Beyond the room where Nick had slain the sleeping ratmen stretched another long tunnel. However, unlike the rest of the sprawling sewer network, this section had never been completed. The brickwork along the walls was up and the concrete had been poured, but the central channel was free of water since the pipework had never been connected to the drainage system running throughout the ruins of the city above.
For the first few hundred feet, everything looked pretty much the same as the rest of the sewer. Although, without the garbage-saturated water running through it, this section wasn’t nearly as nasty as the rest of the dungeon. Past that point, Nick found signs indicating that this extension had been in the early stages of its construction when the disaster that had destroyed the rats’ civilization struck. The area where the channel would have run had been marked off, but the concrete had never been poured, and the floor was formed from raw earth.
Not long after, the bricks lining the walls ended abruptly, as if the builders had stopped working for the day and never returned. Which was likely exactly what had happened. The other infrastructure, including the lighting, stopped about twenty feet before he reached the last section of brickwork, forcing him to double back and retrieve an orb from the wall to light his way.
Five minutes later, Nick arrived at the end of the half-finished tunnel. The terminus of the passage was formed from solid gray stone, chipped and scored from being gouged away by picks and other metal tools. Piles of raw rock were scattered throughout the area, waiting to be carted away by people long since dead. When Nick spotted a jagged crevice marring the face of the rock, he knew that at long last, his exploration of the dungeon was nearly complete.
That must be where the rats came into contact with the parasite that devoured their species. He frowned and then sighed in frustration. While he had been considering trying to complete the dungeon, exploring an unlit, subterranean tunnel was far too dangerous.
There is no way that I’m going to delve into those lightless depths. Even if the parasite isn’t contagious to my species, something awful is certain to be lurking within. Accepting his defeat, Nick was about to turn back and head for the entrance to the dungeon, when a thought struck him.
I should peek past the threshold and see if I can spot anything that looks valuable before I go. If this were a game, I would expect to find a lesser reward chest for exploring the main dungeon and a door or passageway leading to the boss. Perhaps one last enemy or a nasty trap too. I’ll turn back right away if I don’t see anything worthwhile. Nick ran back to unsocket a fresh bulb from the wall and then jogged over to the crack in the stone, figuring that the ten minutes its light would endure would be sufficient for his needs.
Holding his new light in one hand and one of his daggers in the other, he crept up to the looming gap. Before he looked inside, he held his body completely still, straining to detect any sign of creatures dwelling within. But all he could hear was the wet gurgle of the sewer in the distance and the gentle rise and fall of his own breathing.
Tightening his grip on the dagger clasped in his right hand, Nick stuck his head through the hole and then took a quick step past the threshold. He immediately looked left, right, and up, in case there was a trap above the entrance or a hungry beast waiting to ambush him. Fortunately, despite his abundance of caution, he found nothing of the sort.
Breathing a soft sigh of relief, he stood still and diligently scanned his surroundings. He found himself standing in what appeared to be a natural cavern formed from raw bedrock. The cavity was oblong, narrow, and had a low ceiling.
Rather than mechanical devices or the nightmarish creatures that Nick had imagined, the most prominent feature of the enclosure was fungi. Vast mounds of ivory mushrooms, with caps roughly the same size as a human skull, were growing everywhere, including the ground beside his feet. He froze in place, trying to evaluate their danger by using his Size Up skill.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Looking at the carpet of fungi made him vaguely nauseous, but the shrooms did not feel otherwise threatening. He eventually decided that the reaction was caused by his Foraging skill informing him that the mushrooms would be poisonous to eat, rather than Size Up indicating direct danger.
The pool of radiance cast by his light did not extend all the way over to the far corners of the chamber, so Nick took a dozen cautious steps forward until the far wall was revealed. His eyes surveyed the ground ahead, but his ears were glued to the sewers behind him. While he was certain that no ratmen remained in the area, if something did approach from the rear, he would be trapped in this cave with no clear route of escape.
From his new vantage point, three details emerged. Two that made him nervous and one that made his eyes glitter with the excitement of avarice. The largest and most dramatic of these features was an archway that had been cut into the face of the bedrock. Its border was perfectly symmetrical, about fifteen feet tall in the middle, and perhaps half as wide. Most unusual of all, every inch of the arch’s surface was covered in intricate runes. The mysterious symbols revealed a style and level of craftsmanship that felt out of place in both the interior of the natural cavern and the architecture of the sewers behind him.
However, the sigils were not the reason that Nick was certain that he had arrived at the end of the road and was staring at the entrance to the dungeon’s heart. The reason was the bank of roiling mist that swirled within the archway, like a living storm trapped between two panes of glass. It’s a fog door. Nick stared at the most game-like feature he had encountered within the dungeon thus far.
The ratman foreman must be trapped on the other side. Since this is a tutorial, the door is probably there to keep the boss from wandering into the sewers and insta-wiping contestants before they knew what hit them.
During this analysis, he had reflexively fallen into his power gaming mindset. When he pulled himself out of it, he realized that these details were unimportant, because there was no way in hell that he was going in there. He would have been willing to entertain the possibility of completing the dungeon if he had been able to observe the final challenge, then rigorously plot and plan before trying to clear it. But going in blind was a non-starter, especially as the fog door might only open one way, trapping Nick inside after he passed through.
If this wasn’t reason enough to turn back, his certainty was cemented by the chamber’s second feature—the forest of crimson mushrooms covering every surface of the wall surrounding the arch. The fungi seemed to belong to the same species as their pale cousins, but their forms were twisted and covered in running sores that looked eerily like open wounds, leaking a foul brown ooze that dripped onto the floor below.
Nick didn’t need his skills to recognize the decaying scarlet shrooms as a lethal danger. If the color and weeping weren’t obvious enough clues, the rot-shrooms pulsated like internal organs, making that entire wall look like the inside of a living creature. Like he had been swallowed by a diseased giant and was crawling his way through its guts.
I’d bet my last dollar that those are the dungeon’s final trap, he grimaced while slowly backing up. Or whatever the System uses for currency. Confirming his suspicions, the mass of mushrooms was clearly reacting to his presence, because the pulsing stopped as soon as he widened the distance between them. At least they were immobile and didn’t seem to remain agitated if Nick stayed away from their half of the chamber.
The only thing that kept him from bolting out of the room then and there was the presence of the final feature of the chamber—a wooden chest sitting on the ground, about a third of the way between the entrance and the fog door. Unlike the other Exploration Reward Chests that he had found so far, this one was dingy and caked in grime.
This didn’t mean anything in and of itself. Each chest on the island had a unique appearance, and he was standing in a completely different region than the rest of the tutorial. An entirely different planet if the dungeon’s description was to be believed. Thus, he judged it likely that he was looking at a genuine Exploration Reward Chest, although he wasn’t willing to bet his life on it.
Nick just needed to retrieve the loot inside and he would be ready to leave the dungeon behind him, perhaps reexamining that side passage on the way back out. With any luck, he would be out of here soon, with a pile of treasure in his arms.