With tears flowing like water Alice silently howled and squeezed the jacket in her teeth. You can… just do it… faster… With her undamaged, although shaking hand the girl rummaged pockets until two vials showed up. Red and green liquids were splashing inside.

>Level up!
>Hunter lvl. 2 -> lvl. 3
>+5 Skill Points
>Attributes being adjusted…

Rejuvenation felt so in time Alice even forgot to kindly ask system to shut the fuck up. Invisible energy poured in every cell of her body, sprang throughout her bloodstream, cleared the mind and eased the pain. Or maybe it is the poison kicking in, Alice retorted herself soberly, pulled out the cork from the green vial with her teeth and drank the content in a gulp.

>Level up!
>###hidden### being adjusted...

Antitoxin tasted bitter as those horrible medicines Alice had to ingest in her childhood and fiery heat from her duplicate level up helped very little either. At least I was spared from giving birth to another shady skill, the girl shredded more tears.

To her greater joy, the poison spreading stopped. Immediately Alice moved so she could unclench the last grasp of the dead monster using only one healthy leg and free but hardly reacting left hand. Especially tricky job if you are trying not to look at your mutilated arm.

Secondary level up feels different, Alice busied her thoughts meanwhile. System-guided one was built on the outside energy flow, and the fiery tide seemed to be a reaction from the inside. Not pleasant, like at all, but nonetheless her own. Congenital. Hidden race thingy.

“Auch!” Alice hissed. She freed herself, but the pain was slowly coming back.

Plop.

Blood painted the gray-stoned floor in red. Plop, plop.

Alice stared down, stupefied. That hit her. Initial shock had passed during a fever of battle and later the poison numbed sensations, so... The girl was now looking at her dark sloppy sleeve with the strangely angled hand inside and felt surreal.

Mortified, not taking eyes from the cloth-covered wound, the girl blindly found the Lesser Healing potion and drank it down. A liquid fire scorched her tongue and throat, yet the hand aching felt more real. Not at all the scariest part, no, instead it was the suspense. Against will, her imagination was picturing the most hellish agony awaiting her with the poison withdrowal to the point Alice started to feel phantoms of it.

The girl shivered and crawled away from the dead centipedes, sat down at a wall. The ache changed to tingle and then itch. Trembling strongly, Alice shut her eyes, not thinking, not caring to be a target for a wandering monster.

Something in her was changing.

The potion was mending her flesh, moving around and rebuilding broken pieces, melting away irreversible damages. Every moment of it Alice was painfully conscious.

Wrong, this is wrong.

[Lesser Life potion] [Heals light injuries: scratches, small cuts and burns, bruises, cracks in bones etc.]

This was not what was happening at all, and Alice only had one damned clue why, expressed by question marks in her status window, so the girl wasn’t really happy about saving another potion for another unlucky encounter. Speaking of which…

Two ambushes had worked out, and I became so cocky, Alice decisively ridiculed herself and gazed at the dead centipedes with re-found fear. Jumping around like a clown, so sure in these bloody skills… you are nothing! You can die at every moment! Fucking learn!

Smack!

Alice slapped herself. The thrill of seeing the death door was strong, but at last she remembered in what the fucking place she was in, gathered her shivering guts together and stood up since there was no use in waiting for her hand to heal up completely. Even if it was hurting like hell now.

These were definitely guards for something. The girl was thinking hard while pulling out her spear from the slowly burning with invisible flames corpse and bravely surpassing the waking up pain in her limbs. A den? It must be not too close since no monster has come to join the party.

Either thanks to the Observation skill or her own intelligence, but Alice had realized in time that two centipedes hadn’t been positioned in the long corridor just because. She had taken a risk then and targeted the farthest centipede first. The plan had worked out well if one leaves certain pieces out of the picture.

“It’s a den…” Alice collected all arrows and muttered slowly, with some hesitation she then called out for the system.

I should stop with the quest for now, the girl decided, almost wept from relief and right away insincerely berated herself for it. Still, she had reached level 3, earned some battle points and desperately needed some rest to get in shape... it was time for Alice to tiredly shamble back to her node.

Status.

Alice Sung-Hyun Branson
Human/###hidden###

Level 3 Hunter
Exp: 3,100/7,000
Skill Points: 5
Battle Points: 883

Strength: 4.7 -> 5.6
Endurance: 4.9 -> 5.8
Dexterity: 6.9 -> 8.0
Agility: 4.5 -> 5.6
Perception: 6.9 -> 8.2

>System message!

>Warning! Node #8 is under attack! To avoid mana contamination, all functions were suspended for 12-hours!

>Neutralize the threat to activate the safe zone!

The moment she got the message, Alice’s face lost all blood and sticky, heavy flood filled in her head. Somehow, she just assumed from the beginning there would be a way back. The door, the node was there and she only had to wait a few days, maybe defeat some monsters, clear some missions and it might as well open.

Now, with perfect timing, the system announced the contamination thingy.

Why the fuck! Wait... the short girl shook. Safe zone... Safe. Zone.

Familiar tunnels, road forks marked with X, Alice crossed them hurriedly as far as her Stealth skill and newly found ‘common sense in mortal danger’ allowed her. More than once, she would stop still or cover in hiding, haunted by shadows, fearing products of her own imagination. Spear she held tight was sweeping air erratically: the girl’s injured hand was hurting like hell, and her lips thinned into a blue line. Strange heat was still active, slowly easing the pain, and without knowing its nature Alice was honestly scared of taking in another Life potion, she would rather endure.

So the short girl ran. Stressed, not able to get rid of tension was slowly gnawing at her nerves that suffered above a year's worth in a day. Loaded with scattering in different directions thoughts, scraps of different plans and fading signs of brilliant ideas, which she just couldn’t stick together. Luckily, the tunnels and caves of the Emerald Dungeon remained empty until the very end, where…

[Ant Lvl 3] [Ant Lvl 6] [Ant Lvl 4] ... ... ...

System's notifications blurred in her eyes as Alice hid behind a corner. Her wrist pulsed in pain, half of it physical and another half from her panicking subconsciousness reminding her to want to run far, far away or at least stay there paralyzed from the fear of death. The girl opened her mouth to silently gulp the air and seconds passed before she suppressed various impulses. Alice felt dizzy, scorched inside. Wordlessly, she opened her dry mouth and inaudibly asked no one,

“What should I do?”

“Can’t let them go inside, can I?”

“System will close the node.”

“Plan, I need a plan.”

Thanks to the undead-like skill, Alice at least spent these seconds completely still. After making sure she could control herself, the girl very slowly cracked her pocket open and took out the second Life potion. Fire-like liquid soon flushed her veins, concentrated in her hand. A few ugly scars reddened brightly and started to dissipate under Alice's watch. An amazing sight the girl spent significant efforts to look away from.

Long corridor was dividing her and the first dungeon cave. She could only hear legs' clatters, barely.

Ants were black, smooth and looked... well, very much like ants. Half of a meter to a meter long, not really hideous a threat with only one pair of jaws for each.

The problem was the sheer number of these oversized black garden ants. Alice could see three constantly guarding the hole in the wall. With some grief, the girl noticed the broken glass of an oil lamp she had left near it... Anyway, more ants were running around in the cave with no obvious goal. Alice frowned, hardly able to tell them apart from each other, and silently ordered:

Skills window, show up right now.

Absolute Body Control
Hunt mastery: 1 (1 SP)
Bow mastery: 1 (1 SP)
Spear mastery: 2 (2 SP)
Observation: 2 (1 SP)
Stealth: 1 (1 SP)
Butchering: 1 (1 SP)