I stood at the office door for a moment longer than I needed to. The wood felt real beneath my fingertips. Realer than I thought it should have been, like a heartbeat pulsing in the grain. I turned the knob, opened it, and took one step into the hallway.

  "I'm going for a walk," I said softly.

  Bookbite flitted after me like a moth pretending to be a librarian. "Ah. The classic brooding stroll. Very dramatic. Very mysterious. Should I cue thunder, or would you prefer ominous whispers from the walls?"

  I didn't answer. Not because I was angry but because I was listening.

  The dungeon, or I should say I was trying to listen to my feelings for the first time in a long time. They spoke in ways I was still learning to hear. Every floor tile carried weight. Every echo held a memory. I marvelled at how scary the hallway was, it reminded me of a zombie movie with the random bloody hand prints, even though I’d consciously built it to invoke fear. The walls curved in sharp hexagons, the pattern like honeycomb drawn in charcoal. This place wasn't just mine. It was me.

  I felt the Windigo-Moms had respawned and the pit trap reset. My mana dipped a little, but nothing to negative.

  Then I stopped at the center of the second section: the kindergarten classroom. The first classroom I’d carved out. It looked… bigger now, maybe because I was an adult now. Or maybe I had simply grown. Light flickered through the broken fluorescent ceiling: flat, yellow, cold, and wrong.

  The classroom around me was bare bones for now.

  “Funny, isn’t it? What sticks with you,” I said.

  “Yeah Core girl, this place feels, weird. I miss the hole mom dropped me into.”

  "This one," I whispered. “The beginning.” I started shaping the room making it a copy of my childhood. Bookbite didn’t ask what I meant. He just hovered beside me, unusually quiet, his long toenails scraping lightly on the floor. It was the only sound.

  I walked through the room and inhaled. The chalk scent. The dust motes in still air. The memory of fear twisted now into something sharper. I smiled. Not kind. Not cruel. Just… mine.

  "Let’s build something new here."

  I stood in the center, arms crossed tight across my chest. Desks, chalkboard, an old mounted TV with one of those absurd black straps looped over it like a seatbelt. I’d copied it from memory. Back when I was still alive, I’d spent more hours than I wanted to remember in a room just like this.

  The corners of the room were too bright. “This isn’t going to fit.” I dimmed the light, breaking the light bulbs in just the right places. Shadows clung to the bulletin boards like mold. It was quiet, peaceful, almost. Except I didn’t want it to be peaceful. It was that stillness you get right before something goes wrong. Like the air was waiting to be punished.

  My eyes drifted to the coat hooks on the far wall. Half-hung jackets swung gently in a breeze that didn’t exist. We used to hang our backpacks there. We lined up like good little soldiers. I remembered how I’d always pick the hook on the farthest end, so I wouldn’t have to stand near the boys who spat and pulled hair and called me weird.

  Now? Those hooks looked like meat hangers. Empty. Waiting. So, that is what I made them become. Changing the hooks into something you would find in a butcher shop. The name tags, once white with names written with sharpy, were altered. I shifted the writing from a happy teacher's printing to something that looked like it was carved with a rusty nail.

  I then added dirt and mud splashed all over the way, giving the area a look like it hadn’t been cleaned in ten years.

  There had been a reading rug in the corner once. Bright primary colours, big letters and a cartoon frog with too-big smile. I’d sit cross-legged, pretending not to hear the whispers behind me. Pretending the stories mattered more than the laughter. That rug is gone now. In its place is a smear of faded colour, ripped edges, and frad cloth. I scorched letters from A to M. I changed the frog’s smile into something closer to a scream.

  I glanced at the storage bins near the front. They used to store our reading books. Our names used to be taped on little labels. Neat handwriting from a woman who would smile at your tears, then tell you to “be strong” when someone threw a rock at you outside. I imagined those bins now stuffed with teeth. With notes written in red crayon, just one word over and over: Tell. Tell. Tell.

  The chalkboard, I slammed my fist into it, and cracks formed, lines spidering across its face like scars.

  Beneath it, the old teacher’s desk loomed like a forgotten altar. Back then, it was a safe place; you’d run to it, beg it to make things better. Now, it looked like a judge’s bench. A place to be sentenced, not saved.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  I could still hear the clatter of crayons in a plastic bin. The sound of scissors snipping paper is dull and rhythmic. The sounds of a place built to nurture. But all I could feel was how small I used to be. How big the world felt when it turned its back.

  I exhaled. Let it all settle inside me. This classroom… this dungeon… was my world. And I would never pretend again that monsters didn’t sit at these desks.

  I walked to the center of the room, surrounded by twenty empty desks, each one slightly crooked like they’d flinched during some unseen quake. Dusk sunlight, adds a bright darkness to the tone of the room. The low-angled light poured through wide, dusty windows, casting long shadows that didn't feel entirely natural.

  I was back in school. My school. Sort of. Only this time, I was the one holding the chalk. This time I was the one teaching the lesson. I took a step. My footfalls echoed, not just off tile and drywall, but through the bones of the place. My dungeon. Mine. That word sent a shiver of electricity through me.

  It was the first time I could really walk. Stretch. Exist outside being afraid. I'd woken up as a sexy woman, no longer that scared teenager or child. I was in a steel trap of programming and stone and memory. But now I had limbs. Now I had presence. Now I had control.

  Surprised at how much this air smelled like the real thing, I inhaled deeply. Cheap cleaner, old paper, a tinge of whatever weird mystery meat they used to serve in the cafeteria. It even smelled like disappointment and permission slips. But all that was window dressing. This wasn’t just a place—it was a hunting ground. I was going to teach a lesson on Vegence. I gave Bookbite a wicked smile.

  “Status,” I whispered.

  A shimmer of soft blue light shimmered to life in front of me, and my character sheet unfolded like the world’s most judgmental report card. I tilted my head. Just one more small encounter and I’d level. One more soul fed to the walls and I’d get stronger. The thought filled in my stomach like hot honey tea.

  I dragged my fingers across a nearby desk. The surface felt warm, just barely. It was not wood, not plastic. Something... else. The dungeon responded to me like a skin, always aware, always changing. It wanted to shift. To grow teeth.

  I smirked. “Alright then. Let’s give you something to chew with.”

  I dumped five monster points, mentally, into this zone: this solo classroom and the surrounding hallways. A hum rippled beneath my feet. The walls flexed, invisibly, but I felt it, like nerves waking up.

  Then came the trap points. Something deep inside me twitched. A thrill, a sense of forward motion. I sat down cross-legged in the center of the room, right on a faded rug with burned letters of the alphabet stitched into it. My body didn’t ache, didn’t feel human anymore. But I could pretend.

  I closed my eyes and let the darkness press against the backs of my lids.

  "Just one more kill," I murmured. “One more breath of power.”

  I reached into the quiet. I let my thoughts slow. The Moms were already working. The bear had been unexpected. But what came next was up to me.

  It began with a sickening flicker, a glitch in the already frayed edges of my perception. One second, my fingers were tracing the intricate mana lines etched into the dungeon walls. A desperate attempt at control, calculating angles of despair, morbidly considering where blood might pool to amplify the terror. A futile exercise, a distraction from the gnawing unease. And the next… it was there again.

  A malevolent glint. A flicker of light clawed at my vision, a wrongness so profound it felt like a physical blow. It hung just above the phantom outline of the classroom door, a grotesque mote of dust suddenly imbued with impossible weight and significance.

  The stained glass eye. The System.

  My breath, a ghost of memory in my nonexistent lungs, snagged in my throat. The air itself seemed to thicken, to congeal, pressing in on me from all sides. Reality, always a precarious construct, buckled and groaned, the seams threatening to tear open and unleash… what? Something worse than this endless dread. No sound penetrated the suffocating silence. No movement dared to break the frozen tableau. Just that eye. Iridescent, alien, knowing. It was watching with an unbearable intensity that seemed to pierce through layers of unreality. And then… gone.

  Vanished as abruptly as a nightmare swallowed by waking. But it had been there. The certainty of it was a cold knot in the pit of my being, a primal terror that transcended my current state.

  I froze, every nerve ending screaming in silent protest. Then it hit before I could even register its approach, a psychic shockwave that slammed into my consciousness. A pulse of memory, sharp and unwelcome. Of crushing weight, the burden of something I couldn't name. Of before… a time that felt impossibly distant, yet clung to me with icy tendrils.

  And then the familiar, yet always terrifying, happened. The meticulously constructed illusion of the room fractured and peeled away like sun-baked paint, revealing the raw, chaotic underbelly of… something else. Something vast and unknowable.

  Then a flash.

  I’m small again.

  Too small.

  The plastic of the kindergarten chair digs into my thighs, a sensation both distant and acutely familiar. Orange safety scissors lie useless in my hand. Crayons, scattered across the miniature table, are suddenly sharp-edged, like the shrapnel of a forgotten explosion. My fingers ghost over a sticky residue that isn't there, yet the phantom scent of washable markers floods my nonexistent nostrils, thick with the stale air of past humiliation.