I spent the next couple of weeks farming the dungeons near my villa. I didn’t find quite as many as I hoped, but I didn’t want to travel too far in case I ended up injured in a dungeon and was stuck in a part of the city I was unfamiliar with, unable to take shelter before night fell. Despite that limitation, I found a total of ten dungeons just in the vicinity of my villa, which was a considerable number when you compared that to the rest of the city. If I extrapolated the number in just this small area, I calculated there had to be thousands of dungeons spread throughout the city. No wonder it was so overrun.
I suffered a few injuries in the dungeons. My worst injury came from a fire-spewing lizard that caught me in its flames when it ambushed me. I managed to kill it and finish the jungle, but it took several days of rest to heal the many burns that covered my body. The rest of the dungeons only gave me scrapes and cuts, nothing that my nanobots couldn’t heal overnight. I always took time to heal, never pushing myself to do more than a single dungeon in a day.
The tenth dungeon I had found near my villa was an underground mine populated by a swarm of goblins. The goblins were busy mining metal from the walls of the tunnels, and rather than use my revolver to kill them, I practiced using my Stealth skill and my knife to dispatch the goblins by sneaking up on them and killing them before they knew I was there. It was surprisingly effective, partly because of my skill, partly because of my cloak, partly because of how rapidly and silently my body could move, and partly because the sounds of the goblins mining made it extremely easy to catch them unaware.
When I killed the final goblin and collected the orbs from the dungeon core, I was transported out of the dungeon and was met with a surprise announcement.
Congratulations, you have earned the achievement Dangerous Dungeoneering. For completing ten dungeons by yourself and without a class, you have been rewarded. You receive +2 to all attributes, and rewards from all future dungeons are increased slightly.
“Wow,” I said, examining the achievement in my head. Nobody had told me that achievements were possible. Did nobody know because most of them had been claimed already? Or was everyone just hoarding the information, hoping to unlock the achievements for themselves? An attribute boost was significant, especially +2 to every attribute. And an increased chance to receive better loot from dungeons? That was amazing.
I made my way back home, my mind awhirl with the possibilities. The villa was looking nicer than when I first moved in. I had spent my downtime—while I was recovering from my injuries or just waiting and recovering after a dungeon run—cleaning up and mending the house. I had found a workable bed and some sheets and blankets that I had my nanobots clean and repair, so now I was sleeping in a bed like a normal person. I still didn’t need to sleep most nights, but when I did, it was a more enjoyable experience than sleeping on the floor like I had been doing.
I traded with Asylaion a few more times to get some better food than just dried fish. I enjoyed having a more varied diet, the different foods enjoyable to my body’s palate. I still wanted to protect my villa from monsters at night, but until I found a way to do that, I just stayed inside and hid through the night as usual. I was feeling confident in completing the dungeons now, but the number of monsters that came out at night was still just too much of a risk.
I stopped in the courtyard of my villa to test my new attributes. If what Momma Lena had told me was true, a +2 to my attributes wouldn’t seem like much to a normal person but would actually be a significant power increase for me. A +2 should be the equivalent of +20% to the original strength and speed of my body. If Momma Lena was right, I had a base coordination that was the equivalent of a human who had enhanced their coordination to a score of sixteen. That meant now that I had a +2 to my coordination, I should be as fast as a human with a coordination of twenty-four. This meant someone would have to have a coordination of at least twenty-four to match me in speed and hand-eye coordination. That seemed high to me.
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I ran a series of tests, jumping up and down as high as I could go, sprinting across the courtyard at my top speed, tossing pebbles at various locations around the courtyard to test my hand-eye coordination, and so on. I realized I should have created a baseline before receiving any attribute enhancements to properly measure my growth, but I hadn’t exactly expected to receive an achievement for running ten dungeons by myself and without a class.
Even without a baseline to compare against, I had a good sense of my new physical attributes and how much had changed from receiving +2 to each of them. First, I was significantly faster. I was now able to draw and reload my firearm at an almost supernatural speed. I didn’t fumble my revolver, even though I was moving so much faster than I could even an hour ago. Instead, the new speed felt completely natural, my body instantly able to adapt to the changes and apply my muscle memory to my new speed.
The second change I noticed was that I could now sprint faster than the fastest human on Earth. I could probably outrun most vehicles on a city street, and my endurance was so good I could keep that pace for hours without needing a rest.
And my strength was, frankly, absurd. I could lift a hundred pounds over my head without breaking a sweat. I practiced by lifting large blocks of broken stone, easily maneuvering the stone over my head and lifting it up and down with no issues. I couldn’t do anything about the mass of the stone, though, so I had to be careful to not let it pull me off-center. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to recover; the stone would overbalance me and make me drop it if I wasn’t careful.
Finally, I could now leap almost fifteen feet high from a dead stop. I practiced jumping to the railings of a balcony of my villa, then to the roof. With just a few steps of leadup, I could leap to the railing with ease and then launch myself from the railing directly onto the roof, where I could balance on the tiles with perfect dexterity. I suddenly understood why the other scavengers traveled by rooftop; if they had attributes like these, it was significantly faster and safer to just leap across the roofs, avoiding the cluttered and dangerous streets below.
For over two weeks of clearing dungeons, I had accrued ten more gold orbs and thirty-seven blue orbs. I had received a whopping 7500 experience, bringing my total to 11,848. And I had received another perk, this one from a dungeon full of small islands with dangerous shark-infested waters between them. My revolver sort of worked underwater, since it didn’t require gunpowder, but it had significantly less power. I completed the dungeon mostly by outswimming the sharks—my body could power through the water fast enough to avoid them—and if any came too close, I scared them away with a few shots of my revolver. It wasn’t enough to kill them, but it deterred them enough for me to put some distance between me and them. The islands themselves were covered in swarms of praying-mantis-like insects the size of a small child, which were easy enough to kill since they traveled in swarms that were especially vulnerable to an Explosive Bullet or two. When I reached the last island and touched the white dungeon core, I was rewarded with a new perk.
Perk obtained: Swimmer’s Body. The length of time that you can hold your breath is doubled, you have improved eyesight underwater, and water restricts you less when you are moving through it.
The perk, much like the other one I had received, wasn’t particularly useful but wasn’t a bad thing to have either. It was interesting how each perk seemed to be tailored to how I completed a particular dungeon. I was pretty sure I had received this particular perk because I outswam the sharks without killing them, much like my Captain’s Command perk was likely awarded because I sided with the captain who had the ability to inspire his sailors by giving them commands.
Other than those rewards, I had received some basic magical armor that wasn’t worth wearing. I sold it to Asylaion for two blue orbs. He didn’t ask where I had gotten it. Although I could tell he was dying to know, I didn’t want to tell him I had been clearing dungeons, so I avoided his questioning gaze.
It was a fruitful week. Not just from completing the dungeons, but also from spending more time around my villa, simply recovering and spending time in my body. I felt more centered as each day passed. The conflict between my mind and body slowly began to fade as I took the time to relax and take pleasure in just being alive. By the time I was ready to return to Perama to buy my first class, despite all the dangers I had faced and the injuries I had suffered in the dungeons, I felt healthier in mind and body than I had ever felt before.
