For a time, after the stairs appeared and the door opened, Lacie just stared at what remained. She'd killed not-Becky after several attempts to save her, then readied to go down.

  But first she gathered Becky's various explosives, not sure if that was a good idea. Becky had the explosive-handling skills, but a cart full of dynamite was still the most powerful thing they'd found.

  Also, all of the body parts were labeled as corpses. Lootable corpses. She hated herself for it, but Lacie knew what she had to do. She looted every last one of them, taking the accumulated wealth of twenty-seven low-level crawlers who'd died to that borough boss.

  Then she gathered Todd and got him to limp—his new legs were not the same length—down the stairs with her.

  The next floor went slowly. Nobody trusted them, seeing the weird body parts attached to their bodies, so they were stuck as a duo. Two people wasn't enough, and Todd was barely cogent.

  Todd started contributing again on the second day, and on the third day agreed to use the gear she said was good for him, even though it had been taken from all those dead crawlers.

  They'd gone down to level two technically ahead of the curve, both at level 10, but by floor three they were behind. Even worse, they were split up, as they hadn't come in together. Todd was terrified, but he kept in touch.

  Lacie: I'll keep chatting, and try to find you, but I think we both, well...

  Todd: I know. We're gonna have to drop party to join up with other people.

  Lacie: It sucks.

  Todd: We'll keep in touch.

  From there, Lacie's focus went to race and class selection.

  Ezekius had some clear recommendations, but Lacie decided this was too important to rush. She sat down and started reading all six hundred race options she had—apparently that was a lot.

  An hour later, she said, "Can you explain this Mongrel option to me. I think it's extremely good, but complicated."

  Ezekius looked it over, eyes widening. "Oh, wow. I knew this existed, but I'm not sure I've ever seen it offered. Of course, I'm relatively new, only seventeen cycles in, so what do I now? Basically, because you had that arm grafted to you, you are currently a dual-species. Because of that, it lets you select this Mongrel."

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  He scanned it for a moment. "So, the way Mongrel seems to work is that, as you add more races to the mix, they lose more benefits. In general, this is just bad. You end up with less total benefits than if you were a pure race. However, you might be able to stack some aligned benefits and get something powerful. It's risky, though. You stack penalties along with the bonuses and will have severe weaknesses."

  Lacie looked at some buttons on the interface, afraid to poke them. "It looks like I can build a mongrel out, but I'm not sure if that will lock anything in."

  "No, nothing's locked in until you confirm your selection, and you can't do that until you ask me to prompt you for it."

  "Awesome." It took five more hours of fiddling to get what she wanted. The thing is, there were a ton of options. The baseline system had various mixed-races of narrow types, but the mongrel let her just throw stuff together. She could only have 4 full races involved, but she could also have all those be tainted races, like a demon-touched human.

  "Uh, this is, well, I guess it's potentially good?" Ezekius said. "Full transparency, there's like a 99% chance this will get you killed this very floor. You've got all your eggs in one basket. This is going to eat most of your stat-point bonuses out the gate, and you're solo right now. You have a couple spells that work with it, but not a ton. However, if you can level this up and get with a good group, it could be very powerful."

  Lacie looked over her work. "There's no way to make a deal and end up like you until floor 10, right? Are you going to tell me that 99% of crawlers last that long, anyways?"

  "Fair point," he agreed.

  "Then I think we're going for this one."

  Mongrel (Gods-Cursed Naiad + Feywise Goblin + Loamy Dark Elf + Dryadic Succubus)

  There has been much experimentation with genetic splicing throughout the universe, and nobody has been dumb enough to brew up the sort of shit you just threw together. Seriously, you're lucky the dungeon is obliged to let your DIY race survive, because this mess would have self-aborted.

  -4 Strength

  -2 Dexterity

  -18 Constitution

  -2 Intelligence

  +4 Charisma

  You may only learn and cast Nature spells. Already-learned non-nature spells will be lost.

  +25% faster progression of Nature spells.

  Your Nature spells have double duration.

  Your Nature spells have halved casting time.

  Your mana regeneration rate is doubled.

  Suffer +25% damage from enemies who worship a deity.

  Suffer unwanted attention.

  Fragile. Your constitution is capped at one-third your level.

  "Negative 18 wasn't the constitution penalty it listed!" Lacie said immediately.

  Ezekius focused, scanning everything. "I'm sorry, there was a note like five references deep that you suffer minus-two constitution for each mix-in, and the taints count along with the classes, so you're an eight-way mongrel. I fucked up."

  Lacie took a deep breath, let it out slowly. "All good. All good, all good, all good. The nature bonuses are all still there, and that's the stack I wanted. Now, what classes are going to be entirely focused on nature magic?"