Alice stands up straight, quickly making her way to the middle of the hallway. Close enough to see who's coming, but just far enough away so she isn't caught off guard if the enemy starts suddenly attacking.

A young man gripping an axe in his hand walks down the stairs, looking at the odd wallpaper and strange flooring across the long hallway. It'd fit quite well in a mansion, but definitely not in an underground dungeon.

"A newly formed dungeon..?" the young man remarks, before quickly noticing Alice and the Earth Elementals standing in the center of the hallway. "Doesn't look like there's much here. If I can take it down, I'll probably be able to live a comfortable life for at least a few years."

He points his axe at the group and straightens his stance. "I'll wipe this place out clean before any of you can bat an eye."

If he could sweat, Henry would be filling buckets. They've just barely got a bunch of weird walking rock pets, and now there's someone standing there who's threatening to rush down the entire dungeon like he's got an appointment scheduled half an hour from now!

The intruder rushes forward with his axe and swings wide, aiming to slice off Alice's head. She quickly dodges down and-

SLAM!

-What?

The man is knocked backward, blood covering his face, while Alice stands there holding one of the Earth Elementals, clearly shocked with its face drenched in blood. With little hesitation, she chucks the creature at the man's chest, knocking him down to the floor.

Henry is surprised to say the least. He was an assassin in training, spending his days trying his best to remove his humanity in order to kill at any time. And she just tossed a rock at that man with such little care that you'd wonder if she's simply taking care of a pest.

Alice slowly walks up to the intruder on the floor, and picks up the elemental. "I hope luck finds you well-"

The man's eyes well up with tears, as he wipes them away with great effort. "Thank you."

But before he can stand up, she slams the elemental face first into the man's skull, crushing it into a bloody pulp.

"-In your next life. May you rest in peace."

Alice quickly checks her panel for any updates. "Ah, sweet, two hundred points! Score!" she says, looking through the menus again. The earth elementals are crowded around the one used as an improvised weapon, who is currently lying there paralyzed with trauma. Whether it be blunt force or emotional, that is unsure.

"Big man! They've got a new banner up!" she shouts upwards, nowhere in particular. In her defense, even Henry doesn't know where he is yet.

With a confused tone, Henry inquires about what a banner is, and what it means exactly.

Alice thinks for a moment, then seems like she obtained some sort of epiphany. "It's where you get new characters by using a gacha system to try and roll for them!"

In this moment, Henry felt exactly like he did many years ago, when he was sent out to a field with only a long blade and enough rations for three days.

Lost. Confused. Dumbfounded.

What is a gacha? What does she mean by rolling? Is he going to be stuck here with a lady he can't possibly understand half the time, who can simply snuff out a human life on a whim if it inconveniences her? Are ALL insurance company employees secretly trained assassins? As a man blind to the outside world, it was like being in the shivering cold and then tossed into a pit of lava.

After a bit of standing around, Alice simply sighs and presses a button on the panel.

<AUTHORIZE PURCHASE OF [15 ROLLS ON LUXURY GOODS BANNER] FOR [150 POINTS]?>

"What's this all about?" Henry asks Alice.

"I've gotta live somehow! It'd be so boring to just sit around here all day waiting for people to waltz in and get beat to death." Alice replies.

Henry reluctantly accepts the 'Banner' thing, knowing just barely about what it is since he saw her pull it off before. Doesn't mean he knows what a "Gacha" is, though.

Fifteen orbs pop out of a sigil made around the orb, same way they appeared last time. Alice quickly rushes in and picks them all up, bringing them into the hallway and putting them in a pile.

"Any reason why you didn't just break them in the room they came out of?" Henry inquires.

Alice replies after a short pause. "Just 'cause it's more fun to break them open in a big open area. It's way too cramped in that room."

She throws a few on the ground, looking inside. Seems like it's mostly prepackaged meals and a few bottles of alcohol. Alice has to stop herself from immediately grabbing the bottle and downing it, instead setting the bottles to the side with the meals.

Her disappointment is clearly visible as she sighs. "Nothing to clean or play with, huh?"

Though, there's one orb remaining. It's a bit stranger than the rest, being significantly larger with a strange light blue coloration on it.

"I guess this one's gonna be something interesting, right? Maybe it's a fridge. I'd hate to see all this good food go to waste if I don't eat it all in one go."

She tosses it to the ground, shattering it to pieces like the rest. The light that comes out of it is strange, to say the least. It's almost blinding, forcing Alice to cover her eyes with her arm. Henry views it just fine, though. There's gotta be some sort of light dimming feature built into the Survey skill, he'd guess.

And from the light, a creature is born. Its fur is ethereal and looks as if it was made of the night sky itself. It has a small body and short stubby legs, and a set of cute oval-shaped arms. Its head is about as big as its body, and it has a set of round ears and a large tail that could easily be mistaken for a pillow for someone too tired to think straight.

Alice rubs her eyes a bit, and sees the creature.

She squints her eyes a bit and looks at it for a moment, before asking something.

"Did I die again and go to heaven?"

Her confusion is overpowered by her curiosity as she walks over and pinches the creature's cheeks. It's soft, sort of like rubber, but with fur on it.

"Big guy! It feels like mochi!"

At this point, Henry has stopped thinking. All he's been doing is watching her do the work. Why doesn't he have some sort of Menu like she does?

Suddenly, a panel appears in front of him. It's labelled him as a Dungeon Core, with Administrator privileges. He can't see his actual name anywhere on the panel. Did it just decide to overwrite his name entirely? What if one day, he forgets his name? What if he forgets his past? What if he dies before he can even figure out what this all means, doomed to die again due to his indecision?

He shakes off the thoughts before going back to reading the panel. Seems like there's a "Manage" menu, and an "Options" menu. The former allows him to see the information about all the current residents of this Dungeon, and the Options menu lets him set some random settings. The one that catches his eye is the one that allows his Sub-Administrator to automatically purchase goods without his permission. He decides that might be a bad idea for now, but he'll probably enable it when he's more affluent in the future. If he makes it that far.

"Can I have that?" A voice not from either of them speaks. It startles both Henry and Alice as they turn to the strange squirrel-ish creature. It spoke!

The squirrel-ish creature is pointing towards the pile of food and drinks.

"Help yourself!" Alice says, unaware of her mistake.

The creature walks towards the containers and proceeds to put them in its mouth. Whole. Alice quickly runs over and tries to stop him, but she's unable to do so before he swallows the entire pile.

Alice shakes the creature while shouting at it. "I spent 150 points on that! That's about three-quarter's of a man's life!"

The creature looks at her with a rather calm and bored expression. "Do you want them back?"

"Yeah, obviously!"

It starts coughing a bit, and eventually hacks up a bunch of orbs onto the ground. They're shiny, but clear. And each of the orbs has one of the containers inside of it, albeit incredibly small. Alice picks one of them up and looks at it real closely, before shattering it on the floor.

Out pops a box of sushi. Delicious, undoubtedly.

"Big guy. This is an amazing discovery." she says, staring dumbfounded at the box of sushi placed on the ground.

Henry, in his great effort to be acknowledged as anything BUT a talking credit card, quickly looks up the creature on the Manage menu.

{MANIFESTATION OF SPACE} [UNNAMED]

TITLES: {Honorable First}

TALENTS: {Compress And Store}

"Alice." Henry speaks up. "It seems to be some sort of powerful space-based Elemental or something similar."

Alice looks up at nowhere in particular. "Wow. Amazing discovery." she replies in a monotonous voice.

She sits the squirrel creature down on her lap and starts scrolling through the panel once more.

"Fuck it. I'm rolling the earth banner again."

Five more orbs pop out, and she picks them up and heads to her favorite spot to break them.

Another Earth Elemental. And another. A golden one pops up this time, though. Another boring earth elemental after that one. And finally, a strange and slightly larger orb is left in her hand.

"Can we get ANOTHER lucky draw on this one?" she says, preparing to toss the bead onto the ground. It breaks into pieces, shining an incredibly bright light (Albeit quite a bit less flashy as the rare one before) emits from the cracked bead.

And out from the light emerges...