For Terry, the dungeon had been a mental grind more than a physical one. It had felt like crunch time back at one of his old programming jobs. Not a good crunch time when things had gone well. No, the dungeon had been like one of the bad crunch times when a project had been completely fucked but still needed to be finished. One of those delightful times when people abruptly started working twelve hours a day for no extra pay. After a week of that bullshit, everyone would shamble out of the office at the end of the day like zombies. Then, they'd come back in the morning, still shambling but like slightly more energetic zombies.

Coffee and energy drinks would be swilled by the gallon. Not that they actually helped with brain work that much. But those chemical stimulants at least made people feel more awake while they beat their heads against the countless errors in the code. Passive-aggressive blame would be thrown around freely, but it mostly landed on Steve, Will, or whichever keyboard jockey had been hired last. The recent hires always felt super insecure in their jobs and tended not to fight back. Easy targets for misplaced frustration.

The relentless slog through floor after floor of monsters that weren't actually real, but that could really kill someone, had felt precisely like those days. But, now, the end was in sight. Terry had an abiding conviction that they were truly on the final floor. So, it was with no small amount of personal glee that he closed the distance with those first minotaurs. He was not, however, reckless. He got a good look at the simply absurd double-headed battle axes the creatures were carrying. The damn things looked like they could cleave straight through the engine block of a '73 Olds Delta 88 Royal.

There was no way that his comparatively light, jian-style swords could hold up to direct contact with those. It wasn't a problem with his strength, but the strength of the steel. If he tried to go toe-to-toe with these things, his swords were going to either break or shatter. Then, he'd need to resort to beating the cow-people to death with his bare hands. That would get tedious. Or, he thought, I could just take one of those axes. He didn't know anything about using a battle axe, but they were big and heavy. They ought to hold up a little better to a brute force approach. And, if anything ever called for brute force, it was a bunch of towering, enraged bull-men.

With this new plan in mind, Terry zeroed in on the lead minotaur. There wasn't anything particular to distinguish that bull-man from the others. It was just a bit closer, so Terry volunteered it to be the first victim. He picked up speed on his approach, which the minotaur wasn't expecting. It stutter-stepped and almost fell. By the time it recovered, Terry was already there, swords glinting in the false dungeon sunlight. One took the arm that held the axe. The other took the creature's head. After giving both blades a firm swipe to rid them of blood, he sheathed the swords and picked up the axe. It was definitely heavier than his preferred weapon, but not as heavy as he'd expected.

He gave it a couple of experimental swings and found that he could, indeed, control it well enough with just one hand. That left the other hand free to do things like throat punch or hurl fireballs. He glanced toward the rest of the cow-people, expecting them to be closing fast. Instead, they were standing still, staring at him. He wasn't sure what to do with that. None of the other monsters had acted that way. They were all naked, unthinking aggression. These beasts looked almost…If they'd been real, Terry would have interpreted their stares and awkward body language as fear.

But he knew that they weren't real. There were no minotaur wives. No minotaur kids were waiting at home for their daddies to finish their shift of murdering adventurers. They were just things that the dungeon had created to be an obstacle on his way back to the real world. Or, as real as Chinese Period Drama Hell could be. He started walking toward the monsters, axe held loosely in one hand. Holding up the other, he conjured a larger-than-usual fireball and launched it at them. They tried to scatter, and some of them escaped. Three of them, however, were caught in the inferno. That, it seemed, was sufficient incentive for one of the unscorched minotaurs to bellow-moo its fury and charge him. he waited as it approached. When it tried to bring its own axe down on his head.

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The attack looked ferocious. If it managed to connect with something soft and squishy, like a normal person, it would have undoubtedly been lethal. However, the descending axe also seemed to be moving very slowly to Terry's eyes. He took a step forward, lifted a hand, and caught the haft of the axe. The weapon stopped dead. The minotaur let out an odd sound that was probably minotaur-ese for surprise. Jerking the weapon free from the monster's grasp, Terry kicked it in the stomach. The monster seemed to fold almost in half before it was sent flying, a spray of blood erupting from its mouth.

"Thank god I didn't get any of that on me," said Terry.

As the last of the minotaurs found their courage and charged at him, Terry realized that staying clean while fighting with the axes was probably a hopeless cause. Sighing, he rolled his shoulders, hefted the weapons, and went forward to meet their charge. It was over very quickly, and he was, once again, covered in the fake blood of dungeon monsters. Not that it in any way made the experience less gross. What made the whole thing even more uncomfortable was that the ones he'd hit with a fireball were emitting a smell that was reminiscent of a charcoal barbecue. Having his skin crawl while his stomach rumbled just seemed wrong.

"You know," said Kelima, "the guild would make you rich if you were willing to bring other people to this dungeon and handle the fights those adventurers couldn't. Nobles would throw gold and treasures at you if you'd do that for their children."

"I'm already doing it for a noble's kid. I can assure you that this entire experience falls directly into the category of once was enough."

"But you could help so many people! Don't you want to help people?"

Terry tilted his head to one side and said, as though it should be perfectly evident, "No."

"No? Just no? Not anyone?"

"There are a few people that I will help, but you said want. Don't I want to help people? The answer is no. I don't. I damn sure don't want to help some overprivileged noble fucktard to get even more power. Especially since the odds are so high that they'll just go on to be an even bigger fucktard with less accountability. I have better and, frankly, far more important things to do with my time."

"Like what?"

"Napping. Getting a new hat. Finding good strings for Dusk to play with. Critically important activities."

"Not fighting the monster army?" asked Kelima.

"That's not better or more important. It's just unavoidable and aggravating. Although, with the way this little field trip has gone so far, I'd have probably been better off just buying a hundred cheap swords. Well, except for this," said Terry, holding up his hand to show off the storage ring. "This was absolutely worth… Maybe fifty percent of the hassle."

Kelima shook her head and said, "Yes, a storage treasure is great, but I want to know why you don't want to help people."

"For starters, there's my personality. I don't like people. I don't like talking to them. I don't like being around them. So, I'm pretty heavily disincentivized from becoming Happy Helper Harry. Also, and I think that this might be the more important part, you weren't talking about people in general. You were talking about nobles and adventurers. The first group already has wealth and power. The second group already has some power and a profession. They don't need any help. If you'd been encouraging me to feed starving children, or to hunt down evil necromancers and free their still-living hostages, I'd have been more receptive."

"That was incredibly pedantic and intentionally made what I said sound more naïve than we both know it was."

"I'm covered in blood. What can you expect from a guy covered in blood? Now, onward! There's more fake monsters to kill."

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