Haeros Dungeon - Chapter 31 preview (Patreon)

I was lucky to wake up. Not just because of the sheer volume of injuries I had accumulated, of course, but because I had fallen asleep without any safeguards or protection on a new floor after making a massive amount of noise. When the stone imp boss and myself had crashed down into the ground, we must have sounded like the arrival of a dozen cannonballs.

Only pure luck and the dungeon denizens’ good sense to leave unknown noises alone kept me alive. At least, long enough for me to fall unconscious, heal and wake again. Waking came through a series of flickers of agony and shifting bone as my body’s healing skill pulled and reset things, as it patched up torn muscles and open wounds.

Lifting myself upwards enough to get a hand on the orb, pocketing it without looking, was a pain and a half. Every movement sent arcs of lightning from my shoulder, the barest shift bringing electricity as it struggled to handle the still healing bones.

Funny, I could walk – if necessary – on broken toes and the small bones in my feet. Break a clavicle, though, and most people were completely useless. Same with me, though I had one advantage. Shifting just enough to put myself in a better position against the rocks and not so much face down, took long minutes, but propped up against the rocky corpse of my opponent, I managed it.

After that, I pushed with my free hand, the shield knocking into my face a few times. Painful, but almost trivial with everything else going on. Once I had a proper grip, I traced the edges of the damage around and under the shoulder pauldrons, confirming that, yes, I was still broken. And then, gripping it properly, I shifted it as far as I could into the right position.

It didn’t have to be perfect, but once I got over the initial agony, it helped reduce the pain significantly. Sufficient enough that I could move on. Next up was checking the emergency healing potion that I carried around, only to find that it was completely broken. Even in its padded case, all that falling and dragging about had shattered the reinforced glass, leaving my fingers cut when I scrabbled around for it. Hissing, I removed my fingers from the spot and found the healing pills next to it, the “failed” products, and slipped one in my mouth.

Couldn’t take more than one – they didn’t work that way and would just dump a bunch of poisons into me rather than help the healing process. Unfortunately, there was a reason why these pills were considered “failed” products. By the time they helped with the healing, I’d be dead.

No, my only hope lay in my skill. As such, I turned my focus onto the flow of energy from my health vault. Specifically, I poured my energy into fixing my clavicle, reducing the swelling that had held everything together while patching the various newly created torn muscles and skin, closing up blood vessels and restitching them together. The bone began its process of resetting itself, blood cells filling the space and depositing little portions of calcium with each moment.

Once I had that focus well in hand, when I had tightened my mind down so that it became rote, I turned to the next step which was further aiding this healing process. In this case, that meant getting the water bottle – my refillable water skin – into my mouth. I drank, greedily and had to forcibly stop myself after a moment, realizing that I was going to choke myself if I kept that up. Or worse, throw up.

Yes, worse, because have you tried vomiting whilst hosting a series of broken bones? It’s even worse than having a hacking cough with broken ribs, because vomiting requires the whole body and just keeps thrashing everything around in you. Projectile vomiting also ends up with you all kinds of dirty and disgusting when you can’t move properly.

Getting old is not dignified.

Why was I drinking? Well, while the liquid provided by the auto-refilling flask did not – contrary to its taste – have any real nutritive properties – a well-known fact via a series of apocryphal stories of adventurers trying to subsist just on those drinks being the clear sign of that – my body needed the actual fluid. Water, that was real, condensed from the air around me within the bottle, was necessary.

After all, I’d bled out a ton of liquid and while my body could – and did – replace it via the healing magics, basically creating something from nothing – or from core energy – it was still exhausting. As such, providing my body the water it needed helped reduce the amount of energy necessary, since I needed to do less work.

At the same time, I knew my body was cannibalizing muscle mass and fat to provide for the nutrients and other bits for the blood and bone. Which meant that I also needed to eat, if I didn’t want to lose too much. Getting to my food pouches and the easily snackable items near me was another pain and a half, and it took long, agonizing minutes to get the pouch open and begin chewing.

One of the blows had hit the side of my jaw hard enough that I had a major bruise on the side of my face, so each time I bit down, it hurt. The act of chewing required you to bite multiple times and exert force and that was never fun. Unfortunately, hard tack and jerky were mostly about chewing a lot, since you needed to mush them enough to be palatable. Biting all the way was even harder, so I kept adding water in small mouthfuls to help soften the meal.

In this way, for an indeterminate time, I survived. Waiting for my shoulder to heal, to reduce in swelling such that I could move on to the next major problem. My internal organs – thankfully – had been mostly patched up, at least in the sense that they were not outright bleeding. A check through my mental inventory of my body, a slow trickle of energy to check for the most deadly of organs to leave damaged, ensured that while everything was a little bruised and battered, nothing was dire.

Next up were my legs. Since my feet were still laced – tightly – into my boots, they had not swollen as much as they would have. Reducing the rest of the swelling so that I could begin shifting my bones back into place was agonizingly slow, and repulpating my own feet with my fingers was equally slow. Thankfully, the process of healing whilst I was asleep had moved enough of them back in space that I barely had to do any of that myself.

After this, I began to put together the bones in my heels. I tried to keep my focus on the bigger bones, knowing that I could walk with my smaller bones broken. Not well, mind you, and not gracefully, unless I wanted shards of pain shot through me, but viable enough.

All this time, lurking at the back of my mind was the fact that I had been here, by myself, for hours. At some point, the creatures out there would be coming for me, their initial fear driven away by their hunger. Scavengers would come first, the predators more wary and watchful.

Getting mobile, and fight-ready, was the major plan. After that, I decided, I could worry about things like how to get out of this level.

Which, of course, was when the sound of scuttling along the ground made its presence known.