Desiree led the party across the oceanic floor. James had wanted to lead the charge, but their path occasionally led through tight, dark spaces, and Desiree’s staff was best suited to lighting the way. She made sure to bless everyone else’s weapons too, not because they expected demons on this floor, but so the light was spread more evenly amongst the group.

  The journey felt wrong, to James. They’d been walking for at least ten minutes, clomping heavily through the water, and aside from the regular-looking fish at the entrance, he hadn’t seen a single mob.

  Unless he was thinking about it wrong? He kept expecting fish, or sharks or mermaids or something. Or… what was that lake creature from Harry Potter? The one with seaweed hair that screamed a lot?

  But there was nothing. A whole forest of coral, some of it even glowing and all of it beautiful, and not one creature? They had to be missing something.

  And then, an awful thought crossed his mind. What if the reefs were the mobs? What if they were walking past a treasure trove of experience because they were too blind to see it?

  The thought of taking his axe to the beauty around him made James want to hurl — and the thought of his own vomit floating around him made him want to hurl even more — so for now, at least, he held his tongue.

  After another few minutes of walking, Virgil stopped them. He pointed to a pink growth that looked like a bush without leaves. Ocean life being what it was, it didn’t need leaves; pink and orange twigs were bunched close enough together to give it a beautiful, full appearance.

  Beside it was something similar but purple, with thicker stems spread more sparsely across its trunk.

  The colors were bold, and the two together told James and Inara everything they needed to know: they’d been here before.

  Virgil waved his hands in a wide, circular motion. Inara nodded, confirming his fears.

  They were walking in a circle. This secret area, whatever it was they’d stumbled into, wasn’t a secret passage or a shortcut to the boss. It was a dead end.

  Inara started waving her hands in increasingly complex motions, until James couldn’t keep up with what she was saying at all.

  He cut her off and waved her back, along with Virgil and Desiree, until he had enough space to swing his axe.

  With a sick feeling in his gut, he raised the axe above his head and let it fall. Water didn’t put up much resistance against the huge hunk of metal, and the blade slammed into the reef with a sickening crack.

  Like golden smoke, all the color and vibrance leeched out of the beautiful purple plant.

  You have defeated a Chunk of Coral! EXP +2000

  James cringed. It wasn’t just a mob, it was a mob worth a lot of easy experience. Somehow, that made it even worse. This reef wasn’t a tree that would chew his arm off if given the chance. It wasn’t a rat or a demon. It was just a beautiful thing that didn’t deserve any harm.

  And yet. It fell to him to do so.

  He turned, chagrined, to the party, and they all gave somber nods. They understood what needed to be done, and nobody liked it any more than he did.

  The party split, and they all set to work. Inara swung her scythe to cut big swaths of coral, but thanks to her stats that was only so helpful. As soon as her scythe blade ran into anything larger than her fist, it was stopped in its tracks.

  Desiree had better luck. Her staff easily bludgeoned the coral, and it rarely took more than a couple of swings for her to clear something out.

  Virgil, meanwhile, had his hands relatively tied. He tried to cast his Hellflame Bolt, but it dissipated in the water too quickly to do much damage.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Every time they destroyed a Chunk of Coral, the color leeched out and a puff of golden smoke rose from its core. Experience poured in faster than ever, and James did his best to let that ease his conscience. These were the rules of the world, right? All crimes paled in comparison to saving the world from the Demon King, and anyway, no matter how beautiful it looked it was still a dungeon-concocted room. None of this stuff was real in a sense that granted it the sanctity of life, so he didn’t have to feel bad about it.

  He really shouldn’t feel bad about it.

  But every time that golden smoke rose up around the blade of his axe, James cringed. He didn’t like it. He didn’t think he liked the person Grimora was turning him into, but it wasn’t as if he’d had a lot of time to think about it…

  After another minute of chopping coral, though, he realized that this was the time; if not now, then when? Cutting down coral was as mindless as it was disturbing, and there was so much of it that he had plenty of time with just himself and his thoughts…

  So. He steeled himself for a tough conversation with himself. Was he doing the right thing? Was he being a good person?

  The obvious answer was, of course he was. His axe thrummed with confirmation. The bloodthirsty axe, at least, was living its best life right now.

  Not that a bloodthirsty axe was his first choice of moral compass.

  James shook his head. Acting crazy and talking to his weapon was not the move.

  When he first landed in Grimora, everything had been so straightforward: save a little girl from a bear. That was so clear cut it didn’t need thinking about. Then, hearing that a Demon King was building an army and working to subjugate all the people of Grimora, including that little girl, the decision was just as easy. Especially once he saw the demons, witnessed them kidnapping villagers and traumatizing the rest, there was no doubt in his mind that stopping the Demon King was a necessary and good thing to do.

  Level up!

  James winced at the latest flash of golden smoke, but he nonetheless breathed a little easier. He was on the right track, as far as the Demon King was concerned. Nothing had changed there.

  It was the rest of the dungeon that bothered him, he realized. The first floor had been easy, since that was just rats and demons. No moral quandaries to be found there.

  The second floor was… a little more complicated. Goblins were such a standard monster in games like this — and despite everything, Grimora did still feel like a game sometimes — that he hadn’t thought of it in the moment, and the little ones outside the library certainly kept coming at them, forcing the battle whether James liked it or not…

  But the shaman? If James hadn’t looked for a secret bookshelf door and bulldozed into the shaman’s secret room, that goblin might have continued to live a peaceful life. James had basically charged into his home and killed him in cold blood, and for what? A potential quest reward? That would probably be pivotal against his fight against the Demon King, which he definitely needed to do in order to save everyone in the kingdom?

  Did the ends justify the means? Maybe the goblin sucked anyway and would have sniped them from afar if they hadn’t killed him when they did, and it really wasn’t worth feeling bad about.

  And that was also how he got the earth notebook and gained Earth Affinity and the Immobile skill, which he was sure was going to come in handy one of these days.

  Then the Librarian was… obviously crazy. Fighting against his own Demon King had made him deranged, and since the Librarian had started that fight by attacking Virgil, James could probably justify it as self defense.

  And it wasn’t like not having Virgil around would have made the Librarian docile, was it? This was still a dungeon with video game rules, and there was going to be a boss fight whether you were nice to him or not; them’s the rules.

  Right? If anything, saving Virgil from the first floor prison was the one thing in this dungeon that James definitely felt good about. He was a good man and a good ally, and no matter what happened, he wouldn’t feel bad about helping him. And if anyone wanted to attack James’s allies, there was only one answer to that.

  So, he felt good about the first floor, and he could justify the second… but when his axe split open another Chunk of Coral and sent a plume of golden smoke twirling up into the water, he cringed from emotional conflict.

  This was what he was being pushed to do. It was the obvious answer. There was no discernable exit, and the Coral provided a wealth of experience that he and his teammates desperately needed.

  But these weren’t enemies, and he was destroying something beautiful, and that was definitely, fundamentally wrong… And he had to do it anyway because there was no other way out, no other way to get strong enough to fight the Demon King, so he had to do it.

  James went round and round in his mind, a hopeless cycle with no answer. He swung his axe with greater and greater strength as his frustration grew. It was horrible, but he had to do it. But why would he be asked to do something horrible?

  Until his axe met only water. James blinked and rose out of the fugue state which had overtaken him. There was no more coral, only chunks of lifeless, gray debris where color once had been. He could see now that the cavern they were in was massive and circular, and he could see between the piles of rubble that there had been a path that wound between all of the multicolored growths.

  Congratulations!

  You have destroyed the Garden of the Siren! EXP +100,000!

  Level up!