A heavy, metallic throb pulsed behind my temples, and the system boot-up sequence felt completely thrashed.
RE-INITIALIZING MOTOR CENTER PROCESSORS...
I wake up slowly and groggily, opening my eyes to find that my visual tracking window was heavily distorted with lingering static bars from the chloroform agent. The cool, clinical composure of my thirty-five-year-old corporate accountant brain struggled to pull up an immediate real-time ledger of my location. The damp masonry of the second-floor dungeon cell blocks was gone.
Instead, my crystal-blue eyes adjusted to see I’m in a large tent, the heavy canvas overhead trapping a suffocating mix of stale sweat, unwashed hide, and burning sulfur sap. The spatial boundaries were entirely unmanaged. People in cages were all around the perimeter, their hollow, un-throttled whimpers confirming that this was a centralized distribution hub for high-hazard capture contracts.
My motor centers refused to fire on basic kiting vectors. I tried to pull my shoulders back, only to feel a sharp, immediate restriction lock across my wrist joints. My white-fuzzed owl ears gave a sharp, alarmed twitch against my vibrant purple hair as I checked my vertical alignment.
I’m hanging up by my arms above my head on the center post of the large tent, my mature, forty-year-old hybrid frame suspended entirely by cold iron chains bound to the thick wooden timber. My toes barely scraped the dirt floorboards, my green leather ranger vest straining tightly against the balance shift of my C-cup bust layout. The tactical exit logic was heavily bottlenecked: the tent flap stood completely closed exactly ten feet in front of me, blocking out the ambient light parameters of whatever sector we were currently occupying.
I forced my optics to scan the interior lane, searching for any loose hardware assets I could leverage to clear my chains.
To my right, resting against the baseline iron rings of a heavily reinforced containment block, was a chained-up human girl. Her physical features were remarkably distinct: she possessed long, vibrant orange hair that framed a pale face dusted with small freckles. But it was her costume framework that caused my internal historical databases to completely error out.
She was wearing a gown that looked like it was from the 1500s America.
The coarse, heavily structured colonial fabric, the historical stitching of the corset layers, and the traditional lines of the long historical dress were instantly recognizable to my old corporate memory banks. It was an absolute architectural anomaly on this planet’s grid. It looked like it had been pulled directly out of a history text repository from Jamestown or the early Virginia settlement eras.
My mind ran a high-velocity diagnostic pass on her character sheet, but her baseline stat numbers were entirely masked by the local tracking dampeners. She was slumped against the iron bars, her breathing shallow as her orange hair fell over her freckled cheeks, trapped in the exact same slave manufacturing line as the rest of the downtrodden prisoners.
I clenched my teeth, forcefully overriding forty years of deep sylvan motor coding. I routed my thoughts away from the automatic translation cache, fighting the physical shape of my elven jaw to dig down into the forgotten, long-archived phonetics of my original native tongue. It felt like trying to run an old, dusty legacy program on modern, top-tier hardware.
"Your... gonna be ok," I say to her in English, the closest language I know.
The words felt clumsy, heavy, and awkward on my tongue after four decades of silence, but the sonic frequencies were unmistakable. The small girl froze, her jaw dropping as her tear-filled eyes locked onto my face.
"I'll... get you out of hear... I promist," I whispered flatly, straining my arms against the center post as I forced the ancient syntax forward. "My name's Princess Kirra Fay Befredon."
The child let out a ragged, shaking breath, wiping her nose with her sleeve as the familiar English vowels completely shattered her sense of isolation.
"What... your name?" I asked.
"Amy Jackson," she replied, her voice tiny and trembling with that raw, distinctive 16th-century colonial cadence.
"How old are you?" I asked.
"Five," she replied, holding up her small, dirt-caked fingers inside her rusted iron enclosure.
"Where are you from?" I asked.
"Roanoke," she replied.
"My daddy was the governor when we were attacked by natives," Amy continued, her tiny voice shaking with pure, unmanaged trauma as the tears tracked fresh paths through the dirt on her cheeks. "And my pet dragon, Ablion, said Croatoan... then I was in a field surrounded by little green men, with my father nor Ablion anywhere to be seen."
She started violently sobbing, her small shoulders shaking uncontrollably as she curled her knees tightly against her colonial gown, completely buried under the weight of her fractured family grid.
The child’s ragged, hacking sobs were suddenly slashed completely out of the air.
Suddenly, a little green man with a long, hooked nose came barging into the tent. The canvas flap ripped open with a violent, snapping hiss, cutting off the heavy silence of the enclosure as a massive surge of sulfur sap stink rolled into our perimeter. The creature stood barely three and a half feet tall, his coarse, oil-stained green skin stretched tightly over a pair of wiry, hyper-extended muscular arms. His long, wicked hooked nose twitched aggressively as his large, bulging yellow optics swept over the iron enclosures, tracking our exact coordinate locations with absolute malice.
"Keep it down, you bitches!" the goblin bandit screamed in a high-pitched, screeching rasp that rattled the iron cage bars.
He took three heavy, stomping steps directly into our central aisle, aggressively waving a jagged iron cattle-prod that hummed with a volatile current of unmanaged static mana. His jagged teeth bared in a repulsive, mocking sneer as he stepped right into my immediate spatial lane, thrusting the cold iron tip of his weapon just inches away from my hanging elven chassis.
"I don't want to damage the goods before you go to the breeding pens!" he hissed, his long nose twisting in disgust as he glared up at my purple hair and unmasked face.
The goblin bandit bared his teeth, raising his jagged cattle-prod to enforce his structural authority over my hanging frame, when suddenly another loud convulsing noise rang out.
BOOM!
The entire canvas structure of the large tent violently groaned, the ground beneath my dangling feet trembling so hard that dirt clouds puffed up from the floorboards. The little green creature stumbled, his yellow optics widening in immediate tactical panic as he skidded around to face the closed tent flap.
But it wasn't a standard dungeon structural collapse. A massive, earth-shattering wall of sound violently pulverized the air parameters, blasting straight through the canvas walls from the external perimeter. It didn't sound like a standard deployment march—it sounded along with what sounded like an army with an entire rock band.
High-voltage, heavily distorted guitar riffs tore through the humid air with a crushing, rhythmic bassline that vibrated directly against my ribs, backed by the thunderous, localized concussion of an absolute stadium-scale drum kit.
And then, a male singer's voice boomed over the un-throttled musical cacophony, shouting the lyrics with a raw, anthemic power that completely shattered the dungeon's ambient frequencies:
"It's the eye of the tiger, it's the thrill of the fight! Rising up to the challenge of our rivals!"
The little green man completely lost his tactical composure. His long, hooked nose twitched violently as his yellow optics darted frantically from my hanging chassis toward the shaking entrance lane.
Panic completely overrode his structural dominance. Dropping his jagged cattle-prod into the dirt, the goblin ran out of his tent in a frantic, stumbling sprint, ripping through the canvas flap to join the perimeter defense.
But the song kept playing.
The thunderous, un-throttled stadium drum beats and distorted guitar riffs continued to blast straight through the heavy canvas walls with absolute, bone-rattling intensity. The male singer’s voice boomed over the camp, locking into the steady, pounding rhythm of the track as the anthem filled the air parameters.
And then, right along with the pounding rock music, the external audio field exploded as goblins began to scream.
High-pitched, blood-curdling shrieks of absolute terror and dying agony erupted across the outer campground layout, completely slicing through the heavy thud of the bassline. The sound of tearing canvas, clashing steel, and high-velocity kinetic impacts resonated right through the tent walls. It was an absolute slaughterhouse out there. The goblin harvesting line was being systematically liquidated in real-time, their screams filling the air as our rescue army tore through their defensive ranks to the steady, driving beat of eighties arena rock.
For 15 grueling minutes, the horrific symphony of screaming goblins and pounding stadium rock continued to privatize my audio receptors outside the canvas walls. The un-throttled carnage slowly ground down, the high-pitched shrieks fading into the damp air until nothing was left but the low, crackling hum of burning hide huts and the final, lingering chords of the guitar riff dying out across the campground layout.
Then, the tent flap open and a man stepped cleanly into the central aisle.
My crystal-blue eyes immediately locked onto his physical parameters, running a rapid diagnostic pass on his visual asset blocks. He stood exactly 5 foot 8 inches tall, possessing a sharp, refined jawline, remarkably long eyebrows, and the distinct, flawless pointed elf ears of a high-born royal lineage. His deep, piercing emerald green eyes scanned the dark rows of iron cages, tracking the spatial coordinates of the room until his gaze landed dead center on my hanging, purple-haired elven frame.
He didn't hesitate. Striding forward with absolute executive confidence, his pristine armor clinking softly across the dirt floorboards, he looked up at my suspended chassis.
"Are you okay, miss?" he asked, his voice smooth, measured, and entirely clear of any localized stress markers. "We just finished cleaning up the blasted goblin camp."
"We spotted it while I was on my way to the Befredon Royal Dungeon Diving Academy for my last 10 years of school," the elven noble explained smoothly, gesturing casually toward the open tent flap with a leather-gloved hand.
He paused, adjusting the high-tier crest across his breastplate, before bowing with absolute, un-throttled high-court etiquette.
"Hi, I am Second Prince Fadwin Fay Arcaneya," he announced with absolute diplomatic finality, his words echoing through the quiet tent like a sudden, catastrophic macro-system error. "Son of Thorion Fay Arcaneya, High King of the Kingdom of Arcaneya... and fiancé to Princess Kirra Fay Befredon, future Queen of the Kingdom of Befredon."
Prince Fadwin didn't wait for my processing engines to recover from total system failure. He fluidly pivoted on his heel, turning his emerald green eyes toward his heavy armored vanguard soldiers who had just filed in through the open canvas entryway.
"Let's get these chains off and these people out of here," Fadwin commanded with royal authority, waving a leather-gloved hand toward the row of cages.
With a series of heavy metallic clinks, his knights stepped forward with high-tier iron shears and master keys. The heavy shackles binding my wrists to the center timber post were forcefully severed, dropping my dangling forty-year-old hybrid frame back down to the dirt floorboards. I stumbled slightly as my boots struck the soil, my spatial balance centers still heavily thrown off by the lingering chloroform metrics and the sheer, un-throttled shock of his introduction.
Fadwin stepped closer, offering a steadying gauntlet while his long eyebrows narrowed in polite concern. "What’s your name, ma'am? And the little girl's name?"
I don't respond, still in total shock.
Supported by the vanguard guards, we walked outside the camp.
The moment my crystal-blue eyes adjusted to the open air parameters of the forest, a staggering sight of raw corporate liquidation spread out before me. The entire extraction outpost had been systematically wiped off the database ledger. I see goblin corpses spread out everywhere across the blood-slicked dirt, their jagged armor plates broken and their encampment huts reduced to smoking piles of black ash. The remnants of the prince's rock band were packin' up their massive, un-throttled amplifier arrays into heavy storage wagons, the ambient air still thick with the smell of sulfur sap and spent magic chords.
I raised my face, my white-fuzzed owl ears twitching as I looked past the ruined barricades.
I can see the forest and mountains in the distance, the grand, monumental canopy of the sylvan geography sprawling out toward the horizon line under a wide fantasy sky.
The screaming had stopped, the battlefield was clear, but the freezing internal panic in my central processing unit was still clicking at a million loops per second.
It took until that night by the campfire for my vocal processors to finally slide back online. The crackling orange flames licked up against the damp evening air, casting long, dancing shadows across the edge of our temporary wilderness camp. The surrounding forest and mountains in the distance had faded into a deep, silent black wall, completely insulated from the high-octane stadium rock that had pulverized the sector hours ago.
I looked up at the prince, my crystal-blue eyes tracking his profile against the warm glow of the embers. The little girl, Amy, was still clinging tightly to my side, her small fingers holding fast to the green leather of my ranger vest as she hid her freckled face from the high-born elven knights standing guard around our perimeter.
I forced my jaw to move, overriding forty years of sylvan motor habit to push out the ancient, hard-won English syllables one final time.
"My name's Princess Kirra Fay Befredon," I announced flatly, my deadpan voice cutting through the quiet hiss of the burning timber logs. "Thank you for the rescue."
Fadwin turned his head, his long eyebrows narrowing slightly before his deep emerald green eyes softened with absolute high-court warmth. I look up at him, and he has a wide smile on his face—a genuine, un-throttled expression of pure relief that highlighted the flawless, noble contours of his face. His pristine armor caught the flickering firelight, making him look exactly like a legendary, tapestry-tier knight plucked straight out of a sylvan history repository.
Thinking to myself... well, he is kinda dashing in a way.
WAIT. WTF AM I THINKING?!
Absolutely no! No way! My inner mind shrieked, running frantic mathematical risk models to overwrite the emotional asset spike. I am an executive accountant running a highly calculated corporate rollout for a global Adventurers Guild! I do not do royal high-court romances, and I definitely do not find my pre-arranged diplomatic husband-apparent asset charming! My internal coding is explicitly, unalterably structured around balance sheets, not wedding registries! Clear the cache! Purge the timeline parameters immediately!
Fadwin’s wide smile didn't fade, completely oblivious to the absolute psychological bankruptcy currently running behind my frozen, porcelain-flat expression. He reached down, elegantly tossing another sulfur log into the crackling campfire.
To force my analytical processor away from Prince Fadwin’s dashing smile, I initiated a sharp mental click, opening up my tracking window to audit the surrounding local life grids.
The vertical data strings were instantiated directly across my visual field:
Prince Fadwin Fay Arcaneya (White)
Amy Jackson (Green)
sdshsdla (Red)
Before my brain could even process the absolute impossibility of that red name flaring dead center inside our secure royal perimeter, a mysterious voice filled my head. It was the exact same amethyst female frequency that had tried to warn me down on the Floor 2 staircase, screaming directly into my mind with a deafening, desperate surge of absolute panic:
Noooooooooooooooooooooooo!
I quickly stood up and turned around, my white-fuzzed owl ears pinning completely flat against my hair as my body strained to execute an immediate defensive evasion loop. But my reflexes were completely useless against the absolute speed of the attack. Only to feel a sharp, cold pain in my neck.
The weapon severed my neck in a single microsecond. My vision was violently shattered as my head went spinning through the air. The crackling campfire, the star-lit canopy, and the emerald green eyes of the prince blurred into an uncalibrated vortex of tumbling environmental pixels before finally stopping to see a dark figure behind my headless body as it falls to the ground.
The end of vol 1, please join me for vol 2.