Cooro 1’s POV

  I have two things to say. First: It was a good thing I repeated a floor so many times I had to check on him when he didn’t arrive back after some time, and that’s how I found him. Two: I already control an army of insects on each floor including one that can fix a human brain like sleeping dust off a counter. So now I was cradling him while O-Ha and Ares watched me.

  Everyone is not without the trait of caring only about themselves from time-to-time, however, not many are actually in the situation where they use their lap as a pillow for their own head. I have two things to ask my other self when he wakes up: what happened and how could he let it happen when he was just as intune as me. At last he twinkled Cooro’s dead black eyelids open looking at me with glinting eyes of tears, like when I accidentally turned my face into a Christmas fern.

  “You?”

  “Me.” I answered with a smile hiding the infuriating feelings roiling inside me. “Found you passed out in Sloth’s room; said to be like a room filled with magma rocks. Before I remind you how unbelievably stupid you need to be to try something that is asinine, I have one question: was it just a dream you were going through?”

  He winced, shuddering his eyes from a headache he must be having. Raising my hand and snapping my finger like a sombrero wearing el musico dancer, a snail the size of a cat appeared on my shoulder. I don’t know if snails are considered insects; this one in particular just had the hemoglobin to be one.

  With a deep breath and a surge of blue aura it launched a water ball into the face of Cooro 2. For those who want to know what a water ball to the face of a half asleep person would feel like, think of it as freezing cold water when you're jumping in it to save a trapped kid or animal; cold but something you’re able to handle.

  He woke up with a loud panicked roar. O-Ha jumped on his shoulder moving around him like a cat. He could probably smell her caudal glands on her tail stem from her finally moving to his belly, but keeping her tail near his face. She was now curled up unleashing a short but powerful call she’d only bellow for dog foxes to find her. I found this a little amusing and decided to tease him a little.

  “Okay, since you have my companion, how about I borrow yours.”

  Ares made a sound mimicking O-Ha’s sound but looked at me like an egotistical noble in isekai. However, Cooro 2 waved his hand.

  “That’s fine…just let me nap for a–”

  “Not here you won’t.”

  To make a strange situation even stranger I picked up my clone carrying him bridal style to the exit. In the corner of my eye white flitting to check on his guardian, I noticed Ares was looking at me with puffed cheeks, jealous I was holding him before her. That tension rose even after putting him on a nice rocky floor in a cave tunnel encompassing the four of us.

  Despite how he was carried, O-Ha never stopped curling around him like some protective guardian. I felt confident he was safe with those dewclaws around–it also helped monsters usually don’t show up right where you teleported from. Ares and I trekked through the linear line; I was communicating with the beetles in the cave to warn me when monsters were near.

  My golem shield can protect me from near fatal blows once a day but I wasn’t going to have it wasted on the first monster we meet. Since no alerts were made I decided to try my luck on Ares: communication.

  “I know where all the monsters are pacing. Follow my lead and we can take them by surprise.”

  “Tch.” A wrinkle in her cheek was showing, indicating my speech only ticked her off. “First, second and third of all you're not my master–just a close friend who uses tricks to win. For my masters’ sake I’m fighting with you but don’t mistake it for me following you.”

  If you think that was the only yandere trait she showed, guess again. A dark aura burst throughout her emanating a wave of dread. It was at that moment I received a telecommunication between myself and a beetle telling me a skeleton was close by. The thing was it told me the skeleton was petrified with fear. Without even trying, Ares helped me.

  I took out a coin that I tossed against a wall sending a coin straight towards the skeleton. A loud cracking sound I guessed was the coin breaking the skeletons’ skull echoed throughout the dungeon labyrinth. One monster gone; only five more to go.

  Taking them out was easy when your traveling partner could scare a room of monsters just by standing in it. I had to toss two more coins to finish off the skeletons and gargoyles on this floor. I was able to retrieve the coins again thanks to my beetle friends carrying them through the room for me.

  They helped me like an older cousin or a teacher with a similar upbringing, but in the end clearing this floor when it was just a game to me was how I found the teacher. Time to find the hidden doors in walls that open up revealing sacks of treasure. I found emeralds, diamonds, incense, a few linens and a scroll all from one door.

  A skill scroll was useful but every night I received a skill of my choice–and that was why I would sell the scroll. When walking up the stairs to the next floor I noticed Ares wasn’t walking with me.

  Finally getting to the next floor I noticed her already there seething with anger. Part of why she was angry was having to accompany someone on a smaller pedestal than her master–second was she was being dragged away from him making her worried. I might not have known people very well in my old world but just a glance and I could read any NPC like a book.

  The next three floors were mostly her aura paralyzing monsters and me killing them with coins; my insects retrieving before finding secret rooms. However, in the fifth room there were cages looming on the ceiling like an anonymous warning to leave.

  Ares looked up with a pondering look on her face, quickly changed to a look of excitement. Being the God of War her mind probably thought of the way prisoners were tortured to gather intel, and as a bonus she probably imagined me as that prisoner.

  Veering along the paths we stumbled upon bipedal rats with iron masks and axes. They reminded me of enemy soldiers in the series Red Wall only they were human size instead of pint size. These opponents would take more than coins to defeat. Yes, I killed large wolves and gargoyles just by ricocheting coins off the wall, but their armor was of a strong enough grade my coins wouldn’t be able to perforate it.

  Fortunately for me I managed to find a garrote wire in one of the stash rooms. Their armor may be hard but enough coil combined with enough force could sever a limb or even a head. I waltzed right in before standing with my hands behind my back the same way Walter from Helling would.

  Spotting me, they raised their weapons beginning to charge. I stood perfectly still not letting my weapon be known; then once they were close enough to hatchet a blade through my head, I raised my wire slicing through all their bodies!

  Pieces of meat dropped from the air like dough from a pasty chef, not the most fitting analogy but the visuals match if you ignore all the blood that comes with it.

  A sound directs my attention to my stat screen. I had just earned 7 SP points for killing these rat soldiers. Something surprising showed up on the screen: Cooro 2’s screen as well. In games it was normal you control the skill allocation/equipment of your whole party but this was me peeking into me. All of his stats were below 10–didn’t get to spam the Dexterity Seed like I did–with only panels showing his job Trial Runner, his summon Ares, and his Auto-Looting…this was now. He has an Auto-Looting skill. Maybe when he recovers we can use it to take items from a secret room without actually having to enter that room.

  Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

  Until then he was napping and I was investing SP towards an Evolution skill for tamed animals and spirit creatures.

  The rest of the area to the floor boss was as easy as remembering to turn off your alarm clock; all we had to do was run like the wind in a body that's a head bully on a daily basis and I set up traps with my garrote wire. The key was to make them follow me into a four pillar making many turns until they got a little ravenous than swerve to run down a long hallway where the garrote wire was set up. They were sliced like cheese for crackers with a butter knife.

  They charge so fast into it the wire cuts a line like a guillotine through paper. It looks absolutely horrifying seeing a parallel incision exposing their innards–a sight never shown in the game even if it was an erotic game–but 3 SP a kill helps me forget all about it.

  Ares always seems to be leaning against a wall watching in judgmental silence even though she never lifted a hand to help me throughout the ordeal. When all the monsters on the floor were dead and being carried away into a corner not included in the chase, she finally gave me a piece of her mind.

  “Master could’ve taken care of them a lot faster than you, rookie.”

  “Maybe that would be because he had a partner he can rely on.” I retorted.

  Even her strong disdainful aura couldn’t keep me from speaking my mind–with just one more level up I’ll be strong enough to obtain the Evolution skill. Once I have that skill my cloyed fox companion O-Ha will be able to evolve into a fox girl and then a kitsune. With that motivation in my mind we carried on towards the floor to the boss.

  The moment we reached the top the room felt different; even the tinge of color in the area looked eerily dull and stark compared to the light of super stores you’d get in the floors below. Not wanting to let Ares know the color bugged me, I marched forward.

  At long last I found the boss room on the floor: Greed. Last time it was Sloth and now Greed–two characters who were supposed to be the main threat in the Rainbow Ashes game, yes. This world was created after Rainbow Ashes so people would pay to keep playing but hackers found ways to bypass getting here. In response, the programmers moved the bosses to those floors, taking them away from the main story.

  There was Greed himself, a purple skin ghoulish looking man with sapphire lips, small amber eyes, goblin-esque ears pointing up, a lab coat with a black bullet proof vest, and sandals. And he was accompanied by two metal soldiers who resemble every Yu-Gi-Oh machine monster with 1800 ATK. They were bipedal silver carrying large double-sided soldiers, had short heads with slanted black eyelids resembling eyes, and small orange spots supposedly their weak spots but really didn’t do any additional damage if struck.

  The boss room itself was mostly a metallic structure with pillars jutting out of the ground. From the bottom to the top of the pillar were LED screens showing pictures of random people and numbers between 4-5 digits next to them. These numbers were their bank accounts; Greed itself would take every last dollar from their account once he reached the second stage of the boss battle.

  Michael Douglas once said “Greed is good” in the movie Wall Street. That was partly true. Greed is mostly a distorted version of Ambition. Ambition is good to have. I’m not going to go into my altruistic opinion about money being the root of all evil, however, out of the seven sins greed is the worst…even though I’m a protagonist and 80 percent of the time the protagonist always becomes rich or better off by the end of the series with their motivations guiding them towards fruition.

  I don’t want to sound like a hypocrite but people should save their energy for paying their ends meet and not putting themselves in debt rather than trying to become filthy stinking rich. Out of all the other sins that are mostly fleeting emotions or volatile behavior that erodes from your system the moment you go through it…greed is a delusional mindset that sometimes never leaves a person's mind. Well enough talking about my two cent opinion, time to get to my one-sided boss fight to progress further through the dungeon and collect my two skills.

  Greed and his minions were mostly just standing around looking ahead like statues because I have to be close enough to them before the boss fight really begins. If I took one step forward the fight would begin. I didn’t give them that satisfaction–I teleported to the ceiling and used a bunch of bile regurgitated from insects to congeal myself above the boss. Once I was perfectly stationed above them I weaved my fingers wrapped with garrote wires around the room like a spider leaving its webs. Once all the wires were in the position I needed them to be I teleported out of the gunk and back on the floor…then I took a step forward initiating the boss fight.

  Greed raised his hands and chuckled trying to amuse my rapt with how maniacal he was to bring home the message ‘greed is bad’. After that show he turned on a faucet from his big desk which was leading blood through a long plastic wire towards a cylindrical device pistoning in the ground causing a glitch of sparks throughout the pillars. If we reach the second stage he would siphon a golden liquid from this that he would put in a beaker to drink in a Jackal and Hyde-esque way before turning into a muscular Garlic Jr. looking being that also magnetizes all the armor from his soon to be dead minions making him a metal goblin lord.

  But the moment his minions finally took their first steps…I flicked my hand in the air causing a mass of wires to swing right into the minions limbs making them completely immobile, and with a twitch sent the wires towards Greed beheading him in an instant.

  Normally Greed cannot be hurt while his minions are around; that doesn't mean he couldn’t be hurt before his transformation if his minions were taken down first. There was a five second delay before the transformation and in that time he was no stronger than a gag boss.

  With Greed’s defeat two skill cards appeared in big screens before me; grey and teal green. One of the cards showed a hunched over man with a long nose with text bubble from his mouth showing the picture of a folded dollar bill with elongated lines on the ends of a $ sign, and he was holding his hand out towards a man behind a stand with a mustache and a farm hat looking dumbfounded. The card was titled Huckster Negotiation Growth (ii). The card basically gave me more money when I sell things for normal people, but since my job was Vendor I also have a chance of obtaining items not usually sold on the market.

  The second card showed an armadillo silhouette on the far left, a bigger armadillo with a tail a threophora would have adjacent to it and on the far right towering over the rest was a threophora but with more spikes protruding even from its shoulders and its tibia. It was titled Evolution; basically it gave me the ability to evolve my creatures.

  No sooner did I receive the skill did a screen pop up with a blue background etched in white letters: Your companion is now capable of evolving. Would you like to evolve it?

  I pressed the ‘Yes’ button on the screen a little giddy about what she was going to look like as a human; most likely vibrant haired with an hourglass figure. Before exchanging all the items I found for a large amount of money I had two things to do: look at the pillars and return back to Two to see an eroge moment of O-Ha sleeping on him in human form.

  Usually in the game after Greed transforms all the numbers on the screen drop to zero as if everyone was bankrobbed like a scammer hacking into a bank account–goddamn cocksuckers. If you enter the right code in the computer Greed used you can restore their balance(s) with a reward as a thanks. However, since I skipped that scene no one's account dropped to zero. So then I frisked Greed’s corpse for anything important. I found a remote switch in his pocket; immediately pushed it thinking it would trigger an event.

  As sure as the sun rises in the morning, all the screens in the pillars went black. It was not long after that the pillars all around me started to crumble before collapsing into piles of mushy cement. I guess all

  those people were free from his money grubbing talons because I got an update on my skill status: my Huckster card upgraded to (iii) and I received 666 SP points to spend as I like. Almost immediately I upgraded the Huckster skill to V leaving me with 400 skill points including the ones I earned on my way to the boss room.

  Ares and I ventured from the boss room to the next floor. It felt windy and salty in the air; it reminded me of a visit my parents had to the beach where we stayed in a small cabin. I spent most of that vacation playing Pokemon Emerald on my Gameboy Advance which were presents I was given a week before. Most of that vacation we stayed at friends of my parents house and my mom tried teaching me French. As a Canadian it goes without saying I had two languages I needed to learn; I just mostly tried learning French from repeating characters off of the TV. Eventually my parents decided to take French class off my school curriculum and instead send me to the library for studying.

  I was now staring at a great big beach with an ocean staring right at me. If I remember this game correctly there were vessels with different armaments around here–all you had to do was spend a lot of currency which is done by either repeating floors you already cleared before or by entering a coliseum to place bets on yourself. With there being me and my clone we could receive that money in just one day by using our expertise.

  Speaking of, I think it was time me and Ares returned to him. So without a moment's hesitation I clutched my fingers on her arm and teleported back to the previous floor room.

  Ares shook her hand out of my grasp ticked off by my handsiness, but all her umbrage at my lack of boundaries was replaced with shock when she noticed what I figured would happen: a naked woman engaging in skinship with my unconscious clone. She had Bridgitte Bardot-esque hairstyle but with red hair instead of her prominent blonde, had fox ears protruding from the rug area all the way over her hairpiece, skinny body like a model's, and a bushy red tail with a white ring sticking out of her posterior.

  Once the initial shock of seeing her master lying with a naked woman passed, Ares was absolutely fuming. She was emanating a strong purple aura with a miasma not only monsters could get a whiff of but also me. A better man would try to de-escalate the situation calming her down before she did something like stomp him in his balls or murder them both in a spousal affair homicide…all I did was wish them adieu before teleporting out of the area back to the waiting room of the dungeon.

  I was now back in the lobby teeming with male adventurers who were eager to get what I had so they could buy slaves like the ones I was going to have. Among them was a skinny, lanky figured person completely covered in bandages to the point they appeared to be a mummy who had a bronze spear holstered behind their back and smelled like they bathed in sewer water.

  I didn’t know it yet but this person and I were on our way to getting entangled…and I was going to have to help them raise our child.