Five minutes passed, then ten, and the wolf still didn’t know what to do.

It didn’t want to kill the human, but it was going to die anyway. Slowly and painfully.

After another five minutes of its thoughts running in circles, it decided to ignore the human. If she lived, she lived, if she died, she died. There were three other valuable humans it could be eating rather than wasting its time trying to figure out what to do with the one that still lived.

So it trotted away, and instead of eating everything in its path, decided to eat the important bits first. Humans first, small rats that would be easy to eat second, and if its jaws could hold up after all that, it would eat whatever remained.

It found one of the males first, who had thankfully smashed its skull open on the stone with its fall, bits of its brain and blood seeping out of its head like a cracked egg.

After hooking its canines into the human’s neck, it pulled with all its weight and strength, just enough to move the man out of the pile of rats he was in and closer to a more clean area near the still-living female, and started its feast.

Humans were so much tastier than rats, it couldn’t believe it had wasted hours on eating the rodents rather than hunting their corpses first. No dirty fur sticking to the insides of its throat either.

It hated that.

The head was cracked open thankfully, so licking up its brains, chewing up its skull and eating its neck proved to be a task of nary more than five or ten minutes, and after raking its canines up and down the human’s body to cut through its coverings, it clumsily scratched at the corpse, watching sliced plates of leather, some tinklings bits of metal, and various straps of cloth and leather fall off the man, one of them covered in cracked or outright broken glass bottles full of glowing liquid.

It sniffed at them curiously, then reeled back from the utterly bizarre stench coming off them, clumsily trying to wipe at its snout with its leg to get the sweet, bitter, foul and wonderful smell out of its nostrils. After sneezing once, then twice, it shook itself, and got closer to the little bottles of glowing liquids.

They were almost like the burning liquids of the flaming rivers down below, if probably a different color. Its eyes were still slowly being adjusted to be able to see more colors like the humans could, so it wasn’t quite certain that they were all different colors, but their shades of yellow and blue were far enough from the green of the rivers for it to be sure that they were at least different.

It had actually forgotten it had started the process of changing its eyes, so it was going to speed that up quite a bit when it went to sleep again.

At the moment though, it was mostly curious about the bottles. The first two were cracked open, their contents mixed and tainted with blood and guts, but one of the bottles was miraculously intact, so with the utmost care, it hooked its teeth on the small bottle’s neck, and pulled it out of its fabric sheath. There was some sort of weird wooden thing on the top, and after stabilizing the bottle on the ground with its paws, it grabbed onto it and pulled it off with an odd popping sound.

The stench was still horrible. And amazing.

Which meant that it was just extremely confusing, so it mostly shut out its sense of smell as it gripped the base of the bottle’s neck between its front teeth, and very slowly tilted its head back.

The liquid, thick and almost like slime, hit its tongue, and besides a small amount of numbness, nothing happened, so it tilted its head a tiny bit more and allowed a bit of it to trickle down into its throat, and it swallowed before carefully putting the bottle back between its paws.

It really needed to get some more dexterous paws, these things were infuriating to use when trying to work with human trinkets.

For a moment, nothing happened as it swallowed, then a warm, soothing numbness suddenly overtook the pulsing waves of pain coming off every bone in its body, before it wormed its way up to its cramping jaw muscles.

For a few heartbeats, its body was blissfully unattended by its long-time companion, the pain seemingly gone, and then slowly, the numbness receded and it crept back into the wolf’s body. Slightly lessened, but still there.

It looked curiously at the bottle, and decided that while that was useful, it didn’t really have much need for it. It had a high level [Pain Resistance] skill, and lessening the pain would only reduce how quickly that skill further leveled up.

In fact…

The wolf turned its head to look at the living human, who was trying to discreetly shuffle out of its prison of iron and gore.

There was enough rat meat for the wolf to eat nonstop for days. And three humans that were all about twice to thrice its size, still, so it might not even have time to eat the girl if it killed her. That, as well as the reminder of the woman that fed and healed it, and an honest desire just to see what would happen, was what made it decide.

It picked up the bottle with its front teeth, and trotted over to the human, who went limp as she heard its footsteps approach.

Deciding the female was no real threat, it decided to alert her to the fact that it wasn’t genuinely blind and stupid, and thus prodded her mauled hand with the pain remover bottle. She flinched, but refused to move or take it.

Growing annoyed, the wolf put it down on the ground, before clamping its teeth around her wrist, an action which made the girls’s breath catch as she started to tremble, and the wolf moved her arm so that her hand landed on the bottle, before letting go with a short chuffing sound.

After a short moment of indecision, her hand slowly started patting at the bottle, and after she realized it was a pain remover bottle, gasped. For the first time, some life seemed to enter the female, and she raised her head, revealing a mangled, eyeless mess of blood and flesh, chunks missing from her lips, nose, and brows as she turned towards the wolf, before her neck went limp in exhaustion once more.

“Tha-Thank you.” It breathed out, and with weak fingers that could barely hold onto the bottle, she drew her arm back, before biting onto the spit-and-blood covered wood at the top, and with great, great effort, pulling it off. She placed the dirtied bottle neck to her lips, and turned her head sideways to drink up the pain remover with greedy gulps.

Not wanting to waste time, it chewed up a small rat as she continued drinking the pain remover, disliking how the corpse felt like an overfilled balloon as its guts and blood dripped and ran down its jaws and chest-

...Wait, what even was a balloon?

After a moment of thinking and only getting some images of fabric filled with air, it stopped caring, and tilted its head back to hastily swallow the small rodent.

“Thank y-you. T-Thank you.” The human gasped out repeatedly as soon as she finished the bottle, and the wolf watched her for only a moment before growing rigid in surprise.

Her flesh was knitting back together, the wounds closing and her bleeding ceasing at a speed that was unimaginable to the wolf. No flesh was restored, and she was still blind, but it watched in fascination as her wounds scabbed, then turned to skin, in a sped up process that took only a dozen or so seconds, her mangled fingers twitching as some life was forced back into the girl.

That liquid could heal injuries. It was still useless to the wolf, as it couldn’t carry it around with itself until it got hurt, but the revelation was still surprising.

Deciding to help the human a bit more, it let its bottom jaw hang loose, and hooked its top canines onto increasingly more difficult to remove rats the closer it got to the main parts of her body. They would either break apart or just be too deeply wedged between the human and the iron planks above to remove, so after some annoying digging, it decided to just drag the human out itself.

“Can you… understand me?” The girl asked quietly, then sharply inhaled in surprise as she felt its canines carefully dig into her shoulder garment.

It planted its paws down in a wide stance with its neck extended over the human’s head, unaware of the bits of blood dripping onto the back of her head and making her flinch, and slowly started using its meager legs and muscles to walk backwards.

After a moment of strain, the human started assisting it as she feebly grasped at the ground and tried to pull herself out. It was… somewhat effective. One finger’s width at a time, it dragged her out, and it had to adjust its grip on the tearing fabric the girl wore several times. And although the wolf was unsure of why it was so impatient lately, it was quickly growing annoyed at how much energy it was expending for the human, so it decided to activate [Bloodrush] and heaved backwards with a low growl of effort.

A distant, foggy recollection of it doing something similar with a small stick and another kin on the other end surfaced for a fraction of a second before it faded, and it redoubled its efforts from anger at having its mind denied of that memory.

The female gasped and groaned in pain, but helped as much as her useless arm could allow her to, and finally, the resistance snapped away and the wolf managed to yank the girl out of her prison of gore, whatever keeping her trapped likely broken or removed as it hastily used the last few seconds of [Bloodrush] to drag her for a couple feet through grimy, crimson-wetted stone.

“Thank you.” The girl gasped as she tried to turn over on her back, grunting in pain. “A-Are you... a summon?” The human continued muttering, and the wolf ignored her, considering its self-appointed duty to be complete, and it quickly trotted away to continue eating the human it had started eating a couple feet away.

It still kept an eye on the human though. Just in case.

Everything hurt, but nothing was more intense than the feeling of helplessness she felt.

The healing potion was only designed for surface wounds. So she couldn’t see anything, but she could hear the sound of ripping flesh, the tearing of fabric, could smell the miasma of blood and death hanging in the air so thick it felt like inhaling water from the foulest swamps with every shaky breath.

Before today, she didn’t know the sound of flesh being ripped apart, but as the minutes rolled by in relative silence, she was forced to become familiar with it as the beast devoured what she assumed were her former teammates, and she felt tears build up in her mangled eyes, the salt springing a fresh wave of pain through her.

She didn’t like them. Hell, she was basically the team’s property, too in debt to them to deny them anything, even when they would push her down and force themselves on her. If anything, she was glad they were gone, evil and reckless, every single one of them. So she wasn’t crying for them.

No, she was crying because she was scared she would be next to enter the monster’s jaws.

Any monster was terrifying, doubly so after having had to endure the agony of being eaten alive before the world dropped out from under her as she was crushed inside a frenzied blender of teeth and snouts.

Yet there was nothing more terrifying than a monster with intelligence. And although she’d only caught a glimpse of the canine before she fell, two wide, golden gleaming eyes framed in darkness were engraved into her mind.

She didn’t know what it did, but she knew that it somehow broke the staircase. She knew that it could recognize a healing potion, and that for one reason or another, had given it to her. The problem was that she didn’t know if she was given the potion out of some sort of mercy, or because the beast wanted its food fresh and alive.

It was presumably not intelligent enough to understand speech, however, judging by the complete and utter lack of any response.

Never had she cursed her choice of a [Path] more than now.

She was so naive. So optimistic and bright eyed as she’d look down the innards of the sprawling Dungeon below, and think to herself that she just wanted to help people, a stupid, misguided notion borne out of guilt from her noble birth.

So when she, like any good elf, started practising magic and the [Infuser] Path opened for her, she’d taken it immediately, and thought she could finally escape her insane parents to make a life for herself. She had a wonderful support Path that increased the potency and efficiency of her buffing spells, which only grow stronger with time and more specialization, and all she had to do was Level up. People would be clamoring to get her at their side in their Dungeon dives, allowing her to live a life free of guilt and court.

And now look where she’d ended up. Level seven, crippled in a trash pit, covered in blood and guts, blind and helpless, and most likely about to be devoured.

With just three useless spells in her repertoire, she might as well just tilt her head away and hope the dog, or monster, or whatever the thing was, made it quick. Even if she wanted to cast [Sparkburst], it was unlikely to do anything unless she got her hand cupped around its eyeball or something.

It wasn’t even a real spell. She’d just been trying to learn Pyromancy from watching a street performer, and learned how to throw sparks, which the system registered as a spell for some reason. Its use was more of an intimidation trick against stupid animals than anything useful in a fight.

So… she could do nothing but wait and hope.

It was common protocol to lock the entrance to aboveground when someone took a rat extermination quest put up by one Dungeon Baron or another, simply so in case of the mercenaries failing, the streets above wouldn’t be flooded by bloodthirsty rodents the size of a large cat.

And their minder waiting above should have noted the large crash and lack of people trying to get out of the pits, which meant he was probably already back at the guild to report on their deaths and get another party to clean up the rats so the workers could fix the staircase.

That process could take anywhere from a day and a half to a week…

Could she even survive this long in a hole with an intelligent monster that was most likely chewing up her teammates a couple feet away?

A particularly loud snap of crunching bone made her flinch, and she decided to at least try and crawl and shuffle away from the source of those horrendous sounds.

Gods above, just crawling made shards of agony spear into her very soul.

She didn’t need a medic Pather to tell her that her hip bones and legs were probably little more than bony splinters. Wearing metal greaves like the rest of her party had only made the rats concentrate on her upper body, and she vividly remembered the almost cushy crunch of the vermin below her, a split second before her legs slammed into the stone.

That and her right arm being broken, made crawling backwards a near impossible task. And the fact her fingers kept sinking into blood or gore or mangy fur, making bile crawl up her throat with every push, didn't help either.

She gave up on moving fairly quickly.

Okay, Emhreeil. Think. What spells do you have to deal with this?

[Sparkburst] was most likely useless, even if it was her highest level spell. Mostly because her half-teammates half-debtors thought it was useful because it was flashy, even if it didn’t do anything, and told her to use it all the time.

[Illumina] was similarly useless, only because she didn’t have the mana reserves to use it offensively. If she were higher level, with more natural mana reserves and with more points in Soul, she could summon an orb of light in front of someone’s face and “permanently” blind them by burning their retinas in an instant, but the most she could do with what she had was make someone rub their eyes and blink for a few seconds. She could use it to buy time, maybe?

Her final spell was simply [Haste], which would give her a bonus to Speed and Perception, and would be useful, if she could walk.

She had no option but to wait and hope for rescue.

And then…

Then what? Her life was as good as over. She could never gather the coin necessary to restore her sight with a healer. They had grown more common since the church of the Six-Winged Dove settled in on the city out of the Dungeon, but restorative healers were still far, far beyond her budget. Maybe she could get one of the golem specialists to give her a golem’s eye, if she worked for a few years.

And where would she even work? She was probably too scarred to even be accepted at the most filthy brothel. She could do little more than beg.

The realization that no matter what happened, she was already as good as dead, weighed heavier on her chest than any heap of corpses and metal ever could.

As the minutes rolled by and her exhaustion overtook her senses, she fell asleep to the morbid lullaby of snapping bones and tearing flesh, her body soaked in freezing crimson from the tips of her toes to the roots of her hair.