Go back to Web FictionAnalysis of Everybody Loves Large Chests | Web Fiction
Written from August 23, 2025 – present
Prologue
A young man, closer to a boy than an adult, wandered down the dark tunnel.
I'm assuming already that the boy is around 14 years old given that they mentioned that he is closer to a boy than an adult. But yeah, if I designate 12 years old as the end point of boyhood and 18 as the clear threshold for adulthood, then this is what I would get. But indeed, the "young man" as I understand is often a young adult already, but I will make an exception here because of the non-restrictive adjectival phrase.
So this is a traditional opening with "young man". The descriptive phrase merely clarifies the specific age of the subject, but does not add anything genre-specific. While in a vacuum, this could be flagged for a lack of compelling specificity, it performs two tasks. One, it sets us up for his unsuspiciousness, ignorance of mimics, and finality later. Second, it gives the prose a casual feel. Informal clarifying like this is often preferred in web novel spaces rather than if all the information was laid out non–"thought-process-y" like a "stative" traditional novel.
"Wandered down the dark tunnel" is not the most common prompt for the mind since we often associate wandering with things that happen on the surface and "dark tunnel" for something more sinister rather than a place of adventure. While "dark tunnel" is used in fantasy genre fiction, as part of an opening line, it evokes a very different first impression. Ultimately, we have two "contradictions" being performed here: the inversion of "wandering" for something underground and the inversion for "dark tunnel" being used for a fantasy scenario. "Tunnel" contrasts "cave" heavily. If it was "wandered inside a cave," that would fall closer to genre expectations. If they used a "dungeon" instead, that would be on point with fantasy: "wandered inside a dungeon" or "wandered down a dungeon tunnel". In the first case with "inside," there would be no inversion of wandering since it is still being performed above-ground toward what is assumed to be still above-ground (i.e., mouth of the cave) but only directed toward an underground level, rather than on the threshold of underground. In the end, we have "wandered down a dark tunnel," which combines the underground inversion of "wandered" and the less common "dark tunnel" start that does not immediately evoke genre conventions, as this can easily be used as a starting line in a contemporary novel instead. "Wandered" evokes freedom, while "dark tunnel" evokes claustrophobia. This immediately confirms the interpretation of childishness implied by the adjectival phrase.
This sentence as a whole is an exercise of the four following steps:
- subject ->
- informal clarification that emphasizes the boyness ->
- the revealing inversion of "wandered" as is reinforced by "down"
- the emphasis on the claustrophic linear endlessness implied by "dark tunnel," so as to turn wandering with its previously positive endlessness into a likely fruitless endeavor along this unknown linear path.
This opening line alone encapsulates the prologue: boyish young man wanders down into dark tunnel and dies because of the weaknesses of this boyishness.
Death Comes In Many Forms 1
If the prologue was about proving the folly of the boy, Chapter 1 and 2 are about reinforcing its competence by showing that it was not merely the boy's fault but the mimic's potential cunning. This two-chapter series proves this with at least one surprise kill in each.
Essentially, the first two chapters are vignettes that all end with the mimic protagonist killing off the human characters introduced, each demonstrating the variety of human backgrounds and, by extension, and larger world in which the mimic's exceptional ability is gradually playing a role.
Death Comes In Many Forms 1, or Chapter 1, begins the two-part series.
The description of "ripped up clothing, discarded sword, still-lit lantern and several puddles of blood" is not only functional, but evocative of the unfinished business that the mimic is starting. If it was only one, it would be a boy's folly. Now, it is hinted to be more than just a one-off:
After enjoying its first meal, the Mimic let out a small burp and went back to pretending to be a treasure chest.
If this was an ending line, it would be a one-off, but because this is an opening line for a chapter, it indicates that no, no, no, this is the start of a whole fiesta of ambushes. But if it was just ambushes, what would be the point? The author answers this when they go into physical detail with the mimic. We're exploring the character. This means we're going to see so much more of this. It's going to grow and develop beyond its archetypal margins. Having it described this specifically at the start of the chapter is an indicative launchpad of authorial ambition.
80 centimeters long, 35 centimeters tall and 40 centimeters on its side... light oak-like faux-wood... imitation steel reinforcing its corners... half-cylinder lid that served as its upper jaw.
Several dozens of small, insect-like legs sprouted sideways from its bottom and lifted it a few centimeters off the ground.
The kinetic and descriptive use of the tongue throughout the first third of the chapter is the kingpin of this ambition-revealing specificity.
To have that playing with the blade using the tongue as a hand lead to a reinforcement of the LitRPG system through the "-4 shallow cut" and the "+1" intelligence notification for learning to use it by the handle and lead to an accidental ground-banging drop that alerts other adventurers is seamless, reinforcing that this dungeon is tense for both parties—a place of torches, darkness, ambushes, and getting revealed.
The use of the two siblings, Gloria and Ron, as the victims stamped in the moral darkness that the folly of the boy could never instill. This was not a lesson in folly, but a complete wipeout of two budding people in their teenage bantering sibling years.
The cleanness of the murder scene only tempts us with the proof that the author's business never concerned moral lessons, but rather the irreverence toward any backstory, narrative, or justification beyond the clarity of a serial-killing mimic.
Having this closure be the ending seamlessly sets up for the next two chapters of onslaught.
Death Comes In Many Forms 2
While I did say that the first two chapters were quick and easy, one thing to note was that we aren't dealing with a bunch of randoms on the street.
The second chapter shows off to us that the author is not playing around. This isn't The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. This is a cunning monster protagonist whose kind fits the bill for ambushes and a potential sapience with their potentially human hand–like tongue—the mimic. This means he's dealing with people who know more or less that there is an established sudden influx of mimics. These same people care about "washing off the blood and guts from [their] metal greaves," so clearly, we're working with a functional system. While the two siblings from the first chapter had a sword and healing respectively, these guys are three now: a muscular dwarf, Valeria the necromancer, and Bogan the warrior.
The fact that Valeria noted "at least 45 people" having gone missing in this area where the mimic was indicates that a certain amount of time has passed enough for this role-in-the-larger-world to enlarge noticeably. This is reinforced by the narrator's mention of "the various adventurer guilds's" education and caution of their newcomers.
But this is undercut by the fact the mimics are becoming "less and less of a threat" to the point that they "stopped looting the disappointing chests entirely," given that the boxes were turning out just to be regular wood and the influx of mimics were the only reason they were hunting in the first place.
This is where our mimic protagonist comes in. When Valeria had Bogon and the dwarf leave via a "Portal Key" because she told them to leave because they were complaining, she was left alone with the chest that was thought only to be regular wood.
Moreover, it turned out that her being a necromancer came not only with being a monster tamer, but with having the intentions of finding a living monster "pet" on which to unleash her sexual exploitations.
Earlier, when she mentioned 45 people, she revealed her suspicion that it was more than just the influx of mimics and that it was likely that some special monster had come in to inflict this much damage on the adventurer community.
The loss of her previous pet to her "abuses" and her special monster suspicion left her with her fantasies for a new pet, whether a "Cave Troll" or a "Werewolf," in the form of the suspected monster that would resolve the discrepancy.
So when she decided interestingly to engage in self-stimulation, the chest that the three had earlier ignored killed her practically immediately in the act.
While the chapter introduces the idea of inclusive institutional competence and awareness, it actually jarringly shows instead how a more visible event, the influx, can hide dangerous actors like the mimic, unreliable individuals like Valeria, and negligence like the two other members leaving (which is not necessarily their fault anyway given she is a necromancer and presumed to be safe with only easy rats to kill), especially when the closure of the event instills carelessness. The mimic may not have done anything to make this happen, but it is a particular insiduous hole from which a flood bursts out.
In summary, the chapter shows inclusive institutional competenece awarenesness undercut by the concealment of a dangerous actor via the complacency-instilling closure of a much more visible event that led to the actor's lethal encounter with an unreliable and particularly careless deviant.
Even if the author may have mocked this institutional competence, it is their damnation of it that reinforces further the mimic's unique trajectory, beyond just being a cunning dungeon ambusher, foreshadowing the waves that it would ripple across the world, regardless of any presupposed "its-okayness".
While the prologue gives us a moral lesson and Chapter 1 introduces the murderous ambush pattern, Chapter 2 proves that this slips into systemic cracks as well. It predicts how the dungeon, a place of institutional back-and-forths between adventurers and monsters, will prove an insufficient setting for the widespread manipulation, murder, and destruction of this timely villainous protagonist.
The dungeon is just the first institution to fall.
Now, we have three things: the amoral tone, the central character mechanic of LitRPG-driven evolution, and the core narrative loop of vignettes of slaughter.
Finally, we have the answer: a hyper-competent predator exploiting systemic and individual failures on an ever-increasing scale. From the prologue and these two chapters alone, we have everything we need to move forward unflinchingly, save for bolder, more transgressive, more cunning, and more wide-sweeping exploits. This is the cunning monster "hero" and its feats.
Death Comes In Many Forms 3
While this chapter does not offer us an explicit human character vignette that results in their death, it does give us a much-needed moment of confirmation, celebration, reflection, and preparation.
As proven in this list of evidences, Chapter 3 does not betray the core model we've established. It instead advances the on-ground details, concretely codifying the "ever-increasing scale."
So I have pre-empted redundancy by creating the model. This prevents it from just being a series of happenings where the only thing one can do is summarize each chapter in a vacuum. To someone else, it is all just random arbitrary killings for shock value, but while that is valid in its own right, I offer a lived-in world framed through a cumulation and culmination of events, regardless of tone, central character mechanic, and core narrative loop. In other words, you don't have to like the transgressions, "video game-yness," slaughter, and "triteness" to see the underlying narrative construct, regardless of stylistic or aesthetic quality and polish. Web novel readers have read stories (whether original or machine-translated) with "clunky" prose, "simple" themes, and actual typos, while enjoying still the plot structure, the gameplay loop, and the system of escalating stakes.
Chapter 4 gives off the bat the introduction of human irrationality that will be important in understanding the intersection between his monster ignorance, instincts, and cunning and the human-like behavior that cumulates toward the development of friendships, partnerships, enemies, and conquests, even as it does end up toward a spell of depression.
We also can see the third and fourth instances of the word "scuttle" (previous two being in Chapter 1) for our mimic protagonist, reinforcing its smallish critter–like nature, even as it demonstrates accomplishments that defy its "natural order" as entrenched by the "adventurial apparatus."
This is also when we see our mimic's iconic six spider-like legs, which it created by shapeshifing. The author showing it learning how to use the legs as reinforced by the system notification is a critical setup for further complications and evolutions not only in the power system but in the narrative through the ability to change one's appearance. This starts here as the innocent and experimental improvement of its "current mode of transportation" after its realization that the "jagged rocks and pebbles [scraped] its sensitive undersides."
"Proficiency level increased. Shapeshift is now Level 3."
The author also imbues the dungeon monsters to which our protagonist is related awareness in the form of "slight telepathic connection with each other", through specific word choices like "womb", "kin", and "fellow monsters", and through explicit acknowledgements in the form of "curt greeting-like gestures as they walked past each other." This explains that our mimic is not entirely strange, but still exceptional as later reinforced in the contrast between its current jump from Level 1 to Level 15 and its dungeon's "Maximum Monster Level of 6," and it prepares us for monster characters beyond "instinctive dungeon kin stay-at-homes."
The death of the necromancer Valeria in Chapter 2, who we learn to be "level 20," results in "meals-on-legs" no longer entering the mimic's part of the dungeon.
Its system-repelled attempt to use the Storage to "swallow" the metal blocking this part of the dungeon continues to show the mimic's creative and unusual thought process and how that ambushes all kinds of institutions and power systems later on. The fact that this attempt ended up succeeding with the ending leaving it happily continuing on its way to another part of the dungeon where humans did travel after squeezing through the gap he created in the metal only rewards and incentivizes this for its next obstacles.
This chapter marks the second time the word "greenhorn" was used since it was started in Chapter 2. This indicates that the carelessness has not yet dissipated as admitted in the line itself:
But they still had to waste valuable time on something that was clearly just greenhorns getting scared at things that go bump in the dark.
This was the third time this week they had to walk down this dank and musty cave just because some greenhorn raised a fuss.
But this time was not no different. One of them actually was clearly shown to kill a mimic, not our mimic, but enough that the author thought it wise to have the system notification itself in the passage:
You have suffered a devastating blow. HP -53.You died.
The messiness that Bogan expressed in Chapter 2 over messiness and cleaning of clothes was echoed here by one of the five men in Chapter 5 when the yellow blood from the mimic splattered on death. They're still not taking this seriously. In fact, Roger, the person who stabbed the mimic, did it intentionally, making the excuse that it was for his Spear Mastery. They have no idea what's coming. They were bickering about "armor-scrubbing duty" around the time that our mimic protagonist's tongue, now split into three separate tongues, was holding three plain swords from its Storage and creeping up behind them. The Stealth Skill allowed it to pierce exactly into the gaps in their armor as they were walking at a "casual pace." With one guard dead and another stunned before being stabbed through the throat, what we now had were three remaining non-adventure guards left. It became a slashing melee between guards who had at best encountered human bandits and not this uniquely terrifying creature and the three blades that "whittled and exhausted" the mimic's prey. This ended up with the spears of the guards outranging the mimic's tongue-held swords and lasting better with the red potions, in which the tongue itself proved a vulnerable appendage. The fact that the damage dealt to the mimic from the system backfiring in the last chapter had not yet healed only worsened this. And when mimic finished it off by throwing his sword like it did with the shield at the metal after it had the metal damaged with the "swallow" of the Storage and then actually missing, this is the first time that the mimic put itself in a battle of ugly, messy attrition instead of a clean pre-emptive ambush strike.
The fact that our mimic got angry because a mimic was killed even if the mimics were getting killed in the dungeon in the influx could mean that it did not see a mimic getting killed in front of it until now. Otherwise, it would never enter into this kind of battle according to the Chapter 3:
Truthfully, the difference in Level meant that it could probably charge a group of 4 newbies and end their lives with no difficulty. However, such things went against its instincts. And those had never led it astray so far.
But these were not four newbies.
...these [five] men were between Level 10 and 12...
However, these five were definitely different from the newbies that frequent this part of the dungeon.
So this is a big, awkward risk for the mimic where its emotions for its kin got in the way of optimal ambush-hunting. But emotions have been established previously already, like when it banged itself against the wall for not using Cadaver Absorption at the end of Chapter 3. Nevertheless, this example is only a reaction rather than anything that could lead to instant death like with this confrontation with the guards, which, while involving the assassination of two, led to attrition with the remaining three.
When it comes to the guards themselves, the fact that they were sent only because the mayor was a "notorious cheapskate" who couldn't be bothered with qualified adventurers. Nevertheless, as said earlier, the guards themselves viewed this merely to save face, not because they thought there was an actual real threat, unlike with Valeria.
So while Valeria's death prompted the metal blockade, which the mimic destroyed, it did not lead to absolute caution with the armed detail sent by the mayor except for equipping the guards with "enchanted steel" that required "at least level 30" to leave a scratch on it. This indicates that there was still some resistance to the discrepancy posed by the 43 disappearances. Nevertheless, it is hardly simply the fault of the institution. Our mimic itself is an overpowered anomaly who could use a Storage to destroy a metal blockade and one that went around holding swords with its tongue to stab people at the base of the neck precisely through the gap in the armor.
This is way beyond what the boyish young man and Gloria and Ron could ever have comprehended. This is escape velocity. Guards that "give off an extremely intimidating air" and would alienate the romantic and idyllic world of the young man and the two siblings are now in a brawl with the anomaly. This steps over Valeria's still absurd mess-up and enters the new world of "sturdy walls":
Many were content with simply accepting a weekly wage for mundane hard work, living out relatively peaceful lives while protected by sturdy walls.
The author opens this chapter with our mimic's sudden outpouring of seven anxious questions in the face of the troubles it has gotten itself into last chapter and newly discovered information like the lack of monsters in this part of the dungeon due to the guards' rat extermination earlier. This is not the author merely giving our protagonist a list of things to say just to express a bunch of info. While previous chapters have already established its playful use of words in the form of "meals-on-legs" and the weapon toss being its "Killer Move," this is a different, being another break in our protagonist's psyche and composure, another introduction to what would become its ultimate signature attitude and personality when dealing with things far beyond what its dungeon could ever give it.
However, given the guards' inexperience and unfamiliarity and reliance on attrition and wariness, they gave the mimic time to think about its situation enough to take the spears of the two armored corpses of the guards it killed in the last chapter. The author even mentioned that it failed to hunt a Ranger about a month ago, which was never explicitly showed in the previous chapters, using that as a lesson that "arrows [fly] really well" now that it would be holding a spear.
Besides, [the spear] looked like an oversized arrow. And arrows flew really really well, something this monster had learned with its own body when it failed to properly ambush that Ranger about a month ago.
And this time, the spear, unlike the sword, flew well, missing the two guards, but hitting the wounded of the three guards in the nether region.
The system rewarded this action with a "+1" in "LCK." This is its third "LCK +1" and its fifth "A special action has been performed." The previous four of the latter were "WIS +1" and "LCK +1" in Chapter 3 and "WIS +1" and "LCK +1" in Chapter 4. This differs from "Proficiency level increased", which has explicitly happened for the mimic 5 times before Chapter 6.
With the two guards distracted, it kept to its instincts, taking advantage by dashing between their spears and thrusting its swords at their faces before finishing them off.
The author even confirmed that it was indeed the only hard battle the mimic has ever experienced:
A triumphant screech resounded through the dungeon. The Mimic was overcome with the thrill of winning a hard battle for the first time in its life.
And they even confirmed that this was mimic's "idiocy" combined with decisive cunning:
Although, it wasn’t skill or strategy that won the day. It was its own idiocy.
I would point out that it is not simply idiocy, but the mimic's penchant for intelligent experimentation, which is why it has grown all this time, even as it has led to it harming itself in frustration on at least one occasion. It is the same capacity for dance. Its "idiocy" may have been caught the enemy off guard unintentionally, but it is the mimic's taking-advantage of this that cements its place as a learning but established killer, rather than simply predator because at this point, its sword-wielding and spear-throwing were undeniably human to warrant the anthropological "killer."
While I strongly suggested that its emotions made it take such a big risk and its experimenting intelligence mixed with its competent cunning and decisiveness pulled it through since the unconventional use of the Storage, its hunger, which "disabled" its automatic "HP" recovery back in Chapter 4, was the primary motivator, given the metal blockade that deprived it of a regular feed of "meals-on-legs".
The entire passage where it is thinking about how it could best make full use of the food it gained in the form of the dead guards is another erected pillar of intelligence it had not explicitly showed in previous chapters.
Its unintentional departure from the dungeon caused the permanent severance of its "connection with the dungeon," with going back in not restoring this connection. This is when the author reveals that it never had any free will in the first place and that the guards were merely "intruders" that the dungeon wanted killed and that it no longer felt a kinship with the other monsters.
It immediately decided that it was free and made a human eye on itself in the span of thirty minutes.
When it saw a group of four adventurers, it decided that it was going to "attack and eat them all" out of its own will now, "with no warning and for almost no reason," because it was a monster.
The dungeon connection adds another reason that explains why he attacked the guards, and his sudden departure after entering this new part of the dungeon comes naturally as a consequence of destroying the "sturdy walls" that the guards were. These were the closest people to human civilization, and their deaths meant that the dungeon really was no longer its home. Its discovery of the adventurers restored it its natural tendency, but now in the outside world. The human eye itself replaces the dungeon connection that allowed it to know where it was within the dungeon at all times, so cue in the group of lights, the rationing, the Storage, the experience it gained from its first brawl, its established decisive cunning and learning mind, the free-roam food, the dancing and the self-hitting, and the ambush.
This is officially the end of the first Arc.
Which the author explicitly says in the next chapter:
It seems I had made some mistakes in the first Arc...