The group did not relax as they explored deeper into the strange gothic hallways, but a sense of familiarity began to settle over them with each passing room that they cleared. A routine developed wherein they began to take turns with who breached the rooms and who hung back in the hallway, getting excited when there were three or more imps inside and disappointed when there was only one. Each time, everyone’s arrays shifted just slightly in color, including Jeremy’s.
It was not until they had been picking their way down the left corridor for what felt like nearly thirty minutes that Jeremy noticed that the colors of the soldier’s arrays were not changing the same among them. Everyone’s colors changed as the imps were picked off, even though most of them stood far back from the entrance to the rooms to avoid any possible ricochet from the rounds bouncing off the stone floors or walls. Jeremy had already begun to figure out that just being close to a kill was enough to gain some experience.
However, he was not sure if the amount of experience gained was equal among everyone in the vicinity. The soldiers who were engaging the creatures had moved from red to orange, but Staff Sergeant Mwai, who stood back with Jeremy the entire time, had remained in the reds. So, that led to the possible conclusion that killing the creature perhaps counted for more than standing in the vicinity.
He watched the soldier’s overlays shift into a lighter shade of orange as they cleared a room. As the echo of the shots faded from the walls, he clicked his tongue. Mwai shot him a glance out of the corner of his eye.
“Any observations?”
“I’m just watching the way that the team’s overlays level up. Can’t say anything for sure right now,” Jeremy responded. “Do you think it’s strange that we haven’t run into any of the diseased ones yet?”
Mwai looked over to where the soldier with the shotgun was re-loading. “I think all this is strange, and I am not going to complain.”
Jeremy nodded. “Can I ask a favor, just to try to test a hypothesis of mine?”
“Depends.”
“It would be helpful for the same two soldiers to do the next few kills, instead of them taking turns.”
Mwai grunted and turned his eyes back to Jeremy. “You are observing us just as much as this place, aren’t you?”
“Well…” Jeremy shrugged.
“All right.” Mwai turned to the rest of the group, who had reloaded and were ready to go. “For the next three rooms I want Ashford and Rossi to breach and you two will remain as back-up.”
They acknowledged the order, then fell back into their marching formation, and continued down the hallway. The torches flared to life in front of them and died into darkness behind. Ahead of Jeremy, the soldiers walked with careful steps, guns aimed in front of them like they expected the imps to start crawling straight out of the stone walls. The two behind kept an ear out for anything coming up in the back of the group but were relaxed enough to strike up a conversation.
“I’m just saying that we have to call this something.” One of the soldiers was in the middle of explaining to the soldier beside him. Jeremy was inclined to agree with him. He liked labels and such, but the soldier just huffed in response. Then he groaned when the first solider, named McGraw if Jeremy remembered correctly, continued speaking.
“Just hear me out –“
“We already heard you the first hundred times you got all excited about this.” The second soldier interrupted.
“Yeah, but just listen,” McGraw insisted. “Just hear me out, okay. So, there are all kinds of creatures…like dragons, right? And I know before you guys were like…you can’t say its just like your little board game because there aren’t any dungeons, but now…Now!” He broke into a maniacal laugh that bubbled out of his chest like he could not keep his excitement in for all the world. “Now, we are in a literal dungeon. I mean, the stonework. There isn’t a single window! I bet that’s because we didn’t actually go to some other world, but because this is a limited space. Just these hallways with nothing outside of them. We are in a dungeon, which means – “
“God, just shut up,” the soldier next to him hissed. “You are literally starting to echo off the walls. We’ll call it a dungeon. Will that make you happy?”
Jeremy did not turn around, but he could hear the grin on McGraw’s face. “It is a dungeon.”
“Both of you quit it,” Ashford called back.
They were approaching another open archway to their left. Just like they had for all the other rooms, the two in front parted to let Jeremy through, then flanked him closely as he stepped into the doorway to peer into the room. All four walls lit up in a cascade of torchlights that started by the entrance where Jeremy stood and ended on the wall opposite him. Where there had been solid wall in all the other rooms, there was another dark archway leading out of the room.
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“Huh,” Jeremy said. Then he looked at the ground and saw two little goblins who had noticed his presence and begun careening forward. Their long nails scrabbled over the flagstones. He stepped back to let the soldiers take his place in the doorway. “There’s two.”
He rejoined Mwai a few feet away from the door and jammed his hand under the face shield to scratch his jaw as the shots echoed out of the room. Even after having done several of these breaches now, he still flinched with the first shot because it was so loud. One of the imps shrieked loudly, only to be cut off by what sounded like a clean headshot. Mwai glanced at Jeremy’s hand disapprovingly, so he dropped it.
“You’ve got a look on your face,” he observed. “Notice anything?”
“There’s another door in there,” Jeremy said.
“There’s another door in here!” The soldier with the shotgun waved everyone forward. They crowded around the archway and peered across the flickering room toward the dark doorway.
“Ashford, take Jeremy forward to check it out,” Mwai instructed. Ashford glanced back to make sure Jeremy was with him, then began to walk into the room. Jeremy followed, adjusting his grip on the rifle. He looked down at the crumpled bodies of the imps as they passed. They were splayed out on green smears of their blood.
As soon as they got close enough to the doorway, the torches beyond it flared to life. Three of them lit up in rapid succession, then no more. They illuminated about ten feet of a corridor, which abruptly ended in blackness. It was not as if they were not close enough to trip the rest of the torches to life. It was as if the corridor ceased to exist past that point. Each torch was spaced about three feet from the last, but the corridor ended only a foot or so from the third torch. And their light did not reach into the darkness at all.
“Clear,” Ashford said, even though the rest of the team hanging out by the door could probably see themselves. McGraw cackled excitedly and stepped into the room to get a closer look.
“Are you kidding me?” He laughed, gesturing his arm in a sweeping motion across the extra few feet of corridor. “It’s literally constructing itself. A dungeon!”
“Okay,” the grumpy soldier barked, “We get it.”
Jeremy looked over the spot one more time, then shook his head. If that was the case and the blackness was just nothingness out of which the dungeon was being built, that meant there really was nothing beyond the walls. The thought sent a chill up his spine. It was not like he imagined there were rolling fields of wildflowers and blue sky beyond the walls or anything, but the idea that they were just hanging here in space with only that swirling blue energy ball portal thing connecting them back to solid Earth made him uncomfortable. He looked away.
Mwai raised his eyebrows at him, and Jeremy just shrugged. Then, the Staff Sergeant twirled his finger in the air. “Let’s keep going then.”
The corridor ended a few hundred feet from that last room in the same manner that the extra corridor had. It simply stopped in blackness, as though a curtain had been drawn across it, not allowing any light through. Jeremy almost wanted to stick his hand through it but decided that might be a terrible idea, and there were already too many unknowns swirling around. He did not want to take a risk like that.
Mwai called back to Sergeant Warner that they were retracing their steps down the left corridor and would be checking out the right. Despite Jeremy knowing for a fact that he had never been into a dungeon like this, a heavy sense of déjà vu settled over him. He thought back to the night when all this started when he’d been crawling through the tunnels with Moira to look for an exit. As they began to make their way away from the abrupt end of the corridor, he felt a tickle at the back of his neck as though something was watching him, but he resisted the urge to turn around. He was just equating this place with those tunnels where the old god had been creeping around after them, appearing in the tunnels they had already checked out.
They checked each room as they passed, but they remained the same as they had been left, empty aside from the bodies of the imps they had already slain. Jeremy felt a trickle of sweat slide down his neck. He shrugged his shoulders to adjust the body armor he wore and to shake off the discomfort that had settled into his chest. Eventually, he could no longer stand the silence, broken only by their echoing footsteps.
“Are you guys not practicing magic yet?” He asked. He had been wondering about this ever since he first saw the soldier’s red overlays, which indicated they had not practiced much at all.
“No,” Mwai said. “There are some branches working with it, but until we get specific instructions, we were told not to experiment with anything.”
“I guess that makes sense.” Jeremy frowned. “But if you are going to be going into places like this, wouldn’t it be better to know something about magic, just in case?”
“Well…” Mwai glanced at the other soldiers, and Jeremy abruptly understood. They were under orders from the top not to experiment with magic. The decision to go into the dungeon had not come from the top but from this specific incident commander, Captain Byrne. They were not quite directly in contrast, but there was a good amount of friction between the two different modes of operation. One was to let everything happen and only react on the ground once they understood what was going on at the top. The other was for the operators on the ground, who were the ones actually dealing with the situation, to try to figure it out and then probably advise the commander so they could perhaps make more informed decisions. If this National Guard post was going to start taking matters into its own hands, it really should start doing that by learning the magic as well.
“Got it.” Jeremy nodded. Mwai did not want to discuss it right here and now. Not that the rest of the soldiers were too dumb to be aware of the dissonance themselves, but it might not be the best thing to voice out loud while they are in the thick of it.
They reached the place where the original corridor had split into two and paused to let the team back by the portal know. Jeremy looked over the spot where the wall had been patched. It looked the same – hastily constructed and messy, as if with one touch, it would tumble down. He brushed the tips of his gloved fingers along the mortar. Unlike last time, it was not solid beneath his touch but crumbled away like dust, leaving a small void between two stones. He frowned at the spot, but Mwai called for them to move down the right corridor, so he turned away to fall into formation.