I stiffened, barely shaking off the roar-induced paralysis. I cast a protective silence in the cave to avoid another aural assault. I wanted to check to see if Treepo had shrugged the attack off as well, but couldn’t afford to look away, even for a second.

As soon as it had finished roaring, it pulled its head back, and launched a ball of spit at me. I summoned a rocky shieldback shell just in time, and the spit splashed off the surface, sizzling. Acid? I wasn’t sure if my immunity buff would shield from that.

I dropped the shield just in time to see that it had already closed the gap and was swiping at me.

An air blast blew me to the side, and the razor sharp talons just missed me by a hair. What was that? I glanced in the direction the air blast had come to and saw Gregory gliding through the air. Had he…?

No time to stop and think, as the beast had turned toward me again. I cast a bright light directly into its eyes, hoping to blind it, got my feet under me, and ran to put some distance between us. I heard Treepo scream and saw him swiping at the giant monster, trying to scratch through the feathers. I yelled at him to get back. He was more likely to be killed than to help; I would have to do this myself.

The demon roared, but ineffectually thanks to my silence spell. I needed to slow this thing down. I had never tried to cast this debuff to this scale before, and prayed this wouldn’t bottom out my MP. I dropped my large 6-point magic circle out of my inventory, and launched a slow debuff at the silently-roaring terror.

I felt my MP take a hit, but not a debilitating one. My slow debuff at this level would only drop its speed by a bit, but every second would help against this monster. I started drawing my stone ammunition from my inventory and pelting the beast’s face with the stone. Most blew up harmlessly off the feathers without penetrating the skin, but I caught the giant evolved griffator in the eye and it flinched.

While it was distracted, I dropped some shieldback shells and floated them away, holding them in reserve for when I needed them. I launched some fireballs towards the beast at the same time, hoping to prevent it from seeing and tracking the shells.

I circled around, keeping some distance and forcing the beast to pivot if it wanted to attack again. It did so, slowed slightly, and made to pounce towards me again. That was my chance.

As it leapt, I brought the rocky shells down hard on either side of the creature’s head. It stumbled, shaking off the stun and trying to figure out what just hit it. I peppered it with more stone ammunition, not giving it a chance, then lifted the shells back away into the darkness to deploy again.

I was bleeding MP too quickly, so I pulled and drank another MP potion, ignoring my roiling stomach as I moved to run around the beast again. It swiped at me, and I barely saw the motion in time, tumbling off to the side and avoiding the swipe thanks to my acrobatics training. Full of magic, I dropped my large 4-point circle, and hit it with fire.

The feathers refused to ignite, but the beast was surrounded by the scorching flames, and I took the opportunity to pull all my waterskins out of my inventory, popping the corks out of all of them. I gathered the water up together, and dropped the fire all at once. The beast roared at me again, and I sent the water like a jet down its throat.

Surprised and confused, the giant cat-like dinosaur creature gagged and coughed. I tried to hold the water in its lungs, but it resisted, the dungeon-evolved beast having magic resistance of some kind of its own. It horked up the water along with some more acid which hit the ground and sizzled.

I didn’t have enough offense for this battle. I racked my brain trying to figure out what I could do.

I heard the sizzling acid, and had an idea.

The acid was mixed with my water, so I scooped the whole mixture from the ground with magic and threw it back in the creature’s face.

The creature bellowed, the acid burning at the monster’s face and eyes. I circled around the beast more, completing my revolution and returning to Treepo and Gregory, who watched anxiously near the cave entrance after being commanded to fall back. They looked fine, and I sighed in temporary relief.

The beast was turning in place, its eyes closed. The acid must have damaged them, and hopefully it was blind. I saw it shake its head and sneeze, trying to clear its nasal passageways of watery acid.

The griffator hunted from scent, and this evolved monstrosity was now trying to sniff the air. I cast a light breeze to push our scent back up the tunnel, away from the beast. Could I use this?

I ran around the giant again, putting some distance between myself and my familiars, and dropped another shieldback shell. Then I whipped out my knife and cut open my forearm, letting blood pour over the shell. I quickly casted healing magic and backed away, controlling the air around me so as to not reveal my location.

I saw the beast’s nostrils flare, and it whipped its head towards my trap. It leapt, jaws wide to bite at the perceived prey, and as it descended with mouth wide at the shell, I shot it into the monster’s mouth with as much MP as I could, jamming it down its throat.

The beast flailed its head, whipping it back and forth trying to dislodge the obstruction, and I pushed as hard as I could with my remaining MP to hold it in place. It gagged, but the shell held. It slammed into the ground, sliding its neck against the dungeon floor, desperately trying to squeeze out the stone shell which I held in place. My MP hit 0, and my HP started to drain, my life energy converting to magic in desperation. I fell to my knees. I couldn’t afford to lose my concentration for a second, even to pull a potion out of my inventory, or the beast might cough up the shell.

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Slowly, the beast started to weaken, then fall still. I kept holding the shell in place, my HP plummeting, until I saw the floor open up and the beast’s body started to be absorbed by the dungeon.

It was finally dead. I dropped my spell, and collapsed to the ground.

Treepo and Gregory ran over to me, and I rolled onto my back. The two beasts nudged me with heads and climbed onto my chest to look down at my face to see if I was alive. Treepo chittered wildly and Gregory squeaked. I panted, trying to catch my breath, and reached up to pet the pair.

When I finally caught my breath, I picked up Gregory and held him over my face. He peered down at me through the dark.

“Gregory, did you use magic?”

* * *

My absorption buff slowly drew down the dungeon’s magic and restored my MP while I lay there with my familiars, until I had enough magic to recast my light. I stood, trembling a bit, and paused until I was sure I wouldn’t fall back over. I needed to heal, but I wasn’t ready to try and stomach yet another MP potion.

“Is this the final area for the dungeon?” I asked no one in particular. “That sure seemed like the boss. Do you guys see anything?”

Treepo and Gregory looked at me, then started walking away from me, towards the back of the cavern. I shrugged and followed.

Near the back wall of the cavern, in a small cut-out in the wall, a large crystal floated. It looked similar to the small magic crystals I had pulled out of the rocky shieldbacks, the crystals I used to evolve my beasts, but this one was a reddish-purple instead of the turquoise I was familiar with. “A magic crystal?” I muttered, reaching out for it.

I could feel energy coming from the wine-colored stone. It felt ominous, like the whole dungeon had.

“Maybe a dungeon core,” I wondered out loud. I glanced at my familiars. “Do I take it?”

Treepo grunted, and Gregory yawned. I shrugged, and touched the stone, dropping it into my inventory.

As soon as I removed the stone from the dungeon, the oppressive feeling I always felt inside faded away. There was still a rich magic here, but it no longer felt so toxic and dark. I worried about keeping the core in my inventory and what it might do to me, but I would worry about that later. For the moment, I was worried about what happened inside a dungeon when the core had been taken.

“I think it’s probably time to leave,” I told my tamed beasts.

We reached the cave’s entrance with no real trouble or fanfare. My map simply notified me we had exited the dungeon and had returned to the jungle. I turned and looked at the protrusion in the jungle which led into the dungeon depths.

“Is it sinking? I think it’s sinking,” I said, watching. “I can’t tell if it’s my imagination or not.”

We stood there, watching, until I was sure.

“It’s definitely sinking. Just very, very slowly.”

I looked down at my surviving tamed beasts. Gregory had curled up and was napping, and Treepo looked bored. I shook my head, and looked up through the canopy of the jungle at the blue sky.

“We’ll come back when it’s gone and leave a memorial for Birdo,” I decided. “Let’s go meet Whaley at the beach and head home.”

* * *

“Are you ok?” Nodel asked me.

I grunted up at her from my prone position on the beach. I was fully recovered from the MP overdraw of the previous day, but I was still mentally exhausted. I had no desire to do anything for a few days after the disaster that was the dungeon. Nodel shrugged and went back to practicing magic.

I pulled up my stats, a sad smile on my face. At least it wasn’t for nothing. In the end, the combined experience of all the beasts within–and possibly defeating the dungeon–had pushed me all the way through level 13 and almost all the way to level 14. I dropped 7 SP into taming to advance the skill, and the other 6 SP into detect, which I would advance with 2 more SP when I hit level 14 in the near future.

I lay there, thinking about dungeons. That was only a rank D dungeon, suggesting at the very least that ranks C, B, and A existed. Depending on this world, it was possible that there could be ranks beyond that. It wasn’t uncommon for fantasy worlds to have rank S, and even ranks SS and SSS.

That dungeon-evolved griffator must have pushed the absolute limits of what a rank D beast was like, but even still, it was hard to imagine what a rank C beast would be like, let alone ranks A or S. I was pretty sure that dungeon-evolved beasts and ranks didn’t compare one-to-one with tamer-evolved beasts. If I was right and Treepo was rank E, I couldn’t imagine an additionally-evolved Treepo compared to that griffator, if additional evolution was even possible.

On the topic of evolved beasts further changing, I had not been able to get Gregory to use magic again, if that was what had happened. Even when commanded to do so, Gregory would mostly just fall asleep. He was never the most responsive of my familiars, but he would usually obey a command if he could. I wished I remembered to check his MP at the time, but I had been a little preoccupied with not dying and then getting out of the dungeon in case it collapsed. Maybe the magic concentration of the dungeon had allowed him to use a skill that he couldn’t outside of it, but I had no idea.

I thought about the dungeon core in my inventory. Could that be used to trigger further evolution? Would it even be safe to do so, or would they end up like the beasts in the dungeon? I would have to try to tame and evolve one of those stronger jungle beasts and see what happened, but that was a project for the future. For now I would continue resting on the beach, and probably do so for the foreseeable future.

I glanced at Nodel, appraising her. Amazingly, she had already managed to level up and hit level 4. She was practicing magic intensively, every day, using her large MP pool and her ability to draw down environmental magic. I had stopped casting absorption while around her to not hurt her training. She had avoided falling ill again while level 3, so it was possible my decision to teach her magic had helped after all. She seemed vibrant and full of energy. I was glad to see it.

It would be spring soon, at which point I would have been awake in this world for five years. So much had happened in that time, and I was still a mere child. The future held so much potential. I would keep getting stronger, become more able to protect those that depended on me and those that I could help. There must have been someone out in the world who knew more about dungeons, and if not, maybe I could solve the mysteries myself. I wanted to improve on this world’s magic and glorify taming, popularizing raising beasts both as partners in combat and pets.

It never felt like I could amount to much in my old world, but in this world, the possibilities seemed endless. I closed my stats and looked up at the burnt orange giant in the sky, and smiled.