Chương 6: What the Dungeon Changed

We've started noticing that some humans are now capable of doing things they weren't able to before. Even some things that should have been humanly impossible. We've decided to term these abilities as skills. Skills would be any abilities that not just anyone is capable of doing, which eliminates things like running, swimming, and so on, which most humans can do.

For example, I now have the skill Laser Focus, which allows me to enter a state of extreme concentration, where every other thought is eliminated, and my processing speed is double what is normally possible. We have seen cases of skills improving, meaning that they are upgradable. We have decided to divide the skills into the following tiers - Rookie, Amateur, Pro, and Master. - From the memoirs of Claus, Third Principal of the Progenitor's Faction Tremble had lived long enough to find most things predictable.

She knew what Master was doing. He was entertaining himself, yes. That was the surface of it, and surfaces were what most creatures stopped at. Beneath that, he had spent resources on the cub. The Mistwater. The cloak. Neither was particularly costly on this planet, but the point was not cost. The point was that Master did not spend anything on things he did not care for.

He was, in her considered and long-held opinion, the most elaborately disguised sentimentalist she had ever met, and she had met a considerable number over the years. The dungeon, though. That she had not expected him to move to quite so quickly. She stretched, slow and deliberate. Every space she occupied belonged to her, and she moved like she had never once doubted it. The dungeon had not always been here.

It had been elsewhere, on another planet, until it had evolved past the point where that planet's inhabitants could survive it. The creatures inside were not remarkable in isolation. The traps were not remarkable in isolation. What the dungeon did was remove every advantage a person brought into it - light, orientation, the basic sense of knowing where you stood in relation to the world - and then introduced the unremarkable things one by one in the dark, and waited to see what happened.

What happened, more often than not, was either death or worse. She and the others had gone through it, each in their own time. She did not think about her own time in it often. It was not something she had enjoyed, which was distinct from saying it had not been necessary. The cub had been in there for close to a day now. Bodo was pretending to be interested in a patch of ground near the far wall. Kite had not moved from his branch in six hours, which for Kite was the equivalent of sitting on one's hands.

Master was in his chair, turning something over in his mind, the way he did with things he had already decided and was only waiting to see confirmed. Tremble closed her eyes. If the cub survived, she would acknowledge him. Sincerely, if quietly - she was not Bodo. He had earned more than she had initially thought of him, and she was not an animal that revised assessments slowly when the evidence was sufficient.

He had walked through her presence without shattering, which more than a few beings of considerably higher grade had failed to do. He had gotten back up after the jackals, after the ankle, after the spike in his forearm - a body working quietly through its troubles in the order of priority. He was either going to come out of that dungeon changed in the right direction, or he was not going to come out at all. Either way, she supposed, was informative.

She settled deeper into her corner and did not think about which outcome she preferred, because she had made her position on hope very clear to herself a long time ago and saw no reason to revisit it now. The fall ended in water. It hit him like a flat hand - every cubic inch of air driven from his lungs simultaneously, the world reorganising itself into a single urgent priority. He was underwater. He could not breathe. Everything else was secondary to these two facts and would have to wait. He found the surface.

He breathed. He floated. For a while that was all he did, because it was all he was capable of. He realised he could see now. Not much, but enough to make out his immediate surroundings. Before he could act on his newfound visibility, the wounds from the blade made themselves known slowly, the way serious damage sometimes does - in sequence rather than all at once, each one arriving in its turn. His back. His fingers, or the absence of them.

His right leg, which had apparently decided that the poison was no longer the most pressing item on its agenda and had been displaced by everything else. Then something else registered. The pain was going away. It left actively, from each point in sequence, which was very unlike pain. His back first, the deep structural wrongness closing over like water over a stone.

Then the fingers - and this part he felt very clearly, which he suspected he would have found remarkable if he had not been so thoroughly exhausted - rebuilding themselves from the base outward, the tissue returning as if the water knew exactly what it was replacing. His right leg stopped its complaints mid-sentence. He looked at his hands. Both of them. Complete.

He floated in the water for a long moment and did not say anything because there was nobody to say anything to, and because he didn't have words for it anyway, and because sometimes the correct response to something extraordinary was simply to let it be extraordinary. Then hunger arrived, and was extremely uninterested in his philosophical composure.

It had been building since before the dungeon - the mushroom soup that morning now felt like something from a previous life - and the adrenaline had been keeping it at a distance, but adrenaline had limits and his had apparently reached them. His stomach made its position clear. He looked around for the first time with something other than survival as the immediate objective. The lake was small. Blue walls rose about twenty feet on all sides, smooth and featureless, the darkness beginning above that.

The light came from the water itself - a faint luminescence, blue-white, just enough to see by. It reminded him of the pond in the treehouse. He took a careful drink. His body received it the way dry ground received rain. He swam the perimeter slowly, looking for an exit. Nothing at the surface. He checked his interface - health full, stamina full, mana full. The water had been thorough. He put the interface away and looked at the walls more carefully.

Near the base of the far wall, just below the waterline, something darker than the surrounding wood caught his eye. He dove. An opening. Narrow, low, but clear. He surfaced, breathed, considered it. The current near the opening had a direction to it - faint but steady, drawing inward. He took the deepest breath he could manage and let it take him. The tunnel was long. Long enough that the comfortable margin of breath he had started with became an uncomfortable margin and then a margin he was negotiating with.

He kept his movements small, conserving what he had, and when the tunnel finally widened and the pressure changed and the current released him he rose to a surface and breathed with the full sincerity of someone who had not been certain they would get to. He was in another cave. Smaller than he could yet determine - the light here was the same blue quality, reflected off wet walls, enough to see shapes but not details. He found a shore and pulled himself onto it.

Wood floor, wood walls, the ceiling a few metres above him. Bare except - he looked more carefully - a growth of moss along the lower walls, dark green, dense. And near the waterline, a cluster of pale mushrooms, small and round, growing in a tidy row. If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

He sat there for a moment and looked at them, very hungry and very aware that not everything that looks edible is edible, and that he had no way of knowing which kind these were. He pulled a small amount of moss from the wall and held it. Smelled it - damp, mineral, the same quality as the water. He put a small piece in his mouth and chewed slowly and waited. Nothing happened. He ate a little more. Still nothing. He ate the rest quickly, forcing himself to slow down and mostly failing at it. Then the mushrooms.

Same process - a small piece first, a wait that felt longer than it probably was, then the rest. They tasted of almost nothing, which after a day of no food, was a flavour he was prepared to find satisfactory. He checked his stats again. Full across the board. He allowed himself, briefly, to feel better about the situation. Then he got up and looked for the way forward. The next cave was large.

He came to it through a short tunnel that opened without warning into a space several hundred metres across, domed, the ceiling three storeys up. The blue light was fainter here - enough to navigate, not enough to read details at distance. The floor was mostly clear, a few irregularities he catalogued as he moved. At the far end, another opening. He watched the floor and walked toward it. The chameleon announced itself by firing.

He dodged on reflex - three months of thrown rocks, the body moving before the mind authorised it - and then looked up and found the source. Ceiling, northwest, pressed flat against the wood and almost perfectly invisible until he knew exactly where to look was a creature which looked like a chameleon, but could apparently fire twigs from its mouth. He tracked it. Found the shape of it. Felt the particular confidence of someone who had identified the threat and could now manage it.

The second twig hit him behind his right tricep before he registered there was a second chameleon. The arm went numb from the point of impact outward, thorough and slow, working through him like something with a job to finish. He ran. A third twig caught him in a location he would have strongly preferred to keep unbothered, and he stumbled back through the tunnel into the cave with the lake and sat down on the shore with his remaining dignity, which was in short supply at the moment. He removed the twigs.

He thought about it. Over the next several hours he went back twenty times. He found the first chameleon faster with each attempt. He could not find the second one. It fired from somewhere in the ceiling and he could react to the sound of it just barely - enough to shift, not enough to clear. It had developed, he noted with a resentment he considered entirely reasonable, a preference for soft targets.

By the fifteenth attempt he had refined a system for removing twigs from difficult locations that he was not going to describe to anyone. After the twentieth he lay on the cave floor and stared at the ceiling and stopped trying to plan. The planning was not working. Every approach ended in the same place. He had been in the dungeon long enough now that time had lost its clean edges.

Long enough that the darkness beyond the blue light had started feeling less like a feature of the dungeon and more like a feature of existence, which he recognised as a thought worth paying attention to. He went back to the safe cave. Yes, he had verified it was safe and the chameleons wouldn't follow. He ate moss and mushrooms. He drank the water. He lay on the shore and let the quiet get as loud as it was going to get. Then he opened the box.

He had been keeping it in a corner of his mind since he woke up on the beach. He had put things in it carefully - each thought about home as it arrived, each image of his family's faces, each moment of reaching for his brother's and parents' comm code and finding nothing - and had sealed it and told himself it would wait. It had waited patiently, because it lived in the same head he did and knew it had all the time in the world. His mother arrived first.

The way she stood when she was worried and trying not to show it - weight on her back foot, one hand doing something unnecessary near her collarbone. He had catalogued this gesture so thoroughly over the years that he could reproduce it exactly in his memory, which was not a comfortable thing to be able to do right now. His father. The silence his father used instead of the words he couldn't find, which had taken Kara years to understand as its own kind of presence. His brother.

The memory that arrived was small and undramatic: an evening two years ago, after a training session that had gone badly and left Kara feeling like everything was slightly out of tune. His brother had not said anything about it - had not, in fact, said much at all, which was not unusual. What he had done was sit down next to Kara on the harbour wall without asking permission, close enough that their shoulders touched, and stayed there while the light changed. No explanation offered. None needed.

He had understood that company was what was required, and he had not complicated it further. Kara had taken it for granted then. He understood now, on the floor of a dungeon inside a tree on a planet that had no name, exactly what it had cost his brother nothing to give and exactly how much it had been worth. He cried for a while. Not the restrained kind - the kind that came from somewhere structural and took what it needed. Then, at some point, the wave passed through and left something quieter behind.

He thought about a time his brother had tried to gesture his way through explaining a complicated tactic for a sport they both followed, and had gotten so invested in the mime that he had knocked a full bowl of soup into his own lap, and the expression on his face afterward - absolute dignity maintained in the face of complete catastrophe - had made Kara laugh until he couldn't breathe.

He laughed now, alone on the wooden floor, and the sound came back to him off the walls sounding strange and his own and he laughed at that too. Then the laugh faded and the quiet came back, and in the quiet he thought about what his absence would have looked like from their side. A storm in the Indian Ocean. No body found, because there was no body to find.

The torture of not knowing - which he understood was worse than knowing, had always been worse because knowing gave you something to do with the feeling and not knowing just left it open. At one point he walked back into the chameleon cave with no real plan except the vague and not entirely coherent intention of letting the chameleons finish what they started. Two twigs to his hindquarters informed him that this was not, on reflection, how he wanted to go out. He sat by the water for a long time after that.

He thought about water. He had always thought in terms of water - had grown up in it, trained in it, been at home in it in a way that had always felt less like skill and more like recognition. Water did not fight the shape of things. It found the shape and became it, and moved, and found the next shape. He had always been like that. He had spent considerable energy trying not to be. The first time his body had done something it shouldn't have been able to, he had been six.

His fingers had lengthened overnight - not dramatically, not freakishly, just enough that his mother had noticed. He remembered the way she had gone still, the specific stillness of someone frightened who does not want to be seen being frightened. His parents had handled it with love and with a practicality that he had understood only later had cost them considerably. Social circles shifted. Extended family fell away quietly, then not so quietly.

His brother had absorbed the situation and rearranged around it the way he always did - working out what was needed and quietly providing it. Kara had never been able to decide if that made the guilt better or worse. Here, there was no one to notice. The forest had its own adaptations, stranger by far than anything his body had managed. Nobody here was going to look at him the way people looked at him. The thought settled in him slowly, like water finding its level. He got up. He walked into the cave.

The first twig came faster than any previous attempt, as if the chameleon had opinions about how long it had been kept waiting. He did not dodge it. He let it take his left elbow, felt the arm begin its slow drift toward numbness, and kept moving. The second twig came from the right. He had not found the second chameleon - his eyes had simply moved further than they had moved before, a quiet expansion of range that he had not requested and that the hours by the water had apparently made possible.

He caught the motion. He dodged. He turned back. Caught the first chameleon's follow-up. Dodged that too. He moved through the cave with both of them in his peripheral vision, like a careful, choreographed dance - the world slightly wider than it had been an hour ago, his eyes tracking arcs they had not tracked before - and reached the far tunnel and walked through it. He stood at the threshold of whatever came next and breathed.

It was the first time in his life he had felt something close to gratitude for his trait. Something quieter than pride - he wasn't ready for pride yet. An acknowledgment. He had spent so long managing it, minimising it, keeping it slow enough not to be seen, that he had never simply let it be useful. Here, in the dark, with no one watching, it had done what it did without apology and he had let it. He thought about his family.

He thought about his brother - the way he moved through change, absorbing new circumstances with the same steady attention he brought to everything. Kara had always admired this without saying so, the same way you admired something you assumed would always be there. He thought about the changes that would have come since Kara disappeared. The practical rearrangements. The new shape of things. His family would adapt. He knew this because he knew them.

They were, in their different ways, people who found the new shape of things and inhabited it. His mother's practicality. His father's quiet. His brother's steady, wordless competence at the business of continuing. They would adapt. They would find the new shape. And the new shape would not have him in it. He stood with that thought for a moment, in the opening of the next room.