Chapter 02

  “Always keep your core tight!”

  Two days before being trapped in the cave, Michael had been training in the dojo close to his house, struggling to properly hold the most basic of katas for more than a couple of steps before falling back into his old patterns of moving. The latest batch of instructions coming from his sensei were really doing a number on him, making him feel like he was back to the early days of training. This is how it felt to finally advance, he knew, the new knowledge making him question the basics time and time again. With each refinement, came understanding, and previously indecipherable instructions made much more sense now.

  “Now, turn!”

  Together, the five people turned as one, their movements almost perfectly synchronized. To the untrained eye, they all looked to be at the same level of proficiency. Michael knew they weren’t. He was struggling the most to keep pace with the others, his thoughts alternating between wanting to be perfect and wondering just why he was putting so much effort into what, to him, was just a hobby.

  The rest of the biweekly hour-and-a-half of training passed in a blur of katas, ending with the usual conditioning session that never failed to send them all home battered and bruised. That day Michael felt like he had drawn the short end of the stick again, being paired up with a literal mountain of a man who appeared to not even feel the hits.

  Even though he was taking it easy for Michael’s sake, it still hurt. When they switched partners, Michael groaned. Even though the guy was much closer to his own stature and much less muscled, Michael knew from experience that the pairing was even worse than before.

  While the giant guy simply couldn’t hit any softer for lack of understanding of pain, he guessed, this one could and chose not to. The guy was an attorney by profession, a not very successful man who carried more anger and resentment than was healthy, and often needed an outlet to vent their pent up emotions.

  Michael was going to be that outlet today.

  “I hope you are ready, chosen one,” he said, a wicked grin on his face. Michael knew that face well, because Phillip didn’t seem to be able to have any other expression than that when looking at Michael.

  Michael knew bullies. Over the years, he had come to accept them as a part of the world, an obstacle to overcome. He believed it when he claimed that it was only against hard odds that one got stronger. And indeed Phillip always pushed him hard enough to really make the flaws in his techniques show, and being made aware of them was the first step towards fixing them.

  Today, however, was not one of the good days when Michael found it within his capabilities to reframe the blatant bullying and make it look like something other than what it was. Today was not a good day for a number of reasons, Phillip being just the last straw that broke the camel’s back.

  Michael took a hit to his forearm, as the conditioning technique taught. It always hurt, even when done well—that was the point of the whole exercise. But Phillip was hitting like a smith, and was better and more conditioned than Michael.

  Michael knew that Phillip only acted this way when paired with someone weaker than he was, and found it funny that a lawyer would only listen to violence. Unfortunately this meant that for him, there was no silencing the man’s snide remarks and taunts with simple brute force, caveman way.

  “Come on, man, you know the sensei only calls me chosen one as a joke,” Michael groaned, and immediately regretted it.

  “Sure he does, chosen one, like when he convinced master Taiko to make you skip a kyu and go straight to 8th at the exam, while we didn’t get the same treatment. We all studied much harder than you did, you know? If someone deserves preferential treatment, it’s not you.” He hit Michael again, stronger than before. “Or like when he focuses on you for a whole hour, leaving us to just figure shit out alone.”

  Michael didn’t feel like arguing against blatantly misconstrued accusations. “Listen, man, I didn’t ask for it.”

  “So what?” Phillip shot back, “if Stephan thinks you are a natural and deserve better treatment, it’s only right that I do my part!”

  During the beating that followed, Michael thought about reporting Phillip to sensei Stephan several times, but never brought himself to do so. He knew the chances of it helping were slim: the group was too small to really be able to afford to kick one of them away. They needed the membership money to be able to pay the rent to keep using the dojo and besides, they were all long time friends while he was an outsider, only there for a few months.

  Instead, he refused to let the torment break him, channeling his frustration into his training. Every punch and kick became a defiance, a refusal to be beaten down by someone who thrived on belittling others.

  One day. One day the tables would turn, and then it would be Michael’s turn to have the last laugh. He had put on ten pounds of muscle in the last few months, spending what little money he had on healthier food and makeshift weights to train at home.

  Then it was over. Michael skipped the usual small talk in the changing room. It meant nothing to him and, while chatting with the people there had been interesting at the beginning when they were all new, now it felt more like a chore. It was clear that it would never progress into a friendship, even with the more friendly of them.

  ***

  Back in the dungeon, he found himself progressing from one dark room to another. A message greeted him as he did, and together with it came the sensation that he could not go back to the safety of the first room anymore.

  The feeble light of the phone’s flashlight barely lit the room to its halfway point, leaving more than half of the space shrouded in impenetrable darkness. There was a faint sprinkling of dust suspended in the air that made it hard to see, and the sloping, uneven floor made it difficult for Michael to navigate the treacherous terrain without keeping his eyes glued to the ground.

  The room was silent save for the oppressive cacophony of blood rushing and adrenaline, which Michael felt like a physical pressure pushing against his eardrums. Not even his footsteps lasted long enough, the sound waves swallowed by the walls of the dungeon.

  Then he heard something. Sweeping the room in a wide arc with his flashlight, he immediately found what he was looking for. There were two goblins at the other end of the room, appeared as if out of thin air. They were slightly taller than the one he had defeated in the first room, slightly more muscular as well. But, almost as if the dungeon was adapting to him specifically, they were unarmed and mostly unarmoured, their grimy skin barely covered by a loincloth to hide their private parts.

  They jumped him as soon as he entered their range, surprisingly athletic in their burst of speed. Michael met their charge with a grin he didn’t even know he was wearing. Hard odds made for the best growth indeed.

  He sidestepped, right arm performing a perfect circular block and trapping the goblin’s arm. He yanked it, and it was all it took to make the goblin lose its footing. A kick sent the monster sprawling to the edge of where the light of the phone reached. Then the other goblin was on him, attacking with a wild strike from above. Once again, Michael found the attack to be very predictable. He blocked with his forearm, meeting the descending blow with his own strength in a move he had practiced thousands of times in the dojo, but never against an enemy who truly wanted to kill him. This opponent was not a sparring partner back at the dojo. He could strike to kill.

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  Michael made good use of the opening to strike at the neck of the goblin.

  The moves, pulled from katas which he had thought useless and clunky, came smoothly one after the other. Michael grinned wider. The goblin was stunned, almost as if he was not expecting him to be able to block the wild, predictable strike. Michael delivered a punch to the creature’s face, but then blinding pain robbed his punch of most of its strength.

  It was the first goblin. Michael had lost track of it in his retaliatory strike against the second foe. Now his side was throbbing, but he didn’t recoil from the pain. Phillip, just the other day, had hit him harder than the goblin. Instead, he turned around and kicked the offender again.

  The goblin fell on the stone, hitting its head with a sickening crunch that sent shivers up Michael’s spine. It did not get up again.

  The surviving goblin, seeing that the other was dead, snarled in rage. Now the monster was trying to hit Michael with all it had, kicking and punching wildly. It was hard to create distance, but Michael managed to step back enough to catch one of the kicks in an arm lock and send the goblin to the ground.

  That’s when he made a mistake. The lock had not been perfect, and his wrist throbbed in pain. Instincts born of a lifetime lived without healing magic made him pause, trying to assess the damage he had sustained, to see what he had done to himself with his mistake. For a moment, he thought he had broken something. That he could not use his right arm to write, or to play games, or—

  The distraction proved fatal. The world spun, and he was on the ground. The right side of his head felt light, wet and cold. It was tingling. Half of his body was burning while the other half was freezing, pain shooting up and inside his flesh where he had hit the sharp rocks. He got up, woozy, and saw that the goblin was trying to finish the job with a large rock it had picked up.

  Fortunately, the monster had picked a rock that was too large for it to handle. While it stumbled, trying to lift the heavy thing over its head with slow and cumbersome movements, Michael kicked in the balls, folding the creature in half and making it drop the stone… on Michael’s phone.

  The light died with a puff of smoke he could not see, but the smell assaulted his nostrils. Burnt plastic and battery acid.

  Following the groans of pain, he found the lump on the ground that was the goblin. Snarling, thoroughly pissed, Michael threw himself on top of the monster. His whole body was in pain, but the adrenaline and the anger were keeping the edge off for now. The worst of it would come later. Now, they wrestled for a moment, but finally Michael’s hands were around the monster’s throat. He did what most fighters always thought about but never could do in the outside world. He squeezed with all his might, thinking about the broken phone and his own shitty predicament and what he was going to do to Josh once he could finally leave this place.

  The goblin’s throat crumpled under Michael’s strength. His hands had been big enough to squeeze the neck like it was an orange, and his grip strength born of his bodyweight training was twice or more than that of most adult men.

  Then the body was gone. It vanished, dropping Michael a whole foot onto the hard, uneven ground. A flash of light lit the cave for the shortest of moments, which Michael ignored to focus on his pain. It took several minutes before he managed to sit up and try to heal.

  He threw up. Vomiting to the side, he cursed the stupid skill that made him feel all the pain he had already felt all over again as it healed him. It took him an hour to heal, in small bursts that made his body tense and tremble and his mind light up with pain. He kept going until he felt like he could sit still and not feel any lingering pain.

  He did not dare try to move yet. He had run out of mana many times during the process, each time waiting until he had enough to activate the skill again, then again, the phantom fear of brain damage and of a broken wrist demanding that he healed his body as soon as possible.

  He feared that, had he waited, he would have healed wrong. That he would have sustained brain damage. That his wrist would have hurt for the rest of his life.

  The pain that he felt when he healed himself with his magic skill was different than the pain of being wounded. It was the same sort of pain, but rather than happening all at once it was constant, piercing, sharp. A constant reminder and a lesson, teaching him that things do not come easy even with magic. In the end, though, Michael forced himself to think that this was the sort of pain that signified healing, that things were going to be alright, that he would heal right and that, once passed, the pain would not come again.

  Then came the hunger. Of course healing would make him hungry. Images of his body consuming itself to death in an attempt to heal itself up flashed in his mind, and he cancelled the skill immediately. He was not okay, he was hurting and his vision was full of stars where there should have only been darkness. He felt at the verge of fainting from undernourishment and could not go on. Perhaps it was panic again. He remembered reading somewhere that a man could live for two weeks without food, but how did using a healing skill factor in the calculation?

  Michael sat, contemplating things for a while, while pangs of hunger made him wish he hadn’t vomited earlier. The stench was awful… wait. The stench was gone. He was smelling something, but it was not his own vomit anymore. He tasted the ground, finding it dry. His phone was gone as well, as was the plastic smoke.

  He sniffed the air to make sure, catching a whiff of something. Then he remembered the flash of light coming from somewhere around the centre of the cave. He made his way there on all fours, opening at least two gashes on his legs against the sharp rocks.

  Then he reached the location. One hand gripped a cold, hard stone. Colder than the rest of the rocks in the cave, it reminded him of how it felt to hold the skill stone that had granted him the ability to heal. The other hand touched a bundle of something. That’s where the odd smell was coming from, he realized. It opened up easily, revealing some sort of jerky, old to the point of almost being rotten. But it was edible.

  His stomach churned at the thought of food. The jerky was in his mouth before he could think, and he swallowed before his rational brain could stop him. He almost groaned in pleasure when the food reached his stomach, and his body absorbed the nutrients within it unnaturally fast. Soon, he felt strong enough to finish healing himself.

  In the back of his mind, he hallucinated the voice of the dungeon laughing at his suffering. The first time, the voice had been sinister, but not evil. Now, in his mind, the voice had been a flood of malice and evil dripping from guffaws of laughter that were the stuff of nightmares. A pair of bloodshot eyes accompanied the voice, watching as he struggled against weak monsters like unarmed goblins, forced to fight with his hands, forced to eat rotting meat to survive.

  Next time, if there was a next time, he swore to himself that he would bring a gun. He would show the dungeon the power of technology. He would completely tear the goblins up and seize even more magic for himself. What had the voice said after the first room? That the rules were clear, and Michael had earned his magic.

  Michael turned his attention to the stone he was gripping with the other hand. Earned. The word echoed in his mind. As he gripped the stone with white knuckles, a message popped up.

  He immediately used the skill stone. He did not even wonder whether it had been the dungeon who had decided to help him, or just luck that made him find a skill to light the way in the dark, and found that he did not care. He would dwell on philosophical things once he was safe and no longer in the dark.

  A snap of his fingers and a small dancing flame appeared right where he expected it to appear. He squinted at the sudden light hurting his retina. Barely half an inch above his index finger, the flame was only as big as that of a match, but its strange light did not seem to obey common sense as it reached all the way to the end of the room, where the bright and orange glow faded to almost nothing. Behind him, his own shadow danced with his movements, and next to it was the rectangular silhouette of an opening leading into the next room of the dungeon. It was utterly dark beyond the threshold, the light failing to penetrate even when he got close to it with his flame.

  Eventually, he had to do it. Armed with nothing but his fists and a tiny flame, he stepped into the darkness.

  His jaw dropped as soon as the light revealed what was in the room. For some reason, he was expecting the dungeon to have five rooms on the first floor, as if it was a video game area. He was not prepared to be proven wrong.

  Standing at more than seven feet of height, the boss of the first floor of the dungeon was a hulking figure. A goblin covered from head to toe in muscle, completely naked, with eyes gleaming with a dark and sadistic sort of intelligence. It roared at Michael in challenge, and the very air was shaken by its might.

  Then it charged.