ALL NOVEL Chapter 299: Sister
It is an indistinct amount of time later.
The girl with one eye crashes down towards the world below, as the demon-hand, as the grip of the dungeon-master tears them out of the void, sending her spiraling wildly as she surges through the darkness, as she falls downward to inhabit her newest body. It is one of many, one of hundreds, one of thousands that she has inhabited before. That’s just what the life of a trash-mob is like. But she doesn’t mind, it’s her job after all. She’s just a little old trash-mob who lives at the very bottom of the deepest dungeon in the entire world.
She gasps, taking in a sharp breath as she comes to life in this newest shell of hers. But the act of breathing, which she had become accustomed to in her old body, feels rather difficult, given that this new body doesn’t seem to need to breathe, let alone have the capacity to do so. She was a minotaur in her last life.
She wiggles excitedly, her one yellow eye glibbering around as it scans the darkness in a boring, monotone fashion. She is a cubic slime today, by the looks of things.
The other cubic slimes around her, sensing her excited wiggle, glibber in agitation at her unnecessary waste of energy. She tries to sigh, not interested in a lecture from these squares, but she realizes shortly after that she doesn’t have a mouth to sigh with. Haha, silly, didn’t she just realize that because of her breathing? She’s so forgetful these days!
Though, perhaps that’s just what happens when you live the same life day in and day out forever.
Respawn.
Put on a good show of a fight for the hero-party.
Die.
Respawn.
It’s a simple existence, but she’s not entirely unfond of it. Sure, not everybody gets killed everyday during their work, but she likes to think that she has an exciting job. She loves being a trash-mob, she loves working hard to make the dungeon-master happy. Maybe one day, if she works hard enough, then the dungeon-master will praise her and tell her how cool and strong she is. Maybe she’ll finally get to meet them?
She wiggles again in excitement, giddy about that prospect. She bets that they’re super cool, they probably have a giant flaming throne of fire and burning eyes to match.
The other cubic slimes jiggle in annoyance, telling her to settle down before she ends up causing a scene. She rolls her one eye and continues to look around the darkness.
She’s the only one with an eye, though she has never really figured out why. Every time she respawns as a trash-mob, she always has one eye. Even if she’s a trash-mob that usually doesn’t have any eyes to begin with, like a slime. Not that she minds. Sure, having two eyes would be ideal, especially when she respawns as an undead or as a minotaur, both creatures that typically have two eyes rather than one. But having one eye as every trash-mob, rather than two as some of them, is a fair trade as far as she can see it.
There are a lot of things that she can’t see, however. There are a lot of things that she can’t understand. She doesn’t know why she’s a girl, even when she sometimes respawns as something that is clearly a boy. She doesn’t know why she has one eye either. But she knows that deep down in her heart of hearts, in her first-life that happened back in a time far too far gone for her to remember, that she was a girl and so she continues onward, trying to keep that core identity of her being intact.
Is it important? No, not really. But it feels like the right thing to do and honestly, there’s another reason, but it’s too embarrassing for her to say out loud, even in her thoughts. People are listening there. Even though the other three and the other thousand who all live in her mind together with her already know it.
She wiggles, her gelatinous body rippling as she moves away from the disapproving crowd. You see, the thing is, the hero-party… well no, the hero himself -
The hero is a boy and she thinks that he likes girls. So maybe that means he can like her?
It’s stupid, she knows. In truth, she knows that her heart could only ever belong to the dungeon-master who she adores. She’s just a dumb little trash-mob who lives at the very bottom of the dungeon and sometimes she has really weird and ugly bodies. But she’s still going to dream about it, at least in secret. She’s going to dream about being someone who can be loved by the strongest person in the entire world.
But… well… you know. Nobody needs to know that. It can be her secret, her hidden dream that lives in the back, itchy corner of her mind where nobody can judge her for it, at least out loud. Back there where the others live. Those three nagging voices who can never seem to leave her alone. Her only friends.
She sighs, listening to them starting to bicker again, as she crawls through the darkness. The woman’s voice, chiming in her head like a susurrant whisper, tells her to go this way today. The girl with one eye doesn’t know why, but the voice insists on being called step-sister. Not that she minds.
Step-sister and step-brother, the other voice in her head, are always fighting with each other about things that she doesn’t understand. Something about the color purple or something dumb like that. Actually, there are a lot of voices in her head. More than she can keep track of, but most of them fade away quickly, falling deep down beneath the tide of the black-water. Only the three most prominent of them consistently rise to the surface. Step-sister, who often talks about someone that is the girl with one eye’s ‘brother’ and the voice of a stoic, proud man who calls himself a hero. Though she calls him step-brother. In truth, she thinks they’re both a little kooky. But maybe she’s the kooky one. She’s hearing voices after all.
The worst voice though is the one that comes to her head when she is around the real hero, or around eggs, oddly enough. She isn’t sure why, but… she gets desires. Desires that are inappropriate for the work-place and quite honestly, the girl with one eye won’t stand for it. She likes that voice the least.
Professionalism at work is very important, they have a show to put on for the hero-party after all.
Following step-sister’s guidance, she crawls through the darkness, looking around at the blank featurelessness that there is to see of the cave.
Something catches her attention.
The girl with one eye stops, her slimy body wiggling and jiggling as her momentum catches up with her. Closing her one eye, she tries to focus on the thing that she feels touching her body, the disturbance, the thing that doesn’t belong.
There is a wind, a gentle draft, a warm breeze that pushes up from the bottom of the dungeon. The soft breath from an unidentified source runs over her gestalt. Opening her one eye, she follows its path with her vision, wiggling down in the same direction that it blows, as she chases it. She’s never felt anything like this before. Wind? All the way down here? How odd.
The girl with one eye peers around the corner, not sure what it is that she’s seeing. There, hidden in the rock of the cave is a small slit, a vertical crack that runs along the darkest, most hidden wall at the very bottom of the dungeon. Crawling towards it, she peers inside of the hole and looks at what lies beyond in the darkness as she listens to step-sister and step-brother fighting.
She blinks, as she sees the hidden staircase just behind the crack.
Curious now, she squishes her body together, pushing through the split as she moves towards the stairs, feeling that warm wind push against her back, as if gently nudging her forward. It feels much like the hand of a doting mother who is coaxing her child to go into the wide world on the other side of the door that it now only realizes it is able to cross.
