed my class – the one that took in the mana from the atmosphere and made and fired spells on its own.

For an affordable constant cost of keeping it up and active, it rained death and destruction. It was so bad, in fact, that I was afraid that I would damage the enemies too bad to study them later. Thankfully, I was skilful enough in adjusting it that my enemies suffered only minimal casualties.

When it became evident that human (or, rather, undead) wave tactics were ineffective against me, the tiger went on offensive itself, once again covering itself with a wall made up of its remaining forces, which was swiftly shattered, and then rushing towards me.

Admittedly, it was very fast… and rather close to me, which is why, rather than firing stone spells at it, I sacrificed a good chunk of my MP and conjured up a short wall in front of it. After a nasty *crack*, the wall was destroyed and the beast was stopped, its neck dislocated at a very painful-looking angle.

Thankfully, it was undead and this level of damage wouldn’t end its life, but it did teach me a valuable lesson in dealing with weaker but fast living enemies that I would like to study in the future.

After that, the battle was practically over. I quickly took away the tiger’s ability to resist and then, maybe several hours or maybe several days later, when I had exhausted all the available test targets, the dungeon gave me this notification:

[You have cleared the first floor of the “Dark Well Dungeon”. As it's your second time doing this, no additional experience will be granted]

At this point, the wise thing to do would be going back and digesting all the many gains I had received on this floor. And I intended to do so and then coming back and quickly blazing through this floor again and going on to the second one after I was fed and rested – I hadn’t had a wink of sleep in the entire time I was exploring the floor after all and it was by no means an easy experience to a sleep-addict like me, after all.

I should also mention the gains I received on this floor:

The most significant was this:

Psychic (rare)

A title given to those who possess any psychic traits or abilities.

Why would it be significant? Well, because it is representative of the fact that I have learned the tigers ability to use telepathy. Well… not really. What I actually learned were the basic principles behind its utilization of psychic powers and some tricks, which may not come useful for the time being, but the fact alone that I acquired this new avenue of development is huge.

So far, have come into contact with only the elemental magics that among those that I have affinities for. To remind you about the attributes that I have:

“What attributes are there?”

“Water, earth, fire, wind, space, time, life, death, psychic and aura. The last two aren’t considered to be attributes but they work the same way. Life and death ones are kind of similar and the mechanisms are pretty much the same but I divided them because of several reasons you can ask later if you want. Though I think it would be boring”

So far, I have only seen and used water, fire, earth, wind, life and death, the last two being quite difficult to discover in fact. While I am certain that space and time mana exist, I still have yet to discover any, not to mention, even if I did, I wouldn’t know what to do with them. After all, I don’t have any points of reference when it comes to the use of them.

When it comes to psychic and aura, the system doesn’t even consider them to be ‘magical’ attributes, and I now know why. There is no psychic mana and the way of handling psychic… spells? The way of handling them is a bit different, though I think it’s too early to draw conclusions yet, so we’ll have to come back to this discussion later.

Psychic abilities are more on the instinctive side: when mana manipulation felt like a new limb that was underdeveloped yet to me, psychic manipulation (temporary, as the system hadn’t given me any skills yet and I need to call it something) felt a web-tentacle-mouth-like thing I didn’t know I had that is too weird to master the use of immediately. But the cool thing is that now I can move small objects for short periods of time with my mind and maybe learn how to use telepathy.

The second most significant gain was a new understanding of death mana usage. I feel I have achieved a new level in this after observing so many carefully crafted things made primarily with it.

And last, but still very important is the huge amount of mana patterns I have seen, added to my collection and will later try to adapt to my spells.

This time the delve was incomparably fruitful in comparison to the last time. But this was also the reason I had to go back for the time being.

“Ralph, will I need to conquer this floor over and over again as I explore the dungeon further?”

“No. After you step onto the second floor, the dungeon will let you choose to quickly access it whenever you enter the dungeon later. The same would go for all the other floors too”

“Thank god, I couldn’t imagine the sheer inconvenience to have to repeat the process from the beginning every time”

And then I went back.