The passage was fortunately straight but nature hardly intended it to be passed by man. The wide cleft was trying to rip Alice’s clothes with sharp rock juts on the narrow walls and more than once strived to make her trip over stones and cracks. On a plus side, the ceiling was low, which the paranoid over spiders and other jumper predators from the dark girl wholeheartedly approved.

System message

You are entering Emerald Caves (Dungeon Lvl. 0-15)

Dungeon. Great. Alice walked up to a dead end. Well, not exactly: the wall ahead had a small hole just enough to maybe – maybe! – let her crawl through. The short girl opened her Quest Log. 55m.

Five minutes she had spent on a slow exploration of the passage. Maybe a hundred meters? Yes, she was a little too careful. You would too if expecting a monster screamer after every corner. Smelling the air for strange odors, Alice inspected the hole closely. There was a lot of space on the other side, seemingly another cave. Too well lit for underground.

“Emerald, Dungeon…” A thought flashed, or even a trace of thought, before being shooed away. First thing first, Alice stuck her spear through the hole mumbling a couple of curses and baiting an aggressive ambusher, only to gain menacing silence instead. No knocking from multiple legs, no roaring or panting of a hungry beast; no matter how earnestly the girl was straining her ears.

I want to go back. Alice caught herself on a traitorous note and hurriedly shook her head, then took off most of her items and placed it around the hole. The short girl drew a sword next, pointed it forward together with her spear and bravely crawled in the cave.

Empty. The almost round cave was really empty.

“Huff.” Alice smiled with relief and looked around. The cave was big and indeed dimly lit. But instead of a portal to another world, the cavern was illuminated by large green crystallish stalactites. Ah. Not exactly, the girl realized. By whitish moss growing on these stalactites. Bioluminescence?

Anyway, very convenient. With understandable doubts, Alice quenched lamps and left the bigger one to mark the cave as she was retrieving her stuff through a hole. Then she noticed yellow blood or whatever the centipede left on her sword that the girl hadn’t cleaned yet was evaporating as if burning off by invisible flames. Not just from the sword, from her clothes too.

Is it… mana?

A familiar yet out of her reach, she vaguely felt an additional pressure in this dungeon from something what was not the air at all and what immediately reminded her about the system test. The girl immediately felt distant anger of being robbed from whatever Magic Skill system had granted her for a few seconds back on Earth.

Mana was here, right before her eyes and yet she could do nothing. Calling for it, imagining invisible hands, shaping it by pure willpower and any other wild idea Alice tried out on spot went nowhere.

49m

“I need to move.” Alice murmured quietly and sheathed her sword as all physical evidence of the bloody(?) centipede’s murder vanished. “Hope it deconstructed bodies too.” The thought of sleeping in one cave with two giant dead insects was not inspiring at all. Wait, the girl frowned. The dungeon obviously had some sort of resource management... the dungeon, that is.

So I will need to drag them all the way. Shivering, Alice shook her head and concentrated on the task on hand. From the big cavern she was in only one wide tunnel was leading out. The tunnel was flat, more or less, with rounded walls and ceiling, lightened by green crystal veins. Well, by the moss in them.

Whoosh...

And it sounded like trouble. Spooked, Alice sneaked behind the corner, pressed into a depression in a wall and pointed her spear at the exit. The girl started to sweat as the low hum of blowing air grew closer. Closer. One target, she somehow understood. Closer, before finally it showed up cloaked in streams of driven dust and crackles of mandibles, looking exactly as its name supposed.

[Snakefly Lvl. 3]

The spear split up a transparent wing before burying deep into a long black body. With a squeak, the snakefly bent on the spearhead, rowing air with the unbroken wing and all six legs, blindly striking with ovipositor as Alice drove it to the ground with force. Metal ground a short line on the stone floor with sparks and monster's high-pitched screams, which did not arise pity in the girl at all; she lifted the spear with the giant snakefly impaled on it and then drove it down again!

The monster cried one last time from being crunched into halves. The ovipositor flinched and opened completely to add some disgusting notes to a flawless win when the girl pierced the head of the creature.

[+300 EXP +120 BP]

“RIP you asshole!” Alice shouted out in an adrenaline rush, thrilled, still scared and a bit excited.

Just now, everything went exactly as she had envisioned it. The snakefly indeed tried to dodge the spear, but with a half-meter long body it was a far cry from the nimbleness of a real fly. Alice simply shifted the spear’s trajectory by tilting her left hand. Not a slow motion, but still an achievement the girl herself would have never repeated, that much was obvious.

Sorry system, this skill is awesome!

Two skills, she corrected herself immediately and frowned thoughtfully. Spear mastery taught her fundamentals the girl had just started to perceive in action. Moreover, her natural physical limits were lifted by a lot. Two level ups made her faster and stronger than she could realistically hope to achieve in her lifetime.

Yellow blood liquid scattered all over the place as Alice swung her spear a few times.

“No, not quite yet.” The girl judged her strength after a quick inspection of the snakefly’s dead halves. She had checked the attributes, of course, and according to system, the average attribute was five for a ‘healthy adult human’. The number, Alice assumed, was a purely statistical viewpoint.

The snakefly's body started to burn in familiar invisible flames nearby. Fast. How they hunt, or do they even need to? Maybe... New noises interrupted the girl's musings and she backed to her hiding spot. Stirring her ears, beside the heart pounds she could hear wings flapping. Not closing this time, no. Alice knitted her brows. Wings meant new snakeflies.

Clatters of multiple legs? Sounded like centipedes. Shrieks? Unchanging distance?

41m

Alice squeezed the spearshaft, inhaled deeply and bravely entered the tunnel. She advanced slowly while listening to the echoes and watching her own steps not to give her away. After two turns the girl found the source of clamor.

Monsters were fighting monsters. Two snakeflies were circling under the ceiling, and the third already had fallen to claws of a big centipede, lying broken on the ground.

[Snakefly Lvl. 5], [Snakefly Lvl. 3], [Centipede Lvl. 6]

Chirp!

The centipede lifted its body high and attempted fruitlessly to hook snakefly with a forcipule when it went down a little. The low leveled one dived then and stabbed the distracted enemy with its needle-like tail.

The centipede screeched. Crouching behind a big rock Alice noticed multiple stab wounds on the centipede’s carapace and how sluggishly the monster was moving. Poison?

39m

The snakeflies wore their prey down pretty fast. The centipede ceased to move, not dead but paralyzed since its status screen didn’t disappear. In a few moments, it was mounted and then stabbed by one poisonous tail for extra control and one ovipositor…

Alice’s stomach revolted when the apparently female snakefly visually expanded and started to push eggs into the centipede’s body. Of course, her rich imagination added extra sickness and paleness to the girl’s face. The abominable scene was simply beyond her ability to control her body’s psychological reactions.

Don’t throw up… Too afraid to simply close her eyes, Alice shut the mouth with a palm. Push, push, the snakefly wasn’t hurrying up at all. Stop envisioning it on yourself, idiot. Just stop!

Eight eggs, the centipede was seeded with eight eggs by the time Alice managed to defeat her worst enemy yet: hideous nausea. She readied her bow, forcing light tremor in the hands stop, and aimed hatefully. An arrow pierced the air and burrowed into the snakefly, knocked it back forcing slimy egg to drop on rocks with a slurp.

Swish!

Alice had put the second arrow nearby and so shot down the last snakefly almost immediately before it could fly anywhere. Smirking too viciously, she then rushed to finish the creatures off by chopping their heads with her spear.

[+300 EXP +120 BP]

[+500 EXP +200 BP]

These chunks of experience felt especially pleasantly. Never before Alice had been so genuinely glad to kill something. Not just adult insects, their unborn children too: even doubting its ability to survive in the open air, the girl crashed the rolling egg anyway.

“Now it’s only you.” Alice glanced at the paralyzed centipede after she pulled out the arrows. Ridiculous, but the monster looked pitiful even in her eyes now. Being injected by a flying parasite to end up as a host for its parasitic eggs? Numerous horror movies taught her to fear such outcomes.

Well, you know what they say: not killing, but putting it out of misery… or not, Alice suddenly changed her mind after remembering the metaphor with an anthill and lifted her spear with cold light in her eyes. The girl began from slicing off legs, then she destroyed joints, stabbed every segment of its carapace with methodicalness of a juvenile maniac until finally…

[+600 EXP +240 BP]

“What are you, a zombie?” Gloomily Alice asked no one in particular. Then she blinked and trembled from sudden chill as an idea came to her mind. "This is how they hunt. They poison the prey and leave the head intact!" The centipede had been stoically enduring butchering until she reached its brain. Only then it died. Again, the girl silently rejoiced the luckiness she had enjoyed during her first mortal combat and somewhat nervously took out a bottle to moisten her swiftly drying mouth.

32m

Should I press it? Or is it even a choice now?

Alice discovered a small hindrance to her plans to get ahold of Battle Points. The Great Bugs War happened on a crossroad. The tunnel from there was forking into two branches that hardly differed at first glance. The girl looked hard but failed to see anything distinguishable at the second glance too.

If she were to choose reasonably, Alice would have picked the road with centipedes, just how? The rocks retained no traces. Left or right? Okay, abort the mission. Let me just get the hell out of this place. She really didn’t like staying in the bloody dungeon. Even if the Node wouldn’t move with her, simply having a path to escape this place was nice enough.

Nodding to herself, Alice carved a big ‘X’ on a wall and decisively turned right. Not obvious, but this road curved upwards. In a few minutes, the girl was sure of her decision. There were no monsters, nice and easy. She walked in an unhurried pace, methodically even. Her steps produced barely any noise, deeply rooted knowledge of how seeded inside the girl.

Nature of these skills never cleared up despite how hard Alice was brooding on it. She was certain her body was in her complete control, exactly as the painfully born skill implied. Exactly as condensed system's description went, the skill also included every bit of utility, not overloading her mind.

Her spear mastery skill and others were other kinds of animals. As long as Alice was holding the spear, she was presented with options surfacing from unknown corners of her brain. Multiple options, in fact, options that could transform every moment, will she change her stance, bend a little or wherever direction the fight would flow.

Well, in her disposal there wasn't anything exotic, mainly variations of thrusts.

Stealth skill taught her how to place feet correctly, breath quietly and look from the corners without showing herself. But to do so without some big flaws Alice had to control her body manually, so to speak, same with her bow mastery skill. Also, point-blank range augmented her accuracy by a lot. Finally, Observation skill helped the girl to nail down behavior patterns, such as how awkwardly the snakeflies had landed on the centipede...

Alice stumbled across two centipedes as she was rethinking her short battles, noticed them in a relatively long corridor when slightly poking her head out of a corner. She had passed three crossroads to reach this place, but she never lost her caution. After all, being cautious and making good use of her skills were two keys Alice was certain would open any door and carry across any bridge in this trial.

Lvl 2 and Lvl 2. Just enough for my own level up. The nature of the whole experience thingy was still bothering her, but Alice couldn’t deny its contribution to her survival rate. Moving extra carefully, the short girl left her spear standing near and nocked an arrow. I am growing accustomed to this, she thought fleetingly and shook her head. They are looking in my direction. About ten and fifteen meters. Shoot the closest first and then…

Alice was planning diligently three steps ahead to the best of her abilities. Then one quick glance to ascertain the monsters didn’t move. They didn’t. Okay. Breath in, breath out. Now be better, the girl instilled herself. No useless anger. No emotions. Just… wait.

“What are they even doing here?” Alice asked herself suddenly with her lips slightly open and silently moving. Her fingers relaxed instinctively, the bowstring weakened.

It wasn’t a computer RPG were monsters were simply arranged smartly to be interesting obstacles between a player and their game objective. One could easily fall into a loop of game-like thinking ‘oh, they are just a source of EXP and loot items’, but Alice’s nerves were stretched too strong after being that close to death just a few hours ago.

So she ordered herself to think deeper and very soon a realization came to her mind. And only one way to check it. She changed a nocked arrow to a superior version. This system better not to shut down now, suppressing sudden paranoid fear of losing her skills, Alice stepped into the corridor in the classic archer position.

The centipedes saw her, creaked at once, stirred. The string whipped and the arrow flew.

The monsters ran. One to the girl.

Another… away from.

Spoiler: Status! Alice Sung-Hyun Branson Age: 16 Classes Level Race: Human/??? Hunter (common) 1 Exp: 2,700/3,000 ??? (???) 1 Skill Points: 0 ... ... Battle Points: 723 ... ... Attributes Strength: 4.7

Mind: 7.6

Endurance: 4.9

Will: 7.5

Dexterity: 6.9

Perception: 6.9

Agility: 5.6

Wits: 7.1 Absolute Body Control Lvl: – Like a magical undead being, you are lacking muscle memories and have to control your body at all times. You can completely avoid unnecessary movements; your Perception reaction bypasses instincts. Hunt Lvl: 1 (2) Hide from sights, track your prey and take it down. This skill provides a specific hunting experience for all your 'Hunter' templates-related skills. Bow Lvl: 1 (2) Nock an arrow, aim, and shoot. One month of training with a bow. Spear Lvl: 2 (3) Choose your stance and pierce your enemy. Three months of training with a spear. Observation (Nature) Lvl: 2 (1) As a child of nature, you can discern signs of life and behavior patterns in a complex landscape. Stealth (Nature) Lvl: 1 (1) Basic ability to conceal oneself in a complex landscape. Butchering (Animals) Lvl: 1 (1) A child of nature is capable of providing herself with provisions.