Our progress through the jungle was slow, painful, and miserable.

I wasn’t particularly happy to rely solely on Vox’s direction, but we didn’t really have any other choice. The fetid forest was vast, featureless, and inscrutable to all save for the well-dressed man.

So east we marched.

Arduously, we made our way through miles of unbelievably thick and rank foliage, squelching over little streams of too-sweet fluid discharged by rotting fruits and shouldering past broad leaves with razor-sharp thorns. As Glare commented earlier, it truly was a sea of green. Deep, and dark, and hostile.

I took the front as was appropriate, making good use of Fang to hack my way swiftly through an endless supply of thorny vines and serrated vegetation.

Actually, for me at least, it really wasn’t that bad.

Draconic Blood easily handled the minor exertion and any cuts, scrapes, or other potential vectors for unknown viruses or bacteria, growing stronger with every injury and keeping me rested and chipper. The song swirling softly about my head did well to refresh me, cleaning the air of unwanted scents and providing a small breeze that lightened my spirits.

For his part, Fang was pleased enough to simply get some exercise, taking to his task with appropriately dogged enthusiasm. His edge parted the foliage without difficulty, slightly guiding my palms, allowing me to move forward almost on autopilot. All the while, his cheerful mood serenading me in the song made the entire affair seem almost like a stroll the two of us were taking for pleasure.

As a result, I found myself far better off than my companions.

The heat was clearly playing havoc with Thaum and Quarrel. The two women were perpetually drenched in sweat, yet uneager to remove their leathers for fear of injury and subsequent infection. As a result, they stopped our march frequently to take deep draughts of water from their packs. Thank the Priest for small mercies that they both seemed affected equally.

If either one of them had flagged more than the other, the mutual animosity they shared would have been prime to climax, and I wasn’t sure I could forestall it a second time.

Instead, the two seemed to have approached something akin to grudging camaraderie through shared suffering, doing much to soothe my concerns. Even Vox seemed affected by the climate to a degree, the normally unflappable man shining with just a hint of sweaty sheen, though it didn’t hamper his pace.

As for Glare, the sweltering heat no doubt did little other than make him stronger, empowering his Blessing. He floated along in intense concentration, constantly alert, ever-scanning the sides of the tunnel we carved through the brush, perhaps in an attempt to make amends for his earlier folly.

But of us all, none took better to the locale than Rover.

Whilst I forged our path forward, our resident lycan had turned into a phantom in the dark, disappearing entirely as he scouted ahead alongside Thaum’s shadowy spherical servants, appearing and disappearing in my sight every now and again, always on the move.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before he found something.

“Twenty seven feet, south-southwest,” Thaum’s shade hissed from beside my ear. Though the five of us were mostly clustered together, we each still had one of her servants attached, allowing for quick communication.

“Understood,” I replied, even though the sorceress could’ve likely heard me without her shade’s help. I turned in the indicated direction, and began hacking a path to the wolfman’s location, eventually exiting to find a clearing in the dense foliage that surrounded a small pond. A single beam of sunlight pierced through the ubiquitous canopy from above like an arcane arrow, bringing light to the otherwise dim forest floor.

Illuminating a mountain of dead creatures.

It was nothing short of horrific. There must have been hundreds of them, so many that they spilled over and into the pond itself, turning the waters murky and dim and brackish, and nauseatingly grey-yellow. There were all manner of cadavers, from striped tigers to leathery pythons to furry mammals.

It was hard to tell exactly what each one was, though, as the creatures weren’t just deceased, they were decaying. Rotting. Their bodies were decomposing, falling apart, rendering many of them scarcely recognizable. Clearly, they’d been dead for a while. They were all lumped together in the massive pile, unquestionably stacked there with intent.

And that worried me most of all.

Rover stood next to the mound of corpses, eyes wide, trembling slightly. He looked scared.

“What…the fuck,” Quarrel murmured. For once, I couldn’t have said it better myself.

“Now we know where the smell’s coming from, I guess,” she continued, still quiet, her words hollow.

“No, this can’t be the source,” Thaum replied, equally sibilant.

“Think, we’ve traveled miles already. There’d need to be stacks of these things all over, dotting the forest…” She trailed off, blanching.

“Something put them here,” Rover said, interrupting that sufficiently chilling thought with another.

“Something put them here,” he insisted, looking our way as he pointed at the grotesque pile, repeatedly. “Believe me. No animal did this.”

“No shit, Sibyl,” Quarrel muttered, eyeing the pile nervously.

“But, why?” Thaum asked. None of us answered her. “What…what on earth would do such a thing?”

“Something’s wrong.”

Of all people, Vox spoke up. For the first time since I’d met him, the well-dressed, well-mannered, uncannily knowledgeable man actually looked disconcerted. Though his voice remained polished and eloquent, he spoke now without a trace of sarcasm or mockery, serious as the mass grave before our eyes. He nodded as he continued, pacing closer to the mountain of carcasses to examine it.

“I’d merely suspected…,” he muttered fingers warily nearing the mound before quickly drawing back.

“It matters not,” Vox said. “Now, I’ve no doubt. This is not a normal dungeon.”

Suddenly, and only for an instant, his face flashed with the same ephemeral rage I’d witnessed the man display back in the auditorium. He turned to regard us with furrowed brows.

“It’s exotic.”

His words were meaningless to me and apparently to Glare, but Thaum gasped, Rover whimpered slightly, and Quarrel accosted the man.

“No,” she said, firmly.

“No…no, you’re wrong. It can’t be, not below the fourth floor. That’s…impossible!” she finished, shouting at the man.

“Not impossible,” he corrected, stroking his groomed goatee, brow still furrowed in deep contemplation. “Improbable. Very, very rare. But not impossible.”

“Um, what’s that mean? Exotic?” Glare asked, saving me the humiliation of having to do the same.

“It means we’re fucked!” Quarrel shot back viciously, immediately taking out her crossbows and scanning the jungle around us, eyes darting back and forth nervously.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Vox ignored the Immolator’s question as well, much to my dismay, instead continuing to mutter to himself, barely audibly.

“Must be corrupted, influenced…formed around some landmark…but, what?” He paced back and forth rapidly as he murmured. “There’s nothing above us, not for miles in any direction…perhaps…Pre-Collapse?”

Suddenly, his head snapped up, eyes locked on a specific patch of underbrush. I couldn’t see anything there.

“We have company,” Vox stated grimly, raising a palm towards the location.

With a great cracking sound like a clap of thunder, and a blistering fast shot of distorted air, an invisible projectile launched from his hand towards the unknown target, resulting in an ear-shattering detonation of splintered wood and pulped plants. From its place in the trees, a red-grey lump that had formerly been some…thing fell with a splatter to the ground.

All of a sudden, the woods around us erupted in motion.

A legion of small, shrieking creatures exploded from their hiding spots, emerging from the pitch black brush, their ambush foiled. As the first leaped towards us, I heard it.

~~~

SUB-NODE #0A37, UNIT DESIGNATION:

CYBERSIMIAN

~~~

The small, ape-like creature screeched at me once more, half its face brutally sutured to a metal plate, and pointed a laser cannon-covered arm right at my face. I was so shocked by its mangled appearance and bizarre name that I simply stared at the thing.

Glare dashed in front of me in an instant, the High Inquisitor tanking the blast of energized plasma without trouble, and incinerating the cyborg creature in response.

“Look alive, lord Hero!” The blond mage called out at me, galvanizing my action, and as one, our party attacked.

This fight went quite differently to the one in the manor months ago.

There, we’d been mundane, equipped with flimsy, rusted weapons and taken entirely by surprise. Here, though fewer and pitted against far stronger adversaries, we were Blessed, one and all.

The mechanicals macaques stood no chance against us.

We fell upon them like a swift and terrible storm. Vox stood calmly in the very center of the melee, immobile, deflecting laser blasts by unknown means and pulverizing the creatures with rapid pulses of condensed sound. Likewise, a great many tendrils of shadow served as both shield and sword for Thaum, protecting her vulnerable form from harm and ripping foes in twain from afar.

Rover tore them apart with his bare hands, claws and axes rending flesh and steel alike as he leapt savagely from one cyborg to the next. Quarrel dodged their blasts dexterously, without difficulty, nailing them with ease, her wicked bolts skewering the tiny creatures to the thick tree trunks that surrounded us.

But Glare’s combat was truly a work of art.

It was just as beautiful to behold as the man himself, the gallant mage twisting and turning and spiralling through the sky in a stunning display of aerial acrobatics, as if he’d been born flying. The Immolator, despite his name, let out impossibly thin beams of scouring light, piercing countless creatures all at once, never emitting enough heat to cause a fire in the endless woods around us. I’d barely cut down a half-score of them before it was already over.

With the last blow struck, and the final foe fallen, the jungle was returned to that eerie silence.

The only sound discernable after the furious engagement’s conclusion was the slight sizzle of still-roasting simian flesh and the shifting of our on-edge movements. The clearing around us was littered with even more corpses than before. Peculiarly, none of the creatures’ corpses had evaporated, leaving crystals behind. We’d formed a circle with Thaum and Vox at our center, scanning its shadowy edges, awaiting further enemies.

But none came.

“All clear?” Thaum asked, glancing at the man to her left. Vox nodded.

“So it would seem,” he answered, slowly.

“Let’s make sure,” Thaum said. “Rover?”

“On it,” the therian replied, darting outward and back into the dark depths of the jungle surrounding us, a shade attached to his shoulder for constant communication.

“Well, that wasn’t so bad,” Quarrel admitted, rolling a shoulder. “Exotic or no, it’s still the first floor, I guess.”

“So it would seem,” Vox repeated.

“Wait, so what’s exotic mean?” Glare reiterated, and once again, I was thankful for his straightforwardness.

Vox remained silent, though, still apparently lost in thought. The Immolator looked to Thaum, who shrugged and gestured to Quarrel, who herself was in the process of inspecting both crossbows for damage.

“Nothing specific, really,” the archer replied. “Delvers call floors after the fourth one ‘exotic’ because they don’t play by the same rules set by the rest of the dungeon.”

She crouched down, picked up a fallen arrow, twirled it musingly, and jammed it back in with the rest. Then she held up two fingers in front of the rest of us.

“One test per room. One room at a time. The World Titan plays fast and loose with rules, willing to bend most in the name of challenge, but never those two.”

She picked up another, saw its fletching was broken, and tsked angrily.

“Never, except in the case of exotic floors. Fourth floor and up, all bets are off. Suddenly, the tests don’t have to be tests. The rooms don’t have to be rooms.” She sighed, standing, then hummed. “How can I put this…”

“Remember the angel’s test? From the exam?” She asked. The three of us nodded in response.

“I flew to the basin,” Glare said. “At top speed, it didn’t cost me too much time.”

“I had a shade retrieve the water for me,” Thaum added.

“I cut off my arm,” I announced, abruptly.

The three of them turned towards me, shocked. In hindsight, I probably could’ve phrased that better.

“Right, regenerator,” Quarrel nodded, chuckling a little for the first time since her confrontation with Thaum. “Forgot you lot are all insane.”

“Anyways, the reason I bring it up is…well, it’s a good example, a good example of a typical Dungeon test, right? Open ended, multiple different ways to solve it, but ultimately–it’s one problem. Just one. One. fair. test. Solve it,” she said, “and move on.”

Then she raised her pointer finger in the air.

“Fair,” Quarrel emphasized. “That’s important, see? In the old days, Delvers thought that that was a rule, too. That no matter how cruel it might seem at the time, every test had a solution, every problem had a way to solve it. That no matter what, the World Titan always played fair.”

Then she shook her head.

“Then the first party delved past the third floor, and found what lay beneath.” She sighed, scratching her braided hair tiredly.

“You know, maybe they’re still right. Maybe the Labyrinth does play fair, even on the exotic floors. Maybe we’re the problem. Maybe we’re just not good enough, not smart enough.”

She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I’m getting off topic.”

“Point is, this; on an exotic floor, everything’s different. Take that exam room.”

“If it’d been exotic, maybe the statue would’ve required blood, or Entropy to open the door, except it wouldn’t have told you that, and the water basin would still be there, and you’d just have to figure it out on your own.”

“Then again, maybe there wouldn’t even have been a statue. Maybe there wouldn’t have been a basin filled with water. Maybe not even a room. Maybe, there’d just be the time dilation chamber, and you’d have to sit there for forty years to make the door open. And again, you’d have to figure that out on your own.”

“Or maybe, the statue and the door and everything else would still be there, but it’d all be a red herring. It’d all be misdirection, and the real way out would be to drown yourself in the basin of water. Except, once again, you wouldn’t know for sure and you’d have to bank on the fact that killing yourself was the only way to get out of a dimensionally isolated space. That’s an exotic floor.”

She bit down hard on one of her fingers, gnawing anxiously on the nail.

“It’s when the Dungeon gets fucked,” she swore, angrily. “It’s when the Labyrinth stops making sense. It’s when the World Titan forgets its own rules.”

She paused, taking a deep breath, before finishing her explanation.

“It’s why only madmen delve to the fourth floor. It’s why almost none of them survive. The upper floors, you can plan, you can prepare, you can survive. But the exotic floors, your life’s really in no one’s hands but the World Titan’s itself.”

Having said so, she spat on the corpse of a slaughtered simian, and stomped off to recover more spent shafts. The three of us regarded one another anxiously.

“Well said,” Vox’s voice cut through the resultant silence, the man apparently having roused himself from reverie. Once more, he spoke not mockingly, but genuinely.

“Our situation is disconcerting, indeed. We must, one and all, keep our wits about us and be cautious as we proceed–”

“We’re clear,” Rover’s voice interrupted us, tinny through the shade he spoke through. There was a momentary pause as we each took everything in.

“Fine,” Thaum said, finally, exhaling.

The tension hadn’t left her body, but she did stand a touch straighter than before. She looked at the rest of us for a moment in askance, before saying;

“Onwards, then.”