Chương 32: The Boss's Domain

Lloyd opened his eyes. He slowly began looking around and noticed the room already familiar to him. It was much cleaner than the tunnels outside, but the green sludge was still present here — on the floor, on the walls, in every crack between the stones. Lloyd sat leaning against the chest from which he'd retrieved his first relic. The green crystal overhead still glowed just as steadily, casting familiar trembling shadows into the corners, slowly shifting while he himself sat motionless.

The silence here felt almost weightless, broken only by the rare, distant drip of water somewhere in the corridors beyond this tiny refuge. He slowly got to his feet, feeling his stiffened muscles protest against any movement. Every joint answered with a dull, aching pain — the aftermath of hours of fighting, hours of trudging through cold sludge, hours spent in tension that hadn't loosened for even a second.

"How did I manage to fall asleep in a place like this?" Lloyd rubbed his eyes and looked at the empty wooden chest — with a tiny flicker of hope that something new had appeared there, some relic capable of saving him. But the hope vanished as quickly as it had come. The chest was empty, just as before — bare, darkened wood at the bottom, nothing else. The greenish glints of the crystal played across the empty walls, making the emptiness feel especially mocking.

He let out a cough — too hoarse, too dry, sending a sharp pain through his chest. The sound carried through the room and faded, swallowed by the damp air.

"The longer I'm here, the less strength I have. No water, no food left." His stomach clenched with another hunger spasm, insisting on itself so forcefully that Lloyd leaned against the wall for a second, waiting for the wave of weakness to pass. His head spun slightly — from hunger, from exhaustion, from the thick, rot-soaked air he'd been breathing for what felt like an eternity now.

Lloyd pulled the nearly empty backpack onto his shoulders — light enough that it was frightening, as though the backpack's weight were the final reminder of just how little he had left to continue this journey — and headed toward the dark opening in the wall. Before the darkness of the corridor swallowed him completely, he stopped for a second and let out a nervous laugh — short, brittle, without a trace of amusement, closer to a sob than a laugh. He murmured quietly: — Well. Time to finish this.

Lloyd looked into the darkness of the corridor — toward where the greenish light hadn't yet pushed back the gloom, toward where something new, something more dangerous than anything he'd encountered so far, might already be waiting. This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. — Or finish me.

He stepped into the darkness of the corridor, and overhead the familiar greenish light immediately flared up, lighting his way forward — just enough to make out the next turn, the next puddle of sludge, the next stretch of this endless maze. More than an hour had passed since Lloyd left the room. He'd finished off another couple dozen monsters, but each time it grew harder and harder.

His arms barely obeyed him anymore — every knife strike now sent a sharp pain shooting through his shoulder all the way to his elbow. His strength was draining rapidly, like water slipping through his fingers. His sneakers had long since stopped being sneakers in any normal sense — just two wet, slimy shells on his feet, soaked through with sludge. His jacket hung from his shoulders like a heavy, damp weight, snagging with every movement.

"I'd give anything for a glass of water..." He kept walking, stumbling, holding onto the slimy walls whenever his knees began to betray him with trembling. The tunnel stretched on just as endlessly — turn after turn, chamber after chamber, the same combination of rot, damp, and greenish half-light in which Lloyd had long since stopped orienting himself by anything except his own exhaustion.

Every so often he stopped, leaning against the wall, giving his legs a brief respite before forcing himself onward — because stopping here for too long meant one thing: becoming this place's next victim. And then somewhere in the distance he noticed not simply a continuation of the corridor, but something new. Something entirely new. It wasn't even as strange as the room where he'd found his relic — no, this was different. Bigger. Heavier.

The space ahead itself felt different — the air grew denser, the darkness thicker, and the sound of his own footsteps began echoing back far deeper and more drawn out than before, as though something genuinely enormous was opening up ahead. But Lloyd couldn't properly make out what he was looking at.

The crystal hadn't yet fully illuminated the place to confirm his suspicions, and the remaining darkness toyed with his imagination, throwing up images one more frightening than the last — gigantic shadows, broken silhouettes, something lying in wait. He picked up his pace despite the aching pain throughout his body, feeling his heart beat faster with every metre, and finally arrived.

Overhead the crystal lit up — slowly, gradually, as though reluctantly revealing what the darkness had been hiding — and its green light fell across the place, fully confirming Lloyd's suspicions.

These were enormous, ten-metre gates in the form of a grille — black metal, pitted with rust and the same green film that coated the entire dungeon, interwoven bars rising high upward, vanishing into the darkness of a ceiling that here stood higher than anywhere else, higher than Lloyd could make out even under the crystal's brightest light. From the gates themselves came a tangible, almost physical sense of weight — as though something lay behind them whose mere presence warped the space around it.

Beyond the grille began a tunnel — vast, unbelievable in scale, so much so that Lloyd's breath caught involuntarily at the mere sight of it. It was far bigger and wider than every tunnel he had passed through up to this point — so much so that his own voice here would probably echo on forever, lost somewhere in a darkness unreachable even by the brightest light.

Lloyd's eyebrows rose in astonishment, forgetting for a second the pain and exhaustion, the hunger and thirst, everything that had tormented him these past hours. He had never seen this place before, but he was a hundred percent certain — this was it. Behind these enormous gates lay the dungeon's core. Or, put another way... The Boss's domain.