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Tutorial Rewrite 107
🕑 Added 2023-02-02 10:14:06 +0000 UTC—Ridiculous! Oh, I’m back here. Yeah, of course I am. Always back here, always…!
<To repay your debt,
your inventory has been sold
for 121 points.>
Oh, yeah, I did grab a fair bit of lady lure parts. You know… just for the sake of it.
<Current debt:
47 107 points.>
…Really? One floor, and I’m back here again? I hate this place. Even if I did get out of debt and escape skid row, the second I inevitably beat a floor—or better yet: die—I get sent straight back to the pits. I want to buy food and clothing and weapons and magic books and ropes and tools and whatever else is in there, but I just can’t. And even if I could, it would eventually get sold off anyways. This place sucks. Should I just go die?
…Nah. Then the gods would win. Can’t allow that. I need to prove them wrong. This difficulty is beatable, and that’s final.
<Top—Status—Community>
<00:04:38
Day 271>
<The eleventh attempt will begin in
29:23:55:42>
<The twelfth floor will open in
23:49:30>
Huh? The tenth attempt has already begun? Did I really spend almost two weeks on floor eleven…? I want to say it’s weird, but I also can’t remember a lot of what happened on that floor, so… Yeah. Time is weird.
Anyway, you know how this goes by now. I’ll just strut around and paint this here room, and you’ll… hang around? Is that okay with you? Yeah, alright.
If you ask me, this talking-to-you deal is at least half a step up from keeping a diary. I am not a wimp. I detest that description of me.
Hm. I wonder…
As I go about making the room pretty, I check the apostleship thing.
<Want Apostleship Trials
progress: 2/365>
<Cowardice Apostleship Trials
progress: 1/23>
Hey, they went up! Interesting. I have no idea how or why, though, so I’ll hold off on making any theories until later. That said, the room is nice and RED, so now it’s only a matter of waiting until the timer ticks down. And, as it always is, it eventually does.
<Floor 12 has opened.
Do you want to enter?>
<Yes/No>
Duh, of course I do.
Casually, I press yes.
The second I enter the floor, I feel a sweltering heat assault me. It’s worse than a sauna. As soon as my body starts to understandably sweat, it instantly evaporates, leaving me even more exposed than before. The culprit is obvious enough for me to not instantly assume that I’ve been teleported inside of a volcano. Namely, I’m standing right in front of a river of boiling, bubbling, churning RED blood. I know it’s blood. I can spell it. There’s no smell like blood.
<Tutorial stage,
Hell Difficulty Twelfth Floor:
The River of Boiling Blood>
<[Clear Condition]
Wade across the river
to reach the other side.>
Boiling blood is a very accurate description of what I’m looking at, but it feels like the description is hampered by the fact that it isn’t just boiling blood. To be specific, it is far from empty. I can’t count them exactly, but the river is crowded by shades of RED, all covered in dried and caked blood. Each and every one of them is either fighting the others, snarling and spitting like beasts, clawing and spilling more blood to feed the river; or they’re apathetically floating in it, either by staring up at the black, formless sky with unblinking eyes, or with their faces deep in the blood. I have no idea if the latter ones are dead or not. All of them have the same level as I do, though.
I have to go through… this? Seriously? And, since I want to completely clear the floor, I’ll also have to defeat all of them? Really?
…Well, okay. It’s not like I have any choice, right?
So even though the mere heat is making me dizzy, I step towards the river. It’s broad, but not especially strong. Silently, I enter it. They don’t exactly turn on me as one, but the ones closest to me aren’t shy to drag me into their own squabble. And I—being equally bold—join them.
It’s pretty easy to kill myself. After all, I know my own weaknesses. My heat and drowning resistances aren’t very high, and I can’t survive for long without a heart. My spine is still important to my bodily functions, and so is my brain. Breaking my neck works wonders. Evisceration—not so much.
<Shade (Lv. 49) Defeated.>
<Shade (Lv. 49) Defeated.>
<Shade (Lv. 50) Defeated.>
<Shade (Lv. 50) Defeated.>
<Shade (Lv. 50) Defeated.>
I fight on. It’s pretty simple once you get into it. Sometimes I get myself mixed up with the shades because we smell the same and look the same and sound the same and feel the same but that’s alright. We don’t taste the same. It’s hard to find a moment of stillness to skin a few of them, but it works out in the end.
I fight on.
<Shade (Lv. 50) Defeated.>
<Shade (Lv. 51) Defeated.>
<Shade (Lv. 51) Defeated.>
I fight on.
I fight on.
I fight on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on.
<Shade (Lv. 51) Defeated.>
<Shade (Lv. 51) Defeated.>
<Shade (Lv. 51) Defeated.>
<Shade (Lv. 51) Defeated.>
<Shade (Lv. 52) Defeated.>
<Shade (Lv. 52) Defeated.>
<Shade (Lv. 52) Defeated.>
<Shade (Lv. 52) Defeated.>
<Shade (Lv. 53) Defeated.>
<Shade (Lv. 53) Defeated.>
Everything is RED and RED and RED and RED.
Everything looks like RED and smells like RED and sounds like RED and feels like RED and tastes like RED.
If I get too hot I dunk myself in the boiling blood and the brief coolness of the blood evaporating keeps me going.
After some time, I realise that I forgot to kill the me’s floating in the blood without fighting.
But I just kill those too. They’re easier. They don’t fight.
I kill I kill I kill I kill I kill I kill I kill I.
<Shade (Lv. 51) Defeated.>
<Shade (Lv. 53) Defeated.>
<Shade (Lv. 53) Defeated.>
<Shade (Lv. 53) Defeated.>
<Shade (Lv. 53) Defeated.>
<Shade (Lv. 54) Defeated.>
<Shade (Lv. 54) Defeated.>
And then I get to the other side.
Stepping out of the blood, my whole body is RED and crunchy and some bits of me are half-cooked but that’s okay. Because right now, I’ve got bigger problems.
<Tutorial stage,
Hell Difficulty TwelfthFloor
Boss Stage>
<[Clear Condition]
Escape the minotaur.>
Which I would do, if there was a minotaur. But there isn’t. I’m just here, and there isn’t anything else. So, like… What now?
<Error!
[BOSS] missing.
Recalibrating…>
<[Clear Condition]
Escape the hydra.>
…Hydra? Hey, wait just a minute, a hydra and a minotaur are very different—
Oh. There’s a hydra here, now.
Comments
Diez de Groot
Shouldn’t have “Cow off clff”-ed
