Retreat and re-assess

You don't know whether that thing had been acting alone or as part of a group, or even whether it was specifically searching for you or just happened to catch your scent. What you do know is that you need to get away from here, now. You move as quickly as you dare, looking around the corner of one pile of rubble then hurrying to crouch behind the next, changing your direction of travel multiple times so as not to leave a straight trail. After about 10 minutes with no sign of pursuit or any additional monster sightings, you allow yourself to relax and mentally absorb what just happened.

Intellectually, you have known for days that you were not just playing an incredibly realistic video game, but a part of you was still in denial. A part of you was sure that you weren't in any real danger, that you could just step out of your VR rig in the real world and go back to business as usual.

That part of you could no longer deny your new reality, however. You just faced down an actual, honest to goodness monster. You summoned mystical fire from your hand and burned it to cinders. You could feel the heat radiating from it. This isn't a game, it really isn't, and you're in deep, deep shit. However, the shit isn't coming for you right this second, so you check your status screen to see if the experience from killing that monster was enough to push you over to level 3 yet. Surely you have to be getting close.

Congratulations! You have advanced to level 3.

As a Chosen Helltouched Human, you have six Attribute points to distribute and your Willpower and Charisma increase by one. You also gain 25% advancement towards any one Skill. Allocate these within 72 hours or they will be randomly assigned. Honor thy Patron and follow thy heart!

Even though you have fully accepted that you aren't in a game, the gamer part of you rejoices at the new level. After a few seconds in internal debate between the different ways to spend your attribute points -- you were torn between maximizing your long-term effectiveness as a spellcaster and placing points where they would be the most help to you now -- you decide that being a min-maxed mage alone in a dungeon would be pretty stupid. Thus, instead of continuing to pump points into Logic, Intuition, Willpower, and Charisma, you put two points each into a pair of stats you had neglected until now: Senses and Agility.

You figure both will help you in your current situation; Senses should help you detect other monsters before they get as close as that last one, and Agility's description mentioned that it helped reaction speed. As you are currently playing solo, any reduced hesitation in the face of danger is worth immense amounts. Then you add another point to Toughness for extra not-dying protection; you're resigned to **** in the near future, but extra Health might earn you more information when you die, and if there's anything it's impossible to have too much of in the long term, it's probably Health. Your final Attribute point you allocate to Luck. You're not sure how much of your good fortune so far has been luck and how much has been your actual Luck stat, but you choose not to believe that this world is run by beings so cruel that they would rate Luck as equal to the other Attributes for expenditure of points and have it return significantly less overall value.

You leave the Skill advancement unassigned for the moment, as none of your Skills seem likely to be game-changers with just a single extra level in them, though you are briefly tempted to put the 25% gain into Light Armor in case it pushes you over into Novice rank and gets you a useful perk.

You finish leveling up for now and return your full attention to the world around you. In your efforts to evade pursuit, you had moved laterally through the city, not really getting any closer to your goal, the center. Your decision to set your goal as the center was based on the simple logic that the boss of a dungeon was almost always at the end. A city isn't really a traditional dungeon and doesn't really have an end, but you figured the center was the next best thing. You had very little hope of actually defeating the boss if you found it, but any information on it should prove helpful to the Starchasers. With that in mind, you do your best to orient yourself back towards where you think the center of the dome is and resume your slow, hopefully stealthy progress.