“…And that is how I ended up here over two weeks ago. Any more questions?”

My cell-mate was laying facing away from me, mostly due to my ‘Reversed Attractiveness’ being enough to turn a former murderer, rapist and pedophile into a man trying desperately to control his gag reflex. Ever since I was thrown in this cell, something about me had felt… off… and I hoped that talking with my cell-mate would help me feel better. It didn’t.

“Yeah. Just one.”

I reclined against the cold stones of our shared cell in the depths of the castle dungeon. I was still wearing my equipment, as the guards were too disgusted with me to even bother trying to touch either me or my stuff. True, I could just bend the bars to escape, the HP bars above the heads of the Guards outside my cell made it clear that they were elites, and I didn’t want to risk my life just to see if I could respawn in this world.

“Shoot.”

“If you have such an elaborate lie about yourself, couldn’t you at least make it a bit more believable?”

“I already told you several times that you would find it hard to believe, and I already went over the story several times. My story is not going to change after the tenth time I tell it…”

“But seriously, it’s freaking unbelievable. No wonder you’re down here with me, though. Making the Princess empty her guts in front of so many people… Well, you really are a fucking ugly-ass bastard, aren’t you…?”

“She wasn’t the only one to need to clean their mouth. I guess about 40-60% of everyone there puked their guts out…”

My cell-mate snickered and said, “Wish I could’ve seen those shitty nobles and shit do that…”

I pulled up the hood of my cloak and turned over away from my cell-mate, allowing him to get up without throwing up. The sound of banging on the cell door from our side and the words of my cell-mate pleading to be moved to another cell could be heard for the umpteenth time, and the cycle was starting to get annoying. Just for shits and giggles I decided to check my menu to see if I could contact my Tamed Beings.

Much to my surprise, the menu displayed that there was a connection between myself and them, but only a partial one. They were there, somehow, but I couldn’t bring them to me, nor could I order them around. Their names were not crossed out, which would indicate their deaths, but they were colored grey. My eyes perused the formerly large list of various beings I had tamed, and I realized something interesting. Most of the mobs that I had back in the game were no longer there in the menu, but thankfully they were not the most powerful of my menagerie. There were a few names that still were there from before the transfer, but they were much fewer than the number that had once made me the Top Tamer.

I pulled out a mask from my Item Box and put it on using the menu. Rising to my feet, the despicable piece of human trash who was still pounding at the door was startled and initially tried to avoid looking at my face before realizing that the mask that I wore prevented him from seeing even a hint of my ‘hideous visage’. I paced around the cell for a while before stopping and noticing something peculiar.

There was a large black rat that seemed to gaze at me from outside of the cell door with its red eyes. I would walk over out its view and it would scurry over to a position where it could see me. I would move to the side a bit and its gaze would follow me. The rat was watching me, almost studying me with a gaze that displayed an intelligence that it should not have had.

I figured the rat would run away if it saw my ugly face, so I unequipped my mask and sure enough the rat looked at me for a brief moment before scurrying away as fast as possible. I reequipped my mask and sat down and sighed, although the rat did give me an idea that I wanted to try I the event that I could access my menu again.

“Hey, ugly.”

One of the guards called out to me in a gruff voice.

“I have a name, you know.”, I retorted. No one wants to be called ugly, do they?

The guard chuckled and said, “Not here you don’t.”

There was a pause before he started talking again.

“That rat was looking at you. That’s bad luck.”

A rat was bad luck? This was a dungeon, there had to be tons of fucking rats down here and being looked at by one of them was ‘bad luck’? I was explicitly told that no one left this section of the dungeons alive. At least, no one left it and survived for very long, so how could my luck be any worse than that? As if knowing the confusion I was experiencing, the guard elaborated.

“That rat in particular is called “Final Night”. It’s the only one down here that big, with fur that black and eyes that red. Every person that “Final Night” has taken an interest in ended up either missing or dead the next day when we do our inspection. Those that go missing end up being found in various states of dismemberment later on. No one knows who or what kills or takes the victims, and no guard who tried to stop whatever did it has been seen again.”

“Seriously…?” I was unconvinced. “So, what, do you think it is some wraith or something? A wraith would be able to phase through walls and are capable of serious debuffs, but it would need to work with some other being to deal with locks and such…”

The guard laughed aloud and got up from his chair.

“Even if you don’t believe that myth, it doesn’t matter. You’ve been down here long enough.”

My cell-mate raised his hands into the air and let out a shout of joy. We both understood what this meant.

“Oi! Get away from the doors and put your hands against the opposite wall! Legs apart! And you, keep that mask on!”

As I walked out of the cell, my hands bound behind my back, something inside me felt different. It was almost like whatever had felt wrong before was no longer there and in its place was a feeling like everything was normal. I was a smart cookie, or so my first-grade teacher had said, and I opened the menu and was giddy with excitement.

“Eyes up front! Watch where you’re going, dead man!”

As I was led through the dungeon, we eventually reached a place that seemed to be an open courtyard, and in it stood a single wooden structure. It was a set of gallows, complete with a trap door for its victim to fall through and break their neck. Princess Puke, as I had come to call her, was seated along with her father and several other people, waiting for me to swing.

“My, isn’t this a grisly form of entertainment… Do they not have blood-sports here? Nothing better to do than watch an innocent man die?”

My remarks were met with a smack to the head, which rather remarkably didn’t hurt at all and didn’t drop my HP at all. I could tell that the guy who hit me put his all into the blow too, as his mace had been swung with force enough that it should have at the very least have seriously shaken me.

However, I had no real time to contemplate my predicament as I had the hangman’s necktie placed around my throat. I panicked and summoned a being I probably shouldn’t have from my now-available repertoire of Tamed Beings. I glanced around to see if the Kingslayer from the 4th expansion had appeared and, to my horror, the Assassin of Kings had not made herself known.

“Do you have any last words, you filthy, sub-human animal?” Princess Puke yelled her question at me in her shrill voice, obviously not caring about what I had to say.

I only had one thing to yell, and it was misinterpreted by Princess Puke.

“Squeak?!”