James turned, peering through the visor of his helmet out beyond the edge of his wards. Two crab monsters were posturing at each other with a bird monster carcass between them.

Right, the bird monsters.

James picked up his shield and his Green Iron War Hammer and slowly, as quietly as he could, crept forward. Pebbles clacked and clicked against each other with each step, but at the very least James minimized the rattling of his armor, now accustomed to how to best move within it. The crabs paid him no mind, more interested in scaring off the competition for the free food.

This changed when James took his first step outside the ward. Immediately the monsters' eye stalks bent in his direction, and a beat later the monsters zipped sideways towards him, claw first.

Bam!

The first, fastest crab ate a hammer strike, cracking its shell and stunning it. Meanwhile, the other crab managed to clamp its claw on James' left boot, once it had zipped around his shield. But unlike before, with the softer Green Iron boots, these Blue Iron boots were stronger, and completely withstood the pressure of the claw. James rotated his torso, moving the shield out of the way and lining up his strike, but the crab stubbornly kept trying to crush his boot-clad ankle.

Bam! ...Bambambambam!

After a first strike to stun the crab, making it loosen its claw, James finished the job with several more strikes. Then he returned to the first crab and finished it off as well.

Through all of this, James had been keeping an eye on the lake. Its placid waters showed no signs of telltale ripples, but he was ready. Carefully he swapped out his hammer for a shovel, and he flipped the crab monster carcasses into his wards before creeping softly towards the bird monster carcasses. The carcasses were too large and floppy to maneuver with the shovel, so in the end James just grabbed them with a hand and threw them into his ward, forming a pile of dead monsters just inside the boundary.

No reaction from the lake.

James attempted to back away from the lake, keeping his shield up, and almost immediately nearly tripped and fell over from trying to walk backwards in his armor. He caught himself by jamming his shield into the pebbly beach and holding himself up with it as an anchor, but stopped, took a deep breath, and mentally reset himself.

Slow and steady, he thought to himself.

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Posture corrected, James sidestepped, one foot at a time, shield always held up towards the lake, until he was back in his wards.

He breathed a sigh of relief and topped off the ward, just in case. It was larger than his base camp on the upper floor, and made up of the warding stakes he had created himself, which were somewhat inferior, so they either had a smaller mana capacity or a worse mana efficiency, James didn't know.

Focus, James thought to himself.

First, he moved the carcasses back by his forge, smelter, and smoker. He quickly and efficiently dismantled the crabs, extracting the meat and piling up the shells and guts for disposal. Once the crab meat was safely smoking, he turned to the bird monsters.

James thought back to his life before the Dungeon, before enslavement, to the last time he felt safe and secure: when he was living with his family in his parents' home.

He had seen his mother pluck and butcher chickens before. She had known which organs to keep, but James had never much liked the organ meat, so he intended to throw it out. No need to risk getting sick on the wrong organs when he wasn't hurting for food anyway.

Of course, his mother was a Homemaker, and had known her way around a chicken. James was a Smith and Enchanter, and had no idea what he was doing. But he had an idea.

At the end of a messier than necessary butchering, James had put the bird meat to smoking, thrown out the organs and bones, and was left with a pile of sleek, almost shiny looking feathers.

He was going to make a pillow.

He took an old, torn shirt out of his magic bag and washed it as best he could in some Pure Water. The smell had hit him almost as soon as it left the bag, and if he was going to sleep on it, he'd rather it didn't stink.

Again, the tyranny of classes struck. Washing clothes requires more than just swishing them around in water…

The next issue was that not only did The Smith lack a needle and thread, even if he had had them, he had no idea how to sew in the first place.

This issue was solved by the over-application of double sided rivets. The thin, worn out shirt could barely stand the rivets without tearing, but James did manage to make a small pouch out of the shirt.

James then stuffed the sad, misshapen shirt-pouch with feathers from the bird monster, unaware that for pillow stuffing, one wants downy, soft feathers that insulate the bird, not the waterproof outer feathers, which happen to be the only kind of feathers the bird monsters had. Nor did he remove the quills.

Ignorant, James finished stuffing his "pillow" and riveted it shut. It was only a few inches to each side, but certain that it would beat resting his head on the pebbly ground, he took it to his sleeping nook, removed his helmet, and lay his head on it.

He nearly put his eye out on a stray quill. Instantly he was rising again, resisting the urge to yell as blood trickled down his face from a small puncture wound. Looking now, the "pillow" was a spiny mess of quills poking through the thin fabric, threatening to tear in multiple places from just one test.

Angry, James threw the entire spiny sorry mess into his forge, letting it burn to ash and small melted lumps of iron.

In the end, the Smith remembered the mole monster hides he used for lining his armor, and although it was stiff, it was marginally softer than and somewhat more comfortable than a layer of small pebbles, so he fashioned a pillow out of a strip of hide by folding it over itself.

Exhausted, James slept in his nook.

When he awoke, his mana was fully restored and he was full of motivation.

Today, he would resume exploring.

The lake remained placid in the distance, small waves lapping the shore.

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