Duskbound 1: A LitRPG Adventure, page 35
He carefully climbed free of the remnants of the slaughter, a tricky task given how long it took the bodies to stop wriggling even after he’d decapitated or eviscerated them. Presumably, the dungeon would reclaim them all eventually, but he wasn’t going to stand around and wait for the corpses to dissolve and the way forward to be clear.
Once, he thought a living centipede had gotten trapped under the weight of bodies, only to wriggle free and attack him as he was climbing by, but it turned out to just be some sort of nerve response to the corpse being shifted around as he walked on it that caused the pincers to snap closed. He realized that a few seconds after his spear went through its skull when he didn’t get a kill notification.
It was only after he’d fully cleared the site of the slaughter that he got to looking through his notifications. Most were easily dismissed, just messages of decarmas gained and centipedes of up to level 33 slain. Three stood out though—all of them skill rank increases.
He’d pushed [Savage Rhythm] up to rank 2 early in the fight, which didn’t really surprise him. It had been instrumental to his victory, helping him keep up with what would have otherwise been an overwhelming tide of monsters. [Spear Warden] had also gone up a rank, which he attributed more to it being an inevitable fact of it being such a core skill than due to the specific nature of the previous fight. As long as he kept fighting with a spear, [Spear Warden] was going to get stronger.
The last rank up was to [Apex Hunter], surprisingly. At first, he couldn’t figure out what it was about the encounter that had caused the skill to rank up, but eventually he decided it was the perception-based skills that had gone into its mix. Velik hadn’t had time to consciously process what he was seeing during the fight, not at the speed he was moving. There were too many bodies, but somehow, he’d kept his spear moving while defending himself from every direction.
They were excellent gains, but he wasn’t sure he’d want to go through another battle like that again. He’d never had a fight where individual monsters were easily slain, but overwhelming numbers and tight confines conspired against him. Even when fighting packs of worgs, he’d always been able to string them along into a running battle through the woods if necessary. This type of fighting in a place where he was severely limited in how he could use his weapon was a new type of difficulty for him.
Only thing to do about it is finish my business so I can get the hell out of here, he decided, his face set into a grim mask as he straightened his back and strode purposefully away from the mounds of dead monsters.
Monsters grew powerful in the same way people did: through killing. He knew the truth of this, which was why thousands upon thousands of his creations had died at the hands of each other. Only the strongest deserved the gift of life. Only the strongest were fit to serve as the canvas he worked on.
The intruder would make for a marvelous canvas. He’d been tested over and over again, and he still survived. Even against the most powerful champions, he’d found a way to grow in his power. It was like watching a master chef prepare the most decadent meal.
His mind twinged at that memory and he wondered who it had come from. There were too many personas feeding into the amalgamation to narrow it down, usually, but lately, one particular mind was coming to the forefront. He knew the intruder, and that familiarity bred purpose and resolve.
He wanted to be there to speak to the intruder when he made it to the end of the path. Until then, he had to hold on to his sense of self, to keep from being swept away in the current. The intruder would have to hurry, though, else it would be too late.
Then again, did it really matter who was at the forefront? They were all one, in the end.
69
The fleshy coating on the walls wasn’t uniform in any way. It had varying texture, smooth in some places and rough in others, and a smattering of scars. There were long, jagged slices that had healed into puckered marks and small circles from where it had been stabbed or punctured all over. Veins as thick as Velik’s arm formed massive webs, sometimes standing out in distinct ridges along the walls.
One thing he hadn’t seen up until this moment was an eye. In fact, even with his mental stat pushing his perception far beyond normal human limits, he wasn’t entirely sure that was what he was looking at now. It was nothing more than a small black pinprick in the skin to casual observation, easily mistaken for a speck of dirt on the wall.
He would have thought the same if he hadn’t caught the flicker of movement as he walked by. Even then, it was only because he was using [Night Vision] to navigate that the motion popped out to him. Something about the way it reduced the whole world to black and white outlines made it visible in a way that a full spectrum of colors didn’t.
He peered at it, finger poised an inch away, and wondered if he was just imagining things. The speck only superficially resembled an eye, and since he’d started paying attention, it hadn’t moved at all. As much as he doubted himself, though, he couldn’t honestly say he found the idea of the tunnel being laced with eyes that were watching his every move all that surprising.
It made sense, in a twisted sort of way. The whole dungeon was covered in a layer of flesh. There was no reason it couldn’t have other parts of a human as well, and lots of them. It would also explain how the dungeon kept track of the monster hunters who came to destroy it, not that he was necessarily here for that. He just wanted his compass to start working so he could find Chalin, and so far, he’d seen nothing to prove his childhood friend was here.
Except, maybe I did? There was another champion elite, but since I couldn’t recover the seed, I don’t know if it was Chalin’s or not.
His only options were to press forward and hope to find answers, or to give up and leave. If he gave up, he might as well keep walking until the frontier was a thousand miles behind him. After so many years, he needed these answers. He’d do anything for them, take stupid risks against monsters far stronger than he had any right to face, all just to get one step closer to the truth.
The way he understood dungeon architecture to work meant there was probably one more champion in front of a core chamber at the very least, possibly multiple champions he might have to fight his way through. Once he reached the core chamber, he’d smash the core and the dungeon would die. Then, presumably, it would stop interfering with his compass.
If he found Chalin here, then he’d have reached his goal. If not, he could keep going unhindered and the world was a slightly better place with one less source of monsters. Truthfully, he wasn’t sure this dungeon was the only one in the area. It seemed to produce only two specific types of monsters, and he’d seen a far greater variety in the deep wood.
He explored for another hour or two, slowly building up his mental map of the caves. Occasionally, he found more of those sallow sac-like flaps hanging off the walls, always empty. Sometimes, he’d see little spots of fluid that hadn’t quite dried, either puddled in the sac itself or on the ground beneath it.
What he didn’t see was whatever had come out of that sac, but he assumed it was all the centipedes that had tried to bury him under sheer numbers. If this was some sort of breeding ground, it explained why they’d come at him in waves. Some had torn their way free from their sacs faster than others or been closer to where he was fighting.
It wasn’t until he got deeper that he started seeing something different: sacs that were still full. Velik couldn’t tell what exactly was in them—the skin was too thick and leathery, or maybe it was just a quirk of [Night Vision]—but they couldn’t all be the same monster. Some of the sacs were the size of his head. Others, he could have fit fully inside with room to spare.
Every time he found one, he sliced it open with his spear and made sure to kill the half-formed monster inside. Usually, it was some twisted amalgamation of limbs, bones, and organs put together in no discernable pattern. Sometimes, the creature was alive when he cut it free of the sac, forcing him to kill it. The system itself didn’t seem to have a good answer to what the monsters were, instead labeling them as malformed fleshlings, level 1.
Some sort of failed monster? Or maybe it just wasn’t done yet.
The idea that he was killing monsters before they could even finish developing didn’t bother him at all, and Velik went out of his way to destroy every single sac he could find just in case whatever was inside wasn’t dead yet. It slowed him down somewhat, but he reasoned that an extra hour or two now could save him months of hunting in the future. The reality was probably a lot more complicated, but he wasn’t interested in figuring that out.
Things were going well. He destroyed the sacs as he found them, and, occasionally, an actual monster would get in his way. There were no more invisible walls that tried to melt his skin off his face if he attacked them, and the centipedes were much easier to defeat than the scorplings had been. The only problem was that, for all his poking around, he still hadn’t found what he was actually here for.
He came into a chamber that looked like it was full of massive melting candles, each one four or five feet wide and stretching all the way to the roof of the cavern. The fleshy covering sagged over itself in great, floppy folds, and rather than the monster-sized sacs he’d been seeing before, everything was covered in strands of some snot-like substance.
Well, this might be the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen.
Embedded into the mucus were thousands and thousands of little gray orbs, no bigger around than his thumbnail. They were bunched up into clusters that hung off the pillars, draped over the flesh like strings of pennants. Velik frowned and wished he had a way to throw just a bit of light into the room, just to see what color everything really was. [Dread Lance] hadn’t kept that property of [Phalanx], unfortunately, though he supposed if he was willing to detonate one against a pillar, he’d get a brief burst of light in the instant the energy spread outward.
A flicker of movement overhead caught his eye. Velik looked up to see a small hole in the ceiling with a monster crawling out of it. It had four legs and two smaller, delicate arms, and was shaped something like a spider, only with more sharp edges on the joints. There was just one, and [Apex Hunter] was completely confident that it wasn’t a threat. He doubted it was even level 10.
The monster skittered across the roof of the cavern according to some indecipherable logic until it reached one of the fleshy pillars, then it climbed down and unhooked a cluster of the orbs by severing the mucus line connecting it to the rest. Its task finished, it hoisted the orbs onto its back and scaled its way back up to the ceiling, where it disappeared back into the same hole it had emerged from.
“What the hell was that?” he said, not even realizing he’d spoken it out loud until after he’d already said it.
Cautiously, he reached out with his spear and hooked one of the orb clusters, cutting it free by using [Shape Shifting] to curve the tip of the spear into something that resembled a sickle. It wasn’t often he missed [Identify], but right now, he wished the skill hadn’t been folded into [Apex Hunter]. It had contributed a strong sense of intuition about monsters, and in a lot of ways [Identify] couldn’t, but the tradeoff was that it didn’t help much for stuff like this.
The mucus gluing the orbs together started to stretch and separate as he brought the cluster closer. Despite that, none of the orbs actually fell loose. Is it some sort of food for the monsters? They kind of look like fruit, but I’ve never seen a vegetarian monster before.
He plucked one of the orbs loose from the cluster and squeezed it between his fingers. Immediately, it burst apart and a system notification popped up.
[You have slain a seed of corruption (level 1).]
Velik regarded the goo on his fingers with disdain and flicked it away, then dropped the rest of the cluster onto the ground. Mercilessly, he crushed the seeds until they were nothing but paste. Then he looked around the room with an appraising gaze, mentally calculating how long it would take to destroy them all.
I wonder what will show up to try to stop me.
He reached out with his spear to bring down another cluster, then stomped it underfoot.
70
The first indication that he wasn’t alone was a peculiar plopping sound that Velik had first heard a few days ago in the upper reaches of the flesh caves. His eyes snapped over to the entrance, but of course there was nothing to see. There hadn’t been last time, either.
He’d only been destroying the corruption seeds for about ten minutes and had barely even started to clear off the first of the fleshy, melted-candle-shaped pillars, but he wasn’t going to let himself get trapped in here. [Dread Lance] might work to blast through the wall; he hadn’t tried it yet and he didn’t want to until he had to. That meant he needed to get out now before the invisible membrane fully stretched itself across the exit.
For some reason, the monsters that made up the wall didn’t seem to register to [Apex Hunter]. Maybe it was the fact that they were neither predator or prey, but something else that existed outside that cycle. Maybe it was just some skill the monster had to help them hide. Velik didn’t know, but it was damn annoying either way.
He stumbled over an invisible slime, but he’d been expecting that. They always seemed to position themselves in his way, too frequently for him to believe it was anything but on purpose. Whatever senses they had to guide them obviously weren’t hindered by the dark and gave them enough lead time to get into position.
His shins hit the invisible wall three steps later and he pitched forward into a one-handed hand spring. Something struck his leg and knocked him off balance, but Velik was agile enough to compensate and still ended up back on his feet at the end of the tumble. With his spear out in front of him making wide sweeps, he rushed up the tunnel.
Whew. That was close. I was hoping there wouldn’t be any more of those things this far down, but I guess that was too much to ask for. I just can’t figure out what the point is, though. They definitely could have trapped me in a dozen different places. It’s like I’m being herded.
That wall was different. It wasn’t preventing him from going back. If he’d stood there and let it, it would have sealed him in. That might have been worth it, though. Now that he was out of danger and had a second to think about it, he could have taken his time destroying the rest of the seeds, then blasted his way out with [Dread Lance]. Then again, he hadn’t proven the new skill would work, and experimenting when he didn’t have another way out wasn’t a great idea.
No, this way is better. I’ll come back and finish up with those seeds once I break the dungeon core.
The truth was that he wasn’t sure if he could break a dungeon core. The last champion he’d fought had nearly been too much, might even have overwhelmed him if not for merging two skills mid-battle. He hadn’t used his haste potion, but that was only because he didn’t see more attacks being the solution to that fight. More and more, his problem with punching up in levels had been penetrating the monsters’ thick hides.
If the dungeon was going to throw an even tougher champion elite at him, that might just be the wall that finally stopped him. But he wouldn’t know until he got there, and if he let himself be locked up in a room full of creepy parasitic seed monsters, he’d never find out.
Was that the plan? Leave me to die in there, then let one of the seeds take over my body? But if so, why not build the wall farther back from the mouth of the tunnel where I might not have noticed it, or at least they would have had more time to get the slimes stacked up?
Either he was misunderstanding what the dungeon was trying to do, or the dungeon just wasn’t that smart. He snorted at the thought. Smart enough to trap your dumb ass down here, isn’t it?
The only other thing he could think was that killing monsters was fine, but destroying the seeds wasn’t for some reason. It didn’t make sense to him why they’d be any different, but what did he know about how a dungeon worked, anyway? Whatever the reason, the rules were different for that room.
Velik returned to exploring what he thought of as the lower tunnels of the flesh caves, most of which were anywhere from three to eight feet wide, though he did find a few spots tighter than that. None of those weird wall mouths were lurking there, though. He knew because he thoroughly stabbed the wall ahead of him on both sides each time he had to squeeze through.
He also shanked every little eye-speck he could find, but he had a suspicion that he missed far more than he found, and that even if he did hunt down all of them, the dungeon could just grow new ones whenever it wanted.
“Velik,” something hissed softly from ahead.
He froze, his eyes scouring the darkness. A monster that could talk was a new one, but from what he understood, those corrupted seeds could do it back in town, so there wasn’t any reason one of them couldn’t do it here. On the other hand, one that could talk and knew his name was a bit creepier.
“Velik,” the voice called out again, so soft that he could barely hear it.
Okay, so this is obviously a trap. But… do I have any other choice? The dungeon can block off the way back whenever it wants. It only needs a minute, so it doesn’t need voices in the dark to bait me into position. It knows my name, somehow. And I’m here because of Chalin. Connection?
There was only one way to find out.
“Who’s there?” he called out, his voice echoing weirdly in the flesh-coated tunnel.
“We’ve been looking for you,” the voice said back. “Come to us. The way is open.”
“What way? Who is ‘we?’ And why can’t you come to me?”
But the voice was silent. It had said everything it meant to, apparently. It was up to Velik whether or not to walk forward. You’re being an idiot. The smart thing to do here is focus on getting out. Get somebody like Torwin to come back with you. Or even better, a whole dungeon clearing team. You’re in over your head. Use [Dread Lance] to break the slime walls and leave.
