I let out a long breath; my plan had worked so far. We had a vehicle, we had supplies, and I had gotten extremely good achievement rewards, though that last achievement had me anxious. I was pretty confident that I was not violating any dungeon rules, and even had some legal standing that should prevent direct punishment, but I didn’t harbor any illusions that I couldn’t be accelerated if I picked up the wrong kind of attention. I had planned to avoid scrutiny for at least a couple floors. Hopefully the dungeon admins were not as observant as the system AI. And hopefully the system AI didn’t decide to take fairness into its own hands. The system should defer to the admins for the early floors; the Valtay ran a tight ship, or so it seemed from the seasons I had been able to watch.

  Cascadia interrupted my distracted contemplations.

  “Are you getting this? We must have gotten some sort of implant without knowing it. What the fuck are these achievements about? This voice won’t shut up. What’s my stat menu?”

  My prepared response was cut short as the sound of suction cups rapidly and rhythmically detaching from and reattaching to the corrugated steel walls filled the hallway. A bizarre creature with four tentacled limbs and an exaggerated beak appeared, bounding along the walls towards us.

  A tooltip appeared over the creature.

  Squid-dog. Level 2.

  The lowliest of the cephalopod hybrids. While relatively fragile, they are tenacious hunters with a powerful hunger for mammalian flesh.

  I cursed under my breath and hesitantly grabbed the controls. My plan to quickly ram a monster with my vehicle for another achievement had assumed floor one monsters would walk on the floor. I was still fumbling through formulating a plan when Cascadia's throwing staff rocketed past the windshield, smashing through the creature's beak, knocking it from the wall and prompting a health bar to appear that immediately dropped deep into the red. At this point I should have gunned the throttle and rammed the creature to finish it off, but Cascadia was faster. She leapt from the speeder and dashed to the creature, scooping up her ironwood stick and bashing the creature's head in.

  I nudged the speeder forward and leaned over to inspect her work. Blue blood spilled out onto the floor and a mildly unpleasant fishy odor wafted from the corpse. I wrinkled my nose and pulled back into the speeder.

  Cascadia shook the blood off her weapon and stood to her full height. She cut a rather menacing figure, staring at me through the windshield. After an awkward silence she spoke.

  “Gel, what the actual fuck is going on right now? What even was that thing? And you? You should be freaking out right now. Me? Yeah it makes sense. I’m trained to handle high stress situations. An elite competitor. Some might even call me a warrior. But you? You leave the room when a scary flick comes on. You’ve never succeeded at a physical confrontation in your entire life, and you’ve done absolutely fuck all for the last two years. I don’t think I’ve seen you do anything other than watch your tablet for more than five minutes at a time except for when you’re driving me around or doing the laundry.

  “No fucking way you are keeping your cool right now. And what where you-“

  I cut her off.

  “You spend at least 9 hours a day training.” I said, smiling forcedly. “You miss a lot. I got really into robotics the last 6 months. Even did some battles in the local circuit. Very high stress stuff.” I tried with all my might to communicate non-verbally that she needed to drop it. We needed to establish ourselves in the dungeon and build a fan base before having this discussion. Fortunately, our sibling bond was good for something, and she took the hint.

  My claim about robotics was not strictly true; I had been far too consumed with learning about the crawl to have any real hobbies. But I had gathered a small collection in preparation for the dungeon, one of which I removed from the underseat compartment.

  Cascadia looked back down the hallway towards the entrance

  “Let’s get out of here before more of those things come?”

  “I don’t know, you saw what happened. It’s going to be absolute chaos out there. I think we might be better off here. You heard the message, it said all interior organic material is being repurposed. That probably means everyone who was indoors is dead. There’s no society to go back to. Plus didn’t it say that once you enter you can’t leave?”

  Cascadia fixed me with an inscrutable stare.

  I silently prayed she would let it go. I wanted to get moving before anyone else came down. Right on queue Cascadia opined

  “Ok, then maybe we should wait for some other people to come down. Surely you aren’t the only person who will feel so moved to brazenly enter a suddenly appearing, inescapable subterranean passageway ostensibly constructed by aliens as some sort of… quest for humans who survived their flash mining operation.”

  I took a deep breath, I had prepared for this.

  “I don’t know, the speeder only has two seats. Plus, we don’t know what state of mind people are going to be in. I don’t know how safe it will be for us to hitch ourselves to another group. And that voice said that we should find a tutorial guild as soon as possible…”

  I stared at her pleadingly, begging her with my eyes to go along with it. She looked at me for a long moment before replying.

  “OK Gel. I trust you.”

  She vaulted over the windshield into the passenger seat.

  “So, how do you think the tutorial guilds work?”

  I relaxed

  “I don’t know. Maybe if we explore a bit we will find something. Maybe there will be a guide standing somewhere to give us instructions, like in a video game.”

  I endured Cascadia's long-suffering stare…

  “What about those squid monsters. Are more of those going to show up?”

  I shrugged, “maybe, you took care of that one pretty easy though.”

  I eased forward on the throttle and started the speeder down the hallway. After several minutes of driving we came to the first split in the passageway. A huge 8 way intersection with a raised platform in the middle. In the center of the platform was a large sign that read “Stand here and do not move no matter what happens to access the tutorial guild!”.

  “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “I don’t know…here, let me check it out.”

  I dropped my first robot onto the ground. It was a basic but high quality bantam class battlebot. It had only one attack mode, a rapidly spinning 15 centimeter blade. I used a controller to drive the robot onto the platform and positioned it next to the sign. A set of bars raised from the floor, slowly enclosing the robot on the platform. Cascadia looked quizzically at the cage.

  The voice pierced my mind again.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  New achievement! Sacrificial lamb.

  You have activated a trap with a remote controlled device. Clever….I can’t hold this one against you because even the dullest of meatbags could have seen this coming.

  Reward: You’ve received a bronze remote operator’s box!

  A hidden hatch in the ceiling opened and another squid-dog dropped from the ceiling onto my robot. It snatched the tiny bot up in its oversized beak, pulling it halfway into its mouth before getting stuck. I activated the spinning motor and the blade jumped to life, hitting five thousand revolutions per minute almost instantaneously. The bot carved through the monster with ease, erasing its health bar in seconds.

  New achievement! Afraid to get your hands dirty?

  You have killed a mob with a remote controlled robot.

  Reward: We don’t normally give out rewards for being a little bitch, but it was a good kill. You’ve received a silver remote operator’s box!

  “I just went up a level. What does that mean? What are stat points? How do we access these rewards?” Cascadia asked me.

  “We…I don’t know, maybe we need to-”

  I started as a shrill, two tone whistle pierced the air. Previously hidden doors in four of the eight hallways irised close, leaving only a small opening, perhaps big enough to squeeze through. Two creatures appeared in each of the 4 open hallways, a squid-dog and a larger, bipedal, cephalopod-like creature.

  Squid-Monkey. Level 3.

  Larger and more intelligent than their pet squid-dogs, if they catch you they will do unspeakable things to you with their tentacles before they eat you.

  No no no, I thought. This was too big! We needed access to our menus and items before this kind of an encounter. Fighting panic, I turned the speeder towards the closest open hallway and slammed the throttle. The speeder burst towards the pair of squid creatures approaching us from that hallway. I thought maybe I could ram one set of creatures, hopefully kill them, and escape down the hallway.

  Suddenly, the squid-monkey produced some sort of trident like polearm with electrified tips and braced it, tips pointed right towards me, in a ridiculously convenient divot in the ground. Frozen with indecision I waited till the last moment to slam the decelerator and tried to swerve. I lost control and watched in horror as the front of the speeder caught on the wall, the passenger door headed straight towards the trident. Cascadia leapt from the vehicle right before impact, just clearing the trident as it pierced the door. I lost sight of her flying down the hallway as the speeder spun, splattering the larger tentacled mass against the wall and coming to a jarring halt with the trident piercing the side door and front console. The speeder crashed roughly to the ground as the electrified trident shorted the lev-drive controller.

  My head swam as minimized achievement notifications stacked up in the upper left corner of my vision. The sound of whistles and clicks and slapping tentacles filled me with growing fear as the other squid creatures entered the intersection. I remembered the death porn segment that always showed during the season premiers; scene after scene of gruesome kills as millions died within minutes of entering the dungeon. I had usually skipped over those parts, focusing on ways to get achievements and loot. I probably should have paid more attention. If I had I might have realized the colossal idiocy of my plan.

  I fumbled for something useful in the underseat compartment but froze at the sound of tentacles popping against the side of the speeder. Unlike his squid-monkey handler, the squid-dog had avoided the collision. I looked up to see the monster raise itself onto the windshield. I shrunk into the seat, covering my head as it coiled, ready to pounce. I spent a moment regretting the time spent planning for the dungeon before my lamentation was interrupted by Cascadias throwing staff cleaving through the squishy beast. Gore cascaded down on me as Cascadia, dripping blood from second degree road rash, vaulted over the speeder and skidded along the ground, scooping up her staff.

  She pivoted, cocking the flat, curved staff, and released it, taking one of the squid-monkey's heads off at 25 meters. Without slowing she dashed towards the approaching monsters, who had become slightly more hesitant. Hands shaking and clenching my stomach against nausea, I again began to search for a robot. Cascadia had intercepted the monsters at the center of the intersection but instead of engaging them she jumped, using the cage around the center platform for leverage and swung herself over them, reaching the corpse of the decapitated squid-monkey. She grabbed the trident it had dropped and leveled it at the monsters.

  I thanked the gods that they turned to face her, and pulled out the pieces I needed for my next drone.

  I had watched Cascadia train, practice, and compete many times, but she was usually pacing herself or intentionally overextending. Rarely had I seen her completely uninhibited, focused solely on victory. Watching her dance around the squids, effortlessly fending off their attacks while creating an opening to skewer one of the squid dogs, some of my lost confidence returned. I finished construction of what I called a hugger. A medium sized flying drone with a set of electrified spikes designed to pierce an enemy and deliver a powerful shock. If this season was following standard conventions, these “water type” monsters would be weak to electricity. The electrified trident Cascadia was now wielding certainly seemed effective.

  As she gauged her opponents she became more daring. As I powered up my drone she made an aggressive move, skewering another squid-dog but leaving herself open to an attack from a trident. As the squid-monkey thrust, Casacadia released her own trident and dodged to the side, grabbing the incoming trident and launching into a kick that sent the squid-monkey flying back, leaving the trident with two tentacle arms attached in Cascadia's hands.

  The squids were now on the edge of a full retreat and Cascadia easily dispatched the remaining two squid-dogs as the squid-monkeys gathered themselves and began to back away, whistling and gurgling frantically. I accelerated my drone into the back of a distracted creature and was relieved when the spikes easily pieced the rubbery skin. The electric pulse sent the creature to the floor, convulsing wildly.

  New achievement! Drone murder.

  You might expect me to mute this achievement notification like I did before since you are in combat, but we both know you ain’t doing shit here. You’ve killed an opponent with a drone, the most impersonal, soulless way to kill. Did you know that drones are common in the dungeon and that several premium class options focus on their usage but are only available if this achievement has been obtained before class selection?….Anyhow..

  Reward: You’ve received a gold remote operators box.

  The remaining, armless squid-monkey turned to run; Cascadia took a skipping step and hurled her trident, ending the combat. Cascadia retrieved her throwing staff and one of the tridents before walking back over to me. I sat in the speeder, still covered in blue gore, panting.

  “Do you remember that documentary we watched once? The one about how eventually cephalopods were going to evolve to become the dominant terrestrial life form?” Cascadia said.

  I raised an eyebrow, confused.

  “What a stupid idea,” she continued. “Tentacles make no sense on land, those things were about as threatening as a bowl of noodles.”

  I laughed obligingly at her attempt at a joke.

  “This is insane. We just killed 8 alien monsters. This doesn’t feel real. And what is going on with my body. I’ve already stopped bleeding, and I’m pretty sure I fractured an elbow jumping from the speeder but I can already feel it healing. You’re a shitty combat driver, by the way.”

  I laughed again.

  “I don’t know, but we better find a tutorial guild, that sounds like a safe place to figure things out. We’ll have to leave the speeder behind for now…”

  I stepped out of the speeder.

  “Help me carry some of these bags.”

  Cascadia looked at the duffel bags full of supplies and gave me a sidelong glance but thankfully decided not to question me. We had walked for just a few minutes when we saw a head poking out of a doorway, watching our approach. It disappeared when we noticed it. Cascadia dropped her bags and held her trident in two hands.

  “Wait,” I said, and set my bags down as well. I pulled out another drone, this one equipped with multiple cameras, put on my FPV headset, and sent it down the hallway. Through my headset I saw a plain metal door with a control panel on the side and an engraved metal plate above it that read “Tutorial Guild” in syndicate standard. I received a mundane achievement for reading a dungeon sign, but also a much more interesting one I had been hoping for.

  New Achievement! Remote Surveyor.

  You have successfully read a dungeon sign through a remote camera interface. This is a great way to stay safe in the dungeon, and as you know your safety is our highest concern. How convenient that you happened to have your surveillance equipment in your vehicle when you entered the dungeon…

  Reward! You have received a gold surveyors box.

  “Oh lay off it,” I muttered under my breath as I recalled the drone and removed the headset.

  “I think we are clear. The door says tutorial guild on it.”

  “Yeah…so did the sign in the intersection..”

  “This one feels different. The sign was in a different language and I got an achievement for reading an “official dungeon sign.” Here, if you’re worried I’ll carry all the bags so you can go trident first.”

  Another patented Cascadia stare later and I was staggering down the hallway after her as she prowled towards the door, trident crackling threateningly. We waited in front of the door as Cascadia inspected the sign and received the accompanying achievement. Eventually, she pressed the control panel before springing back, weapon up.

  The door slid open and we were greeted by a dark furred, jackal-headed knoll. Bare chested with black canvas pants and techno style light bandoliers strapped all over, he held his arms out wide and smiled.

  “WELCOME TO THE WORLD DUNGEON, CRAWLERS!”