3: Prep

After a week of hunting low level monsters I realize: This loot isn’t enough. The experience was very helpful. I’ve definitely grown stronger, and more skilled, but I’ll never be able to afford useful equipment at this rate. The only thing I’ve been able to afford that’s important is the inventory service. For a small fee, the guild can store items for me. Anywhere in the dungeon I can use a command word to open up an interface similar to video games, to either place items in guild storage, or take items out. Most of my money has gone into paying for this, so I don’t have to carry all my food and water around. I need to advance to a later floor, but that means I need to defeat the boss. My current curse setup is not good for boss fights. In fact, it’d probably get me killed.

Let’s start over. 

[weaponless] - Cannot use weapons. Greatly improves unarmed combat ability.

Slight modification. Not just damage bonuses anymore. I need a more balanced range of capability since this is a boss. It’s not going to be safe to rely upon brute force. I do have enough money to get a weapon now, but as far as I can tell, what I can afford would be worse than the benefits of this curse. Besides, I have a lot of practice unarmed now, and no practice with weapons.

[Cursed] - Immune to blessings, curses are strengthened. No limit to the number of applied curses. 

This remains unchanged. It’s important for making all my curses stronger and letting me curse myself with an absurd number of curses.

[Armorless] - Cannot wear armor. Greatly improves natural defenses.

Again, a small change. There might be attacks I can’t afford to be hit by, and I’ve noticed these generic bonuses tend to be overall stronger than more specific ones. Though I’ve not really experimented enough to see if specific ones can be stacked to absurd levels or not.

Now, a lot of the other things I got before are no good for bosses. One hit KO style just isn’t safe to even try, and not being able to exploit weak-points also seems like a bad idea. However, it’s impossible to run from a boss due to the boss rooms sealing up after the fight starts.

[Mad Fighter] - Once combat begins there is only one thing: kill or be killed. No retreat, no even thinking about retreat. Only fight. Fight, fight, and more fight. Greatly improves focus, awareness, and reflexes.

Sanity is overrated. Basically, if this works how I think it does, once a fight begins, I’ll be unable to think about or focus on anything other than winning the fight by killing my enemies. The benefits come from that: Better ability to fight well because there are no distractions. Considering how boss fights work, this really shouldn’t be a detriment in the slightest.

Hmmm… previously I’d used a curse to increase natural healing, but that’s really slow for a boss fight. There’s a lot of time between fights when hunting monsters, so even slow healing is a big deal, but in a boss fight, needing a few minutes to heal from minor injuries is just too long. Perhaps I can copy something from videogames? I’m not sure if it’ll work. Let’s try.

[Vampiric Healing] - Draw upon the life force in spilled blood to heal. The more spilled blood, the more you can recover. Cannot heal by any other method.

… I just tried to make a life-steal type curse. The whole gain life based on damage dealt thing that games often have on weapons. This though… I get the feeling it’s slightly different. *sigh* The system lets me imagine something and then it spits out something similar as a possible curse. Most of the time I get exactly what I imagined. This… this feels ominous for some reason. Blood? Does this mean if the monster doesn’t bleed it won’t work? Will it totally fail if I encounter a golem for a boss? What about slimes? Do they bleed? Heck, I’ve not even seen any monster blood so far. I hit them and they vanish.

… The system wouldn’t give me a curse that doesn’t work, right? I should test it… unarmed attacks aren’t very good at making enemies bleed though.

[Blood spilling strikes] - your attacks inflict bleeding; cannot inflict stun.

While I don’t actually have any experience or skill with stunning foes, I’ve seen enough mixed martial arts fights on TV to know that in a fist fight, getting stunned means defeat. One solid hit to the head can end a fight if they are even a little bit dazed by it, because if they can’t properly defend themselves for even a moment, more such hits will be coming. So, I suspect this is not an advantageous trade under most circumstances. It should however, let me test my curses.

…

First test in dungeon: Striking myself.

Ow!

My karate chop sliced my arm badly enough to bleed… though it didn’t look like a serious injury, just a minor one. The blood… it just kinda turned into glowing light and then vanished shortly after spilling out, and the wound mostly healed. I guess it works? Better than expected even. Weird to be slicing with unarmed strikes though. 

Second test in dungeon: Fighting easy monsters

Lucky, the first thing I found was a slime, which is perfect for testing since I don’t yet know if they bleed, and I still have an injury (though minor) to heal. I didn’t see blood, but I did heal as the slime also vanished upon defeat. Though it seems as if the colors of light I see monsters turn into as they vanish are a little different than before. Is the curse messing with the dungeon?

After more testing, the conclusion is: goblins, rabbits, and slimes all provide healing even if I manage to kill them in one hit. Though without all damage bonuses I used to have, they only go down in one hit if I strike the right spot. Strangely, if I do it right, I can behead a goblin with hand chop.

Just one thing left: The boss.