The pain was everything.

  As I regained the ability to think, the pain faded. Or perhaps the reverse.

  Slowly, I could feel pain in individual parts of my body, as opposed to as a single, agonized whole. The pain in my left leg was the worst.

  I jerked upright, finally noticing that Lacie was right there, hands on my legs, pouring healing into me. I lay back. "We made it."

  She swallowed, nodding jerkily.

  "The others?"

  She shook her head.

  Tears formed as I thought about what had happened. "It was Vitorio. He was pulling out explosives as Luxe killed him."

  "That fucking psycho," she snarled.

  "I saw him do it. I don't think he was crazy, not really. I think he just hated this place so much, he refused to go out quietly." I thought a moment more. "Also, I think he hated Luxe."

  "Well, he went out with a fucking bang, that's for sure." Her stiff face crumbled. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have pushed it. Now, now, now—"

  "It's fine." I moved, gasped, and settled back. "Alright, need to wait longer for those legs to work. I've never been hurt worse than a potion could heal. But we're alive. That's what matters."

  She leaned into me, sobbing, and I didn't tell her it hurt. I set my head in the vines she had for hair, the press of leaves oddly comfortable, and cried. Mickey, Vitorio, Luxury, and five crawlers I'd never seen the names of, all dead.

  We wept.

  Eventually, I realized there was someone else crying, too. I looked around the safe room. There were a group of dwarves, seven of them, around one of the tables. We went from crying to sitting against the wall, shoulder to shoulder, just staring vacantly.

  A tired looking bopca was behind the counter, looking like this was just one more of the many bad days she had to endure.

  When I shifted, Lacie leaned away, her tears mostly dried. She glanced around. "This is all that's left.

  "What?"

  "The town's gone. We're dead, just more slowly."

  I wasn't sure what she meant. Apparently it showed in my expression.

  She gestured at the door.

  I walked over. Fallen stone blocked the door, some sliding into the chamber. I could sense that the rubble was thick. The city was now just cave-ins, trapping us.

  I sat back down beside her. "This room's fine, though?"

  "You got us to the safe room, so we're safe. Along with the only seven dwarves who were here, and a bopca who can sell all the standard goods." She snorted and then sniffled. I realized she'd been half-laughing because it was seven dwarves, like some sick joke except neither of us would be called snow white. Maybe that was the bopca.

  There was another long period of silence. The dwarves were silent now, too, and I could hear the plinking of a drip echoing in from the rubble. If we didn't move, we actually would die in here.

  I took a deep breath, let it out. In. I'd found Lacie. Out. I could do this. In. I stood up. Out.

  "Alright, let's figure this out."

  "What's to figure out?" Lacie asked.

  "We need to find a way to get out of this place so we can deal with this floor, so that's what we'll do." I looked down at her, refusing to let my face slip. "Come on, Lacie."

  She stared for a moment, then stood. "There's no way out. I looked while the spell was stitching your legs up."

  "I'll find a way out. You stay here and figure out what we can do with our gear, I'll go out and find a way through."

  She nodded, not looking confident. "Okay."

  "Oh, yeah. Gear." I was about to start handing her stuff, then realized the dwarves were looking at us. I repositioned so they couldn't see as I took stuff out of my inventory and gave it to her. I handed her stuff quickly, but made sure not to touch the Rev-Up drugs.

  Maddy: This is everything I've looted so far. I always figured, you know, Lacie loots everything in games, so I'll give it to her in case she wants it. I don't know how to use any of it.

  Lacie: Maddy, these are mana potions. And those are healing.

  Maddy: I kept the stack of potions on my hotbar. And I don't have any thing that uses mana.

  Lacie: You have the heal spell. It's part of the tutorial.

  Maddy: The what?

  Lacie: The Heal spell. Everyone gets it, so they can heal themselves.

  Maddy: I don't remember anything about that.

  Lacie: How the hell are you past level 20?

  Maddy: I have very high dodge. Now, I'll go check the rubble. Take your time looking through things.

  It took twenty minutes to rapidly transfer everything to her inventory. She refused to take the gold, which I guess was fine, but took everything else.

  While she sat around digging through stuff, I started noticing a lot of worried messages from Mom and her party.

  Maddy: Lacie, are there some weird rumors about us?

  Lacie: Yeah. They claimed we'd gone crazy and attacked them. That was right before the blast wrecked the place. Being as they're dead and their last messaged blamed us, and that other group just said that we were fighting with Luxe's group, basically everyone believes them.

  I told Mom and Sandra that I didn't do anything wrong and that I was busy trying not to die so I couldn't talk. Jack and John, who were also asking, got about the same message.

  As I left, I finally noticed that the letter jacket she was wearing was different. I stared. "Lacie, what happened there?"

  She looked down, then grinned. "The initial one got an upgrade because I was, uh, baggage—"

  "Oh my god, I kept getting insulting achievements about losing my baggage!"

  "Well, it said the item would change if I was in a party with you again, or if I returned it to you. It got new stats when you joined the party earlier, lost them for like half a second when we split from Luxe's douchebags, and then got it back when we re-grouped."

  I looked across it carefully as she explained the details. Obviously, it was matching what I'd done. Just as some people put sports patches on the arms of real letter-jackets, this one had patches on alternating arms for the classes I'd taken.

  On the left shoulder was a set of olympic rings for the multi-sport athlete, then a simplified figure of a woman skating with a hockey stick for the hockey Goon. On the other arm, a figure of a woman winding up for a pitch signaled the No-Hitter Ace, and then a silhouette of a woman vaulting off of something must have been the parkour Traceuse.

  Loaned Letterman Jacket

  Grants +5 to all stats.

  Gain 2% in all stats (Multi-Sport Athlete patch)

  +5 to the Thrown Weapons skill (No-Hitter Ace patch)

  Gain the momentum benefit at 10% effectiveness (Goon patch)

  +5 to the Light On Your Feet skill (Traceuse patch)

  If you leave the group of the original owner, or if you return it to the original owner, or if the original owner dies, the effects of this item will change.

  "Thats really good, right?"

  She nodded. "It's an amazing piece of gear. A bit scattershot, so not exactly perfect, but really good. We should, um, return it and see what happens."

  "What if it doesn't go back to this when I return it?"

  She paused. "That is the sort of fuckery they might do down here. Alright. Well, I'm going to sort this stuff, you see if we're actually trapped and about to slowly suffocate."

  I headed out to explore. The door was blocked, and so were most of the windows, but the two windows oppposite the door were still clear.

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  I climbed through, hitai-ate closed so I had better blindsight. It actually didn't take long to find a way out. The rubble hadn't closed literally every passage, just made them all difficult. I could shimmy along the top of one section, then down to the bottom and under a slab, through a window in a mostly-intact wall, along a gap of what seemed to have once been a gutter, and there was suddenly an actual hallway ahead of me.

  I went back and found another way out. I think only the first, which was also the shortest, would be difficult for Lacie.

  When I returned, she glared at me.

  "What did I do?"

  "So many things. Did you know you have a skill potion in here?"

  I frowned. "Oh, I totally forgot about that. It was in one of the boxes I got on the third floor, but I forgot while figuring out all the gear."

  "It grants the Hide In Shadows skill."

  I frowned. "I guess that could have been good, but I don't think I'm about to start using it now."

  "Are you serious?" Lacie did not look happy.

  "Look, you'll see when we fight some stuff together. Hiding would be for that assassin stuff the dungeon wants me to do, but I don't actually hit things in huge ambushes. Why don't we just hold onto it until we decide we actually need it?"

  She glared for a moment, then said, "Whatever. That's not even the worst. You have to know you've got a whole stack of tickets for personal space stuff?"

  "I got that in some weird box because of some weird stuff that Carl guy did. How do those work?"

  She groaned. "I literally can't believe you. Alright, well, I'll give them back and you trade them in with the barkeep over there. He's a valid vendor for this stuff."

  "Why shouldn't you use them?"

  "They're your tickets!" She literally threw her hands up in disgust.

  "So, can we share the space?"

  "You know, everyone was gossiping about these after that Carl-and-Donut reward thingie, and you're literally the only person in the dungeon who doesn't know. And yes, so you buy it and I share."

  I asked, "So, if I have the personal space and I die, do you keep it?"

  "We're not talking about that," Lacie snapped

  I replied, "We are if you want me to use that coupon."

  Lacie sighed. "No, if you die it's gone."

  "Then you use."

  "You deserve these!"

  "I don't use safe rooms," I explained, "so I'm fine if it's gone. You need safe rooms, so you won't be fine. You use it."

  "Where are you going to sleep?"

  I shrugged. "I don't sleep."

  "What the fuck are you talking about?"

  "The first floor, I started leveling up something called Ignore Fatigue. I just kept going. The dungeon has been giving me rewards boxes for how long I've gone while fatigued. At 60 hours, I got a bronze box. At 120 it was silver, 240 was gold, and 480 was platinum. I'm hoping there's a legendary at, uh, 8, 9, 960."

  "You haven't slept since you came in?"

  "Nope."

  "Get over here. I need to look at your skills."

  I doubted proximity mattered, but I did sit down beside her.

  "You haven't done anything with your interface. There's just a blanket ignore setting and that's it. Okay, I can't do sorting and searching on your interface, I can just look at the lists you made. How do you check your skills?"

  "I just skim the notifications when they level up. I don't remember anything about a skill-interface from the tutorial. Although Bizzeki was absolutely blitzed while she explained things."

  "Fucking hell, Maddy. Alright, some order. I'll buy the personal space, we'll head in, and then I'm gonna talk you through actually using your interface, then get you to run some searches on your skill list, and then I'm gonna figure out what skills and stats you have and, wait, have you just dumped everything into dex?"

  "I'm pretty sure dexterity is the only stat I use."

  She looked doubtful, but went ahead with her plan.

  The personal space was a bedroom with a small desk, a large bed, and an attached bathroom. We sat on the edge of the bed and I nervously kept my hands on my thighs as she talked me through using my UI properly.

  Eventually, we sorted my skills properly and she said, "Holy Lord, how are your skills this high?"

  "I think it's almost entirely because I fought this one boss for way too long on the first floor, but also I don't sleep, so I can fight mobs 24/7."

  "Firstly, upgraded beds in personal spaces reduce sleep-times. Secondly, what boss when?"

  "A giant worm called Glory. It was a borough boss, and I still was level 1 with no weapons, so I just kept running. Actually, I guess I can check the time-stamps on the notifications to see how long I was actually in there."

  I skimmed back through notifications, then copied two over to the chat. "Okay, so 'Borough Boss' was when that started, and 'You Did Nothing' is when it ended, so I was in that room just running away from Glory for, uh..."

  "Holy fucking Christ you were in a single fight for 82 hours straight?"

  "Well, I couldn't damage it, so I just kept running, and that got me to 13 dodge."

  "And this 'You Did Nothing', how did you get it to die without damaging it?" Lacie asked. Her eyes narrowed. "Why are you blushing."

  "So, you see, I hadn't caught all the updates, and it had been a long time in there, and well... so there was a rage elemental, and it killed the boss."

  Her eyes widened. "Ah. I see. So, back to your skills. When did you get 15 dodge?"

  "15? It was 14 last floor, so I guess it was during the fight just outside. Actually, it never leveled last floor, as it hit 14 when I met Mom, back on the third floor."

  "Wait, your Mom's alive?"

  I nodded, frowning. "She was very angry when I left to find you. Even more when I dropped her party."

  Lacie stilled. She swallowed nervously. "Thank you for coming. If my mother were here, I don't know if, well... I'm sorry you left her just to well, all this."

  I looked down. "I don't know how I feel about my Mom right now. She had 5 skulls, and she wasn't the only person in her party with skulls by her name, and she just got mad when I asked about them."

  Lacie opened her mouth as if to speak, then gave up and looked at my skills again. "So you only checked notifications?"

  "I mean, sometimes. I stayed busy. I know I got light on your feet to 15, that one's really nice." I frowned. "Also, I thought I'd lose skating when my class changed since it wasn't a skill, but it was still working. I never even thought about using it, it just happened."

  "Skating is a skill. Most things are skills or spells, even if it calls them an ability or something. Now, let's look at these skills, because you have a lot of incredibly high ones, and they all unlock special abilities."

  "Oh yeah, I saw double-jump from the 15 light on your feet. That's super useful."

  "Maddy, almost all of them have bonuses. That 15 in ignore fatigue grants a Second Wind ability that lets you heal to full once every 30 hours. The 15 in dodge grants you Uncanny Dodge once every 5 hours which will magically evade one attack that would otherwise deal more than 15% of your health at once."

  "Oh, that'll be really useful. Why didn't that— Oh, I bet that's why I was unhurt by that first explosion, and then it was on cooldown for the big blast."

  Lacie was aghast, even more as I wasn't overly concerned, and we spent a full hour going through all of my skills. She seemed particularly annoyed that I actually had gained skill in hide in shadows on my own without ever taking that potion. In general, she was annoyed at how little I knew about what skills the dungeon had listed for me. Although my level was still an un-impressive 22 (just 1 level ahead of Lacie), I had five skills at level 15: dodge, ignore fatigue, balance, tumbling, and light on your feet.

  I also had gained a lot of skills I didn't know existed. Some were obscure skills I expected would never matter, like web-walking and pruning. Others appeared to be entirely passive, but might be very powerful. In particular, I'd gain 5 levels of spike during the last floor, which gave bonus damage whenever I slammed a creature into the ground or into another creature, presumably leveled while I was sending creatures into the walls with illegal checking.

  After going through my skills, Lacie showed me her main skills and spells, but they seemed very complex.

  "You don't have, like, any skills," I noted.

  "I'm a caster. And mine being around 10, that's normal. The only other people with high skills like yours are in the top ten, and I'd wager none of them have 5 at 15. That said, your 15's, aside from dodge, are very mundane skills, but still, it's amazing."

  "When I picked the tundra elf, I was hoping that the uncapped dodge would really pay off, but it's incredibly hard to move these skills past like 13 or so."

  "Shit, dodge is uncapped?"

  I copied my race details over for her as well.

  "Wow. You could be hitting 16 dodge on the sixth or seventh floor, and probably light on your feet and tumbling as well. Based on everything I've heard, that'll be truly game-changing."

  "Thanks."

  "Your gear, on the other hand, is kinda mid. Like, it's not exactly bad, but other than the knife, I don't think much of it lines up with how you seem to fight."

  "I don't get many boxes."

  "Well, you have some now, right?"

  I looked over my new achievements. Aside from a lot of minor things giving bronze boxes and the notifications of skills leveling up, all I had were:

  New Achievement! Fifteen Minutes of Fame

  You had the highest ratio of viewers to followers of anyone in the dungeon over a thirty minute period. That might sound good, but what it means is that people usually don't watch you, and when they saw you doing something that was supposed to be interesting, it wasn't interesting enough for them to click the follow button.

  Reward: You've received a Platinum Fan Box

  New Achievement! Fifteen Minutes of Fame

  You had the highest ratio of viewers to followers of anyone in the dungeon over a thirty minute period. That might sound good, but what it means is that people usually don't watch you, and when they saw you doing something that was supposed to be interesting, it wasn't interesting enough for them to click the follow button.

  Reward: You've received a Platinum Fan Box

  New Achievement! Thrown Clear

  The blast from a truly massive explosion hurled you into a safe room without killing you. It's like when the heroes walk away from an explosion looking cool, except you looked like a broken doll and shat your pants.

  Reward: You've received a Gold Adventure Box

  I also still had some boxes pending from when I was racing to find Lacie. It was mostly useless, as usual.

  Silver Adventure Box (17/20)

  Potion of Invisibility x2

  Silver Adventure Box (18/20)

  Silver Anklet of Strength +3

  Silver Quest Box (19/20)

  Heavy Steel Ball

  Gold Adventure Box (20/20)

  Potion of Upgrade Find Trap

  Lacie was staring at me. "How in the actual fuck is that all you got?"

  "Seems fairly normal to me."

  "Wait, did you actually give me everything?"

  I twitched, thinking about the massive collection of drugs I was still taking to not go insane and die. "Yep, that's it."

  "So, you're on the fifth floor, and that's all the gear you have?"

  I held up the Extremely Sharp Knife. "This has been excellent." I lifted the Heavy Steel Ball. "I think this is going to be really good, too."

  Heavy Steel Ball

  It's solid metal. Those rivets? They're decorative, so it's less boring. It is, however, still just a metal ball, which is pretty fucking boring.

  After being thrown, returns to the inventory or hand of the thrower (their choice).

  Causes a knockback when hitting a target, or triples the effect of a knockback if there already is one.

  "It's a fucking ball!" Lacie said. "It's not even a fancy one!"

  "My fastball has that knockback effect, but it's not too strong with the knife, I think because the pierce-through effect weakens it. This will triple it, instead, which should be really effective. This is basically perfect." I frowned. "Wait, where's the fan box?"

  "Those are voted on for the next 30 hours." She sighed. "Now, spending stats. You do have a dex-only build, which is deeply weird. Soon enough, you'll get to 100, then maybe it will be worth changing plan. If you hit 100, tell me the options."

  "Options?" I upped my dexterity to 87, which was all I could get at level 22.

  "You get additional benefits at every 100 points in a stat." Lacie grinned. "I asked a lot of questions during the tutorial."

  She paused a moment, and we both looked down, for some reason reminded we were on a bed.

  I stood up, blushing again. "Leveling done."

  Lacie stood as well. "We'll figure out what crafting tables and upgrades we should have, then get going."

  I smirked. "Do either of us believe I'm gonna be figuring out a game's crafting system. You're gonna figure out what crafting tables you want, I'm gonna be exploring."

  "Watch for traps!"

  I drank the potion that raised my Find Trap to level 8 and headed out. We'd cut it short because I was way too shy to not cut it short, but sitting there and talking about leveling up actually felt like a pretty good first date, considering the circumstance.