Chapter 118: Seven Ways to Die (Part 2)
Downloading a nearby compatible signal cost nothing but time.
Jin confirmed the selection and watched his Sovereign Coins remain exactly where they were.
One thousand and seventy-three.
Untouched.
He wasn’t spending a single one until he understood exactly what they were worth.
[Dungeon Selected: Shattered Iron Quarry]
[Signal Stability: Acceptable]
[Download Initiated...]
[Download Complete]
[Deploy Bound Avatar?]
Before confirming, Jin checked the real Glitch, the way he always did. His shoulder was almost healed, he’d been recently and properly fed, and he was resting safely inside a locked room.
No Sync was required for deployment. The avatar operated as a separate body inside a separate world, and whatever happened to it inside the quarry, the lizard beside him would remain physically unharmed.
Jin confirmed.
The avatar took shape inside the quarry—an obsidian-scaled Grey Rock Lizard identical to the one breathing beside Jin’s leg, down to the last claw. The real Glitch remained exactly where he was, watching the phone with predatory attention as his copy arrived somewhere new.
---
Shattered Iron Quarry felt nothing like the dungeons they had entered before.
Rustwater had been wet and rotten. This place was dry, ancient, and heavy.
Narrow excavated passages branched away from natural fissures, their floors covered in fine mineral dust. Broken support pillars leaned at dangerous angles, while rust-colored veins threaded through the walls, catching a dull metallic mana-light that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once—just enough illumination to see by, but not enough to trust.
Abandoned stone-hauling channels disappeared into darkness. The ceiling sagged in places, and deep vertical cuts split the quarry floor without warning, dropping into pits whose bottoms Jin couldn’t see.
Every part of the dungeon warned them to move carefully.
Glitch did not move carefully. He moved like he owned the place.
Jin allowed it at first because the confidence wasn’t entirely misplaced. The avatar’s dark, stone-like scales blended well with the walls, and rocky ground was the one type of terrain Glitch understood instinctively. For the first minute or two, it even appeared to be an advantage.
Jin gathered information while they moved.
Some passages were natural, worn smooth by ancient water. Others had been excavated in straight, deliberate lines, with tool marks still visible in the stone. The dust made silent movement nearly impossible; every step Glitch took produced a faint grinding noise against the floor.
There were grooves in that dust as well. Long, shallow channels repeated along the bases of the walls before disappearing beneath rock shelves.
Something used those paths, something that traveled low and used them often.
Small vibrations occasionally passed through the floor.
They weren’t sounds. Jin realized that slowly while watching Glitch’s ears remain relaxed, because the avatar heard almost nothing.
Whatever lived here didn’t make much noise.
It didn’t need to listen for any, either.
Jin noticed all of it. He simply failed to put the clues together fast enough.
---
The passage widened into an open cut.
No enemy was visible, so Glitch advanced, and Jin’s gaze caught on one of the grooves. It followed the left wall before continuing beneath a low rock shelf, where the dust looked recently disturbed.
The pattern started taking shape in the back of his mind.
The grooves are routes. The routes are buried. Whatever made them is—
The floor beside Glitch erupted.
Mineral dust sprayed across the passage as a creature burst from beneath the surface. It resembled a mantis plated in dull metallic armor, its segmented body low to the ground and its forelimbs edged like blades of carved stone.
It had been right there, buried only an inch beneath the same floor Glitch had walked across.
The creature struck before the avatar fully registered the threat.
[Iron-Shell Tunnel Mantis]
[Quality: Iron]
[Combat Rank: Rank 1 Novice, 3-Star]
[Traits: Mineral Carapace, Vibration Detection, Buried Ambush]
"Harden—brace!"
Glitch’s scales darkened half a second before the bladed forelimb crashed into him. The impact produced a scream of stone grinding against stone and sent the avatar staggering across the passage.
Harden had turned a killing blow into a survivable one. It had saved him, but it hadn’t won anything.
"Get away from it! Reposition!"
Glitch scrambled sideways, claws grinding against the loose floor and dust spraying with every hurried step. The mantis turned and came directly after him without needing to look.
Every frantic footfall sent tremors through the mineral floor, and the creature read them like a map.
Running wasn’t helping Glitch escape.
Running was ringing a bell.
It’s tracking the vibrations. Every step tells it exactly where he is.
"Stop moving—"
The mantis was already closing in.
Instinct pushed Glitch toward the same answer he used whenever something managed to hurt him. Jin felt the decision gather through the bond, sharp and immediate, but there was no longer enough time to stop it.
The avatar drew a breath and spat.
Acid Breath washed over the mantis’s carapace. In Rustwater, the attack would have eaten through half of a creature’s face. Here, the acid hissed and smoked across the mineral shell, staining the armor and carving a few shallow lines without penetrating it.
The warning had been exact.
[Corrosion Effectiveness: Reduced]
The armor held.
Glitch felt his strongest attack fail and responded in the worst possible way.
He got angry.
Then he charged.
Glitch met the mantis head-on, hardened claws crashing against stone-edged limbs. He attacked with pure force and frustration, giving the creature exactly the kind of fight it wanted.
The mantis yielded ground.
One step, then another.
It lured Glitch across the loose floor until one of his rear claws slipped and his weight shifted too far forward. The creature vanished beneath the dust.
Glitch spun, searching for it, but every movement gave away his position more clearly. A buried shape raced through one of the grooves along the wall, the dust trembling faintly above its path.
The same mantis erupted behind him.
Its bladed forelimb punched through the gap left exposed by Glitch’s unbalanced posture, striking from an angle he never saw.
The avatar died.
[Avatar Defeated]
[Cause: Iron-Shell Tunnel Mantis — Buried Ambush]
[Respawn Available in: 02:00:00]
---
Beside Jin, the real Glitch jerked upright.
His head snapped around, eyes wide, and he twisted to inspect his own flank—the exact place where the killing blow had landed on his avatar. His attention ran over his body in sharp alarm.
Nothing.
No wound. No blood.
The bruised shoulder remained the only real mark on him, and even that was now little more than a fading ache. His body was whole, safe, completely untouched.
Relief arrived first.
Fury followed half a second later.
Outrage surged through the bond in a hot wave, carrying the offended humiliation of a proud creature who had just lost.
Died.
To a bug.
In the dirt.
Glitch glared at the phone, then at Jin, radiating the unmistakable belief that the result was illegitimate. A clerical error had occurred. Someone owed him an explanation, and possibly an immediate rematch.
Jin wasn’t distressed. He had died in games more times than he could count, and the old machinery inside his head was already working.
"Good news," he said. "We learned something."
Glitch’s response made it abundantly clear that he had found no good news anywhere in the preceding minute and deeply resented Jin’s suggestion that any existed.
"It didn’t track you by sight." Jin tapped the screen as he went over the useful parts. "It reacted whenever you shifted your weight. Running made it worse. You were basically shouting your location. Acid barely damaged the shell, exactly like the warning said. Harden stopped the first strike from killing you, but it couldn’t win the fight."
His finger moved back toward the passage they’d crossed.
"And those grooves in the dust? Those are its routes. It was moving beneath the floor the entire time. The floor is the whole fight."
Glitch did not care about the floor.
Glitch cared that the enemy count remained at zero.
"We test how little movement it can detect," Jin continued, speaking more to himself now. "That’s the next run. Find the threshold. Learn how still you need to be before it loses you."
This was exactly why he had chosen the quarry.
---
Jin opened a fresh set of private notes, the way he always did when facing new content. He had done the same thing in his previous life for raids that consumed weeks of his time and every scrap of his patience.
[Shattered Iron Quarry — Run 1]
[Progress: Minimal]
[Enemies Defeated: 0]
[Primary Discovery: They hunt through vibration.]
[Avatar Status: Respawning]
Enemies Defeated: 0.
Glitch felt Jin’s dissatisfaction with the number and responded by seething about it on general principle.
Jin was already somewhere else, mentally into the second attempt. The cold, clean part of his mind that no one in the Outer Ring had ever seen was settling into place—the part that had nothing to do with the lazy kid who wanted to avoid the draft and everything to do with the grinder who never stopped until the content broke.
Next time, Glitch would move slowly. Slower than felt possible, until Jin found how much vibration the mantis could detect and how still Glitch needed to remain before it lost him.
Loose stones could become decoys. A vibration somewhere else would show how quickly the mantis redirected and what path it took to reach the disturbance.
The visible grooves needed mapping before Glitch advanced through them again.
And from now on, the floor was never neutral terrain.
The lazy slacker who wouldn’t walk to the corner store lived in one body. The person willing to send an avatar into the darkness to die repeatedly until a mineral quarry surrendered all its secrets lived in the other.
Jin had chosen the quarry because every death inside it could teach them something.
The first one had taught him that the floor was listening.
Now he only needed Glitch to die enough times to learn how closely.