Katelyn.

  Katelyn emerged through the gloom as though waking from a momentary daydream.

  Her eyes scanned her surroundings with quick, animalistic interest, instincts driving her initial movements until her human mind could once again parse the situation and take the reins.

  She was in Grom's chamber again, the roaring fmes of his bonfire reminiscent of the st handful of times she'd seen it.

  The cavern walls were adorned with brutishly cured skins and Neolithic-like murals, all painted by finger rather than brush, the surroundings littered with piles of bones and shamanistic knickknacks of carved ivory and wood.

  Several goblins stood sentry at each of the rge cavern entrances, all dispying a degree of heightened awareness and discipline absent from what one might encounter elsewhere within the dungeon depths.

  This was not the first time she'd appeared here, this instance marking the third in which she'd spawned and the fourth counting her lone cognizant visit before meeting Abby.

  The woman rose, lifting from the mountainous throne of hides and pelts where Grom would typically sit while waiting to be confronted.

  Then, Katelyn stretched with lithe and nguid ease, smacking her lips with grinning satisfaction in memory of her st meal.

  She resisted the urge to pick at something she felt lodged between her teeth, experience having taught her that anything stuck there during her prior encounter was already gone following the transition. Even if its phantom presence still annoyed her, the sensation would pass quickly enough.

  Though she couldn't pinpoint where Grom's chambers appeared within the somewhat byrinthian sprawl of Abby's bizarre pocket-world without a little exploration, she ultimately found it mattered little and, in some ways, was even a boon.

  It tickled Katelyn's new sensibilities when she knew a delectable meal was out there, waiting for her to find it.

  Patiently watching from the shadows like a spider in its web could be entertaining, yet the thrill of the hunt was a euphoric thrill, unlike anything she'd previously experienced in her initial life.

  She reveled in the chase, much more than even she had expected.

  Sure, one could assume they'd share some of the more monstrous instincts that might come with becoming such a beast, but it was actually her human side, not the other, that so fervently enjoyed this test tidbit of intrigue.

  If they actually existed back home, she likely would have grown addicted to the prospect and excitement of hunting trips wherein the rich and powerful let loose a few cages of humans for them all to track down and butcher.

  With a thought, Katelyn shifted her body, transforming into a near-perfect approximation of a ckluster goblin, complete with a falsified status page. The cost hardly puting a dent in her prodigious and absurd mana regeneration.

  Passing them by, she plucked a knife from a nearby goblin standing watch. The creature eyed her with a moment of uncertainty before, as usual, disregarding her and returning to its monotonous duties.

  Honestly, stealing the little autonomous nightmare's weapon hadn't merely been for shits and giggles; she didn't need the stupid thing, as she had nearly a hundred of the same weapons stored in her seemingly endless void.

  No, the purpose was pure spite.

  The goblin, whom she'd named Dumbass, had been the only creature to date to actually stab her.

  It had been during a brawl, the first she'd gotten into since Abby had created this test shard. During the melee wherein Katelyn had taken on Grog's form, just to see what it would be like, Dumbass had accidentally knifed her in the leg.

  His wild and uncaring swings were so barbaric and savagely ineffective that now, every time she passed, Katelyn took away his knife privileges.

  It would serve the little cretin right.

  Though it hadn't actually hurt her, the shock she'd derived from it had nearly allowed one of her victims to bst her with a fireball. Naturally, she hadn't been happy.

  All the same, Kate tossed the knife aside once she reached the next chamber, just far enough away that the idiot wouldn't go running for it when he heard it ctter.

  Instead, she retrieved a somewhat well-made short bow from her storage.

  The weapon looked positively massive in her current, diminutive state, along with a rge quiver of arrows that she strapped across her back.

  Katelyn had decided to take three csses at the same time, partially to help her combat Abby's fear that she'd evolve too early while also serving as another test.

  While she had initial evidence that neither of her two halves could seemingly out-level the other in their base states, she had since realized it was much more nuanced.

  Now, her working theory was that her levels weren't tied at all to her inability to gain experience. It was more that should one half of her be fgged by the System to stop receiving it, so would the other. Moreover, while the stats were shared, the total level and all its associated pitfalls were not.

  In practice, this meant that monster Kate could theoretically gain all the benefits of human Kate and her potentially advanced levels without triggering Abby's restrictions or causing her monster self to actually stagnate while bogged down by her other half.

  To her eye, Katelyn was still just a level two mimic of the first tier, with the prop-hunter evolution, of course. But, in reality, she was also now a level sixteen human, one who had shot up in power through system fuckery and three low-level csses, along with all the monster cores she'd been eating.

  The truly weird part was that the experience she was gaining appeared wildly inconsistent.

  Using monster cores to expedite her personal growth had become a lost cause. The rge gap between her human-based levels and the cores she consumed proved Abby's warnings correct.

  The System did not award her anything beyond a pittance of experience, given the now evident disparity in presumed power. However, when she ate someone, what she earned seemed to be filtered through her monster self rather than the other way around.

  In effect, despite her souls being connected and sharing whatever came their way if the System awarded her lower-level monster-self experience, it wasn't dampened by its counterpart.

  Unwieldy as it all seemed, Kate was quickly discovering the rge and vulnerable hole in the system, yet she was still wary of adding more csses to her small repertoire, as she didn't feel she had a firm enough handle on it all to risk it.

  Nevertheless, through system abuse, Katelyn was becoming absurdly powerful.

  Already, she'd wiped out two full parties of adventurers and had only gained two levels on her monster side, while her human half was all but sucking up three-fourths of what it would otherwise earn. '

  Oddly enough, nothing was wholly proportional, nor did it make sense.

  Given that she was a higher-level monster, it wasn't unsurprising that progress was starting to slow, but to understand that nine lives only amounted to two small levels as a prop-hunter made the whole experience somewhat grim.

  Worse still was that this was but the start of her advancement in the new tier.

  The easy part!

  Going forward, she'd need to drown herself in a veritable ocean of blood just to see results.

  Moreover, unlike her initial ten levels, csses didn't offer nearly the same quantity of attribute points as they ranked up, that number shifting from a lofty eight to a much less spectacur two.

  Granted, she had three of them, so it was more like she'd gone from eight to six; however, again, there were issues.

  Katelyn, in her infinite wisdom, had decided to explore her possibilities to try and get a taste of everything.

  A glutton indeed.

  Thus, she'd taken the csses fighter, ranger, and mage to start, all of which Abby had expined were universally considered starting points in one's adventuring journey.

  The System rarely awarded an individual a css scroll that one might consider advanced before they'd dabbled with the basics. However, it wasn't impossible.

  Instead, the majority of those living in the Lacunae did as all others, slowly maxing out the levels of their low-tier csses with the hopes they might be awarded an advanced form once doing so.

  Alternatively, one could choose to level two different csses simultaneously, and if the System deemed their efforts worthy, they might be bestowed with a sort of amalgamation of the pair that could create something truly powerful and unique.

  Sadly, Kate hadn't pilfered any such powerful scrolls during her time as a monster, and if Abby had any, she hadn't offered to share them.

  Evidently, she used the scrolls as well, though the process for a dungeon was slightly different, as she apparently needed to combine a great number of them, which, according to her, would then turn into a skill scroll that she could apply to one of her mobs.

  The specifics and numbers hadn't been delved into, but Abby had implied the quantities involved were significant.

  It was all, in the end, a rather tightly knit and interconnected process that seemed to feed off one another so each could grow in power—in theory, of course.

  Given that Abby had apparently been ensved, Kate suspected the universe took a somewhat hands-off, sandbox approach to its grand designs, which allowed those within it a good deal of leeway.

  For her part, the Monster had simply desired to see which of what some might name the holy trinity of csses would best fit her. Maybe if she'd spent more time indulging in Brandon's hobby, she'd already have an inkling.

  As, who could have guessed the afterlife would resemble computer games?

  That being said, what the monster girl didn't account for was where her new csses would assign attributes. While the fighter was useful in that it applied one point to endurance and strength, respectively, the ranger added one to wisdom and dexterity, bypassing agility, which one could probably make an argument for.

  She suspected the thief might increase it instead or one of the many other starter csses she hadn't picked, but it was too te now.

  Simirly, the mage was in the same boat, also increasing wisdom—a useless stat for her monster body—while adding a point into intelligence with each level.

  Sadly, this brought her total of actually usable attributes back down to an even four...

  She did receive a single point allocation for all her monster stats on level-up, which had grown to five total with the addition of intelligence, but it still grated on her nonetheless.

  The st time Kate had fought, she had done so as a fighter, doing just as her namesake entailed and mimicking Grom's own style of combat, which had been a lot more barbaric than she'd given it credit for.

  Mostly, she'd just been swinging a copy of his club she'd previously looted, discovering that while she seemed to have the raw stats to outright clobber her mortally terrified foes, there had been a distinct ck of finesse about her rampage, which had rgely amounted to the phrase 'hulk smash.'

  Apparently, one was supposed to be granted associated skills to go along with a css that would help it flesh out and feel distinctive among all the others. Yet, thus far, Katelyn had observed a decided ck of such offerings, which left her rather bemused.

  Maybe it had more to do with proving oneself worthy of earning them, the System potentially not having completely done away with the need for hard work and practice.

  Still, with her first run having been all about letting loose to see how dangerous she was at full tilt, and the st run exploring her fighter css, this time, Kate wanted to see what using a bow and arrow felt like.

  She did have to admit that while fighting with the club, Katelyn had felt somewhat at home with it in her hands, the admittedly primitive blows she'd nded much less foreign than one might otherwise suspect for her dormant monkey brain.

  Likewise, her hands naturally slipped into an easy and rexed grip with the bow, the length of wood feeling almost comfortable in her goblin form, even if she hadn't shot one of the damned things in her entire life.

  Was it smart to engage in perilous life-or-death combat with a numerically superior foe without a few test shots? Probably not. But victory wasn't so much a question as an eventuality for her.

  Katelyn wasn't putting pointless restrictions on herself to py nice, merely figuring she could get those few test shots off in a more chaotic and true-to-life environment.

  If needed, she could hunt down any who survived her salvo, assuming any even got hurt. Taking advantage of her considerable agility to run down any would-be escapees from her tests.

  She knew it sounded callous, she really did, yet at the same time, Katelyn wasn't human anymore.

  The gods had chosen.

  And it wasn't like they couldn't have seen her reincarnated on the side of the good guys if one wanted to get philosophical about it.

  She wasn't the one at fault just because she was so good at this whole evil business.

  No. It wasn't her fault at all.

  In actuality, they'd put her here, inside a box, inside a sapient cave whose brains the local good people had done their best to scramble.

  If they wanted her to be a hero, or even any sembnce of good, well, sadly for them all, that ship had already sailed.

  Katelyn crept along through the dark, skulking through the gloomy passageways while keeping her ears perked for any adventurous sounds.

  In a strange twist, two parties rather than one were beginning at opposite ends of the dungeon. However, only one of those two adversaries was aware of the other.

  Having spent a little over a year here, even if she hadn't been present for much of it, the floor pn of Abby's many variations of youts quickly became clear to her.

  Memories of stalking endlessly through its chambers arrived in her thoughts as brief fshes of déjà vu, her accumuted time here giving her an edge in this little game that had Kate sneaking up on the fated group not long after she'd set out.

  There were four of them: a warrior at eleven, a thief at nine, and two mages. Katelyn frowned as her eyes lingered on the higher level of the pair, the woman in question all the way at level twelve. It was the highest she'd seen so far.

  Given their average, Katelyn immediately pulled back from her pnned ambush, narrowing her eyes.

  Abby had gone over this sort of thing before, and while the numbers didn't exactly pin them as one of the suppression teams the girl seemed so worried about, they were, in theory, better than that first squad that had nearly killed her.

  She retreated further, sinking into the dungeon depths as the team seemed to methodically explore the area, the lowest-level mage moving with parchment in hand, as though he were making notations and comments while his companions systematically crushed the under-leveled monsters with brutal tactics.

  "Hey, Abby, you out there?" Kate hissed, only deciding to speak aloud once she was sure she couldn't be overheard.

  Annoyingly, the dungeon didn't seem to be paying her much attention at that moment, which left the Monster in a weird spot.

  She wasn't worried about her safety; she'd grown by considerable leaps and bounds compared to her first interaction with such a hostile force.

  Comparatively, this group was down an entire person, even if their average level was slightly higher. As a numbers game, this should theoretically be easier for her, if she ignored that Grom wouldn't be there to soften them up.

  Which, as it happened, was part of the reason she was uncertain.

  She could absolutely leave the group alone and just wait them out until they left, thus her secret would be safe, assuming they didn't catch her ruse and scrutinize whatever she tried to hide as. But doing so would mean they'd report that one of the dungeon's main bosses was absent from his post.

  And since that kind of information would undoubtedly turn some heads in conjunction with all the deaths, Katelyn wasn't sure if killing them would be better or if she should let them go.

  It was a conundrum that wasn't so cut and dry, nor was it a decision that would solely affect her. It ultimately came down to a question of opinion.

  What was the worst of two evils?

  Letting the outside world know that the dungeon was possibly making changes to itself again or risking the disappearance of yet another suppression squad and inviting all the possible fallout such an event might entail.

  From what Katelyn could gather, this was potentially a group of guild trainees, members of slightly higher status than the countless newcomers who plundered Abby's depths, who had been given jobs by the city to perform a dedicated function.

  They weren't here to level, even if the experience would be a bonus to their payout. No, they were here as professionals. And any time bureaucracy was involved, someone, somewhere, would eventually notice even the most minuscule change.

  Honestly, it was a bit of bad luck that Katelyn would be forced into such a confrontation so soon after her priority shard had opened. Yet, that was just how luck sometimes worked.

  Lightning could strike anywhere beneath a storm. It just so happened that it had struck her this time. All that was left to do was decide how she wanted to deal with it.

  The answer came to her rather quickly.

  While their deaths might be noted as suspicious, given a stroll through Abby was supposed to be retively harmless, the alternative was, in fact, exactly one of the big concerns the dungeon had voiced when Kate had pitched this idea.

  They had to die.

  And unfortunately for them, scaring them off wouldn't cut it.

  Still, this did present a certain opportunity and one that likely wouldn't disappoint.