Darkness once again consumed a mysterious figure, his silhouette fading into the void. There was no warmth, no quiet, and not even a living soul in the place he called home. It was the Dungeon of the Dead.

That figure was the dungeon master, who set down his staff in an ancient room covered in dust and webs. No living feet had ever graced his chambers of rest, since no one had gotten far enough into his dungeon to reach its end.

The staff was set aside by the wall near the rotting bed he slept on. Letting out a sigh, he dropped to the bed and stared aimlessly at the cold stone ceiling.

It happened again, for the dozenth time this week: A human adventurer had invaded his home and tried to bring it to ruin. And for the dozenth time, he had to exit his chambers to deal with the problem. He grew tired of it all by now.

He was dead and his skin was a pale gray, but he couldn’t help but feel human. After all, he was human in his past life a century ago, so he still held onto those human tendencies. He still had a habit of walking to the shattered mirror across from his rotting bed, brushing his decayed yellow teeth with an old brush scavenged off of one of the adventurers he had slain. It never made a difference to his teeth, yet it was a habit he carried on from his human years. All the constant commotion created by adventurers made him familiar with the modern language, so even he could speak and act just like a human. But his humanity was long torn from him.

Some say a part of what makes someone human is their urge for companionship and unity with one another, and that was the greatest thing ripped away from him. Death parted him from friends and family, but his reanimation brought him back to a world he never wanted to return to. He had nobody, besides the endless hordes of mindless undead.

What about humans? With how human-like he was, he would have no trouble conversing with the living. However, no matter how hard he tried, he could never come to love and respect another human again. He was dead but lucky enough to even retain his human qualities, but humans casted him aside. They killed him and had the audacity to cast him aside from society.

The undead mage still stared aimless towards the stone ceiling with his gray and lifeless eyes. Every single time he went out to fight off another human, it brought back distasteful memories of his past, both living and dead. The very thought of it made his teeth grate against one another.

The dungeon master had trinkets from his many battles stored up on shelves coated in grime built up for decades, and one of them was a shortsword. It belonged to a man whose family had once brought him to ruin, a man with the blood that the undead mage could never forgive.

Back when the Kori Soaro Kingdom was founded under the careful and powerful rule of King Galligar, all workers who could hold a pickaxe went to gather resources for large sums of coin. Clay and stone for building, and iron for weapons were the most valuable of all. That same undead mage, who was a youthful man in the beginning years of adulthood at that time, was among the ranks of those miners.

Things seemed to be looking up for the young man, as he would climb up out of the mines with bags of coal and iron to sell to infrastructure contractors. His pockets were getting full with coins and his belly satisfied from the tasty cuisines of nearby vendors establishing themselves, one of the first of them being the Soaran Bull Head.

Then his life changed when the Great Dungeon Rave began, forever altering his way of living. Priorities shifted from resource gathering to trying to discover more and more dungeons so one could reap the insane reward the King was handing out. He was one of the few who stuck to resource gathering.

He made more money than ever before, seeing as how the demand for resources skyrocketed when more than half of the mining industry stopped extracting resources from the ground in favor of dungeon hunting. Each piece of stone and iron were worth more than twice their amount, giving him quite the wealthy fortune at such a young age. Stone and ore collecting provided a much more stable income for him, thus he ignored the popular sentiment of striking it rich on a discovery of a dungeon.

Never would he have thought that he would stumble upon the very dungeons that people went crazy to find. He heaved high his pickaxe over his head, sweat beading down his cheeks and falling on the dusted floor, then struck the wall of stone in front of him. Rocks cracked and crumbled away under the power of his strike, and what was left behind was yet another wall of stone. This time the wall was cleaner, more refined, and chiseled with delicate patterns. This was a man made wall, no natural process could make something so intricate and perfect.

The young man put his hands over it and felt the smoothened stone’s surface. He gawked at it awestruck by its beauty. It didn’t take him long to realize what he truly had stumbled upon.

It was the entrance to a dungeon, he had found it by complete accident when others made it their life mission to find one deliberately. He shook his head and lifted the heavy iron pickaxe over his head again and slammed its tip right on the wall. It shattered into chunks of finely chiseled rocks, and a hold was punched. Inside was enough darkness to make one go blind, and that young man let his curiosity overtake him. He hopped right into the hole in the wall and lit a torch.

When the torch burst into life, it revealed dozens of figures staring back at him with pitch black eyes. He fell back on his butt, absolutely terrified and gripping the pickaxe so tight his fingers turned white. He thought those figures that once were trapped in this dungeon for possibly hundreds of years would grow violent at the sight of an exotic new meal: himself. The young man didn’t want to be eaten by these monsters, yet his legs wouldn’t move. Fear and shock kept them as still and stiff as a wooden plank.

The figures shrouded in the darkness around the man did not move, they too stood by and groaned. Despite the life in them being void, they showed signs of confusion and shock much like that young man had went through. Both were in awe and fear of one another. It was to be expected, as both had never seen their kind before.

Footsteps that slammed against the stone floor echoed down into the dungeon and startled the figures and the young man as well. He jumped to his feet to meet the noise head on.

When he walked over to the hole he had made, he came face to face with another miner who stared ahead of him with gleaming eyes.

“Did… did you find this?” he asked, still not giving any eye contact to the young man.

“Yeah, I just stumbled upon it while digging for ore.”

That miner’s grip on his pickaxe tightened and he flexed his jaw. “You ‘stumbled upon it’?” The miner made of fist of his free hands and his long black hair fell over his face.

“Yes I did. Gosh, now I have to report it to the royal faction, huh? There goes my day of ore mining.” The young man, feeling the tension flow into the air, tried to smile and make a quippy light hearted comment. But the miner standing in front of him didn’t take it so lightly. He spent months searching for just one dungeon, barely digging up any ore to sustain himself in the process. But here this man was, making a fortune off of hogging the resources and even found a dungeon when he wasn’t even searching for it in the first place. Thinking about it more and more made the miner’s blood boil.

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He had to do something about it. His heart raged like a burning fire, and veins were bulging on his head. He held his pickaxe with two hands.

The young man, after turning around one last time to get a look at the dungeon, turned back to leave up the path he made to the surface. The minute he passed by the miner, that enraged miner hissed and swung his pickaxe against the side of his head. He died instantly.

He wanted that wealth and the reward of discovering this dungeon all to himself. There was no room for a second person, so he acted as he saw fit, only until reality hit him in the face when he looked down on the young man’s corpse making a river of blood pouring down into the hole that led into the dungeon.

All evidence must be hidden. That miner…no, that murder, dragged the young man’s body and threw it into the dungeon, where it would forevermore belong to. No one would ever come back looking for him.

X X X

The once-completely black eyes turned gray, and life was made in the most unnatural way: reanimation. The Dungeon of the Dead lacked many things like plants, animals or even insects, yet life existed in it. That was through the corruption of bodies, turning lifeless corpses into lively things. It was the signature feature of any dungeon, yet the Dungeon of the Dead could have that occur even without a dungeon master.

Life was given to the young man yet again, years after his original death. He could still feel the throb in his head left behind from the killing strike of the miner’s pickaxe. He could see well now in the night, able to distinguish each shambling undead figure roaming around. Most important of all, he remembered it all. He remembered the discovery of the very dungeon he sat in and even up to his demise at the hands of a jealous miner. That moment left a sour taste in his mouth.

Everything he did, he did it for his own livelihood, so why was he stripped of that? Everyone else had the opportunity to strike it rich, so why wasn’t he allowed to do the same? The young undead man beat his fists against the stone floor in agitation.

“That monster!” he yelled. He looked at himself and saw his skin was now a pale gray and dry. He looked like the very undead monsters that dwelled among him, but it was that miner who was the true monster.

These undead, though, were the only things he had left. Even when he was betrayed by human hands, these monsters never did him any wrong. They walked passed him and made gestured resembling something close to a nodding head. These monsters never attacked him nor meant any malice when humanity did.

As he stared at all the undead walking aimlessly passed him, they all turned their head towards the hole that the young undead had made possibly decades ago. Voices once again interrupted the peace in this dungeon, and the clattering of armor made the undead man angry. Did they come to take this dungeon for themselves too?

What was coming was a band of adventurers, led ahead by a middle aged man with a shortsword in one hand and a shield in another. His long black hair that was once a complete dark hue now was growing gray strands, bouncing on his head while he ran ahead of his party.

Their loud aggressive battle cries shook the undead man to his deceased core. It wasn’t until they got close and started peaking their heads into the hole that his fear turned into hatred yet again.

The middle aged man jumped right in first. “Be on guard, this dungeon is crawling with undead. But be on the lookout for any treasure we could plunder.” He raised his sword.

“Yes sir!” The younger adventurers behind him said.

They all entered the dungeon and ignited their torches with matches. The undead all around them were like curious puppies yet again, approaching them to satiate their urge to understand these new creatures to them. The living were exceedingly rare in these parts, so anyone in their position would do the same. But had they known the aggression humanity possessed, none of them would have dared go near those adventurers.

“Watch out!” the middle aged man screamed when he saw an undead approaching him. He slashed at the figure and killed it. That sparked the other adventurers to go in a frenzy and start butchering nearby undead too.

That undead man witnessed the horror unfold. Those calm creatures were being slaughtered right before his eyes, and their groans were like cries for help in his ears. There it was again, humanity screwing him over and taking away the only things in life and death that he had. That miner who murdered him wasn’t the only monster. Humanity was the monster, the blemish of this earth that stained everything pure and beautiful.

He caught a look at the middle aged man, and recognized his face. That man was his murderer. Decades may have passed since then, but he could never forget the face of the man who tore everything from him. He wouldn’t let it happen ever again.

The undead man got to his feet and ran to the adventurers as they continued to cut down more of his kind. “Leave, now!” he yelled at them.

All the adventurers stopped in their tracks and stared. They looked dumbfounded at the undead man. “They can speak?” a young adventurer shook in his boots.

“Get out now! You’re destroying this place! You’re destroying my home!” the undead man told them off yet again, but they still were idle with gaped mouths.

This was his home now. He had nowhere else to go, nowhere else where others accept him except here in this dungeon. He wasn’t going to let them take that too.

The middle aged man had just finished slaying an undead, then brought his head up slowly to meet the undead man’s lifeless eyes. His pupils began rattling after looking all around him, even at his decayed clothing and the old wound at the side of his head.

“No… it’s you… How’d you—”

“You took everything from me! My livelihood, my life, and now this? You’re despicable,” that undead man cut off the adventurer.

All of the younger adventurers looked at the middle aged man with confusion in their eyes. And that middle aged man could not bear to look them back in the eye. He clicked his tongue and raised his sword and shield to his former victim of the past.

The undead man was shocked. That man who had once killed was willing to do it again right in front of his pupils. He gritted his teeth. “Get out!”

As he yelled his lungs out, he outstretched his hands instinctively, and magic shot out of them with so much force that it instantly killed everything except that middle aged man. Light brighter than the sun shot out of his hands in a straight beam that struck his foes.

That middle aged man was knocked to the ground and hissing in pain. What surrounded him was melted armor and what was left of his allies. They were burnt to a crisp, but he was the sole survivor. He was a coward now when fear overcame him and his body let out danger signals all over. Sweat poured from his forehead, his legs grew numb, his arms shook, and his heart pounded so heart he thought it would breach his chest.

“Ah! No! No!” That man who had the audacity to attack innocents forced himself back and scurried away from the undead man. He was no longer a man, but a cowardly rat that had no dignity. “Please, leave me alone! I won’t do anything like that again, I promise!”

His pleads didn’t reach the undead man’s ears. He didn’t even bother listening to him, he did deserve to be heard. Nor did he deserve to live any longer. This man had taken his life, and he would take his in return. An eye for an eye, a life for a life.

Before the undead man could make a decisive move, the undead figures around him pounced on the despicable human and ripped him limb from limb. His cries rang throughout the dungeon and his insides painted the floor red. He just watched as his foe lost the strength to lift the only hand that was left attached to his body.

When the undead figures had finished, they returned to their endless strolls around this desolate place, leaving the remnants of their first ever prey.

The undead man walked to the remains of his murder and stared down at it. Vengeance was served, but it was far from being dealt. That man was one of many more to come who’d try to take away his only home left. This made him realize not to trust a single living thing, they were all monsters that needed to be put down.

He took the short sword of his killer and walked off with it into the heart of darkness where his new home was.

That very sword was the one that sat on his shelf all those years and was a constant reminder of the pain and suffering humanity had caused him. It renewed his resolve at his lowest, reminding him that he’s the one in the right, and those humans who daily try to raid his home were the ones who should be deemed evil. After all, it was the human law that defending yourself against invaders was justified, so he had all the rights in the world to protect the only place that treated him right, even if that meant bringing the city above him to ruin.