Solo (Part 1)

It was dawn before Idris gave up on finding more cave imp tracks. He had tracked down and killed a couple dozen of them but he was sure there were more out there. His body just couldn’t continue the search any longer, and with no energy left to feel angry the space leftover filled him with guilt.

Broken. He hadn’t just said it, he had insisted on it. To his own sister. The shame of his own betrayal cut deep. He had to make it right. But there was so little time.

Sunlight was filtering through the trees but everything was still cast in the gray of early dawn. He needed to meet with Jibs or Karno in a couple of hours, make amends with his sister, and hopefully grab a short nap. His stomach rumbled unhappily. And something to eat.

It took the better part of an hour for him to wind his way through the trees and arrive back at home. He knocked gently on Eana’s door and when, as expected, she didn’t answer, he gently opened the door.

“Sorry if I’m waking you, Yahn,” he began, but opened the door on an empty room.

He wanted to leave it. To just set the problem down to be picked up after some rest, but fatigued though it was, his mind couldn’t help but force him to wonder what her normal schedule should look like.

She usually left later than he and his father, she would go and meet with Gendra. But Gendra would be coming down to meet with him and the Seekers. Beside that, she had been hiding from the village since the incident with the Node and Ken’s death. She had nowhere to be. No friends.

But was that true?

“Shimmer,” Idris said to himself, “she said it’s her friend.”

Worry began to grip him but he shook it off. She was impulsive and angry at him but after the fight they had just had, and the whole fiasco of leveling up the dungeon, she wouldn’t be back there. No, she was just out somewhere avoiding him.

She would be back tonight. She had better be.

***

Training proceeded much the way it had previously. Hellishly painful and difficult, but Idris had to admit it was working. His toughness was all the way up to 21.

And bizarrely, he felt like he was growing closer to his new comrades. Even Gendra, who Idris had always pictured as crotchety and irritable, had brought them all lunch and a bundle of sweets for him. He accepted, and to his surprise the hulking Karno nudged him for a bite.

This whole situation was so bizarre in its hominess. He had his bandmate, taking him under his wing and, though harsh in training, friendly in everything else. Then this old woman who was beloved in the community that Idris had avoided interacting with almost entirely out of resentment for how she had treated Eana. Resentment that was entirely a product of Eana’s impressions and stories, not his own.

Come to think of it, everything negative he had heard about Gendra had come from Eana. And Gendra had undone it all with a bundle of sweets and a comforting presence.

He bit into another of the sweets as the three of them chuckled together over some story the old woman told, and Idris squashed the sense that liking this woman was somehow another betrayal of his sister.

He just wanted this experience to be for Eana as well. Wanted her to be there and laughing - accepted - along with the rest of them. He wondered about what she was doing. How she was doing.

When Karno sent him home it was with a spring in his step and new energy to make amends with Eana. He wanted to get her to a place where she could see the good in the townspeople and the adventurers that called Irondale home. And where they could see the same in her.

But it was an empty house that greeted him when he got back. His father would be home sometime the next day. This one week of managing his own affairs would come to a close and perhaps he could close the book on that argument with his father, putting it to rest for good as he started the rest of his life.

Eana first though.

Maybe she had gone to the dungeon. She did it before and she was OK, but that was the entrance area and the level up didn’t happen quite as he imagined it. The creatures gushing out were less interested in fighting and more interested in escape to the surrounding Chaos Lands.

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If she could brave it alone, so could he. He stuffed some supplies into his inventory, equipped his bracers - which he kept diligently hidden from the adventurers in case they asked - and headed out on the path to the Shimmering Rocks Dungeon.

The entrance looked no different at level two than it had at level one, but his map wouldn’t update until he got inside. He hefted his hammer, ready for anything, and stepped through into the space beyond.

The change was shocking. Looking around for immediate threats and seeing nothing, he opened his interface and checked the map. It mirrored what he saw in front of him, and like before, showed some icons off in unexplored sections of the dungeon but none of it was filled in anymore.

The main hall colored itself in as he looked around. It was much smaller than before. The original room had shocked him with its size, grandeur even, but this was much more a simple cave with enough crystals and shimmering rock to highlight the theme of the dungeon. A small pool was at the center but, insofar as Idris could tell, the water in it was just that.

He wondered what sort of options or choices the consciousness that controlled the dungeon had. It obviously worked within limits like he did in his own path, so maybe it had a certain amount of points to spend on new rooms and creatures? That first room was a bit overly large for not doing anything. He supposed it could have reclaimed some of the resources used to make it to build out something else.

He quit musing and focused back on the present.

“Eana!” he called out.

The only answer was the echo of his own voice. He didn’t expect any sort of reply but figured it couldn’t hurt.

“Stupid,” he said aloud, venting the fresh frustration with his sister, “ ‘ShImMeR wOn’T hUrT mE!’ You MORON! You had to go deeper!”

He front kicked a crystalline stalagmite, annoyed it didn’t break.

He took a couple of deep breaths and tried to put his frustration aside long enough to take in the situation at hand.

Instead of three options like the original, he had two which he thought of as east and west because of the map’s orientation with the main hall at the bottom and center of the illusory page of his map.

He circuited the entire room, checking for anything that hadn’t made it to his map or wasn’t immediately obvious and hoping to find some sign of Eana. He was doubtful though, since dungeons tended to absorb anything left in them long enough.

“Dungeon funeral!” he said aloud, remembering what Conrad had said would be done with the body of the man killed when the imps broke through the node. They had taken his corpse and left it in the hive dungeon to be absorbed, giving its energy and XP to help grow the dungeon.

The practical part of his mind understood the reasoning, but Idris recoiled at the Idea about which Conrad had been so cavalier.

Eana on the other hand could simply channel energy somehow into the dungeon and grow it herself… Was that really so bad? It had shocked him so much and so much had happened he hadn’t had a chance to reflect on it in light of what people would do to grow a dungeon.

Finding nothing to go on, he picked the west passage on a whim and passed through. The map updated, letting him know he had entered the West Hall. In front of him and stretching into the semi darkness of the cavern environment he could see several small fires and torches. He dashed off to the side and did his best to conceal himself behind a low rock formation.

This hall was much like the Hall of Imps he had cleared with Eana, but looking closely he saw the imps were changed. Not a lot, but after killing so many of them he knew what they should look like.

All of them carried spears or axes with crystal or shimmering rock heads and points. Their sizes were varied, with most of them being the size he expected - about that of a human child, but others about a head taller, more muscular, and sporting pauldrons and semi protective armor of what looked like ironwood.

What was more, they seemed to be traveling in organized groups, with one larger imp to several of the smaller ones.

With Eana here and healing him, they could likely handle this but without the certainty of having his wounds close up, even if he was more powerful than these creatures he might eventually be taken down by attrition.

He retreated slowly, not sure if they would be able to follow him back into the main hall if he was spotted. Checking out the other passageway before attempting to make his way forward made more sense - as a solo adventurer he had to be smarter about this than he had been with his Healer.

Here he had expected to find the Mushroom Forest. But it was more of the same. The East Hall was almost a clone of the west in terms of monster composition. It was as if the dungeon had completely changed itself, not just in layout, but in type. Everything seemed to be more in line with the Shimmering Rocks, and less so with the surrounding forest lands.

As he took it all in he couldn’t help but mull over a persistent doubt - was Eana really here? The thought crept into his mind alongside the anxiety of attempting to kill so many monsters on his own.

She could have tried to clear these rooms on her own. She was a capable fighter now, moreso when he was around, but no way could she handle an entire set of these things on her own. Especially not these upgraded versions. She was impulsive, but not crazy.

But where else would she have gone?

And what if she didn’t have to fight to get through? If she could really talk to the dungeon, could really help it, this strange class gift she had been given by the dungeon could perhaps have given her a way to bypass all of this and go deeper.

But if it was drawing her in by playing this game of friendship then it had plans for her. Dungeons made their whole existence on killing and absorbing creatures and people, growing forever like great trees spreading their roots further and deeper. Nothing like that could ever actually be friends with the things whose deaths it used to build and power its own existence.

But to a girl rejected by everybody around her, now even including her own brother? Even the friendship of a dungeon must feel like a lifeline.

She had to be here somewhere - there was no other possibility.