I wasn’t sure how long had passed since I died, but eventually I awoke once again. I could feel the soft grass against my back, the evening sun shining on my face. After slowly sitting up, I looked down at my hands, finding my arms healed from the previous fight. Sadly, it seems like I had lost my grip on the greatsword just before I died, seeing as how it was not anywhere near me.

Shaking my head, I glanced around to find my location. If memory serves, this looked to be the ninth layer, so I should be able to find my way. However, the most important thing was to locate Lilith first. Likely due to not many people actually dying in this location on the eighth layer, this isn’t a very popular location for predators, but that doesn’t mean she couldn’t get unlucky.

Hopefully I wasn’t turned around when I fell. I thought to myself, before turning to where my back had been facing after I stood up and walking. Assuming that this was the right direction, I should be able to see her soon. Just in case, I pulled out one of my swords and began calling her name.

“Lilith! Lilith!” As I just woke up, I knew that she probably hadn’t awakened herself yet, but there was a good chance of my shouts waking her if I grew close to her.

And sure enough, after a few minutes of walking, I saw her slowly sitting up within the grass, just a short distance away from the path I was walking. Her dress was torn slightly along the side, and she had her arms wrapped tightly around a thick branch, one hand clutching a large piece of amber. Though her wounds had healed, I could see a bit of dried blood along her fingers.

It was then that I realized that, in our haste, I had forgotten to give her the pick to retrieve the amber. Had she pried it out with her bare hands?

“Lilith!” I called out one more time, rushing over towards her. Her groggy expression suddenly seemed to wake up at this shout, and she turned her head abruptly to look in my direction.

“Oh, thank goodness.” She said with a relieved sigh. “I was worried we might have died too far apart and gotten separated.”

I shook my head when she said that. “No, it doesn’t seem like that happened. And… sorry about forgetting the pick.” I apologized, glancing down to her previously injured fingers. “Was kind of a rushed situation.”

She smiled at that, using the branch she had salvaged to push herself to her feet. “Don’t worry about it. It just took a bit of magic and elbow grease. Though, I wasn’t able to find a second branch before the fenrir showed up…”

“That’s fine. We got the most important parts.” Honestly, the second branch would have just been used to make a bow, but judging from our encounters so far, I wouldn’t be needing to use one much. Likely, it would have just ended up with Lilith anyways. “Let’s head to the nearest town so I can grab a carving knife, and then we can go ahead and move on.This layer doesn’t have anything we need badly.”

Lilith nodded her head slightly. “Uhm… Grim? You know this area from your time in the game, right? Do you happen to know what city we’ll go to when we go down again? Or where the key is we need?”

I raised my eyebrow slightly when I heard that, but figured she was asking due to the history she wasn’t too keen on revealing. “If nothing has changed, after we leave the city that’s about a day’s walk west of here, we should be arriving near Nashton on the tenth layer. As for the key… It was in the hands of a traveling merchant, so first we’ll need to find out where he is, if it plays out like it did in the game.”

Hearing that we would be going to Nashton, Lilith let out a strange sigh of relief. “Okay. Thanks.”

“Sure you can’t talk about it?” I asked, though I didn’t really hold much hope.

Lilith had a conflicted expression on her face as she considered it, but after a moment she began speaking. “We aren’t going there either way, so it should be fine… I told you that I was born on the tenth layer, right? And that I managed to smuggle myself back up there after dying, before I got in prison?”

I nodded my head briefly, and she continued. “Well… There’s a bit more to it than that.” As she spoke, she looked up at the sky, before beginning to walk to the west. Naturally, I followed after her. “My dad is an abusive bastard and a drunk. As for my mom, she still loves him, and ignores anything bad that he does.”

I had a bad idea I could see where this was going. “Getting hit was pretty normal growing up, but one day it got really bad. I stayed out later than he wanted, and we got into an argument. He shoved me, and I ended up smacking my head on the corner of a table. The next thing I knew, I was in a hospital bed on the eleventh layer.”

“I was still a teenager back then, so without a home or a job, there wasn’t any way for me to take care of myself. I sold what little I had on me when I died, and bought myself a dagger. After that, I left the city. I was too old for an orphanage to take me in, but too young to fend for myself.” She wrapped her arms around her chest, hugging herself tight as she talked.

“It didn’t take long for me to die again. This time due to eating a poisoned mushroom of all things. From there, I ended up in some strange jungle, and managed to go a few months before I was mauled by a stoneclaw bear. After that, I was in a cave. That’s where I learned that trick with the glowing root from before. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find any water, and the roots didn’t have any in them, so I died again about a week later.”

I winced slightly as I imagined that, having to die from dehydration. “I don’t know what happened at the fourteenth layer, but the next time I woke up I was on a flying island in the fifteenth. I got lucky, and managed to land somewhere safe, with a steady source of food and water. This time, I was determined to survive.”

“I lived on that island for three years before a merchant ship came by and saw the shelter I had built for myself. At first, they wanted to see if I was interested in trade, but when they saw me, they realized that I had nothing to barter with. Instead, I gave them my dagger, and the food I had saved up to pay for passage on their ship to one of the cities. Thankfully, they were willing to teach me while we traveled, so by the time we arrived I was able to find myself a job.”

“It had to have been another five years at least that I spent in that city, before I learned about the existence of the smuggling routes. I heard about someone being thrown into jail for smuggling themselves up from a lower floor, and figured that was my ticket home.” I glanced over at her, and noticed a somewhat sad smile on her face.

“It took a while to find someone willing to do the job, and cost me everything I owned, but I made my way all the way back to the tenth floor. I found my home, my parents still living there. Happy to finally see my mother again, I waited until my father had gone to work before showing myself to her, letting her know I was back. Yet… she seemed scared to see me, even after I told her who I was.”

“She still let me stay the night, but not because I was welcomed… While I was asleep, the police charged in to arrest me. She had called them as soon as I had left the room. As punishment for being smuggled through five floors, ‘breaking into’ my parent’s home, and ‘threatening’ them to keep quiet, I was sentenced to life imprisonment on the first layer. I’m not sure how long I spent there before they came and threw you in with me as my cellmate.”

She turned to face me, her smile looking a bit less sad. “Though I guess it wasn’t really you yet, we did get along pretty good for a while. The whole jailbreak thing had been your idea in the first place. We spent weeks discussing it, and then on the day it was supposed to happen… well, you know the rest from there.”

I could see her eyes starting to water as she finished her story, turning her head away to look at the ground. “So… Even if that merchant or whatever is still in Brighton, can we just wait for him to go somewhere else to meet him? If we go back there, someone will probably recognize me, and we’ll just be in more trouble.”

I nodded my head slightly as I heard that request. “Alright… But, are you sure you don’t want to get the claw from this level? If you change into a catwoman, there’s basically no chance that anyone would know who you were anymore, right?”

She laughed bitterly as she heard that. “I’m still me, Grim. I managed to survive on my own so far. I’ll survive as who I am, and won’t change my body to run away from it. Thanks for the concern, though. I’ll be honest, I thought about changing when you told me about the claw. But, would that really fix anything? I mean, sure I’d be able to avoid being spotted if we happened to visit my home city. But after that, I’d be trapped in a body I didn’t know, and I wouldn’t be me anymore.”

Seeing her shake her head, I smiled slightly. “Alright. We should get a mortar and pestle if we can, before we leave this floor. I’ll see if I can brew us one of those potions, and we’ll have them on the next floor.”

Hearing that, she curiously looked at me. “Is there a limit on how many of those you can take? I mean… if we keep duplicating them, we could potentially get an endless supply, right?”

“Not really… I mean, we could get the supply, but we couldn’t use it.” Though, that was something to think about. “There is a limit to the use of floor items, and you can only use one of each. In the game, I thought it was just a bug, since each of them had the ‘Use Limit: 1’ note on them. After all, the duplication thing didn’t exist in the game, so how were you supposed to get more than one in the first place? You even had to carefully choose which character you used it on.”

Lilith knit her brows together as she heard that. “Then… how did you get strong enough to fight the creatures further down? It would take a lot more than some of these potions to fight a being like the fenrir.”

“Well, the effects are multiplicative.” I answered, rubbing the back of my head as we walked to get some of the grass out of my hair. “So… let’s say that I brew us a potion that will raise our magic reserves by twenty percent. Then, later we get another item with a similar effect. Instead of raising us to a total of one hundred and forty percent, it would bring us to one hundred and forty-four percent. What’s more, is that this stacks on top of our normal training. So, if we manage to train ourselves to double our original magic power, that one hundred and forty-four becomes two hundred and eighty-eight. The same thing applies with all the other enhancement type items.”

She nodded her head a bit as she digested that information. “Still, there must be quite a lot of items like that, if you are able to fight a being like the fenrir after two hundred layers.”

“There are. Most floors after the first twenty have some kind of enhancement item. Sometimes it’s in addition to another artifact, and sometimes they simply replace the artifact. Either way, we’re definitely going to want to get as many of them as we can, even if they might seem useless at the time.”

She nodded her head again after I said that, agreeing with my decision. “Alright. And Grim… thanks for listening to my story. I haven’t told it all to anyone before…” I saw a faint smile on her face as she said that, and returned it with one of my own.