I leaped back from the direfox, throwing my sword up to deflect the blow from the large, clawed paw that was swinging at me, then slid forward to counter attack, slashing across the beast’s face. It shrieked out as my steel bit flesh, and pulled back.
With the added distance between us, I pelted it with stone bullets, aiming at its face. I caught it in an eye, half-blinding it but also giving me a chance.
I moved in swiftly, spinning around to its new blind spot, and slid my baselard into its neck with ease, ripping it away to open the beast’s throat.
I wiped my sword off as the beast bled out and fell.
“I am so mad that I can’t justify taming one of these,” I grumbled to Treepo.
The enormous fox-like beast was bigger than a large wolf from Earth but clearly vulpine, with a huge bushy tail that I badly wanted to hug. On a tamed familiar, not a dead corpse.
“At least this fur should make something really nice,” I said, dropping the corpse into my inventory to dismantle it, trying not to imagine how outrageously cool an evolved direfox would be so as to not tempt myself further.
The forest to the east of the main road was significantly more temperate compared to the subtropical jungle around my hometown. The beasts within were very different, and I was getting lots of extra experience from novel encounters while also recording all the information I could along the way.
I had used 3-point magic to try and scry for another dungeon. Scrying with information magic wasn’t quite the same as using my original metasystem map, but when I did use that with my metasystem it only showed me where I had already been. Scrying let me direct myself to things I hadn’t yet seen, although not nearly as precisely. The more MP I poured into the spell, the better it worked, and I was reasonably certain there was a dungeon somewhere in this forest.
The beasts here reminded me a lot more of the animals I was used to back home. Mostly. They reminded me of multiple animals I was familiar with, combined together, more often than not. I had seen a kind of owl-bear hybrid called an urstrig, a bipedal climbing badger-like beast called a barknail, a kind of miniature wild boar with a squirrel tail that was simply called a chipig, a beast that absolutely should have been called a jackalope but was actually called a rackenbit–which made me really quite cross with my appraisal skill–and of course this wolf-sized vulpine, the direfox.
“It’s not fair. I want to tame them all,” I whined, and Treepo chittered angrily at me for a solid minute. I glanced down at him. “What, you don’t want more friends?”
We heard a sharp crack coming from deeper in the woods, and I immediately set us up with invisibility and silence to sneak ahead. I was increasingly confident in my skills, but better safe than sorry.
Creeping towards a small clearing, I looked out at the huge beast that was passing by, and my annoyance flickered again.
One day, I’ll come back here and tame you, Mr. Pegasus Moose.
* * *
Deeper into the forest, a familiar eerie quiet fell, and Treepo and Buda started to act funny. I recognized it immediately. We were near a dungeon.
On guard, in case of some surprise possibility that we hadn’t encountered at the first dungeon, we made our way towards the center of the disturbance, pushing towards the withering and dying plant life until we found the center and the scar jut out of the land.
“Whoa,” I muttered, looking at the towering dungeon entrance.
It was easily twice the size of the outcropping I had discovered in the jungle. As before, there were no beasts outside of it, all the local fauna drawn within to be used to populate the interior.
Taking careful steps towards the entrance until I was standing right before it, I slowly stuck my head inside to see what my map said, then quickly withdrew.
Yikes. It was a Rank B dungeon.
“All right gang, let’s head back to the convoy,” I said, mounting up on Buda with Treepo and taking off full speed back to the road.
I was still going to tackle the dungeon, I just had to let the people who were expecting me know first. As I approached the road, we veered south, passing opposite-moving convoys who were ahead of mine. Several guards drew as they saw me approach, so I dropped my cloak into my inventory and waved to them in my armor. It wasn’t impossible that I was just a very well-dressed bandit, but most saw clearly that I wasn’t some kind of raider and waved back, sheathing their weapons.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
After passing a few other convoys, I found ours, led by Marshan, and came to a slow before sliding up alongside him. He nodded a greeting at me.
“Find anything interesting out there?”
“Quite so. I’ve got a bunch of meat for the convoy, but then I’m going to have to take off for a while.”
“How long? Despite all the fuss, we’re not actually in a huge rush, since the kingdom is paying either way. We can camp for a day, if there’s something you need to attend to.”
The fact that he was willing to wait attested to how much faith he had in me and wanted to keep me around, which was comforting. It felt nice to be appreciated.
“Unfortunately, I don’t quite know how long I’ll be occupied for. I might have to meet up with you in the capital, in the worst case.”
Marshan frowned, but nodded. No matter what he thought of me, he couldn’t put his full trust in a young boy, so the convoy still had a full guard. Combined with my strength, it was excessive, because there were so many convoys on the road north that there wasn’t really a chance of an isolated bandit attack. It would take a particularly well-outfitted group of bandits to handle so many possible guards, especially this close to the capital, and the road had been exceedingly safe.
“Well, it’ll hurt not to have you for the rest of the journey, but we’ll survive. Maybe some of these guards I’m paying will actually pull their weight and hunt us down some meat without you,” he grumbled. I laughed in response.
“Don’t be too mad with them. I’m just too good at what I do,” I said, giving the older man a cheeky grin. He rolled his eyes at me.
I realized Marshan might be the first adult friend I had made in this world, as leaving Mirut had allowed me to act more natural and like myself. I had made adult acquaintances in Mirut, but I was still acting as a child then. Though I was sure Marshan still saw me as a child–albeit a peculiar one–I was able to drop my mask a bit and found myself quite enjoying the man’s company. I knew that I could add him to my friend list, and so I did.
“Anyway. I’ll hand off this meat and get going. If anything happens, I’ll try to get in touch with you,” I said.
“How’re you planning on doing that? Actually, nevermind, it’s probably just another one of your strange mysteries,” he said, shaking his head and looking at my age-inappropriate muscles flexing under shining, white scale armor while I rode a mysterious wooly ramhog mount. I grinned and gave him a wink, then peeled away.
* * *
Together with Buda and Treepo, I returned to the dungeon entrance, expecting a serious challenge.
“I’m not sure you guys should come with me,” I warned. “It’s going to be incredibly dangerous.”
Treepo grunted at me and Buda snorted, and I understood more or less what they meant.
“Fine, but you’re both going to stay back. Watch my back, but don’t run ahead, and don’t do anything stupid,” I said, glaring especially at Treepo. “I’m stronger than both of you, and I don’t want you throwing your life away trying to save me.”
More grunts and snorts, and I crossed my arms. Buda wasn’t there for Birdo’s death in the last dungeon, but Treepo was. I didn’t want to lose either of them in this one. Their noises of displeasure transformed into chitters and soft squeals, sounds of more contrite acceptance and agreement.
“Good. All right. Here we go,” I said, swallowing hard and stepping into the dark.
Just like the dungeon in the Mirut jungle, this dungeon was uncomfortable inside. The air felt wrong, the walls were made of whatever it was that I couldn’t interact with physically or magically, and everything was too-warm for underground. I cast bright light magic, not worrying nearly as much about stealth in the shallowest parts of the dungeon in favor of full alertness to avoid being ambushed. I would not let anything sneak or dart past me, not this time.
It wasn’t long before we started encountering some of the weird, catatonic beasts. They only acted when we got close enough to attack, as before. I cut down some rackenbits and a few of the other small beasts that made this temperate forest their home, wills usurped to whatever this dungeon’s end goals were.
Though it wasn’t right to assume there was a goal to a place like this. Perhaps it just was. Some kind of natural order, or natural disturbance to order. Given that there was such a large one this close to the kingdom, I had to assume they weren’t that carefully searched for, monitored, and certainly not regularly defeated.
That posed a bunch of questions, and also, some possible answers, or at least some hypotheses.
If these dungeons weren’t being managed, perhaps they didn’t grow. Perhaps the size was fixed from the start. I didn’t know how they came to be, at least not yet, but if they had the potential to grow and they were all left alone, they would probably all be the highest rank. Either they grew incredibly slow, or sporadically if requiring special circumstances, or they were fixed in their growth.
I could think of examples that could support any of those ideas, but without experimentation, I just didn’t know. Did the dungeon grow to the strength of the strongest beast it was able to capture, or could it only capture beasts to the strength it was already ranked?
If they did grow, then were dungeons really quite new to this world? It seemed so far that people didn’t know about them or weren't worried. Was that because they were novel, and largely undiscovered?
Could their existence have something to do with my reincarnation here? Was it causal, even? If so, which way? Was I here because they were, or were they here because I was?
Without a much larger information network, I just couldn’t know yet. I wasn’t in a position to really experiment with dungeons, either. If I could find another Rank D dungeon, or preferably even a Rank E dungeon, I could try feeding it stronger beasts to see what happened. I could learn a lot from that.
If I conquered this dungeon, I would also acquire a second dungeon core. Perhaps I could learn more from those, if I started experimenting more, but I was worried about unleashing a horror on the world that I couldn’t control. That was why my first one just sat useless in my inventory. Safe, hopefully, not just for the world but for myself.
We had passed by a number of the smaller, weaker beasts that lived in the tunnels closest to the entrance, and started meeting and defeating some of the bigger beasts. From what I recalled from the last dungeon, we would start to encounter dungeon-evolved beasts soon.
“Let’s keep going deeper, fellas,” I muttered. “This is going to get dicey.”