Lillia awoke in the dungeon. Lillia was fine with that. Lillia was not fine with the fact that she was fine with that.
That was a thing a lot of people said, ‘You get used to it.’ Waking up in a dark, gross dungeon surrounded by a mixture of a friend’s corpse and monster carcasses was not something Lillia was particularly interested in getting used to. The issue being the more time Lillia spent in the dungeon, the longer she thought this whole endeavor was going to take.
When she had first fallen down here, Lillia lacked context for the situation she’d been thrown into. Now that she had spent some time underground, she had more context. It wasn’t enough, but it was more.
However long this was going to take. It was going to be too long.
By the door to the black pit was Havoc’s body and the twisted carcass of the Crashscale Ambusher. Unlike the other monsters Lillia had killed, the Crashscale had not disappeared when she collected the rewards.
Havoc probably would have called it “good eating” and done something gross about it.
Lillia’s ‘morning’—there was no way to tell what time it was—was slow. Resting by the hearth had sewn her remaining wounds shut and massaged her sore muscles, but that didn’t stop her body from being convinced that it was supposed to be haggard. With everything they had been through, Lillia’s arms and legs were sure they were going to fall apart. She wouldn’t have blamed them for doing so.
One of the strange things about having access to the hearth was that Lillia always woke up satiated. What had originally been a pressing problem—the lack of rations—was now an issue of taste. The dungeon food sucked, but she was longing for it even while her stomach said she was full. The princess couldn’t fight the gnawing feeling that she hadn’t eaten in what must have been days.
Even worse, she hadn’t lost any weight. From what Lillia could tell, if anything, she’d put on some muscle. Whether that was from leveling up or simply using some of her muscles for the first time, it was impossible to know.
Lillia had spent the better part of the morning trying to lay out a plan for what she would do next. Havoc was awaiting her at the next hearth. Assuming that hearth was somewhere in the dungeon, it was within one of the rooms Havoc didn’t know about.
Or Nennia’s room, but if that were the case, Lillia and Havoc were both doomed, so there was no reason to plan around that possibility.
Assuming that the Ambusher was enough to impress the Huntsmaster, which it had better have been, Lillia needed to speak to them. After that, there were two rooms on the third floor Lillia needed to check. Her mouth went dry at the thought.
Two more rooms, plus Nennia. All of which were supposed to be worse than the second floor, and Lillia wouldn’t have called her time on the second floor a resounding success.
The first floor had been, well, Lillia wasn’t going to say “pleasant” but one bug and Havoc. The second floor had been the Spellmite Architect’s Challenge and the Hunting Grounds. If the dungeon were a hill Lillia needed to climb, the hike between the first and second floor seemed less like a manageable climb and more like a cliff of difficulty.
If the third floor was anything like it…Lillia was going to need help she didn’t have.
Of course, that was a skill within Lillia’s repertoire. If she had spent the past five years imagining her parents’ voices when things became difficult, she could imagine Havoc’s when things got too dungeon-y.
First, what was Havoc? Havoc was grumpy. That part felt optional.
Havoc, though, was also thorough. Now that she had defeated the Ambusher, Havoc’s first thought would have been to lay out all of her options. Sure, his plan for fighting the Ambusher hadn’t really worked. But that didn’t mean it couldn’t have and didn’t mean his method wasn’t a strategy worth pursuing.
Lillia set to work pulling each item out of her inventory and staring at it for as long as it took for the text to change.
Lillia was most excited about the crown she’d received from the Ambusher, but first thing Lillia noticed was that ‘crown’ was a misnomer. It was clearly a coronet. That or whatever kingdom granted this crown to its sovereign didn’t appreciate the gilded nature of royalty.
The ‘crown’ was unjeweled. Copper and bronze woven together and shaped to look like brambles. Along the uppermost branches were seven small thorns positioned evenly around the ‘crown.’
Lillia turned the item over in her hand. It was light, like a cheap replica of something her parents would have worn. Or that of what her aunt wore now.
[The Plains Tyrant Crown]
[Equipment - Crown]
[When equipped, allows the user increased movement speed when moving across grassland, plains, or dirt.]
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[The first strike against creatures with the subtype ‘beast’ deals increased damage. This bonus is greatly increased if the wearer was unseen.]
[While it does not meet the standards of the High Kingdoms, the crown demands authority through sudden and catastrophic violence.]
There were two immediate thoughts upon reading the description of the crown: The first was that at least the item’s description understood that it didn’t deserve the title of crown. That was one of the few times the dungeon and Lillia had agreed on anything. The second Lillia said out loud.
“Where am I going to find more grassland or plains?” Lillia checked the bottom of the crown as if it would explain some secret to her. “There already was one of those, and I got this for killing the thing I had to kill so I never had to go there again.”
A rock-like feeling sat in Lillia’s stomach. She had heard the few adventurers who were invited into the Grand Hall speak of a concept called farming. Lillia had understood they weren’t talking about actual farming—she was disconnected from the peasantry, but her mother had forced her to learn something about agriculture.
No, the farming they were talking about involved killing certain monsters over and over, like how Lillia had killed the chitterpede twice. Frankly, even fighting that horrid bug twice had been a terrible idea and had gone poorly. The idea of going back into the Hunting Grounds to either slaughter some more of those poor black beasts, fight another Ambusher, or discover what other fresh horrors lived there was the last thing Lillia wanted to do.
Maybe not the last thing. But a lot of things were tied for last place in Lillia’s dream journal.
Once again, Lillia was assuming the Huntsmaster thought the Ambusher was enough, Lillia didn’t have a plan if they didn’t.
Okay, so the first part was completely useless. Lillia would at least have an advantage against any beasts she fought. Not that she knew how to tell what ‘subtype’ anything had.
Lillia frowned at the coronet and then, in a moment that felt monumentally wrong, she placed it on her own head. It was light, thin, like the near-toy tiaras she’d had as a child. It felt like a joke.
The dungeon handing her a crown was a joke. Of course, it wasn’t a crown.
Joke or not, the coronet was something, and Lillia couldn’t afford to ignore help where she could get it. She pulled each item from her inventory and laid it on the dungeon floor before her: the claws, the last piece of burnmite cloth, the feathers, and the vials of ichor blood.
Lillia went to pull out the last item, but it failed. Instead, the text just changed in front of her.
[Essence of the Hunter]
[Equipment - Aura]
[When equipped: Enemy Class: Monster drops greater amounts of offensive, defensive, and crafting materials.]
[Equip?]
“Sure?”
The Essence of the Hunter disappeared from Lillia’s inventory, but she didn’t feel any different. It wasn’t as if she were suddenly no longer a princess. Nor did she feel like she wanted to grab a bow and go find a boar. No pulse of heat, no flash, no tightening in the chest, no shimmer, nothing. Lillia stared at her hands, poked her cheeks, and even took off her boots to check her bare feet.
There was no evidence that Lillia had done anything at all. Her toes wiggled the same as before.
“That seems useful at least,” Lillia said. Sure, she wasn’t on fire or anything, but combined with Privileged Position, it sounded like Lillia was going to have very full pockets. That meant a wardrobe of potential clothes or at least a lot of things to sell to Rickshaw. If she ever found the skeleton again.
Lingering on the thought of potential dresses, Lillia grabbed one of the feathers. It was silkier than she’d thought it would be. Based on the thick scales of the Ambusher, Lillia had pictured coarse, rough feathers with thick barbs. These feathers looked as if they belonged to a much smaller, much prettier bird. Tan with an intricate black patterning on each.
Which brought up the question: were these feathers from the Ambusher that Lillia had killed, or were they something separate provided from the dungeon? When she cleared other monsters, their bodies had disappeared, but the Ambusher was still there. Theoretically, Lillia could take as many feathers as she wanted. Or at least as many feathers as she could ever carry.
Would that work?
Rather than trying on the dress right away, Lillia went to test her hypothesis, cautiously approaching the tangled remains of the Ambusher. It had seemed towering to Lillia when it was fighting her, but now it looked small, crumpled on the ground instead of raising itself on fearsome wing talons.
Lillia paused on the edge of the huge pool of blood that had formed under the creature. She closed her eyes before stepping into it, hearing her boots squelch in the gross aftermath of her near-death experience.
The princess opened her eyes three steps later, closer to the Ambusher than she would have liked to have been. Its pure black eyes had become foggy and gray in death. It was sad, not scary.
Still incredibly gross.
Lillia held her breath as she shimmied around the side of the beast to reach its wings. Or at least what remained of them.
The feathers were larger than the ones she had pulled out of her inventory. The intricate patterning was gone, spread across the entire wing instead of being contained in each individual feather. They were also covered in blood, probably a mixture of Lillia’s, Havoc’s and the creature’s own.
The princess took a deep breath, grabbed one by the base of the stem, and pulled. It came free easier than Lillia expected. She stumbled backwards, almost falling into the puddle of old blood. Once she’d steadied herself, Lillia looked at her prize.
The feather hadn’t changed by being in her hand. It still felt different and wrong when compared to those she had pulled out of her inventory. Lillia went to shove the feather in her dress, but it bent against the chitterpede chitin. In her effort to be Havoc-like—thorough—Lillia tried putting it down the collar of her dress, just in case the first time needed to be more literal.
That didn’t work. Lillia shivered as she pulled the feather out. She didn’t want to think about where that thing had been. It had just been on her skin, and there was no way it was clean.
Lillia frowned at the corpse. It felt like it was there for a reason, but if there was a way to make parts of the Ambusher into usable, carryable items, Lillia didn’t know what it was. She trudged back over to her collection of feathers, blades, and monster parts on the floor.
She was getting too okay with the idea of wearing body parts. Luckily for Lillia there were no mirrors around to invite introspection. Unluckily for Lillia there were no mirrors around because she did want to see what her new clothes looked like.
Lillia gasped. The Huntsmaster. They probably made all of their clothes out of monster parts. Which meant they probably had a mirror. The princess picked up the equipment she’d scattered across the ground and shoved it into her dress. Unlike the previous feather, all of it vanished.
She would check what dresses she could make out of the feathers later. Now it was off to talk to the Huntsmaster and put this whole second floor behind her.