They had reached the brook where the unmoving corpse of the wooden automaton still sat, just as charred as it had been last time they saw it. Nate looked at it in wonder. He was too busy drowning to see the last part of the fight and the aftermath. He didn’t say anything though. They were all moving at too fast of a pace to waste precious breath speaking.

Once they entered the forest, Agnar veered off to the left away from the main path and both Nate and Tray followed.

The landscape they passed by in their silent hurry was almost as much of a patchwork as the city was. There was dirt of the normal color from what the town had, but there were strips of a more rusty dirt color stretching across the forest floor. Trees would sometimes be halfway turned into a completely different species of tree. Normal ugly mushrooms would be right nearby an unusual glowing variant of the same mushroom.

They climbed over a rotten log that blocked their path. The shelf fungus dotting the wood was also interspersed with a more exotic variant of shelf fungus that was exhibiting a bright dotted red hue. Dangerous looking luminescent red spores floated around those ones.

Nate was lagging behind. All the physical training from earlier in the day wasn’t doing him any favors right now.

“C..Can we find a place to stop please? Just for a moment.” He panted out

Agnar was disturbed from his thoughts having seemingly forgotten that he wasn’t alone.

“Oh, right. There’s a hidden location up ahead. Just a little further.”

All Tray could see were leaves, trees, and wood.

They traveled for almost a minute more before stopping near a hill. In the middle of the hill a crevice had been formed making this small place look like a pizza someone stole a thin slice from.

Once they were hidden in the crevice with the dirt walls on both side, tray noticed that the soil on the walls was the normal brown, but the soil underneath him was the more rusty iron soil that was foreign to him.

“Sorry, just stay here a minute, I have to go do something” Agnar requested before leaving out of sight.

Tray and Nate sat down in exhaustion, trying to recover their breath. Sweat dripped down as they just rested.

Almost a minute had passed before Agnar returned. His eyes were puffy and red around the edges, but Tray chose not to point that out. He could guess well enough as to what Agnar was doing.

Shadows started to elongate as the sun slowly dipped below the horizon.

Tray couldn’t help but ask “If the soil here is mismatched, doesn’t that mean this hidden crevice is a result of our worlds getting mixed? How would you know this hiding place was even here?”

Agnar simply responded “Once a talent evolves, you get a second magic skill related to your talent, but this second one is unique to each person. One of my talents came from killing a Whimsy boss. It was embarrassing to lock one of my three talents into a Whimsy talent, but it was so weak that I didn’t even know it was a boss until I earned the talent for killing it.

“It lets me summon a handful of flowers. At best the flowers can irritate your eyes and nose, but only if you smash it into your face and hold it there. Likely the weakest talent a person can get. The evolved version of the whimsy talent that I got is a different story. It sort of lets me...read the wind I guess. Helps for reading the movement of a sword, detects movement in a wide range so I can avoid ambushes, and can also for finding hidden places like caves where the airflow is different.”

“Evolved talent?”

“Yes. After reaching a level of proficiency with a talent you get a second skill that is also related to the boss monster you got the talent from killing. The first is the same for each person. Everyone who kills a promethian turtle boss gets the ability to shield themselves from attacks like I can, but the second ability that evolves from it is different for every person. Some can get the ability to shield others, or to project a shield and maybe even use it as a foothold. My evolved version of it is a passive one that causes any reasonably sized non-living object I am touching to become incredibly durable and nigh unbreakable.”

“That’s cool.” Nate finally spoke.

Agnar responded. “Yea, I suppose it it...Speaking of which, there’s a deeper patch of silence in the air up ahead. Probably a cave. There’s honestly no way the two of you can outrun the hunters that Donnel will send after us, so I think hiding would be your best option.”

“Right. Makes sense.” Nate nodded.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hidden underneath a large boulder and blocked by many overgrown roots was a large cave opening.

It was somewhat ominous, but it was also perfectly hidden. If there was ever to be a hiding place that was better than this, Tray most certainly would not be the one to find it.

Seeing Tray’s hesitation, Nate took the initiative to enter first.

Once Tray finally had the courage to enter, he looked back to where he entered from and only saw a dirt wall.

“What?!”

Agnar appeared suddenly through the dirt wall confused.

“What do you mean what?”

“The wall behind us.”

Agnar’s eyes widened once he saw what Tray meant.

“Drat! This is a dungeon!”

After a contemplative moment Tray punched the wall they had entered from, but it was solid dirt just as it looked.

"Can't we just dig out?" Nate asked

“If this is a dungeon, digging out won’t work. People have tried. This is a completely different space and is separated from the entrance. We need to kill the boss to get out.”

“How dangerous, exactly, are these dungeons?” Tray asked.

“Very.”

The only reassuring thing that Tray found was that the dim place was lit with an ambient light. The three of them cast shadows onto the floor as they walked, but Tray didn’t see any light source in the ceiling.

They turned down into a hallway, and the walls of the hallway was also constructed out of dirt and the odd fungus here and there.

Up ahead of them was an expansive room. Agnar slowed his pace while cautiously peeking around the room.

The room was a wreck. There were many beautiful pillars of what looked like tree roots entangling around columns of stone. Half of them or more had been smashed in the middle and only held off the ground due to the roots still clinging to them. Many others were missing as if something had just barreled right through them.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Nate tripped as he lost his footing. The floor was in equally bad shape as the rest of the room. Pockmarks and massive holes littered the surface.

Agnar walked up to one of the smashed pillars and looked around to the other side of it. A dead fungus monster sat there, smashed into a shape that it was not naturally meant to be in.

Closer inspection of the room revealed more of the same. They were hard to spot at first because they almost looked like a part of the natural environment.

“Someone’s already in this place. Dungeons vanished when they are cleared so they must still be in here somewhere.” Agnar broke the silence.

“If we’re in luck, they might not know that we are basically fugitives.” Tray added.

“Or they’ll mistake us for a monster and flatten us like they did to these mushrooms.” Nate said

“Hush Nate. No more of that pessimism.” Responded Tray.

They kept walking. They passed by more and more rooms, each one in a similar state to the others.

“Someone sure was destructive with how they fight.” Tray muttered, almost amused at how much necessary damage was dealt to the walls ceiling and floor of each of these rooms.

Sometimes the hallway branched off in multiple directions, but Agnar could feel generally how much empty space was in each and elected to go down the one with the most free space. The other paths were likely nothing more than dead ends or worse.

The farther along they walked, the more the fungus started to recede as roots, stones, and sometimes even brightly glowing flowers growing from the walls became prevalent.

They found a set of stairs leading down to a massive room. Above the staircase were many tree roots dangling down.

They hesitantly continued down the stairs.

The ambient lighting got slightly dimmer as they descended. Lining the edges of the room was a massive pit that Tray could not see the bottom to. The ceiling consisted of what looked like stalactites, though close inspection would reveal them to be intertwined roots. Ivy draped down from above is sparse patches. At the center of the room stood two people and one monster.

Both of the people were female. One of them wore what looked like heavy leather armor and a massive poleaxe with carvings of serpents adorning it. The other wore chainmail and held a shield in one hand with a large heavy spiked mace in the other.

The monster they were facing was huge. It was as if the root system of an ancient tree had detached from the tree and decided to grow legs. It’s face was covered with moss and hanging ivy. It’s eyes glowed a pale teal fog.

It was also wrapped up by two massive snakes that were constructed out of rocks and lined with spikes. Whatever fight had happened here had already concluded long ago and for whatever reason they had decided to simply wait around instead of killing the beast.

Upon seeing the three descending the staircase, the one holding the poleaxe perked up and spoke.

“There he is. See? I told you we were in the right dungeon. Tray! It’s about time you got here. I was getting bored of holding this monster for you.”

This wasn't quite the reaction any of them had expected.

"Do you know them?" Nate inquired.

Tray shook his head in response. "No."

"Yes he does, or did. The other two must be...Nate?..and the old guy you told me about but I never remembered his name."

"Agnar" the old man entered the conversation. "and who might you two be?"

"Clair" The one holding the mace introduced herself "and she's Terra." she pointed to the one holding the poleaxe.

Tray couldn't puzzle out if he had ever met them before. "How did you know my name? Or that we were going to be in this dungeon?"

"Because you told us all about you adventure here. Said that you lost your two friends with you while clearing this dungeon out. Seems things are a little different this time around though."

Nate put two and two together and rolled his eyes. "Should have guessed we'd encounter self-proclaimed time travelers. Next up on the bucket list of strange things to see would be purple flying elephants. I don't believe you two one bit."

Clair scoffed at him "Whether or not you believe us is of no concern. You weren't important to the future anyway, whatever your name was."

This irked Nate more than he expected, but Tray stopped him before he could say anything he would regret.

"Nate is my friend. If friends aren't important to the future that you claim to know, then I'll have nothing to do with you."

Terra stepped inbetween clair and the others. "Simmer down. Simmer down. We just came here to hopefully have 3 allies instead of 1 ally with a sad story. Wasn't really time travel either. It was more of a...I guess you could call it a system restoration. The forceful usage of this basically fried the backups, or at least that's what I was told would happen if we ever needed to use it and I assume it's true so unless you know how to repair a magical computer game's files back to what they were, it won't happen again."

"How convienient you can't do it again to prove you really did time travel" Nate muttered.

"It's rare to encounter other people in dungeons and ever rarer that people would defeat a monster and wait for a specific person at a specific time when that person never even knew he was going to enter a dungeon until less than an hour ago. This isn't a co-incidence." This reasoning came from Agnar, who had taken the backseat to the conversation until now.

Agnar continued "Either they have a pre-cognitive talent letting them see the future, or they could be telling the truth. I suppose it doesn't matter which one it is, but I do still have a question. You called Tray an ally. An ally to help you with what exactly? What would any of that have to do with not killing the dungeon boss?"

Terra smiled and she twirled her poleaxe and turned to face the restrained monster. She pointed her weapon at it.

"That there is an Ent Sage. Tray, the evolved Ent Sage talent that you unlocked was of immense use to us. The ability to see and hear through any tree in a half-mile radius nearby kept us alive through terrible situations more than once. It was almost as if the trees were cameras and you were switching between each camera's screen to keep an eye out for danger."

Terra turned back to Tray before continuing. "So I'm going to need you to kill it to gain it's talent."

Without even a moment of consideration, Tray responded with a "Nope."

Terra's smile vanished.