Luckily for me, sight wasn’t the sense I would be counting on. My hearing had sufficed to alert me to creeping ghouls before, and it could do it again. All the light had to do was let me pick up on any potential exits without having to run my fingers over everything, and even the humble radius of useful light my torch put out was more than enough to outdo the span of my arms.

I walked down the hallway, moving deeper into the area dominated by vines. I did my best to stamp down on the anxiety rising deep in my chest, but I couldn’t stomp it out entirely. The plant growth blanketed every surface now, even extending out from the walls to form a carpet of roots across the ground.

At least the roots beneath me had the decency to cling to the floor, the life along the walls bore no such restriction and could easily hide some other horrendous thing behind its branches. All I could do was keep an eye out for anything suspicious. Like creepy-ass crypts filled with undead, for example.

Oh, I found one, wasn’t I clever.

I shook my stupid jokes out of my head. I needed to be focused, to mainta—

What was that!? I froze, going from walking to an absolute stillness. A shadow lurked within the hallway ahead of me, just around the closest sarcophagus. I lunged forward, whipping my dagger around in a deadly arc that ended in its skull.

….and kept going, bits of desiccated brain falling all around me as the complete lack of resistance left me overextended and sent me tumbling to the ground.

What?

I flipped back to my feet and turned to face my foe, but all I found was a mummified corpse limply dangling from the vine’s grip. It didn’t even have the decency to have the glowing light of undeath in its eyes. I gave it an experimental stab and watched as its flesh tore like dry paper.

Huh. This version wasn’t as intimidating as the last. I stabbed it a few more times, but it continued to be very dead. Its papery skin collapsed like the dry husk of a bug you found hiding under your bed only a few weeks after it had died.

I scanned both directions along the hallway, but kept my eyes focused on the probably actually dead Hob. At least I assumed this was a Hob too, it wasn’t nearly as intact as the last corpse. I narrowed my eyes as I activated the one surefire way to confirm its deadness.

“[Soul Sense].” Even with the Skill I couldn’t get any level of detail on something else’s soul, but I didn’t need detail to tell if anything was there in the first place. I glared at the corpse so hard it ought to catch fire, focused my eyes so hard they crossed, and didn’t stop until I’d given myself a headache, but there was still no soul to be seen.

I blinked the stars out of my vision and deactivated my Skill. This one really was dead. I stepped back from the wall and kept on walking. I was beginning to doubt the value of exploring, the stress from the last twenty minutes alone had probably taken off a good five years of my life.

Of course, I’d still take a bit of stress over the level of crazy necessary to feel safe here.

The wall fading into view on my right fell away into darkness as I reached an intersection. I paused, trying to place the junction in my mental map of the place. It was… in the middle? Eh, fuck it, I’d just follow the right hand wall. That’d work.

I turned down the hallway and immediately came face to face with yet another fucking corpse. I flinched backwards, whipping my blade up into a guard.

“[Soul Sense]!” My voice echoed off the walls, but no soul made itself evident to my sight. I exhaled and let my arms fall back to my sides. I might as well just leave [Soul Sense] on at this point.

Still, it was looking like there wouldn’t be any more of the bastards still up and kicking. This one looked like he’d gone down fighting, but he was still fully dead. His corpse wasn’t bound tight against the wall by encircling vines like the others had been. It dangled from the ceiling above, one outstretched hand still reaching for freedom, even countless years later. His face was caught in a snarl, fighting up until the moment the thorns impaling his body had bled him dry.

Wait, what was that on the other side of him? I craned my head as I tried to get a better angle, but no matter how awkwardly I contorted myself I couldn’t quite see the dim shadows of the stone behind the overgrowth.

I grinned. This was either one hell of a bad time, or my ticket out. I leapt up and grabbed the lowest vine in one hand, using my momentum to swing my foot around and catch another with my toes. From there it was a simple, if awkward, task to clamber up and over the corpse to squirm up into the vines above. Yeah, they were definately less dense here, as if they’d overextended trying to reach the escaping hobgoblin whose corpse I was currently using as a stepping stone.

I put aside that lovely thought to push up through the thorns, worming my way higher and higher. Soon I was past the point where the ceiling had been back when I could see it, and it wasn’t long after that when I pushed through the last obstruction and reached open air.

Well, opener air anyway. The point was I’d reached a new level, one where I wasn’t half an inch from poking my eye out on a thorn. I hadn’t even set myself on fire in the process, which I viewed as a huge plus. It wasn’t easy, climbing through a thornbush while carrying a torch in one hand, but my shitty torch couldn’t burn hot enough to light up solid wood on its best day.

I stepped up to my feet and lifted my flickering torch, casting light across the room. It wasn’t all that different from where I’d already been. I suppose that fit, it wasn’t all that far from where I’d already been either.

I walked to the doorway, scanning with both my ears and my eyes. It was impossible to know if this level had enough connections to the last one for its slavering ghouls to have been drawn in by Garrett, so I had to be more careful here.

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I glanced down both directions of the hallway and saw no ghouls, slavering or otherwise. I barely even saw any stone so thick was the blanketing plant life.

I crept down the hallway with the utmost caution, but the further I went the less it seemed necessary. I couldn’t hear anything, not even the distant echoes that had been omnipresent below.

I picked up the pace. I didn’t know when the other shoe was going to drop, but I wanted to be out of here when it did. Finally, a doorway came into view, right in the middle of the hallway.

I immediately perked up. There’d been plenty of doorways, but they’d always been off to the side. A small detail to pick up on, but an architectural shift signaled some degree of progress, right?

Whatever. I could use the encouragement. I jogged over to the doorway and only just stopped myself before darting through. I gave it a quick once over to check for traps, although I don’t know what good I thought I’d do. Goblins made traps from twine and driftwood, not elaborate stonework.

I mentally retraced the route I’d followed from the lower level, really damn easy when you consider it was basically a straight line, crouched into a sprinter’s stance facing my exit point, and tossed my torch over my shoulder.

I looked over my shoulder, every muscle in my body tense and ready to burst.

The flame flickered wildly as it soared through the air, only to smack into a root and clatter to the ground.

I let loose the breath I’d been holding. Really. I get all worked up and it's another fucking root. I stood back up and stepped through the doorway. If there’d been anything there then it would have as least reacted when some asshole chucked a torch through the door, and if it’d moved, I’d have heard it.

The second I stepped through far enough to get a peripheral view I...well I just kinda twitched. What can I say, there just wasn’t all that much shock left in me at that point. There was maybe a quarter-second of true shock laced with adrenaline, then I recognized that nothing here was gonna kill me and stopped giving a shit.

There were bodies all around me, although these at least had the decency to decay properly. No skin left on these bones. The most obvious was just to my right, a massive one-eyed skull speared directly through its over-large eye socket by a root that continued to pierce right through the stone behind it. The rest of the cyclops skeleton littered the ground beneath it, and the rest of the chamber, a wide shaft leading both up and downwards, wasn’t much neater.

A twisting mass of wood stood proud in the center of the shaft, spiraling its way upwards even as it sprouted inumerable branches outwards, each finding root in an ancient corpse. The trunk resembled no tree I’d ever seen, but that hardly mattered, as the thing was clearly magic. Even if the thing hadn’t clearly grown fast enough to kill I could feel the mana radiating off of it.

The kind hostile to mind controlling Hobs, interestingly. I couldn’t help but be comforted by that.

I toed the edge of the ledge I was standing on and peered as close to straight up as I could without tipping over and falling. It would be nice to know how far this would take me…

Was that light?

I turned and stomped on the fading light of my thrown torch, killing its light before whirling back around and grabbing a root to steady myself as I leaned out over the abyss.

Light, faint but unmistakable, filtered down from far above.

Fuck yeah, it was high time I get the fuck out of here. I pulled up on the root I was holding, pivoting up to wrap my legs around it. From there it was a simple task to get on top of the root, and my climb upward had begun. The countless roots spearing outwards weren’t always close enough to grab from one to another, but the distances weren’t so extreme that I couldn’t jump between them easily.

It was a long climb, nearly enough to feel endless, but I persevered, and the light above grew ever closer. It shifted from near pitch darkness, to a dim glow, to a comfortable light, to the searing bright of the sun at noon.

By the time I reached open air and stepped back onto solid ground I was forced to squint and shade my eyes to have any hope of seeing my surroundings. I was at the top of some kind of step pyramid towering above the twisted jungle below, tall enough for my shadow to stretch for miles across the treetops.

Wait, shadow? Noon cast no shadows. But nonetheless, I had a stark black silhouette cast out ahead of me as if the sun were setting behind me.

I turned around, and I saw no sun.

Pyramids dotted the landscape, all at least as large as my own, and from the pinnacle of each grew a tree burning with a blazing light. They spread in a circle, each beaming forth its own incandescent light towards the circle’s center. Two more met them there, one rising from the ground beneath, the other descending from above.

But however bright they blazed, however brilliantly that sphere mimicked the sun, I could still see the faintest sight of shadow within its center, a pinprick of absolute darkness surviving even within the brightest light I had ever seen.

I jerked my head away and fell to one knee. My vision swam before my eyes, pulsating colors drowning out the world. I closed my eyes and breathed. My sight would return, just as they would after staring directly at the sun for too long. But that shadow…

I shivered. There were more dangerous things bound here than mere Hobs.

I hopped down from the step pyramid’s top and landed on the next level down, putting solid stone between me and that burning light. I wouldn’t be stupid enough to look directly at it again, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that given another chance, it might just start looking back.

I sat down against the stone wall and rested the back of my head on it. Ugh. I hadn’t bothered to look straight up, but now I could confirm my suspicions: I wasn’t out yet. There was no sun, no sky above, just more twisted dirt and twisted roots. This was another cavern, albeit with better lighting.

I sighed and sat up straight. I’d gotten out of one cavern, I’d get out of this one too. The blazing trees didn’t reach the ceiling, but there were a few plants that did, presumably to support the whole damn thing. Stupid fucking plants growing on other plants instead of the fucking ground like they ought. I hoped the entire incestuous jungle collapsed on itself.

Just not until I left.

The closest pillar tree looked to be a good few miles away. Maybe half a day’s journey over flat ground for my short legs. I examined the terrain with a bit more skepticism, but it actually looked like solid ground. Solid ground with woody tendrils weaving in and out of it like snakes, but there was definitely dirt down there. Mundane plants too, with honest-to-stars leaves. It was nice to see something without thorns.

The difficult terrain would make it a pain to actually traverse though. All that overgrown shit was a hell of a lot slower than flat ground, and that was before you remembered how much easier it would be for ambushers to hide. I’d have to slow myself down even more if I wanted to move quietly enough to avoid a trap, and I certainly did.

Just getting to the tree would take a day if I was lucky, let alone climbing the bloody bastard. I stretched out and rose to my feet. It was high time to get off of this pyra-—

A slight gust of air brushed across my back, an infinitesimal change that nonetheless screamed danger in the still cavern air.

I dived forwards, rolling beneath a stronger gust of air that swept over my back. I came to my feet with blade in hand, ears scanning for any sound and eyes snapping back and forth, searching for the threat.

Nothing. I scanned the ground and sky with every sense I possessed, but there was nothing to find. I stood alone on bare stone, and the only sound in the sky was the creak of wood shifting in the breeze.

I paused. I hadn’t used every sense I possessed. “[Soul Sense].”

I bent the sense outwards, glaring at the sky. A vein popped in my forehead as I struggled to maintain the intense focus necessary to see a foreign soul, but the Skill demanded more than mere concentration to perform as I demanded. It just didn’t seem to be capable of scanning wide areas, as if I were peering through a keyhole.

Maybe this cavern just had its own weather system? If any cave was big enough, it would be this one.

A light breeze brushed across my shoulders...from the opposite direction as before.

I blinked, canceling my Skill, and pushed off to dive sideways, but halfway through the movement razor talons slammed into my side and hurled me through the air.

No. I realized with mounting horror that I wasn’t going back down. The talons hadn’t penetrated more than an inch past my skin, having caught on my layers of cloth rags instead, but that was enough to provide them firm purchase.

I wasn’t being hurled. I was being carried.