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He set the rest of the armor and the buckler aside. He didn’t really need that much protection. It would only slow him down. It looked much too hot and bulky to wear anyway.

Simon was a big guy, and even though he was strong, cardio and tight leather outfits weren’t really his thing. This time he did decide to belt on the scabbard though. He didn’t really like the look of it, but he wanted the long sword with him for whatever attacked him on the next level, and he needed to keep his hands free for the rats.

After that he descended again. He thought about talking to the mirror first, but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it until he had a win under his belt. The next time he came back up, after he’d conquered five or ten levels he could learn more about the system. It would make for a good reward for all his hard work Simon decided.

At least that was what he told himself. A small part of him was worried that if he waited, the anger over what happened would cool off enough that the horror of dying in such a painful way might overwhelm him.

Seriously - he’d thought that the vague rush of fear and pain when he was hit by the truck was bad, but being eaten alive by rats until he passed out from pain had to be about the worst death there was. He’d never forgive them for that, and when he reached the earth floor he started looking around for some vermin to crush.

It turned out that Simon didn’t have to wait long. At some unseen signal, the same half dozen rats that swarmed him last time came at him again, but this time he was ready. He ran at them even as they charged at him, meeting them halfway and stomping two of them with wet crunching sounds before they even had the chance to attack him.

The remaining few died in a battle of attrition that lasted over a minute, and though they managed to bite Simon a couple times before he ended them, the outcome was never in doubt. He emerged out of breath but victorious. “Level One down - only what? Ninety-eight to go?” he said, reassuring himself that he’d basically already won - he just had to go through the motions.

He considered going back upstairs to get some wine to wash out these cuts, but decided against it, and focused on finding the exit to the next level instead. Afterall, there had to be a healing potion around here somewhere. He’d never played a game that expected you to do much fighting without them. Soon he was sure he’d be popping potion after potion like some fantasy world junkie as he made his way ever deeper.

The door seemed to be the only thing worth finding as Simon glanced around the bags of potatoes and boxes of junk before he opened it. Behind the door was a narrow and slightly curving set of stone stairs that led down to the next level.

That level turned out to match its stairs, and appeared to be some sort of underground hallway with branching corridors that were filled with darkness and stank of something old and sulfurous. Perhaps this was the tomb he’d finally be seeking, Simon wondered as he pulled out his sword and stepped forward cautiously.

He thought the art design could have blended better between the levels, but even still. Things were improving. Another few levels in and he might start to find some magical equipment or maybe even— when he reached the T junction, he turned to the left but no sooner had he taken one step forward than he stopped in his tracks at the sound of a click echoing down the hallway.

He wasn’t positive, but Simon was pretty sure he’d just set off a trap.

That was confirmed moments later when the wall just in front of him slammed hard against the opposing wall with a booming sound that echoed throughout the tomb. It would have easily crushed whoever had been unfortunate enough to be standing inside there, but fortunately Simon had frozen the instant he heard it, and so it only grazed his torch, before it started to slowly retract. In the faint grinding of the wall moving back into place though, he could hear something else though: wings.

Something had been woken up by the noise and was headed towards him. Simon couldn’t make himself worry about that right now though. He was still coming to grips with the fact that he was standing in the midst of a minefield, and he was paralyzed by that fear.

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The light he had was small and flickering, and it made it hard to tell the pressure plate he’d stepped on from any of the other stones around him. If he’d brought a spear or even a broom handle then maybe he could have felt the way ahead, but right now that would require dying again, and as painless as it would probably be to get crushed between two walls of stone, he just couldn’t make himself see the appeal to that grizzly prospect.

Instead he forced himself to turn towards the noise of the beating wings. They were getting closer. When the first one finally appeared Simon was almost relieved that they were just bats rather than something worse like imps or gargoyles.

He pulled out his sword and reminded himself that bats were just rats with wings, and rats had already killed him once so it was best not to get too cocky even if they were nothing but easy experience points. With that thought in mind he slowly withdrew back towards the safety of the way he’d come. Hopefully there really weren’t any traps this way, because there was no way he could dodge both hazards at once.

The fight didn’t go well exactly, as he flailed about with his sword and his torch. The bats presented a much larger target as they swarmed around him screeching at least, and Simon was able to knock most of them to the ground before they managed to bite him. Honestly his own fear of their creepy faces and hideous squeaking noises were worse than the actual bats. They were the very definition of bark being worse than bite, and if he had to guess he would say that whoever put them in this level did it to distract adventurers from traps rather than for a serious enemy.

Halfway through the fight he noted that if he’d just bothered to put on the leather jerkin or the chainmail hauberk, he would have gotten through this fight without a scratch too. That was one thing he could do to improve if there was a next time. With any luck he’d never have to see this floor again.

He hated traps. They were hard to see on screen and harder to dodge than even boss attacks. Games would be better if they just left them out, he was convinced. This game wouldn’t result in a quick loss of hit points if he tripped one though. At a minimum, being riddled with poison darts or something would be very painful and would likely result in Simon having to start all over again with those damn rats.

So he took it slow, tapping every suspicious looking stone with his sword and walking very slowly down the corridor in front of him. It was an effective strategy, and just to make sure he didn’t get lost he always followed the left wall whenever there was a fork in the road. On his journey he found several more traps including a wall with impaling spikes, two dart shooters, and a deadfall that dropped rubble from the ceiling. There were only a couple more bats though, and one at a time they were so easy to deal with that it made Simon feel like the sword master he wanted to be rather than the noob he knew that he still was. It was also very slow, and Simon found two dead ends before his torch started to gutter.

“Oh shit,” he said loud enough for it to echo down the halls as he finally noticed he was only a few minutes away from running out of light.

That left him with two choices, neither of which was good. He could blunder around this level in the dark until he died, or he could hurry up and take his chances with the traps. So, he did what he knew he should do, and switched from methodical to fast. He still looked for traps, but he no longer checked every stone.

The bats might have one other purpose in this level after all: even after he lost his light, they could still see him well enough to gorge on his blood. Simon had trouble shaking that image as he started to walk faster down the corridor… being attacked by a whole swarm of bats in the perfect darkness of these tunnels until he was nothing but a desiccated corpse.

That was when the ground underneath him suddenly fell away. One second, he was walking along scanning the ground for traps, and the next, the ground shattered and he was falling down a pit into the darkness below.

He had just enough time to register that before he was impaled on the three-foot spikes that lined the bottom of the pit. Simon would not have believed that pain like this could exist, but as he looked down at his body, he saw that his left leg was stabbed through once, his torso was impaled twice, and his left arm was stabbed through the palm. Blood was literally pouring out of him as he half laid, and half crouched on his awful bed of nails. So much so that before the torch that had fallen beside him went all the way out on its own, the growing pool of blood snuffed it out instead, leaving him in the darkness with nothing but that horrible wailing sound.

It took Simon almost a minute to figure out that the sound he was hearing wasn’t some distant banshee coming to finish him off - it was his own screams, crying out in agony until his throat was raw. Silence only came when he eventually passed out several minutes later, and he once again woke in his own bed.

This time Simon immediately felt his body to make sure he was actually whole. He could still feel the phantom pain of that awful trap. The rats were nothing compared to that, he realized as the pain and shock that slowly left him was replaced by an overwhelming sense of dread. How was he supposed to fight monsters when he knew that failure would be met by that sort of agony?

“This was supposed to be a game - a fucking game!” he yelled at no one in particular while he balled up his fists and curled up on the bed. How was he supposed to beat a game that could hurt so badly that he was almost afraid to play it though?