The second phase was simple: escape from the dungeon alive or die in it... There were no rules; nothing told you what else to do; just survive inside a dungeon...
When my body was teleported, I appeared in the middle of the darkness. Only in front of me could a faint light or glow be seen. Thanks to my newly acquired ability, I could see my surroundings. It was not in great detail, just like when I saw gray shadows. Behind me, there was what looked like a demolition. I was at a dead end; the cave was natural, without excavated walls or masonry. The tunnel was about 2 meters wide for the most part, although it narrowed to a meter or so near the end...
The ground was wet and cold, and my feet hurt... Mental note: get some shoes as soon as possible... I advanced little by little towards the light. This corridor reached another, wider tunnel, and it was clear that the light wasn't from a fire, nor a torch; it was the glow of some type of mushrooms, pale, but enough to say by comparison that this area was illuminated...
The passage curved a little; to my left, it seemed that other lights were illuminating; to my right, everything soon plunged into darkness... I could sense the contours, but it seemed that the tunnel extended quite a bit. What? Was the light or the dark better? The first instinct is to do what is easy, to play it safe, but if I were a monster, wouldn't I go precisely in that direction? Wouldn't I lay an ambush there, knowing that any intruder would go towards the light?
Groping into the darkness was not easy. The tunnel was narrowing, so I hung the shield on my back and moved forward, holding my spear with one hand and resting the other on the wall. Soon I reached what was another crossroads. The path forked in two...
I stopped being attentive to any sensation... In the end, it was a smell and hearing that guided me. While the tunnel on the left went up and continued to smell of mold, the second one smelled... it smelled slightly shitty. Have you ever farted in a small room...? That trumpet echo was heard on the right. A latrine? What's better than knowing what monsters I would face if I caught one absent-minded?
I went to the right, trying to make as little noise as possible. About 7 meters in front, the figure of a child the size of an 8-year-old child but more muscular was on its back, shitting. He had a sparse head with a few locks; he didn't have much clothing or armor; only the slight shape of a knife protruded from his left hip... I placed my spear on my left forearm to stabilize it, and I grabbed the spear a hand's breadth from its bottom. ... I would like to say that I was aiming for his head, but as they said in a movie, "small target, big mistake, big target, small mistake",
I concentrated like I was playing billiards, and in a quick movement, I stuck the spear under his shoulder blade. , I pushed with all my strength until his body crashed against the wall. Despite being impaled, he tried to turn around, but the one-meter-long spear stuck in the walls and stones, making it difficult for him to move. I grabbed the axe that was there. I was hanging between the adjusting straps of my leather breastplate, and I picked him up. The first blow hit him on the back between his collarbones because I slipped on the feces on the floor, but the second hit the top of his head. It rang like a clock, a coconut breaking...
"I'm the shitkiller!" I shouted to myself while laughing.
I had a hard time recovering the spear. I dragged the body of this being through the tunnel. I dragged it beyond the fork, towards the area of light. I wanted to examine that body... It was indeed a goblin, or at least the image of that one. Monster gave us fantasy games and books. His death had given me 5 experience points; he was much more than the rats... I was surprised that he had not died after being skewered with the spear; it should have pierced his heart... I took the crude knife that he had on his hip. It could not be considered a dagger; it was a single-edged knife made of malleable metal.
After vomiting twice, I managed to cut his chest and put my hand in to search; just as I suspected from the result of the fight, his heart was not on the left but on the right.
It may seem like silly information to you, but if I wanted to play cat and mouse with the goblins in the middle of the darkness, it would be better to know something about his anatomy...
The loincloth full of shit was no use for me to improvise shoes, so dragging the corpse back, I hid it in a hole in the tunnel through which I arrived. I didn't worry about the traces of blood and shit... Possibly it was a mistake, but doing what my instinct told me, I proceeded to destroy the luminescent mushrooms. In the dark, it is more difficult to see a trace...
I entered the darkness again to explore the ascending tunnel on the left, the one I was missing... I would have liked to check the latrine a little more, but the nauseating smell put me back, and at the moment, the encounters could be more frequent over there...
The tunnel rose little by little, ascended, and soon narrowed until it reached what seemed like a dead end; however, something in the air was not normal; it was a current, although it did not come from the front or the tunnel. . It came from above...
Without the selected ability to see a little in the dark, I could not have detected that between the rocks and stalactites on the ceiling there was a gap that went up. To advance through it, I would have to climb the wall. I never liked climbing, but with the strength and agility of this body, I won't say it was difficult, but rather tense. Move your foot, find a place to hold on, push with your legs, push with your arm...
The hands hurt, but in the end I climbed onto what was a small ledge. To continue climbing, I had to discard both the spear and the shield. The climb itself was not vertical, but it was narrow, at an angle of 70 degrees, there were easier areas and other complicated ones. ... after an incalculable amount of time, light began to be seen at the end, not a faint luminescence but natural light... when I was one meter from the exit, Data's voice resonated...
"Congratulations on being the first player to reach the first exit of the dungeon; do you want to continue to the next phase?"
The easy thing would have been to end up like this, but I was a cheater. What was happening with the hidden quests? In addition to the experience points, I also had data to consider. The first thing is that the corpses did not disappear in a beam of light, so There were many possibilities that the number of enemies was watertight, unlike in the coliseum, where the rats returned again and again. The second thing was that this was not the exit, but one of them with which there was another possibility to escape from the zone...
I slid down as best I could, falling, slipping, and hitting myself. I deviated a little from my ascent route; my hand landed on a ledge, but it wasn't rock that I was touching; it was bone and flesh. I stretched out my hand until I grabbed what I was touching. It looked like a foot (big for a goblin, small for a human). I didn't have many options, so I dragged it towards me, but things don't happen like in the movies, so what I managed to do was tear the leg off the corpse.
It took me 5 minutes to recover the body and its belongings, and almost twice as long to go down the slope without it falling and making a scandal that echoed throughout the cavern...
It was a humanoid about one meter and sixty tall, with broad shoulders, and a large head. The hands were wide, with bones more robust than those of the anatomy of a human.
The first thing was to recover my spear and shield that I had abandoned below and see if I could make any profit from this dead man...
Although my behavior was not logical, a cheater and an exploiter had a second basic rule: the first was to repeat until tired, the second was to leave nothing unexplored, and the third was an exception to the first: only stop exploring if you are at risk of dying...
If I wanted to get the most out of the game, I had to start with the tutorial. As I had already explained to Mariela, would she be doing well? Not that I cared much; I had only gotten to know her a little the night before entering the game, but at the moment, it was my only contact with the outside world in this universe.
Many despised the tutorials; deep down, they were boring and one was wishing they were over so we could really discover the game. However, mathematics had certain rules that applied to the games; the errors, exploits, and advantages tended to grow exponentially throughout the game, so the sooner you acquired those advantages, the more growth projection your character would have.
Another rule for games with permadeath is that a poorly made character from the beginning would only end in a waste of time and unnecessary suffering...