I was, you might say, getting antsy. For every ant we felled, another ten popped up to take its place. I wanted to be rid of the damn things, but even that simple “wanted” turned into a “wantantantantantantantantantanted!” Talk about conjugation frustration! And I thought that sixteenth century stuff from earlier was brutal…
“Where did I even learn to read sixteenth century literature? We studied it in school…right? We must have. I distinctly remember falling asleep in those classes. It’s just, I can’t remember if the teacher had a name…or a face…”
The ants’ exoskeletons were as thick as plate armor, but just like plate armor, the ants were most vulnerable at their joints. The hard part was finding the joints in the GIANT ANT PILE—or the subsequent GIANT SPELLSTONE PILE. It was hard, hard effort!
“Good work, team. We cleared ant hell. Hey, do you think ant hell is the same thing as anteater heaven? Have we seen an anteater monster yet? I suppose the girls count… They’ll eat anything! Okay, on second thought, I don’t want to picture the fresh hell that is girls crunching on insects. Never mind.”
Eww! Monsters were gross! Not cool, dungeon!
Just when I thought we were free from ant Armageddon, we came across the “Armored Queen Ant, Lv: 36.”
“Yeesh, no wonder the adventurers had a tough time. A hidden boss constantly laying eggs to hatch fresh baby monsters? Not cool, dungeon. Not cool at all.”
I say “came across,” but Queenie here had holed up in the hidden room and refused to come out. I had the brilliant idea of using the “Carbuncle Crown: MP, Intelligence +50%. Scarlet Shield. Scarlet Armor. Scarlet Eye. Uses unique Scarlet magic” to waterbend all the fluids in her body. To make scarlet ammo à la Aria, y’know? But I couldn’t figure out how to get the hang of it. It was hard? And MP-draining? And time-consuming? So I got mad?
“Yeah, the bullets came out purple! ’Cause there’s too much of that blue stuff that some ants have! This scarlet magic isn’t being very scarlet!”
Wiggle wiggle.
Grr! Miss Armor Rep, Dancer Girl, and Slimey shared my frustrations (although I think that’s ’cause they were tired of sitting on the sidelines), but I couldn’t turn them loose. They’d perform pest control and clear this ant infestation in no time flat. I wouldn’t have been able to keep up. Hell, I couldn’t keep up with their running pace any longer—not unless I introduced some major slippage. Superspeed a-go-go! Whee!
“Hmm. That wall was rather more textured than I expected. Very mountain rustic. Wall au naturel. That is to say, ow? That hurt?”
See, the problem with slipping was that if you didn’t turn in time… Well anyway—upon further reflection, I realized that sliding was even more difficult than walking. I loved my traction-optional “Spiked Boots: Power, Speed, Dexterity +30%. Acceleration +30%. Sudden Super-Speed. Sudden Braking. Suction. Wall + Ceiling Walking,” but controlling the boots was like herding cats. The sliding part was fine, but the sudden stopping part was less fine. My feet would bolt themselves to the floor while the rest of my body kept going, snapping my tibias like twigs and giving my face a whirlwind introduction with the ground. That was usually about when I panicked and let go, thus flipping me into the air, smacking me against the wall, and otherwise subjecting me to a lesson at the school of (very) hard knocks.
“Wagh! Whoa! Yipes!”
So, naturally, I Entangled the boots with Airwalk and the Black Demon’s Bladed Wings. Alas, my days of graceful soaring and gliding through the skies were long gone.
“I was thinking of splitting my equipment with my classmates since I can’t use them all anymore. But I doubt my classmates could get much use out of them either—nor do I want them to blow themselves up trying.”
The thing was, all my equipment was really, really good—regardless of its usability or lack thereof. It was the kind of stuff people with levels in the 100s couldn’t use without Wisdom or a boatload of practice.
“Too soon, for equipment. Focus on control, first… In fact, too soon for dungeon.”
“Equipment strength, bigger threat, than your frailty.”
“Heal up first. No fighting. I fight for you. I get strong for you. You don’t… You don’t need, to break yourself. Not anymore.”
Jiggle jiggle.
I’m feeling outvoted here, gang… I guess the dungeon emperors were not fans of my second alchemical transmogrification. (But guys, it did bump up my stats! Guys?)
“Sure, I might’ve gotten sideswiped by an ant or three and nearly died every time…but who’s counting?”
I was still using my old external control Blockhead tricks (although Blockhead had gotten an upgrade into Hoplology) and helping it along with the “Marionette Ring: Dexterity +30%. Control Abilities Boost (large).” The results were fantastic. More than my mortal body could handle, but like…who cared? Revival existed for a reason. If things got hairy…whaddahell. I’d figure it out. Why was everyone looking at me with such grave concern?
“Don’t worry, guys. It’s just practice. Potentially lethal practice. I’m proud to admit that I’ve never died once. Pride goeth before a fall, but I’ve fallen lots of times, and I’m still puffed up with pride, ergo, therefore, TL;DR, don’t worry? ’Cause I won’t die? My luck stat is off the charts, if nothing else? And stuff?”
I thought my explanation of my flawless track record of not dying was perfectly sound, but none of the others were convinced. Um, don’t shake your heads at me?! I had a zero percent death rate, people! Was that not impressive? How come it failed to persuade anybody?
“I literally have a 100% survival rate? Say I was the cat in Schrödinger’s experiment, and you opened my box one million times. I would turn out alive every single time. Unless it was because I, like, cat-apulted (heh) the Geiger counter into the sun… And until the box is opened, aren’t I theoretically immortal? And furious that you stuffed me in a box? Schrödinger should worry for his life!”
Speaking of things that were neither dead nor alive, the Cathedral’s ultimate dungeon had had that one ghost that was both dead (kinda) and alive (kinda), plus a saint who was dead but living and could also die, plus another part of the same saint that had existed simultaneously until I’d fused the two parts together, and when I’d opened that box I found a naked girl? And she was sexy?
“I don’t know about all this quantum business, but if there can be a girl both dead and alive before you open her box, I don’t see what’s so far-fetched about a cat.”
The double-slit experiment had proved that the microscopic world did not obey the same rules as its macroscopic counterpart, but the only double-slit experiments in this fantasy world proved that thighs here were infinitely more attractive than women’s thighs back home… Hubba hubba!
“Let’s assume a probability P(Haruka dies) = 0. Opening the box is roughly akin to flipping a coin. If we run this experiment an infinite number of times, we can assume heads—or ‘death’—never emerges, not once. Yet with enough permutations of tails—‘life’—we might break the system such that the coin suddenly begins producing dice rolls, bringing up sex—I mean, six—and dice don’t have head sides, so I’m even less likely to die. Yeah, a die means I won’t die? Ever think about that one, huh?”
And—returning to the previous thought exercise—it was therefore only logical that, just prior to being crammed into the poison-filled box, I could turn on old man Schrödinger, beat him black and blue, stuff him into the box, and assume he’d come out unscathed. Or at least not dead. He was surely going to be scathed when I was done with him—P(Haruka beats up old men) = 100%.