You see a chest.

Your eyes fall upon something that momentarily makes you forget your worries. A chest, stuffed away in the far corner of the room next to a door. That must be where the loot for defeating the boss is kept.

You eagerly rush over to it and pry the lid open with a bit of effort, again cursing your small, weak body. You then stick your head over the edge and peer inside, seeing a bed of gold coins at the chest's bottom. Upon it lies an amulet of some sort, along with an odd, transparent object and a dagger.

You reach your arm inside for the precious-looking loot, but you can't reach it and end up falling inside the chest as the lid slams close, your vision going black as all light is shut out of the chest. You groan, but you know you can open it again and focus on collecting the loot. You start with the dagger, picking it up and studying it. The dark handle has a black, dull gem encrusted in it, and the moment you wrap your hand around it the crooked blade starts to pulse softly with faint, black energy. Suddenly its stats appear before you.

Sacrificial Dagger
Damage: 15 (+5 Dark Magic)
Durability: 130/130

A rush of excitement courses through you. You finally have a means of attacking. Not your intended one, sure. You'd rather have a spell, preferably ranged, but this is excellent too. It seems to have high damage too, which makes sense for a boss reward. You doubt it's very high though, since it's still also an early boss reward. But hell, for a low-level monster like you that's splendid. ...Wait.

Your shoulders droop as you notice a little detail: The stat requirements. You don't meet them. You need higher Strength and Agility. And it's a weapon intended for flipping mages! Of course, even by mage standards your stats probably suck, especially the physical ones. You don't even know what those stats are, you sure have never seen them in your stat menu. Thus, you don't know how close you are to meeting the requirements or if those stats even increase when you level up. You suppose you'll just keep the dagger on you and check if you can use it every time you level up.

Not letting yourself be discouraged by that disappointment, you move on to the transparent object. Lifting it up with both hands, you see it is shaped like a skull and the eye sockets have faint, glowing blue lights.

Skull of Reanimation
Consumable
Throw on a corpse of up to level 100 to resurrect them as an undead ally for 60 seconds. The fast and aggressive reanimation causes the reanimated corpse significant decay, reducing their level by 50%. Subsequent reanimations of the same corpse are possible with multiple items, but the 50% level reduction will stack each time.

Hm, a consumable item. Not very useful to you, but you can definitely see this item saving your ass at some point. The short duration and the half level thing makes it sound less appealing, but the fact that it works on targets all the way up to level 100 means that in the best-case scenario, you could have a level 50 ally for what could be more than enough time for it to tear your foes apart. So you decide to keep that one too, for when it may or may not be useful. You wonder if heroes ever do that... Nah, with all the loot they must be finding all day they must've learned to prioritize only the good stuff and not things that flimsily "may or may not be good maybe at some point".

Then, finally, you move on to the amulet. It's a shiny, diamond-shaped gem with a dark red colour, attached to a black necklace. While you're pondering why somebody would name a shape after a gem when said shape can be applied to non-diamond gems, you study it closely while trailing your finger over the red stone.

Hellflame Amulet
+10% Magic Resistance
+10% Fire Resistance
+5% Darkness Resistance
-5% Mana Cost
+5% Fire Spell Damage

Quite a number of effects... Very minor though. You can't even benefit from the spell damage increase since you have no fire spells, and you doubt the Darkness resistance boost does much since you as a dark caster already have pretty high Darkness resistance. But you won't say no to the buffs, especially not the reduction to your mana cost. Minor as it may be, it's still a massive boon to someone like you who have never gotten a new piece of equipment before.

You happily hang the amulet around your neck, admiring it. The gem is quite big on your small frame, but you think it's a nice look.

Having collected all the items, your attention then turns to the gold you're sitting on. As a monster, gold is useless to you. At least so you believe. You can't imagine any shopkeeper willingly trading with someone like you, or doing anything other than yelling for help or chasing you off with a broom. But you still have inventory space left and gold could still have its uses... Be it bribes, lure, or whatever else you can think of.

Now that you're sitting in an empty chest, you get ready to open the lid and get out. However, then you hear a sound that you recognize as a monster respawning. Your body tenses up as you hear the bitter grumblings of your boss as he paces around in the room. It sounds like he's lamenting his humiliating defeat. As you expected. He's still not very happy with you. You dare not to move, crossing your fingers that he won't open the chest. Figuratively speaking, that is, since as stated you don't dare to move even that much.