I didn’t leave.

No.

I had no intention of running away. It was my goal to send everyone back, which I had seen too; now I had to take the decision.

Kill them.

It was my thoughts to unravel . . . no, not unravel, but understand. Unraveling was a word too egoistic for someone of my strength and position. To call what I was to do ‘unravel’ would have removed the dangerous aspect from this place, the dungeon, and termed my struggle . . . our struggle as an adventure — which it wasn’t. Such I neither had the guts nor the understanding to pull off. I hadn’t pushed the others back in order to return myself. It was my intention to struggle my way through.

And kill the bugs. Make them pay.

And hopefully have my revenge. It was my intention to give Justice to Billy and the others from the farm.

Destroying everything which comes my way, leaving not a single leaf unturned. Burn the whole dungeon to the ground, and bathe in the ashes of the dead!

And if I could, I would kill everything that tried to stop me.

“Yes. I will kill them all, all of them. None will be spared! NONE,”

Unknowingly, it was this acceptance of my inner feelings which brought to surface a deluge of emotions so raw, and hatred so deep, so red, I found it hard to keep myself centered and calm. Until then I had no idea I could be so vile, so straightforward. A minute before I might have been juvenile but I was focused, with the acceptance however, I lost all that made me myself.

It was me that rushed past the opening in the spike barrier melted by the caterpillars, but I had no control over the legs which were moving or the red-tinted sight I was seeing.

I, in reality, found myself in pain, conflicted. In so much pain I was, it is indescribable. It was a pain not of physical or mental order, but an emergency of someplace much deeper in my body, someplace I had no recollection of. It was a struggle. It was an explosion of wildness, of upturned meanings and structure. It was the result of accepting something emotionally attuned yet, unfamiliarly vulgar and shapeless. It was the emergence of my rage.

Rage has activated.

I was a sickly sorrow, a moon burning red with vengeance. I was a river of blood; of a wet, sticky and gleaming liquid drained of all life and warmth. At that moment I was death herself.

I was bathed in a spray of fuming poison the moment I stepped outside the shiver of my creation. I took it upon my body. I breathed the fumes rising from the damp, invading liquid. I trudged through the melting fibers of the stalk which made my path. I screamed as the poison invaded through my pores and struggled against my resistance. I pressed forward against the spray and entered the giant’s mouth that had almost taken all of my friends from me. And I did it all without a single shred of dignity or panic or care or worry.

And I bit into the succulent flesh of its mouth. And I gored its throat with my mandibles. And I washed its insides with a mist of burning, raging, melting acid. And I ate. I ate without reason, without hunger, without fulfillment. I ate while it lived; I ate its flesh as it died. I tore the giant from the inside out. And I cared not a single bit about the agony it suffered or the pain it experienced.

With its death, I moved forward. I blasted out through its tail and sensed my enemies converging at the stalk to meet me. I rushed their way. Like me, they also moved without a shred of fear or worry or care — the death of the fearful giant neither hampering nor enraging them. Their resolution was a line on a stone: straight, engraved and unwavering. My rage was a result of the consequences, of my fear, of my anger, of my youth.

Those who could, attacked me from far. I was rained upon with dark spheres of concentrated poison, which I didn’t dodge nor defend against. Slowly, my resistance dwindled. Slowly, my fear diminished. Slowly, the destruction seemed not so destructive, and my tinted sight, a new norm. Slowly, I lost myself to the pleasure of being a third person in the game of perceptions. Slowly, I grew stagnant, as an intellectual, as a spirit, as a mind. And all that was left of me was rage.

The poison damaged me and the plant below. So what? My resistance rose as my health dropped. My body ached yet strength flowed. And I felt so powerful!

My opponents were balloons filled with clear fluids that popped when poked with a sharp spike. The poisonous shy ones ballooned every time I neared them, releasing hundreds of thin yet sharp needle-shaped hairs, which some ruptured my body, some ricocheted off my exoskeleton, a few logged inside my eyeballs, and the others took roots on the leaves. I always answered their aggression in the same way. My body dissolved what it could, healed what it wanted, and never feared getting hurt.

Most, I killed the way they had attacked me — with acidic poison. A generous mix of my dissolving concoction I dumped into the shredded wounds of my opponents and left them to struggle. All dealt in this fashion wriggled and coiled around their head and grew rigid and fell off the stalk. They all paid with pain.

The caterpillars of the other kind, the ones which could dash and charge and bite and could ricochet, I answered personally. I met their charge with charge, their bites with my bites, their ricochet with mine, and displayed brutality of another dimension. By the time I was done dealing with them my body had started returning to my control, and my mind was soothing; it was not an initiative from my side, but the exhaustion of the force driving my body heedlessly.

First, recovered my tinted red sight and detailed me a view of the battlefield which had remained behind as the result of my rage. The once green plant was now but a desolate stretch of the stalk with only a single piece of leaf remaining behind. Half of it was gone, obliterated, and the rest of it was nothing but a blackened and dissolving skeleton of its past. Then, returned the control I had forfeited, my senses, and the pain. Oh, so horrifying a pain it was. So agonizing, I believe, not a winkle less than what my enemies suffered. And after the pain, I experienced emptiness, complete disappearance of emotions, and exhaustion of both physical and mental order.

As I stared dazed at the wonderment of what I could achieve, a buzzing started echoing around me. It was another foe, another wave of menace. It was the one that had brought me out of the abyss, carried me all the way back to the only foothold in the bludgeoning darkness, and left me behind without any questions asked. It was the lacewing flier that hadn’t cared about the struggle of its companion caterpillars, unlike me. The time of its appearance I had slightly forwarded, but that hadn’t changed its preplanned course of action – which was to act only in case the rest of its kind were eliminated.

Alone it was, but it was going to be a difficult fight. For one, I didn’t know anything about it; another, I was in the poorest condition ever of my small-yet-violent existence. Health was one thing, because I could still heal. I had memorized heal to use under such a circumstance, after all. But my depleted mana and stamina were a cause of concern. Mana, I could regenerate at the rate of 4 points per minute thanks to my mana-saturated surroundings, but stamina was a problem that had left me unmovable.

A short appraisal set my opponent at E-tier with 75% of the points dumped into agility and dexterity. It was going to be fast and nimble, an opponent of the worst kind in my situation. This was going to be one quick fight, however; a complete opposite of what I wanted. I moved to the other side of the stalk to gain cover and time and used the memorized heal to remove the worst of my afflictions. The skill could take a while to work. The golden glow of its production had to seep into my body for it to take effect. I wasn’t allowed the comfort, however, for my former steed thundered my way sooner than I could have wanted.

My wounds had closed, but my health was only quarter-way filled when it ripped past me from the other side of the stalk and turned to a stop facing me, a few inches from my position. I knew it would act and it did. I had to cancel heal and let the glow disperse in order to gain charge of my body, but my movement came in the form of stumbles and flailing when it should have been seamless and balanced. I slightly panicked as a few of my legs even slipped, refusing to take hold of the stalk. My enemy charged with its mandibles open and me —feeling a dodge impossible— quickly let loose a wind cannonball from my arsenal, emptying one of the nine slots. Unfortunately, it maneuvered a roll around the attack, which sped past it, easily dodging that which had been my sure shot method of killing buggers like it for the longest time. Correcting course, it pounced at me once again. This time, however, I managed a dodge —somehow with shaking legs— and it hurled past me, grinding against my back.

I glanced at the winger turning around and hurried over to the last remaining leaf. The winger pointed its bottom half in my general direction instead of charging, and let lose long translucent laces of clear liquid upon me.

25 mana in my pool and an attack of unknown gradient and effect; I went with disrupting wave of cancel to make sure I wouldn’t be stopped midway from reaching the leaf. The liquid dispersed. Unfortunately, unlike what I wanted, the dispersed liquid didn’t dematerialize rather turned into vapor -- thoroughly hardening around everything it came in touch with, including me.

It formed a shallow but complete layer of grainy white plaster around my body and the plant. The fact of the matter is that, although the vaporous mixture covered a large area of the plant, the plaster formed from its hardening wasn’t very strong. And yes, even though I was taxed in terms of both mana and stamina, a few short strengthened pulls and jerks allowed me to break free of the menace — not completely, but enough to move my burdened body.

The winger, however, had me mistaken helpless and was diving to end my story, a silver glow covering its whole body. He was using a skill. That much I had learned to figure out. If there was one thing I had realized from my fight with the hopper enroute to the farm, it was the unquestioning effect that racial skills have on their users and their status. The hopper berserk state had allowed it to climb past me in terms of raw stats, thus harming me even while I was in a perfect state of being. Here, I was already half-dead and decaying; hence in no condition to let matters of life and death play out automatically. I had to do something. I knew it, but to act where I could hardly move, I had no idea what to do. That’s when I remembered a skill made for such a moment of crisis — even its skill description said so: To use when you can’t move. Marvelously precise it was.

I used the skill and felt the grueling effect of mana starvation, for the skill needed twenty points of mana to work, which I had to the point. The skill had my body stiffened and compressed and rounded instantly. Next, what happened was a work of art, for neither of us was left in the condition to act against each other? The winger had rotated like the ladies from before and slammed me from the side with its large —and hardened— tail like a battering ram, ringing me like a bell and dropping my health by a hefty 24, even though the skill called fortress had not only increased my defense by 100% but had also added 75% damage reflection to the mix. Even then, with a toppling defense of 90, I lost a fourth of my already quartered health.

The bug conversely had a huge [-84 hp] trail above its head after the collision, halving its total health; and it lost its tail. So there’s that.

It was also the reason that I decided to face it right there and then instead of running away, because not only was it in a stunned state and injured but had also lost its method of producing those hardening laces. Unfortunately, though, fortress is a skill which once used can keep going on for a whole minute, so it wasn’t that I didn't kill the winger while it was still vulnerable; I just couldn't.

Once again, thanks to home conditions, it was the now bottomless winger which first came to consciousness. It obviously attacked me right then without confirming its condition. It was something I had noticed about all those that infested the depths of the dungeon floors. They were certainly vile and murderous, but also insanely empathetic toward themselves. They seemed to have no inhibitors against self-injury or problem with such; unlike even the parasite infested ants of my past, for even those sordid bastards had feared death. Perhaps, nothing remains of their former self whether memories of inflictions? I wondered as the leaking winger took a shot at me with its scarred jaw.

It struck me once, and then a second time, and then sprayed upon me a jet of poison against which fortress came out as impotent. Neither the active nor my passive skill for that matter kept me safe, as the dissolving poison stuck to my body like slime and worked its way through my defenses.

[-.75HP/Sec], the system displayed me a counter in bloody red.

Resistances I had many, but stamina I had little remaining. Skills need mana to operate, but resistances feed upon stamina. Had I mana to purify the poison I would have done so, but as I was, the only option I saw I took the moment my bypassed fortress crumbled like the stalk underneath my six feet. I produced all the poison I could and showered it upon my body, covering the invading liquid in a wave of its own nemesis. Four points of mana I had regenerated, all gone in that maneuver. The world spun as the effect of mana starvation intensified and the poison entered my body. It burned me from the inside, slowly, thoroughly. Everything about me started shrinking . . . coiling . . . dying.

My opponent, I saw through my tunneling vision heaving and crawling toward me. Its obliterated tail had taken more than its method of creating laces I learned. Insects, I had forgotten, had their stomachs in their tails. So by losing its bottom, it had essentially lost all of its stamina in an instant. We were both suffering, but my anguish soon came to an end when the poison I had released relieved me of the foreign force. Left with only a tenth of my total health, I ravishingly inhaled the cool air to stomp the fire burning inside my body, and ended the fight with a wind cannonball.

I looked around after the fight ended and the last leaf remaining of the many which once grew from the plant attracted my attention. I wondered how similar its story was to mine. We both had trundled through the sickness which was this dungeon and survived. If there was a cause to my sorrow, it was that, while my fate was still in my hands, the leaf's fate was sealed. It was going to disappear along with the stage and the plant, just like how the natives had all but crumbled into lifeless embers upon death and become undone of all that they once were.

{Congratulations! You have completed Stage-2 of the Second floor!}

{Experience earned will be provided once you conquer the Second floor.}

{Graveyard of Hate is now open. Would you like to proceed?}

The system asked. I disagreed. Looking between the leaf and the sphere which had come to existence at the broken top of the plant, I started climbing once again. This time there was no more wonderment or conflictions filling my mind, but responsibility and resolution for which I had stayed behind.