A Dungeon’s Survival

Flur

The Dungeon's entrance was a good walk away from town. At a leisurely pace, the trip to or from it would take a normal person around fifteen minutes. Adventurers could make better time, especially if they were in a hurry. Adventurer rogues, along with other classes with high agility, could cover that distance in a matter of minutes. That was why I had split up from the rest of my party: to make better time.

We didn't know how serious the threat was, but from how easily the giant who attacked the village had swatted me away, it was clear that we couldn't underestimate it. Technically, we didn't have any concrete evidence that there was a full bandit group around. Still, we couldn't dismiss the threat and either way, we had accepted the role of senior adventurers in this new guild branch.

We had a duty to fulfill. To that end, I had gone ahead. I could have made better time than I was, and I would have liked to. Unfortunately, my top running speed wasn't the limiting factor.

“Seriously, can't you go any faster?” I complained.

“No–huff–I can't,” the man trailing a short distance behind me wheezed out.

I shook my head. Why the boss had made me bring Chris along, I couldn't understand it. I knew that the rogue from Oct's group was probably the only one around who could at least try to keep up with me, but trying to do something and succeeding were two entirely different things. I had a good handful of levels on him. That meant I could have gotten there sooner to intervene if I needed to had I gone alone, and that wasn't the end of my complaints on the matter.

As far as I was concerned, he wouldn't be of much help either. I'd heard that their group had tried fighting the plant monsters in the second room a few times, but even if I hadn't heard about the outcomes of those attempts, I could guess how they had played out. Oct would have spent every free moment she had bragging about it if they had succeeded in bringing one down. I had heard no such thing. That meant their team as a whole had failed at what I alone had managed to do. Did I fault them for it? No, not at all. It didn't make me feel any safer knowing one of them was watching my back, though, and I couldn't see how it was worth the time lost to bring him along.

No, come on Flur, calm down.

I wasn't actually that angry about it. I was just directing my frustration at him since he was the nearest annoyance. The thing that was actually bothering me was my own helplessness in the situation. My attacks against the bandit leader had been entirely ineffectual. He was strong, and we had left Lance to hold him off until help could arrive. I was worried about my friend and angry at myself for being too weak to help. I needed to get stronger, and more pressingly, I needed to trust him and do what I had to do.

I clenched all four of my fists and focused on the sensation. I needed to be mentally present as we approached the cave opening. For all I knew, there would be bandits swarming it. Getting distracted at critical moments had always been a weakness of mine, possibly a coping mechanism that did more harm than good.

I'm doing it again.

Clearing my mind, I took in the view. Through the trees, I could make out indistinct shapes on the ground. As I drew nearer, I was able to make out what they were. Crumpled up in the dirt were four bodies. Two belonged to the guards that had been stationed outside of the Dungeon to ensure people were only entering it after we had dealt with the static monster guarding the core room. The other two I didn't recognize.

They were a mess, even before taking into account the wounds and blood that marred their bodies. I wouldn't have necessarily pegged them for bandits. Instead, if I were to have run into them in a dark alleyway at night, I would have expected to be pickpocketed at worst and asked for spare change at best. They looked like beggars.

“What is it?” the fellow rogue asked as he caught up.

“A fight. From the looks of it, I'd guess at least a dozen people. It could have been more.”

“You can tell all that?”

I shrugged, “Yeah, I'm no expert tracker, but I know some of the basics. The ground here's too tracked up for less than that.”

I took a step toward the staircase in the hill before being stopped, “Wait, what about light? Do you have a torch?”

“I don't need one. I can see in the dark.”

“Well, I can't.”

I sighed and turned to face him. Then, I reluctantly grabbed his arm and began pulling him forward.

“Here,” I spoke as I dragged him along, “this way you won't get lost. It's better to keep the element of surprise than to wave around a flaming stick while shouting, 'We're over here!'”

“But, how am I supposed to fight if I can't see?”

I stared him dead in the eyes. He flinched.

“Look,” I began, “if you can't do this, you can turn back now. This is your chance to do so. Otherwise, you can trust me. I won't let you get killed by a monster you can't see, and when we find the bandits, you can use their light to see by. If that doesn't work for you, just go now. You'll only be getting in my way.”

He averted his eyes but nodded as he took a step forward. I gave him a small smile. I had half-expected him to leave when I gave him the chance. The fact that he hadn't was enough to elevate my opinion of him somewhat.

[You are now entering Cave of Absolution.]

As we stepped through the entrance to the Dungeon I was flooded with a sense of relief. It was still a Dungeon. The fact that the System alerted me of that meant we weren't too late. The bandits had yet to destroy the core. We had time, but it likely wasn't much.

As I descended the few stairs, I began to take deep, slow breaths. We needed to be prepared for anything, so as we made our way through the first room, I forced myself into a state of complete alertness. I listened for any sounds that could indicate the presence of others, and I kept an eye out above us. I didn't waste time scaling the walls to check for the Trenti that was usually there. I couldn't discount the possibility it would pop its fungal head out and blast us with a spell, but I doubted it would. If a group of bandits had just passed through, it was likely anything that had been there would be dead now. Keeping an eye out had to be enough of a compromise.

As much as I was paying attention for anything, there wasn't much for me to notice. The Dungeon was desolate, and I didn't like it. We made it half-way through the room in that ominous quiet without anything happening. There were no signs of life or of anyone having recently been around. It felt wrong. Then, it happened. I heard something.

Boom.

I stopped in my tracks. Chris bumped into my back a moment later.

“What is it?” he whispered near my ear.

I shushed him.

Boom.

The sound came again. It was faint, as though it were a long way off. I frowned at that. Thinking about it, I wasn't sure the Dungeon was big enough to warrant something sounding so far away. The sense that something was wrong grew within me.

“Do you hear that?” I asked.

Boom.

“Hear what?”

I sighed in exasperation. Rogues were supposed to be observant, yet I could only come to the conclusion that his hearing was shot. The nonexistent reassurance from having him watching my back somehow diminished farther.

“It sounds like explosions,” I explained, “probably spells going off or something. Let's hurry.”

I began pulling him onward once more. We quickly reached the small tunnel, and I started to make my way through. The second room was a distance away, so I couldn't make out the details yet, but I could see light and, even without it, a lot more than I felt like there should have been to see. I started moving faster.

“What is it?”

“I think they're in the core room fighting. We have to move fast, but there's something wrong up ahead. I need to see what it is before anything else.”

We hurried along, and as we approached the end of the tunnel, my eyes went wide. The scene in the next room was so far removed from the realm of possibility that I didn't know what to make of it. There were not just the two dead Bloodthorn Vines that I was expecting. There were two more of the viscous plants dangling limply from the ceiling, and one of them was a whole lot larger than any I had seen before. My eyes rested on them for a moment, likely because they were the easiest thing in my field of vision to understand.

Stepping out through the entrance of the room, I found bodies piled up around me. Three were from the little mushroom creatures. Three were from people who looked wholly unfit to be in a Dungeon. They resembled the bodies I saw outside, but every bit of these ones' exposed skin was covered in blisters. That left the few remaining bodies. I didn't know what to make of them.

They were so bloodied, mangled, and had so missing body parts that I wasn't entirely sure what had done them in. I could guess from context that it had been the spiked vines I had grown unfortunately familiar with, but from all the good examining them did me, it could just as easily been a dragon that had stepped on them. The rest of the room wasn't much easier to parse.

Everywhere I looked, I saw corpses. To my left, there were people skewered on stalagmites. To my right, there was a pit filled with lumps that I assumed used to be people, and in front of me, there were intact bodies with obvious markings left behind by fatal injuries, some monstrous in nature and some that looked like strikes from weapons.

Every corner of the room was stained with blood, and there were dozens of corpses strewn about. It was a mockery of the beauty I had seen in the underground forest the first time I had been here. I had a hard time reconciling it with the sight that had inspired a sense of awe in me before.

I didn't know what had caused this, but the mere fact that the Dungeon was still standing after whatever had played out in the room before me was enough me make me reconsider whether or not it would be for the best if it did fall. I shook the thought from my head. That wasn't my judgment to make.

“I think I'm gonna be sick.”

“Not on my back you aren't!” I hissed before adding on a, “Also, quiet.”

The worst part of the scene was the smell that saturated the room. It was the acrid scent of meat charred to a crisp and tinged with a hint of iron that I knew to be blood. I didn't blame the other rogue for hurling behind me, or at least not beyond a little resentment that stemmed from him adding to the putrid odor. As much as I felt like emptying my own gut, something else took priority in that moment. Not all of the bodies in the room were dead.

Ahead of us were fourteen individuals, some with torches. They were sitting in groups along the path. All of them were as heavily armed as one might expect bandits to be. None of them were in good condition, and they were in the process of treating their injuries with mundane methods. They didn't seem to have any healers in their ranks, not odd for those of their ilk.

Boom.

Whatever was happening in the next room ahead was still going on. There was no time to waste.

“Okay, Chris, there are injured bandits ahead. I'm going to rush in and finish off as many of them as I can. You,” I paused to gesture to his vomit-stained self before realizing he probably couldn't see me doing so, “be prepared to help me if you see an opportunity. Other than that, maybe clean yourself up a bit.”

“Will you be okay?”

“Who knows? Life's short, and there's no time to worry about that.”

With that, I turned and fell into a sprint. I drew my four blades simultaneously and used Dash. As I surged forth, one man stood up and yelled, “Something's coming!”

I felt a hint of amusement at his shouted warning. It seemed as thought he thought I was a monster, and since we were in a Dungeon, that wasn't the worst guess. I didn't have enough time to do more than acknowledge the words, though. By the time the rest turned to look at me, I was already upon them. I swung a blade and pierced an angry gnome through the eye.

[Gnome Warrior (Level 14) slain! You have gained 1,400 experience.]

My smile dropped, and at the same time, I kicked a sword out of reach from a woman who already had their hand extended toward it. I stabbed a dagger into her shoulder and watched as her eyes went wide. I planted a foot in her stomach a moment later. Then, I tossed two daggers at the least injured pair in range. They pierced flesh, but they didn't do any significant damage.

With my last arm, I tossed a blade downward into the chest of someone who had been lying down, getting treated for what looked to be a lot of impact wounds. I stomped down on the weapon and drew three new daggers to replace the ones I had used. I lunged forward in the same movement.

[Human Archer (Level 15) slain! You have gained 1,500 experience.]

It was only once I was moving again that I found the time to give the notifications a cursory glance. I didn't actually read through them, only checking the experience values to gauge the average strength of the people I had just gotten myself into a outnumbered fight against. My heart threatened to burst its way through my chest from the spike of adrenaline caused by the realization that dawned on me. Their levels were high.

The odds were stacked against me, but it was too late to back out now. I felt a pang of emptiness from deep within with each life I took, but my mouth twisted into a grin all the same. I didn't enjoy killing these criminals, even if they deserved it, but that is what adrenaline did to me. The thrill of battle was something I had learned to embrace wholeheartedly, the alternative being fear and death.