Dear Diary,

Important things first: after a long, hard battle, where many good marbles raced to exhaustion, battling for supremacy, one marble out of the new batch stood alone at the end of the day. He’ll be given two day’s respite, and then will fight between twenty other marbles for the honor of representing my team in the tournament this cycle.

(Look, I’m fully aware of how dumb this sounds, it’s hekkin’ marbles, but there is seriously nothing better for us to spend our time on. Sad as it is, marbles is life.)

Now that that’s out of the way, I can tell you about Mika’s plan.

See, way back in cycle 1, when we tried getting out, we went up. And that was absolutely, completely not allowed. But we never tried going down.

So maybe we should try it? I mean, the hobgoblin managed it. …And then had the crap beaten out of him by a group of catgirls, but that’s not the point. The point is, he went solo, while we’re a team.

From player gossip, we know a couple things. 1, the reset point for if you die is lvl 85. 2, lvl 97 is stupid hard. Apparently there’s a whole army of decently-leveled kobolds there, protecting a dragon. 3, things that spawned into a level will respawn there once the thing that killed them is out. 4, to get through a level, you don’t have to clear it, just pass through the next door. However, the main goal of monsters in any given level is to stop that door from opening. 5, I got distracted and don’t remember what I was going to write next.

Anyways, Aya thinks that if we die a level down, we’ll respawn here, while Kimi thinks we’ll respawn on lvl 85, and I think we should ask the hobgoblin where he respawns, if he comes down again. Which I think he will.

Oh! Right! 5, we should, with enough determination, be able to get to lvl 100. And once we’re there, we could push the reset button.

And then… what would happen? Maybe, just maybe, we could win.

…

In all probability, the Admin would stop us. He’d find some way of making it impossible for us to get off this floor again. But, like, we could try. It’s worth that much, right? And, I know that there are five of us, so only three can win, but… I don’t know. Even if I’m not one of the winners, I don’t care.

Like, I wasn’t given a choice to be here. I wasn’t given a choice to be a catgirl, or to be the green one. I wasn’t given a choice in job, which is why it’s super lucky that I’ve always liked cooking.

So I don’t care how dangerous or stupid this might be. If it means I’m doing something that I want to do, because I think it will be fun, and I make the choice to do it… I’m doing it.

No matter what.

Goodnight, dungeon.

I’m coming for ya.