Chương 29: Another Type of Relic?

Somewhere beyond the room where Mippo and Lloyd sat, water was dripping — or rather, something resembling water. It was green sludge, slowly trickling down from the ceiling somewhere in one of the distant corridors. The sound carried through the tunnels in echoes, bouncing off the slimy walls and fading away into the darkness, repeating itself over and over before finally dying out completely. But Lloyd had long since stopped paying it any attention.

That sound had become just as much a part of the dungeon as the heavy air and the ever-present stench of decay, which seemed to have soaked permanently into every cell of his body. In the room itself the green crystal kept brightening and dimming by turns, casting uneven, trembling shadows on the walls that lengthened and shrank, as though living creatures were watching the conversation from a distance.

Mippo's yellow lantern added a warm golden tint to the picture, mixing with the cold greenish light and creating strange transitional shades on the slimy surfaces of the walls — sometimes swampy, sometimes almost amber. This blended light made the whole conversation feel almost cosy — as cosy as a conversation can be in the middle of a decaying sewer, surrounded by dried sludge and one's own exhausted body. But it wasn't the atmosphere that concerned Lloyd. The shock on his face was hard to miss.

— Another type of relic? Usually when something gets that kind of emphasis in movies, it means it's the most dangerous one. Lloyd crossed his arms over his chest and raised an eyebrow, waiting for a reaction. The sludge beneath him had long gone cold, its chill seeping through the fabric of his trousers, but he barely noticed the discomfort anymore — the conversation demanded too much of his attention. — Well, did I guess right?

A quiet chuckle came from beneath Mippo's mask — short, slightly creaky, as though the sound had to pass through wood before it could escape. The feathers on top of his head swayed faintly from the motion. — Movies, huh. You could say you guessed half right. Lloyd raised his eyebrow even higher, clearly signalling that he wanted a more detailed explanation.

The tunnel beyond the room's walls kept dripping in its monotonous rhythm, and the crystal above their heads flickered once more, as though underlining the importance of the moment — a barely perceptible shift in light that Lloyd had already learned to recognise as a sign that the dungeon somehow responded to whatever was happening within it. — This type of relic works so chaotically that it doesn't resemble any other relic. They don't necessarily have the most dangerous echo.

What makes them dangerous is that you never know what you're dealing with. It's like rolling dice — you don't know what you'll get. Their abilities and echoes vary so much that there's no balance to them at all. They don't follow any fixed pattern. It's not like Red relics, where you're guaranteed destructive power. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. Lloyd's face plainly showed that he hadn't understood a single thing.

His eyebrows knit together in the middle of his forehead, his eyes narrowed slightly — that particular look that appears when a person is trying to hold too much new, confusing information in their head at once. Mippo seemed to notice this — crossing his small green arms, he continued in a more patient tone, like a teacher explaining the same thing to a stubborn student for the second time. — Which is exactly what I was saying... In short, they don't fit the description of any type.

That's why X marked them as a separate category. Mippo held a pause — deliberate, theatrical, keeping Lloyd's attention the way a skilled storyteller holds a listener right before the most important part of a tale. The golden light of the lantern flickered, the shadows on the walls froze for a moment, as though the entire dungeon were holding its breath.

Even the distant dripping of water in the tunnel seemed to fall silent for a second — though that might have just been a trick of Lloyd's imagination, worn down as he was by hunger and exhaustion. — Black Relics. Black. This colour didn't fit into the rest of the palette at all — red, blue, green, yellow, violet — all of them somehow echoed each other, forming something like a system, a rainbow with its own internal logic.

Black stood apart from all of it entirely, like a dark stain among bright colours, like a tear in the fabric, making it clear that this was a special type, one best avoided unless absolutely necessary. Lloyd scratched his chin, smearing yet another patch of dried filth across it — over the past few hours this had already become an almost unconscious habit, a mechanical gesture he repeated without even noticing. — Forgive me, but I didn't understand anything except that it's the Black type.

Mippo sighed wearily — the sound came out unexpectedly human for a creature with a wooden face, as though something genuinely alive were hiding inside him, capable of growing tired from long explanations and impatient students. The lantern at his feet dimmed slightly, as though the lamp itself shared its owner's fatigue. — Well, this type is the rarest of all the others. So perhaps my information won't even be useful to you.

Lloyd nodded — slowly, with the air of someone trying to convince himself that he had genuinely remembered all of it, though in his head a tangle of red, blue, green, yellow, and violet shades was already forming, mixed together with fragments of what he'd just heard. He glanced briefly at the empty chest behind him, then at the dark opening leading back into the tunnel — toward the place where dozens more creatures like the ones he'd already fought were surely waiting.

The tunnel beyond the room stayed silent, waiting. Somewhere very far off, right at the edge of hearing, something rustled faintly — perhaps another victim of this place, perhaps just sound playing tricks in the endless stone corridors. — Yes, I think I remember it all. But right now there's one question that worries me more than anything else... Mippo tilted his head to the side, the feathers on top swaying slightly, showing that he was genuinely curious to hear what came next.

The green eyes beneath the mask looked at Lloyd with an expression that might have been called attentiveness, if a wooden face could be said to have expressions at all. The crystal above them glowed steadily, the warm light of the lantern swaying gently with the creature's movement, reflected in the dark sludge around them. Lloyd cleared his throat and put on the most innocent expression he could manage — the look of someone about to ask a perfectly simple, completely insignificant question.

He straightened up as much as he could, trying to make his voice sound as calm as possible, though inside everything tightened with tense anticipation of the answer. — How do I get out of here?...