“Lucy!” said Christine. “Right on time! Are you ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alright, equipment check!” announced Al, turning to me. “We do this before every dive, to make sure we don't forget anything. This Dungeon is pretty well-known, so there’s not too much to worry about, and we’re only goin’ down to the second floor today, but it still won’t hurt.” He turned back to the others. “Weapons?”

  “Check!”

  We went through an exhaustive list of Dungeon supplies– spare weapons, food, water, bedrolls, magical heaters, extra sets of clothes, an extra extra pair of underwear, bandages, minor healing potions, rope etc…– until we were certain we had everything, then went through the trouble of repacking it all. The other three did not have [Inventory] skills like I did, so they had to actually pack the things in their dimensional sacks, instead of just willing them into the aether. The whole ordeal took half an hour, after which we finally did one last check of our wearable equipment, and then went to the entrance.

  The entrance was set in the grassy hill like a hobbit hole, only the door wasn’t round, and there were two of them, made of stone and propped open with guards on either side. The guards were yawning and leaning on their spears and not at all interested in us. We flashed our badges, mine bronze and the others’ silver, and the nodded and waved us in without looking too closely.

You have entered the Halls of the Chimerae

  The interior was a simple stone corridor, decorated only by sconces holding dim luminous orbs, and dark corridors branching outward. We ignored those branches and walked straight back toward a tall door. Behind the door, there was a spiral staircase that seemed to disappear into the void ten feet below. The void fled another story down as we approached, reacting to the presence of the three veterans. Had they not been with me, I would not have been able to go that far down; not without clearing the first floor at least.

  The Dungeon, The Halls of the Chimerae was themed after a legendary necromancer that Anatoly said had lived even before his time. The necromancer had dedicated his life to researching life, and finding ways to combine species together into chimerae, and each floor represented a different stage in his life and research.

  The first floor represented the beginning, before he really dove in. The tunnels were crude and non-uniform, and the only monsters were low-level undead, like zombies and skeletons. It posed little challenge to even the least skilled of adventurers.

  The second floor, where we went, showed the first stages of his research. The monsters were no longer the same as they had been in life. They had extra limbs stitched on, and artificially enlarged body parts.

  The third had the first attempts at combining different species. There were humans with wings, trolls with tails, wolves that breathed fire, and many, many more.

  The fourth had the “final products”, chimerae whose stitch marks were nearly invisible, and whose abilities synergized to make them actually strong, and the fifth floor held the “masterpiece”, a monstrous amalgamation of nearly every low-level monster in existence.

  We moved slowly through the second floor, which looked like an oddly square cave and smelled like death, stopping to fight monsters and learn about how to move and fight as a team, our roles, what we had to watch out for, and so on.

  I would go into further detail about it; I’m sure it would bore you even more than the it bored me. I spent the entire time being babied, and taking the whole thing far too slowly. The monsters posed no real threat to us, and we, or more accurately, they, spent most of their time talking about strategy and standard operating procedure, but it was all base level common sense, and it took all of my willpower not to roll my eyes at half the things they said.

  “Don’t let the trolls grab you.” “Watch out for the three-armed ogre’s third arm.” “Don’t cut yourself on the rusty metal.” “Make sure you keep track of the route you took so you don’t get lost.” “Don’t eat any of the putrid, rotting food.” “Watch out, the fat ones tend to spray their blood everywhere when you cut them.”

  We re-emerged in the early afternoon, and I could not wait to get away from them. They weren’t unpleasant people, but after listening to them talk and talk and talk about the most inane, patronizing, insultingly simple topics for six hours had left me in a foul mood.

  “You’re a natural, Lucy,” said Christine. “I think we’ll be able to take you straight down to the fourth floor next time.”

  “Yeah, you picked up on things quick,” said Pierre. “Sorry if that was a little boring, but we needed to make sure you were ready.”

  “It’s fine,” I lied. “Better safe than sorry.”

  “Want to join us for a late lunch?” asked Al. “There’s a good place right by the gate that we usually go to after divin’.”

  “No thanks,” I said. “I want to take a bath first. I don’t want to be smelling like corpse all day.”

  “Oh, there’s a good bathhouse nearby too,” he said. “We can head there first, if you can handle Pierre’s whinin’.”

  “I don’t like public bathhouses. I’d rather do it at my house.”

  “I think they have private rooms,” said Al. “It costs a bit extra, but you just earned a bit down there, so you can probably afford it.”

  “No, I can’t be spending money that freely,” I said. “I’d rather just head home.”

  “Are you sure? We can wait if you-”

  “That’s a shame,” interrupted Christine. “Maybe next time, then?”

  “Sure, next time,” I said.

  “Well, we’ll see you then,” she said. “Let’s go, Al.”

  “But-?”

  “Bye,” I said.

  They walked away from the Dungeon, Al half-dragged by Christine, looking very confused, and Pierre pretending he understood what was happening. As they left, Christine pulled Al toward him, and started whispering at him, unaware I could still hear them.

  “You idiot,” she hissed. “Couldn’t you see that she didn’t want to come with us?”

  “What? Why not?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she has to meet someone. Maybe she’s in debt, and can’t afford it.”

  “Well, we could just pay then,” suggested Al.

  “That’s not the point. The point is that if someone turns down your invitation three times in a row, no matter what their excuses are, then it’s because they don’t want to go.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Their voices faded away as they got further, but I silently thanked Christine for having at least a bit of social sense. I watched them until the curve of the road hid them behind a wall of trees, then turned back to the Dungeon to contemplate my next moves. What I did next was, admittedly, not the smartest thing I could have done, but I was frustrated and restless, and I had a new spell I wanted to test out.

  I pretended to follow the trio down the road, but as soon as I was certain that no one could see me, I darted off the road and into the woods and circled around to approach the Dungeon from the back side.

  The spell I wanted to test out was [Invisibility], a Light-based spell that was supposed to completely hide myself, or any object I applied it to. I had only just unlocked it, so it was low-level and imperfect, and I was only truly invisible while standing still, but while moving, it still functioned as an effective camouflage. Effective enough for my purposes, at least.

  I approached the entrance slowly from the backside, moving slowly with [Invisibility] active to avoid notice. Thankfully, since it was early afternoon, the only Adventurers around were leaving the Dungeon, not entering it, so no one looked my direction, and even if they had, my back was to the sun, so it was not likely that they would notice my shimmering silhouette.

  I crept down until I was standing directly above the stone doors, staring down at the guards. They were different from the ones I had seen in the morning, but they were just as disinterested and unwary as the first pair, if not more so. I took a deep breath– not because I needed it, but because it was a concentration habit from my time as a human that I had yet to break– and then jumped down, using the upper frame of the doorway to swing in. A small rock came loose, landing behind me as I froze in place inside the Dungeon with my back to the wall. Both guards looked down at the pebble, then at each other, then into the Dungeon, then back at each other, then shrugged.

  “Must have been the wind.”

  My biggest obstacle cleared, I went back to the door at the end of the hall and down the spiral staircase. This time, having cleared the 2nd floor with the veterans, the void didn’t start until after the third floor. Out of curiosity, I tried to continue descending into the blackness, but as soon as my foot touched it, I let out a cry of pain as my leg snapped and I was sent flying backward up the stairs. Fortunately, there was no one around to hear my cry or see me crawling toward the third floor entrance, so I could let [Rapid Regeneration] mend my leg without risk of being seen.

  Once my leg had healed, I walked down the tunnel, much more cautiously than I had been. My experience with the stairs had knocked all the recklessness out of me, and, having tested [Invisibility], I started to wonder whether I should really still be there, or if I should turn around so that I could make it back in time not to worry Anatoly. Ultimately though, the sunk cost fallacy won out, and I pressed on.

  The first monsters I found were a pair of ogres with elongated torsos and three sets of arms. Unlike the monsters on the second floor, these two were mostly symmetrical, and the stitches holding them together were clean and even. I hid around a corner, out of sight as I launched my first attacks.

  My first volley contained two spells: a [Blind] for one ogre, and a [Stone Bullet] aimed at the face of the other. They both let made noises somewhere between a grunt and a gurgle and stepped back in surprise. The blind one swatted at the sphere of darkness that encompassed its head, to no effect, and the other felt at the hole where its left eye used to be. I didn’t give them a chance to retaliate, following it up with a second volley of two bullets. A few seconds later, both had stopped moving.

Defeated [Chimera] lvl 27

Defeated [Chimera] lvl 28

  Feeling proud of myself, I double-checked the room for hidden enemies, then looted the corpses. The undead didn’t have any weapons or useful equipment, but the crystals at their cores were worth nine silver apiece.

  I didn’t notice anything amiss with the battle. I had a plan, and executed it, and it worked perfectly. I suspected nothing the second time it happened, against a group of lions with scaled front legs, nor the third, against an unnaturally large troll, but when it happened again a fourth time against a trio of two-headed, four-armed humans, the nagging at the back of my mind grew too much to ignore. Everything had gone far too smoothly. Not only had I defeated all my enemies without receiving any damage, they had not even attacked me once. I initially thought that this was just because I killed them too quickly, but later realized my own foolishness.

  In the fifth room, there was a giant turtle with the head of an eagle and a pair of vestigial wings sprouting from its shell. Rather than attacking from out of sight, like I had in every other room, this time, I walked out into the open, [Invisibility] disabled. I stood at the ready, wary of incoming attacks, but they never came. When I walked around in front of its head and made eye contact with it, it did not make a move. When I got close enough to touch it, it still did not react. Even when I climbed onto its back and sat down between its wings, it did nothing.

  “Why won’t you attack me?” I asked.

  It did not respond.

  I sat on top of the turtle for a few more moments before remembering that it was a filthy corpse and that it was probably leaving bits of itself on my rear end. I used [Siphon] to take some moisture out of the air and clean myself as thoroughly as I could, given my circumstances, then returned to pondering my situation.

  I had never heard of monsters that would not attack people. By definition, monsters were creatures of mana who existed to kill intruders, so the fact that they wouldn’t attack me meant one of two things: either they were unique, or I was. Obviously it was the latter, as if it were the former, someone would have noticed, and I was likely the most unique person in all of Astraeus.

  Still, I wanted to be sure, so I left the turtle’s room and went to another, this one containing a herd of llamas with reptilian tails and fangs. When they did not attack me either, I confirmed that, at the very least, whatever was making the monsters passive toward me affected every monster in the Dungeon.

  What followed was a mess of hypothesis and logical deduction that I will not bore you with the details of. Suffice to say, I concluded that the reason that they were not aggressive was that I, like them, was an undead, and something about the way they were created meant that they did not recognize me as a threat.

  Once I figured this out, I could easily have just stayed there and farmed them for experience until l got strong enough that the experience gains would be minimal. That certainly would have been the most efficient way for me to strengthen myself. I had already grown another three levels in the hour and a half since entering, and I could no doubt make it to level 50 within a week, but the more I thought about that plan, the more I hated it. If I did something like that, could I really call myself a level 50? Would those levels really be mine? Objectively, the answer to both of those questions is yes, but I still could not justify it. It would be cheating, and the power I got from it would be unearned.

  Instead, I decided to leave the Dungeon. If I left right then, I would be back a bit late, but still within the realm of timeliness. Anatoly would still be awake, and, after a light scolding for my recklessness, he would praise me for my successes and all would be well. The Dungeon, however, had different plans.

  When I went back down the path toward the turtle room, I instead found myself at a four-way intersection of hallways, the marks I had been making in the walls nowhere to be seen. And when I tried going back to the llamas, I was greeted by the sight of tiger-headed, steelfur wolves.

  “GodDAMMIT!” I shouted, flipping off the ceiling, hoping Pride would see it.

  Not only did the monsters not recognize me as an enemy, but the Dungeon itself did not realize I was an outsider either. It was treating me like one of its own, and by that, I mean it made me part of its ever-changing, randomly generated layout. Ordinarily, the act of passing through an area “set” it, preventing it from changing, so Adventurers could always find their way out by tracing their steps backward, but that didn’t apply to me, meaning that now, the only way for me to escape was to find the boss room and kill the boss. Either that or wait for whatever room I was in to be found by a group of Adventurers so that it would be set and I could escape.

  Both methods depended on luck, but as you have seen, I am not one for sitting around and waiting for someone else to help me, so I set out in search of the boss room.

  It took nearly twelve hours, and dozens of miles to find it, at which point I was so angry and so accustomed to being ignored that when I saw the giant doors, I threw caution to the wind and flung them open and walked inside. That was a mistake, because for whatever reason, whatever bullshit System shenanigans made the regular mobs not attack me did not apply to the boss.

  It was a giant with the head of a drake wielding a solid steel spear twenty feet long, and its first attack nearly took my head off. I stumbled backward, falling to the ground to avoid the weapon, whose bladed tip was the size of a surfboard. I rolled to the side to avoid followup stab, that broke the stone floor where I had been sitting and started circling the room and firing spells.

  Although it was large, strong, and durable, the monster was also slow, and stupid, as one would expect of an undead. It kept using the same, simple attacks, over and over again while it tanked all of my spells as if it did not feel any of the obvious damage it was taking. Soon, I was able to whittle its left knee down enough that it could no longer stand. It kept trying to attack from its position on the floor, but without much effect, and a minute or so later, it was dead.

Defeated [Advanced Chimera] lvl 41

User lvl 29->30

[Sole Survivor] lvl 29->30