Chương 489: B7—Chapter 65: Mahya’s Willies

Outside the dungeon, I opened the house, and we had one rainy day. The rain poured nonstop, hammering on the roof and drumming against the windows, so we stayed inside and held our fingers crossed it would stop soon. Our wishes came through, but with a twist. The next day, the temperature dropped, and it started snowing again. Big, lazy flakes at first, then thick curtains of white that swallowed the world outside. I did like snow occasionally, especially on Christmas, but now it was a bother.

It turned everything cold and inconvenient. Once again, we held our fingers crossed it would stop soon. It didn't. After three days of nonstop snow, when the mounds piled up higher than my shoulder, we gave up pretending this was temporary. Moving around felt like wading through punishment. We decided to brave another dungeon, hoping the snow would stop by the time we were out, or at least that we would feel productive while suffering. After some deliberation, we chose the curse dungeon.

Mahya promised me that with my Neutralize Curse spell, it would be a breeze, and that this kind of dungeon rarely involved a lot of fighting, if at all. That sounded more appealing than staring at snow walls for days. I made a passage to the dungeon with the new ability I had developed in Ashara, imitating an industrial snowplow and pushing the snow aside in heavy, rolling waves. The path opened slowly but steadily, with white walls piling up on both sides as we moved forward.

"Impressive," Mahya said. I winked at her over my shoulder. She laughed.

"Show off."

"Yep, and proud of it." She shook her head but kept laughing. When we entered, there was no flavor text at all, which already felt wrong. Immediately, I felt myself growing weaker. My knees tried to buckle, and my movements turned sluggish, like my body was suddenly made of wet cloth. Neutralize Curse did its job for a few minutes, and we pushed through the first section fast. It was a long, dark hall that swallowed sound and light with stale and heavy air.

The hall opened into a twisting tunnel, where we all struggled to breathe. Every breath felt shallow and unsatisfying, like the air didn't have enough oxygen. Once again, my spell carried us through. That was the only pleasant part of the entire experience. The rest was awful. Dark halls that seemed to stretch forever. Twisting tunnels that disoriented us, no matter how careful we were. Stalactite caves that dripped endlessly. Staircases that went up or down for far too long, with no sense of progress.

Overgrown gardens packed with an endless variety of long, vicious thorns that tore at our clothes and skin. The curses themselves were just as unpleasant. There was weakness that made even lifting an arm feel like work. Impaired vision blurred edges and ruined depth perception. Deafness came and went without warning. A slowing effect made running feel like crawling. Black blotches spread across the body. Incessant itching nearly drove us crazy, especially Rue, who had no way to scratch properly.

Vomiting struck out of nowhere. Disorientation made us walk in circles. Visual and auditory hallucinations played tricks on our nerves. Bloating came with especially foul-smelling gas, which nearly broke Al on a spiritual level. Various types of sores shifted from green to black, each worse than the last. There were several other unpleasant experiences that I chose to forget.

My spell did help lift the effects, but they kept shifting so fast from one to the next that I had to cast it nonstop, and even then, I still experienced every curse to the fullest. It took us over a day to cross that horrendous place, and we didn't get any loot along the way. The final boss was a curse tree that flung every variety of curse we had encountered before, and on top of that, tried to flatten us with its massive branches.

By that point, we were so fed up with the dungeon, the curses, and the general depressing environment that restraint was no longer an option. We attacked it with unprecedented viciousness. Swords and spells came at it from every direction. Even Mahya didn't bother saving mana. The tree barely had time to cycle through its tricks before it came apart. Less than three minutes later, it was down. The rewards were curse spell scrolls. I got Slow. Rue got Weakness.

Mahya received Disorientation, which turned out to be very similar to the Confuse spell she already had, so she switched with Rue. Al ended up with Hallucinations. When he tested it once, we discovered it caused visual hallucinations, making the target see bugs crawling all over them, along with tactile hallucinations that made it feel like the bugs were biting them. At least that gave us one small moment of satisfaction at the end. We did get some benefit from it on top of the spells.

My Neutralize Curse rose from level 3 to level 9, which at least made the suffering feel slightly justified. My core absorbed everything inside the dungeon, stripping it clean, and Mahya, of course, took the core itself. It was relatively small, only about 9 cm, which explained the lack of flavor text and the dungeon's short length. It was a young dungeon, barely finding its footing. Despite all of that, I still thought we should have skipped it. Rue and Al were in full agreement with me.

Al was still dealing with some lingering trauma from the gases, and every now and then, he rubbed his belly, as if expecting a repeat performance. Rue was just done with the entire experience on a deep, personal level, since he couldn't bite the curses and still suffered from phantom itching. Mahya was the only one smiling after that awful place. And as a cherry on top, the snow didn't stop. When the dungeon finally spat us out, we dropped straight into deep snow that reached over our heads. Ugh!

We spent the next three days recuperating. I cooked heavy winter food, like soups, stews, and hot desserts that filled the house with comforting smells and made the cold outside feel a little less chilly. We watched movies, played on the PlayStation and board games, and generally pretended the world beyond the walls didn't exist. At one point, I even asked the house to heat the pool water, mostly as a joke. To my complete amazement, it worked. Steam rose from the surface, and the water turned warm.

Mahya couldn't understand why I was so amazed. After all, I was the dungeon master, and it was my dungeon. To her, this was obvious and expected. I still thought it was amazing and stubbornly refused to see it as commonplace. Some things deserved to remain wonderful forever. On the morning of the fourth day after the curse dungeon, during breakfast, Mahya tapped her fork against her water glass, gave us a radiant smile, and asked, "Ready for the next one?" I slumped in my chair. Rue wagged his tail, the traitor.

Al hummed and nodded.

"Yes. We should proceed with clearing the rest in order to depart."

"Yellow portal or the last dungeon?" She asked, looking between us.

"I do not have a preference," Al said, lifting one shoulder in a slight shrug. I rubbed my face and glanced toward the window, where the snow kept piling up.

"The dungeon had huge insects that curled into balls outside, and with all this snow, we would have trouble finding them," I said.

"I can push the snow away, but it will be a hassle to move the snow mounds from place to place." I let out a breath and spread my hands.

"So I think the portal will be better."

"Great," Mahya said. She nodded once, apparently satisfied, and went back to eating. Again, I cleared a passage to the portal with my snowplow ability, still feeling like a badass and hoping that feeling would never go away. The portal itself was odd, hovering quite high off the ground. I'd seen portals that weren't anchored and floated in the air before, but those were usually a meter off the ground at most. This one was almost thirty meters off the ground.

For us, it wasn't a problem, but as we flew into it, I wondered how the gnomes could ever get into such portals. The rest of the gang didn't have an answer. The minute we crossed inside, I almost choked. We went from minus twenty to plus fifty in an instant, with air so humid it felt like breathing water. Or maybe hot tea. Every breath coated my throat and lungs in liquid, and I was covered in sweat within seconds. My clothes clung to my body, my skin felt slick and miserable, and sweat dripped into my eyes.

For a brief moment, my sense of balance lagged due to the temperature change, as if my body needed an extra heartbeat to catch up. The heat didn't just surround me. It pressed in from every direction, as if the air itself had weight. My ears popped, like we'd changed altitude instead of temperature, and then everything settled again. I shook it off and focused on breathing. The other side was a jungle, dense enough to block out most of the light, with a wide river cutting through it.

The surface was too smooth for fast-moving water, barely rippling despite the current, as if it were sliding forward like a conveyor belt rather than flowing the way water should. I'd never visited the Amazon, but based on the pictures, this was close enough. Or it would've been, if the jungle had been turned up to eleven. The trees were packed together so tightly that their canopies overlapped in layers, the trunks were twisted and bent in ways that didn't look natural.

Some leaned at angles that suggested movement frozen halfway through, as if they'd been caught mid-step and never finished. Nothing about them resembled anything I'd seen before, not even in dungeons. Bark shimmered with strange textures and blotches of shifting colors that didn't settle on any single shade. Leaves grew in impossible shapes, squares and triangles mixed with grape-like forms sporting ten wide fingers, each one the size of a parasol.

Thick vines hung everywhere, some pulsing slowly, as if they were breathing along with the jungle. You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. There was no breeze at all, not even a hint of one, yet the jungle moved. Branches swayed in different directions at the same time, some jerking as if caught in a strong gale, others fluttering gently like in a mild draft. The motions didn't line up or spread outward, and they didn't ripple through the canopy the way wind should.

Each tree seemed to follow its own invisible current, and watching it for more than a few seconds was disorienting and made my skin crawl. The air buzzed with unseen life. Still, for all that buzzing, there were no distinct sounds. No calls, cries, or roars. Nothing I could point to. The noise felt more like pressure than sound, and the sound didn't seem to travel quite right, swallowed too quickly by the foliage one moment and exerting pressure the next.

Heat, moisture, and vegetation blended into a single suffocating presence, and hovering there, sweating and gasping, it felt less like we'd entered a forest and more like we'd stepped straight into the lungs of a creature. Mahya flew toward the river, Al following. It took me another couple of seconds to acclimate before I could follow them. Rue, as always, was unaffected by the heat. I thought it had stopped surprising me, but I was wrong. I still stared at him in bewilderment.

How could a dog covered with a thick, fluffy coat love the heat so much? Mahya found a relatively clear area on the riverbank and began peeling off her winter clothes, Al copying her. The heat made every movement look impatient. She'd just taken off her armor jacket when a strange creature lunged at her from the water.

It looked like the biggest snake I'd ever seen in my life, thick as a tree trunk, with a shark's mouth full of teeth where its head should've been, rows of them catching the light as it surged forward. Along its body were small legs, far too many of them. At least twenty on the section that burst out of the river, all flailing and clawing as it came at her. Mahya didn't hesitate. Her sword appeared in her hand, and she decapitated it with one smooth motion.

The headless body slammed back into the water, disappearing beneath the surface. For a heartbeat, everything was still. Then the water churned violently, frothing and twisting, and quickly turned red, spreading outward in dark clouds. All of us watched it in apprehension, waiting to see what else might come lunging out. Nothing did. The jungle didn't react at all. Or more precisely, it reacted in the opposite way it should have.

Everything went still so completely that the absence of noise felt louder than screaming in a storm. I joined them but didn't change, only put on my cloak to deal with the heat. The moment I put it on, I let out a sigh of relief. It didn't feel cool or anything, but I stopped feeling miserable and like I was melting from the heat. Mahya and Al changed into summer clothes and put their armor back on. Rue was growling at the water.

"What's the matter, buddy?" I asked him. He growled again.

"Rue's snake fall in water." I scratched his ear.

"Don't worry. I suspect there'll be a lot more snakes in our future." He looked at me for a moment, weighing my words, then nodded, and his tail picked up speed. I was right. We kept to the riverbank, walking slowly along it, and every ten to fifteen minutes, another one of the strange snakes lunged at us. Mahya and Al decapitated all of them, and except for two that something yanked back into the water, I collected them all. The portal was about three kilometers long, and the river ran its full length.

It was strange. When we reached the end of the portal, it had hazy borders similar to dungeon borders after my core had eaten everything inside, and the river just touched the border and stopped. That wasn't the strange part. What confused me was that the river flowed in the direction we were walking, and it kept flowing right up to the hazy border. Yes, I knew magic had only a loose relationship with the laws of nature and physics, but those small details kept tripping me up. They were just too odd.

At least this time, I didn't exclaim that it didn't make any sense and make Mahya laugh, although I did think it. I just exclaimed it in the privacy of my mind. Once we reached the border, Mahya stopped and stood there, looking from the river to the jungle, her hands planted on her hips.

"We should fly to the other side of the river and walk upstream to the other end."

"Why?" Al asked. Mahya pointed a thumb toward Rue.

"So Rue could get more snakes." Rue's tail went into overdrive. He bounded up to Mahya and licked her cheek, practically bouncing on his paws as he exclaimed,"Mahya very smart! Mahya genius! Mahya Rue's bestest friend!" I crossed my arms.

"Hey! I thought I was your best friend." Rue froze mid-wag and looked between Mahya and me, his head tilting one way, then the other. After a long moment, he nodded decisively.

"Today, Mahya Rue's bestest friend." We laughed. At least somebody was having fun in this miserable heat. The trip up the river netted us another seven snakes, and three were lost to something strong enough to yank them out of my hand. Each time it happened, my grip tightened on instinct, and each time it wasn't enough. The river changed immediately, turning into hellish, churning water, blood spreading through it in thick clouds that made all of us tense and watchful.

Mahya adjusted her stance, sword never quite lowering. Al's gaze stayed fixed on the water, his shoulders tense. Rue's tail slowed, his ears angling forward as he tracked the ripples. So far, nothing jumped out except the snakes, but whatever was stealing our kills seemed quite dangerous. None of us said it out loud, but the unease was obvious all the same. When we reached the other end, Mahya looked again between the jungle and the river, but this time, I had an idea.

"Let's take to the air." She and Al looked at me with questioning expressions.

"I'm going to fry the water, and I don't want anything else jumping out at us." They boarded their swords. I rose a meter above the water and channeled red lightning into the river. Lines of red snaked through the water, branching and splitting, lighting the surface from below in harsh, pulsing flashes. The river churned violently, far worse than it had when the unseen spawnies had stirred it, steam hissing up where lightning met water, the surface roiling as if something beneath were thrashing in pain or panic.

I flew along the river to the other end, releasing lightning into it every minute, keeping the spell going longer than was comfortable. Despite the higher regeneration in a mana 50 world, I was dry and woozy by the time I reached the far end. Just in case, I didn't land, but hovered instead, forcing myself to regenerate actively as fast as possible. After about five minutes, with my mana a bit above five thousand, I flew back to the group along the river, eyes fixed on the water below.

Nothing floated on the surface, and nothing crawled up onto the shore. The gang was zooming over the treetops, staying just above the canopy and not venturing far into the jungle itself. Mahya and Al rode their swords in tight arcs, while Rue hovered nearby on his Skyrush. When I caught up to them and matched their pace, Mahya said, "There's a problem." I adjusted my flight to stay level with her.

"What?"

"The lightning didn't do anything." I frowned and looked down at the river winding through the jungle below.

"Huh?" Al's expression was grim as he flew in tight circles around me, balanced on his sword, one knee slightly bent, eyes locked on the water. He said nothing, but the tension in his shoulders was obvious.

"Drop meat into the water, and you'll see," Mahya said. I pulled a big slab of meat from Storage and let it fall. It tumbled end over end before vanishing into the river. A heartbeat later, the water churned like before, frothing and twisting as if something massive had just rolled beneath the surface. Rue leaned forward on the Skyrush, ears pinned back and tail stiff. None of us spoke as we hovered there, watching the ripples spread across the river. When the river calmed again, I asked, "What do you wanna do?"

Mahya flew in a short arc over the water, then slowed and made a face.

"I'm not sure. It seems too dangerous. The trees are too tight to move freely, and the water—" She waved a hand toward the river below.

"You saw." I shrugged, shifting slightly in the air.

"I'm good either way. But before we leave, I want to cut down some trees. The ones I practiced with in the dungeon were shit." Mahya looked down for another minute, tracking the river and the jungle below, then nodded.

"I'll help you. But let's do it fast." She glanced toward the trees, her expression tightening.

"This place gives me the willies." We flew along the river until we reached a spot where the shore rose to over ten meters before the tree line began, then landed. She pointed at Rue.

"Fly above and let us know if something's coming." Rue's Skyrush lifted immediately, rising above the treetops. Mahya then turned to Al.

"You stay on the ground and watch our back." Al nodded and shifted position, turning so he could keep an eye on both the river and the jungle behind us. Mahya and I headed into the trees, choosing targets near the river but far enough apart to give each other room to work. The jungle resisted every step. Vines snagged at my boots, forcing me to stop and hack them away. Roots bulged from the ground without warning, trying to trip me, while the air grew heavier and wetter the deeper I pushed into the undergrowth.

Once I found a suitable tree, I went to work with my axe, felling them as quickly as I could. The wood was better than the dungeon junk, but not by much. Mahya worked even faster. Trunks crashed down one after another under her blows, each impact sending a tremor through the ground when they hit. A shadow broke free from between the trees. It was giant and wrong, with too many limbs in various shapes and a bulk that didn't match its speed.

Plates of something hard slid over muscle, catching the light in broken flashes. Its face was nothing but a split lined with teeth. I fired lightning on instinct. Arcs slammed into it and crawled over its body, branching and snapping, but the creature didn't even flinch. It kept coming, the ground trembling with every step. I tried my new Slow spell, with zero effect. Al cast, and the freezing spell hit the creature's legs. Its charge faltered.

Mahya jumped, sword flashing, and landed high on its body, driving the blade down between two armored plates. The creature screamed, a sound that rattled my teeth, and black liquid sprayed out. I drew my sword and hacked at its legs while she carved from above. Al stayed back, watching the trees and casting the freeze spell every time the creature started moving better. Rue continued to watch over us from above. My new Slow still didn't do shit. The creature thrashed, and Mahya almost fell.

She jumped, landed, and stabbed it again. It threw itself sideways, snapping a tree as it went. Mahya wrenched her blade free and struck again. I drove my sword in where the frost had cracked its defenses. We kept attacking for almost a minute, taking a few wounds from its claws that I healed immediately, until the creature finally shuddered, sagged, and collapsed in on itself, its body going slack with a wet, heavy thud. The jungle went dead silent again, and the trees stopped moving. We didn't relax right away.

After a long moment, when nothing else came crashing out of the jungle, Mahya pulled her sword free and nodded. We carved the thing for another minute to find the beast core, then finished cutting the trees we'd started, working fast. Neither of us was eager to linger. Once the last trunk was down and stored, we took to the air and flew out of the portal as fast as possible. Exiting a hot and humid jungle into sub-zero temperatures was a shock that stunned me for a second, despite my cloak.

The cold slammed into me hard enough to steal my breath, skin prickling instantly, but it cleared my head just as fast. I exhaled in relief, fog billowing out in front of my face as the cold burned clean through the lingering heat. Only now, outside and away from it, did I really understand what Mahya had meant about the place giving her the willies. There was something deeply wrong there. Not just dangerous, but off in a way that crawled under my skin and stayed there.

Once we got far enough away, I opened my house and stepped inside. For the first time since entering that portal, my shoulders finally dropped, and I let myself relax fully. Later, we sat around the fireplace, mugs of hot cocoa warming our hands, the crackle of burning wood filling the quiet. Rue lapped hot beer with happy sighs. I thought it was disgusting, but to each their own. Al stared into the flames for a few seconds before speaking.

"I recommend we depart from this world soon," he said.

"Not only are the residents strange. Everything is."

"They're fun," Mahya said, blowing lightly across the surface of her mug before taking a sip. Al made a disgusted sound and shifted his gaze to me, one eyebrow lifting.

"I agree, they are fun," I said.

"But if it's important to you, we can leave."

"We still have a dungeon to clear," Mahya said, her tone firm. Al inclined his head in acknowledgment.

"I can tolerate one more dungeon. But please, I request that we leave after we clear it." I shrugged and snuggled into the couch.

"Sure." Mahya stared into her cup for a moment, clearly unhappy, then nodded.