I don’t appreciate having doors slammed in my face. Especially not when the door slam puts me in the dark. I doubt most people would appreciate that, in fact. The nasty sentiment aside, there’s just something upsetting about having something forcibly closed off to you, right when it was within your reach just moments ago.

So I raised my fist and swore at the closed grave, before grumbling and making my way down the tunnel. Fortunately, I found that opening up any game window gave off a dim, green light that I used to light my way. It was not enough to see my surroundings, but at least it was enough so that I wouldn’t trip over myself. I could guess where I was going anyway (straight down along the tunnel), so it was less stumbling around than it could have been.

The tunnel sloped downwards at a pretty steep incline, steep enough that I half slid half walked my way downwards. Everywhere around me were the damp, echoing sounds of dripping water. Contrary my expectations, the surfaces of the tunnel were the same papery texture that everything else was, so I could happily brace myself against a not slimy wall without reservation.

At one point, the incline shifted upwards at a much gentler angle, and the mud textured walls began taking on a sootier, brick outlook. I continued onwards, the light in the tunnel gradually increasing to the point that I didn’t have to use the status window to see anymore. Soon, I found the source of the light — a long, narrow crack in a brick wall blackened with soot.

Cautiously, I wriggled through the crack and emerged into a huge kitchen. Much like the Forest, everything had been scaled upwards to the point that I was the tiny bug in a human sized room. Everything towered over me, from the counter, to the oven, to the unlit fireplace that I had popped out of. Although I’d already experienced the Forest, going from a tiny, cramped space to soaring heights all of a sudden was somewhat dizzying.

And so I didn’t notice till the last minute as a red capped figure rounded the corner of the doorframe.

I stared at the Redcap.

The Redcap stared at me.

It opened its mouth.

I flung a throwing knife in its direction. Alas, it was too late.

The Redcap screamed.

In response, a plethora of screams came echoing through the doorway.

Oh boy.

***

So you see, aggroing Redcaps without a game plan is a bad idea. It was one thing to lead them on a wild march through various other mobs and have them all kill each other, and it was another to try and take on the hoarde all on my own.

Here in the Crimson Hall, all the enemies were some variety of Redcap, be it an Elite Redcap or a Knighted Redcap. And since all the Redcaps were technically friends, there was no way the same strategy would work here.

And so here I was stranded in the kitchen, balancing atop a pile of gigantic plates, while the Redcaps began climbing over each other in an attempt to get to me.

I glanced down at the nearest Redcap, its elderly face snarling up at me to show its lack of teeth. With a wrinkled hand, it tried to swipe at my foot. I dodged. The entire Redcap tower wobbled.

“Back up,” I kicked the Redcap in the face and it fell off the tower down to the kitchen floor, hitting the ground as a red smear. Then, the smear got up (the red was its cap. Drat), and rejoined the base of the tower, hoisting the other Redcaps higher.

Needless to say, I spent an unflattering amount of time kicking Redcaps off their Tower of Babylon and waiting for them to die from fall damage.

If it were any other mob, I’d have booked it by now, but given the Redcap spirit of following the enemy to the ends of the earth, I couldn’t do that without risking getting myself cornered somewhere I didn’t have the high ground.

I probably looked like a complete noob to anyone who was watching, but there really wasn’t anything else I could do. Rule number 1 of the Light Marshes existed for a reason: don’t aggro the Redcaps when you’re not strong enough to beat a village of them.

After a long, long time, I finally whittled the group of Redcaps down to something more manageable. The tower had shrunk to the point that there were only twenty Redcaps teetering off of each other’s heads.

I hopped off the stack of plates, bouncing off one of the Redcaps on my way down with Sorrow. The remaining Redcaps turned to stare at me, before shrieking and flailing in hot pursuit.

Twenty was definitely more manageable than whatever atrocious number had come after me before. I cast Throwing Knives behind me as I ran laps around the giant kitchen, whittling down the number of Redcaps with the skill.

Eventually, the last Redcap bit the dust, and I finally had some respite from all the shrieking.

Walking slowly around the room, I picked up all the drops that the Redcaps had left behind upon death. Not a lot of good stuff, despite the sheer amount of Redcaps that I’d killed.

Red cap accessories, some pants, a shirt here and there… nothing better than what I had on at the moment, but I kept those anyway. There were also about eight Rings of Dimensions dropped, though tragically five of them were Inventory boosting and three Accessory boosting.

Nothing I desperately wanted.

Satisfied with the cleanup, I passed through the massive entrance of the kitchen into a similarly massive hallway. This hallway was, you guessed it, similar to all the other hallways I’d seen in the dream so far, all long and tall and made out of large blocks of stone.

Instead of dark grey stone like the others though, this hallway seemed to be made out of marble. And it wasn’t dark. Lining one end of the hallway were tall, palladian windows, hazy light cascading through the glass and casting streaks of creamy white onto the floor.

True to its name, the hallways of the Crimson Hall were covered from top to bottom in red. Red carpets, red tapestries, red curtains… even the Kobold statues wore red—

I equipped Sorrow and caught a charging, live Redcap by its teeth, swiftly dispatching it. Dealing with them seemed to have gotten easier than it had been when I was leading them as my personal army all around the Marshes. Maybe because I was now the same Level as them…

I appeared to have attracted and murdered most of the Redcaps in the dungeon in the kitchen earlier, and so I made it through the hallway fairly peacefully, occasionally having to take care of the stray Redcap. This let me be free to explore the bottom floor of the Crimson Hall in all its morning glory.

Funnily enough, I was able to open all the doors in the place by hand, even the ones that you couldn’t open in the game, though those usually led to a blank wall.

There was a cozy parlour, a small library, a drawing room… all nicely furnished and blanketed in red. The only downside to it all was that nearly all the furnishings had been torn apart and all the books ripped up, leaving behind what looked like the remains of a mad scuffle in each of the rooms.

I initially wondered whether Rosa’s confidant was waiting in one of these rooms, but after checking them all and clearing out every Redcap I came across, there was still nothing.

Maybe he was at the boss?

I made my way to the staircase leading to the second floor, the sound of my footsteps blanketed by a plush crimson carpet (That, again, only looked plush, and felt like paper).

Rounding the corner, the hallway of the second floor posed a stark difference to the first.

Where the first floor was pretty well lit, the second floor was completely dark, the crimson curtains drawn shut before the windows. All the furniture was covered over in red velvet, leaving vague shapes and shadows that stretched all the way down the corridor.

I marched straight towards the boss room at the end of the long hallway, till I stood before a pair of gilded double doors. Double doors that towered nearly thousands of miles above me. I paused for a second to take it in. It was like looking up at a cliff face, both majestic and intimidating.

“Exquisite…”

Said a voice that wasn’t mine. Almost immediately, I felt the tug of something foreign. Like back during the Class Change quest, something that compelled me to act that wasn’t quite myself. First faintly, then stronger and stronger, it wrestled the autonomy out of my grip. My body slipping out of my control, “I” kicked the massive double doors open, to reveal…

A lovely lady with doll-like features, leaning back into the grip of a man, reclining upon an armchair ten times the size of them. The lady was dressed head to toe in black, black dress, black shawl, black gloves. Her face pale and seemingly drained of blood, her black hair falling in front of her eyes messily. Her eyes were rolled back in their sockets, her mouth left agape in a perpetually surprised look. She looked like she was dead— actually, she was dead, but the dead part wasn’t the thing that caught my eye.

“What a lovely specimen.”

The man crooned as he stroked the dead lady’s cheek lovingly, his features hidden behind an elaborate silver mask. He was tall and crooked, and, just like the lady, was dressed in the deathly colours of brown and black.

Atop his bleached hair sat a sharp and spiked obsidian crown. His mask was the only thing that glinted in the dark room, silver moth wings spreading out across his face. From behind the mask, his blazing red eyes stared down at the lady.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

“Even in death, the Mistress of the Hall is filled with such a fiery temper. A wonder she hasn’t turned into a sluagh yet, don’t you think?” the red eyes turned to me. “Champion?”

“Who are you? What do you think you’re doing?” I cried out heroically, even though I already knew the answers to those questions. But as story mode decreed, I could not stray from the script.

“My, my, has Rosa not told you?” the Decay flung the corpse to the side, where it hung in the air looking like a puppet on invisible strings, and strode off the edge of the armchair. He dropped to the floor before me, his limbs cracking all the wrong ways before popping back into place as he straightened back up.“To think that she thinks so little of her precious Champion.”

I raised my arm to point Sorrow at him in a defensive gesture. Almost leisurely, he strode towards me, his hands making grand flourishes in the air as he spewed flowery language from his mouth.

“I am what makes flowers wilt in the winter. I am that which reduces woodland to dust. I am the Ruin that comes for all things,” he gave me a shove, and immediately I went flying sideways into the wall.

“Remember my name, for I am the Decay.”

“You…” I stumbled to my feet.

“Now if you would excuse me, I have something to attend to,” he left me struggling against the wall as he skipped through the air back over to the floating puppet of a corpse.

Roughly, he grabbed her by the waist and spun her around. With every spin, the corpse grew in size, till what was once a fairy sized woman was now a human sized corpse laying in a human sized armchair.

The Decay chuckled slyly, and leaned towards the corpse’s ear, now half the size of him.

“Awake, my sweet. Let the world burn at your feet.”

The corpse was jerked upwards, where it stood silently for a moment.

It then opened its mouth, and screamed.

***

I’m sure you’re tired of all the screaming by now. There had been a lot of screaming with the Redcaps, and now their Mistress was screaming. If you’ve been flexing your mind while reading this, your imaginary eardrums must be popped from all the imaginary screaming you’ve been picturing.

The lady screamed, her voice echoing out throughout the room and beyond. Like a wave, it travelled through the air, shaking everything in its path. The force of it ended up slamming the double doors closed twice as hard as I had kicked them open.

I suddenly found myself pressed against the wall I’d been thrown into, glued to the surface from the back of my head to my ankles.

The lady crumpled forwards, her gloved hands clutching the two sides of her head as she wailed. From her eyes came sparks. Hot, red sparks that fell from her face like tears and sputtered onto her dress and the ground. From the sparks came long tongues of flame that licked up the scorched hems of her skirts and hair, her once black visage now consumed in roaring, blazing red.

The armchair crashed to the floor burning. The singed carpets curled up as the flame engulfed them, as did the curtains that got set on fire along with everything else.

I felt the gigantic pressure on my limbs abate, and I was able to scurry up onto a massive vanity as the floor beneath me began to smoke.

Turning, I watched the final parts of the boss introduction sequence end. What was once a corpse was now a doll-like woman with hair and clothing made of rising flames, raising both her arms in what would soon be a strike coming down on the vanity.

Now that was one heck of an introduction.

I dashed out of the way just as her fists came down with a huge crash, leaving a crater where I had previously been.

“Speed! Attack!”

I shouted, feeling the tingle of increased speed and attack power take effect as I activated Gift of the Wind and Gift of the Sun. Sorrow flashing in my hand, I turned and slashed at the dainty fingers clenched up into tight fists.

One, two, three…

“AIEEEEE!” she shrieked, her hands moving slowly away from the surface. I threw Throwing Knives after them as they retreated back to her side.

…eight, nine, ten. I chucked a last Throwing Knife at her as she leaned backwards swaying on her heels, and jumped off the vanity onto a chair.

Fwoosh. The vanity went up in flames. The Lady hissed, smoke spewing from the edges of her lips in irritation at the miss.

Towering above me, the Lady began to move, her giant fingers stretching outwards. I leapt off the chair and onto the floor and began the sprint, the edges of my vision beginning to take on a red hue.

There were… about ten seconds before I started taking burn damage. I wasn’t particularly concerned about it though, since the effect would reset once I left the floor for long enough.

I scurried up the leg of the fallen armchair, making sure to avoid the burning patches. The trick to a hitless Burning Lady run at low level was to keep moving, running around the room in a designated pattern.

Since her attacks would temporarily set pieces of furniture on fire, it was not a good idea to stay in the same spot for too long, lest you start to lose HP from burn damage. Eventually, the things on fire would put themselves out, and you could reuse the space to launch an attack.

Of course, at higher levels you wouldn’t even have to dodge if you could kill her fast enough, but I wasn’t in a position to do that.

Another fist came crashing down from the sky, another opportunity to attack. My stamina was running low after the last spiel of Throwing Knives, so I opted to let it recharge, instead using melee attacks to pepper her with damage.

Gift of the Sun and Gift of the Wind were really doing a good job here, letting me attack twice as fast as and hard as I would have originally been able to at this level.

Rolling out of the way as she opened her mouth to breathe fire again, I took a flying leap, just managing to step onto the edge of a dresser—

— and…slipped?

No… I missed it, by barely a millimetre.

That wasn’t supposed to happen.

I flailed frantically as I fell, my fingers slipping off the knob of a drawer and missing that too.

I was supposed to barely clip the hitbox and glitch onto the surface of the drawer. It was a part of the tried and tested route of speedrunning the Blazing Lady. Clip the hitbox, land on the drawer, dive onto the shelf and run along it till I reach the vanity again.

Straightforward! Easy! My mind screamed as I fell. That was how it was supposed to be!

Then again, there weren’t any hitboxes in dreams, were there?

I dropped back to the smoking marble floor with a smack, the fall thankfully not far enough to initiate fall damage. Luckily, my feet had left the ground long enough for the timer on floor burn damage to reset, but the Lady herself wasn’t quite so kind.

A large, flaming heel came down right next to my ear, debris flying in my face and briefly obscuring my vision. Taking an educated guess, I timed a jump up in the air again and slashed blindly beneath me, catching the shoe as it rose back up.

The recoil took me further up into the air, above the debris where I could see again. I spotted the dresser I was supposed to have landed on a few inches behind me and to my right, the wooden surface now level with my chin.

“Throwing Knives.”

I flung my hands out and activated the skill, the recoil from which sending me shooting in the opposite direction towards the dresser. I felt my back slam into the edge, and with a fair bit of scrambling, I managed to get on top of it.

I briefly let out a sigh of relief and darted away from a stream of slow moving fireballs. That could have gone wrong very quickly. Lesson learned. Don’t rely too much on the clutch strats.

Back on track, I began executing what was supposed to happen, with a few minor adjustments made to the route to make sure that the little hiccup with the hitboxes didn’t happen again.

Instead of diving halfway across the room straight for the shelf, I took a detour along the top of a coffee table. It was shorter than the shelf and closer to the Lady, so she would activate more fast physical attacks than slow, ranged ones, but it was safer than chancing another hitbox fail.

Three stomps and a flail later, I was back in the rhythm of the fight, ducking and weaving under attacks while dishing out a fair amount of damage. So far, the only near miss with getting hit I’d had was the accident on the dresser, otherwise, no hit run was looking good. Slowly, the boss’s health bar depleted, until only a sliver was left.

Using the last of my MP, I teleported right up in front of her face and slashed downwards.

“AIEEEEeeeeee!” With a fading scream, the Lady combusted. The fire consumed her, skin and flesh and bones and all, shrivelling downwards from the heat of it. Down and down, the lady shrank, till all that was left of her was a pile of bubbling, black sludge on the charcoal remains of the carpet.

Achievement: Untouched by the Flame complete

Received skill: Burning Passion

Burning Passion (B)

10 base MP cost. Cooldown: 15s

All normal attacks do low burn damage for 20s.

A boon from the late Mistress of the Hall. May your passion burn like flames.

Bubbling black sludge… and drops. I hurried on over to the pile of drops, sorting through all of it.

Hey, since I worked so hard to get a hitless run on my first try, maybe I’d get something good! Like a Ring of Dimensions that was actually useful!

Or so I thought.

Drat.

***

After reorganising my inventory, I ran another lap of the Crimson Hall, looking for Rosa’s confidant. Even after beating the boss, he still hadn’t shown up, when Rosa had specifically said that he would be waiting for me, not the other way round.

Yet there was no sign of mysterious fairy NPCs or Chosen Ones, or at least none that I could find. It was disappointing to say the least, but hey, at least I beat a boss and cleared a dungeon while I was at it.

Having completed my very first dungeon in this dream, I began making my way back to the Capital to turn in the story quest. It wasn’t as if I actually got nothing out of it, per say.

I did have some decent quality materials, that Blazing Passion skill, and a shiny new B rarity bow. The last one wasn’t better than Sorrow, but if I ever got a Ring of Dimensions that let me equip two weapons at once, I’d be able to cover short range and long range at the same time.

On the way, I stopped by Bog Down to turn in a hidden quest I’d completed back in the dungeon. But by the time I got there, it seemed as if everyone had upped and left during the time I was in the dungeon. The village was gone, not a single sign of the gathering of Kobolds that had been there just a few hours ago.

It seemed as if the chief intended to stay true to his word of never seeing me again, I mused to myself as I looked around for any traces of activity.

I did find a few child sized footprints that led to brick walls and thought I heard the sound of giggling now and then, but there was nothing to be seen. I knew they were there, Kobolds had the ability to turn invisible, after all, but there wasn’t anything I could do to get them to come back out to face me.

“You could at least give me my achievement,” I called out to thin air. “I killed every Redcap in the Crimson Hall. You know what I want. Hand it over.”

The giggling stopped. I heard a rustle of grass as something invisible ran past me.

Hidden Quest Completed: Crimson Genocide

Received skill: In the Dead of Night

Ha. Much better.