[NARRATOR POV]
The fetid air of the Nightmare Dungeon's fifth floor burned in Claude's lungs as he sprinted through the labyrinthine corridors, his footfalls echoing against the damp stone walls.
Sweat stung his eyes, dripping down his face as he risked a glance backward. The sight sent fresh adrenaline coursing through his veins.
"Crap, crap, crap! Shouldn't they be consuming each other?"
His desperate words emerged in ragged gasps as he fled from the unholy alliance pursuing him—vorpal rabbits with blood-stained teeth, wolves with eyes like burning coals, and bears whose massive paws could crush his skull with a casual swipe.
In any natural ecosystem, these predators would be tearing each other apart. But here, in this twisted mockery of nature, they moved with singular purpose, united by their desire to rend his flesh from his bones.
As Claude wove between stalactites that hung like petrified tears from the ceiling, his mind betrayed him, dragging him back to memories of his first kill.
He had been seven years old then—a child only in body, with the fractured memories of multiple lives driving him toward survival with ruthless determination.
Unlike his previous incarnations who had developed their skills over decades, Claude was still physically a child who had only recently learned to properly grip a sword.
Yet he understood, drawing from Alex's memories, that accelerated growth required two essential catalysts: a first kill and an intimate understanding of mortality's cold embrace.
Fear was humanity's most primal motivator. When faced with the objects of their deepest terrors, people ran.
They fought. They transcended their limitations. Alex had understood this fundamental truth, and throughout his life, he had deliberately pushed himself to the precipice of death—not from suicidal impulse, but from the calculated understanding that greatness was forged in the crucible of terror overcome.
The results of this philosophy spoke for themselves. Before his reincarnation, Alex had become legendary among mercenaries, his name whispered with equal parts reverence and dread.
He brought fear to his enemies and security to his allies, his reputation spreading like wildfire through territories plagued by conflict.
But true survival demanded more than combat prowess. The wilderness skills Claude had inherited from Alex's memories proved more valuable than even the magical abilities bestowed by Fred. How to find water in seemingly barren terrain.
Which plants would sustain life and which would stop a heart. How to move through hostile territory leaving no sign of passage. These were the gifts that kept Claude breathing when others would have perished.
As a child, he possessed one advantage over his adult incarnations—his young body required less rest to recover, a brief nap often sufficient to rejuvenate his mind.
Yet even this natural resilience couldn't immediately compensate for his physical immaturity. Drawing upon Fred's systematic approach to learning, Claude devised a methodical progression to develop the skills his memories told him he possessed but his body had yet to master.
His first kill needed to be straightforward—a controlled introduction to the act of taking life. The village butcher's establishment provided the ideal setting.
There, amidst the copper tang of blood and the buzzing of flies, Claude made his first kill. His small hands trembled as they gripped the knife, his eyes wide as he watched life drain from the livestock. The moment the animal's eyes glazed over, Claude's stomach rebelled.
He vomited violently, his body rejecting the reality his mind had forced upon it.
For days afterward, the stench of death seemed to follow him like a shadow. Food turned to ash in his mouth, the mere thought of consuming meat from the creature he had slaughtered making his gorge rise.
Sleep offered no respite—nightmares painted in crimson haunted him, the dying bleat of the animal transforming into human screams that jolted him awake, sheets soaked with sweat.
But Claude forced himself to confront these terrors rather than flee from them. For two weeks, he returned to the butcher's shop daily, training himself to kill livestock swiftly and cleanly.
He studied their anatomy with clinical detachment, noting how tendons connected to bone, how blood vessels branched through muscle tissue, how the heart continued to pump for precious seconds even after death had claimed its victim.
At home, he assisted his mother in the kitchen, watching with forced stoicism as she transformed dead flesh into meals.
Each day, the revulsion diminished incrementally, replaced by a dispassionate acceptance that existence was sustained through death—a natural cycle that had endured since time immemorial.
When Claude judged himself ready, he ventured alone into the woods surrounding the village. There, away from watchful eyes, he encountered his first true monster—a juvenile dire wolf separated from its pack.
Claude's hand had moved to draw his blade, but hesitation seized him at the last moment. The creature whimpered, its posture deceptively submissive, and Claude's childish instincts nearly overrode his tactical knowledge.
That moment of compassion almost cost him his head. The wolf lunged with sudden ferocity, jaws snapping mere inches from his throat as Claude threw himself backward.
The lesson was branded into his consciousness as vividly as if seared there with hot iron: wilderness showed no mercy, and neither could he.
"You must never bring your kindness to a hunt," he whispered to himself as he finally drove his blade between the creature's ribs, feeling resistance, then surrender as steel parted flesh and pierced the heart.
For weeks afterward, Claude stalked the forests, honing his skills against the monsters that lurked in the shadows between trees.
With each kill, the trembling in his hands diminished. The nightmares receded. His mind grew steady, his strikes precise.
It was during one such expedition, as twilight painted the forest in shades of amber and shadow, that Claude stumbled upon a scene that would fundamentally alter his path.
Slaver caravans weren't uncommon in these remote regions where law enforcement was sporadic at best, but the brutality Claude witnessed that evening surpassed even the horrors his memories had prepared him for.
Using the gathering darkness as his ally, Claude struck with cold efficiency. His first human kill differed profoundly from his experiences with animals and monsters.
As the slaver's lifeblood spilled across forest loam, Claude felt neither revulsion nor regret—only a terrible, consuming thirst that demanded satiation.
He wanted to kill. Not indiscriminately, but with purpose—eliminating every slaver he could find, liberating those who had been reduced to mere commodities by the cruelest aspects of human nature.
Some of the slaves he freed chose to follow him, drawn to his uncanny confidence and the protection he offered.
Under his tutelage, they learned to defend themselves, to transform their bodies from vessels of servitude into weapons of retribution.
Yet freedom proved a complex gift. It wasn't uncommon for Claude to discover that someone he had rescued had been sold again within days—often by their own families, desperate for coin or terrified of reprisal from the slave traders whose merchandise they had harbored.
These betrayals inflicted wounds deeper than any blade, leaving emotional scars that Claude could not heal with magic or medicine.
Despite these setbacks, Claude's militia grew at a pace that surprised even him. By the time he summoned Mike to discuss future endeavors, Claude commanded enough loyal fighters to provide his friend with significant backing.
These forces would stabilize Mike's position within his merchant group—or, if necessary, facilitate a complete takeover.
A month before the metastasis event, Mike had accomplished precisely that goal, seizing control with a ruthlessness that belied his eleven years.
Of course, such an achievement would have been impossible for an ordinary child. But Mike was exceptional in his own right, navigating complex power dynamics with preternatural acumen.
Claude shared the knowledge gleaned from his incarnations, transcribing critical information into journals and clarifying concepts that Mike found challenging.
This intellectual foundation allowed Mike to grasp not only the broader strategic landscape but also nuanced tactical details that would have eluded most adults.
With his merchant connections providing legitimate revenue streams and Claude's militia handling more clandestine operations, Mike elevated his new enterprise to unprecedented heights.
Moreover, Claude's fighters continued their nocturnal activities—liberating slaves, disrupting trafficking routes, and eliminating those who profited from human misery.
While Mike managed these expanding operations, Claude maintained a punishing schedule designed to maximize his development. Mornings found him in his father's smithy, learning metallurgy and the craft of weapon-making. Afternoons were devoted to swordsmanship, his small body repeating forms until muscle memory began to approximate the skill his memories insisted he possessed.
Evenings belonged to magic training with Rudeus, followed by solitary experiments in enchantment that often stretched until midnight.
After a brief respite—no more than an hour of sleep—Claude would visit his militia's hidden encampment, overseeing training and planning future operations.
Before dawn, he would cleanse himself in the river's frigid embrace before returning to the smithy to begin the cycle anew.
Remarkably, Claude's young body withstood this regimen, though not without cost. Now trapped in the Nightmare Dungeon, he could heal physical injuries through spellcraft, but the bone-deep fatigue accumulated during his explorations often left him unconscious for days at a time, significantly impeding his progress.
Fortunately, the first five floors of the dungeon contained no monster spawn points, creating relatively safe havens after Claude had methodically eliminated every threat.
This pattern changed on the sixth floor, where creatures materialized from the darkness with unsettling regularity, forcing Claude to adapt his strategy.
After months of careful advancement, devastating ambushes, and countless deaths followed by resurrections, Claude finally reached the eighth floor and destroyed its spawn point—an achievement that would prevent new monsters from manifesting for approximately a month.
This temporary reprieve allowed him to press onward, eventually confronting the final adversary his third incarnation had faced before the flow of memories abruptly ceased.
The implications were clear: Kuro had died fighting this creature—likely multiple times—until he had either discovered a method of defeat or perished so completely that no further memories could transfer.
Either way, the absence of information beyond this point meant Claude was venturing into truly unknown territory.
The Ancient Troll was an abomination that defied conventional understanding of life and death. Its stamina appeared limitless, allowing it to pursue prey for days without rest.
Unlike most predators that killed efficiently, the Troll derived perverse pleasure from tormenting its victims, systematically destroying their will to fight before consuming them alive—often beginning while they remained conscious enough to experience the horror of their own consumption.
Although the Troll occasionally fed upon lesser monsters from the upper levels, Claude's observations suggested it didn't require sustenance to survive.
Its regenerative capabilities bordered on the miraculous—wounds closing almost as quickly as they were inflicted, severed limbs regrowing within minutes, even destroyed sensory organs like eyes reforming before Claude could capitalize on the temporary disability.
It represented a seemingly invincible opponent, a physical manifestation of despair that had claimed countless lives over centuries of existence. Claude devoted four months solely to reconnaissance, studying the creature's patterns and searching for vulnerabilities he could exploit through stealth and precision.
The tactical approach became clear: either kill the Troll instantly with overwhelming force, or inflict only minor injuries that wouldn't trigger its full defensive capabilities.
Any middle ground—damaging the creature significantly without finishing it—would provoke a relentless hunt.
Once enraged, the Troll would pursue its quarry throughout the dungeon, smashing through walls and obstacles as if they were constructed of parchment rather than stone.
Claude's third incarnation had learned this lesson through unspeakable suffering. In one particularly vivid memory fragment, Claude witnessed Kuro's capture and subsequent torture.
The Troll had forced Kuro to drink its blood, which contained regenerative properties that prevented death even as the monster systematically dismembered its victim—allowing limbs to regrow solely for the pleasure of severing them again.
The Troll's face had split into a grotesque parody of a smile as Kuro's screams echoed through the cavernous chamber, the sound apparently as nourishing to the creature as flesh itself.
Most horrifying was the duration of this torment. After the Troll had finally grown bored with its plaything, it had abandoned Kuro to a slow death in the dungeon depths.
Three years passed before release finally came—three years of being forced to cannibalize his own regenerating flesh when hunger became unbearable, three years of being periodically rediscovered and butchered anew when the Troll desired entertainment.
For a seven-year-old child to inherit such memories would drive most to madness. That Claude retained his sanity was remarkable enough; that he continued to function with purpose and clarity approached the miraculous.
He channeled the trauma into preparation, using the horror not as a paralytic but as motivation to strengthen himself and the village against the disasters he knew approached.
And yet, despite all his efforts, the metastasis had still occurred. Claude found himself returned to the very nightmare he had spent years preparing to avoid.
To combat the paralyzing fear that threatened to consume him when confronting the Troll, Claude sang—a bizarre, discordant melody about monsters devouring humans.
The song, drawn from the same fictional world as Mushoku Tensei, reminded him of a crucial truth: somewhere across the vast expanse of possibility, others faced similar trials. He was not alone in his suffering.
"I am not suffering alone in this world," he repeated like a mantra, each syllable reinforcing his resolve as he engaged in what appeared to be a hopeless battle against a creature that embodied death without the mercy of finality.
Days turned to weeks. Weeks became months. Claude died and returned, each resurrection bringing new insights, each defeat teaching valuable lessons.
The Troll's regeneration had a pattern. Its attacks followed predictable sequences when faced with certain provocations. Most importantly, its arrogance—the absolute certainty of its invincibility—created exploitable openings.
On the seventy-third attempt, Claude finally succeeded. The Troll fell, its seemingly immortal existence concluded by a child who refused to accept the limitations of reality.
Claude dismembered the creature methodically, preserving each component—particularly its blood, whose regenerative properties might prove invaluable in the trials that still awaited him.
To symbolically bury his fear and mock the entity that had tormented him across multiple lives, Claude named the defeated Troll "Trolly"—a childish diminutive that stripped the monster of its mystique and reduced it to just another conquered obstacle.
Standing amidst the scattered remains of his nemesis, Claude felt a weight lift from his shoulders. His nightmare had finally ended, but he harbored no illusions—what lay ahead might prove even more terrible than what he had already endured.
The memories of his incarnations had brought him this far, but beyond this point, he would be writing his own story.
The thought brought a grim smile to his blood-spattered face. Perhaps that had been the purpose all along—not merely to survive, but to surpass the limitations of those who had come before. To forge a path where none had previously existed.
With steady hands, Claude collected the last of the Troll's remains and turned toward the passage that led deeper into the dungeon's heart.
Whatever awaited him there would face not a frightened child, but a being who had conquered death itself—repeatedly and with increasing proficiency.
The true nightmare had never been the dungeon. It had been the fear of failure, the knowledge of past defeats carried into the present. And that, at least, Claude had finally put to rest.
___________________________________________
✨ Enjoyed the chapter? Dive deeper into the story world!
I've started to share my source here, and thinking to create a AI based video by story telling the story, I already had a testing video for another fanfiction of mine.
Check them out and let me know what you think! Your feedback really helps me grow.
📺 YouTube: EternalLibrary
🎵 TikTok: @library3550
📸 Instagram: @libeternal
☕ Love the story? Support and read ahead!
Help me keep creating by becoming a patron:
💖 Patreon - EternaLib
Read up to 50 chapters ahead + get early access on my site:
📚 Eternal-lib.com
__________________________________________