I glide gently into the hole, powered by a [Featherfall] spell – courtesy of the [Archmage] living unlawfully in my soul.

It took a good ten seconds for my feet to touch the ground, and the hole looked dozens of feet above my head. As you can imagine from my relationship with Lady Luck, the hole closes immediately behind me.

“Fuck me, this is creepy,” I swear, immediately activating three rotating [Lights]. As soon as they illuminate my surroundings, I notice that the darkness seems much thicker than it has any right to be. The [Lights] manage to pierce it for only about six feet from my body – I raise my eyebrow.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” I say, dispelling the current [Lights] and taking a deep breath.

I draw all the power of [Light Manipulation] before casting three new [Lights] with as much Mana as I can cram inside them. They are even brighter than the one that initially almost blinded me. Thankfully, [Eyes: Major Light Resistance] prevents me from having any problems.

Finally, the [Lights] do their job and illuminate the entire corridor and beyond. There’s, however, a slight fizzling sound coming from the darkness around me that makes me shiver.

“Old man, do you have any idea what this is? Are Dungeons supposed to be this creepy?”

I wait for an answer, but nothing comes back.

“Are you for real? Is this because I have to go through the trial by myself? My fucking goodness. I gotta play this horror simulator all on my own? Jesus.”

I start moving along the side of the corridor, pointing roughly toward the North. But as soon as I move, I notice that the smooth stone of the corridor walls has some faded markings hidden by moss.

I get closer and start scooping out the moss in big chunks. Soon, I can see wall paintings of…

“Dragons?” I frown, seeing a huge Dragon head appear from under all the moss I removed. “Ok, let’s speed this up.”

I cast a few [Lights] as if they were wipers and liberate the entire section of the wall from the moss.

What I find myself looking at is a huge golden-yellow stylized Dragon with flames enveloping him, covering his body, and accentuating his claws. There are also many white rectangular projections around the Dragon that look like sun rays. Well, maybe not sun rays since they come from the Dragon himself.

“Ok?” I look at it with another frown. “Yo, old man, don’t you hate Dragons or something? Can you at least tell me what this is?”

No reply.

“I swear to God,” I growl, leaving the section of the wall behind and continuing to walk down the corridor after getting the huge sword out.

Will it be Goblins? Wait, aren’t Goblins an actual race and not monsters? Do I remember that correctly?

I sigh as the corridor seems to stretch indefinitely, and I stop at an intersection, scratching my head, unsure what to do. There’s a little bud of anxiety ready to blossom in my stomach.

I wish I could have just finished the duel properly instead of whatever the fuck that was. Maybe I wouldn’t be here if it had.

“Old man, can you give me a hint?” I say in front of the two corridors branching out in front of me. “What am I supposed to do here, just pick?”

No response.

I turn to the right because… because. Looking at the walls, I see some inscriptions on them.

“Huh?” I get closer, noting that this corridor seems to have less moss than the one I came from. As I shine a [Light] over the wall, a few words appear. There’s one sentence that stands out amidst several that are too ruined to be legible.

“Interficite portatores lucis mortuae,” I mutter. “Kill the bringers of dead light? Wait, the light of death, maybe? Dead light sounds better, actually.”

Before I can reason on what this inscription really means, I feel a rumble in the distance in the direction I was going.

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“Alright,” I swallow, “time to kill Gob—monsters. Not Goblins. Goblins are people—I guess.”

…

After a few more minutes of walking, I find myself inside a chamber. It’s large and wide, bigger than an Earth-sized suburban house. At its center, there’s an 8-foot-tall statue that looks like it’s made of pure darkness. It’s a shredded man with a huge sword in his hands.

I look at the sword over my shoulder and raise an eyebrow.

“Is that sword actually bigger than mine? Oh, Christ, really?” I feel a pang of jealousy.

Before I can say much more, I notice something in the corner of the room. I walk to it, and my eyes go wide.

“Fuck,” I swear, noticing a heap of corpses that have been dragged there. I shine a [Light] on the ground and notice several tracks of blood coming from all over the rest of the corridors. I kneel, turning around one of the corpses and finding myself staring at a clearly recently deceased Elf in leather armor.

“A [Guard]?” I mutter. “This will be a lot of trouble for the [Captain].”

I look around and then at the ceiling, wondering if I can make enough [Light]-made stairs that would manage to hold my weight and let me escape from here somehow. I am finally getting the feeling that there’s something deeply wrong with this place.

I ruffle through the dead man’s pockets until I find his Enchanted badge and put it in my bag of holding. I’ll need to bring this to [Captain] Drusillus when I get out of here.

I stare at the corpse for a good second before muttering a quick apology to God or whoever might be watching before I put down my sword, take out a dagger I found on the Elf, and start cutting off his clothes and removing his leather armor.

As I cut away, among the dried blood, I find whole chunks of flesh missing from the Elf’s body. One of them, previously covered partially by the armor, is right below his neck.

“Jesus,” I cough from the smell of the dead and spit on the ground.

It takes me a few deep breaths to calm myself down and get up.

“Grim fucking business,” I shake my head. Whatever killed these poor Elves is a monster that rips throats. A four-legged one, most likely. Last I knew, Goblins didn’t walk on four legs, so they are, obviously, out of the equation.

I look around the otherwise very empty room, wondering where the hell that sound came from. I get closer to the statue to see what kind of weird material it’s made of, but before I can raise a hand to touch it, I hear a deep growl from behind.

“Oh, fuck, Rider Goblins?” I turn with narrowed eyes and find two huge hounds the size of big fucking wolves.

No Goblins, I frown. Only big hounds.

They snarl at me, extending their forelegs and showing their weirdly white teeth. Their fur is essentially made of shadows that give out a weird miasma-like gas.

“Couldn’t put Appius under the ground myself,” I tell the hounds, ignoring my previous racist comment against Goblins, “but I am going to cause a nightmare to PETA, though."

[Captain] Drusillus will be happy to know I got the bastards that killed his [Guards].

One of the hounds suddenly lunges at me, but I immediately duck, already swinging at the second one that is following closely after. I activate one of my skills and hit it like goddamn Joe DiMaggio.

“[Null Inertia]!” I shout, suddenly feeling no resistance as the swing fully hits the hound with so much momentum that the sword leaves a massive wound on its side and smashes the monster into the wall. However, to my great surprise, the monster is still alive as it writhes on the floor.

There’s no time to worry about that as the second hound is jumping at me again. I side-step away easily, starting to rotate in place to generate enough angular momentum for my next strike. My head, as I practiced countless times during training, is always pointing at the enemy thanks to the sharp, snapping motions of my neck.

The monster seems slightly confused by my movements but soon decides that spinning prey is still prey. Too bad the hound is slow.

As the hound jumps at me, I extend a hand and palm the beast’s snout with a smile.

[Inexorable Momentum Redirection, Double-Up]

I redirect the monster’s momentum to the ground at twice the speed, where it smashes with incredible strength, leaving it stunned. Meanwhile, I twist my feet, jut out the hilt of the sword, and go for another swing with all my strength. My muscles strain as I use the sword's momentum to raise it upward and aim for a devastating cleaver swing.

When my enchantment-powered sword hits the hound, the chamber trembles slightly, and, glancing at the thing, I find its body bisected and unmoving.

I exhale, relieved that this attack has worked. For a second, I was afraid that even with a sword like mine, it would be too hard to hurt these things. The other, in fact, is already getting up on its shaky legs. I can’t really see the wound well, but I guess it has already regenerated quite a bit.

“Swinging this thing is tiring,” I mutter, looking at the beast. “But you know what? I came out of the city for a reason.”

I raise my hand and focus on a spell I have never used before.

One deep breath.

[Lightbolt]

A projectile the size of a wine bottle comes out of my hand and strikes the monster. Against my expectations, not only does it punch through it as if the monster was made of paper facing a fiery burning plasma bullet, but it also starts fizzling as if the [Lightbolt] has actually burned it! Plumes of smoke erupt from the monster with a fist-sized hole close to its neck. The hound tries to whimper, but no sounds come out of its maw before it finally falls to the ground, dead.

“That was something,” I say, looking at my hand.

Nonetheless, both hounds have been quite challenging. If there had been… a dozen or two, I might have died. Well, at least before I found out about the [Lightbolt] working great, I guess.

“Good thing my enemy is not you, pal,” I say jokingly to the hulking statue before turning to the hounds and approaching them to examine their corpses.

It’s right then and there that a realization hits me.

“Oh, no, oh, no no no no. Please, Lady Luck, please. I won’t boast anymore. Please!”

But when I turn, the statue has shifted silently and come down from its pedestal, wielding the huge sword and smiling creepily at me.

Fuck.