Chương 5: The Dungeon

Humans are incredible in their ability to adapt. We've now found a way to survive on Mars without the suit. Of course, the nanotechnology in the bodies that enables the elements on Mars to fuel the body instead of oxygen has a huge part to play in that. I won't be around physically to witness life on Jupiter and other planets, but I'm sure it will happen someday.

- From the memoirs of The Progenitor, Lord Trinket Kite watched as the youngling was splattered with crane poo for the forty-seventh time that week and felt, not for the first time, that there were aspects of the Great Master's training philosophy that did not require deeper understanding so much as simple acceptance. He had been watching the youngling for six months now.

He had watched him stumble through the early rock-dodging drills - rocks wrapped in leaves, invisible to him, thrown at random while he ran and climbed - taking bruise after bruise until the Mistwater each evening erased the evidence and reset him for the next morning. He had watched the ears change.

It had happened slowly, over the first three months, so gradually that Kite was not certain when it had become noticeable - the ears lengthening slightly, the points sharpening, the whole architecture of them shifting toward something better suited for the work. The youngling had not seemed to notice. He had simply gotten better at hearing, and his body had apparently taken note. Then the training had changed to this. Traps, across the entire forest floor and through the lower branches.

Each one rigged to release a ball of crane poo on contact. The smell was, in Kite's considered opinion, one of the more formidable things on the island, which was saying something given the island's other residents. The youngling had spent the first week of this phase smelling exclusively of it regardless of how long he spent in the pond each evening. He had improved. After three months of the traps, he could smell them - orient himself toward the general vicinity with enough precision to avoid roughly half.

His nose had changed shape in the same quiet way his ears had. Slightly broader at the bridge, the nostrils more open. The youngling had noticed this one. He had felt it with his fingers one morning and gone very still for a moment, and then continued with his breakfast without saying anything, which Kite had found interesting. The meditation was coming along too.

Bodo had taken that on himself, which was typical of Bodo - finding the thing nobody had assigned him and doing it anyway, warm and steady, because he had decided it was necessary. He would wrap his trunk around the youngling after the harder sessions and simply breathe, slowly, until the youngling's heart rate found its way down. The youngling had gotten good at it. There was a quality of stillness he could reach now that hadn't been there at the start.

Whether that would be enough for what came next was not Kite's question to answer. The Great Master had not explained his reasoning. He never did, particularly. But Kite had been with him long enough to understand that when he stopped explaining, it was not because the reasoning was absent. The youngling would be going in there today. Kite watched him and thought, not for the first time, that the Great Master's wisdom operated on a timescale that made short-term assessments unreliable.

He hoped the youngling was as resilient as the Great Master believed. Kara thought he would get used to the smell eventually. Three months in, and nope. It was exactly as bad as on the first day, which he had to admit was a consistent achievement of sorts. Pranky had told him it was some fermented fruit - that it smelled terrible but tasted excellent. Kara had a strong suspicion this was a lie.

Whenever he raised the subject with Bodo, the mammoth developed a sudden and intense interest in whatever happened to be in the opposite direction. He had stopped asking. The training bell rang - Kite's call, which somehow sounded like a clear struck bell despite coming from something whose shadow, when it passed overhead, briefly turned afternoon into dusk. Kara stopped moving, took stock of himself, and headed back toward the treehouse.

He was wearing roughly half the session's worth of the stuff, which was an improvement on where he had started three months ago. The traps were positioned across the forest floor and through the lower branches, triggered on contact, and he could now smell their general direction well enough to avoid most of them. Most. The ones he missed he missed decisively. The bath was the best part of the day. It had been the best part of the day since the first week and it remained unchallenged.

He lowered himself into the pond, let the cold water do its work, and stayed until the smell was gone and his muscles had stopped complaining. Afterward, he stood at the edge of the treehouse branch and looked down at the log. It was still there. It had been there since the first morning, when Pranky had collected the entire pile in one effortless armful and jumped back up without a word. The single log Kara had managed to drag six feet across the ground that day had stayed where he left it, as if by arrangement.

He had been coming back to it every evening since. He could lift it now, just about, but getting it up the tree while holding it was a whole different ball game. He was going to do it without rigging something. He had decided this early and was committed to it, which he was aware was not strictly rational but which felt important in a way he didn't entirely have words for. He made three attempts. The third one got him four feet off the ground before his grip gave out and he dropped back to the base.

He stood with his hands on his knees and breathed. He closed his eyes and called up his interface. He hadn't looked at it in a while. The stats sheet appeared in front of him, clean and familiar. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

Name: Khatarnak Arafel Human, Earth Grade G, Tier 3 Health: 235 / 235 Stamina: 40 / 40 Mana: 258 / 258 Attribute Score Strength 12 Dexterity 23 IQ 23 EQ 14 Full health, full stamina, full mana - the pond saw to that every evening without fail. He dismissed the interface and was still looking at the log when Pranky's voice came from inside the treehouse.

"Today we try something different. Follow me." He went back up and inside. Tremble was in her corner, eyes closed, performing her usual impression of a creature that had never been inconvenienced by anything or anyone. Bodo was near the far wall. He looked at Kara as he came in, and there was something in the look that Kara set aside to think about later. Pranky walked to the back of the room and disappeared. Through the wall, where no door had been. Kara stood there for a moment.

He looked at Tremble, who opened one eye, watched him the way you watch someone dithering at the edge of a pool they are going to jump into anyway, and closed it again. He walked to the back wall and reached out his hand. It passed through. He stepped through the rest of the way slowly, half-expecting resistance that didn't come.

As he crossed the threshold, a smooth female voice arrived in his head, the words clearly ones it had said many times before and would say many times again: Welcome to the Great Banyan Dungeon. Assessing challenger's level to set the dungeon level. Challenger level too low to measure. Dungeon set to lowest level - Level 1. He was in a dungeon. He knew about dungeons - everyone did, in the abstract. One in each of the twelve Areas.

Final-year university students, top hundred by tournament, sent in as a test with rewards proportional to how far they made it. Nobody outside that system knew what was actually inside them. Nobody he had ever met had been in one. Details were a closely guarded secret, which in retrospect should have been a more alarming data point than he had previously treated it as. A Level 1 dungeon. That didn't sound too bad. It was pitch dark. Completely dark.

The kind where closing and opening his eyes produced identical results, where his hand held six inches from his face was a concept rather than a visible thing. He stood still and waited for his eyes to adjust, and waited, and understood after a while that there was nothing to adjust to. He reached out in all directions. Nothing. He took a careful step forward, then another, then moved slowly to his right until his hand found a wall. Wood - the tree itself, smooth and dense.

He put his right hand on it and began to move forward, his left arm extended ahead of him. He had been walking for a few minutes, feeling the wall, when he noticed the vibration. It was faint - barely there under his palm, easy to miss if his touch hadn't been doing most of his navigation. But it was there. Rhythmic. Getting slightly stronger as he moved forward, then weaker, then irregular, the pattern shifting as if whatever was producing it was not stationary. He slowed down.

He kept his hand on the wall and tracked the changes. The vibration peaked. Held. And then his instincts - honed by six months of training, the part of him that had learned to respond before the conscious thought caught up - screamed at him, and he lunged forward. The wall burst behind him. Something came through it and latched onto his right leg with a grip that went straight through the tunic, injecting something needle-thin before he could process it. He punched it away and ran.

He ran until his stamina was low and the vibration had faded, then stopped and pressed his back against the wall. He felt his leg where it had been injected. A small point, barely detectable. No immediate pain. No sensation at all, which he had learned by now was not the same as no damage. After a few minutes, his right leg felt wrong. Unreliable. The muscle responding a fraction slower than it should, the feedback from it slightly muffled, like a signal with interference. He was poisoned.

He began moving again before the leg deteriorated further. Which was when his outstretched left hand found the vine. He had reached for something to steady himself against a section of uneven floor, grabbing what was there. There was a resistance, then a sound, short and percussive. Then the pain. The spike through his forearm on the first day had been comprehensive and deep, the kind of pain that floods in slowly. This did not flood.

It was instantaneous and absolute, already everything the moment it arrived, hitting four points on his left hand at once. He screamed. The sound left him before he had decided to make it, tearing out of him in a way that had nothing to do with rational thought. He pressed his right hand over his left and felt the damage and his legs gave out entirely and he hit the floor. He retched. He couldn't stop it.

Whatever was in his stomach came up and he was on his hands and knees on the dungeon floor sobbing in a way he hadn't done since he was small, the kind of crying that has nothing to do with sadness, the body insisting on a response to what had just happened to it. From the middle knuckle up, four fingers were gone. He felt the stubs. He felt the blood, warm and continuous, soaking into the tunic he had wrapped around his hand. He did not know how long he stayed there.

Long enough for the first wave to pass into something he could breathe through. He thought of Bodo. He put his right hand on his chest and breathed, slow, the way he'd been taught, and his heart rate came down by increments until thinking was possible again. He was trapped. The creature was behind him, its vibration still present and tracking closer. In front of him: swinging blades. He had triggered them with the vine. He could feel their rhythm now - mechanical and regular, through the wall to his left.

He focused on it. One full swing for every two heartbeats at rest. He calmed himself further. The rhythm clarified. There was a fractional pause at the apex before the return - barely there, but present. That was the window. He could not see which end the blade was at. He would have to feel for the pause and commit. The creature's vibration spiked. Close. He was out of time. He got to his feet. Left leg back, right hand flat against the wall for the final reading. He felt the blade reach the end of its swing.

The fractional pause. He jumped. Something opened across his back, a line drawn from his left shoulder across to his right side that his body registered as structural before it registered as pain. He was already through the blades, already past them, the momentum of the jump carrying him forward, and then there was no floor. Behind him, the creature hit the blades. The shriek was brief. In front of him, below him, around him, there was nothing. He fell.