Chapter 7 Seven
Chapter Seven
The portal opened the same way it had before — no ceremony, no warning, just a door where a door had no business being, standing in the middle of his living room like it had always been there and he was simply the last to notice.
Ethan stood in front of it for a moment.
Last time he had gone in cold, reading the environment as he moved, learning the rules from the inside. He had gotten lucky with the creature that didn't attack. Luck was not a system he intended to rely on.
He called up the status screen.
[Host: Ethan Cole — Level 1]
[Active Skill: Heroic Martial Arts]
[Inventory: Quick Healer x1]
[Mission: E-Rank Dungeon — Clear the dungeon core]
[Time Remaining: 30:58:41]
[Penalty: Death]
He noted the Quick Healer. One use. He would treat it the way he treated the fifty dollars he had spent on the suit — carefully, and only when it counted.
He stepped through the door.
The environment was different from the first dungeon. Where the FF-Rank had been stone corridors and amber dark, this opened into something wider. A ruined building, or the suggestion of one — collapsed ceilings, exposed beams, daylight coming through gaps in the walls but not the right kind of daylight. Too flat. Too even. The light of a place that was mimicking a real location without fully committing to it.
He moved carefully through the first room and found nothing.
The second room had three of them.
E-Rank enemies were visibly different from what he had faced before. Larger, for one. More deliberate in how they moved, less of that jerky mechanical quality. These ones tracked him when he entered the room — all three heads turning at once, weight shifting, the specific stillness of something deciding how to approach a problem.
Ethan didn't wait for them to decide.
He went for the nearest one fast, closing the distance before it had fully committed to a stance, and drove the heel of his palm into its jaw with everything the martial arts skill put behind it. The impact rattled up his arm. The creature stumbled but didn't drop, which told him immediately that E-Rank absorbed punishment differently.
He adjusted.
The second one came at his left side while he was still reading the first. He ducked under the swing and used its momentum against it, redirecting the force and putting it into the wall hard enough to crack the plaster. It slid down and stayed down.
The first one recovered and grabbed his shoulder from behind.
The grip was strong — genuinely strong, the kind that would have dislocated something a week ago. He felt the pressure and made a decision in a fraction of a second: don't fight the grip, use it. He dropped his weight suddenly, pulled forward, and the creature's own strength became the problem as it overbalanced. He got an elbow into the back of its neck on the way down.
Two down.
The third one had not moved during any of this.
He straightened up, breathing steady, and looked at it.
It was watching him the way the creature in the last dungeon had watched him. Not with the blank hunting focus of the other two. With something that resembled evaluation.
"Not again," he said under his breath.
But this one did not sit down. It did not produce a blue light or make any kind of offer. Instead it simply pointed — one long finger aimed at the far wall of the room, where a door stood that he had not noticed when he came in.
Then it stepped aside.
Ethan looked at the door. Looked at the creature. It had not attacked him. It had cleared his path without being asked and without asking for anything in return.
He filed that away and walked through the door.
The dungeon core room was larger this time. The pedestal was the same but the crystal above it was a darker colour, almost red, pulsing with a slower rhythm. And standing between him and it was something that had not appeared in the last dungeon.
A single enemy. But not like the others.
It was tall — well over six feet — and it moved when he entered the room, which meant it had been waiting. It had what looked like armour, or the dungeon's version of armour, plates of something dark fitted across its chest and shoulders. It carried nothing in its hands but it didn't need to. The size alone was the statement.
Ethan stood at the entrance and looked at it for three full seconds.
Then he went.
He did not go straight at it — that was what it was built for, something coming directly into its range. He moved on an angle, forcing it to pivot, buying himself a read on how fast it turned. The answer was fast but not exceptional. He could work with that.
He feinted left, drew the swing he expected, and went right and low, driving his shoulder into the back of its knee. The armour made it harder but the joint was still a joint. It buckled. He was already moving up before it could recover, one strike to the side of the neck where the armour didn't cover, clean and precise.
It dropped.
He stood over it, chest rising and falling, and waited to see if it got back up.
It didn't.
He walked to the pedestal and closed his hand around the crystal.
It went dark.
[Dungeon Cleared.]
[Rewards: 60 EXP, $15,000 transferred.]
[Level Up: Ethan Cole — Level 2.]
[New feature unlocked: Class Selection — review when ready.]
The building dissolved and his apartment returned around him. He sat down on the floor because there was still no furniture and checked his phone.
Balance: $231,567.00
He set the phone aside and opened the system to the class selection screen. Four options sat waiting in a clean row, each with a description beneath it.
He read through all four slowly, once, then again.
Outside, the city carried on without him, entirely unaware that the person sitting on the floor of a fifteenth-floor apartment was deciding, with considerable care, what kind of man he was going to become.
