Dear Diary,

  When everything you’ve ever loved gets stolen from you, are you going to sit down, cry injustice, and wait for someone else to sort it out? Or are you going to fight, tooth, nail, and—if necessary—improvised weaponry, to take it back?

  Annabel Smith didn’t consider this a choice. It wasn’t even something requiring deep thought. It was simply a matter of immediate, reckless action.

  ***

  The hallway groaned, clattered, and scrambled with the enthusiastic efforts of Annabell’s uninvited guests.

  They were eager to reach her, alright. But they were also tangled, limbs failing to coordinate in any resemblance of progress.

  Some were stuck in boxes. Others were stuck in other zombies. All were far too focused on nefarious undead groaning rather than trying to get unstuck.

  This bought her precious moments.

  “Wallace, engage Operation Vengeance! Phase one—”

  Rummaging under her bed, she retrieved a soda bottle that had, at some point, become the final resting place of a rat. A moment of silence for its noble sacrifice (aka enough to get the worst smear off the bottle cap), and she tilted her head back and chugged.

  +2 Temporary HP

  “Sugar tanks: refuelled,” she burped, eyes watering as carbonation waged a brief but intense war in her sinuses. “Proceeding to phase two—”

  Wiping her mouth, she surveyed the battlefield.

  Behind her, the first zombies had finally managed to untangle themselves. Or, rather, the second wave of zombies had, largely by using the first wave as doormats.

  Now, they were shuffling forward, hurriedly dragging rotting feet through piles of abandoned laundry and the shattered remains of her snacks.

  Another few seconds, and they would reach her.

  “Aha!”

  From the bottom of the overturned laundry pile at her feet, Annabell yanked out a pair of cat-paw gloves. The kind with soft fabric pads on the palms and retractable plastic claws—impulse-bought at 3 AM during a particularly strong bout of questionable decision-making.

  “I knew these were around here somewhere.”

  Thud.

  Bump.

  ARGHHH.

  The first vanguard of zombies behind her? Dispatched by the inherent hazards of a Gremlin’s nest. (Hazards not even the Queen Gremlin herself was safe against.)

  This bought her the seconds she needed.

  She slipped the gloves on.

  Gremlin’s Jury-Rigged Arsenal: Activated

  Equipped: Cat-Paw Gloves → Abilities Gained:

  Active - [Swipe]

  Active - [Pounce]

  Passive - [Claws]

  Flexing her fingers, Annabell watched with satisfaction as the claws curved out into wicked little points.

  “Purrfect,” she said, stepping over to the squeaking hole in the floor. “Armaments acquired. Preparing for Phase Three.”

  Behind her, more undead were stumbling forward. Ruined snacks crunched underfoot. They groaned, and so did the hallway under the sheer amount of rotten flesh squeezing through it.

  "You ready, Wallace?"

  She didn’t wait for an answer.

  Before common sense could get a word in, and before she could be turned into a zombie snack, Annabell bent her knees, sucked in a breath, and—

  Jumped.

  For a brief, glorious moment, she was airborne. A creature of instinct. A nimble predator. The apex hunter of this tiny, disgusting patch of reality.

  Then gravity remembered it had a job to do, and she plummeted into the rat-infested abyss below, claws extended, ready to reclaim her stolen loot from whatever hissing horrors would dare stand in her way.

  ***

  Lionel was still in the middle of composing a rather long and heartfelt message to Alphonse—one that involved many carefully chosen words and at least three pointed underlines—when Bac finally finished her speech about why one should never, under any circumstances, engage directly with an unsupervised, evolving Dungeon.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Something about how the only way to survive such a thing was to not engage with it directly. To ignore the tantalizing rewards of its challenges. To heed the inevitable flood of warning prompts from the System.

  Then again, what kind of Delver would be stupid enough to charge headfirst into the dangers of a vengeful, unchained dungeon, deliberately escalating the situation for entirely selfish, shortsighted reasons?

  Lionel shook his head.

  Bac’s warnings were like the danger-labels on the back of cheap products: completely wasted on any reasonable person.

  ***

  Warning! Requirements Not Met for Dungeon Instance!

  Warning! Danger Levels Reaching Critical Threshold!

  Warning! Immediate Evacuation is—!

  Having braved the interwebs in their darkest age—having fought through the trenches of pop-ups, emerged scarred but victorious against the great spam epidemic, and endured the terrible plague known as Auto-Playing Ads with Sound—Annabell didn’t think twice before swiping the annoying notifications to the side.

  She had more important things to focus on.

  Namely, a floor that squelched unpleasantly beneath her shoes; walls that dripped with something that probably wasn’t water; and air that was thick with a scent that suggested several things had died here. Possibly recently. Possibly repeatedly.

  Scenario Updated:

  Grimy Garth’s Rodent Paradise! (Level 7)

  Warning! Instance Still Forming!

  Warning! Recommended Level Not Met!

  Warning! By Being Here, You Are Making Several Poor Life Choices!

  When she jumped through the hole in the floor, Annabell had, as most reasonable people would, expected to land in her down-stairs neighbor’s apartment. Now, she wondered if being reasonable ever paid off.

  In a sense, the rank space was similar to her apartment above. It had all the basic requirements: a floor (questionably stable), a ceiling (questionably intact), and the vague, unsettling sensation of walls somewhere in the distance.

  But beyond that, well… if Annabell hadn’t known better—and let’s be honest, there were days when she truly questioned if she did—she’d have thought she’d jumped straight into a sewer. The décor certainly suggested it.

  Everything, from the rotting chairs to the damp walls to what she sincerely hoped was just piles of uneaten food, was covered in a slick, green layer of something that probably had an advanced degree in microbiology. Any windows were firmly boarded up, as if someone had once tried very hard to forget whatever had been outside. A steady trickle of water dribbled from a dripping sink, across a kitchen that extended for far too long.

  Longer than any kitchens Annabell had ever seen.

  Longer than the apartment complex should have allowed.

  Longer than space and geometry were strictly comfortable with.

  And within that too-long kitchen, hundreds of red, beady eyes had just snapped toward her all at once. The earlier squeaking and faint scratching turned into a symphony of angry, wet hissing.

  “Alright, you thieving, slippery-pawed rodents,” she said as she cracked her knuckles—or rather, flexed her cat-paw gloves, which was basically the same thing if you didn’t think too hard about it. “Do you wish to do this the easy way, or the—”

  Before she could finish her sentence, a gurgling groan from above made Annabell instinctively step back, just in time to witness a zombie drop through the hole above her head and hit the floor with a crunchy splat.

  To the undead rodents, who had been watching her with a mixture of suspicion and hissing, homicidal curiosity, this was the starting pistol they had been waiting for.

  As one, they swarmed from every nook, cranny, and highly unsanitary hiding spot. Faced with this, Annabell did the only reasonable thing:

  She panicked.

  Also, she activated Emergency Escape and Pounce at the same time.

  What followed was an escape maneuver so wildly acrobatic that most professional performers would have nodded approvingly at the technique but firmly rejected it on the basis that they had a deep-seated love for their own skeletal structure.

  There was a spin, a twist, and a pair of shoes that, somehow, ended up with more velocity than Annabell herself. They hit the rickety kitchen table before she did, which was unfair, because they made no attempts of catching her.

  Bang.

  Her back introduced itself to the table shortly after. The table, having been in a long-term relationship with mold and structural instability, gave up on existence entirely.

  “AAAAAH!”

  Momentum, being an utterly inconsiderate force of nature, kept carrying her forward atop the now-defunct table, plowing straight through a few unlucky rats who had, until this moment, probably assumed they were at a strategical advantage.

  Then, inevitably, she crashed into the kitchen cabinet.

  More specifically, the sink.

  Now, this was the same sink that had been steadily in the process of losing a long, bitter battle with rust and questionable plumbing choices.

  A battle that was, at last, over.

  The moment a tumbling Gremlin entered the equation, the rusted pipes and their deeply shoddy solutions met a violent and watery end.

  Two jets erupted across the room—one steaming hot, the other arctic enough to make penguins file complaints.

  Worse yet, there was a comical amount of it. Within seconds, the entire floor was starting to flood.

  Exactly how so much water was coming out of a single kitchen sink was the kind of thing a skeptical person might have questioned.

  “Hot! Hot! Ah, cold!”

  Annabell, however, was far too busy scrambling up onto the counter to avoid becoming an unfortunate participant in an impromptu rat-and-gremlin swimming competition.

  A screeching, writhing mass of sodden fur scrambled to escape the rising flood alongside her, which was rapidly transforming the kitchen from "unsanitary nightmare" to "minor maritime disaster."

  “Get away from me and bring me my loot, you thieving vermin!”

  The vermin didn’t listen.

  The two nearest rats had already sunk their claws into Annabell’s leg and were making a very determined attempt to summit Mount Gremlin.

  Before they could reach her sweater, her cat-paw gloves greeted them with several rapid Swipes and more than a few undignified cries of “Yuck! Ew! Why?!”

  One of them had the audacity to bite her.

  -1 HP

  A moment later, it was turned into a crimson splatter across the nearby countertop—a countertop that was in the middle of being invaded by even more howling, furious undead rodents, all driven into a shrieking panic by the sheer, ungodly amount of water flooding their domain.

  (Really though, how does Dungeon plumbing work? Is it enchanted? Is some poor magical intern stuck in an eternal job making sure Dungeon pipes produce infinite water at a moment’s notice?)

  The table Annabell had so gracefully broken earlier bobbed up and down like a makeshift raft, flipping over and over as far too many frantic rats fought to climb aboard.

  “LEAVE MY SHINS ALONE!”

  Annabell herself was, meanwhile, fleeing across the counter, desperately dodging wave after wave of undead vermin attempting to sink their teeth into her legs.

  All the while, frantically searching for her stolen loot in the flooding, increasingly apocalyptic kitchen.

  Because if there was one thing Annabell was good at, it was clinging to all the wrong priorities at the worst possible times.