I Hate Dungeon School

The next several minutes were a blur, I had made it out of the research building, propped up by Danica and Calderon. I had no idea how I made it up all the stairs, and that quickly. Did I take the stairs? I wasn't sure. As time went on, my vision refused to focus, and consciousness was a struggle to maintain. I felt so weak.

My mouth tasted like copper coins, too, which was weird. Why would I be sucking on copper coins. Oh right. Blood. That's not supposed to be in my mouth. Or outside my body in general.

I must have lost consciousness finally, because as I came to I was in the healing wing. I looked around blearily.

I saw the three professors around me, discussing something with concerned voices, though I couldn't quite understand what they were saying.

"Hello?" I mumbled weakly.

"Oh good, you're awake!" Danica said excitedly. "It was getting iffy there for a bit."

"What happened?" My brain was slowly clearing up, and I felt so incredibly tired. Thankfully, I didn't seem to be in much pain. There was pain, of course, that went without saying, but it wasn't nearly as bad as what I felt the last time I was here.

"I'll be honest with you, we're not entirely sure. Its going to take a good while to go over all the readings we were able to collect, plus repair the damage." Calderon explained.

I felt a panic rise in me. Damage? Did I do something to cause damage? Was I going to be in trouble? Just what I needed, another reason to slap the troublemaker label on to myself. Calderon obviously saw the look on my face and raised his hands in some kind of conciliatory gesture.

"Now, now, don't worry about it. Nothing you need to blame yourself for. This is one of the risks we juggle with our research. Despite decades, if not centuries, of research, there is a lot about dungeon cores that is a mystery, and this is just another one. Admittedly, this was more spectacular than expected!" He chuckled before catching himself. Good. He was finally becoming a bit more self-aware.

"So, what exactly did happen to me?"

Andritch stopped Calderon before he launched into a undoubtably technical explaination. She was much better at explaining things in a way I could understand.

"Put simply, your core did something very unexpected. You know those pillars around the large core? Each one contained another infant core. We released them. Once we did that, you fully lost consciousness, and your core flew around and ate them, just like you described." She explained.

"Ate them? All of them?" It was then that I realized that I couldn't feel my pouch around my neck. I felt panic rise in my guts, a sick and painful feeling. I couldn't feel its presence either.

"Where is it? What happened to my core?!" I could feel my voice raising. I hadn't been without its presence for so long, it felt like a part of me was missing.

The three of them looked at each other and then at me. Calderon cleared his throat.

"We had to put it into a containment vessel. It had begun having strange reactions, and it was having an effect on you. We began to fear for your life, so we locked it down." He explained.

"What do you mean by containment? Locked down? I'm so confused." I felt tears welling up in my eyes for some reason. Was I so attached to that little sphere?

"We put in a warded vessel. It puts a dungeon core in a sort of suspended state, in essence putting it to sleep. We had never seen a reaction of that sort before, and didn't know what else to do." He continued.

"After your core devoured the other smaller ones, it began emitting a large amount of dungeon mana, and it started to cause you to show, well, physical abnormalities." Danica cut in.

"Just give it to me straight please. You all keep dancing around it." I leaned back in the bed, rubbing my temples.

"You started bleeding. From your eyes, nose, and ears. You had strange marks appear on your body, clearly a written language, but one we couldn't identify. They were also bleeding. Most of them have disappeared, except for one on your upper right arm. Don't try to look at it right now, it's bandaged right now." Danica continued, her tone clinical, which in a strange way I appreciated. Everyone was trying to soften the blow of what happened, but I needed information.

I sat there in silence, running through what happened to me in my head, but all of it was unclear.

"I suppose you'll need to know my side of what happened, yes?" I looked at the three.

"When you've rested. You lost a lot of blood, Alta. And your mana levels are all wrong now. Something happened in there, and we don't understand exactly what. You shouldn't even be alive, to be blunt about it." Andritch said softly, putting her hand on my shoulder, an easier feat when I'm lying down.

"All wrong? How do you mean? Other than tiredness, I feel fine." I thought about it for a moment. "Well, now that you say it, I do feel kind of strange. I'm not sure how to describe it. It's like everything is half a degree off. No, that's not right either." I scowled and then stopped as moving my face hurt a lot more than I expected.

"Do you feel anything strange when you try to tap into your mana?" Calderon asked, pulling out his notebook. I cocked an eyebrow at him.

"I'll give it a try, but I'm not sure what-" I reached out to my reservoir, feeling how much I had lost. I couldn't feel it. I tried the deeper meditation techniques I had used before. It wasn't that I couldn't feel it, it wasn't there. It was like I was looking for water in a desert. There was nothing there at all.

That shouldn't be possible. Best case when mana was low was unconsciousness, and when mana ran out, most things just straight up died. I was feeling the mana levels of a corpse in my body.

Wait, there was something there. Some tiny flicker. I concentrated, focused my mind, and my will on that tiny mote of magic within me. It came into focus slowly but surely. That wasn't my mana. I had no idea what that was. It was like dungeon mana, but wrong. More wrong than dungeon mana was usually.

"What the actual hells is going on?!" I shouted, tearing myself from the trance. "Am I dead? Undead?!"

I felt myself break into a cold sweat, drenched in fear and uncertainty. What had my connection to the core done to me? What had the Anomaly Core done to me? I just wanted to help the study of dungeons, get a little fame under my belt, maybe some leverage some money out of our discovery. Now I was some kind of byproduct of a freak accident!

I felt my heart beat hard as the fear washed over me. That was some kind of relief. If my heartbeat was still there, then I wasn't dead.

"We have no idea, Alta. Its like you had all the mana sucked out of you and replaced by dungeon mana, which then got sucked out of you. It happened multiple times before we could contain the cores and get you unhooked. We have no idea how you are even alive, much less in as good of a condition as you are. We're going to have to keep you under observation for a while, I'm afraid to say." Calderon said, his expression and tone suggesting that his words were genuine.

"How long?" I croaked, fighting back a wave of emotions. I was going to fall behind in school, not to mention my job at the cafe, and who knew what this was going to do to my relationship with Eira, or my roommates, for that matter. I was finally starting to feel like we were a proper team, and now this. I hated this. I hated this so much. I wanted to lash out in rage and anger, but I was too weak to do so.

"We don't know. But you'll be able to continue your classes, as long as you don't mind reading more than listening to lectures. We are also fairly confident that you don't need to be isolated, so you can have visitors." Calderon continued. He was trying his best to be comforting, but it wasn't entirely working.

"I can still see my friends then? There's that at least. The Atelier though," I snapped my mouth shut. I really didn't need my teachers knowing about my work as a maid on the side. It wasn't illegal, but it wasn't particularly encouraged either.

Andritch laughed at my reaction. I didn't expect that from her of all people.

"Don't worry about it, Alta. I know the manager pretty well. Used to be a cook in her kitchen during my student days here." She smiled warmly at me. Which raised even more questions about the manager, as Andritch was undoubtedly over a century old. How long had the manager been working there?

"Thank you, Mrs. Andritch. I really appreciate it. I actually like working there." I confessed.

"I did too." She patted my shoulder. My shoulder was starting to get sore from all the patting. She was stronger than she realized.

"When can I have visitors?" I asked.

"Tomorrow, most likely, assuming nothing else weird happens. After we got the bleeding controlled, everything, except for your mana, seems to have gone back to normal. If things have cleared up after a week or so, and after a few tests, we'll tentatively let you out." Danica said, shrugging.

"That is, of course, making a lot of assumptions about the future, Danica. There are too many factors for you to be deciding that on your own!" Calderon interjected.

"Have you never heard of bedside manner? Seriously, man!" She snarled at him. A terrifying expression, if I had ever seen one.

Andritch ushered the two bickering researchers out the door with a stern whisper that shut them up right away. She closed the door with a soft click and returned to my side. I looked her right in her eyes.

"Tell it to me straight, ma'am. How bad is this for my future at the school?" I asked bluntly.

"At the school? Assuming you don't slack off on your studies while you're in here, you'll be fine. Winter is the time for theoretical study anyway, so you wouldn't have been doing much delving anyway. And given your track record, I imagine simulator dungeons weren't all that interesting to you anyway." She shrugged before pulling a chair up to my bedside.

I nodded and looked out the window. It was snowing again.

"I forgot to mention this, but my mana is gone. There is a tiny bit of dungeon mana in me, but the rest of it is gone. I've been trying to draw some in while you were all talking to me, but I couldn't manage to draw any in." I heard my own voice coming out of me, sounding flat and analytical. I was trying my best not to sound as frustrated and scared as I truly was.

"I'm sorry, Alta. I really am. We had no idea that would happen. We've never run into a situation like this. We got too excited at the possibility of learning more about the cores, that we didn't do enough to protect you, and for that I can never apologize enough." Her voice was genuinely sad. It almost sounded like she was about to cry, too. I had never imagined I'd see the stalwart, stern, and steadfast Helena Andritch sad or ashamed, but here I was, witnessing it firsthand.

I reached out and patted her shoulder this time.

"I knew the risks. Well, I didn't know, but I think I would have done it anyway if I had known. I wanted to make some kind of mark. Something I did on my own power, not because of some connections, or something like that. I thought, why not go further in the field of dungeon research? Maybe I could leverage that to get rich one day. And because of that, I'm like this." I sighed. It was after all my call, and she shouldn't shoulder the blame.

"I'm your teacher, though. I bear some responsibility." She started to say, and I held up my hand.

"Professor, I'm an adult. Any stupid decisions are my problem. I can even drink and fornicate at will on top of all of that. You did your best, considering this is all new ground. That said, this does reveal something important." I noted.

"Oh?"

"I no longer suffer from negative effects when the core isn't in close proximity. I can't even feel its presence on my mind any more. Mana problems aside, I might be free of the connection." I explained.

"I thought you said you found the connection welcome, though. Despite the fact it was leeching off your mana. I remember distinctly you complaining about having to eat extra to make up for that." She sat back in the chair, rubbing her chin in thought.

"Thats what I thought, but I feel fine now that the connection has been severed by whatever containment you put it in, and please don't try to explain the mechanism to me, I wouldn't understand it right now." I laughed and then sighed. I was so tired.

"I'll pass that on to the others. We might be able to figure something out based on that, but I can't make any promises." She stood from the chair. "I'll let you get some rest. We'll talk tomorrow, and let you know what's going to happen from here on."

She left the room, closing the door behind her. I sighed and shut my eyes tightly for a moment, concentrating on my mana reservoir again. Still nothing. I breathed out, realizing I had been holding my breath.

This was all less than ideal, and I for sure had seen more of the healing facilities than I would've liked.

I decided to forget about all that, and just watched the soft dance of the snowflakes outside the window.