As casually as anything, Garou closed in for the kill as I lay there on the ground with an arrow through my leg, slavering, bleeding, and crying from the pain. I was in complete denial of the scene unfolding before my eyes.
“No, no! This can’t be happening! The Concord of the Tribes is supposed to be good! You’re all imposters! You have to be fakes!”
The fake Drago snapped back with invective of his own. “Nonsense! We dragonutes simply have too much pride to consort with you inferiors on equal terms. I only consented to this charade because I had orders from above.”
“Aha ha ha!” the fake Garou howled with laughter. “Oh, man! This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in my life! Yer killin’ me!”
The fake Sasha’s face wrinkled in disgust. “Why are you marveling over this display? I swear, humans are vile, revolting creatures! Why don’t the authorities just eradicate these inferiors once and for all?”
The fake Sionne looked on impassively, as if she were watching a lab rat taking its final breath. “Light could have been very useful as an experimental subject, but alas, it is out of my hands. I suppose I can make up for it by purchasing a few young female inferiors and using them instead.”
The fake Naano—who looked like he’d completely run out of patience—was egging on my killers to hurry up and finish the job. “C’mon, kill him already! This kid’s not a Master. He’s nothing to us! We’re burning daylight as we speak!”
The fake Diablo shrugged in agreement. “Naano is quite correct. We are wasting precious time here. In any event, these inferiors look ghastly when they have lost all hope. Our best option is to kill him at once and leave this dungeon forthwith.”
The fake Oboro chimed in as well, practically whispering as he spoke. “If none of you will kill him, I’ll have the honor.”
The fake Santor bellowed angrily. “Damn it! I wanna kill him! Though I really want to pay him back for making my life hell first, by torturing him over and over! This is infuriating!”
All the murderous fakes who had the same faces, voices, and mannerisms as the real party members were mocking me and laughing at me, but I didn’t want to die, so I tried to get away the best I could. With my leg hurt, however, I couldn’t run, so I crawled along the jagged, rock-littered floor of the cavern—the very act of which ripped open my skin and caused me to bleed even more. I ignored these new wounds and kept moving.
I didn’t want to die, but in the back of my mind, I knew I was a goner. I had a power level of 15, which was high for a twelve-year-old and mostly due to the party helping me to level up, but if you were to ask what the power levels of the other members of the party were, well...
Garou and Santor were both around 150, while Sasha, Sionne, and Naano were all around the 300 mark. Diablo and Oboro were nearer 400, while Drago’s level was up around 500. Humans were way behind the other races when it came to physical strength, magic, and lifespan—to name just a few traits where we were found to be lacking. All of this meant humans had the weakest overall levels of any race, while the others were able to reach much higher levels, thanks to their strength, magic, and longer lives. This sizable gap in levels was the main driving force behind the discrimination humans suffered in this realm, and it was this stark difference in our respective power levels which told me I didn’t have a hope in Hell of getting away from the much higher-leveled members of the party.
Still, I carried on crawling for my life. Though as I struggled desperately to get away, more bad luck befell me. As my outstretched right hand touched the ground, a huge curtain of light exploded from underneath it.
“Huh? Did he just trigger a teleportation trap?!”
“Don’t let him get away! We have to kill hi—”
In that instant, the sound of everybody’s voices cut off abruptly, and for a moment, all I saw was blinding white light.
✰✰✰
“Urgh, I hurt all over.”
Luckily for me, I’d managed to escape from the other party members, but unluckily for me, Sasha’s arrow was still wedged in my left leg and I was still scraped and bloodied from crawling across that rocky cavern floor. A momentary wave of relief washed over me on the realization that I’d made it to safety, though it was almost instantly followed by a second wave of total pain that tore through me without mercy.
It looked like I’d ended up in another cavern in the same dungeon. Unlike the middle layer of the Abyss, this area was much darker. I flopped onto my back on the bare rock beneath me.
“Mom, dad, big brother, Yume,” I mumbled to the air around me. “You were right. The city is a scary place. I wanna go home.”
I hurt all over, I had an arrow in my leg, and the party members I’d trusted completely had humiliated me and tried to kill me. I felt crushed by their betrayal, and longed to be back with my family.
I was born the second son of a poor farmer, and with my big brother being the one who would one day take over the family farm, I decided to leave home. My parents and siblings told me I didn’t have to go, but I’d made up my mind. My family would have one less mouth to feed, and there would be more food for my baby sister, Yume. I set out with a plan to make a name for myself in the city, but this was where I’d ended up. I’d be too ashamed to face my family after what had happened.
But that wasn’t important right now. If I didn’t make it out of the Abyss, the most dangerous dungeon in the realm, I’d never see sunlight again, let alone reunite with my family.
“Why’d they trick me and try to kill me?” I murmured. “I’m just a poor farm boy. What is a ‘Master,’ anyway? Why is some nation behind this? I don’t want to die—not until I know what’s going on. At any rate...”
The lingering respect I felt for my party and my sheer anguish at being betrayed by them gave way to a burning desire for revenge.
“I’ll make them suffer for what they did to me! I’ll kill them all! I can’t die here without paying them back! I won’t be able to die in peace until I’ve taken revenge against all those who betrayed me!”
The inferno of vengeance welling up inside me eclipsed the pain coursing through my body. “But if I want my revenge, and to see my family again, I have to somehow stop this bleeding and get out of—”
“Grrrrr...”
The guttural growl that cut me off told me that my bad luck had struck again. A monster appeared out of the shadows in front of me, perhaps drawn by all the noise I was making, or perhaps because it had caught a whiff of my blood. It was a huge creature, maybe ten meters in length, and it walked on all fours. It had a tail that was thicker than my torso and that looked a lot like a snake, even down to having its own two eyes and a mouth. The snake-tail rippled its way through the air toward me. The monster stared at me with keen, menacing eyes as drool oozed from its mouth. Even if this had been an ordinary predator, I would’ve been done for, but I was in for a real shock when I saw the monster’s stats screen.
“What?! Is this some kind of joke? This can’t be real!” I cried. “Level 1000?!”
A person or creature can voluntarily activate their stats screens for others to see, which meant, by displaying its stats to me just to rub in how outmatched I was, the monster wasn’t just intimidating me physically, it was mentally tormenting me as well.
I’d had it all wrong. I’d thought the teleportation trap had sent me back to somewhere near the entrance to the middle layer of the Abyss, but it turned out that it had actually transported me to the deepest part of the Abyss—a completely unexplored area that nobody in the world had set foot in. I assumed that had to be the case, because there was no way I’d be face-to-face with a Level 1000 monster otherwise!
“I-I have to get out of here! But where do I go?!”
I was a Level 15 human, so there was absolutely zero way I was escaping from the bottom-most levels of the Abyss. There was nowhere I could run to escape from the monster.
“Grrrrr!”
As if to confirm this, the creature let out another guttural growl and slowly advanced toward me, obviously fully aware of how hopeless my situation was. If the monster reached me, I’d probably suffer a fate worse than death on the wrong end of its carnivorous teeth.
But I wasn’t dead yet.
“I’m not going to die without finding out the truth, nor without seeing my family again, nor without getting revenge on the people who betrayed me!” I screamed. “I’m not going to die like some piece of garbage!”
Unfortunately, because I’d left the rucksack back with my former party, I didn’t have a knife, a canteen, or even a piece of flint on me. The only thing I had was my god-given Gift. I smashed the Unlimited Gacha button repeatedly and prayed feverishly for something that might help me out of this, as my Gift was my one last hope for escaping this hopeless situation.
“Huh?”
“Grrr?”
A large, magical seal that gave off a heavenly light emanated from my core, and the Level 1000 monster—which had been so cocksure up until just a second ago—stopped in its tracks in front of the mysterious brightness.
“Grrr—graaw!”
Whether due to intuition or instinct, the monster charged at me at top speed! Unsurprisingly for a Level 1000 creature, it closed the gap in an instant, and the monster’s gaping jaw was soon looming over me.