First things first, I took out the shield. It was similar to the old shield in the Sanctuary, but with a few differences.

  Hickory Shield

  This shield has been carefully crafted of the best hickory available and a high-strength aluminum alloy used as a binding. This allows for a strong and stable protective surface while maintaining usability. Hickory and high-strength aluminum are both stronger than their weight would imply which allows the wielder to utilize speed as well as defensive measures. Note: This is a low tierless item. It will have minimal effect against tiered attacks.

  A really good item, for all intents and purposes. I was even confused as to why it was considered low tierless for a second. But my confusion cleared a second later.

  Naturally occurring materials—that was materials you could find in the outside world—and the things made from them were always considered low grade. They were also considered of poor quality. This was one of the reasons it was so surprising that Hades came out as a natural Paragon: he used what could be considered the worst armor possible. Sure, it was at a purity and a strength that put it at Paragon tier, but it was bottom of the pile. He could have gotten hundreds if not thousands of times more protection if he had only used a higher grade and quality of material.

  Another thing about weapons. A Paragon tier weapon could wipe nations even in the hands of a tierless person. It just had to be appropriately enchanted so as not to kill the wielder. If it wasn’t properly enchanted, or enchanted at all, a single touch could kill a suitably weak enough person. This is to say, tiered weapons had their own inherent power, given to them by their maker. It wasn’t just the wielder, though some still argue otherwise.

  However, enchantments like that were so hard to come by that they were considered practically myths. So I wasn’t going to be wading through a pool of enemy corpses with an Expert tier sword any time soon. It would splat me like one of those silly cartoon characters the second it was handed to me.

  That wasn’t to say this shield was bad because of its composition. No, this thing was actually impressively good for its grade. It had the potential to stay with me all the way up to the backside of level nine. I just couldn’t take more than a few attacks from an Initiate tier monster or human.

  I hoped I could even take that. Things of a higher tier than you tended to get harder and harder to beat as the gap widened. At Initiate tier, every level was worth five of a tierless’. That grew to ten at Novice tier, then twenty at Apprentice, then thirty-five at Journeyman and so on until at Paragon tier each level was worth a hundred tierless ones.

  And that wasn’t even considering the stats became worth more each tier, so even if you were one level away from the lowest of the next tier, that jump was probably worth a minimum of five if not more.

  So, if you weren’t punching above your belt by at least fifteen levels, that last little inch was enough for even the weakest monster in the next tier to kill you with relative ease. As a general rule of thumb.

  There were outliers, of course. Classes designed solely for punching up, those designed to deal insane chunks of damage over time instead of all at once, and other such things.

  The problem with those was distribution, though. If you were able to do mass amounts of damage to a single thing, you would struggle with numbers. If you could destroy whole armies at a time, you struggled with overwhelmingly strong single targets.

  Each and every class had a weakness. That was why parties existed: to cover each other’s weaknesses and boost each other’s strengths. Solo dungeoneers usually got killed a few levels in. But those solo dungeoneers that actually survived were the strongest in the world. All four natural Paragons were solo… somehow. Even with all their glaring weaknesses.

  I put the shield back into my inventory. I was finished with my examination, and getting hungry. Was there a good place to sit and eat?

  Strolling down the road for about fifteen minutes did me no good, so I asked someone else. They were very helpful and pointed out that I was going in the exact wrong direction to find a nice park or some such to eat in. I was still on the outskirts of the city, but I was slowly—ever so slowly—working my way inward.

  Really? Still on the outskirts? How big was this city? It was made of almost exclusively wood and various kinds of thatch, so I had assumed it wouldn’t be much bigger than your average town.

  I asked about that as well.

  “Oh, that’s because the buildings out here aren’t permanent like the ones in the city proper,” the nice man I was talking to said. He shrugged indifferently. “If the dungeon shifts out here, it causes massive amounts of damage even to stone buildings, so we just make them out of wood. When the dungeon finally stops its shifting, we’ll make these buildings out of stone as well and expand to the newly opened territory.”

  “Newly opened territory? Shifting?”

  “That’s right. See, the dungeon is still forming, even after all these years. It’s still trying to decide what it wants the terrain to look like. So it shifts. Changes. The turmoil gets worse the farther out you get, until it’s so dangerous nobody can survive. Man, I’m level twenty-one and I can only get about fifteen miles from the outskirts of the city before I start taking more damage than is reasonably healthy. Any further and I probably won’t make it back.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “The city’s quite large, though. So I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Judging by the look of you though, I’d say you’re on your way off this floor here soon. Do you know where the portal is?”

  I shook my head. My main source of information about the dungeon itself had vanished when I entered. I was going to have to find him eventually. But I wasn’t overly concerned for the moment. I’d be fine. He’d be fine. We all would be fine.

  Maybe.

  The man just sighed. “They’re rather tight with information there, aren’t they. Well, the portal to the next level is always at the center of the one you’re on. For the first level, you are teleported onto one of three different spawn platforms set up by the system itself in the outskirts of the city. On the upper floors, you start in the center. We don’t really know why.

  “From there, the first floor quest is always to kill your first monster. Starting next floor they get a bit more personalized. More challenging to the individual. In order to use the portal again, you must complete the floor task. That means if it becomes impossible to complete, you are stuck. You can’t leave the dungeon, you can’t move back a floor, and you can’t move forward.

  “My advice for if that happens, just kill things and level your skills until you can brute force the task with sheer strength. If possible. Good luck and may the system bless your efforts.”

  I thanked the man and bade him goodbye before walking yet another half hour to find a nice spot to eat.

  The place I chose was just outside city limits. It was a grove of trees with longer grass and patches of wildflowers. The last light of day cast the place in a calming shade of gray as the warmth slowly bled from the air.

  Sitting down with my back against a tree, I pulled out one of my daily food rations. It was a hunk of dried bread, some cheese, and a package beef jerky. Delightful. I had the money to pay for a nice warm plate of food in a restaurant somewhere, but instead I had decided to eat this stuff. Why? I don’t know. Ask my past self. He might have a coherent reason for you. I just wasn’t in the mood to wait any longer.

  Maybe not thinking straight either.

  I took a bite of the bread. It crunched pleasantly, like an ice cube but without the freezing cold and with a lot more crumbs. The cheese was good too. It might have been that plastic-y kind of cheese you find in lunchables and those pre-sliced cheese piles divided by pieces of wax paper, but it wasn’t bad. Not bad at all.

  As I moved to take a bite out of a length of jerky, a blazing pain shot up from my ankle. I jerked, causing the pain to increase a little, before looking down.

  There was an animal attached to my leg.

  What?

  The little thing had sank its teeth into my ankle and was now trying to shake me like a toy. It was failing miserably, of course. I was about a hundred times bigger than it. What did it think was going to happen? That I was going to float around like a leaf on the breeze? That’s not how mass and density work, buddy. Sorry.

  Deranged Chipmunk(Lvl 1)

  These things are usually pretty shy, but this one’s deranged so it doesn’t care. They lives in burrows under the ground where they store all their nuts and sometimes accidentally forget about them. This one is very hungry, and perfectly willing to kill you to get at the food you’re holding, but it would have a hard time breaking your skin enough to get you to bleed out even though you’re the same level. Cute.

  What was I going to do about it. It was tiny and weak and just overall adorable even clamped onto my leg as it was. I really didn’t want to kill it. But did I have any other choice? Maybe. I had an idea for that.

  I summoned the backpack out of my inventory and shook the little guy off my leg. Then, before he could launch himself at me again, I grabbed him and stuffed him into it. He made a bit of a ruckus, but that was shut off after I zipped the thing closed. Ha! He was trapped. Now I could… what? Release him? What was the point? He would just starve. Maybe I could make him my pet? But I didn’t know how to do that. I could always ask, but it would probably be a bit convoluted. Ah, well. In the bag he would stay until I figured out what to do.

  Finishing up my dinner, or breakfast—I really had no idea anymore, my internal clock was completely busted—I made my way back into the city. It would take a long time to reach the portal to floor two. By my standards at least. Which could mean anything from three to seven hours. I wanted to be on my way. The levels were singing my name.

  The city was dark. But you may say ‘Of course it was, Felix. It was night out.” No, no, no. You don’t get it. The city was really, really dark. There were no light posts, no illuminated signs, no headlights of cars traveling down the road leaving trails of billowing dust behind them.

  Everything was quiet, too. People had gone to bed early because they couldn’t see. Oh, there was the occasional glowing slit between curtains, but for the most part everyone was asleep.

  It was nice. To be walking down a quiet street for once. Too many of the streets in Falkirk city were loud and obnoxious. People were coming home at two in the morning drunk and singing whatever tuneless lullaby they could think of in the moment.

  I shook my head. While I loved my city, it tended to have a bit too much character for my taste. This city had character too, but it was much more subdued and less of the crotchety old grandma complaining about the price of eggs these days to her oldest son in the middle of a rave kind of place.

  Hours passed quickly as I wandered, street by barren street, towards the center of the floor. Eventually I began to see people out and about, though very few of them. These were the common brigands, who ignored me, and the fools who were either passed out on the side of the road from too much drink, or so high on drugs they couldn’t think outside of the two inch by two inch space the intelligence part of their brain now took up.

  I saw stone buildings, too. They started out pretty plain, being boxes with beds, a kitchen, and a window or two. But they eventually became more and more elaborate as the center of the city loomed.

  Larger, more well established shops appeared as well. They were much less affordable, but probably had better reputations. That was the usual way of things.

  And there it was, the center of the floor. It was a massive plaza with cobbled roads and a great structure in the middle of it all. There were sign boards and wanted posters, job offers and advertisements of all kinds. But what really caught my attention was the portal.

  This one was a bright green. It was glowing too. I didn’t know by what logic the portals operated, but this one was much more appealing than the pitch black of the original one.

  Walking up to the portal, I stuck my hand out and brushed its surface.

  Do you want to enter the portal?

  Destination: Floor 2

  Warning: All items on your person except clothing, armor, and weapons will be lost during the transfer unless placed in your inventory.

  I put my backpack into my inventory, then got the feeling I had missed something. What had I missed? Was there something wrong?

  Oh well. If I didn’t remember, it probably wasn’t important. I hadn’t really done anything important on this floor anyway.

  Accepting the prompt, I went through the portal.