A slow sound of footsteps shook Freida from her resting. She'd already ate a second time and spoon fed some milk soaked bread to her party.

It'd been impossible to get the courage to try and snuggle with the quartermaster however.

"Quite the gentle soul aren't you? They won't die from this, I assure you." Said a brown haired young man standing in front of her. He felt familiar, but his calming presence didn't ring any bells.

"I don't have much else to do while I myself recover. To what do I own the pleasure of your company?" She lazily answered while getting to her feet.

"I simply want to make some things clear. You have attacked me and are now prisoners, there's nothing to change about that. I don't wish to be cruel however, so you can rest assured that you will be treated well as long as you behave. What I actually came for however, is to ask about your former employer. You are pugilist at level fifty with plenty of stats, though some skills could be better, you are certainly strong enough to evolve your class, maybe even reach level one hundred and become some kind of powerhouse in the human realm. Why remain with them?" He articulated, slowly explaining his reasoning like a parent to his child or a teacher to his student before presenting the question.

She could only chuckle at that. The superiority in his voice contained no disgust or will to make her feel inferior, his patient attitude to her response much the same.

"Because I want to. It's not like there's some life debt or blackmail material keeping me restrained, I just don't wish to fight even more terrifying foes, politics being one of them. Why do you ask?" She asked in turn, having ideas of what the answer could be.

"I wanted to recruit you, of course. You on the front lines of my expansion would be great. I'm not going to force you to choose such position though. The dungeon will have more and more humanoids as my plans progress, so you teaching and or defending the place would also be quite useful." He said, the options taking her mind from her predictment for a bit.

"I mean, that knowledge would be used to kill humans, and despite some exceptions, I would also not enjoy fighting people." She shrugged. "So I'm afraid I will be declining that offer." This only made the young man shake his head however.

"We are basically in the middle of nowhere. It will be months before anyone comes around, nevermind clears my still expanding dungeon. No, your martial arts would mostly be used against monsters since I'd get those from other sources anyway. No need for you to fight humans either." He rebuted, his words actually making a lot of sense. "Besides any benefits we actually agree on. I mean, a normal manual of martial arts is worth around one to five hundred, but a specialised stile like the one in your stats could go for thousands of points. With a trade like that I wouldn't mind letting you have some more freedom. Maybe even free you when there is a city above ground if our cooperation continues to be fruitful." He shrugged, leaving Frieda to ponder in silence for a bit.

"I see what you mean. No matter how weak the dungeon is, we'd likely still have some trouble getting in and out without any preparation, and the same applies to anyone below high or peak tier 3. The more I wait the higher the chances my fears come to be true as more people come look for us." She nodded, the reasoning easily coming to her. "It is still not my place to spread these arts however, no matter how tempted I may turn out to get, it simply would not happen." She sighed.

This time it was Aki who stood silently for a moment before nodding again.

"I understand. Then all that is left is to ask wether you'd be up for some spar sessions at a later time." He sighed, obviously a bit let down that the trade didn't work out.

*****

Even as he walked away, the pugilist didn't seem to notice that he was the same blood soaked youth that had literally treated her like a rag doll. It was a strange feeling for him, but it was also not like he had a lot of opportunities to practice his human form.

The risk of becoming a mindless murder machine, lucky alliteration, would always be there as long as he intended on being a monster, but that was exactly why the image and ideal were powerful to begin with, so balancing out was the best he could do, just like his own mind and it's peculiarities without magic bullshit being inserted in context.

Since he'd failed to obtain the actual martial technique and developing a counter would feed the monster much more than the human, Aki decided he needed to find a hobby.

Magic was awesome but, and he couldn't believe his brain had conceived the notion as such an unshakable truth, he simply didn't have the talent nescessarry to skip over te math, coding and precision work of more powerful magic them those he already used. Body strengthening would become better as he refine his control over his body and it's basic attributes, sure, but making complex orders with mind magic or the like was impossible without both better theory crafting and rune/energy work, both of which took time and some resources.

That left him with the options of learning a craft, building a family or finishing the base of his third image, neither of the later really being feasible at the moment. He'd neither met someone he could consider as a possible life long partner nor even started with any of the city building projects he had in mind.

Having already determined through status checks that no one around knew their way around any sort of profession but face puncher, Aki could only sigh and pick up a basic enchanting book from the point shop, his pocket feeling the jolt of five thousand points just dissapearing without any sort of immediate benefit.

The dungeon on hell had been doing great, the points he inevitably got for the anima he could not hold pilling up much quicker then he though would be possible. The spenditures were high even though there were just three simultaneous instances of the same first room for now, but the thing was way past self sustaining itself.

Apparently everyone on the concentration camp thought he'd be offering some runes for whoever passed the first room, or so complained the only guy who did pass the test. Aki had gone to check on the event of that happening and just caught onto the string of curses of the guy who'd apparently spent three days trying.

Having his reputation take a hit was not exactly the best idea when you were on the kind of business that made players lose their rupees till they were dry, so instead he'd appeared before the crowd of eighteen or so men waiting for their turn and apologized, immediately suggesting a new mechanic.

People would get runes for passing through a challenge for the first time, but only a slightly higher amount of anima if they tried to repeat it, which had quite the negative effect until he explained he intended to add nine more challenges of the same level and run more instances of the room, which finally got him an ovation he left while bowing and throwing a small stone with marks that looked like a bull.

Since that day things had gone swiftly, only four other wins registered with two of those being from the same guy, where he bought them the rune and handed it over with a pat in the back for their accomplishment. He never mentioned how the test for getting the dragon rune was the hardest one with twenty five minutes of irritating musics almost necessarily about monkeys, but people just kind of assumed that since it was thanks to him that 'ear rape' had become a popular expression on the surroundings.

This series of events led him to realize that it was more than pass the time he should start doing things in a more modernised way. He really wasn't cut out to be a dungeon master straight away, there was no need for Science Mc.AIlfather, even sleep and fuck feet was a more upstanding businessman than him.

Making some scribbles was the least he could do.

Or so Aki thought, but despite his surprising talent in keeping the mana uniform through the enchantment and more than good enough imagination, there were two problems.

The first was much more general, his drawing skills were pure shit and that was affecting the overall effects he could cause.

The second however, was that there something stopping him from deviating from certain forms, some ideas finding purchase on the magic involved while other parts didn't and causing an overall pain in the ass that made all his first ten attempts to fail more and more ridiculously.

It only took about five minutes of cursing and feeling frustrated for the dungeon master to remember that he was technically operating inside several images that literally made the reality around him.

The Ginungagap was in part the corpse of it's personification, Ymir, the first giant, and the land that actually 'existed' inside of it was the domain of Yggdrasil.

Translating, if he wanted to enchant then he'd need to learn the tree's 'language' or overpower the caos and firm something in it.

He'd originally thought it idiotic to perfectly copy what he'd seen in the book, not that he'd actually be capable of doing it, since it went against what he considered enchanting to be, his own hubris stopping him from taking anything he'd briefly read too seriously.

Trying to create a hieroglyphic language in which he'd imprint his magic and ideals through geometry, mechanical engineering principles and sheer will was not going to work apparently.

This, in turn, further reduced the value of his newest purchase.

Unlike certain one eyed paranoid raven lovers and nymphomaniacs with taste for jewellery, normal people didn't tie themselves to the world tree to forcefully understand it nor were they born with intrinsic growth over their knowledge of fate and reality, meaning that said book contained either incomplete or inheritedly flawed ideas, because the above mentioned were exactly the two methods of learning universal sypher that existed.

Aki breathed deeply, irritated over the impact this revelation.

Because his magic and images were compatible with the surroundings, he'd never really noticed it, but he'd been treading the path of a lesser entity in the already convoluted tapestry of fate that was Yggdrasil.

And everything in him hated that.

His anger reaching a new level of frigidity and cold, Aki held together and restrained the fate strings trying to reach and connect to the surroundings, his unique skill the only thing even allowing him to try his hand at the monumental task.

Teleporting over to the entrance of his dungeon through his authority, his blood shot eyes and throbbing head ache didn't stop him from stepping outside and looking around till he found the damn animal.

Flooding his body with mana, Aki caught the retreating snake by the base of the neck. It hissed it's mouth open and seemed ready to speak, but he wasn't having any of it.

A small blade of pure energy formed in his hand, his cut swift and merciless.

His palm and fingers wrapped around the series of strings he'd been able to cut off, yanked it out of his chest and shoved it down the wide eyed snake's throat.

"Give it to the idiot dragon living down there or something, I am not becoming a calamity cultist or the like." He growled, releasing the god and turning around, his back to the confused man who suddenly had an even uglier smile than his own before both dissapeared.