Chương 36: The Dungeon Did Not Clap

The room stayed dark and unhelpful. Meno wiped his face with the heel of his hand, sat up, and breathed until the shaking in his chest turned into something smaller and meaner. He changed out of the donated clothes and reached for his old hoodie and jeans. They were not there. He stood in front of his tiny closet, stared at the empty hanger space, and remembered the SUV. The black bag. The way he had changed in the car and left his old clothes behind like a genius.

"Great." Soft home pants and an old shirt went on instead, and Meno climbed into the Soma-X7. The capsule closed around him with a quiet seal. Padding adjusted under his shoulders and back. The system mapped his body in a warm sweep, steady and professional in a way his brain resented. Meno turned on the stream without saying anything, left the viewer counter alone, and loaded Veyrath. Sand hit his boots. The Melrai Dunes stretched around him under a pale, hard sky.

He stood near the shrine where he had logged out, broken ridges in the distance and wind dragging lines across the dunes. His Common III dagger rested in his hand, short and terrible. Chat started before his eyes fully adjusted. wife dinner? HOW WAS PARTY did you hold hands Meno gave chat nothing: no answer, no joke, no threat to ban the word wife, no pretending his face was fine. He just started running across the sand, angling back toward the ridge and the half-buried ruins he had passed on the way to BrineSaint.

Chat noticed too fast. uh oh he's quiet quiet bad date? don't say wife maybe something happened talk to us idiot Meno ignored them harder. The dunes fought each step, sand sucking at his boots and stealing speed. He used False Wings only when a slope broke wrong under his feet, kicking off empty air in short corrections instead of flashy launches. A group of swirling sand elementals spun near the ruins of an old well, their bodies grinding the ground into glittering dust.

[Hostile: Dune Spiral | Type: Elemental | Threat: High | Trait: Erosion Body] He gave them a wide berth. A few minutes later, the broken pillars appeared. Two leaning statues framed a dark entrance in the sand, and a faint glassy shimmer twisted inside the doorway. [Dungeon Entrance: Glassdry Catacomb] Recommended Level: 30–40 Party Size: 1–5 Meno looked at the prompt for exactly one breath. Then he walked through. [Dungeon Entered: Glassdry Catacomb] The air cooled around him.

Sand vanished under stone stairs, and the light behind him collapsed into a thin glow from the entrance portal. Walls pressed close on both sides, dry and pale, carved with old lines that had been worn almost smooth. The steps descended into green torchlight. Meno drew the dagger up and kept going. At the bottom, the stairs opened into a wider tunnel lined by stone walls and iron brackets. Green flames burned in skull-shaped lamps, steady and soundless, throwing long shadows across the floor. He expected undead.

Skeletons, bone casters, maybe cursed archers. He took two steps into the tunnel. Something stabbed him in the back. His HP dropped to half. Cold shot through his spine, locking every limb in place. [Status Effect: Stunned] The second stab hit before he could turn. His HP fell to a quarter. Meno's jaw clenched so hard his teeth hurt, and the instant the stun snapped loose, he spun with the dagger already rising.

The attacker stood behind him in strips of shadow and bone: a narrow skeleton with curved knives, cracked ribs wrapped in scraps of black cloth, and green fire leaking from empty eye sockets. [Hostile: Glassdry Boneknife | Type: Undead Rogue | Threat: High | Trait: Grave-Stealth] The Boneknife lunged. Meno parried on instinct, metal catching bone-knife with a sharp click, then drove his dagger into the skeleton's ribs.

The blade scraped bone instead of flesh, skidding across curved surfaces that tried to turn clean hits into misses. [Compound Swing | Chain: 1 | Damage: +10%] Hitting bone was wrong. The dagger wanted to slip between gaps, and slipping through gaps would be invalid contact. He had to stab ribs, collarbone, arm joints, skull edge, anything with enough resistance to count. Fast strikes. Short recovery. Keep the blade touching hard material.

[Compound Swing | Chain: 5 | Damage: +50%] The Boneknife was dangerous from behind. In front of him, it was too slow. It feinted less than a player rogue would. Its knife hands came in clean lines, quick but readable. Meno parried the next two strikes, cut after each, then stopped giving the skeleton's attacks the respect of full blocks. He leaned aside, let one knife whisper past his ribs, and stabbed the shoulder joint. Twisted his chest away from another, cut the skull. The chain climbed.

[Compound Swing | Chain: 10 | Damage: +100%] The dagger hit fast and did almost nothing. Bone chips flew, tiny white pieces scattering across the green-lit floor, but the Boneknife's HP bar barely moved. Meno kept working anyway. Parry less. Dodge smaller. Cut more. The dagger became a needle in a sewing machine. At thirty-four stacks, the skeleton was still nearly full. At forty-two, Meno's patience snapped.

[Technique Activated: Panic Pump] [Compound Swing | Chain: 142 | Damage: +1420%] [Current HP set to 1] The tunnel became lethal. One scratch would kill him. A thrown knife, a toe caught on uneven stone, one mistimed lean, one greedy stab into a rib gap. Everything narrowed to angles and bone. Meno's hand blurred. Dagger to collarbone. Step. Skull edge. Pivot. Elbow joint. Duck. Rib strike. Each hit took a small chunk now, not enough, still too slow, but real.

[Compound Swing | Chain: 150 | Damage: +1500%] The Boneknife's HP finally started falling with purpose. Its attacks sped up near low health, green light flaring in its sockets. Meno bent backward under a slash, stabbed upward into the jaw, then stepped around a cross-cut and hammered the dagger point into the sternum. At Chain 172, the skeleton was almost gone. Meno risked it. [Hundredfold Cleave] The dagger cut in a shallow arc, and the force radiated through the tunnel in a compressed wave.

The Boneknife shattered apart, bones scattering across the floor. A second skeleton flickered into sight at the edge of medium range, revealed by the cleave's reach. It had been creeping along the wall, knife raised.

"Yeah," Meno said under his breath, voice rough.

"Of course." The second Boneknife charged. Meno realized the mistake before its first slash landed. Panic Pump was once per combat. The fight had not ended. The dungeon still considered him engaged because the second stealth rogue had been within the encounter state. He had one HP, a dagger, and no button to skip the ramp. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. He dodged. The next fight took forever.

He had to build the chain manually, one clean hit at a time, while every Boneknife attack could delete him. His movements got smaller and uglier. A shoulder turn to avoid a stab. A knee bend under a slash. A half-step around its hip angle. Dagger to bone. Dagger to bone. Dagger to bone. [Compound Swing | Chain: 50 | Damage: +500%] Chat had gone strange in the corner of his vision. talk is he mad? this is actually stressful 1 hp no commentary is cursed dagger damage pain Meno let them rot there.

At Chain 100, the skeleton finally started losing health at a speed that felt reasonable. [Compound Swing | Chain: 100 | Damage: +1000%] At Chain 152, the second Boneknife collapsed into a pile of ribs and knives. No level-up. Meno stood in the green tunnel with one HP and a dagger that felt smaller by the second. The XP had been good, in the clean numerical sense. Each High threat skeleton had given a visible chunk, maybe ten percent. That should have felt generous.

Instead, all he could think about was one hundred and fifty-two hits to kill one crappy skeleton. The weapon was strangling him. A mage would cast a spell with a built-in multiplier. Three hundred percent, maybe five hundred percent, before staff bonuses, traits, elemental weaknesses, and class nonsense. Meno had to hit thirty clean times to reach the bottom of that range. Sixty for six hundred. A hundred for the kind of damage other classes got through a cooldown and a mana bar.

At high stakes, he could outstrip them because his chain did not care about mana if he lived long enough. Normal farming was a slog built to humiliate him. He checked the view counter for the first time. Viewers: 63, 011. A lot. More than his old self would have begged for. It did not feel like it mattered. He looted the bones. Plain crafting materials, no special bonus. [Uncommon III Gravebone Splinter Acquired] [Uncommon III Gravebone Joint Acquired] Meno waited.

HP regenerated slowly out of combat, one miserable tick at a time. He stood in the tunnel for five full minutes because going forward at one HP meant donating junk, an apple, or something much more expensive to the dungeon floor for no reason. At this point, he was sure item drops were weighted by rarity and stack count, but that did not make the chance of losing something valuable from his inventory zero. It only meant that if he got unlucky enough, he would cry. Viewers: 59, 204.

The dagger durability sat around eighty percent. At least bone did not chew through gear like dream-flame worm skin. Even so, two skeletons had already taken a fifth of the blade. The math got worse every time he looked at it. When his HP finally reached full, Meno advanced. He swept the dagger in small arcs as he walked, cutting across empty air, probing for invisible bodies. It felt ridiculous, but less ridiculous than getting stabbed in the spine again.

The tunnel stretched ahead, green lamps burning at even intervals. Farther on, it opened into a square chamber with a pedestal or altar at the center. He made it halfway there before another knife found his back. [Status Effect: Stunned] His HP crashed again. The stun held him just long enough for the Boneknife to start its second stab. When the effect broke, Meno twisted and drove his dagger straight into its skull ridge.

[Technique Activated: Panic Pump] [Compound Swing | Chain: 100 | Damage: +1000%] [Current HP set to 1] He did not make the same cleave mistake. He kept the fight tight, cutting skull, shoulder, ribs, forearm, never spending the chain outward. The Boneknife died at Chain 142, faster than the first. HP variance, hit location, higher starting stacks, all of it mattered. Skull hits seemed better, but they were riskier. Safer ribs meant slower kills. [Uncommon III Gravebone Shard Acquired] Five minutes of waiting.

Then another rogue. Then another. By the fifth, Meno had stopped thinking of them as enemies and started thinking of them as tax collectors. Backstab, stun, Panic Pump if combat had reset, one HP, machine-gun dagger, wait. Backstab, dodge, build, wait. The sixth one forced him to fight without Panic Pump because it caught him too soon after the previous kill; that fight dragged long enough for chat to start counting hits and complaining about the sound of bone.

He killed eight Boneknives before reaching the chamber. Eight crafting materials. Forty minutes wasted on regeneration. Eighty percent of the way to Level 29. Viewers: 39, 486. The golden rule of streaming sat there in the empty tunnel with him. Talk, or have someone on comms talk for you. BrineSaint had a whole party, clean calls, calm rotations, people explaining the plan by doing their jobs. Meno had silence, a dagger, and a mood so ugly even chat had stopped poking it directly. It did not matter.

He waited for full HP after the last skeleton, then stepped into the square chamber. The room was wider than the tunnel, built from pale stone blocks stained with old green-black marks. Four torches burned in the corners. At the center stood an altar shaped like a cracked tomb, its lid carved with a robed figure holding a dark orb. The moment Meno crossed the threshold, the altar lit with necrotic green. A crack ran down the tomb lid.

Bones, torn cloth, and a black orb flew upward from inside, assembling in the air piece by piece. Rib cage. Spine. Long arms. A skull with a cracked crown of bone. Tattered robes wrapped around it as the orb settled above one skeletal palm, rotating slowly and drinking the green torchlight. [Hostile: Glassdry Ossuary Adept | Type: Undead Caster | Threat: High | Trait: Shadow Orb] High threat. Only High. It was still clearly the first boss. The orb glowed.

[Debuff Applied: Shadow Vulnerability] Shadow damage taken increased by 20%. Meno dashed. He hit the boss before it could cast again, dagger scraping across ribs. [Compound Swing | Chain: 1 | Damage: +10%] He tried a kick on the next beat, just to test weight and stagger. His boot hit the skeleton's robe-wrapped pelvis like he had kicked a stone wall. The impact jarred up his leg, threw off the rhythm, and the chain died. [Chain Broken]"Right," Meno muttered.

"Brick wall." The orb lit again. Meno jumped back to make space. One second after the glow started, a dark bolt fired from the orb toward his chest. He jumped and kicked off empty air, dodging up and sideways, then angled the second False Wings step backward and shot forward again. He cut the Adept's shoulder. [Compound Swing | Chain: 1 | Damage: +10%] The orb glowed. Meno stayed close this time, betting it was the vulnerability stack. The debuff snapped deeper into him.

[Shadow Vulnerability: 2 Stacks] Shadow damage taken increased by 40%. He kept stabbing. [Compound Swing | Chain: 20 | Damage: +200%] The orb lit again. This had to be a bolt. Meno jumped back for space. [Chain Broken] Shadow chains burst from the orb in every direction, whipping through the room with random gaps between them, even upward toward the ceiling. Meno tried to twist through one opening, misread the angle, and a chain pierced him through the side. It pinned him without dealing damage.

[Status Effect: Bound] A second later, the orb glowed again. [Shadow Vulnerability: 3 Stacks] Shadow damage taken increased by 60%. The chains stayed. Meno snarled and hacked at the binding with the dagger. One hit. Two. Three. Four. Five. The last cut snapped the chain apart, and he lunged forward. The orb lit again. Meno went up instead of away, striking the Adept as he jumped. [Compound Swing | Chain: 6 | Damage: +60%] The shadow bolt fired directly at him midair.

He kicked off False Wings too hard, launched sideways, and slammed into the chamber ceiling. [Chain Broken] Stone hit his shoulder and back. He dropped, clipped the altar edge, and landed badly enough to lose twenty percent HP before he rolled to his feet. The boss was still almost full. The orb lit. Shadow tendrils crawled across the floor in branching lines. Meno jumped on reflex, too early, already solving with vertical movement because False Wings had become his answer to everything.

The floor filled with black tendrils, but there were gaps. Safe gaps. Meno saw them while he was already above the pattern. He kicked upward, trying to stay out of reach. A heartbeat later, the tendrils erupted in clean vertical lines toward the ceiling. One speared through him from below. [Death | Glassdry Ossuary Adept — Shadow Eruption] [Dropped: Broken Loom Peg x1] The world went black, then blue.

He respawned at a shrine outside the dungeon entrance, sand shifting around the stone base and desert wind dragging at his clothes. The portal shimmered nearby, reset and waiting. Meno stood there with the dagger in his hand.

"That was obvious." Chat barely moved compared to before. floor gaps bro he jumped into it quiet death dungeon reset? weapon pain He had jumped because jumping had worked too many times. False Wings had saved him from worms, cliffs, fireballs, bad drops, and his own movement checks. Now the dungeon had given him a spell where the answer was standing still in the right gap, and he had launched himself straight into the kill line like an idiot with wings. He checked the dagger. Durability: 20%.

Each rogue had shaved about ten percent. He had barely touched the boss. That meant he could maybe kill two more Boneknives before the weapon broke, if he was lucky. He hated it. He wanted to go back and kill the boss. Right now. Solve the patterns. Stand in the gaps. Cut the chains faster. Learn the orb timing. Beat the stupid caster with the stupid dagger and prove the dungeon had not beaten him. He had no weapon for it. Viewers: 32, 108. Chat looked like a funeral march with emotes.

Meno entered the dungeon again without speaking. The first Boneknife confirmed the reset by stabbing him in the back exactly where expected. Meno killed it with Panic Pump, took the material, waited, moved. The second Boneknife caught him closer to the chamber. The fight went long because the dagger started giving him that wrong vibration through the hilt. At Chain 131, the Boneknife's HP was a sliver. The dagger cracked on the final stab. [Item Broken: Common III Balanced Dagger] The skeleton fell apart anyway.

[Kill Confirmed: Glassdry Boneknife] [Level Up | Level 29] Meno looted the skeleton, then stood in the green tunnel holding a broken dagger handle. Sword gone. Dagger gone. The Ashen Crown Tail Spike sat in his inventory, priceless and useless for Swing Master. His blacksmithing hammer counted as a tool, not a weapon. His class, his level, his passives, his movement, all of it stopped at one missing object. A recognized weapon. Meno walked out of the dungeon. The desert wind hit him again.

He did not look back at the portal. He started running toward Westmarket. He avoided everything: sandworms, skeleton camps, Dune Spirals. He climbed the mountain with False Wings, crossed down into the starter lands, and ran through roads where wolves and low-level beasts no longer mattered. The whole return felt like walking away from a fight he had not even lost properly. His phone-link pulsed during the journey. Aureliana: Meno— He dismissed it before the rest displayed.

The message left a sick feeling in his stomach anyway. He entered Westmarket in silence. The city gates did not stop him. The streets were still crowded, still loud, still packed with players. He knew what came next. Crafting. The forge. The hammer. Materials. Recipes. Perfects. Gold burning by the minute while BrineSaint kept farming and the rank gap widened. He wanted the dungeon boss. He wanted the clean answer. He wanted to fight until the pattern broke open.

Instead, he had to make the thing that let him fight at all. Meno headed toward the crafting district, jaw tight, and said nothing to the stream.