Chương 134: Chapter 133: Into the Dark

The entrance was wider than I remembered. The first thing I noticed was the temperature. It dropped the moment we crossed the threshold, the warmth of Fang Forest vanishing as the rock walls closed in around us. The second thing was the silence. The birdsong, the wind through the canopy, all the ambience cut off, replaced by the faint drip of water on stone somewhere ahead.

"Call Pet, Lune." My companion materialized at my feet, her small form darting ahead before circling back and climbing to my shoulder. She looked at the cave ahead with her eyes, ears twitching.

"Foxfire." The flaming orb appeared at my side, casting a warm orange glow across the walls. The shadows retreated, and the rough stone revealed itself.

"Candlelight!" Desirae cast a spell, adding another light source.

"Cute pet," Somnus said from somewhere behind me.

"She knows." Alice moved up beside me, her sword drawn. Heavy plate covered her from shoulder to her legs, Guardian-grade armor that no Swordsman should be able to wear, but Armored Stance made her an exception. She kept pace with me as if the metal weighed nothing at all.

"Formation?" she asked.

"Denxy up front, with Redcap and I on the sides. Desirae in the middle. You and Somnus take the back." I glanced over my shoulder.

"If anything ambushes us from behind, it's your problem."

"I live for problems," the Acolyte said, his staff resting on his shoulder.

"They make things interesting." Denxy took point, his Mythril shield forward, and we moved. The Flamewing Tulips started appearing about three minutes in. Their red glow bled across the walls, painting the stone in shades of crimson. I remembered collecting them on my first day, stuffing my inventory with flowers for a quest in a game I'd barely understood. That was three weeks ago, I thought. It feels like a lifetime.

"Oh," Redcap said, reaching for one.

"I never got to finish that quest. Who would have thought they grew in caves?"

"Let's leave them," I said as he was reaching for one.

"There are plenty of new players around who need them for their quests." The Spring Festival was over, but I was certain the game would design new fetch-and-collects for lower-level adventurers. He pulled his hand back with a grin.

"Noted." The corridor continued deeper, the slope growing steeper and the ceiling rising as we descended. The Flamewing Tulips grew thicker along the walls, their red glow replacing Foxfire and Candlelight as the dominant light source. Ten minutes passed without a single enemy, and that bothered me. Cyrus had described the Cave of Bones as hostile from the first chamber, and Verdugo's team had encountered resistance within minutes of entering the western cave.

The northern one was supposed to be the hardest of the three, and nothing had tried to kill us yet.

"This is too quiet," Alice said, echoing my thoughts.

"Agreed," Denxy tightened his grip on his shield.

"Feels like we're being watched."

"We probably are," Somnus offered.

"By dark, Lovecraftian monsters hiding in the shadows."

"Cheerful," Desirae said.

"So I've been told," the Acolyte smiled. I kept Spriggan's Will drawn, an arrow nocked. The passage widened gradually, and the Flamewing Tulips thinned until we were walking under the light of our own abilities again. Then I saw the first trap: a thin wire stretched across the corridor at shin height, attached to a mechanism in the wall; Candlelight's glow caught the faintest glint of metal.

"Stop." Everyone froze, and I crouched, tracing the wire with my eyes. It connected to a series of holes in both walls, small, evenly spaced, screaming projectile trap. I brought Foxfire closer. A few meters beyond it, I could see discolored stones on the floor, a pressure plate pattern that would be invisible without a light source at ground level, and my Twilight Hunter passive working in unison.

"Tripwire," I said.

"Pressure plates beyond it." Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel. Desirae raised her staff slightly, and a soft pulse of light washed down the corridor.

"Two more tripwires ahead, about five meters apart. And the ceiling has something, too."

"Falling blocks, maybe," Alice said.

"Or spikes."

"Step where I step," I told the group.

"Single file until we're through." I moved first, stepping over the wire and threading between the pressure plates. My Agility and Twilight Hunter made the work almost routine, and I marked each safe foothold with a tap of my boot so the person behind me could follow. Denxy had the hardest time of it, his broad frame and heavy shield making the narrow safe path a tight squeeze, but he managed.

Alice moved through it as if she'd memorized the layout from watching me once, and Redcap was light on his feet, clearing it without issue. Somnus strolled through with the same casual energy he brought to everything, his staff somehow never touching a wire despite him seemingly not even trying. Desirae came last, careful and precise. Three more trap sections followed over the next several minutes.

One was a corridor of intermittent flame jets that erupted from the walls in a timed pattern, and we waited, counted the intervals, and sprinted through, giving me an opportunity to use my 'Light as a feather' stance for some added speed. Another was a series of loose stones that collapsed into a pit, which Redcap nearly discovered the hard way before Alice caught his arm.

"Thanks," the Lancer said.

"Watch the floor," she replied. The last trap was the worst: a section of corridor where the walls were lined with carved faces, their mouths open. Dart traps, poison-tipped based on the green residue around the openings.

"Feather Stance." I activated the skill again, just as it came off cooldown. My movement speed surged again, and I sprinted the length of the corridor. Darts hissed from the walls a fraction of a second after I passed each face, embedding in the opposite wall where my body had been. The others followed my lead, spacing themselves to avoid bunching up, and we cleared it without taking a hit, although Denxy was visibly surprised with his achievement. We'd spent about twenty minutes in the cave so far.

The corridor opened into a cavern, and the scale of it stopped us all in our tracks. It was enormous. The ceiling rose thirty meters above us, maybe even more but our light sources had a finite reach, and the chamber extended in every direction, layered with natural stone platforms at varying heights connected by crumbling stairways, narrow ledges, and rope bridges that looked ancient.

Stalactites hung from above, some thick enough to be pillars, and the walls were carved with symbols; angular, geometric, painted in faded pigments of red and black, and turquoise. The Mayan influence the forums wrote about was obvious. The carvings depicted jaguars, serpents, and figures in elaborate headdresses. Stone altars dotted the platforms at different elevations, their surfaces stained dark with something I preferred not to think about. And there were paths. Dozens of them.

Stairways branching left, right, upward, and leading down into the darkness. Ledges that curved around massive stone columns and vanished into the void. Bridges spanning gaps between platforms that led to tunnels in the far walls. The cavern was a maze of vertical movement with no obvious route forward, no markers, and no indication of which path led deeper and which led to a dead end.

"Well," Redcap said, looking up at the bridges and platforms above us.

"That's a lot of options."

"Too many," I agreed.

"We could spend hours exploring wrong paths." Somnus tilted his head.

"I reckon we don't have that much time."

"No. We don't." He looked at the tunnels way below us.

"Pity." Alice was scanning the chamber systematically, her eyes tracking each visible path.

"There has to be a tell. Desirae?" The Cleric raised her staff, and five orbs of pale golden light separated from the crystal at its tip. They hovered in the air, each about the size of a fist.

"Guiding Lights, go," Desirae said. The orbs shot outward in five different directions. One climbed toward the upper platforms. Another dove through a gap in the floor to a lower level. The remaining three split across the chamber, each taking a different tunnel or stairway, their light growing fainter as they traveled deeper. Desirae closed her eyes.

"The orbs let me feel the mana density wherever they travel," she explained, her voice steady and focused.

"Areas with higher concentrations of ambient mana usually indicate something significant. A boss chamber, a treasure room, a progression point. Dead ends and empty corridors tend to have almost none." That was an interesting mechanic that was pretty unexplored so far.

Similarly to the Presence stat, which people were already theorycrafting — correctly, in my opinion — that it could be used to measure an opponent's strength, mana density was once again something without clear numbers on a character sheet, but more and more players were figuring it out. We waited in silence. Some orbs had returned, then chose a different path.

After about three minutes of back-and-forth, Desirae opened her eyes and pointed toward the upper-left section of the cavern, where a carved stairway wound around a massive stalactite toward a platform barely visible in the darkness above.

"That way. The mana density spikes hard about two hundred meters in that direction. Most other paths have less mana. Adds, most likely."

"Good enough for me," I said.

"Then let's—" A sound cut through the cavern, coming from everywhere at once. The carved faces on the walls began to glow. Their eyes, set with what I'd assumed were decorative stones, lit up with a green light that spread across the chamber in a wave, illuminating alcoves and recesses I hadn't been able to see before. And in those alcoves, things started moving. They poured out from gaps in the stone, from behind altars, from tunnels on platforms above and below us.

This is the part where most have died, I assumed, although thinking back, the traps from earlier were probably much harder for ordinary players. The first were spiders. Again. But these were different compared to the ones I'd fought so far. They were larger, armored with plates of dark obsidian-like chitin, their legs tipped with curved hooks that gripped the stone as they moved.

Their eyes glowed the same pale green as the wall carvings, and webs trailed from their abdomens; thick, dark silk that looked more like chains than thread. K'atun Weaver Level 23 The second type walked upright. They were humanoid, skeletal figures clad in the remnants of ancient armor — jade-studded breastplates, feathered headdresses, and obsidian blades fused to their hands where weapons had once been held. They moved with rigid, mechanical motions, controlled by the green magic that filled the cave.

Balam Tomb Sentinel Level 24"Contact!" I called, drawing Spriggan's Will to full.