Discounting the last decade, the first day of Triumph of Light had always been a day to first celebrate that one had lived through Shadow’s Feast, which usually began with putting things back together that had been destroyed in the night. Burials of the dead. Prayers of thanks to the gods. Curses against the Dark.
In some places, that pattern held true. Those places were the outliers these days, though. These days, in Candlepoint at least, people mostly spent the first day of Triumph relaxing after spending all the previous night awake. Just awake. No real danger, except the expectation of danger. And that was exhausting.
Erick spent the day sleeping. He was not the only one.
The first night of Triumph of Light was when the parties really started in Candlepoint, and all the Greater Candlepoint Area.
As the sun began to set, Erick had a private affair at his home. Just him and most of the extended family he had made here on Veird. Poi, Poi’s sister, Rizala, and Rizala’s husband, Variol. Teressa, and Teressa’s husband, Dariok. Kiri was able to make it, thankfully. Quilatalap could not attend because he was still inside the dungeons of Storm’s Edge; he was also exceedingly busy, which was a shame for multiple reasons. Erick had wanted him here, to have him here... And also to ask him about what Atunir had told him, about delving into the Dark, and seeing memories of the Old Cosmology inside certain types of dungeons.
Jane wasn’t able to make it, either, but she was rarely home in Candlepoint these days. Her absence was expected.
“But I wanted to ask her about all this shit, too,” Erick said, as he drank a beer while sitting with Poi and Teressa on the ‘patio’, on the clouds around Erick’s house. He had spent the last little while talking about the [Witness] memories he had experienced inside the Glittering Depths, and his family had listened, while they drank beers on the patio.
It wasn’t really a patio, though. It was more like a large, grassy hill-like space, with garden chairs and a firepit and other general-outdoor amenities, and few nice trees. The whole thing was held up by wispy clouds. It was one of several outdoor spaces among the lands of Erick’s floating cloud castle, and perhaps the most normal one, located more or less centrally between all the various houses of the castle.
Dariok was at the firepit, overseeing the cooking of a large pig, while Rizala and Variol were in the kitchen making even more food. And so, the only people who had really heard Erick tell his story of the Glittering Depths had been Poi, Teressa, and then Kiri toward the end. The others were probably giving Erick space and purposefully not intruding, which was fine. Erick was absolutely sure that Rizala, Variol, and Dariok considered themselves loved ones, but he was also sure that they simultaneously didn’t consider themselves truly part of the family. Erick supposed that the only way that would change was to give it more time; he certainly wasn’t going to force it.
Kiri brought over the pitcher of beer and refilled some drinks, as she said, “I went to a lot of dungeons in my own Worldly Path and I saw a lot of shit, but I don’t think I ever saw a true memory in the Dark. Going into the Grand Dungeon at Freeland and coming out of the Grand Dungeon here at Candlepoint was perhaps the oddest part of my Path.”
Teressa asked, “You never went to any Endless Delves, did you?”
“I did, but only the first ten floors of the Endless Blue at Dungeon Island,” Kiri said, sitting down. “Dungeon Island has three Endless Delves, one of which is Melemizargo’s own Mount Ascendant. Almost went in that one instead. Perhaps if I had, I would have come out of some other dungeon on my way back out.”
“But you never saw actual, true memories, did you?” Erick asked.
“Well… I’m kinda reevaluating that, actually.” Kiri said, “There was that one random floor in a Random dungeon that was like an image of Tower Town, but even more horrible than I remember it. I fought off monsters that looked like the nobles that used to torment me when I was a kid, and then Archmage Quel’s shadow, too. It was like a waking nightmare… But I got through it. And Tasar was there with me, so it wasn’t that bad.”
Erick paused. “… You never told me about that before?”
Kiri shrugged. “It’s still odd to talk about. The whole Path was weird.”
Erick looked at Kiri with compassion in his eyes.
And Kiri rolled her eyes at him, saying, “Eh! It’s fine, Erick! All dungeons are delves into the Dark, and meant to be journeys of self discovery; this is known. I didn’t know that we were actually going into real memories, though. Not like we can go into Benevolence and see your memories…” Kiri looked at Teressa. “Can we?”
Erick chuckled. “Hopefully there’s nothing too embarrassing in there.”
Teressa easily said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a memory of you sitting on the toilet, or otherwise.”
That earned her a little chuckle, but inwardly, Erick was glad that no one would be snooping on his memories… And yet…
Erick decided to say, “Atunir said that my far descendants might have some sort of ‘elemental memory’ tied in with Benevolence.”
“I could see that,” Teressa said.
Poi nodded.
“Anyway.” Kiri continued on, “There are a few other Endless Delves in Songli that are rather well known, and there’s a few down by Stratagold, too. And apparently the Glittering Depths has one, too. They’re hard dungeons to make right because they delve into the ‘random’ generator option of dungeon cores rather deeply, and it’s that randomness that has to be producing these sorts of deep memories. There’s no such thing as true randomness, after all, and what we see as randomness in a dungeon is really just a dungeon producing something that will challenge the specific delver that it's testing at that time. And since randomness gets people real-deathed, dungeon masters try to keep true randomness out of their dungeons, so it’s not too surprising that this is ‘new’ information.”
“I know Quilatalap doesn’t have any Endless Dungeons,” Erick said, “I never got into the ‘why not’ with him, though.”
Kiri shrugged. “I have an accepted answer, but not a real one.”
“That’s fine,” Erick said.
Kiri nodded, then began, “All dungeons are delving into that alternate dimension of the Dark, to allow people to make themselves stronger, or whatever, but they’re also curated experiences. They’re all allowances from Melemizargo to the world, to allow the people of this world to see if they can make a better one. Endless Dungeons are an extreme, esoteric variation of this principle.
“And Endless Dungeons are very hard to get right.
“Endless Dungeons are very prone to failure in a few specific ways that other dungeons are not.
“Most dungeons try to set a scaling level of danger between one floor and the next, because danger means resources become real, and they can be brought back into this reality. But you don’t want people to hurl themselves into inevitable death traps, because that just means death, so you incrementalize the danger. Therefore, people can choose what level of danger and gains they are comfortable with.
“But Endless Dungeons have two-ish big problems.
“The first problem is that the continual, incremental danger added to fake floor after fake floor means something always ends up breaking because the fake can become real inside a dungeon, and especially when someone views it.
“Adding to this, Endless Delves can get very random.
“Randomness, when combined with a viewer that changes what they view into reality, causes problems.
“And now, here you come, Erick, adding in this whole ‘[Witness]ing the Old Cosmology through some sort of shared resonance with the dungeon’ thing you got going on...” Kiri thought, then shook her head. “Still not sure what to make of that. But your experience does add even more reasoning as to why Endless Dungeons often break. Perhaps the truly dedicated delvers out there see glimpses of their past in those Endless Depths, so they dive deeper and deeper, in order to see their previous life. Maybe they usually end up seeing what killed them in a past life, too.
“Now that would be darned traumatic, if you ask me. That sort of mental anguish deep in the Dark, where Reality is reality, could cause a dungeon break.
“But! Good news: I have never seen an Endless Dungeon break badly —no Ancient-level monsters suddenly storming every single nearby city and whatnot— which means something odd happens when an Endless Dungeon breaks. Does the delver that caused the break consume themselves in the process of witnessing their own Old Cosmology death? Does the death of the delver cause a disconnect in the dungeon, meaning that everything the delver had been searching for is simply lost to the Dark? Does Melemizargo step in, directly, and sever the break before it propagates to the upper floors, and then out into this real world? I don’t know.”
Teressa scrunched her face. “Quilatalap is not making Storm’s Edge into an Endless dungeon? Right?”
“Not part of the plans at all,” Erick said, instantly understanding Teressa’s concern. “That dungeon is supposed to be the solution to a Storm; not the cause of the storm.”
Teressa nodded, but she wasn’t wholly sure.
Kiri asked, “How is he going to make a dungeon that contains 22.5 million people, anyway? That seems… improbable.”
Erick began, “The original plan was for 6 side dungeons of normal size, and one central dungeon of massive, million-people False-Society-size. The amended plan is for all of that, but each dungeon turned into several levels of civilization, and…”
The conversation went on into the evening, into dinner when everyone gathered for a grand feast, and then afterward, into after-dinner beers. Eventually, Teressa and Dariok split off to go have fun at an orcol mosh pit in Treehome; they planned to spend the next few days partying up there. Kiri went back to work. Pregnant Rizala went to bed, with Variol to rub her shoulders for her. Poi went to his meditation room to take care of Mind Mage business that had been piling up, for just like with Kiri, it might be the Triumph of Light, and most people were partying, but a lot of people still worked.
Erick almost decided to go visit Jane since she couldn’t visit him and their normal talking day was still two days away… But she was probably busy. So Erick checked in with the people down at Adventurer City to see if Jane was actually busy.
And sure enough, she was. She was inside a dungeon.
So Erick decided to tuck himself into bed for an early night.
- - - -
The next morning, he bid his people farewell and did some light preparation to go back into the Glittering Depths. Mostly, he got some good pants and some nicer boots, and a small backpack that could hold lots of little things, like his Wand of [Drinking Food], and whatever metamonds he managed to find. None of it was remotely enchanted at all; it was all ‘dungeon gear’. Vendors these days knew their stuff would be going inside dungeons where magic didn’t always work the same. A lot of vendors were working with fun Particle Magic spells and specific types of spider silk and other silks, though, because carbon fiber and nylon-adjacent stuff still worked inside alternate-magic-spaces.
Erick’s new outfit was all grey, and would act as both underarmor, in case he ended up getting something like a breastplate inside the dungeon, and general-purpose clothing for all types of weather. It would even resist small bites and sweat and dirt. Truthfully, Erick was kinda excited with his new outfit. Being an ‘adventurer’ was rather different from everything he normally did, and he so rarely had to actually worry about his clothes. Usually, Erick was either made of Benevolence and using his sunform, or else he had [Mend] to repair everything. But none of those options existed within the Glittering Depths.
Erick, of course, recognized this desire to delve into a dungeon, to explore the Dark, as something new. Almost like a calling. Perhaps it was the newness of it all that drove him to go back to the Glittering Depths. Perhaps he was following something Fated, like the Worldly Path, drawing him onward.
Hopefully not that second thing, though.
‘Searching’ Atunir’s memories of the Old Cosmology, and seeing ‘Ashes’s’ life play out before him in a way that seemed so familiar, and yet so distant. That’s what truly called Erick back to the Glittering Depths. Erick had picked that name, ‘Ashes’, out of his head and not really thought too much about it, and yet, he had picked out an important name. Which was odd for so many different reasons.
Maybe Erick went back because he was interested in the Sundering.
Atunir didn’t have answers for the Sundering inside her memories, but Erick figured an exploratory jaunt into Atunir’s memories was a safer space to start his search for Sundering answers, than to go directly to Melemizargo. If nothing else, Erick would find out what life was like in the Old Cosmology, even if such a sight was marred with current-day understandings of magic and ‘not that true at all’, according to Atunir. Later, maybe Erick would go to Melemizargo, and to the Dark, for better, more dangerous answers about the Sundering.
Or maybe journeying through the Glittering Depths was Erick simply doing his due diligence, to search out what ‘Second Script’ truly meant both to him, and to the rest of existence from now until forever. There would certainly be a lot of Second Scripts going forward, with a new one for every possible world out there… Or something like that.
Maybe he wanted to understand his daughter a bit more, too.
Jane had been delving these dungeons ever since they came into being. She was at the forefront of the creation of the Dungeon Guild, and high up in their leadership these days. Every week she went out with her teammates and killed rogue dungeons the world over. She barely had time for him these days… Which was rather what kids were supposed to do when they grew up. But with Erick finally delving dungeons, maybe he could connect with his daughter once again. Maybe they could have something fun to talk about when Erick finished the Glittering Depths to floor 5.
And he had to kill some time, anyway, to let the Viridian Throne let Denutha Odaari explain herself to Odaali, and the public at large. Erick wondered what the holdup was, exactly. The story couldn’t be much deeper than Odaari turning radical in the face of Greensoil’s tyranny, could it?
Likely not…
Ah.
Erick realized.
Denutha’s testimony would probably implicate some people in the upper echelons of the Greensoil Republic of doing some bad shit, and a trial would have those people held accountable. That had to be the reason, right?
… Eh. Erick would give the Viridian Throne a week and a half before he got directly involved. Maybe he would give them a few days past the Triumph of Light and the new year? Sure. That sounded fine. Maybe they’d close this Daydropper Quest under their own cognizance, before he got involved.
- - - -
Welcome to Floor 2, the blasted plains.
What was once farmland on the world of Insten, of the Old Cosmology, is now a warzone.
This is a true story, turned into a learning experience.
More than a hundred years have passed since the fall of that city, and the fall of many others like it. Whether you fought the cat at the school, or the suit of armor at the castle, or the ghosts of nobility in their homes, all paths ended in brief success. And then Riam retaliated.
We have skipped those many years of horror, for all individual resistance is but a spark, easily extinguished within the Emptying.
And yet, horror fades, time moves ever onward, and the seeds of a true rebellion have been planted.
In this time, in this place, the resistance had gained a modicum of true power. Underground, they developed new tools with which to truly resist Riam. They survived. They matured. Like seeds buried under winter snows, they waited for the sun to rise and for an opportunity to present itself, but sometimes they were disturbed in their rest.
Sometimes, they had to blossom early, because anything other than total war was to lay down and die.
You are NOT alone in this world.
Everything in RED will try to kill you, so kill it first.
Fight against the ruthlessness of Riam.
Make some more magic, behead the war machine coming your way, and carve a path of blood to the next floor.
Erick sat up and blinked a few times, trying to get the dirt out of his eyes.
Several things happened rather fast.
First came realization, and a trickle of mana sense. Erick felt the world, and the world seemed hollow. Empty. It was not empty at all, though; just comparatively. Erick’s mana sense was a wild streamer of sensory information, mostly contained to the ground where the mana moved slower, but also in the air directly above the ground, where mana wisped into the air like streamers. He sensed maybe 20 meters all around himself, and only partially.
The nature of his mana sense had changed. In an odd sort of way he could still tell what mana was what, and strangely enough, that particular nature of his mana sense was a lot clearer than back on Veird proper. Under the Script, the manasphere was almost uniform in power and distribution, with equal parts Elemental Stone inside the air as there was Elemental Air inside the land. But here, the ground was layers of Elemental Stone, the air held Air, and there was only mixing upon the surface, in the sand and grass and otherwise.
A whole lot of Fire burned in the crater right next to him.
That crater was five meters across, and whatever artillery had impacted there had barely missed him.
Almost as fast as Erick noticed all that, he saw that his core was exposed; his [Illusionary Soul] had been broken, and that the mana he contained inside his core had been reduced to 60%; the same density as the ambient mana all around. That was still 33k mana, and he could still manually cast his Domain, which he tried and succeeded in doing the very moment he thought of it, but he was down a lot of mana. His personal safety net was heavily reduced.
His [Unbreakable Form] was gone. His natural absolute damage reduction as a dragon was probably compromised, too.
At least he didn’t feel bloated.
At least his Belt of Many Functions seemed to be cocooning his body with its Elemental Illusion-based [Unsensible] magic, which was… A thing. Erick wasn’t sure exactly what [Unsensible] did, but he seemed [Ward]ed against casual mana sense-based enemy inspections. Still, though, Erick would be experimenting with [Unsensible] and [Benediction] as soon as he could, in order to make that whole thing work a lot better than it currently was.
Three seconds had passed since Erick had sat up and checked himself. He had seen the land all around him, but he wasn’t in immediate danger and the floating text for floor 2 had yet to leave his sight, so he didn’t look outward too hard until now.
But now, Erick looked away from that floating floor 2 text, that text vanished, and the full breadth of the land around him came into view.
The land was a warzone.
Craters everywhere, spilling smoke into the sky. Bodies strewn across the land, all of them human-looking, but all of them with great wounds upon them. Sword cuts. Mace smashes. Armor dented or rented apart. Only a few of the bodies wore red tabards. Most of the dead wore simple clothes and had spears or wooden shields. A few people had blue or grey tabards. Broken weapons lay everywhere. Some of the bodies were still on fire.
The main battle had passed by hours ago, at least—
A sword clanged against a dull wooden thing, sending the sound of dying battle across the dead field once again.
Erick turned to the right.
In the distance stood a man fighting a defensive retreat, holding a shield up to ward against two people in red tabards. The retreating man had a grey tabard. One of the reds held a sword, the other held a spear. All three of them were bloody and covered in dirt, and on the verge of dying.
Erick stood up, feeling funny, his head lighter than usual—
His body was not the ‘Ashes’ that he had come into this floor with. The hair was a bit longer. The body was a bit younger. A bit more muscular. He was also wearing a grey tabard, for some reason. This was an ‘Ashes’ that had gone through some shit, and came out the other side physically better for it, somehow. There was a story there, too, and especially since there was a hundred year difference between floor 1 and floor 2. Ashes had gotten up to something odd? Some special healing magic?
This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
… Erick looked to his wrist, where the Bracelet of [Self Rejuvenation] held strong, its sky-blue glow mirroring the light of the sky overhead.
Well…
Aging and bodies worked differently in the Old Cosmology, didn’t they? Perhaps ‘Ashes’s’ bracelet had gifted him with years beyond the norm—
A spear clanged with a wooden shield. The retreating man grunted. The spear and the shield fell to the ground, locked together, and the red tabards cursed hate at the retreating man.
Erick would leave the investigation of [Self Rejuvenation] to later, after he helped the resistance fighter. Erick began running that way as he called out, “Over here!”
The fleeing man looked up to see Erick running his way. The red tabards cursed and yelled epithets. The one with the sword prepared to receive Erick, while the one who had lost his spear to the fleeing man’s shield bent down and grabbed a mace off of a dead body. The fleeing man began to flee Erick’s way, though he was incredibly exhausted.
All three of the men were exhausted, but the red tabards were still ready for war. And then Erick hefted his Rod of the Lightning Guardian, and the red tabards both saw the flickering white energy upon Erick’s weapon. They looked at Erick’s grey tabard. The fight left the red tabards. They decided they had had enough of war.
The red tabards raced away across the burning field, rushing to get away as fast as they could.
The fleeing man glanced backward at his pursuers— He stopped fleeing. And then he laughed loud and happy, cursing the red tabards, laughing at them with great purpose and as loud as he could. His laughter didn’t last long. The guy rapidly quieted and then collapsed to the ground like an exceedingly tired toddler.
Erick reached the man and nudged him with his foot. “You okay, mate?”
Ripped clothes. Ripped grey tabard. Bloody arms and a forehead wound. Dirty as a ditch digger. The fleeing man looked like his better days were long, long ago. His ribs showed in the ripped gaps of his shirt; he looked like he hadn’t eaten properly in years. Everything about the man told Erick that he was on the verge of death, and that he had been on the verge of death for a long time.
And then the man opened his brilliant blue eyes, and he saw Erick standing over him, and he smiled. “Hello, Captain Ashes. Fancy meeting you in a place like this.”
Erick smiled a little bit himself, and got into the moment. “I don’t have any healing for you, so we’ll have to go back to camp. I got food, though, if you need that.”
The man instantly balked, writhing theatrically, mumbling, “I hate that stick of [Drinking Food].”
Erick laughed, then said, “Get up, private; you’re not that wounded. What’s your name?”
“Private Parts, sir.”
“Lie again and you won’t get any gruel.”
“… I’m not sure if I want to lie or tell the truth, sir.”
Erick stared down at the man.
“I’m Private Kinder Scottsland.” He added, “I play the lute and mostly talk shit in camp? Known as the company gossip? Did you hit your head, sir? Also thank you for saving me, sir.”
“I was struck with some heavy ordinance back there.” Erick pulled out his wand. “You hungry now? Or can you wait until we find a bowl? Also, we gotta get back to camp.”
Kinder said, “I can wait.” He held up his hand.
Erick grabbed the man and hauled him back to his feet. As he put his wand back into his fanny pack, he looked around, asking, “Which way is camp?”
A shadow of pain passed across Kinder’s face. And then Kinder ignored that shadow, and made his voice as jovial and non-depressed as he could, “It’s gone, sir. We’ll have to regroup at the mountain.”
Erick looked around.
Erick and Kinder were currently in a lower part of some rather flat plains, so all Erick saw for kilometers upon kilometers was blasted plains, destroyed trees, and battlefields filled with bodies. Maybe if Erick went to the top of one of those larger hills they might see something, but right now, there was nothing but war all around.
The sunstar held high in the sky, but it was dimmer than Erick recalled back at the end of Floor one. A hundred years of the Emptying had probably harmed Insten’s sunstar just as much as it had harmed Insten itself.
Erick asked, “And where is the mountain?”
Kinder pointed in a direction. “That—”
Right as the man said that, a pair of fireballs exploded in the distance, in that exact same direction, sending up roars of flame. Those bursts of fire sent out even more fireballs that flew wide and wild, causing smaller explosions across the land.
“… that way.” Kinder slowly lowered his finger. “Their artillery mage is watching that direction.”
Erick wasn’t sure what that double [Grand Fireball] had even been aimed at; he couldn’t see any living troops anywhere at all. Perhaps if he got to higher ground, he could see something. But that was probably a bad idea. That would just make them a target. Erick pointed toward some relative lowlands, perpendicular to where the explosions had happened. “Anything in that direction?”
Kinder went, “Uhh… I don’t know—” He pointed left. “That’s where the main base was. Gone now. Too many refugees came to us and none of them could fight…” He looked down at the bodies all around. “They certainly tried, though...”
Erick could tell he was losing the man. With authority in his voice, he said, “Kinder.”
Kinder instantly solidified, to stand as strong as he could. “Sir! The main base is probably occupied by Riam.” He pointed forward, toward the explosions. “That’s where we reconnect. The mountains, that way. A month of walking. We can walk around the battlefield. Soon as we get to the forest that way we can hide. Probably come across others—”
Another distant explosion rocked the land.
“We’re not leaving, Kinder.” Erick said, “Besides the fact that I’m not spending a month hiking to new lands, they have to be watching all the ways out, and the fight is still happening. Our forces are still out there, getting picked off. And if they’re not, then I won’t let Riam have the base, and all the intel inside. We’re going hunting, Kinder. We’re going to wipe them out, as they have tried to do to us.”
For a moment, Kinder said nothing. And then he blurted, “HOW?!” He rapidly added, “Perhaps you have forgotten, sir, but they assaulted us with at least a full assassin cadre, ten regiments of highly trained soldiers, a whole class of mages— I’m pretty sure the artillery mage is an archmage, or at least really fucking good with fire. And we barely put a dent in them!”
“I’ve killed armies before, Kinder. I’ll just have to do it again.”
“… Ah. You’ve hit your head rather hard, then. Well. I suppose we’re dead either way. Might as well take some of them with us, yes?”
“Exactly.”
“HOW though… uh. Sir.” Kinder asked, “How though? Like really. I would like a plan of action.”
“It starts with us finding some spell components and then me making a sniper spell.” Erick looked around the nearby battlefield, but didn’t see any metamonds or metairons sitting around. “From there, it’s a matter of our kill count going up, as theirs failing to rise at all. Very simple stuff.”
Kinder blinked. “Uhh. Where do we start?”
“Immediate safety first. I’d go toward the explosions and help whoever was fighting the artillery mage, but I don’t think that guy is actually hitting anything.” Erick looked in the direction opposite of the exploding fireballs. “We go that way, then we circle around to the main base. Keep on the lookout for any meta-pieces.”
Kinder started walking that way, saying, “They probably destroyed the spell cubes back at the base.”
Erick followed. “Backups?”
“Architect Marii had a side base? She was paranoid enough to have backups, too. So maybe we can look for her?” Kinder looked across the battlefield, taking a moment to orient himself. “… I think it’s that way?”
“Away from everything, then? Sure.” Erick nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”
Words appeared.
Main Quest updated:
Find Architect Marii’s hidden location. 0/1
Create a devastating spell to change the course of war. 0/1
Push back Riam’s abominable forces. 0/4
Erick nodded, and the words vanished.
… But that word, ‘abominable’, seemed odd.
Erick started walking in the correct direction, and asked, “Have you seen any abominable forces yet, Kinder?”
Kinder kept up beside him, saying, “I’ve seen abominations every day that Riam’s forces exist on our world, sir.”
Erick looked at Kinder again.
He was being oddly cognizant for an NPC.
Erick’s paranoia started tickling.
So he asked, “How’s it being an NPC?”
“Not sure what that is, sir.”
Erick nodded. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll keep you alive.”
“Thank you, sir! Can I have a full chicken dinner once we get to Marii’s?”
“I have gruel, Kinder. Want some gruel?”
“… Not that desperate yet, sir.”
Erick nodded.
And all around them were dead people.
No metamonds or metirons yet, as far as Erick had been able to see—
“Ah.” Erick walked over toward a fallen body with one hand clutching a half of a staff made of metiron. The body itself was half burned to bones, all of their clothes gone, save for a strip of long blue cloth that might have been a blue tabard. The staff was just the upper half, with a tangle of wires on one end, and a nasty break halfway down. If the other half was somewhere around here then Erick could not find it. Erick reached down and pried the body’s bony hand from the staff, saying, “May Atunir take you into her embrace, and may the weapons we make of your tools strike holes into the heads of our enemies.” Erick hefted the metiron, and said, “Looks like I’ll have to reforge it into something else, but it’ll probably make a good anti-personnel weapon.”
Acquired: Staff of the Anti-Magus (BROKEN), 12/50
Kinder looked at the body. “I’m sure she would approve, whoever she was.”
“I’m sure she would, too.” Erick asked the man, “So I’m used to a lot of death, but you’re not, are you? You’re taking this a lot more in stride than normal people in your situation… If I gather the situation correctly, that is.”
“I think I am in shock, and playing it all off. This was all empty plains two months ago, and good farmland before that… when I was… a child...” Kinder went silent.
Erick decided to distract the man as they walked away from the explosions far, far behind them. “So, Kinder. How long have I been here, at this base? How long have you been here? Where is ‘here’? What happened to cause this attack?”
Kinder blinked at Erick’s sudden barrage of questions, and then an explosion happened a bit closer behind them than either of them would have preferred. Kinder walked faster.
Erick matched Kinder’s pace.
Kinder began, “I’ve been here two years. I… You were here before me. Uh. Riam sent out a normal patrol, I think. But with all our refugees… I think someone leaked our location a month ago…” As Kinder moved, he visibly worked out some kinks in his shoulders. His voice turned even, and solid, “The higher-ups decided to make a stand of it. They thought we had enough of our shit together to fight back. The Mountain has made a real go of it, and the higher-ups thought the Plains could do it too. Turned out they overestimated the power of underfed, undereducated people who had been fleeing for their lives for the last year. There was probably some espionage. Not sure how it all happened, exactly. Three days ago we had a base and 25,000 people, half of which could at least hold a spear and a shield. Today we have us, and whoever Riam has captured instead of killed. I’m just a grunt, sir.”
Erick and Kinder jogged through low hills filled with bodies, avoiding the dangerous hilltops, and also the deeper parts of the undulating land, where blood and gore had slipped free of the people it used to belong to, to turn into mires of mud and death. Back where Erick entered floor 2, most of the bodies had been commoners, with little more to defend themselves with than wooden spears or farming implements turned into weapons. There had been a few people in grey tabards like Erick and Kinder, and even a few people in blue. Most of those people back there had died fighting enemies in front of them, and they had even taken out some red tabards along the way.
But here, on this back side of the battle, the people were pointed mostly in one direction; away from the front lines. These people died with wounds on their backs, and heads caved in from behind. They were all commoners here, and the number of red tabards on the ground were almost zero—
Someone screamed up ahead, asking for mercy.
Instinctively, Erick put on speed, rapidly leaving Kinder behind, his Rod of the Lightning Guardian in his hand as he raced forward, up over a low hill—
Seven people in red tabards advanced upon a trio of teenagers. Four other people in red tabards stood behind the advanced hunting party, their hands gripping chains that trailed behind them, connected to fourteen commoners and two grey-tabard soldiers of Insten all manacled together, all injured. It was a hunting party, a collection team, and their prey.
Erick advanced, silently and quickly, but there were a lot of eyes among the collection team.
One guy holding the reins of the prisoners yelled out a warning to his people.
The hunting party turned.
A slightly better-dressed woman standing to the side of the collection team, held the reins of Ashes’s people tight, and yelled at him, “Lay down your arms and I won’t harm your soldier— FUCK!”
Erick gave no response except to crash into the hunting party, his free hand turning aside a spear as his other hand brought his lightning rod down on top of a red-enameled helmet. Lightning flashed bright and the man from Riam’s brains scattered. Erick hadn’t meant to hit him quite that hard, but it was done.
One of eleven, down and out.
In that very same moment the woman in charge flicked some sort of magic down the chain holding her prisoners and all of the prisoners collapsed to the ground, groaning in pain. And then the woman raised her hands and cast a dark and light spell of some sort that arced up and then down, aiming for Erick. It looked illusionary.
Erick would deal with that spell in a moment.
He dodged into the team of hunters, crippling one of the men with a tap of his rod against a leg, sending lightning across the man, and the man down to the ground. With overwhelming force, Erick cracked spears and then dodged further into the melee, just in time for the woman’s [Illusion Bolt] to hit one of her own people. That man curled into himself, screaming in fear. So it had been a [Fear Bolt], then? Sure. Three of eleven down.
Erick dispatched three additional soldiers of Riam in just as many seconds. Six of eleven down for the count, but only a few permanently out. A less-injured hunter groaned in sparking pain, trying to regain their footing. Erick would have to let them try, because he was dealing with four other hunters now.
Kinder finally entered the fray with a spear thrown from afar, hitting the casting woman’s center mass. It deflected off of her breastplate under her tabard. It was a distraction, and that was all. Instead of everyone going after Erick, the prisoner team went after Kinder instead.
A particularly accomplished hunter parried Erick’s lightning rod with a spear and managed to keep out of Erick’s meter-long reach for several more seconds, as his team reorganized around Erick.
The surprise round was over; now came the actual fight.
Two minutes later, bloodied and angry, Erick had chased down the final hunter and added more brains to the gory battlefield. As Erick walked back to Kinder and the captured people, words appeared.
Rescue and Revenge, 1/??
The more you fight, the larger your challenges and the greater your rewards.
MP up! +500 mana production per day!
The message vanished when Erick looked away.
He took his time walking back to Kinder, and the recently freed people.
He needed a think.
Firstly, Erick wondered that if he had killed those two guys going after Kinder, if he would have been on step 2 of this question-mark-long quest. Erick decided that the answer was ‘probably’, but not because rescuing Kinder was the actual first step of this R&R quest.
Kinder was from Greensoil.
He was not a part of this dungeon scenario. But this was a Grand Dungeon. The Glittering Depths were able to do everything it needed to do on its own, but it was still able to be controlled by the dungeon master when necessary. Whoever the dungeon master was, they now had their focus on Erick, and they had controlled the dungeon enough to get two fake people from Riam to attack ‘Kinder’. In that same sort of way, a dungeon master could have made this quest prompt appear back then… If Erick had killed the red tabards chasing Kinder.
But why do this at all? Why approach Erick in this way?
… They were trying to figure him out, so they were coming at him in this odd, roundabout way.
… They didn’t know he was Erick, did they. If they did, they wouldn’t have come at him like this. Erick would have had people from Greensoil coming right up to him and trying to get him to either go away, or to come at Greensoil through normal channels. Greensoil did not like Erick on their land without Erick having an escort.
So…
That meant that Greensoil was looking for answers about ‘Ashes’? Why, though?
Maybe someone in the Glittering Depths’ dungeon control rooms had noticed weird shit happening around him, and that sent a trickle of information up the chain of command, and now ‘Ashes’ was getting investigated.
Erick almost sighed. He was rather bad at subterfuge when it got this convoluted, but he could play along for a while. See where this whole circumstance led.
There was only so much one could tell from situational happenstance, after all.
Erick had hoped that by coming back to the Glittering Depths that he would have been able to dive into the memories of Ashes’s life, and that required him being alone in the dungeon, but here he was with another real person somehow tagging along, inside his dungeon experience.
Eh.
A little more walking brought Erick back to the group.
Kinder had taken the keys off of the red tabard woman in charge of the collection party and unlocked everyone from their manacles, all the while acting like a soldier in the resistance. The ‘real’ soldiers were already recovering from whatever spell the woman had used on them, but some of the people were still dazed from whatever controlling spell they had suffered. The teenagers who had been targeted by the now-dead hunting party were helping Kinder and shaking people awake.
As Erick came close, most people turned toward him, and Erick softly commanded, “Spears. Tabards. Put them together and make a stretcher. We carry those who cannot walk until they can walk again. All of us are getting out of here alive, so get it done. Someone pry that metal bar off of the front of that manacle chain; it’s the only thing that’s actually made of metiron, and I want it.”
People got to work fast. Only one older woman needed to be put on a stretcher, and she looked like she would recover eventually. As they worked, Erick found a small, cerulean blue metamond lying in the gore under one of the red soldiers. He put the Elemental Healing metamond in his small backpack, along with the others.
When they were all ready to move, they started to do just that, sticking to the lower parts of the blasted plains, headed toward Architect Marii’s, wherever that might be.
“How far is it to Marii’s? Anyone know?” Erick asked the whole group.
Kinder answered, “An hour walk.”
Erick asked the group, “Anyone else corroborate that?”
Kinder rolled his eyes.
The teenagers each spoke in monotone, “Architect Marii makes good magic,” and, “I miss my father,” and, “War sucks.”
One of the soldiers said, “Marii is an hour that way,” while the other soldier said, “She makes good meta-monds.” Both of them had spoken with soft, monotone words.
A few other people began to speak as though they were machines answering. “This grandma is heavier than she looks,” said one of the men holding onto the stretcher, carrying the older woman, while the other person holding the stretcher said, “I’m hungry.” Someone else in the crowd responded with, “I miss redberry pie,” to which another said, “I need a sword, and an enemy to stab,” but that guy was missing one hand and the other arm was broken. He probably wouldn’t be stabbing anyone too soon. Adding to all the other oddness of speech, another one said, “Blue magic is for healing,” while another had been whispering this whole time, “Woe and death to us all, when the dark in the light finally comes to claim this world, to destroy that what must be destroyed to make manifest an Ultimate End.”
… Erick stared at the woman who had said that last thing.
Kinder was also staring at the doom prophet NPC.
Erick asked the doom prophet, “Repeat that?”
The woman spoke in monotone, “Kill the reds before they kill us all.”
“No. The thing you said before that.”
“Kill the reds before they kill us all.”
“… Whatever.” Erick turned to Kinder. “So how is it being an NPC?”
With a perfectly natural and not-monotone-at-all voice, Kinder repeated the same answer he had given Erick once already, “Not sure what that is, sir.”
“Sure, Kinder. Sure.”
Erick walked on.
Kinder followed, his eyes lingering on the woman who had spoken of ‘Ultimate End’.
- - - -
In a break room far away from the monitoring station, Quince sat down across from George and opened up his own lunchbox. George was already done with his lunch but he was still nursing his lemon-lime soda because he didn’t want to go back to work while the inquisitors were still there. It wasn’t a surprise inspection, thank Atunir, but it had been a routine inspection, and George didn’t like to stick around for those either. Quince usually stuck around, though, because of various reasons, and because he could handle being around those people.
But Quince was here now, eating lunch, instead of watching the inquisitors as they messed around in the monitoring room.
George chuckled to hide his nervousness. “Should both of us leave our stations at the same time?”
Quince shrugged. “They ordered me to leave… so I left.”
George felt his stomach sink. He whispered, “Did something happen?”
“Besides their normal callousness? No.”
George glanced around the rec area. Then he turned back to Quince, whispering, “But what about the d-guy?”
Quince shook his head a little and then hid his face with his sandwich, whispering, “Last I saw the master is looking after him and scrubbing records. Forget you ever saw the guy.”
George startled a little at the mention of the master. Then he simply nodded.
Quince nodded in turn, then got to eating lunch.
George went back to slowly drinking his soda.
- - - -
- -
Ashes Woodfield (9 saves remaining)
MP per day: 5500
Meta-Irons: 1600, 0 in storage
Meta-Diamonds: 5/10, 0 in storage
Bracelet of [Self Rejuvenation], 99/100
Rod of the Lightning Guardian, 1000/1000
Necklace of [Meditation], 49/50
Wand of [Drinking Food], 200/200
Belt of Many Functions. (depleted), (depleted), [Unsensible], 5/250
Unused Meta-Irons: Staff of the Anti-Magus (BROKEN) 12/50,
Unused Meta-Diamonds: [Murky], [Benediction], [Flaming Ooze], [Shadow Bolt], [Paper Control], [Memorize], [Minor Treat Wounds]
- -