“Faster, Whaley!” I shouted, ocean spray hitting me in the face, seawater splashing into my mouth. I spat the salt out of my mouth and laughed. Treepo raced down the shoreline, keeping pace, probably chitter-grunting away in frustration out of earshot. My slippery, biological jetski kicked it up another notch.
When the weather warmed with spring returning to Mirut, I had started walking down the beach outside of town regularly, enjoying the bright sky and freedom. I only needed to stay invisible until the shoreline veered back inland and put the trees between the line of sight of the beach and the town wall so I could walk undisturbed. The jungle encroached right up to the sand, but few jungle beasts ever came out of the jungle and onto the sand or into the sea, unless I was baiting them to the water to use it for farming experience. It made walking the beach quite peaceful, even without the protection of the town wall.
It was on one of those walks that I saw the pod of sea creatures migrating by. After turning some pieces of fish into tamer treats, stealthily swimming out to them, and laying the bait, I had managed to convert one of them to Team Pilus. Now I was riding on its back away from town into new, unexplored territories. I watched as my map peeled away the fog of war and revealed to me new sea, beach, and jungle.
The beast was called a whaloid and was more-or-less a miniature orca with a small horn, if orcas were purple and orange, and if they had stubby hippopotamus-like legs to boot. I had no idea if whaloids could use their legs to actually come to land, and they mostly lazily drifted unused as the beast’s powerful tail pumped hard, propelling us forward. I held on to the dorsal fin, riding its back with glee.
After a while, I motioned for Whaley to take me back towards shore, swimming back to the beach where Treepo lay panting, finally able to rest. “You could have ridden with me if you were willing to get wet,” I told the tired treehopper, then turned back to the water. “You can go hunt for food, but stay nearby and check in when I’m ready to head back,” I told the whaloid.
I surveyed the beach and the jungle, which looked like more of the same beach and jungle I was used to. I didn’t want to go too much further because I would have to head back before it got late. Treepo worked up some energy to chitter-grunt at me so I cast a weak cure on him to alleviate some of his fatigue. “Let’s eat some lunch and then check out this part of the jungle,” I told my familiar.
A short while later, well-fed and ready for adventure, Treepo and I headed into the thick foliage.
We weren’t far enough from our usual stomping grounds for anything to be sufficiently different in the jungle. We found a lot of the same flowers, plants, fruits, and nuts in the flora, and saw a lot of the same treehoppers, vicaws, and other beasts that make up the fauna. Being further from town, I noticed more wild polerats than I was used to seeing in the jungle; I assumed the ones that were near town found their way in, where there was less predation and more opportunities to scavenge from humans. After seeing the nodmouse’s evolution, I found myself curious about what a polerat, raised to its plateau and fed magic crystals, would look like. It probably wouldn’t be that hard to do…
I shook my head, chasing the thought away. One day, maybe, but not today.
I was looking for a challenge, something big and mean to fight so I could earn some good experience. I wanted something new. What I found was not what I was expecting.
We had been walking for a while when I noticed that the sounds of the jungle around us had faded, as if all the beasts had cleared away. Treepo raced up to my shoulder, stiff, eyes wide and tail quivering. His claws dug into my skin a bit, and I winced. Something was seriously spooking him. I saw something dark through the trees ahead.
A beast? Something bad enough to scare away the locals? I was already magically invisible and silent–Treepo and I always were now when we were in the jungle, to avoid surprises and give us the ability to get the first strike on a possible threat–so I slowly pushed forward to scope out the target.
The darkness was not a beast. It was an outcropping that jut out of the ground, some kind of dark rock. I touched it and was surprised at how warm it felt. I walked around it slowly, curious, and when I got to the other side I saw the cave entrance. Treepo started grunting softly as I stepped forward and stuck my head in the cave to try to peer through the darkness.
I felt the pressure of a notification, and pulled up my map.
Exiting Mirut Jungle. Entering Unknown Dungeon (Rank D).
I gasped and quickly stepped back, which gave me the inverse notification as I returned to the jungle. A dungeon.
Several emotions warred inside of me. I was nervous and a little scared, yes, but mostly excited; the experience potential could be huge. I wasn’t sure what “Rank D” meant, but it didn’t sound insanely tough. I badly wanted to go inside and take a look, but I had no idea what would happen. Would I be able to leave, or would I get trapped inside? Was I prepared for the contents? Even if I easily survived, if I got trapped inside for the night, how could I possibly explain myself to my parents?
There was so much opportunity here, but it could seriously screw things up for me if it went wrong, ignoring the reasonably large risk of death. I was surprisingly used to the risk of death, but I didn’t like the notion of being in real trouble with my parents. Depending on how I counted my real age, I was pushing, or even over, 40 years old now. I wasn’t sure I could handle being grounded and wasn’t willing to give up my current, comfortable life just yet.
I had already technically entered, according to my map, even if it was only partially. I didn’t get warped or sucked inside, and I was able to leave. So maybe I wouldn’t get stuck if I tried doing this. I realized immediately I had already decided I would, but that didn’t mean I had to do this today.
I backed away and Treepo’s tension eased a bit. For the moment, I would head back to Mirut, and I would prepare. I would come back fully ready and conquer this dungeon.
I couldn’t wipe the grin off my face as I raced back to the beach.
* * *
“Mom, can I stay at a friend’s house tonight?” I asked during breakfast.
Horg and Sharma looked at each other, surprised. This was the first time I mentioned a friend. “Which friend?” Sharma asked.
“Rog,” I lied. “We met at the Church.”
Horg smiled and Sharma thought it over. “Sure,” she said after a moment. “We expect you home tomorrow before dinner.”
I tried not to grin too big. Hopefully they didn’t actually know Rog and follow up with his parents. After doing some delicate research by way of the other children at the Church, I confirmed that the children of Mirut do, sometimes, have sleepovers. That was the oldest lie in the book back on Earth, the simplest way to get away with nights of youthful mistakes, and if I rushed there and back would give me about thirty hours to test out that dungeon. I had prepared potions, cooked meat, stone tools and traps, and several larger emergency magic circles made of stone to deploy in case things got wildly out of hand and I needed to unleash a lot of magic all at once. I had practiced debuffs, slightly more advanced illusions, and other offensive tactics I hadn’t used in the past in case I was overwhelmed. I was as ready as I could be, save for actually growing up and attempting this as an adult instead of a child.
Fortunately, magic was the great equalizer. My spells would be as powerful at fifteen years old as they were at seven and a half, if my level and skills were the same. Some of the novice guards were only level 10, themselves, so I didn’t feel particularly underpowered despite my age.
Admittedly, they had a lot more combat skills than I did. If I totally ran out of MP, I was screwed.
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Four years had passed since I fully awoke in this world, and I had trained throughout. I could do this. Probably.
I raced out of the house after wishing my parents well, my pack stuffed with a care package from Sharma which I transferred to my inventory when the house was out of sight. I hit the beach, already invisible, summoned a dome of air around my head–this was actually a complicated bit of magic, because it also used water magic to prevent the sea from caving in the bubble when underwater–and dove in, swimming out to Whaley who met me as I had planned. I grabbed its dorsal and we zoomed away, surfacing when the beast was sufficiently far from the wall.
I guided the whaloid with my map open back to the location where my fog of war started. I spotted the cairn I had built and left on the beach as a marker and came ashore. Treepo scurried down a nearby tree; I had staged him there the day before so as to not slow down my journey here and maximize my available time.
“Bye Whaley, I’ll be back tomorrow,” I said, tossing him a fish from my inventory. “You ready, Treepo?”
The treehopper chitter-grunted at me, looking unsure. I tossed him a treat.
“Well, tough. Time to earn your keep. Let’s go.”
We reached the cave, the same uncomfortable silence that was so abnormal in the jungle. The dungeon exuded an aura. I hesitated to call it evil–nothing in life is that black and white–but it felt unnatural. This wasn’t a normal cave, and the contents likely weren’t normal either. I had no idea what to expect.
I stepped through the entrance anyway, and cast a light. I touched the stone discs seated in my belt. I had six slots in my belt, two of each type of magic circle. The stronger I got, the easier it was to crack one of these by casting with too much power. I needed metal and a means to shape it to make stronger magic circles, but that was a problem for the future.
The light barely lit up the darkness of the dungeon, so I pushed some more MP into the spell and headed further in. I heard a scratching sound up ahead and squinted into the darkness to try and make out a shape. Upon getting closer, I saw a familiar form.
“Oh. It’s just a polerat,” I complained under my breath. I fired off a stone bolt and killed the beast. I took a few steps over to grab the corpse and drop it in my inventory, but by the time I reached it, the body was gone.
I prodded the ground where the polerat had fallen. It was as hard as the floor was throughout the dungeon. It felt like my eyes had tricked me, but it seemed like the ground had absorbed the dead beast.
“Well, that’s new,” I muttered to Treepo, who seemed particularly displeased about this whole affair.
I heard a familiar screech and ducked, dodging a divebombing vicaw. It flapped its wings, stopping itself from hitting the ground behind me, then flew at my face, claws extended. Wait, wasn’t I invisible? I swatted the bird off me, and it hit the ground. Treepo jumped on it, slamming it into the ground with his back legs to death. Then he screamed in surprise, leaping away as the ground slurped up the dead body. He grunted angrily and raced back to my shoulder.
Ok, so, the dungeon consumed the dead and the beasts within could sense me even when invisible, which probably meant silenced too. That was… unnerving, but the beasts within had just been the beasts outside, and I could deal with those, even if I was taken by surprise. A ramhog, striking vipis, or griffator could be a problem if I didn’t have the possibility to prepare in advance, but I could manage those beasts pretty well in an even fight. We pushed deeper into the dark tunnel, which slowly descended beneath the surface of the jungle.
I touched the wall of the tunnel as I walked, the rock warmer than I would expect for a dark, underground tunnel. The air was warm too. I stopped and knocked on the wall. What kind of mineral was this? I glanced around for a loose rock to examine, and finding none, I tried to use my magic to separate a piece of stone from the wall.
It didn’t work. I frowned, and tried again with more magic. I could not affect the material in this cave, whatever it was. Fortunately, I brought my own stones, but without an inventory like mine, an earth magic user would be in trouble down here. If I could find a piece already separated I would try to cast magic on that and put it in my inventory, but for the moment I couldn’t afford to waste the MP.
The cave system appeared to be a series of tunnels. Every now and then the tunnels would split, giving me choices about which direction I wanted to explore in. I encountered polerats, vicaws, and–unfortunately–treehoppers, all of which were hostile immediately once they noticed me, forcing me to kill each one, upon which they were absorbed into the weird material of the floors and walls. Some tunnels would dead-end, and I would have to double back. Other branches of the tunnel seemed to be circling back on itself, causing me to reach forks in the tunnel from the wrong direction. I was leaving some markers for myself in place of having a map, but it was getting rather confusing the more I explored. The only thing that was absolute was that the tunnels that went deeper increasingly went downward, deeper into the earth. I should be able to find my way back so long as I traveled upward, provided I didn’t hit any reverse-oriented dead ends or get caught in a looping tunnel that leads me back down elsewhere.
I was getting a bit frustrated at the labyrinthian nature of the dungeon and the low-level beasts which weren’t giving me much experience when I encountered a ratman. I was used to seeing ratmen in the jungle in the winter, but it was already well into spring. These beasts usually returned north by spring, with the ramhogs migrating back north from the southern jungle near the desert. Ratmen were usually pretty passive, too, but this one seemed furious. He attacked me with an anger I wasn’t used to seeing from a ratman and it took me by surprise. I almost lost my footing as the beast threw itself at me, pivoting to dodge and air blasting it away. It hit the wall with a loud whump, but was back on its feet immediately, snarling. I shot a stone bullet into its eye and it dropped, the floor already giving way to the corpse as it disappeared into the dungeon’s belly. I shuddered. That part made me feel incredibly gross.
Ratmen became more common as I pushed onward, until I encountered something truly strange: a ratman and a ramhog, together. They weren’t fighting, they were just idling, at least until one of them saw me and they both rushed to attack.
No way these two creatures would be working together. These beasts must be enslaved to this dungeon in some way. Perhaps the dungeon lured in the beasts which passed by, which meant that the longer the dungeon existed, the more different types of animals it caught, even across different seasons and migrations. No wonder Treepo hated how it felt. He could probably only resist becoming enslaved by the dungeon because of his tamer-familiar bond with me. It also explained the zone of silence around the entrance. Anything that would be making a sound was already consumed by the unnatural-feeling entrance to this dark underworld.
I dodged the ramhog at the last second as the beast charged me with aggressive vigor, and hit the ratman with a stone bullet. I summoned a rocky shieldback shell from my inventory to slam into the ramhog when it recovered from its first charge to turn back on me, and timed an air blast into the back of the shell to hit the ramhog with significantly extra force. While it was dazed, I jammed a stone blade into its neck, tearing open an artery. Now I just had to evade it until it bled out. I had hunted a number of ramhogs since my first and had them pretty well figured out.
Once the dungeon consumed the two bodies, I got my bearings and decided to take a short break. It was probably around lunchtime now, and it wouldn’t hurt to recover my MP. Treepo and I ate our meat in the silent tunnel, the soft light barely keeping the darkness at bay. I pondered what we had seen so far as I chewed.
It wasn’t too bad, overall. It was dark, quiet, and creepy, sure. I got no loot from corpses, because the dungeon ate them. I wasn’t getting a ton of experience, but it was steady, and there was little risk of being snuck up on since each encounter was further forward and I had killed everything at my back. It seemed like the stronger monsters had been drawn down into the deeper parts of the dungeon, since that was the pattern so far, and I could foresee a point where I could be facing groups of griffators and vipises which would be a problem, but I could always back out if it got to that.
Was it worth it, though? Now that I had a larger inventory, losing out on all the corpses was kind of a drag. I wasn’t getting more experience than I would outside, even if I had to spend more time hunting to find the same level of creatures. If there wasn’t some kind of reward at the end of this, it might not make sense to tackle these challenges.
Except… this was a dungeon. The map said so; it even ranked it. There probably was something at the end. It also might be able to rank up further and become dangerous. I didn’t know the relationship between dungeons and the people of this world. Did people normally feel compelled into dungeons as well, when they encountered them? Did anything ever come back out of the dungeons? That could be the case when a dungeon gathered enough strength and power, but I had no idea. Did the dungeons negatively affect the area as they got stronger, aside from leeching away the local fauna? The only way I could learn more about this, for the moment, was to continue on.
After taking out another ramhog and choosing a path at the next intersection, things started to change.
I summoned the rocky shieldback shell from my inventory just in time to block the fireball, and pulled out a waterskin with my other hand, popping the cork and drawing the water out. I peered around the shell to see what had shot offensive magic at me for the first time in this world.
An orange and grey bird was flapping its wings, hovering in the tunnel ahead. I increased the light to try and get a better look, and it shot another fireball at me. I ducked back behind the shell, then fired a jet of water at the bird. It screeched.
“That kind of looks and sounds like a vicaw,” I mumbled to myself as I sent an air blast at the bird, hoping to knock it to the ground. I heard a thunk, glanced out to see the bird down, then pushed hard with my earth magic to slam the shell into the bird. I lifted it and brought it down on the bird again. I saw the bird getting absorbed into the floor so I pulled the shell back to try to get a glance before it was gone, but the dungeon ate the body too fast.
I had never seen that bird before, which didn’t tell me anything definitive. It had shot magic at me, though. Was it an evolved beast? An evolved vicaw, maybe? If the dungeon had the power to evolve beasts, then things could get dangerous inside of one very rapidly. An evolved vicaw wasn’t a big deal, even with fire magic. An evolved griffator or vipis would be a different story.
I debated briefly, but my curiosity won out, and I headed deeper into the dungeon.