So it should come as no surprise to anyone that Brock Beetle was exactly the same unpleasant shit when we dipped into the dungeon as he was outside of it.

Most of his swagger came exclusively from his level--58, more than high enough for him to feel unrepentantly superior to a level 30 scrub, if not quite enough of a difference for him to be able to still claim he was twice my level. With his equipment and class bonuses, he no doubt would do a lot of damage if he hit me--just like the Devil would have done a lot of damage, and maybe even one-shot me, if he had been able to lay a finger on me any of the times he fought me.

But in the grand scheme of things, he was a brute-force, front-line fighter.

The first four levels of Armand Bayou were a classic minotaur-esque maze. The standard mob type for the zone were "zombie pygmy dire boars"--they were about the size of a smallish pig, undead, with big tusks, a lot of scars, and hit like a ton of bricks. Undead were annoying for me, because they tended to not take extra damage from critical hits, but as zombies they were also dumb as a ton of bricks. In watching Brock fight one of them I could see they were really easy to kite and would never be a problem for anyone with above-average agility and a wit sharper than a balloon.

So of course Brock, at nearly twice their level, struggled fighting them.

"Holy shit! There's one," he said, after having spent at least five minutes lost in the first hundred feet of maze (which I'm pretty sure didn't actually change when you went back in). "I've fought these things before. Watch out, they're fast."

And, well, it was faster than him, I guess.

Watching Brock fight made me want to give lessons on normal everyday swordfighting, not critical bladework or martial arts. He used his sword like an axe at every opportunity, and he honestly seemed to think that in order to hit the pig, he had to first, taunt it into charging, second, step out of the way, third, chase after it, fourth, wait for it to turn around and face him, and then finally smack it in the head. He had gotten so used to the pattern that before the boar got to him, he had stepped aside and seem poised to sprint to try to catch it.

Naturally, he required multiple passes of this to kill one boar. I could have helped, except I was too busy trying to sublimate my desire to weep for the human species into laughter, and it wasn't going well. I don't know how deep he'd gone in the dungeon to get almost to level 60, but he had clearly been carried along by someone. Fighting one boar, not even for the first time, he needed Louise to keep him in good health.

Now, to be fair, I can't expect Brock to have a fighting style that matches mine. Not everyone goes for high agility and critical hits. His style, if I were to give it any credit at all, would work if he was outfitted to be an armored tank. He really just wanted to stand there and be in the middle of everything from the moment the fight started until the end. And he had the stamina and the HP pool to win that fight even without Louise, even with the boar scoring a critical hit on him late in the fight. But... he's... just no good.

"He's just no good," I said as much to myself as Louise, as I stood there next to her watching him.

"He just needs a little help," she replied, with the kind of obvious but very sweet disbelief that comes from trying very hard to be optimistic.

And again, to his credit, by the time the fight was over, he was ready to go again. He wasn't a panting, disheveled mess, he wasn't down to his last hitpoint or anything.

"How about I take the next one, and you can give me some pointers," I offered as we moved down the hall.

"What, you think you're ready for them? Feh." Brock flourished his sword a couple times idly. "Sure, sure. I'll save your ass when you get in too deep, don't worry."

Of course, the next encounter was two zombie pygmy dire boars, one a flame variant. Brock had just started to offer an assurance that he would take the one on the left (that is to say, the variant) when the Executioner's Blade, heavily backed with telekinetic force, uppercut that pig's face. It wasn't enough for a one-hit knockout, but as long as the pig was airborne, I could do whatever I wanted with it; I flung it down the hall to give me time for the other. Since I couldn't effectively double-wield with the big weapon, I used the push against the flame boar to spin myself in the air and ended up dropping a strike on the other pig's ass.

Not Brock's, I mean. The literal boar's ass.

That attracted its attention, and unlike the first blow was nothing like a critical hit, not that those were very effective. I unsummoned the larger sword and flung myself backwards as soon as my feet touched ground, and the second boar charged at me. I pulled out my two black blades, and again making good use of telekinesis, popped myself just high enough into the air to plunge one sword into each of its shoulders as it went underneath me. I was aiming for the eyes, honestly, just to stick it to Brock, but the tusks... well, they were big enough to get in the way.

I let the swords go before I got dragged along with it, and almost botched the landing, but tucked and rolled and came back up with the same two swords at the ready. The fire variant was still recovering, so I gave myself a good push at the closer boar and managed to get a very clean strike straight up the asshole.

I would never have done that if wikipedia didn't assure me it was a good idea. That article had way too many details and citations about critical hits to the asshole. Specifically, a finishing blow to any pig-type enemy... yup, just as it said it would, the thing disappeared and instead of perfect corpse that I normally got for solo-killing an enemy, I received the corpse in my inventory pre-cooked, as though the whole pig had been put on a stick and rotisserie-roasted. Which... didn't help me much because it was still rotten zombie meat even if it was now seasoned and char-broiled.

Fuck administrators, man.

The fire boar was finally coming back at me with a mad dash, and I swapped my main two swords for the Executioner's, again, and delivered a double-hand overhead chop, which was enough to finish it off. This time, I got the perfect corpse, as well as a fire mana gem as loot for defeating a variant.

And then I just strolled back to Brock and Louise, as smug a motherfucker as I could possibly be. Brock's face was some kind of unreadable mask that I assumed was, or would soon become, pure hatred, but I ignored him and pulled the fire gem out and tossed it to Louise. "Come on, let's keep going. I'm hoping we'll see something challenging before the day's out."

Louise, to her credit, followed after me, if a little confused. "You're pretty good at that," she said. "Do you take lessons?"

"Just a lot of experience," I replied, nonchalant.

It took Brock a minute to realize he'd been left behind.

"Hey," he shouted from around two corners--fortunately for him, no intersections, or he might've gotten lost. "Hey, HEY. What the fuck was that?"

I just stopped and looked over my shoulder at him, hoping that I could invent a Smugness Aura skill just by practicing the right, innocent-seeming facial expression. "Is something the matter?"

"Where the fuck did you get that kind of attack power? Those things are monsters! It had almost 300 health!"

"Oh, that? All of my weapons are rare drops from boss monsters." I shrugged.

"Rare dro--how the fuck did you afford that?"

"I didn't buy them. I won them all in Pearland Dungeon."

Brock looked at me for a minute, and I declined to stay standing there waiting for him to speak. I kept moving forward, finally hitting an intersection of the maze, and sent my telekinetic senses out, hoping (against hope, as it turned out) that I could sense through walls or find some other clue to which way we should go. I looked to Louise for guidance. "Any idea which way we should go?"

"My god isn't one of the Dungeon Gods..."

"Oh, right." I sighed. "Guess we just have to--"

I might have gotten punched in the back of the head if Brock's footsteps weren't so loud, and if I wasn't completely expecting him to try to hit me for being a smug asshole. His face, though, when I bounced up into the air and latched onto a nearby wall, was a little more serious than I expected.

"What the mat--"

"I know who you are." Brock stepped up to shield Louise from me. "You're a fucking murderer."

I... suppose it was cute, in a sense, that Brock obviously didn't think of himself as a killer at all, and thus put himself and me at completely opposite ends of some kind of moral spectrum. "Well," I replied. "Yes, that's true."

Louise looked at me with alarm, but Brock just leveled his sword at me, as though I hadn't just proved that I outclassed him. "You've killed people. For real. You're a monster."

"And if you'd bothered to ask literally anything--"

"Just shut the FUCK up." He tensed like he wanted to charge me. "Solo diver of Pearland who killed five people--"

"Only two--"

"SHUT UP! I won't hear your lies."

"Well, three, I guess," I admitted.

"Stay the fuck away from us." He used his off hand to try to shepherd Louise away from me, backing down one of the two available paths. "If you follow us, you're dead. Got it?"

I hung on the wall and stared at Brock until they went around a corner. Since he hadn't done it, I went into my interface and deregistered Brock from my party. Then, because I just couldn't bear to see Louise most likely get murdered trying to follow Brock solo through the dungeon, I popped on my stealth items and followed them.

The irony of a murderer stalking his teammates in the shadows to save them was not lost on me.