At the end of the corridor was only the single doorway. It looked exactly like all the others, so Serenity chuckled. “Well, now I know we’re traveling through a representation instead of an exact replica of what happened. That means this is probably far smaller than the original. I prefer this type.”
“A representation?” Andarit clearly hadn’t heard about that either. Well, she didn’t know much about Field Dungeons; that was obvious and not really surprising since her society killed most of the dungeons they encountered. Where would she have had a chance to learn about them?
“The door is the same as all of the others. That isn’t how it would be built in reality. You wouldn’t wall off just three rooms. It’s also pretty unlikely that there would be only three rooms on a corridor this long; rooms that small and bare means either temporary or the residents are poor or low-value in some way, but the rooms had perfectly squared off corners; they were deliberately built and in good repair. Regardless of who the occupants were, you try to minimize costs when building cheap housing. Boring a tunnel then doing all the work to make it a corridor instead of a round tunnel is expensive, as is doing the rooms like this. So you’d want to pack rooms relatively tightly together; even if you want good isolation and support, a foot of stone between them should be enough.” Serenity looked back down the hallway. The two doors on the same wall were over twenty feet apart and the rooms were each well under ten feet wide.
“More than ten is simply wasted space, and they aren’t even that close together. To then have a door the same as the others? This almost has to be an area divider, as if we’re exiting our room. The other side of that door should be the next thing that’s important about the event the Field Dungeon is retelling.” Serenity glanced over at Andarit to make certain she followed the explanation.
She was waiting with her hand on the door, obviously eager to move forward. Serenity grinned and waved at her to open the door.
The door led onto a stub of a corridor, perhaps ten feet long with no distinguishing features other than a single light rune, which then opened onto a much larger room.
It was hard to tell what the room had once been, because it was a bloody mess. After some examination, Serenity settled on it being a youth sports venue of some sort, perhaps a school gymnasium. There was some seating clearly visible on one of the ends that rose like bleachers, while one of the long sides was lined with chairs. The middle had five large circles marked on it, each about the same size and separated by a little distance, but Serenity had no idea what they were for.
Everything was covered in blood, bodies, or both. Most of the bodies were probably in their early teens; Serenity didn’t want to look closely enough to know more than that he was looking at a death scene for children. It was horrifying, and he was certain that was the intent.
Serenity could hear Andarit retching behind him. He probably would have been, as well, if he hadn’t seen the same or worse in the past. The universe wasn’t a kind place, and this would be the perfect place for a small reminder of just how unkind it could be to those who stopped looking for trouble.
Serenity didn’t see anything on his first sweep of the room; whatever it was was hiding. He didn’t believe for a moment that the dungeon would have put this out there without also having them run into whatever caused it.
On the other hand, there was a very good chance that whatever it was wouldn’t attack until they stepped out of the corridor, to give them a chance to see the carnage while not overwhelming them with it; it would explain why there was so much space. It meant the dungeon was a relatively “nice” one, despite the subject matter.
“Andarit? When you’re ready, let me know. There’s going to be an encounter in this room, and I’d bet it starts when we step in. You need to be ready to fight in a room with that mess before we trigger it.” Serenity was confident he could handle the first fight in a “progressive” dungeon of this caliber on his own, but that didn’t mean he was about to let Andarit off the hook. She had to figure out how to deal with it or they’d be better off simply turning around and abandoning the dungeon.
Some people were never able to adjust. It probably said something good about their ability to empathize with others, but it wasn’t helpful in a horrifying dungeon, and it was already clear that this dungeon would require some desensitization. Serenity wondered if it was a deliberate warning or simply the first thing that had happened during the Nights of the Shadows; it could have been either or both.
Serenity kept a watch on the scene even as he became more and more convinced that nothing was going to happen until they entered. Nothing at all moved; not even the air. It was an effect that dungeons sometimes used when they wanted to avoid someone altering a scene before it should be interacted with; it wasn’t even fully there yet. Even if they’d seen something to attack, it either wouldn’t be affected or it would start the scene early; Serenity had seen both.
“How can you just look at that and not feel anything?” Andarit panted as she stood, bent over the remains of her breakfast.
“I want to kill whatever did that,” Serenity admitted. “As for how I’m controlling myself … well, it’s mostly because this isn’t real. This is a dungeon; I know that this happened somewhere, this is a Field Dungeon, but it wasn’t recent. This is a gruesome picture, not reality. The rest is practice. Once you see enough horrors, you learn to fight and fight well even when you’re raging inside. Or you die.”
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Serenity was pretty sure he wasn’t heartless, but there was something about the scene in front of them that simply didn’t make him react the way it once would have. He was certain his reaction would be worse if it were real, but there was something about the dungeon itself telling him it was only a setting, only stage dressing.
There was no reason to be upset, but even with that knowledge Serenity couldn’t keep himself from reacting a little, even if he could still function normally through it. The bodies were children and this was a Field Dungeon. Whatever the Nights of Shadows were, they must have been horrible.
It was several more long minutes before Andarit had herself under control enough for Serenity to be comfortable stepping forward.
“I’ll take the lead,” Serenity offered. “Anything in here is probably going to be pretty straightforward.” He left it unspoken that this would shield her from the carnage a little and also open himself up to the greater risk; he was sturdy and could heal himself, while she had to depend mostly on items for healing and defense.
Andarit shook her head. “No. I need to face this, and we can’t just assume that there won’t be traps just because the place is horrid. It’d be sneaky to put traps somewhere no one wants to look, so I have to look.”
Serenity had to agree that her logic was sound, so he let her lead the way into the room. He still thought it was unlikely for this room to be trapped, but having traps over a gory scene was something he’d seen in the past so he couldn’t rule it out.
When Andarit stepped into the room, Serenity started to hear wind; it almost sounded like birds, but there shouldn’t be birds in a cave deep below the ground’s surface.
As Andarit moved farther into the room, Serenity stepped across the threshold and looked up. There was something moving up there, so he called out a warning. “Look up, Andarit. Monsters. I can’t tell if they’re birds or bats or - well, hells. They’re imps.”
Imp wasn’t exactly a specific designation; in fact, it was more of a general category of more or less human-like small creatures. Often but not always winged, imps were generally more menacing in appearance than fairies and usually a little larger. Other than that, imps could look like anything. Most of the time, like their apparently outwardly ethereal fairy cousins, they were mischievous, but these imps were clearly not out for mischief. No, these were the kind that gave imps the reputation of being lesser demons.
Serenity didn’t see any obvious signs of magic use, which was a relief. Imps were often magical, but these seemed to spend whatever magic they had on their flight and sharp claws. One on one or even three on one, they wouldn’t be a problem for him or Andarit; in fact, at one on one, they could probably be beaten by an even somewhat fit untrained teenager.
The problem was that there wasn’t only one of them; these imps were in a swarm. They looked like pigeons homing in on birdseed in the park, only these pigeons would try to kill anything they swarmed. Serenity doubted they’d be able to get through his armor, since it was as strong as his scales, but anywhere not covered in armor would be hurt.
He grumbled about not having infused a weight-increasing gravity spell that morning; he hadn’t been expecting a flying swarm.
Of course, he’d also expected Andarit to know what they were facing and be able to take the time to prepare if there were any oddities like this.
Serenity triggered the two spells he did have infused in quick succession, a Slow spell aimed at the swarm of imps and a Quickness spell targeting Andarit and himself. Realistically, it would be enough; unless these were a lot tougher than they looked, simply being fast enough would let them evade the attacks and kill the imps.
After his first swing with his ax, Serenity knew he probably hadn’t even needed the spells; it simply kept going when it hit one, taking out a second he hadn’t even aimed for. The imps were incredibly fragile and quite slow. Andarit wasn’t having any trouble either; she was able to dance out of the way of their attacks and hit them with her primary attack Skill, which seemed to be a short-range energy blast of some sort. The spells he’d cast were helping, since Serenity suspected she’d have picked up a few slashes from their claws without them, but the slashes would likely have been shallow and probably not even required immediate healing.
A properly composed and equipped Tier One group could have handled it with no trouble, though they’d likely have been healing themselves afterwards. It was good to have a reading on where the progression started; it wasn’t unusual to have a progression Field Dungeon start higher than Tier One. A pair of Tier Threes like Andarit and Serenity should be ripping through the imps exactly the way they were.
The imps kept coming until the last one was dead.
Serenity looked around the building and shook his head. “How did this happen? Where was their protection? A weak band of imps should never have been able to get into a school; even if they did, where were the teachers?”
The two of them spread out, examining the scene in more detail. Andarit seemed to have mostly overcome her revulsion, but she was still slower than Serenity. Even so, she was the one who found the first adult body. “They’re dead too. It looks like they fought, but I don’t see a weapon.”
Serenity moved over to Andarit and found that she was completely correct; the man she’d found seemed to be in his mid-fifties, but he’d fought with the imps using only his fists. From the damage he’d taken, Serenity guessed that he was probably Tier One. If he was higher, it was in a Path with no combat ability. “This place was clearly expected to be safe. What changed?”
“I don’t think we’re going to find out here.” Andarit swallowed heavily, then stared at the ceiling.
Serenity nodded. “I think you’re right. I think this is just something the dungeon’s showing us; we’ll find out more if we move on. There’s only one other entrance; let’s head over to that pair of doors, then stop. There’s something else I want to take care of before we move on.”