You press onward.

The string has yet to split again.

No smooth or not so smooth surfaces get in your way.

...

Doors.

They are called doors.

...

Sometimes.

Sometimes it’s not doors.

Sometimes its just walls of dirt

...

You-

Answer the call, Oh Loyal Servant.

You obey.

You press onward.

...

You find something in your way.

It moves.

...

It’s a beetle.

Larger than most and glowing.

The beetle is looking at you.

You’re looking at it.

Neither of you has moved after you noticed each other.

...

You cease to move.

Answer the call, Oh Loyal Servant.

You obey.

The beetle takes a defensive stance as you approach.

You press onward.

You are about to step past the beetle when they attack.

The world slows to a crawl.

Critical Damage Detected!

Your HP has hit Zero.

You fall to the ground, body shattering underneath the beetle’s assault.

You lay there broken.

You are dead.

...

You cease to move.

Answer the call, Oh Loyal Servant.

You cannot.

You are dead.

Reprocessing...

You are dead.

Skeletal-Undead Perk “Death Defiance” Activated.

Fueled by mana, your body does not die unless destroyed by specific means. Mana Eyes Activated.

You see yourself entirely from a third-person perspective.

Ghost Puppet Strings Activated.

Boney Reconstruction Activated.

Slower than any time before, you begin to reconstruct your body.

The beetle, who hasn’t left, doesn’t notice.

You have regained 1 health Mana Eyes Deactivated.

Enemy Detected!

Entering Combat Mode!

Skeletal-Undead Perk “Clawed Hands” Activated

Lacking meat, and through arcane means, your boney fingers are far deadlier now than they were in life.

You stand up.

The beetle doesn’t realize what’s happening until you are swinging downwards.

One misses.

The other does not.

Your dagger-like fingers pierce the beetle’s exoskeleton.

Shoving your arm deep into its guts, the beetle crumbles instantly.

Ripping your arm out, blood spills the ground.

You rise, your leg reconstructing itself.

Fully healed, you stare down at the beetles soon to be a corpse.

A leg twitches.

...

You cease to move.

Answer the call, Oh Loyal Servant.

You stare at the broken body before you.

You obey.

You press onward.

The unmoving but broken body of the giant luminescent beetle lies motionless. Dead to the world as far as anyone was concerned. Its ichor pooled around its body, a crushed exoskeleton cracked and broken far more than what is capable of keeping the creature alive.

And then the natural healing kicked in. The caprice slowly closes, leaving scars where you left injured them.

In a painfully slow manner, the beetle no longer is in anear death state. They rise shakily, changed but clearly still alive. For a moment, the beetle stares in the direction you went. To an outsider, they could make a wild guess that something unlikely was happening.

That the beetle was thinking. Of weighing the pros and cons of chasing you down. Truly a ludicrous idea and would be quite improbable. And in this most definite hypothetical situation, precaution won out over revenge.

The scarred beetle head further into the labyrinthine like tunnels, aiming to live its life far away from the creature that nearly killed it. A little wiser. A little scared. A little tougher.

A little more bloodthirsty.

Some time after this day, a wanderer or two would recount seeing a rather large Fire Beetle, larger than most, to have been prowling through these tunnels. Recognizable not only by their size but also the handprint sized scar on their back.

They would also recount seeing many a creature found dead, bitten in multiple places.

No one ever connected the two. No one who lived to tell the tale, at least.