Blake held the bone of one of the rabbicorns from the first room in his left hand. He had lit the top on fire to replace his torch that he had to leave behind. The rabbicorn bones, when covered in viscera, had proven to be highly flammable.

  The darkness receded from in front of him as he walked down the tunnel. Soon enough Blake come to another room. It was identical in all ways to the first room he had run into except there were only two other exits from this room.

  Ten rabbicorns turned toward Blake to attack. His second battle in the den went much faster than the first. From the very beginning, he maneuvered the monsters into each other through tactical dodging.

  Despite going faster his makeshift torch was down to weak embers by the time he was done. The viscera and bone might have been flammable enough to use for short periods of time but wood was always going to be better. Scavenging through the new monster corpses Blake lit a new torch before choosing a new tunnel at random and moving on.

  The pattern repeated itself with Blake coming to a new room, killing all the monster, then moving through a tunnel at random. He lost track of time while exploring, the lack of a sun making things difficult.

  Not every room was identical but they were all variations of the same thing. A round room of either stone or dirt with rabbicorns filling it. Sometimes there would be boulders, roots, or other obstacles but nothing of value. The number of rabbicorns varied between 10 and 15 per room. Doing more than 10 at a time pushed Blake to his limits even with his newest insight into combat positioning but he never took more than glancing injuries.

  While exploring Blake had hoped to run into a natural treasure or two but had no luck. It did remind him that he had no way to identify a natural treasure unless it was glowing or giving off some other obvious clue that screemed ‘look at me, I’m a treasure’.

  After crossing three rooms in a row without finding any new monsters Blake realized he was backtracking. He had not planned ahead in his navigation and had been traveling on a whim. This was coming back to bite him as he didn’t know if he had cleared all the rooms yet. If so, where was the boss?

  Blakes memory had reached beyond normal limits and he was perfectly capable of retracing his steps but that didn’t give him a sense of direction. All he could do was point out which tunnels he took and in what order. Forming a map from his memories was a skill that he would have to take time to train. His Memory and Alacrity stats would help but they only represented potential to be utilized.

  At this point, Blake had crossed more than ten rooms and killed over 100 rabbicorns. This scared him. Common knowledge was that a medium-density region should have 50 at most and that was at higher tiers. At tier 0 he should be looking at somewhere around 20 to 30 rabbicorns across the whole den and that included the sub-boss.

  If there were an abnormal amount of monsters in the den what did that mean for the sub-boss? Would it be stronger than what he thought possible? Perhaps it could break the limits on sub-boss abilities and wield magic.

  Blake tried to think positive thoughts. Spawning monster took energy so maybe the sub-boss would be weaker. The energy to spawn all the extra monsters had to come from somewhere and the sub-boss was an easy answer.

  Unfortunetly, Blake was quickly proven wrong. He jogged through the coriddors searching through the rooms as fast as possible for the sub-boss. His newest torch wouldn’t last long and he wanted a fresh kill to make a new torch from.

  Wanting to kill something just to make something from its body would have disgusted Blake before coming to the spirit realm. Now he ran around a den full of dead bodies that he had made, holding a bone he had ripped from the corpse of a monster and was letting the viscera drip onto his hand without a second thought.

  Following his first encounter with a rabbicorn Blake had been too scared to leave his glade and wash up. He had been covered in the blood and guts of that first monster for weeks because of his trauma. That didn’t even mention the puke and crap from his encounter with food poisoning. While he didn’t want to do that again it did leave him immune to the little things like getting blood and guts on his hand for perfectly practical reasons.

  Entering the next room Blake was met with a sight he had been dearly hoping wouldn’t come to pass. The room was the same shape as the others with a flat stone floor, curved walls, and rounded ceiling. It was many times the size of the other rooms, however. The room was filled with rabbicorns and he wasn’t able to get an accurate count within the short period of time he had before they attacked.

  In the center of the chamber was a monster that Blake could only assume was the sub-boss. It looked similar to the other rabbicorns but its lethality had been taken to another level. Over two meters tall the sub-boss towered over not only the normal rabbicorns but Blake as well. Its body was more humanoid in shape with well-defined fingers on its hands and legs that could be used for walking and running as much as hopping.

  Its muscles rippled under its fur and Blake swore he saw a glimmer of intelligence in its eyes. Its eyes were on the front of its face. On Earth, this was the sign of a predator. Prey animals had eyes on the sides of their heads to give them a peripheral view to keep track of predators stalking them. Predators had eyes on the front of their heads to keep sight of their prey. The rabbicorns maintained the side eyes of a normal rabbit but not the sub-boss.

  It still had the white fur of the normal rabbicorns but it was shorter and not as fluffy. It left the monster looking more hairy than furry. On the top of its head, the sub-boss had a horn similar to the rabbicorns but no one would mistake it for the same thing. The rabbicorns had horns around half a foot in length on the high end but the sub-boss’s horn was a foot long.

  The horn glimmered in the light of Blake’s torch. There was a sense of power radiating from it. It took Blake a moment to realize that the sensation was being read through his Affinity. He hadn’t run into anything except region borders that could be picked up by his Affinity.

  That wasn’t good for his chances in a fight but it did tell him that the horn could most likely be classified as a natural treasure. He really wanted a spear made from that horn. Blake could imagine it now. A supernatural spear capable of piercing any target he set his mind to. He hadn’t run into anything capable of resisting his current spear but the benefits provided by his Talent would be great too. There was no way a spear crafted with a natural treasure was not classified as high quality.

  Blake only had a moment to take it all in before the first rabbicorns began charging at him. Taking in the sight of at least 20 rabbicorns charging at him backed by a sub-boss he did the only thing he could. He turned and ran.

  The only reason Blake hadn’t run from his first fight was because it hadn’t been an option. There had been enemies on every side cutting off his route of escape. After that none of the fights had pushed him to the point where he had needed to consider it.

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  That was not the case in this fight. Blake had already cleared out the nearby chambers giving him a route of escape. Only, escape wasn’t his goal. Blake knew he couldn’t take on such a large group all at once so his plan was to separate them out. The tunnel acted as a natural choke point to limit the amount of rabbicorns that could reach him at once.

  Alone that would not have been enough. The rabbicorns could build up speed when charging over longer distances and their horns were still dangerous to Blake. His fights with them always involved him dodging the rabbicorns’ charge and retaliating while their backs were turned. That wasn’t an option in a tunnel.

  Luckily the tunnels were short. Reaching the chamber at the end of the tunnel Blake jumped to the side just in time for a group of rabbicorns to charge passed. The monsters spilled into the room in a wave tumbling into each other in their eagerness to kill the intruder. With the monsters getting in each other’s way for the moment Blake picked off a few from the edges of the group.

  It was only a fraction of the monsters after him but it was a start. With the rabbicorns quickly getting back to their feet, Blake ran down another tunnel to try and repeat what had happened. It was a success but he wasn’t as happy about it as he wanted to be. As he ran out of the second chamber he glanced back to see the sub-boss staring at him.

  Blake thought he saw a little smirk but its facial features were too alien to him to be sure. It walked slowly behind the charging rabbicorns and the monsters around it looked to be getting to their feet faster. That was not a good sign.

  Despite his mounting dread, Blake was able to repeat his performance three more times before anything changed. The rabbicorns’ numbers had been cut down to below half and had the sub-boss not been a concern he would have been able to take on the remnants without resorting to his tactical retreat strategy. That’s assuming you don’t consider dodging a tactical retreat.

  The sub-boss lifted its foot high in the air. Blake got a good look at it to see it wasn’t as big as you would a rabbit’s foot to be on a creature so big but it was still much bigger than a human’s foot and covered in white fur. The sub-boss stomped its foot into the ground with a loud thump. It repeated the action at regular intervals over the next couple of seconds.

  Blake wasn’t sure what to make of that and began moving on to the next chamber. He was already in the next chamber killing off more rabbicorns when he hear it. A rumble shook the earth. It took a moment for him to identify what it was. It was the sound of rabbicorns charging but not the ones he was fighting.

  From one of the side tunnels in the newest chamber, a group of rabbicorns joined the fight. It was a group of ten that had clearly come from an uncleared room. Blake wanted to scream. Not out of fear or panic but rather frustration with himself. He had known that boss-type monsters usually had the ability to call on every living monster in the den and sometimes the region but he had been impatient to get the fight over with and hadn’t done his due diligence.

  Blake had not spent the time to map out the whole den and mark down where the rabbicorns were to make sure they were all dead. No, he had decided that since he hadn’t run into any new enemies for a while it must be safe to approach the obviously different room without preparation.

  Over the next ten minutes Blake continued to lure the monsters into chamber after chamber to pick off the ones at the edge of the group. He barely kept up with the growing horde of monsters during this time. It never grew back into the same size it had been originally but horde got close.

  Blake had several close calls when monsters had come down tunnels he was running down. It was only because the rabbicorns didn’t start to charge before seeing him that he was able to slip between them and run passed. His breathing was coming heavily and his legs felt heavy.

  It took a lot to tire out Blake these days with his Constitution stat but running as fast as he could while fighting for almost half an hour was a stretch even for him. As new groups of rabbicorns came less and less frequently the sub-boss sent out its call again. This time it put more force into each stomp and went on for longer.

  Blake suspected this was to call in the rabbicorns from across the region not just those in the den but there was nothing he could do about it. Trusting that at least his preparations outside the den had been sufficient Blake kept working to clear out the rabbicorns.

  As the minutes passed with no sign of new rabbicorns the sub-boss began to show signs of irritation. The next chamber over, with no signs of rabbicorn reinforcements, the sub-boss took direct action against Blake for the first time in the fight.

  With a speed far surpassing the normal rabbicorns the sub-boss charged at Blake. He only had a moment to feel surprised before dodging out of the way. Unfortunately, the sub-boss was no stupid rabbicorn incapable of doing anything but run in a straight line. At the speed it was moving it couldn’t turn on a dime but it could reach out its hand.

  From its human-like fingers claws extended tearing into Blake’s arm in passing. He let out a scream almost dropping his spear. His Constitution was useless against the sub-boss’s claws. The monster quickly shifted its body to engage Blake more directly not sticking to the rabbicorn pattern of repeated charges.

  Only a few rabbicorn were alive at this point in the fight and both Blake and the sub-boss ignored those that remained. Without numbers, they were little more than obstacles to maneuver around. Claws extended, the sub-boss dashed at Blake.

  Blake hadn’t trained to fight creatures with claws. A major oversight given claws were such a common characteristic of even normal animals let alone monsters. There was nothing he could do about it now while fighting for his life.

  Moving his spear into the way of the claws, Blake stepped back trying to buy some space. His spear worked best when he had room to stab with but the sub-boss didn’t allow him any reprieve. It pushed forward slashing at him with both hands. Wounds began to cover him to accompany the gashes in his arm that the sub-boss had already scored.

  Things were not going well. Blake was unable to get a single strike in while the sub-boss was able to hit him repeatedly. His blocking and dodging skills were enough to prevent the monster from getting a good hit in but the damage was adding up. If he didn’t finish the fight soon he risked bleeding to death.

  Blake felt helpless. Memories of arriving in the spirit realm where he had been trapped in that void for eternity only feeling pain blossomed in his mind. His first encounter with a monster where he hadn’t been able to fight back. The food poisoning that came after which he had been pushed into by circumstances beyond his control.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not again.’

  More memories came to Blake. His months of training and gaining confidence in his Strength. His first fight with a rabbicorn one on one where he had slain it with ease. Traveling the realm marking out regions while pushing his training even further. Entering the medium region for the first time and finding that he was strong enough to not only survive but kick some monster rear.

  Entering the den, specifically, the first room, where he thought he was going to be stuck in a cycle of endless dodging forever but pushing through despite that. He had surpassed his own expectations and maintained a state of calm meditation long enough to come up with a solution.

  Blake’s attention returned to the monster in front of him. He had pushed through, survived, and thrived every challenge put in front of him. By himself. He had built the base where he lived. He had come up with the training regiment that taught him how to fight well enough to take on a medium region alone. He had taken the horns of his defeated foes to craft weapons and tools capable of shaping the world around him.

  With a guttural roar, Blake shoved his spear forward, it was lengthwise to block the monsters claws, before letting it go. Leaning forward he charged shoulder first into the sub-boss tackling it to the ground. The monster was stunned by his actions not moving for a second. That was plenty of time for Blake to go all out with his fists.

  He hadn’t trained with unarmed combat and it was antithetical to his Talents nature but his Strength made up the diffrence. He wailed on the monsters face, punching with all his might. If that wasn’t enough he repeatedly kneed the monster in the chest caving it in.

  By the time Blake regained awareness of his surroundings, the sub-boss was long dead. At some point during their fight, the remaining rabbicorns had disappeared, either dead or having run away, leaving him alone in the chamber. He had dropped his torch leaving him in almost complete darkness but the sub-bosses horn let out a soft glow.

  Blake, covered in gore from both the sub-bosses body that he had mutilated and his own wounds, smiled widely. He had done it.

  Blake then promptly passed out.

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