The river swept Levi along, twisting and turning him around until he wasn’t sure where the surface was. He did his best to hold his breath, resisting the urge to panic and try and swim upwards. The current was fierce, and Levi tried to protect himself as he slammed into a wall when the river cut a sharp right. He felt his heart rate spike, increasing his use of oxygen. The was nothing like the river he swam in as a child with his dad.

Soon Levi was at his limit, his lungs burning, screaming for air. He couldn’t stay down here much longer. Even if he risked banging his head on the ceiling he need to breathe.

Reaching for the surface, Levi uncovered his body, exposing himself to a rocky protrusion in the river. With a loud crack, he slammed his right hip into the rock, the break radiating waves of pain through his body and expelling the rest of the air from his overtaxed lungs. He unconsciously tried to breathe, inhaling water instead of air.

The river forged onward, ignorant of its unwitting passenger. It flowed around a bend, tossing Levi to and fro, before spouting out in a waterfall into an underground lake, dumping its passenger unceremoniously into the wide expanse of water. Levi only felt the throbbing of his hip and the burning of his lungs as they cried out for air before he was briefly airborne before once more being submerged. During that short window he managed to cough out some of the water in his lungs and pull in some air, sustaining himself until he managed to find his way to the surface of the lake.

Sputtering water from every orifice, Levi concentrated, activating his skill, honing in on the task at hand. Ignoring his hip, he struck out in a direction, mechanically moving his arms to propel him forward. One hand after the other, he inched closer and closer to shore. An indeterminate amount of time later he reached the edge of the lake, heaving himself over its stone lip and onto dry land. Reaching safety finally allowed Levi to relax, and now that the immediate danger was gone, his body responded.

First came the shaking, his body spazzing out. Then the hyperventilating, his body struggling to expel the remaining water in his lungs while his diaphragm imitated a hummingbird in flight. Finally came the sweet release of slumber, the whole experience taxing his mind past the breaking point. Susan was dead, and he was now alone, trapped in a dungeon with a leg he couldn’t even feel.

It was hours later that Levi finally awoke, slowly rousing from sleep’s cold embrace. He kept his eyes closed, just feeling the aches and pains of his body. His hip was reduced to a dull throb. What worried him was his right leg, or the lack of feeling he had in it. It just felt numb, like he had been sleeping in the wrong position and woke up in the middle of the night to pins and needles.

He carefully opened his eyes and craned his neck forward, inspecting his lower body. There was the same omnipresent quasi-dusk that the rest of the dungeon had, allowing him to confirm that his leg was still intact. It was even facing the right direction. Levi slowly lowed his head back down and just stared at the ceiling.

Shit he thought. Except that wasn’t quite right.

“Shit.”

Somehow speaking the word out loud felt much better, except for the hacking cough it inspired, his body still not clear of the last bit of water in his lungs. Careful of his hip, he rolled himself onto his side letting the coughing fit pass. After that Levi sat up to inspect his current domicile.

Huge. That was the only word he could use. He was in a cavern, if you could even call it that, that had a genuine lake, no ponds here. It was the kind of lake people took boats out on. The kind where you couldn’t see people on the other side. In what was surely a physics-defying move, the ceiling was low, much lower than it had any right to be. Levi pictured caverns with large arching ceilings, the natural curve of the walls supporting the massive weight of the stone above. Not so here, this ceiling was flat, almost unnaturally so, with more of a large upside-down basin shape. The surface was creepily smooth, looking like a second lake on the ceiling reflected from the water below.

Levi was currently on a ledge. There was only a short few meters between the lake and the wall behind him. The ledge extended both ways around the lake, the right side going under the waterfall he entered by, and the left side stretching out beyond his vision, following the slight curve of the lake. There was no exit in sight, but Levi wasn’t sure he could have used one anyway. Each time he moved, his hip went from a dull throb to a shooting pain, penetrating all the way up to his skull.

He had to move to get water though, and Levi could only grit his teeth and bear it as he slowly swung his body around until he was perpendicular to the lake, allowing him to lean over and scoop handfuls of water into his parched mouth.

Thirst sated, his stomach made it painfully clear that his last meal was almost a day ago. That wasn’t a huge amount of time, but after his harrowing flight through the dungeon Levi’s stomach was imitating a kitten left out in the rain, begging to be let in.

This whole thing sucked. Levi tried his best to make himself comfortable as he lay there on the stone ledge. He was immobile, trapped in a dungeon, and currently had no available food or even good prospects to find any. Even if there were fish in the lake he had no way to catch them other than his hands. He didn’t think his survival skill would allow for that, at least not at its current level.

As soon as he thought of his skill, Levi realized he should probably check his status to see if anything had changed. The System didn’t seem very good about giving notifications, and since it didn’t have a convenient HUD situated in the corner of his vision he had to actively check to see any updates.

[Name: Levi Curchman

Level: 2

Titles: System Inductee, Inheritor

Stats: (Unallocated Stat Points: 1)

Strength: 1 Constitution: 3 Dexterity: 1 Agility: 1

Willpower: 3 Insight: 1 Attunement: 1 Charisma: 1

Concentration: 2 Luck: 3

Skills: Concentrated Will, Survival, Improved Awareness]

Somehow he had gained a level. It seemed Susan had been right that skill usage contributed to leveling up in addition to just killing stuff. Concentrated Will was now level seven and Survival was a whopping level twelve. Levi also suspected he might have earned some experience from surviving the traps. It was common in tabletop games for encounters to give experience, whether they were combat, survival, or even social. He had no clue how much, if any, of that applied here though.

Next up was deciding where to put his measly stat point. It took all of five seconds for Levi to distribute it to Constitution. It would have been nice to have more balanced stats but, based on his current situation, he needed everything he could get that would help him recover enough to get out of here, and Constitution fit the bill. Although interestingly Levi had a feeling that Attunement also helped a little with healing and recovery, albeit in a smaller way.

With all his immediate concerns taken care of, Levi now had to turn to the long term and actually figure out some sort of plan. Which he sucked at. It was why he made a schedule and stuck to it back on Earth. Having a consistent schedule he could do. Mostly. He did slip up sometimes, like when he went out for Taco Bell. He was supposed to cook lasagna that night. But as bad as he was at setting and keeping a schedule, he was much worse at any kind of long-term planning. He had tried varies strategy games in the past and always failed miserably at them.

For better or for worse he currently had limited options. With a broken hip he had severely impaired mobility, at least for the short term. That ruled out any exploration. Or really anything that wasn’t just lying there. He held out some small hope that his Survival skill would come through for him, but utilizing it didn’t bring him any stunning revelations on how to find food or set his hip.

With nothing but time, Levi brainstormed potential solutions. But no matter how hard he thought, there really only seemed to be one choice realistically, and that was to level up.

He had three skills that he could level up, which would both give him stats from the skills themselves and hopefully give him experience to level up himself. As far as Levi could tell, all skills, or at least all of his, had passive and active components. For instance, Survival could be used to learn new ways of surviving, but he got the feeling it would also make him more resilient and capable of surviving in general, especially in harsh environments. Levi’s theory was that starvation should be a fast way to level up his skill, thereby increasing his Constitution stat. He didn’t really have any way of using the active part of Survival anyway, so passive it was.

For the other two skills, Concentrated Will seemed more active, with only a small passive ability to boost his concentration, while Improved Awareness was more passive, with an ability to concentrate on the skill to improve its effectiveness. Levi’s plan was to combine these two skills. He wasn’t sure if Improved Awareness would level up if he wasn’t actually finding anything, but it was worth a shot. He didn’t have any better ideas.

Levi arranged his body to give himself easy access to the lake and to make himself as comfortable as possible, which wasn’t very considering his hip and the stone he was lying on. In position, he then closed his eyes and activated his two skills.

It was harder than he thought it would be. It felt like the System helped facilitate activating one skill, but as soon as he tried to use two, the usefulness of the System dropped off drastically. He had to go back and forth a few times to get used to using both before using Concentrated Will to achieve the necessary focus to simultaneously use Improved Awareness.

When he first got the skill, Levi had been rather skeptical of how useful a concentration skill would be. Seeing how it helped him use two skills at once drove home how wrong he was with his initial conjecture. If the System was going to play hard to get with multiple skill activations, a skill that allowed him to multitask would be a godsend, especially later on.

When he started out his training, Levi could only sustain the skills for a few minutes. Minutes turned to hours, and soon he was in a state of quasi-meditation, zoning out of his body and purely focusing on activating his skills. As they days passed, his hunger got worse and worse, but as his skill levels rose, Levi became increasingly adept at activating his skills.

A few days into his practice Levi inspected his status while taking a drink break. He was making progress. He could do this. He would to this. Both for Susan and for himself.