Gareth’s eyes snapped open, “Fuuuuuck. Not again.”

  He tiredly sat up, muscles and body groaning. He reached into his backpack and took out his metal grinder, which contained some primo spiritual herbs. Then he went through the calming motions of peacefully rolling a J. He felt no hostile gazes, and it was nice and quiet around him. He therefore reasoned that taking a moment wouldn't be so bad. [Darkvision] helped immensely in seeing his dust-covered hands completing these small tasks, even as sticky blood kept his left eye half-closed.

  He looked around the small cavity of stone he found himself in, and achingly scooched against a nearby rock to light up. He removed a small lighter from his pack: basically a fire attribute city Leaf, modified to vent some of its contained mana through a small artificial hole.

  Click. Inhale… “Pheeeeew…”

  Puff, puff, puff, inhale… “Phuuuuuw”, he groaned.

  Why do I always have to go unconscious just after something massive happens?

  He took another deep pull and decided it was time for a self-assessment. Conclusion: All good. Some bruises and lost nails, a dislocated shoulder, maybe a light concussion, but nothing debilitating.

  He then employed his enhanced senses.

  [Darkvision] obviously let him see in the pitch dark, but his ears did pick up faint talking not too far away. That was about as much as his ringing ears would allow, at least. He reasoned that moving towards the voices would be best, considering he also felt a pleasant breeze coming from that direction.

  He wincingly got to his feet, placed his J on a relatively flat piece of rubble, bent forward until he was stepping firmly on his right hand’s fingers, placed his left hand on his bicep, and heaved backwards while pushing with his left. A sickening pop snapped through the nearly dead-quiet crevice. He groaned in momentary pain, but he managed to get his shoulder back in. “HMMMmmmm…Fucked up.” He sighed and packed his lighter away.

  He recalled a time, what felt like decades ago, when he’d fallen into an Oni Broodmother’s tunnels and had to relocate his shoulder.

  Now, he could breathe fire. His body was no longer emaciated - strong, actually. He could see in the dark, and he was immensely strong and durable. That alone was likely the only reason he was even alive, nevermind the miraculous fact that none of his limbs had been crushed. He was, *puff-puff...blow*, fundamentally better off than he'd been in the Oni tunnels.

  "I can do this," he quietly told himself, even as he deliberately ignored the voice in his screaming that he would be trapped underground for all eternity. Yet he couldn't ignore his shaking hands, nor that awful acidic worry in his gut.

  There wasn't, strictly, a way out of the little cavern he was trapped in, but there was no better time than the present to make one. The air was, of course, choked with dust. Yet Gareth managed not to collapse the cavity he was in by carefully and meticulously wiggling stones, then putting them aside, like the highest-stakes game of Jenga he'd ever played. He then crawled through the small-ish hole he'd made and found himself in a partially collapsed rock tunnel, an improvement if nothing else.

  The moment he saw that tunnel, specifically the light at the end of it, he realised that this nightmare might be over before it even began. The worry in his gut immediately disappeared as he somewhat successfully raised his arms with joy. He could even hear voices at the end of the light. One: a high-pitched female voice. The other: a deep baritone. Unfortunately, by the time he’d limped to the end of the short tunnel, the high-pitched voice became clearer and more transparent in its plight, “No! Please! Stop! He didn’t do anything bad - NOOOO! I’m begging you!”

  The small voice sounded hysterical. It tugged at Gareth’s heartstrings, as she doubtlessly sounded like a child. She sounded like his little sister.

  He drew his sword and advanced down the tunnel, occasionally hopping over pieces of rubble and stone, though his limp was utterly forgotten.

  When the little girl’s voice went hoarse, Gareth started running.

  Perrywinkle

  Perry scratched at the meanie’s hands as he grabbed her Bastian off his pedestal like he was some cheap trinket. However, she might as well have been a mote of dust for all the bother she caused him.

  "Then I'll be a mote of dust in his eyes!" Perry screamed across their mental link as she dove towards the fully armoured knight's face.

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  “Perry!!!!” Bastian screamed at her to stop, but she would do what she could.

  She fluttered her little wings and blurred towards his face with tier 6 speed…and was smacked aside like a gnat. The impact of a tier 8 body cultivator’s gauntleted fist crushed her top-right wing, snapped her thin little leg and arm, and crushed her into the wall of what had once been her home.

  “P-please…I beg you.” She whimpered from the floor as pain worse than she had ever experienced wracked her body. “Why, *wheeze*, are you, *wheeze*, doing this?” Her small voice asked as the heavily injured tier 8 fucker contemplated Bastian’s core, like he was inspecting a shiny piece of jewellery, greed shining from within his faceplate.

  What used to be impeccably shiny armour was now caked in blood, dust, dents, and scratch marks. The right side of his chestplate was caved in, a last-ditch horn attack had pierced through his upper-thigh armour, and his left arm was missing from the elbow downwards. His sword lay dented, chipped, and warped on the floor, and his once-pristine cape was torn to shreds. He might have been a tier 8, but Bastian's dungeon beasts had put up a mean fight. It was miraculous that the man had even survived having six entire floors dumped on him.

  These monsters, four of them, had made their intentions known from the start. They had warned Bastian. They had mocked him. They were here to destroy his core, and there was nothing that 'this little dungeon' could do about it. They had been arrogant, and rightfully so, as none of Bastian's tricks had worked. His last-ditch effort, collapsing his dungeon and destroying centuries of work, had only killed three of them.

  The dark knight's black eyes, barely visible through his visor, shone with an internal black flame, and Perrywinkle knew fear.

  “It will all be over soon, little fairy. Just close your eyes and…beg for death.” The evil knight chuckled in a deep baritone.

  “Listen, Perry, it's gonna be fine! So-someone is coming. They’re gonna he- aaaa…aaa!...aaaaAAAAA!!!!!!”

  Bastian’s pain ripped through them both as the gauntletted fist started squeezing Bastian’s crystalline core. Small fissures spider-webbed where the finger met the crystal, and small flakes began peeling off. Each flake represented an aspect of Bastian, a memory, a shred of slowly accumulated power, his love for Perry, his past before he became a core, his sense of self.

  Just before all was lost, a blue-robed man, wielding a sword and a cigarette hanging in the corner of his mouth, burst into their core room.

  Gareth

  “Yo bro! Fuckin chill, why don't you? Put the fucking core down!” Gareth frowned at the heavily armoured man he’d seen in the dining hall that morning. In his right hand, he held a large lemon-sized blue crystal, which had to be the dungeon core. The trashed room was thick with the smell of a single body-cultivator, and bright mage-light shone from the core.

  “P-please h-help us, s-sir.”

  That small, weak voice drew his attention to a blue-haired fairy that looked seriously messed up. Her left lower leg was at an angle, her left forearm sported an evident curve, and at least a few of her delicate fingers were missing. Tears streamed down her overly large, terrified blue eyes. The pure desperation reflected in her expression broke Gareth’s heart.

  He didn’t know the situation, fact, but the seriously injured guy with the evil black eyes surely couldn't be on the good side. The helpless little fairy couldn't be on the bad side, right? While good was subjective, there was one thing that he could trust. [Sense Hostility].

  The moment Gareth locked eyes with the man, he knew that they were going to fight. Hostility was screaming from him, bellowing! Fuck, it was actually making Gareth’s legs weak. Yet Gareth didn't pause; he didn't consider his actions; he just took a breath and bellowed out a cloud of concealing steam.

  It didn’t matter.

  Faster than he could blink, faster than he could think, the man closed the distance, and that same bent sword appeared through his chest. This wasn’t like his arena duels, where some higher power would whisk him away to a healer. This time, he would die. Except, he couldn’t. Gareth had been on the cusp of death more times than he could count. He knew how to make the most of his conscious moments.

  He coughed blood, as the sword had nipped his lung on its journey through his heart, but Gareth knew he still had precious few seconds to act.

  His head slumped forward, and when he sensed the hostility abate as the man looked away, he drew his hip dagger and stabbed the man in his evil eye, right through the slit in his faceplate. It only worked because the man had lost focus, a crucial mistake on any battlefield. It certainly helped that the fucker was heavily injured.

  “RUUAA!!” The man bellowed with enough force to vibrate Gareth's entire body, enough for dust to rain from the ceiling like snow.

  Gareth was about to stab the dumbass again, this time in the hole in his thigh, but with pain-induced rage, his gauntleted fist backhanded Gareth, sending his broken body crashing against the cavern wall.

  In his dying moments, Gareth saw the man drop the core, shattering when it hit the floor. He saw the man hold his hands over the gaping wound in his empty eye socket and knew that he had won the fight. The guy might be a body cultivator, but even a tier 8 had sensitive eyes.

  The man rocketed out of the cavern in an enormous implosion of rock, sand, and stone. He was sure that his work had been done, because it was.

  The core lay shattered, the fairy lay dying, and the lone witness...lay dead.