Jensen's POV

  I befriended my first dungeon dweller today.

  A five feet, black haired, skeleton of a dungeon dweller to be exact.

  I had to blackmail him to come along. But kidnapping him was next on my list. Either way, he has proved to be instrumental in understanding the life in a dungeon. And to make matters interesting, he happens to be one of those blanks which was just perfect.

  True to the copies of the exploration records that I had to pay a hefty sum to be smuggled out from the physical library, and then get it encrypted and digitized. The System interference down here was minimal, and things were run by a self governing body. But what I hadn't anticipated though were the hundreds of two-story buildings accommodating thousands of creatures.

  It wasn't only the dungeon that had grown in size since that exploration was published and forgotten. The human and the other creatures population had grown with it. Given that there were thirteen floors, and if all the floors had the same capacity for a safe zone. We were looking at an army of low leveled warriors of twenty thousand creatures surviving and thriving inside a dungeon.

  A truly marvelous discovery for the right buyer.

  But even this discovery paled in comparison to him.

  I eyed that dungeon boy crying on the floor after I had paid him thirty five thousand credits as promised. It was chump change given the place I come from. But for him, it was life altering moment.

  I knew he had financial troubles. These sorts of targets were the easiest to manipulate after all, and him being a blank was like icing on the cake. Because him having no System meant that I will not be leaving any trace behind once I had completed my mission.

  But after seeing him break down the way he did. It made me question the records I had smuggled out. According to it, the people of the dungeon were fidgety, prone to violence without provocation, and lived like goblins.

  True to the records. The humans here did mate at fifteen, and most had kids by sixteen. This was true even in the case of Jack. His parents and even Tuma's weren't that old. Maybe in their early to late thirties. Truth be told it was a little shocking to see them have a kid as old as Jack.

  But if I was trapped in a place where there was no entertainment. Where every day was either kill or be killed. I too would have gone down the same path. From what I had gathered. Many folks here had a dozen kids or more until a generation ago. Many of those kids eventually died when the dungeon upped in difficulty, and only a handful survived to see adulthood.

  So what Benzo the explorer had said in his records was true on all counts to an extent. But what was also true was the fact that they had no resources like we had. The explorer had made no mention of this among a lot of other things that I had observed since I entered this dungeon.

  Either he was a sloppy explorer or was trying to sell fiction by showing this place to be filled with unstable creatures with no laws to govern them effectively. No wonder his work was marked as inaccurate by the System and was sealed away. But at least he got the entry point right, unlike the dozen other explorers who at best gave a vague estimate of the entry point of the dungeon they explored.

  The sobs of the boy grew louder and crashed my chain of thoughts. I eyed him while he repeated 'Thank you, so much', over and over again.

  I huffed out.

  "Don't you have to transfer the money to them?" I asked him, and he went still for a moment. Then looked up at me. His face covered in tears and snot. I offered him back his device, and he got on his feet. Wiped his hands on his already messed up clothes, and sent the money to his folks.

  He then looked at me with grim determination, "What do I have to do?" he asked.

  "Come," I said to him, and we walked back the same way we had entered.

  "Where are we going?" he asked from behind my back while still maintaining that six feet distance.

  "To the safe zone," I said.

  "What about bombing the Dungeon Council?" he asked next, and my heart stopped for a moment, and I turned on my heel to face him.

  "Bombing the Council?" I asked him, a bit louder than I had intended to.

  He stared at me like an animal, unblinking.

  "What gave you the idea that we would be doing that?" I asked him.

  "You said, they won't know what hit them," he said.

  "So you thought I was talking about a bomb?" I asked. "And isn't your father in that council meeting?"

  He nodded.

  "And you were still going to bomb it?" My eyebrows raised.

  "He has a skill," Jack said, with a shrug.

  "What skill?" My ears perked up.

  "Thou shalt not die," he said. "He can use it once a day, and he uses it every day when he is in the dungeon fighting—"

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  "While being a merchant?" I asked him with a straight face.

  He nodded with childlike innocence.

  "He sells and buys stuff in the morning, and then enters the dungeon to fight and make money until it's around mid night and the market gets packed again," he said.

  I took in a breath and huffed at that.

  Even if such a skill existed. The cool down on it would be at least in years, if not decades. But I had no heart to tell that truth to that kid. So I just nodded at his explanation and said, "Sorry to disappoint you. But we won't be bombing anyone or anything for that matter."

  "Then what would we be doing?" he asked me, blinking.

  "Once you kill the floor boss, and loot his garden—"

  "The flowers?" he asked.

  "Yes," I said. "We get access to a bonus floor." It was about time I told him things, anyway. So I went ahead and did just that. "The bonus floor will be right next to the thirteen floor boss room," I continued. "Once we enter the bonus floor. We blast our way into the floor boss room, kill it, and take control over the dungeon while the council members are stuck here in their meeting."

  "How… how do you know all this?" he asked, baffled.

  I caught that glint of awe and admiration in his eyes and couldn't help but boast.

  "Ha-Ha-Ha," I laughed. "Cause I'm smart," I said. I would have ruffled his head. But he was kind of stinky and sweaty.

  So I turned and walked towards the safe zone from where we could access the bonus floor. If the exploration record was accurate. Then this dungeon's layout doesn't change as such. But the catch was that this bonus room could only be accessed once per cycle of the dungeon. Seeing that even the strongest on this floor were at level fifteen, I did not have to worry about them being able to do what I had just done.

  "Can I ask you something?" Jack spoke up from behind my back again.

  "Sure," I said, while I conjured a flame and killed a goblin without slowing down.

  "Why do you need me?" he asked. "I mean, you're plenty strong on your own—"

  "I need you to be in the boss room," I said. "I will blast the wall and gain us access. But after that, you would need to distract the boss for five seconds. It would take me that long to conjure a fireball big enough to one shot the boss. Under no circumstances can I hit the boss twice. It has to be once."

  "Is that a System requirement to gain access to the dungeon?" He asked me. "One shot-ing the boss?" He repeated my lingo with a little difficulty.

  "No," I said, conjuring another flame. "It's a self imposed one…" I burned another goblin, and before the boy could ask the next obvious question, I answered him. "The System rewards you with more credits and experience if you handicap yourself in a battle and still win," I said.

  "So you are not at your full strength?" he asked me, the bewilderment crystal clear in his tone.

  "Far from it," I said. "The System didn't budge on extra reward until all I could do was this, in terms of attack." I conjured a flame in my hand and hit another goblin that ran straight towards us.

  Jack went quiet when I told him about his role.

  "Scared, boy?" I asked him while he walked behind me.

  "No," he said.

  That's what I expected from a boy who was ready to bomb the council, and not just kill himself but the others as well. The explorer was right on that account. Life inside the dungeon was filled with death and gore. So much so that even the young ones thought it to be a norm. But that wasn't just the case with this one.

  Jack was special for a different reason. Being a dungeon born, and mana fed, Jack was stronger than an average human. He hadn't realized it yet because everyone around him was inducted and stronger than him. Yet he worked beside them on an equal footing in the fields and the ponds.

  I hadn't met Jack by accident. I had kept an eye on him and a few others while I scouted out the dungeon. But what made me zero in on him was the way he kept going. As if there wasn't any need for him to slow down and regain stamina or mana. The others might have dismissed it by thinking that he had a fighter build. But not me.

  Plus, he had yanked those flowers out with one hand, and my buffs stacked on him just like the way de-buffs stack on dungeon monsters. This boy. He had grown strong on his own as the System hadn't messed with his body by placing hard limiters on his natural growth. He didn't have to wait until the next level gain to assign stat points to his strength and speed. He grew into them naturally as he got older.

  "I…" Jack spoke up behind my back, and I snapped out of my thoughts. "I have a question," he said.

  "Ask away…" I said, while I walked.

  "What is it like to be inducted?" he asked. "Even I wanna do stuff that you do."

  That made me stop in my tracks.

  "Once inducted, boy," I said, so that he hears me loud and clear. "Your own body doesn't belong to you anymore," I said. "It belongs to the System." I paused, as a blue screen popped up in front of my eyes.

  Ping!

  Dungeon monsters are not privy to the existence of the System.

  Have you encountered a sentient dungeon monster again?

  Report to the System.

  Yes/No

  I dismissed the blue holographic screen in front of me with a thought. This was the third time that prompt had shown up ever since I met Jack. The first ping I got was when I had asked him if he was a blank inside the tunnel a couple of hours ago. The second was when I was having a random conversation with him, and now the third was when he asked me something about being inducted.

  "What do you mean your own body won't belong to you?" he asked from behind my back.

  "Who, apart from your family, knows that you are a blank?" I asked in return. As the System was not all aware and all hearing entity, and its presence down her was much weaker to begin with. Yet it was pinging whenever Jack and I had a sentence too long a conversation about it.

  "Mr. and Mrs. Tuma know about it," he said. "I'm with them the entire morning." He paused. "But I'm careful when I'm outside though. I don't talk whenever I'm in the field or the pond. And I'm careful even when I'm selling the herbal weed. I just started doing it like a week ago…" He trailed off. "Am I speaking too much?" he asked me.

  The active quest notification on my screen that had just popped up from the System had grabbed my attention. So I couldn't answer him as I read through the notification.

  "I know about the system warning," said Jack, trying to fill in the silence. "It's the reason I don't talk to others that much," he added. "Half the time, I pretend to be retarded and unable to speak while I take orders at the inn to avoid getting caught." He chuckled half-heartedly. "The regulars are used to my hand gestures. So I don't have to worry about that." He paused. "I just… I just thought I could be open with you as you are not from here," he said.

  "Bad idea," I said, dismissing the quest notification and walked again.

  He followed quietly.

  For a moment there, I could relate to him. Pretending to be something else so that you don't get caught? I ran my hand through the mirage I was wearing. The mirage of an old man. My hair wasn't white, and I certainly wasn't old. But such was the nature of my quest.

  I huffed and called forth the System screen.

  Status...

  Ping!

  Name: Jensen

  Age: Thirty-five

  Class: Battle-Mage

  Level: Eighty One (Restricted)

  Strength: Forty Two | Mana: One Eighty | Speed: Fifty Two | Stamina: Seventy

  Regen: Two per idol second (Restricted)

  Skills (Active): Fire Ball, Buffy the friend savior, Mirage.

  Skills (Sealed): Four of seven

  System Restriction: Class capped at level one hundred

  Mission Restriction: All stats reduced by seventy percent. Four skills are inactive for the duration of this quest.

  *****