Date: March 13, 2023 - 6:00 am

Location: Sunland

The alarm goes off, and the man wakes up from his sleep. He turns off the alarm clock and does a sort of half yawn and half grown before slowly getting out of bed. As a Dungeoneer, there is no real need for him to wake up so early everyday, but he does it to try and keep himself disciplined. Or at least, that’s what he tells himself. More likely, it’s just because he is used to waking up at this time while in school and during his old job.

As per his usual routine, he goes into the kitchen, drinks a glass of water, and then goes to his washroom to deal with his business. After washing his face with cold water, he heads back into the kitchen to eat something. The breakfast of the day, and for everyday for the past several weeks, is cereal. Not quite the norm for breakfasts for working people in Sunland, but not exactly unusual either. It was, however, a bit strange for a B-rank Dungeoneer to eat something so cheap and simple for breakfast.

Even though his promoted rank was only granted recently, he has participated in about a dozen C-rank Dungeon clears. Originally, this man had also planned to save up the money from Dungeon raiding to purchase an apartment building for himself since he didn’t like being a tenant and wanted to have control over his neighbours. He also was saving up quite a bit to use cash to pay off as much of the purchase price as possible, since he didn’t like being in debt and had a general dislike of banks.

However, while he was still a C-rank Dungeoneer, he suddenly gained a certain unique Skill that ended up burning a lot of money. For now, he will just have to save up some more money again, which hopefully shouldn’t take too long since he is now a B-rank Dungeoneer, one of only a handful in Sunland.

The man finished his breakfast and then went to his window, looking at the sunrise. Then, he felt the apartment shake. Initially, the man wasn’t particularly concerned, since earthquakes were relatively common in Sunland, since it was an island nation that lay along several different fault lines. However, when he saw a bright flash of green light as well, he instantly became uneasy.

He waited with baited breath for a couple seconds after the shaking ceased. The green light dimmed significantly, but he thought he could barely still see it in the distance. Then, he heard the sounds of car alarms going off in the distance. Then, shouting. Then, screaming. Then, something clearly inhuman. Amidst these sounds, something finally caught his eye. A dark cloud appeared from the corner of a nearby building, and he stared at it more intensely.

The cloud started to break off into multiple directions, one of them heading straight for his apartment. When the cloud got closer, he saw what it was. It was a swarm of gigantic, lime-green, hornet-like creatures. Their six legs had serrated edges, their compound eyes glowed with an ominous red light, and they were about the size of full grown stallions.

Several of the hornet-like monsters seemed to notice him and went flying straight towards his balcony. Not wanting them to break it, he opened it before they arrived. The man had observed long enough, and was ready to make his move. He opened up his inventory and from out of the invisible space, two human-sized figures, dressed in samurai armour and wielding katanas, appeared. Their faces were obscured by the masked helmets they wore.

“Ah, I should have equipped one of them with a bow,” the man said as the two figures went out to the balcony and cut down the first two hornets to come close enough. The man then reached into his Inventory again, after a couple seconds, pulled out two more human-sized figures.

However, they were not armoured, and wore cheap business suits instead. Their faces were also covered up by wooden masks. They both had a bow, and a quiver of arrows. After the samurai-like figures cut down a couple more, the hornets, although looking as fierce as before, were now keeping their distance. Then, the next two were shot down by the archers in the back. There were still ten more hovering around, but the man could not wait any longer.

“Protect this area and then advance when it is cleared,” he said to the four right before he jumped off his balcony. He safely landed on the bottom of his five storey jump and started running towards the sounds of mayhem. Above him, two more hornets were shot down. When he turned the corner, he saw a terrible sight.

The alarms were still going off non-stop, for both cars and stores, but there was no more screaming. Everyone here was now dead. There were barely any hornets in this area, but in their place, were two other types of gigantic bugs. Giant, black millipedes the size of limousines crawled about the area, smashing through more of the surrounding buildings. And, amongst the corpses of the humans he saw littered about the area, he saw dozens of giant white spiders, the size of school desks, wrapping the bodies up with silk. One body was completely cocconeed, and he saw the spiders sinking their fangs into it.

At his arrival, a couple millipedes turned to face him while the rest continued to spread out to the rest of the city. Among the spiders, only the ones that were not already near human corpses paid him any heed. This gave the man sufficient time to take in the scene and plan out what to do next. Unfortunately for him, he didn’t have a high-rank Mental Resistance Skill, and he was having difficulty controlling himself and keeping himself calm in the face of this nightmarish scene.

Fortunately, the monsters that noticed him were approaching him rather slowly, perhaps cautious about this human who did not try to immediately flee. The man reached into his Inventory. It cost him almost his entire savings, and now it was time to showcase the full extent of his Skill.

From out of his Inventory, the man took out six more human-sized figures. Four of them were dressed in samurai armour, but two of them wore plate armour. The samurai-like figures wielded katanas or spears whereas the knight-like figures each carried a longsword and shield. It was at this point that the man regretted now stocking up on more bows, but he reasoned that that would have required him to have stocked up on a lot of arrows as well.

The spiders paused, curious about the sudden reinforcements, whereas the millipedes continued trundling along towards them. The samurai went in first and slashed at the millipedes. The shells of the millipedes were very sturdy, and although the man had no way of knowing at the time, they were tough enough to completely deflect ordinary, armour-piercing rounds. However, these were no ordinary katanas. They were enhanced C-rank weapons. They sliced through the millipedes, and the cautious spiders became even more wary. They started to retreat and grouped up by the other spiders that continued to bind the human corpses.

The two knights boldly made their approach towards the first group of spiders, while two of the samurai started hunting down the other millipedes. Two of the samurai remained by the side of the Dungeoneer, acting as his bodyguards. When the knights got close, all the spiders attacked together, latching onto whatever part of the knight’s body they could. The knights made little attempt to try to throw them off of them and proceeded to slash at the ones they could. The spiders tried to sink their fangs into their armour, and due to the spiders’ Defense Pierce, they could.

The spiders’ secreted their venom, but it made no impact on either of the knights. They continued to slash and kill the spiders or smash them with their shields. More spiders came over to try and take down these knights, but also to no avail. The Dungeoneer had a brief smile of satisfaction.

His warriors were created using his unique Skill, Doll Master, and being inorganic, were unaffected by the spiders’ venom. They were equipped with C-rank equipment that he either enhanced with his Enhancement Skill, or created using a combination of his Smithing and Enchantment Skills. The ones he made were sometimes of lower quality, but they were also cheaper than having to buy them on the open market. If he had more time and wasn’t in such a rush to equip ten of them (still ran out of time and money for two of them), maybe he wouldn’t be as broke. However, he became almost obsessed with creating them and wanted to make as many as his Skill allowed. He even wasted a lot of time remaking some of them since he also wanted them to appear as human-like as possible.

The Dungeoneer’s feeling of satisfaction at the performance of his warriors, though, would soon come to an end. The Dungeon Portal flashed once more, and a colossal monster emerged from the portal. A giant, grey centipede came out of the portal and twisted itself up into the air, revealing its massive length. It extended itself to a nearby building, and started to coil itself around it right as the entirety of its body had finally exited the portal. On top of its tremendous length of at least six hundred feet, it also moved with incredible speed.

As if the centipede couldn’t care less about the resistance the Dungeoneer was putting up, it didn’t turn to face him even once and just continued to rest on top of the building. When it was at the top, it used its lower body to squeeze and pulverize the outside of the building. With so much of the building destroyed, the rest of it completely collapsed, and the centipede crashed onto the ground. However, it was completely unscathed and it emitted a strange, high pitch noise at intermittent intervals. To the Dungeoneer, it was almost as if the centipede was laughing, like it was simply enjoying itself and reveling in the destruction it caused.

It continued to ignore the Dungeoneer and left to start climbing another building. The Dungeoneers Dolls continued to fearlessly fight the monsters on ground while he barely kept himself standing, instead of collapsing in sheer terror. In the distance, perhaps since now an entire building was gone now, he could more clearly hear screams and shouts in the distance. Then, he heard the sound of grinding stone and rubble as the giant centipede began crushing another building.

“We’re done for,” the man said to himself.