"Fuckin'—cough—dust," Yuuta grumbled, waving a tired hand in front of his face.
The dusty trail was a nightmare. Every step felt like walking barefoot across broken glass, and for a frog with three stubby green toes? It was even worse. Sharp little pebbles dug into the soft pads of his feet, each stab a personal insult from the canyon itself. Every few meters he'd let out another hiss of pain, followed by more complaints and a few creative curses about how this whole place was trying to murder him one rock shard at a time.
With one arm flailing to clear the air in front of his wide frog eyes and the other rubbing a bruised thigh, Yuuta trudged forward through the thick haze, stopping only when he recognized the broken slope where he'd blasted himself out with a Lightning Bolt earlier.
The site looked rougher than he remembered.
Scorched black from the spell impact, the cratered slope was surrounded by jagged rubble and smoldering debris. This was the eye of the storm, the core of where his desperate last stand had happened. The bunker—or more accurately, the shit-tier dirt hole he called a bunker—was now just a collapsed ditch with a few smoking rocks leaning over it like tombstones.
Yuuta scratched the back of his head and muttered, "Alright… If the XP balls didn't get vaporized, they should be around here somewhere…"
He scanned the uneven ground, eyes narrowed in concentration. Each mound of rubble could be hiding glowing orbs of golden experience—or just more disappointment and sliced fingers. But if he had to bet, the XP was close. Real close.
"Okay," he said, positioning himself over a patch of particularly charred ground, "this feels right. Probably some pork-chopped bastard is under here."
Reluctantly, he dropped to his knees and began to dig.
And immediately regretted it.
"Ffffffuck!" Yuuta cursed, yanking his hand back as a razor-like rock sliced into one of his fingers. Blood oozed from the wound, and a small shard of stone embedded itself in the webbing between two digits.
He stared at it for a moment, grimacing.
"This is so fucking stupid…"
But he didn't stop. Gritting his teeth, Yuuta kept going. His fingers, still not fully hardened from regeneration, were already being shredded again. With each scoop of loose rubble, his nails cracked and bent, his palms scraped raw, and his forearms got sliced on the jagged edges of larger stones.
"Please, please let there be something under here," he muttered. "If there's nothing, I'm gonna lose it. I'm gonna fucking croak, for real this time."
His mind drifted as he dug, picturing himself as one of those sweaty, shirtless miners in the mobile games he used to laugh at. Except instead of getting virtual coins, he was out here getting bloodied fingers and sand in places he didn't even want to think about.
Just as he was about to call it quits, something shifted.
A soft blue light and a small golden light came rushing at yuuta beneath the cracked stones.
"Wait… what the—?!"
Yuuta stumbled back in panic, landing ass-first on a pile of smaller rocks.
Crunch.
"AAAAAAAAAAGH!"
The scream echoed across the canyon.
He rolled to the side, clutching his now thoroughly impaled frog butt.
"You pointy-ass fuckin' rocks!!" he screeched. "I swear if my cheeks start bleeding—!"
But before he could curse any further, a sound chimed in his ears.
[XP Increase: Level 3 — 25% Progress]
[+1 Gold Coin]
[+1 Gold Coin]
[+1 Gold Coin]
[+1 Gold Coin]
........
Yuuta blinked, staring at the message hovering in front of his vision. The glowing orb that had startled him was now gone, absorbed into his body like all the others.
"…Huh."
Despite the pain in his ass and his still-stinging fingers, Yuuta couldn't help but grin.
"Oh yeah… I forgot about that stupid-ass passive."
He dusted himself off—again, not that it helped—and stood.
"Right, I've got that magnet-pull XP thing. Like a vacuum. Five-meter range or some shit," he muttered, recalling how it worked.
It was like those loot magnets from the dungeon crawler games he played before he died. He never really thought about it before—probably because he was always blasting enemies point-blank—but now that he was digging around corpses?
This changed everything.
"No need to dig like a madman," he said, cracking his knuckles. "I just need to get close. XP and gold will come crawling to me like loyal bitches."
Suddenly the task ahead felt way less torturous.
He looked around again, re-evaluating his surroundings. If he had to guess, the cliff collapse probably crushed at least a dozen pigs. Maybe more. And if he got within range of their corpses…
Yuuta's eyes lit up with greedy ambition.
"Alright. New plan. I'll pick the spots that look like they're hiding fat ones and dig a meter down, tops. That should do it."
He rubbed his sore rear and adjusted his footing, careful this time not to sit on any more death spikes. With slower, more deliberate movements, he began digging again—this time aiming for shallow depth and strategic positioning.
The sharp rocks still cut his hands, but now there was less fury behind his effort. Less desperation. The first few digs hurt like shit, but then a second blue orb floated up. Then another. And another.
[XP Increase: Level 3 — 29% Progress]
Yuuta smirked.
"Yeah. This'll work."
He moved a few feet to the left and repeated the process. Dig, curse, wince, then collect. It was slow, but it was worth it. Even if his fingers were bleeding again and he was coated in sweat and dust, every new XP notification pushed him further.
The pain didn't matter. Only the numbers did.
________________________________________
________________________________________
The wind carried nothing but dust and the faint scent of scorched rock as Yuuta resumed his one-meter digging crusade, crouched over with determination in his twitching frog eyes. Each stroke of his dirt-caked fingers peeled more of his already wounded green skin, and yet the bastard kept going, muttering curses like a deranged goblin librarian.
The canyon floor was now littered with shallow holes—most of them dry, frustrating, and useless. But finally, as he brushed away a clump of dust with his arm—careful to avoid his bleeding fingers—the long-awaited [XP Increase: Level 3 — 99% Progress] blinked into view.
"Fuck yeah," Yuuta huffed, dragging his long green arm over his face like a war veteran wiping away sweat. "Took longer than I thought, the fuck is this, a grind simulator?"
He inspected his injured frog hand with a sigh. His fingers still had a few stubborn shards poking out, glistening like glass needles under the sunlight. His hand throbbed, but that one-percent itch was louder than the pain. Just one more. One last orb.
Yuuta waddled awkwardly through the graveyard of dig sites, his wide webbed feet squishing into dusty ground and occasionally letting out a pained grunt whenever a sharp rock kissed his soft soles. His eyes scanned left and right like a frog detective looking for a murder clue.
"I can feel it," Yuuta mumbled, staring at a patch of uneven stone ahead. "Right here. There's a juicy-ass XP orb buried under this bastard."
He squatted down, stretched out his wounded arms with a groan, and prepared to dig. But before he could get one miserable swipe in—
Thump.
The ground shifted. A fat, filthy hand burst out of the earth like a zombie sprouting from a cursed garden. Thick fingers twitched in the sun, coated in blood and dust. Yuuta let out a strangled croak of surprise and fell on his ass—again—this time landing on a jagged pile of rock shards.
"AAHH—FUCK!" he screamed. "My ass! My fucking frog ass again?! Are you kidding me?!"
He rolled to the side in pain, clutching his butt while cursing up a storm, but his words trailed off as more rocks started shifting. The surrounding debris crumbled, parted—and from beneath the wreckage, a pig head emerged.
Yuuta's breath hitched.
The pig's face was wrecked. Cuts crisscrossed its snout, blood streamed from its brow and cheeks, and dust coated it like powder. But those beady black eyes were open. Wide. Panicked. Alive.
Yuuta's wide mouth twisted into a wicked grin—if it could even be called a grin.
"Oh, you fucking bitch," he whispered, laughing under his breath, "you scared me shitless, and now my butt's looking like a minced meat pie."
He stood up, brushing off his scraped knees, then turned around dramatically and mooned the stuck pig—exposing the bloody mess that was now his backside.
"You see this shit? Huh? This is your fault, you dusty fuck!"
The pig groaned, one arm flailing weakly above the ground, the other pinned below debris. Its head writhed, trying to push out of the pile, eyes darting in panic.
Yuuta didn't stop grinning. "Nah. You don't get to crawl away. You and your asshole pig buddies tried to bury me alive! You tried to cook me in my own dirt shelter!"
He spotted a chunk of stone beside him. Big. Heavy. Cracked on one side. Perfect.
Yuuta picked it up with both hands, ignoring the sting in his fingers, the blood that smeared across the jagged surface of the rock. His breathing grew heavier—not from exhaustion, but from the thrill pounding in his veins. He waddled over to the pig, who was now frantically squealing and shaking its half-buried body like a terrified worm.
Yuuta loomed over it.
"You're going to take responsibility for what you did to my ass. And my sanity. And my fucking fingernails."
The pig shrieked as Yuuta raised the stone high.
And then—
CRACK.
The rock came down like a hammer of judgment.
THUMP.
Again.
THWACK.
And again.
Blood sprayed across the broken rocks in hot bursts. The pig's squeals turned into gurgles. Its snout split open. Its skull caved inward. Bits of tooth, brain, and eyeball flew in all directions like confetti at a nightmare party.
Yuuta didn't stop.
He couldn't stop.
All that rage. The near-death. The burns. The exhaustion. The cliff. The spells. The dust. The butt trauma.
This pig was the perfect outlet.
By the time he was done, Yuuta's arms were shaking, the rock was soaked red, and the pig's head was nothing but a caved-in mess of gore. The brain leaked from its skull like gray jelly. One eyeball hung loosely by a nerve, twitching.
Yuuta stumbled backward, panting, eyes glazed. He let the rock fall from his hands onto the dirt with a dull thud, then turned around and saw a flatter stone nearby. Without ceremony, he walked over to it and plopped himself down.
Another sharp rock stabbed his ass slightly from below, and he let out a dry groan.
"Fuck... I forgot to check the seat first."
Still, he leaned back and stared at the ruined corpse.
"Damn. That was... kind of fucking exhilarating," he muttered. "No magic. No spells. Just pure brute rage and a big-ass rock."
He reached up and rubbed the back of his neck, croaking a chuckle.
"Maybe I'm not just a spell-chucker after all. Maybe I'm turning into a real goddamn frog barbarian."
He paused.
Then snorted.
"Wait, no. Frogberian. Yeah. That's it."