“You ate a slime?” asks Alleluia, following with a sound that he can only describe as a giggle.
Canta frowns. “I ate about a dozen.”
“At once?!” asks the voice on the other end of the pipe, breaking out into a loud, clearly audible laugh now. He rolls his eyes.
“I was hungry.”
Alleluia lowers the tone of her voice from the high-pitch she was at. “Aren’t they super dangerous to eat though?”
“I drank a lot of water,” replies Canta. It’s a half-truth, he supposes. To his surprise, she laughs again.
It is the middle of the next day, hours after he had gotten up and continued his ‘adventure’. Neither he nor the girl on the other end of the pipe had spoken about what happened last night, but she seemed to have forgiven him and they had been making small-talk all morning. Although, in truth, he found it hard to talk to her since he had so little to talk about. His new life has been very short, after all.
“So, how big is the dungeon?” he asks, following the pipe. “I’ve been walking for days now.”
“Well, it’s a dungeon,” replies Alleluia, her voice coming down the pipe a moment later. “So about a hundred floors.”
“But I haven’t gone up or down any floors?”
“Huh…? Up or down?” she asks. “There aren’t any floors up or down.”
Canta looks at the pipe. “What?”
“It’s a horizontal dungeon,” explains Alleluia. “There’s one giant staircase that leads all the way up to the surface on floor one. All of the floors are at the same height here, deep down below.”
His eyes drift from the pipe as he looks around the corridor that he is in, as if seeking any further answers that it could give him. But it has none to offer. “I’m sure this dungeon had a lot of floors from top to bottom,” says Canta. “It was like that before I died. I mean… I fell off of a bridge. Well… ‘fell’.”
There is a whirring and Alleluia is quiet for a while. “Did you really die?” she asks, sounding somewhat unsure.
Canta rolls his eyes. “I ate twelve slimes and lived to tell you about it, didn’t I?”
He can hear a quiet laugh from the other side of the pipe, followed by a clearing of her throat as she straightens herself out. “The dungeon used to be vertical back in the very distant past,” she explains. “But that was a very long time ago…” adds Alleluia. “Even before I got here. When the magic started to run dry, they rebuilt the dungeon to be more efficient.”
“More efficient?” asks Canta.
“Yes,” replies Alleluia. “Dungeon-magic stems from the core of the world, it’s easier for it to flow left and right at a low depth than it is for it to go up through the world,” she explains. “That’s why dungeons tend to have weaker monsters on their top floors than down deeper below, where the real strong things are.” Canta rubs the back of his head, assuming that makes sense. “– Less dungeon-magic.”
“So, what’s with the pipes?” he asks.
“The reconstruction bought a century of time or so. The machinery was a last attempt to keep the dungeon running after the well dried out.”
“Did it work?” he asks, sarcastically.
“Yes. The dungeon flourished and everyone lived happily forever after,” replies Alleluia, her voice completely dry.
This time, he laughs.
The day comes to an end soon enough. The darkness of the dungeon doesn’t seem to bother him tonight, though, as he lays with his side against a pipe that is low against the ground, feeling the whirring vibration come through it to reach his body like a heartbeat next to his. He’s hungry, but he doesn’t let that sour his mood this time.
The night passes, and the next day comes.
Canta passes the next boss arena, knocking on the next pipe to signal his arrival. It is about half an hour after he has woken up. Looking to the side, just beyond the giant, shattered gate, he sees a small wooden door to his left. Curiously, he pulls it open and looks into the little room.
“Aaaah! Damn it!” swears Canta loudly, as he looks inside the small, well furnished room that is built up just like the one he had slept in the other day. “Of fucking course,” he rolls his eyes and sighs. There’s a bed and everything.
“What’s up?” asks Alleluia’s distant voice a moment later.
“I found another room. I could have slept here instead of on the floor,” he mutters.
“After the boss-arena?” she asks.
“Yeah,” replies Canta, annoyed, shutting the door again.
“Oh, yeah, those were check-points for adventurers,” she explains. “There’s one around every ten floors.” He looks over at the pipe, somewhat annoyed that this information was being relayed to him now. If he had known last night, he would have just walked another half hour to sleep in a real bed again. Canta can feel his blood boiling, but he takes a deep breath and calms himself down instead of letting his temper grow, despite his gnawing hunger starting to make him feel on edge.
He can feel his mood becoming bitter, but does his best to keep himself in control.
New life, new Canta. Take it easy.
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Staring down at the crusty blanket that he has draped around himself, he wonders if he should replace it with a fresh one from the room?
“Nah,” mutters Canta as he delves deeper into the darkness, pulling his favorite blanket tighter around himself, heading further into the dungeon.
The day passes, and then the next one as well, and then even more after that, so many that he eventually forgets where his count is at.
Canta makes his way forward, surviving off of the occasional pit of slimes and water-filled basins that he finds in every few boss arenas. During particularly luxurious moments of his journey, he finds some nice, fat spiders as well. Although, he can’t help but wonder what it is that they’re surviving off of. He never sees any bugs for them to be eating.
During the days, he walks, always following the pipe towards the sounds of Alleluia’s voice. The two of them are always talking about anything and everything, although much of it ends up becoming nonsensical, as apparently both of their libraries of topics are rather limited.
During the time that he considers to be night, he huddles up against the pipe and falls asleep as the girl on the other side sings her song. Neither of them ever talk about this and at this point, it feels like an awkward topic to bring up to begin with.
Still, in the mornings when he wakes up with a rumbling, aching stomach, the thought of falling asleep beneath the warm blanket and listening to the song again in the coming night is what motivates him to get up and to keep walking through the world’s most empty and boring dungeon. It’s like an underground desert, and only the underground oases, which are the rare boss arenas, are what allow him to stay nourished enough to not lose himself to the animal hunger that he can feel rising a little more every day and that he can feel becoming just a tiny bit harder to control with every passing moment. The deep-hunger grows stronger and stronger, unsatisfied by slimes and spiders.
Every time he passes by a new two-way intersection, he can’t help but wonder where the leftward path would take him if he followed even one of them. But, entrenched in his ways as he is at this point, it makes more sense to him to keep following the path and, more importantly, the pipe, which always only ever takes the right turn. He thinks that he’s figured it out now, how he can keep turning right without the floor ever cutting back into itself.
What Alleluia had said about the dungeon being flat and wide isn’t entirely true, in a sense. The floor is slanted ever so slightly, not enough to even be noticeable while walking. But after enough distance, it’s high enough that it can rise above the hallways.
This is only a theory, of course. But it’s confirmed as he walks through another one of the monotone corridors, this one spiderless, and looks up, seeing the hole above his head. Picking up some rocks, he sets them into a circle. Hours later, he comes across the same hole, but from the top-side. Looking down at the space where he had stood just before, he sees his circle of rocks. Seeing this somehow brings him deep relief; it’s a sign that he isn’t really stuck in time like he has felt so far. He’s moving; he’s making progress, even if it doesn’t look like it from where he stands.
The further he goes, the louder the whirring of the machinery becomes as well. The silent turning of the gears, at first audible like the soft chiming of a music box, becomes louder and louder the longer he walks. The trickling sound, akin to the babbling of a tiny creek, becomes more like that of a churning ocean. Yet Alleluia’s voice always remains the same. It always carries with it a tone of high-born softness, holding an odd mixture of shyly maternal tones and high-nosed indignation at the same time.
That aura of nobility seems to lessen in its intensity the more they talk, however, or perhaps he simply becomes better at hearing her words for what they are rather than for what they sound like.
Canta pops another spider into his mouth, biting down and relishing the wet crunch that it makes, savoring the gooey popping as it explodes inside of his mouth.
“Spider,” he says plainly, after swallowing.
Dungeon Spider ~100g Calories: 115 *Protein: 19.3 g Fat: 4 g Carbs: 1.3 g Fiber: 0.5 g Sugars: 0 g Rich in ZINC!
“Sixteen,” counts Alleluia. “That’s a lot of spiders.” At first she had thought this was a rather disgusting game to be playing, if it could be called that, but eventually she joined in on his counting of the spiders that he has found and eaten. It gave them something to talk about, and that itself is actually the main goal of the ‘game’.
“I’m a growing boy,” he says, patting his still empty stomach.
“I’m sure,” she sighs. “So, if you died and were reborn, how old does that make you?”
Canta blinks. “Huh?”
“Well, how old is your new body?”
“I don’t know? It’s weird. It’s kind of… fishy,” he explains, looking down at his smooth skin.
“Hmm… well… Do your years from your last life count? Doesn’t that make you really old?”
“You’re one to talk,” he says. “How old are you, anyways?”
“What a rude thing to ask!” exclaims Alleluia.
“Huh?!” he flicks the pipe in agitation, pulling back a second later as an equally loud ringing reaches him. She had flicked her end at the exact same time, perhaps having seen his attack coming in advance. “You asked first!”
“I’m a lady. You can’t ask me that.”
He rolls his eyes. “As far as I can tell, you’re just an imaginary voice in my head. I can ask you whatever I want.”
“Says you.”
“Yeah, says me!” Canta turns his head, looking at the little thing in the corner. “SPIDER!” he cries, lunging forward towards the little morsel.
Alleluia sighs. “Seventeen.”
Canta chews on the spider, relishing the crunchy texture that he has slowly come to really appreciate. Lifting his head, he looks to the right, down the hallway, where he sees the next boss-arena. But this one looks different.
Dungeon Spider ~100g Calories: 115 *Protein: 19.3 g Fat: 4 g Carbs: 1.3 g Fiber: 0.5 g Sugars: 0 g Rich in ZINC!
“Hey, I see something,” says Canta, after swallowing his latest snack. Walking forward and wrapping his blanket back around himself, he looks around the corner, following the pipe that takes an odd turn that it has never taken before. His eyes look up at the massive door that spans from the floor to the distant dungeon ceiling, locked with what appears to be a series of giant chains. Someone had gone to great effort to embed them deeply into the rock in order to keep the door closed.
Canta crosses his arms, looking at the pipe and then back up at the door, noticing the many skulls laid out around this floor just before himself, hundreds of them.
“Hey, question. Are you sure that you aren’t evil?” asks Canta sarcastically, a tinge of both sarcasm and suspicion in his voice.
The whirring returns a moment later. “Huh? What an odd question. No, I’m not evil.”
“Just checking,” replies Canta, walking into the room, kicking a skull to the side as he heads towards the door.
She’s clearly evil.
The last thing he sees is a shadow pressing itself down onto him before something gigantic crushes him into a fine paste that is squashed flat against the ground. He is smushed into a goopy puddle that is not much thicker than the blanket that it permeates.