“How long have you been here?”

To his question, blondey and I both replied quite quickly.

“My name is Koda.”

“Up.”

Why am I still repeating that sound ? Also, I seemed to have learned the name of the blonde boy.

All three of us frowned at one another and I heard another sigh. This mage keeps sighing. His massive frame may need more air than the rest of us. I looked past him towards the aftermath of the fight. I didn’t know any of them, but still,18 people dead. He glanced at me and brought my attention back to him.

“Focus. I’ll start.”

And thus started a long explanation from the curt and inexpressive man. It was spoken bluntly and without trying to give us hope. It goes like this:

He isn’t sure how long he's been here, but he’s been in the backline of a handful of groups that grew and shrunk multiple times per day. They would stumble on, picking up new explorers and leaving the corpses of those who died to bad luck. And he emphasised how that is what makes the difference here, Luck. Though skill minimizes the risk, taking life endangering risks every day will eventually catch up to a close-range fighter.

It was at this point that a bitter sounding Koda seemed to grasp the conversation enough to weigh in.

“Can’t you heal? Surely some would survive.”

Of course, healing isn’t all powerful and his teammates die instantly more often than not. The monsters are also bloodthirsty and often throw themselves into the center of the fighting. Those two reasons, along with the fact that it’s next to impossible to retreat makes it difficult to heal someone mid-battle. He said that even if you run, a monster will just chase you down the stone corridors until you pass out from exhaustion or are forced to confront it. They never seem to tire or give any chances for recouperation.

Throughout the explanation I weighed in and asked a few questions as well I probably sounded equally as bitter as Koda, but I don’t think anyone can blame us. Really, this conversation felt like a long and depressing lecture. He didn't even introduce himself. He didn't try to ask about our past again either for that matter. I think our inexperience gave him all the answers that he needed to know.

The mage finished up the conversation with another sombering fact. With just two frontliners, our odds are very, very bad. Our plan would be to continue on and hope to find more explorers before we found anything too challenging. His blight spell would be unusable for a while, but he could still heal.

Gripping the sword on his hip with almost casual indifference he said,

"We rely on luck and move forward."

And so we moved forward.