Chapter 3: The Infinite
Tulland found himself in the flickering entrance room of the dungeon, and snapped his head back, barely in time to keep the glowing teeth of the weakest and slowest dungeon beast in existence from closing around his neck. He was still woozy enough from the teleport into this place that he wasn’t sure he knew up from down, but he knew he couldn’t let an entrance mote separate his head from the rest of his body.
In the histories, being laid low by the entrance motes happened so rarely that it was usually only mentioned as a joke. “He couldn’t pass his motes” was something you said about the most absentminded, useless characters you knew. It was an implausible thing to assert, like saying that someone couldn’t lace their own breeches or lost track of which side of the spoon was for scooping.
Even though Tulland almost lost his life a moment ago, he had a wide smile on his face. Dungeon classes were the rarest of the rare. The most costly. The most glorious. If the System had sent Tulland here, then his future was looking brighter by the moment.
The mote trying to rip his throat out didn’t know any of that. Tulland forced himself not to flinch as the floating, fist-sized ball shot towards him again. He managed to steady himself just enough to leap to the side and barely make it out of the mote’s range in time.
That was concerning. Tulland wasn’t faster than normal, and he certainly didn’t feel any stronger. He had read every book on classes there was, and was fully aware that he should feel and see differences in both stats, even if the class he had didn’t focus on physical combat. But he didn’t. He didn’t feel different at all.
What in the ice-cold hell is going on here?
Tulland’s head ached and throbbed as he tried to recall the events before just this moment. It was no good. Not only was it not working, it was distracting him from the immediate danger. He glanced around the floor for anything he could use as a weapon and came up empty. The entrance room was made from tightly fitted stones, each made to look as if they had been carved to near perfection. They were far too large and far too closely packed to pry loose and use. The rest of the room was bare.
As the mote turned and lunged again, Tulland reflexively slapped at it. He made contact, too, which surprised both him and the mote. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he heard the droning voice of his world mechanics tutor reminding him that this wasn’t too far-fetched. The man had been unbelievably boring, but he had also read his tomes.
There are those that say that the purpose of the entrance motes is to remind those chosen for a battle class of their newfound strength. Scholars have calculated the power of the motes to a high degree of certainty, and while their distribution of stats differs from ours, the total amount is virtually identical between each mote.