<~> CHAPTER 70

This is so surreal. I'm waiting in a line right now. This was it, we were finally queued up to leave the dungeon. I looked around at the whole mess of people around me. Don't get me wrong, I lived in a large city so being in a huge crowd isn't the crazy part. It has more to do with the... variety of people around me. I couldn't help but look around at everyone, which probably looked weird through the blindfold, and saw so many different humanoids. Beastkin of all different types made up a good half of everyone in the area, a fourth were humans, and the last fourth were draco and drakken, slightly weighted toward the shorter drakken.

I secretly studied one of the drakken since no one could see what I was looking at through the blindfold. It was like a shorter draco, the ones I've seen were somewhere between three and five feet tall. I absolutely towered over them now at my much greater height. They all had vibrant colored scales in all colors of the rainbow, some even having gradients or metallic tints to them. While the draco looked more humanoid but with dragon heads and a few other dragon-like features, the drakken looked much more animalistic with their reverse bent legs and their long tails balancing out their almost raptor-like stances. They did have upright torsos though which at least made them seem more like people, and they were all dressed and chatting in draconic so I couldn't mistake them for a monster, but all of it made me feel pretty strange.

Especially since I was gigantic compared to everyone else. The only people who came close to my height were some of the draco but I was taller than most of them too. They tended to be a bit taller than most humans on average, but I've only come across two now that were about the same height as me. My best estimates put me at around six and a quarter feet tall in my human form, but without tape measures or a ruler, I wasn't exactly sure. Few people around me even made it to six feet. Luna, who I thought was short, is actually kind of average and everyone else in my party is actually on the taller side when not compared to me.

Our group took a few steps forward as the line slowly kept moving. Luna leaned against my arm and smiled up at me. ("Are you excited to finally see the surface?")

I took her hand in mine and squeezed it. ("Very much so. I'm not sure what to expect up there but it'll be good to finally get out of here and be somewhere actually safe after so long.")

She nodded. ("Yes, deep dungeon dives like this can be stressful, especially if you weren't prepared for it like we were. All you had was that small bag.")

("My purse, yeah,") I replied. ("I didn't have much with me that was helpful. I would have died if it wasn't for my regeneration and ability to eat monsters. Well, maybe not the eating part, I did run into you guys pretty quickly after I got here. It was only a few days before I ran into you... not counting the time I was knocked out with the corpse on top of me anyway.")

I glanced at the crowd around us again and decided to change the subject. ("What other... species of people are there? Are there things like elves and dwarves?")

Luna shrugged. ("I don't know what elves and dwarves are, the rings didn't translate those words into anything I know of. As for other species of people, they're not very common this far inland but Aquilux are a race of semi-aquatic humanoids. There are also the Forn, they look like humanoid plant people, they have villages all over but there aren't as many in this region except for the occasional trader. Oh, and I suppose the Trillin. They are the children of Drakken and beastkin, they're not common because most beastkin don't find Drakken suitable mates. You see them occasionally, most of them are traders or wandering tradesmen. They tend to be hit hard by the beastkin wanderlust.")

("Beastkin wanderlust?") I asked.

She nodded. ("Yes, I think I mentioned it before but some places see beastkin as outsiders because they are more likely to travel around compared to the other races. Beastkin have a reputation for wanting to leave the place they grow up when they get old enough, which makes a lot of villagers resent having beastkin in their village because they can't count on their villages growing the same way an exclusively human village might. A beastkin might have six kids over her life and it's pretty likely not one of them will stay in the town when they come of age. It might even out if they accept traveling beastkin that want to settle down there, but many humans don't like it because they can't make the same multi-generational friendships they could have with humans or even draco. Trillin tend to be even more likely to leave and gravitate toward traveling jobs in particular. In a strange contradiction, people sometimes are more accepting of visiting Trillin than beastkin because they don't expect them to stay in the first place.")

("That's sad,") I replied.

("It is what it is,") she said with a shrug. ("It's not like the reputation is unwarranted.")

"We're almost there everyone," Maxwell said while turning back to look at us. "I need to go to the desk to sell everything and pay taxes on our game. Aria needs to come with me to see if her party reported her missing. Since you," he said looking at me while trying to get a message across, "don't want to go to the hunter's desk with me, the rest of you should go find all of us an inn for tonight. We can see what our options are after we see how much we made from this trip." He turned to face me more directly. "Helena, we decided to split everything four ways for most of the dungeon, but that doesn't include the... hound's fur. Is a three-tenths fee for cleaning the pelt fair? That leaves you with the other seven-tenths and the bones, after taxes." Luna had to fill in a few words but I got the message.

"Seven-tenths for that is fine. I trust you not to take advantage of me. I had already forgotten that we were not going to split the hound," I replied.

Maxwell laughed. "You've already helped us a lot on this delve. I wouldn't dare take advantage of you now."

I nodded toward Aria. "What about Aria?" She flinched and her brow furrowed when I brought her up.

"What about her?" Maxwell asked.

"Are we going to give her a cut? She did help us on the last few floors."

Aria suddenly looked surprised which... was an odd reaction.

"But..." she stumbled.

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Maxwell turned to look at her with an appraising glance. "Aria was supposed to pay us to escort her up here... She helped a bit, but I don't know if giving her a cut would be appropriate," Maxwell said, conflicted. Aria looked between everyone nervously.

"No cut," Piper said plainly. "But we can waive the fee for bringing her up... and she can keep those daggers. They're probably worth something but none of us can use them anyway."

Aria's eyebrows rose and most of her worry evaporated. "Really!?" She looked at the rest of us to see if anyone would push back against Piper's words.

"Fine with me." I shrugged and Luna nodded in agreement. Aria let out a sigh of relief and smiled.

"But..." Piper's tone suddenly turned more serious. "If... the worst has happened with the rest of your group, come back to the inn with Maxwell. No arguments."

"...Alright," Aria agreed.

Piper pulled off her waist bag that held the slime cores she carried and she handed them to Maxwell with Luna following suit. Piper looked over at me. "You didn't keep any slime cores did you?"

I shook my head. "No."

She nodded. "Good. You have some of that crystal on you but you didn't take enough to have to declare it so you should be fine. Can I look through the rest of your bag?" I nodded and handed it over to her. She dug through it for a while and even opened my purse and looked at my broken phone with a confused look on her face before putting it back and handing the bag back over. "Everything looks good. You shouldn't have any problems at bag check."

After another ten minutes, our group finally reached the stairs. There were two draco soldiers wearing full armor guarding the stairwell. The one on the right held a hand up. "One moment, please."

After another minute or so of silence, one of the short drakken reached the bottom of the stairs with another group of hunters following behind him. Once the group cleared the way, the soldiers stepped aside for us. "Follow him up to the top, the hunter's outpost is on the left, the bag check is on the right." He nodded to the drakken soldier and waved us forward.

My anxious anticipation was slowly growing as the five of us followed the drakken up the stairs and closer to the exit. Halfway through I could smell the scent of pine needles and feel cold air touch my skin. Luna pulled her robe tighter around herself, making me realize that it was even colder than I had thought, even though I couldn't feel it. And then, with a final step, I was on the surface again. I was finally outside the cruel dungeon.

It was late morning, not quite midday yet. We had been up for a while in our last sprint to get out of the dungeon today, which meant that we had left the lost halls in the middle of the night sometime. There was something different now that I was outside again, like a huge weight had been lifted off of my shoulders. It wasn't just anxiety, I actually felt lighter. It looked pretty cold and I could see my breath. It wasn't snowing but the nearby mountain chain was covered in it, and from the looks of things, it might start snowing here too. The city was in some kind of valley, nestled between two rows of mountains.

I couldn't see much of the city from here. At the top of the stairs was the entrance to three buildings with large walls built between them and another that wrapped its way around the dungeon stairs. Signs were posted above each building but I couldn't read them, we had been focused on teaching me to speak, not to read.

"You three are that way, toward bag check. Aria and I are going this way," he said pointing at the two opposite buildings. "Piper, the usual inn... two rooms I think. We'll figure out what we're doing next later tonight. I suspect it will take a while to meet up so feel free to take Helena on a tour of the city."

"I will bro, take care of Aria. See you later tonight."

Our group split up just as the drakken soldier was getting annoyed with us for holding up the line. I followed Piper and Luna to the bag check building.

("Do I need to do anything, or worry about anything going through here?") I asked Luna.

She shook her head. ("No, just don't wave your axe at anyone or make a fuss with them touching your stuff. They won't take anything and shouldn't break anything. They're just making sure we're not smuggling anything out that Maxwell needs to declare like monster parts. Or large amounts of that crystal on your waist.")

We got in another line that reminded me of airport security, but luckily it moved pretty quickly. We spent some time waiting for the people to look through all of our stuff, my phone once again got some odd looks, but we finally made it through. On the other side of the bag check Luna took my hand as we walked through the door into the dungeon city.

The city sprawled between the two snowcapped mountains in long bands in both directions, built around a sparkling river in a channel that cut through the middle. Right outside of the dungeon building were large multistory buildings made of what looked like stone and white concrete. The road that led up to the dungeon was packed full of people, and there were all sorts of food stands and tent shops between the buildings down the road. The air was fresh and smelled like the pine trees that were growing between some of the buildings, off in the distance, and on the mountainside.

Unfortunately, my blindfold made everything look a bit fuzzy and undefined past a particular point and I wasn't going to remove it as long as there were people around, so instead I got to see all of the various people and objects around me lit up with magic. It was a little disappointing that I wouldn't be able to look around with my own eyes but it was hard not to enjoy the novel experience of looking at everything with this curious form of sight. I was happy to see that in the sunlight I could make out colors in a way that I couldn't in the dungeon, even while using the crystal tied to my belt, but they were muted compared to what my true eyes would see. Despite the dull roar of chatter and barkers, I was able to distinguish the sounds around me pretty well too, I didn't feel quite as overloaded after my experience with the clockwork floor and the incessant beeping of the heart rate monitors on my version of the lost halls.

Luna squeezed my hand. ("Come on, there's so much I want to show you!")

I laughed as Luna pulled me toward another adventure in the new world that I've found myself in.

END OF BOOK 1