Tails, ears, and clothes dry, we entered the run-down hut that still smelled awful, but at least didn’t make my head spin from its stench.

It wasn’t a very large building. It featured one large living room with a kitchen corner and a bedroom. We quickly found the trapdoor leading to the dungeon under the bed there. Before we entered it, though, we explored the hut a little more just out of curiosity… and also because we were reluctant to enter the dungeon that smelled even worse than the hut had.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much loot to be had in here. The most interesting thing was the bookshelf stuffed with books and even something resembling a diary. Not that we could read any of it though.

“Hold on, that’s the same text that was on the scrolls,” Frank said before pulling his phone out.

I raised an eyebrow, wondering how he planned on accessing the wiki without an Internet connection in here.

“I downloaded the translation page off the wiki. Figured it might be helpful,” he clarified.

“Huh… Convenient.”

“Yeah, so… Let’s see…” He walked over to the table in the kitchenette and placed down both the book and his phone. Casey and I stood on each side and tried to help with the decoding.

It soon became obvious that this diary had been written by someone related to Abyground and the zombies there.

When words and phrases like–

‘Lord. Betrayal’

‘Time left. None.’

‘Different world. Escape. Cure.’

–came up, there was little doubt left. The last one was by far the most worrying. Did it mean that we would have to go to another world to get the cure? Or did it mean that the writer thought escaping into another world – meaning this one – would help them find the cure?

Worst of all, there was no mention of ‘the beast’ again. It made me worried that we were on a wild goose chase. That even if we did defeat the octopus boss after all our struggles, we wouldn’t find the cure in the end.

“Did the wiki say something about what this dungeon was supposed to be?” Casey asked.

“I… haven’t looked at the wiki. I just skimmed over the patch notes and all it said was that they added this to flesh out the area.” I shrugged.

“Flesh out the area? I guess they meant the lore, huh?” Frank mused. “Hey, maybe we’ll find the cure for the plague down there instead!” he cheered.

“I don’t know about that,” I said with a grimace.

“No, look. This diary! This is a classic cliche!”

“Cliche…?”

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“Yeah! Think about it! Who wrote this diary? Where are they now? I bet they did some experiments on the zombie virus and whatnot and it went all wrong and then they turned into something even more powerful and zombyish and now they are the mini-boss down there!”

I blinked.

“I… guess that’s possible?”

It did feel like a pretty cliche setup for something like that.

“Yeah, so maybe we can get some info on whatever experiments they did and do the reverse. Or, wait! Maybe we can even cure them with the staff!” Frank beamed.

Casey and I exchanged a wide-eyed look before giving each other a firm nod.

“Okay. Let’s do it then. If this dungeon is filled with zombies who were infected by the same thing, then we don’t even need to go into the bubble to do our experiment.”

“Oh, yeah! Perfect! Let’s go then!”

Frank’s cheer only lasted until we all gathered around the opened trapdoor that was still emanating the stench of death.

“So… uh… I don’t suppose either of you have something to help with the stench?”

I sighed.

“We’ll just have to deal with it, I guess,” I said, before clenching my teeth, and finally setting foot on the ladder underneath the hatch and slowly climbing down.

I ignored the chill going down my spine and looked around as I carefully descended. There weren’t any zombies yet, luckily. Just a mostly empty cellar with a metal door to the side. I could only assume that the door marked the start of the dungeon.

I climbed all the way down and kept looking around while I waited for the others to do the same.

“Why does this feel like a raid staging area…?” I murmured, still trying not to breathe in too much of the rot.

“Uh, probably because it is?” Frank said.

“I thought this was a small dungeon with a mini-boss…”

“It’s a mini-boss next to an end-game area, so… it’s still going to be tough for us.”

“Right…” I grimaced again. “Well, are we all ready?”

Both of my friends gave me a nod.

“Let’s go, then.”

With that, Frank grabbed the metal handle of the door and swung it open. Naturally, even more stench assaulted us as soon as it opened.

“Argh, goddammit! This just keeps getting worse and worse!” he complained. “Ugh, next time, we’re bringing nose pegs.”

Despite his protests, he didn’t hesitate for long and entered the dungeon, shield in hand, eyes looking for incoming threats. Casey entered close behind him and I took up the rear, closing the door after we had gone through.

It was the most basic of formations, but there wasn’t much need to complicate things. Frank in the front blocked any enemies that attacked us head on, I watched our back, and Casey supported us with her magic from the middle.

With that said, we found ourselves in a damp cavern. There was some moss growing on the rocks, but other than that, it was barren.

It didn’t take long for us to run into our first enemy, a skeleton wearing the same Roman–inspired armor the zombies in Abyground wore, along with a trident resembling the one I’d gotten from the treasure hunt, just less decorated.

The skeleton quickly noticed us and immediately charged us like a knight with a lance. Frank stood in its way, dug his heels into the ground, activated the stone skin skill, and prepared his shield. Despite all of that, he still almost fell over with a yelp when the trident impacted his shield.

Luckily, he had done his job as the tank, which allowed me to flash step right next to the skeleton and swing at it, lightning powering my katana.

The skeleton reacted incredibly quickly and transitioned from its stab into blocking my swing with the length of the trident. The lightning spread through both the trident and the skeleton as my katana hit, but he didn’t seem to be inconvenienced in the slightest.

Before either one of us could recover, a blast of magic flew by and hit his side, knocking him to the ground and making him drop the trident.

“Swap!” Frank shouted and I immediately jumped back to allow him to finish our enemy.

The skeleton barely lifted its skull off the ground as Frank’s axe buried itself into it, cracking it, and making the whole skeleton fall back to the ground motionlessly.

It all only took about five seconds.

“Hey, nice! We’re getting better at this teamwork thing!” Frank beamed at us.

“Yeah, we are,” I replied with a smile.

It was moments like these that kept me believing that we might have a chance against the true final boss of our quest.