Thirst. The normal kind.

#author's note: since this is the first chapter of a new volume I decided to write a long one.

~hope you enjoy.

Oh, the smell here is awful. I knew it wouldn't be nice, but this? I guess I'll call it "training my lungs".

"So, where exactly am I?" I'm supposedly in the dump, but I expected it to be like a dungeon of some sort, whereas this place is more like a maze.

The walls are made of some strange material that is very hard to break, or at least I had no luck in doing so. A bit of blood here and there, plus the smell and the cold dry air already makes the enviroment hard, but there are also supposed to be monster here, though I haven't seen any yet.

I have to add that the corridors, which this whole maze is made out of, are very wide and tall. I'd say it's about 10 meters in both height and width.

~~~

It's been several hours now, and I haven't seen a single mosnter yet. By the looks of things, the immideate area around me is safe so I think I should activate the [manipulators] now.

I opened the box and there were four balls made of a weird fluid inside, and they started taking the shape of daggers.

The handles were transparent with a faint while glow and had a slightly curved shape, pefeclty fitting into my hands. the blades, 25 centimiters long, had a black color and were shaped like fangs. Some parts of the blade looked like transparent veins, which had a blue liquid circulating inside.

The blue color wasn't particularly bright, but I knew what it was right away. It was the mana circulating insidide.

The back of the blade extended further than the rest of it, leaving a protrusion which looked like a spike. The mana circulating inside of the blade was being moved out from the veins and into me, creating a blue stream of mana which travelled into my shoulder blades.

With this, I hade four blue rope-like mana strings attached to the same place were demons and other winged humanoid races would have their wings.

After all of that happend, I noticed a bubble for around me, and it kept expanding until it was like a sphere in with the radius of three meters around me.

The sphere disappeared as suddenly as it appeared, dissolving everything aound me as it went.

"Oh, so that's why I needed to have an open space around me when I activated the manipulators." I was still mesmerised by the look of the manipulators and now I wanted to try something out.

I threw thwo of them into the air, and sure enough, they kept floating until the mana string ran out of energy, at which point they moves to a special place in my inventory which takes up no space.

Nobody can steal your manipulators even if they tried to, because the second they would pick them up the manipulators would appear in their designated inventory spot again.

~~~

After a bit of testing I figured out exactly how they worked.

First of all, just as intended, they fly around at my own will, doing exactly what I want then to. Even though I don't have any experience with those manipulators, I feel like I'm using a part of my body which I've always had, so that makes my life a lot easier.

They can fly away up to 20 meters from me, allowing me to change my style of fighting.

Now, instead of ramming at my opponents to slice them I can completely focus on avoiding the enemies' attacks and I will let the daggers do the fighting. Of course, I still need to control the daggers but thanks to [analytic thinking] that becomes a low effort task.

So, the most important part about using the manipulators is fueling them with mana, otherwise I will just be forced to switch to the usual style. The whole reason why I decided that I should take the risk of going into the dungeon is because I came up with a great idea to fuel the manipulators.

I'm going to use the enemies' mana.

As you already know, everything in this dungeon is supposed to be ridiculously overpowered, so why not just use their near-infinite supply of mana to fight them? The way I made them work is this - they take the mana of the closest non-friendly unit and fuel themselves with that.

Since these guys will be giving more than enough mana, I decided to make it so the manipulators send the excess mana to me, which also gives me an endless supply.

The amount of damage that the manipulators do depends on my strength value, and since I don't have enough strength to damage the monsters in this dungeon, one more thing is needed.

"Pure damage is unfair, ain't it?" I though aloud.

That's exactly what I'm going to use to deal hurt them. Pure damage.

I have the ability [chilling touch] which makes all of my attacks deal pure damage after I have landed 10 hits with the ability activated. Any kind of attack works, including the manipulators', so I can stack ten attacks no problem. Even if they have ∞ armor, pure damage couldn't care less.

Knowing all of this - with a bit of luck and skill I can kill anything as long as it doesn't have massive AOE attacks, in which case I'd be screwed.

**AOE means "area of effect", for those who don't know**

"Well, that's exactly why I need luck though." And that only leaves one problem.

Because of my unstable mind, if I level up too much at once, which I certainly will considering the strength of the dump's monsters, I will go insane and try to attack everything around me again.

Losing my cool in a place like this is one of the worst things you could do, because being even a little careless would cost me my life.

~~~

Having spent a bunch of time thinking about this problem, I couldn't come up with a solution so I guess I'll just let things be and hope for the best.

"Luck, you better not fail me." As I said that, I realized that my throat was parched.

It makes sense. I've been here for many hours and haven't had anything to drink yet.

In fact, this whole place is very weird. I expected to get attacked the second I entered the dump but I haven't met a single monster yet.

I've also explored two of the three ways, and both of them were dead ends.

That only leaves one way to go, so this must be where the monsters reside.

It took me four hours to reach what looked like a dead end at first, but then I noticed something on the wall.

"Is this, *cough*, an elevator?" I said and glanced at a clean metal door, which looked rather unfitting in this environment.

After a closer look I noticed a backlit orange button. After I pressed it a small panel, which was also orange, appeared in the air.

It had 10 numbers on it, but the numbers 2-10 had a slightly darker glow and an icon of a lock covered them.

There was also an extra button which had the words "ground level" written on them.

These must be the levels of the dungeon which are currently available, and the only one which isn't locked is 1. I guess after I clear the first floor the next one should become available, and this elevator is probably the only way to travel between the floors, unless I find a shortcut of some sort.

Oh, but would that mean that I can go back to this floor, the ground level, whenever I need to take a break? I hope so.

After getting my mind ready and taking a few deep breaths, I pressed 1.

A short delay and the elevator door opened. I walked in. It beeped three times, and after the last beep the whole elevator got lit up with red light.

"This is tense enough as is, no need to add even more pressure on me. Jeez." I barely managed to say the whole sentence, because I haven't had anything to drink for more than 24 hours now.

Welp, it's time..