It wasn't until Terry found himself standing in a sunny little clearing with nothing attacking that he realized he'd been bracing for an attack. Oh, right, he thought. Getting attacked when coming out of a dungeon doesn't really happen unless there's some kind of narrative setup for it. Like, there was a hostile adventurer's party, or the dungeon was located right outside of a city. He vaguely remembered a few other examples, but the predominant trope was that you didn't get attacked directly after leaving a dungeon. Kind of strange and unrealistic in practice, since that's when people were most likely to have good shit to steal, but whatever. He was happy to lean into this one particular trope that actually worked for people.

Of course, that was only true if he was actually out of the dungeon. He looked around, noted Kelima's presence and that she was uninjured, and then saw some familiar mountains. In fact, they'd bypassed a lot of walking. They were at the base of the mountains. Unless he missed his guess, they were at the base of Mount Doomsicle or whatever the hell its name actually was. His eyes narrowed when he realized that there was a visible, if somewhat overgrown, path leading up the mountain. Yeah, that's not at all ominous, he thought. Then again, if this place was a mine before some all-powerful monster took it over, maybe the path isn't ominous. It only followed that they'd need to get the unobtanium down somehow.

"We're really back," said an overjoyed Kelima.

Her eyes were shooting in every direction, no doubt taking in the familiar wilderness around them. Given how hostile this area had been before they got sidetracked, Terry supposed it said something about how bad the dungeon was for her. In retrospect, he supposed that most of those final floors had probably been nerve-wracking for the girl. While he hadn't been in any serious danger until that final boss, she'd been in constant mortal peril. It had probably occurred to her how utterly screwed she would have been if anything bad had happened to him. No doubt, she had spent a lot of her time in that dungeon cursing the day she met him. Terry knew he would have been doing exactly that if he'd been in her shoes.

Shaking off those thoughts, he said, "Okay, let's go find something edible to kill. I'm hungry."

Much to Terry's amusement and Kelima's exasperation, the first thing they found was a murder-bird. He almost made her fight it, but he was too hungry to stand by and watch that experiment. So, he just got its attention and waited for the thing to charge at him. One modest doom-slap later, and they were set for dinner. Aside from Terry's insistence on using the term murder-bird as often as possible, setting up camp and cooking the monster was mostly done in silence. Kelima seemed far more engaged with glaring at the frilly party dress she'd throw on the ground than with talking to him. Not that Terry had much to say once dinner was ready. He mostly basked in the twin luxuries of hot food and Kelima's unusual silence.

After agreeing to take the watch for the second part of the night, Terry crawled into his tent and fell asleep almost immediately. When Kelima woke him to watch the camp, he had disjointed, unsettling half-memories of minotaur children pleading with him not to kill their daddies. He found that perplexing. He'd gone out of his way to avoid killing people whenever he could, mostly to avoid becoming a homicide vagrant. That brought him up short. Damn AI, he thought. Infecting me with its stupid phraseology hangups. Regardless of his fears of becoming a murderhobo, he hadn't been troubled by the idea of killing monsters.

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They were monsters. Monsters were bad. It was one of the more reliable tropes. You didn't need to feel bad about killing them because they were evil and hungered for human flesh. And all the ones he'd come across so far had fit that profile to a T. So, his conscience had been clear. At least, it had until now. He wasn't sure what lodged in his subconscious mind to make the damn minotaurs seem different. Was it just because some of them hesitated the way he thought humans would? Now that he thought about it, the actually weird thing was that the other monsters didn't hesitate as a rule. It violated the principle of self-preservation. Except for the goblins, but they were notorious cowards. It would have been even weirder if they didn't hesitate and run away when the odds turned.

No matter how he turned it over in his head, Terry couldn't put his finger on what the problem was. Maybe it was just that he'd associated them with cows, which had a reputation for being docile back on Earth. He knew that bulls would get aggressive and violent, but he usually thought of herds of dairy cows when he thought of cows. He'd never really seen them in person, but he'd met some people who grew up on farms. They all said the cows were more curious and friendly than anything else. Apparently, they'd even play sometimes. He'd found that claim a little hard to believe, but what did he know? He wasn't a veterinarian.

I just anthropomorphized them too much, he decided. That's all. But those minotaurs back in the dungeon weren't even real to begin with, so there truly wasn't anything to feel bad about. The next time some poor dumb bastards got dropped into that place, the dungeon would cook up a whole new batch of them in cloning tanks or assemble them in a factory. Whatever moral quandary his heart and soul had cooked up was built on sand. If he ever found real minotaurs and they were more like people and less like crazed murder machines, he'd revisit this question. Until then, he planned to sleep soundly. Granted, his declaration that he was over it didn't entirely settle his conscience, but it did seem to help.

He was finally able to stop pacing around the campsite and sit down by the fire. He even pulled out some leftover murder-bird and had a snack. That gave him an excuse to gloat one more time over the fact that he finally had storage treasure. He'd been half-hoping for a bag of holding because it was kind of iconic in D&D. It was damn near a trope in and of itself. But the ring was objectively better in just about every way. It would be a million times harder to steal, for one thing, since it was snugly wrapped around his finger. He was also pretty sure that his ring could hold a hell of a lot more than a bag of holding.

He was surprised that they managed to go a whole night without being attacked by anything. He wondered if they were in some kind of exclusion zone. One created by the presence of whatever terrible thing was waiting at the top of the mountain. The more he thought about it, the more likely that felt to him. Of course, that also meant that they were likely to be entering the zone of minions soon. Unless it was one of those really powerful, self-sufficient monsters that didn't bother with minions. He supposed that the only way to find out would be to climb the mountain. However, he only planned to do that after taking a nap. The very second that Kelima exited her tent, Terry went and did that over her loud protests.

"I fought a dungeon boss," he finally said to her. "I've earned an extra few hours of sleep."

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