Chapter 3 - Lillia is gross

[The Hunting Lodge - Level 1 - Incomplete: Please collect your rewards!]
Lillia stared at the message on the door until the glowing text had burned itself into her eyes. She was covered in guts. She’d tried to clean some of it off with stale alcohol and now smelled like a drunk. She was gross. She wanted to get out. There was nothing here that even resembled a reward! She wanted a bed!
The princess hammered on the door again. It was the kind of knocking that would have summoned a servant down the hallway at a sprint, but she knew there was nobody to come running. She was alone down here.
Even if she escaped the room, what were the chances that the door across the landing had a bed? Let alone sheets worth a damn. Would it even be safe to sleep down here?
She wanted it to be.
It wasn’t about being tired. It was about wanting the day to be over.
[Please collect your rewards!]
“What rewards? Come on,” Lillia said as she stopped staring and started pacing.
Back. Forth. Back. Forth.
What did they want her to take? If the reward was alcohol, she wasn’t interested. She barely liked wine, and she’d been served the best wines from the western coast for her entire life. Ale? Ale was out of the question when served in a chalice, let alone a rotting barrel.
Back. Forth. Back. Forth.
Maybe it meant the knives? She wasn’t allowed to ‘equip’ those according to the system, but that hadn’t stopped her from using Vianaffir like any other sword. Sharp sticks were still sharp sticks no matter who was holding them. Plus, the knives were rusty and gross, and if nothing else, the sword the knight had left her was clean.
Back. Forth. Back. Kick the table. Regret kicking the table in soft shoes.
Lillia flopped down onto one chair once she’d stopped saying some very unprincesslike things. At first she sat there with her arms crossed, glaring at the door and the faded text on it. As the seconds dripped into a minute, she let her head fall back over the chair.
There was the ale room and the trail of guts she’d tracked out of it after doing her best to wipe off her dress. Lillia sat up, as if looking away would make the room disappear.
“No. No, no. No way.”
[Please collect your rewards!]
There was only one thing ‘new’ in the Hunting Lodge.
“I’m not touching it!”
[Please collect your rewards!]
“If that’s the reward. I don’t want it.”
[Please collect your rewards!]
Lillia bit her lip and kicked her legs before shooting up from her chair. Even if the door wasn’t forcing her to take the rewards, she knew deep in her annoying head that it was a good idea. They hadn’t taught her much about the dungeons during her years of tutoring, but she understood rewards were the reason people fought monsters in the first place. Nobody would choose to do this if they weren’t getting paid.
She’d never been interested in those lessons. Anything adventuring related was a world away. She was a princess; there was an assumed path for her. Her hardest work would be managing a kingdom and stunning at galas. Swinging a sword at a monster was so farfetched that she’d never even considered wanting to do it. Princelings from neighbouring kingdoms would talk about wanting to become brave warriors.
Now that Lillia had the chance, she didn’t know what the hell all those boys had been looking forward to.
“Fine…fine.”
Lillia made her way back to the dark ale room. She’d closed the door most of the way on the way out, and opening it revealed the scattered chitin and globs of green guts. The mandibles were still in the corner Lillia’d kicked them to in the first minutes after her ‘victory.’
“Well?” she asked. This was her great reward. What was she supposed to do with it? She certainly wasn’t about to touch it, and even if she did, none of it looked useful. It was disparate pieces of a giant bug that had been desperately dismantled in her panic. What a reward.
She looked to the exit door, waiting for a response that would never come. Considering how many hours she’d spent alone in her tower in the six years since her aunt had stolen the crown, she should have been better at being alone. Personifying the floating text this early was worrying.
“Oh, the stone. On the altar and the wheat and the silk,” Lillia said as she crouched down close to the guts on the floor. The smell of sour alcohol was permiated this room, but once she close to the carcass, she smelled the saccarine stench of the carcass.
She didn’t have to touch it. Did she? Lillia drew Vianaffir and prodded at the guts; they squelched, but nothing happened.
By every god from every church. Fine.
Lillia squeezed her eyes shut and reached out toward the thing. It suddenly felt too far away. She had to lean forward and—her pinky pressed against the cold chitin on the floor. Lillia whimpered.
Lights! Sound! Fanfare!
Lillia jumped, which caused her to fall forward into the remains of the bug. Something got into her mouth. She was busy retching when the white text tried to interrupt the trauma.
[The Hunting Lodge - Level 1 - Cleared!]
[Reward! Chitterpede Chitin x 1. Meagre rations x 2.]
[Collecting Loot has Cleared this stage of the Tutorial!]
[You can learn a skill for Class: Princess.]
Once the princess had spit out everything she thought she could taste and scurried over to the back corner to pretend she didn’t exist, she stared at the text and then past it. The guts of the chitterpede were gone.
According to the text, she’d received them.
Ew.
There was another point there about skills. Most people never learned skills. Most people didn’t try to kill monsters.
There was food, too. That sounded important.
Lillia peeled herself off the floor and ran her fingers through the text again, confirming it was still useless. She’d been told that she had a skill to choose, but not how she could choose it. There was a reason that adventurers never went on their first quest alone, but here she was.
Well, apparently she was supposed to have a knight escourting her, as any good princess should. But he was a skeleton out on the…landing.
Lillia ran across the room, over the fur rugs to metal door. There was a new shining handle. She unbolted the door and threw it open, stumbling out onto the landing and almost catching herself on the knight.
“Sorry.”
The air felt fresh out here even though she was still underground. She would have kissed the floor if it weren’t covered in a thick coating of dust. She was out! Escaped. Victorious.
Victory felt good. Lillia felt hungry and tired.
The text was still in front of Lillia wherever she looked.
[You can learn a skill for Class: Princess.]
How?
She crouched down beside the corpse of the knight. There had been one glass bottle on him with a note. If he were a guide worth a damn, he would have left a series of bottles with instructions for someone like her. Of course, he’d probably figured that anyone following him would be a seasoned adventurer, but what was a bit of grave robbing to search for clues?
Well, it was gross, but it was less gross than the bug had been.
Once Lillia had gotten much closer to a skeleton than she ever thought she’d need to, she sat back on the floor. There was nothing. A set of armour she couldn’t wear. A sword she’d already taken. A now-missing bottle. So much for bonus information.
Had the knight really left her nothing? Lillia reached down to where she’d tucked the note in the strap of her tarnished dress. The paper was damp, but as she went to pull it out, the text changed in the periphery of her vision. The princess stopped looking past the message and the new options focused in her view.
[Inventory]
[Key Item - Note of Sir Nobody]
[Empty Bottle x 1]
[Meagre Rations x 2]
[Chitterpede Chitin x 1]
Lillia frowned at the text and stood up again. Her joints were oversore and, now that she wasn’t fighting, she could feel the blisters on her feet. This was supposed to be her first ‘victory’ but she didn’t feel any closer to getting out or figuring out how any of this worked.
She pulled out the note and saw it disappear from her inventory as she removed it from the interior of her dress. She went to dive in and try to pull more out of the fabric before freezing.
That meant the bug was in there. Ew.
Meagre rations first.
Lillia tucked Vianaffir back into her belt. The text changed.
[Currently Equipped]
[Weapon - Vianaffir - You are not high enough level to use this weapon]
[Armour - Gown of House Ashvalin - Ruined. This item no longer provides defensive benefits.]
Had it provided defensive benefits in the first place? How would it have helped in a fight? Was the big, stupid bug going to get caught in her big, stupid ruffles?
The same guilt she’d felt swearing at the knight settled in her stomach alongside that thought. She loved her ruffles. She didn’t like that they were useless here. Her dress was meant to elegant in court, not thrash around in a dungeon.
What was she going to wear now? There was nothing on the knight that would come close to fitting her, not to mention pulling off his armour felt like it was a step too far for Lillia’s stomach. Then again, so was sitting and stewing in the bug guts she hadn’t extricated from her dress.
If she had been an adventurer, she figured she would have had the wherewithal to simply deal with the seeping of bug through fabric. She’d spent too many nights on satin sheets to tolerate that sort of thing.
If she were an adventure, she would have headed to the next room.
Rather than charging through door number two, Lillia went back up the stairs. She wasn’t ‘giving up’; she was just checking off every box before doing something decidedly miserable.
What Lillia expected was a lap. She would head to the top of the stairs, see there was nothing, and resolve to head back down into the dungeon’s second room.
What she didn’t expect was a campfire, low and flickering in the centre of the cathedral-like room. The soothing crackle echoed off the empty walls, and—even if she were too far away to feel the true heat of the fire—the golden-orange glow felt warm on the princess’s skin. Perhaps best of all, it smelled like fire. Burnt cedar and pine smothered the stench of the hunting lodge out of Lillia’s nose.
She didn’t know who or what had set the fire, but Lillia approached it either way. Sitting down on the floor, not giving a damn about the dress she’d already ruined. She pulled her knees in close to her chin before holding her palms out to the fire.
Lillia hadn’t realized how cold she was. As soon as she was close to proper heat, she began shivering.
She tried to use the flames to pull her attention, to watch their dance instead of letting reality sink in, but as her mind wandered, she began looking past the warmth and into the future, her options.
Lillia was trapped. She’d been abandoned, at least for a while. Probably forever. She didn’t know what she was doing. She had no real options. She—
Food. Food. That would fix it. Lillia reached under the strap of her dress and thought about the rations. As she pulled out her hand, it came with a small, shoddy wooden box tied closed with rough twine.
Earlier today, putting food in a box would have been unacceptable, but Lillia’s standards were cratering.
There was meat inside. Dried meat and stale bread. No fruit from the southern coast. No fish from the western sea. No baked goods snuck to her by the kitchen staff. Lillia stared at the sad meal in the flickering glow of the campfire.
It wasn’t much, but she’d won it with her own two hands and a dead man’s sword. More work than she’d ever put in for a meal before.
Lillia took her first bite and confirmed that hard work didn’t stop the food from being miserable, flat and tasteless. She had already killed a bug for this. She would kill several more for some salt.
The princess couldn’t tell if time rushed or dragged as she worked through the tough meal. Seconds weren’t seconds. Minutes weren’t minutes. There was nobody coming to get her, and she had nowhere to be. Whatever meetings she’d had back in the castle were long over.
People were probably looking for her. Considering her aunt would be in charge of the search party, she wouldn’t be found.
Lillia finished half the food in the box and set it down beside her. She’d been supposed to eat daintily and politely. She’d been able to do one of those. It was hard to eat daintily out of a box with her hands.
Just when she thought she was going to need water, Lillia looked over to the box, or at least where it had been, and saw a rough wooden cup had replaced it.
That should have been unsettling. Lillia just sighed and held the cup tight with both hands as she warmed by the fire. She stared into the abyss beyond the flames. At some point, the text changed, but she let it linger for a while before turning her attention back to it.
[You’re Safe! Choose a Tutorial Skill for Class: Princess]
[1. Royal Force - Attack]
[2. Adaptive Regalia - Defensive]
Lillia stared.
“Do I get to know what any of those mean?” she asked.
The crackling fire was at least an improvement over the usual complete and absolute silence.
“Of course. I don’t.”
Even though she didn’t know how to make a choice, Lillia cocked her head at the options as she took a sip of water that tasted like it had been sitting too long.
She was going to be doing a lot of fighting, something as aggressive as Royal Force sounded like it would be useful. Then again, regalia meant clothing, and she desperately needed that at the moment.
Maybe it was dumb, but if she’d known how, Lillia would have chosen Adaptive Regalia right then.
[Skill Chosen! Adaptive Regalia]
Pardon?
[Adaptive Regalia - Allows defensive materials to be equipped as wearables for the Princess Class.]
Lillia knew most of those words, but not how they worked together.
[Your Gown of House Ashvalin is ruined!]
[Equip Defensive Item - Chitterpede Chitin?]