The past day and a half had been uneventful. The girl was still glued to the adventure novel, still holding it upside down. Pell found it both amusing and infuriating for reasons he couldn’t fully explain.

Sometimes, he would try to talk to her, but every time he did, all he got was an attempt at repeating his words. Unfortunately, that included swear words.

He rolled his eyes. He didn’t care if he swore around her, but if she started copying him? That was a different matter. If her noble family found out she was picking up curses from him? Well, he’d probably be tortured to death. Or un-death? Re-death? Whatever—death-death, he decided.

Pell was practically a babysitter now. A child had been dropped on his shop’s doorstep, and now he was stuck looking after her. It was a fortunate coincidence that he still had almost an entire stockpile of rations—small preserved cans of meat and plenty of drinking water. Some of it was his, some from the dead adventurers he’d originally traveled with. It wasn’t just about keeping the brat entertained; he also had to feed her. He didn’t even want to remember the aftermath of helping her.

What the hell was this? A daycare?

Escaping the dungeon was all he wanted, but it wasn’t something he could do alone. Once he became undead, the dungeon core took control of his soul and bound him. He was trapped. Trapped in a four-year nightmare. Whenever he tried to ascend or descend the dungeon’s stairs, an invisible force would drag him back, as if he was cursed to never leave his post.

He needed to find the dungeon core. To claim it, and become free once again. But he was just a skeleton; his strength was no match for the monsters ahead. Even if he did somehow make it past everything—there was still the dungeon boss to worry about.

Pell glanced back at the little girl once more. She was nodding her head silently, like she was listening to a bard singing a tune.

Maybe if I teach her a few words, she might at least be able to pull up her status screen, he thought.

It was clear he’d have to wait a while longer, especially considering the girl’s party hadn’t made a sound anywhere near him. They might be his last lifeline, his only chance at escape. Surely, they were still looking for her, and hadn’t abandoned her. They couldn’t have just died in a dungeon full of low-level undead.

Right?

⬥⬥⬥

He stood there, staring at the wall opposite his shop, his head resting on his palm, utterly bored out of his mind. Two more days had passed, with nothing of note to mention.

"B-boo?" came a sound from behind him.

Pell lifted his head and shifted on his creaky stool. The girl was there, waiting patiently. She held a closed book pressed to her chest. With a small smile, she extended her arm and presented the book to him with a "here you go" gesture.

"B-bo-bok," she stammered.

Pell let out an exaggerated groan. "Alright, alright, I'll grab you another book," he muttered, dragging himself off the stool as though it were the greatest burden in the world. He walked over, took the book from her small hands, and tucked it beneath his arm.

With a huff, Pell returned to the closet and fetched three more novels. He placed them on the table in what he considered to be an ascending order of difficulty. Not that it mattered much—none of the books in his collection were written for children. Bandit Town wasn’t a children’s book either—it just happened to have a few illustrations.

The girl reached for the first book on the stack, gripping it with both hands. Pell rolled his eyes as he saw it was upside down. But before he could correct her, she flipped the book the right way up on her own. Well, it seems like she’s getting some of her memory back, he thought.

With a sigh, he turned back to his counter and stupid stool. He resumed his usual routine—standing, staring at the wall, skull resting on his palm. Guess I’ll keep waiting, he thought, though he had no idea for how long.

Everything was strange. Nothing made sense. No trace of the girl’s party—no voices, no fighting, no movement. Maybe they’d left to regroup. Maybe they’d hit an obstacle. Worst case, maybe they were dead.

Pell wasn’t new to waiting. Four years in this dungeon left him with little else. That other odd skeleton hardly counted as company. Beyond his small collection of books, all he could do was sit in his shop and wait—hoping something, anything, would finally make today different from the last.

Behind him, the little girl began to bang the spine of the book against the table, like she was trying to smash a bug.

Pell glanced over.

There was no bug.

⬥⬥⬥

Time crawled by, laughing at him for thinking things would get better. Like always, the second day melted into the third, and the third into the fourth.

The little girl stayed with him, reading more and more books and picking up a few words here and there. Pell seized the opportunity to help her learn, if only to pass the time. But more often than not, it only frustrated him further, especially in the early days when she first started speaking.

“No! Not that word, you brat!” Pell would snap at her, but all he’d get in return was her obnoxious giggling as she butchered the word "skeleton," pronouncing it “sell - a - ton.”

Honestly, that one was amusing, given his profession, but that didn’t make it any less annoying.

Each lesson became a battle of wills, with the rare satisfaction of hearing her learn a new word—or spending hours trying to get her to read her own damn name. Apparently, teaching someone to read was much harder than teaching them to speak.

“Boo?” she asked.

“No, not Boo. Book. Buh—ook!” Pell sounded out, stretching the syllables.

“Ba-uk!”

Pell groaned and slapped himself in the face.

“Ba.”

“Ba,” she repeated.

“Ook.”

“Ook.”

“Great. Now altogether, and do it fast. Ba-ook.”

“Back!”

“I’m going to die all over again. I’m literally going to die alone here by smashing my own skull into the floor,” Pell whined. “There’s no helping this kid. I’m screwed. Absolutely screwed.”

Despite his grumbling and groaning, there was some solace in these moments. He wasn’t alone anymore. He had Mr. Bones, the mysterious and odd, almost - sentient skeleton who had led the girl here in the first place. But Pell couldn’t communicate with him, as Mr. Bones lacked the soul-flames that would have made him more than a mindless monster.

It wasn’t easy to be trapped, to be alone, not knowing where his fate would end. The little girl became someone Pell desperately needed, though he would never admit it. He would never admit it. That was just the kind of guy he was.

He thought about his own family. Only his father remained, his mother having passed away in childbirth. Memories of happier times flooded in. How fun it used to be. How peaceful everything was. The time before he was born, when everything was just the void. How he wished he hadn’t been born to a despicable scumbag of a father who’d kicked him out—how he wished his father had been the one to die in a dungeon and become a skeleton instead.

Happier times.

Behind him, the sound of something hitting the wall broke through his thoughts. Pell turned, snapping out of his reminiscence to inspect the noise. To his right, a book lay on the ground, its cover sprawled open, pages pressed flat against the floor. And in front of him—at the table—sat the girl, pouting, arms crossed, clearly dissatisfied with what she had just read.

Maybe he and the little girl had more in common than he’d thought.

I hate that book too, kid, he thought. But goddammit, it cost me 10 copper, you gremlin.