Seventeen… seventeen of those goddamn motherfuckers. Fuck at least they’re all finally dead.

Shaking my hands, I threw off some of the blood and grime that were left from the last hellhound I had just killed. Curious about how fighting seventeen of those monsters had affected my stats, I had called forth the page and was currently going over it. Now more sure than ever that progress of my stats was dependent on my experiences.

Unlike with the fight with the Minotaur, my fights against the hellhounds didn’t consist of me getting one-shotted multiple times until the end. Instead, after the first fight, I began employing a strategy of dodging the hound’s attacks while waving my knife and waiting for an opening to appear. 

At first, this strategy was not too effective, as the dogs were far more agile than I was, and were capable of dodging my movements with ease. In fact, for the first four hounds that I killed, I was only able to land any hits once they hand finally grabbed a hold of me. Which ended with me killing them at the cost of grave injuries.

As the fights went on however, I began to notice a certain pattern to their attacks. If the distance between us was just right, and the fight had lasted long enough, the hounds would jump straight at me and attempt to bite me, which made the obvious response to dodge left or right before stabbing them. However, this strategy did not work at first. Instead, I was barely able to dodge right or left before the hounds had already turned and began attacking me again. Ultimately, my fights with the fifth and sixth hounds ended just as the previous four.

During my fight with the seventh hound however, I finally found a way to overcome this dilemma. Instead of dodging to the right or left, I would step into the hounds attack before sidestepping to the sides and stabbing it while it was still dazed from my dodge. It wasn’t actually easy to get the hang of it, as the hound managed to scratched me pretty bad while barely not biting one of my arms off. Nonetheless, that fight marked the first time in which I had managed to defeat a hound with sustaining an incapacitating injury.

During the fight with the next hound, I tried to get a little cheeky due to my rising confidence, and actually put out my hand to stop the hound in the air before attacking it. After the hound had jumped, I bopped it in its snout before trying to move in and stabbing it. Before I could even do that however, the hellhound simply released its firebreath which incinerated my arm and left me to employ the old tactic of relying on the hound to bite me before taking it out.

But it wasn’t all for naught. One thing I noticed after the hound had used its firebreath was that it didn’t really move while using it, which led me to wonder if I could abuse that to my advantage.

For the eight hound, I decided to test this strategy out. After managing to bait it into lunging itself at me once more, I stuck out my hand to stop its movements mid air before immediately throwing myself to the right. The hound, just as the last time, released its firebreath. And, just like the last time, it remained still for the few seconds that it was using it. Not letting this opportunity pass, I lunged towards its neck and stabbed the knife there.

From then on, my fights with the remaining hounds consisted of me dancing around until I could get them to jump at me, from where I would simply repeat the action of putting out my hand to stop them mid air and dodging to the side before stabbing them, although not all attempts ended with me coming out unscathed. Luckily, these wounds were mainly due to scratches and, while quite painful and essentially rendering my left arm useless, they didn’t require me to rely on the extreme option of ending my life to continue fighting.

As a result, I was now down to only one arm, as I had no intention of ending my life at the moment. Currently my luck had improved and gone all the way up to -46, and I had no plans to lower it once more by ending my life. It seemed that facing my fears head on had a positive effect on my luck, which really made me wonder how the hell the stat even worked since it had gone down after my fight with the Minotaur, and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t exactly having fun against it.

As for my fear of dogs… yeah it’s not gone at all. At the very least I’m now able to fight them, but I still felt fear every time I had to face against one of them. And every time one of them bit me or scratched me, I would momentarily freeze before moving quickly resuming thanks to the adrenaline inside me.

Another thing I didn’t understand was how this cave worked. No matter how much noise I made, the hounds would not come to the cave. Instead, just throwing one rock outside the cave attracted the attention of all the hounds, which almost resulted in me having to face seven of them at once if it wasn’t that they backed off for some strange reason after one of them entered. It appeared that one way or another, no more than one monster would enter this cave, and it seemed that no matter what I did, they would not walk here on their own unless I somehow caught their attention. Which also raised the question of how the Minotaur ended up stumbling here, although I had my suspicious that a certain goddess might be to blame.

Leaning myself against a wall, I continued to relax for a moment as I wondered what to do about my arm. I didn’t really have a way to heal it, and it was now more than clear to me that my healing abilities were nothing special at all. This meant that I would be stuck with these deep cuts for many days, and there was also the possibility that they could fester and only make my situation worse.

While thinking this, I felt the ground begin to vibrate before a rumbling sound came out. Looking in front of me, I saw a strange black mist begin to congregate in three different points, with one of them being significantly larger than the rest.

Getting a bad premonition about these events, I began making my way to the exit as the three different congregations of mists began to take some rather familiar shapes. After about a minute of this, the mist had finally disappeared with three figures standing where the mist once was as the identity of the room became apparent to me.

Standing in front of me was absolutely massive Minotaur, at least five meters in height. It had two massive horns, was wearing brown leather armor, and possessed two large cleavers each more massive than the one the previous Minotaur had. And like his smaller friend, he had two red eyes which shone with pure rage. 

Accompanying him, where two hellhounds who were definitely a good half a meter taller than their meter tall regular versions. Also looking as though their bite and fire breath would be far more potent.  After a few seconds, all three of the monsters locked eyes with me as I felt the ground begin to shake once more.

Turning my head to look behind me at as the sound caught my attention, I saw that the exit was beginning to close. Acting immediately, I began to make a mad dash towards the exit as the two large hounds chased after me, both committed to not letting me escape. Making it just in time, I exited the room as the hounds stopped right at border separating the boss room from the rest of the dungeon. Not trying to tempt fate, I quickly made my way through the passage as I continued on in what I was now sure, was a game-like dungeon…