The sun was shining in Mitro, and it was a beautiful day outside. Still, the king pouted. The knights laid out the picnic blanket on a very nice spot at Styer's Park, with enough shade from a nearby tree to remain cool, but also enough sunlight to achieve ideal warmth. On the blanket they'd taken out a variety of delicious foods. Sandwiches packed with meats and greens from all over the kingdom, salads made from seasonal veggies, and a very well prepared fruit salad, the royal chef's speciality. They even took out a large jug of orange juice, the king's favourite (and only) drink. But he sat on the blanket with a thoughtful face, and the thoughts were all bad.

Jeerad looked at the king and felt a sort of paternal emotion that commanded his body to console him. “My king,” he said, cursing under his breath for his failure to take advantage of the peace and quiet of the situation, “is something the matter?”

“Yes, Jeerad, something IS, as a matter of fact, THE MATTER!” The king screamed as he spoke, scaring the birds on the nearby tree that left their marks on the lazy knights that were relaxing underneath it. “That damned orc is lying to our faces, and I'm paying him to do it! There must be someone else in this Gozag forsaken town that can tell us of Styer!”

“Your highness, everyone else we asked said they knew nothing of the elf. And everyone says Worrack is the only one that truly knows Styer's tale, even at the castle!”

The king sighed and snapped his fingers at one of the guards and a small leather bag filled to the brim with golden coins was placed upon his open hand.

“Fine, if you say so, Jeerad. I sure hope you know what you're doing.” Said the king, despondently, while grabbing a sandwich packed with octopode arms.

After lunch, the king and his guards returned to the tavern to find Worrack. When they spotted the giant orc, he was chatting it up with a red-haired fellow that looked awfully familiar.

“A-And then, I tell you I'm saying true, I-I wouldn't lie to ya Worrack I wouldn't I promise you that” said the red-haired man, wrath overflowing from his face like blood from an open wound, “he was just standing there, in the middle of the road, staring at me! Just staring, he ain't even say a word I tell you, not a word! He just stared, well thankfully then this lad walked up and took him away, he looked plenty scary that he did I tell you true Worrack I tell you, plenty scary, had a sword and all.”

The poor demigod merchant was telling Worrack of the king's early morning shenanigans. As the troupe approached, he winced and shot a look of disgust laced with fury at the king who, without a second thought, threw the bag of gold at the orc with full force akin to a fastball peaking at about 160 km/h. Like an experienced catcher, the orc took the bag of gold straight to his face.

Now four men sat at the table, and an already uncountable number of head-sized mugs lay on the floor.

“Styer knew nothing of necromancy before he entered the dungeon,” started the orc, “but Yred's power coursed through him. The ogre's body twitched. Its arms moved in an unnatural way, causing its joints and bones to crack and break, but its muscles kept them in place. It stood, the gaping hole in its chest leaking a dark goo that pooled on the floor of the dungeon as its jaw lay agape.

Styer could hear a voice in the back of his mind that warned him, it was screaming, but it felt so far away, so quiet, so irrelevant, that he ignored it and basked in the glory of his necromancy.

His priority was to determine where he was in the dungeon, so he walked around with his zombie, careful to make as little noise as possible, though the large wobbling creature made that a rather tall task, even for the careful elf. Still, he managed to find a set of stairs leading up without alerting anything in the dungeon. He commanded the ogre to lumber up the steps, but it failed. As its lifeless legs moved clunkily, it couldn't find its footing and kept on collapsing before reaching the second step. Styer wasn't sure how powerful his necromancy was, so he didn't know how long it would last or how far it could reach, but between roaming a floor that might be too deep in the dungeon to survive, even with his newfound undead weapon, and leaving it to rot as he went up, he preferred the latter.

He went up by himself and didn't recognize the level, but thankfully he had a new set of stairs leading up right beside him, so he took them and went up another level. This time, he recognized the layout of the second floor. As he felt safe in a place he understood, he decided to take some time to analyse everything he'd acquired up to this point.

On the first floor of the dungeon, he'd managed to scavenge a small bag which he used to store a myriad of things he'd been collecting, including scrolls and potions. He laid all of them out near the stairs, and started by looking at the scrolls.

The first thing he noticed was that the scrolls weren't written in any earthly language, Styer wasn't certain they were written in any language at all. Inscribed in them were a myriad of seemingly unrelated symbols of different sizes and shapes without any alignment. Still, Styer could feel power in the scrolls, and he was able to find meaning in the symbols. By memorizing them and drawing them in his mind, Styer cuold conjure a spell from the scrolls.

The first scroll he tried this with crumbled in his hands as a shrieking sound rang out from his hands. The second one crumbled as well, but this time a thick smoke covered a large area surrounding him that dissipated after a while. With only three scrolls left, Styer noticed something else. Two of the remaining scrolls had the same inscription. It was hard to tell, at first, but despite the bad penmanship on the artifacts, it was now clear to him that they were indeed holding the same spell. Styer held one of the scrolls and drew the symbols in his mind. The scroll crumbled like all the others, but this time, he felt a magic come over him.

His eyes burned with a strange heat that came from inside his head and his hands felt an uncontrollable desire to grab at something unknown. Without thinking, Styer's hands reached out to the third scroll and images of teleportation filled his mind as the heat disappeared from his eyes and he regained control of his hands.

Scared by what had transpired, Styer decided to leave further analysis to a different date. Instead continuing deeper into the dungeon.

Styer went down to the third floor and explored. He found several different monsters, including the usual kobolds wielding daggers and short swords, as well as kobolds that held poisoned darts, little thin pieces of metal covered with kurare. The kobold's skill in this area was rather limited, their accuracy was subpar and not even all the darts had kurare on them, so Styer managed to escape unscathed from these dangerous encounters using his searing ray and magic dart spells. He collected the darts in his bag.

Then, he saw a small wooden shack in the middle of the dungeon. It was a creepy thing, barely lit and constructed of mismatched pieces of a light brown wood. In front of it was a sign with black lettering that read “Snorlachon's Weapon Shop”. Styer was careful on his approach. When he got close enough to see what was inside the little shop, he noticed a shadowed man. His face was obscured entirely, so all he could see was his body. He was giant, barely fitting in the small shack, he thought at first, but then he noticed it was only his arms that were so large. They were these huge chunks of flesh, burned in places, cut, bleeding, rotten in others. His torso, on the other hand, was thin and frail, and covered in a thin, almost transparent robe that gave Styer the impression he could look through his chest and see the items hung behind him.

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Without exchanging any words with the man, and only thanking Yred for granting him a dungeon encounter that did not jump at the opportunity to kill him, Styer tried to look at the items for sale. He'd collected only about one-hundred pieces of gold in his bag at this point, which was only enough to buy some short swords and daggers, something he opted not to do. However, he noticed an incredible item hanging from the roof of the shack, a sword that was long enough to scrape the floor as it hung. It had a colourful hilt that shifted in hue as it slowly swung with the natural breeze of the dungeon, and its blade was sharp in an unnatural way. Styer pointed at the weapon, and one of the man's arms shot up in a flash, so fast Styer was taken aback and stumbled over himself, falling on the floor. The man's brutish hands skilfully unhooked the sword from the roof of the shack, and handed it to Styer. Though he spoke no words, Styer felt, deep in his bones, that he had no choice but to return it after examining the sword.

The sword had magic. It was imbued with it, like a spell had been cast on it. It didn't feel like Yred's blessing, so he assumed it wasn't a god's work, instead, it was likely to be a simple spell that granted the weapon some special ability, an enchantment. He swung it around himself, and flames were left in the path of the blade. A heat like hell that almost burned his face was being emitted from the weapon, the steel of the blade turning hues of red, orange, and yellow. Styer nodded to himself, it was a flaming sword. He took a mental note of the sword and the location of the shop, before returning it to the shopkeeper and continuing on his journey.

As he went back down the stairs, he saw the rotting corpse of an ogre that was now completely ruined, as far as necromancy was concerned. The skin was gone entirely from its body, its muscles had melted into a black goo, and its bones had little holes everywhere that made them brittle and weak. Regardless, Styer had no choice but to start exploring the fourth level on his own.

Similarly to the third, not much of note happened this time around. He noticed the enemies were getting stronger, but so was he. He fought packs of wolves, bears, and giant lizards, but he could dispatch of them relatively easily using his careful positioning, taking advantage of the dungeon's layout, as well as his long range magic. Thanks to Yred's necromancy, he managed to recruit most of his enemies as help for the dungeon floor, though after he tested this on the third floor he was sure that the god's necromancy was only effective on the floor it was cast on, and the living corpses were not capable of going up or down the dungeon via the stairs.

During his exploration of the fourth floor, Styer came face to face with a wooden door. It was the first time he'd come across a door that was intact in the dungeon. The space that the door led to was a small enclosed room, he was sure, as he had explored around it first. Whatever was inside could be easily locked in, if it was too dangerous for him, he thought. He put his hand on the door, and turned the handle. Inside, he saw a large stack of gold, right in the middle of the room. Around it, were five cave orcs. Styer knew this would happen eventually. Orcs are beings often found in the dungeon, according to the returning adventurers, and their religion, the worship of Beogh, was originally founded by orc adventurers that had found an altar, deep in a branch of the dungeon. Still, Styer felt some reservations regarding the murder of these beings, even if these cave orcs were different from the hill orcs that lived on the surface.

The feeling wasn't mutual, however, as the orc fighters immediately started screaming and raised their axes in his direction as a fourth orc, wearing a blue robe, proceeded to cast an invisibility spell on himself, while the final orc, wearing a tan robe, closed his eyes in prayer, his lips curling up in a terrible grin that made Styer feel that the pig was not asking its maker for forgiveness.

Styer cast a searing ray in the direction of the dungeon dwellers, bending the light in his hand to hit all of them for as long as he could, almost exhausting his magic. It wasn't enough to kill any in the thick-skinned group, but it dealt some serious damage. Then, he ran out, hoping the orcs would follow him. They did, all five of them running out of their closed off room with smiles on their faces, making horrible snorting noises as they were exposed to the darkness of the rest of the dungeon. But Styer wasn't alone in dealing with the pack. He commanded his small army of risen beasts to attack the orcs.

The undead fighters weren't as precise as their living counterparts, they moved slowly and clumsily, often missing their swings and bites, which also made them unable to wield weapons. But what they lacked in dexterity they made up for in raw power, as their bodies surpassed their natural limits to attack the orcs in full force. The first to fall were the front-liners wielding axes, their necks ripped to shreds by wolf bites and bear claws, their knees and ankles shattered from the force of kobold punches. Then, the orc priest fell. He prayed to Beogh for help and the god sent down smites that rang out like thunder, taking out a few of the undead beasts, but it wasn't enough to stop the whole army, who quickly overtook the otherwise unarmed pig-faced cave orc.

Without a target to attack, his army started to slowly disperse, the zombies moving slowly in different directions. But Styer knew there was one orc left, the wizard that was invisible was biding his time. Styer stayed quiet and tried to feel for the magic around him, but it was almost impossible as every inch of the dungeon was enchanted in some way. Then, he heard that familiar sound. His head snapped back, and a few meters away from him he saw a flash of blue light form out of nowhere. He jumped to the side, crashing into a dungeon wall, before a magic dart spell made a dent on the floor.

He broke out into a run, listening for the rushed clonking sound of the hooves behind him, occasionally having to dodge magic darts being cast at him by the wizard. He had a plan, however. He knew the layout of that level, so he ran towards a long and narrow corridor. He dodged a final spell, before casting a powerful searing ray that almost immediately made a hole in the orc's skull, disabling his invisibility, before his slack body slapped onto the dungeon floor, still and dead.

Styer tried to catch his breath and returned to the room he'd found the orcs in. It was a relatively small thing, but it had the signs of a campsite. There were ashes on the floor from a fire, there were pieces of half eaten meat strewn around, as well as a lot of gold everywhere. Styer picked it up. It wasn't enough to buy the flaming sword just yet, he was missing about two hundred more gold for that, but he thought it was a great improvement over his current finances. What he did end up wondering was why the orcs had brought that much money with them up the dungeon.

He knew of the mines that the cave orcs ruled over. They were a branch of the dungeon that was filled with gold, and was actually the main reason why hill orc adventurers from the surface came down to explore, consumed by jealously of the riches of their cousins. But these orcs were carrying a small fortune, as far as gold was concerned, though their equipment was subpar. Styer could barely imagine the extent of the riches the mines held.

He continued to the fifth floor soon after.”

As the sun set outside, Worrack finished his tale for the day. The king was satisfied, and so was Jeerad. The only one that still had a crinkle in his forehead was the man with the red-hair, his rage clear as the flames of the raging sun, his anger overflowing from his eyes like lava, his fury burning in the air around him. The orc looked to him and asked.

“What's wrong Grot? Not satisfied with the story?!” Laughing softly at the man, his grunts like earthquakes and his belly knocking over the mountain of mugs down to the floor.

“Well Mr. Rack, didn't you tell this story differently last time? I feel like Styer struggled more against the orcs...” Grot said, despondently.

“No, it's always been this way,” said the orc, taking a sip of his golden beer, “your memory really isn't the best is it, big guy?”

The demigod shrugged his shoulders. The king and the knight looked befuddled at the interaction before leaving the tavern.