A Dungeon’s Survival

Flur

A knock came at my door. I groaned in response. I wasn't looking forward to this, but I knew it was inevitable, so I figured it would be better to get it over with than to delay it any farther.

“Come in,” I called out.

A moment later, it opened, and Lance entered. I didn't bother to so much as shift my position in bed. I'd tried that once already, and simply put, it wasn't worth the effort.

“You're awake,” he commented.

“Yep.”

“You look like shit.”

“Yep.”

He sighed before walking to my side, setting a bowl of soup on the edge of my bed, and pulling up a chair. He took a seat, and for a while, time passed in a silence I would've been content with had I not been certain of what awaited me on the other side of it. Then, the words I was dreading came.

“Can we talk about what happened back there?”

“Yeah, let's get this over with.”

My casual tone seemed to irk him.

“Flur, this is serious. You nearly died.”

“I didn't, though,” I replied with a forced smirk and cheerfulness that I didn't actually feel.

“Flur!” he snapped, “Would it kill you to take this seriously?”

I let my smile fall at that. It had never been for my benefit anyway, and on this rare occasion, I lacked the mental fortitude necessary to maintain it in the face of it clearly being unwanted. I also let the levity I imposed on myself fall from my tone.

“You really want me to be serious?” I asked.

The coldness of my words seemed to chill the room. This wasn't a side of myself I often showed, instead usually opting to hide behind a mask of my own making. Lance had only seen me with it completely removed a few times before, and my sudden shift seemed to be enough to unnerve him. To his credit, he didn't hesitate or back down, though.

“Yes.”

“Go on then. Start the lecture.”

With a sigh, he slumped in his chair. It took a while before he said anything more.

“You nearly died.”

“Yeah, we've already established that.”

“Autumn and Lawrence filled me in on what happened, you know. What were you thinking? You literally let what is potentially the most venomous monster in the first tier bite you just in order to land a hit on it, one that didn't even finish it off. If it wasn't for Autumn landing the final blow right after and Lawrence healing you, you'd be dead right now.”

“And if I didn't take that risk, we'd all be dead.”

I didn't sugarcoat it. We'd ended up in a horrible situation, and our survival was miraculous. I was sure we could handle one monster on that level. Two was a tall order but still doable, and that's what we'd planned for. Three, however, simply wasn't a barrier we could reasonably overcome as we were, which, according to everything we'd known about the Dungeon, should've been okay.

Encountering that strong of resistance from it shouldn't have been possible. The Dungeon was too young and had yet to see enough death, or so we thought. Apparently, we were wrong, and the Dungeon continued to defy all logic. How? I didn't have the slightest clue, but under those circumstances, reckless or not, I used every last trick at my disposal in order to get us through that mess. I didn't regret it.

“They were running out of ammo, and once they did, it would've been over for us. I did what I needed to to get us out of that alive.”

“What would've happened if your gamble failed, though?”

“The same thing that would've happened if I hadn't taken it. We'd have all died. The only difference would've been that our chance for victory, which paid off by the way, wouldn't have existed. It was either certain death or near-certain death with a chance to survive. I took the risk.”

“You really had no other option?”

“No, that thing was freakishly strong. No first tier monster has any business being that strong and certainly not a Shadow Viper of all things. Anything less would've only ceded the advantage to it and bought its ally the time it needed to finish us off. It was do or die, and I did.”

Silence returned after that, and in that time, I couldn't help but to replay the fight in my mind. It shouldn't have been possible for a monster that powerful to exist within a Dungeon only a few months old. Three monsters of comparable power was even more ridiculous. It just didn't make sense, and I had a feeling there was something that ancient alchemist wasn't telling us. That was an issue for later, though, and besides, my musings were cut short by a few muttered words I caught from my companion.

“It's just, ugh, I can't lose you too. I can't lose someone else.”

I spared him a glance only to see his fists balled and a sad expression on his face. I sighed at the pitiful sight. Then, I said the words that came to mind, not bothering to sugarcoat them.

“Lance, you're an adventurer. Adventurers die. That's a fact of life. If you stay on this path, you will lose more people–will, not might, will. The only two ways to avoid that are to die first or to change your profession. I know this might be hard to hear, but if you can't handle that, I'd recommend reaching out to your family and seeing if they'd take you back.”

It was a harsh truth, brutal honesty, but he needed to hear it. I'd seen plenty of others like him, fledgling adventurers who lost their teams and were devastated. When that happened, they needed to make a choice: to harden themselves to the pain, to let it consume and break them like it had for Octavia, or to throw in the towel and give up on adventuring altogether. For many, that time came a lot sooner than it did for him, but he wasn't numbing himself to the pain, and at the rate he was going, he was going to break.

Clearly, my words had an effect on him. Wide eyed and mouth agape, he looked like I'd just slapped him. Then, after a short pause, he asked in a somber tone, “How many?”

“How many what?”

“How many people have you lost?”

It was my turn to feel like I'd been slapped. There was no number I could give him. I never counted. That would've required me to think about it, and recent occurrences of memories forcing themselves back to the front of my mind aside, I couldn't handle reliving everything I'd been through.

“I try not to think about it,” I eventually answered.

“Can I ask a question?”

“Yeah.”

“How do you keep going? If the people you care about always end up dead, what's the point? Why continue as an adventurer? Why don't you just go back home and call it quits?”

I sighed. His words stung, but in large part, it was my own fault. Just as I'd refused to think about my past as much as I could, I'd also avoided talking about it.

“Lance, I don't have a home to go back to. The only skills I have are that of an adventurer, and as bad as things can be, I still like to explore the world and see what it has to offer. Short as it may end up being, this is the only future I have, so I'm going to make the most of it. You aren't like that, though. You have a home–a family–to go back to. That's a good thing; don't discount it.”

Silence fell once more. One look at his face made it clear my answer had caught him off guard. I didn't blame him for his words. I'd avoided talking about my past up until now, and he was in pain. He wasn't thinking straight, so even if I was pretty sure he'd already connected at least some of the dots, I couldn't fault him for it.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“It's fine, but Lance, I'm serious. If you can't handle the life of an adventurer, go home while you still can. You're not in too deep yet.”

“If I did, would you want to come with me? I don't know if they would take me back, but if they did, with your skill, I'm sure they'd be able to find a job for you. It would be safer than adventuring.”

“Ha, Lance …”

“What?”

“What's my least favorite type of guild request?”

“Low-leveled monster exterminations?”

“Uh, second least favorite.”

“Escort missions?”

“And what would a job provided by your family entail?”

“Guarding caravans most likely.”

I didn't even need to respond verbally. I just shot him a look, and he averted his gaze. I did give him an actual answer, though.

“Like I said, I do enjoy being an adventurer for the most part. A life without risk or exploration wouldn't suit me. I don't know anything else.”

“Old man Gyle seems to think you're good at negotiations. I think you could probably make it as a merchant.”

I chuckled at that.

“A profession that thrives on ripping other people off? Sorry, I've been on the receiving end of that one, and I'd rather not.”

“Oh, right. You did say something about merchants ripping off your tribe before. Sorry about that.”

“It wasn't your family.”

Another silence stretched out until he asked a different question, “What would happen to you and the others if I did? Leave, I mean. Go back home.”

“Well, for starters, I'd probably skip town–the kingdom as a whole if I'm being honest. With those rumors of a war brewing, if it weren't for our current obligations, I'd have done so ages ago. Without us, old man Gyle and the branch head wouldn't have the pawns they need to save the Dungeon, so the planned extermination would go off without a hitch, and without the Dungeon, everything around here would go back to how it used to be. Lawrence would keep learning alchemy under his master, and the siblings would either return to their old lives or leave, striking out as adventurers. That's my best guess at least.”

“What?”

Lance was giving me a blank stare.

“What?” I echoed back to him defensively, “You asked.”

“I wasn't expecting that thorough of an answer. You've really thought it through, huh–my leaving?”

“No, I've thought through what would happen if I left.”

The was a pause before he asked, “You want to?”

I'd have shrugged had it not been for the pain I knew doing so would cause me. Instead, I just gave a noncommittal grunt.

“What's keeping you?”

That was a question I'd rather have avoided, but given the brutal honesty I'd already been spewing during this talk, I answered, “I think my doing so would be enough to push you over the edge, and reckless as I am, it would seriously lower the kids' odds of survival.”

He grimaced before asking, “Would they die if I left?”

“No, only if I did. If I left, I couldn't see you guys just giving up on the Dungeon, but if you left, I would too. With both of us out of the picture, the Dungeon would be a lost cause, and by not delving it anymore, they're odds of survival would probably jump significantly. The place is a death trap, and I think its insane we're trying to prevent it from getting exterminated at all.”

“I see.”

“So, are you going to leave?”

“If I stay, will you?”

“Pretty much.”

“Then, I think I am going to stay. I don't want to lose anyone else. Sure, if I left, you guys might not die, but as far as I'm concerned, I'd still be losing you. Also, the Tarnished Blades are still out there. The thought of them doing the same thing they did to our friends to more innocent people–I can't just sit back and do nothing about them.”

“Then, stay on course we will.”

I actually thought that would be the end of the discussion, so I turned my attention to the soup he'd brought me. I eyed the bowl warily, weighing my hunger against the pain of moving my arm. As many resources as our sponsor had and as good as he was at alchemy, that static monster's venom was no joke.

Apparently, regular Shadow Viper antivenom wasn't entirely effective against it. Neither was the magic Lawrence used to cleanse it from my body or even antivenom derived from the same monster's old corpses we'd collected in the past; it'd grown too strong since then. The result was my health having never fully recovered and an ambiguous timeline for being healed.

As it stood, either a new sample of the monster's venom was needed or I was going to have to wait until old man Gyle got around to whipping up some advanced cure, all of the more mundane ones with readily available ingredients unable to fully fix me. The best they'd been able to do so far was to stop the degradation of my body, and considering the fact that I had no desire for my team to fight that thing without me, I was out of luck for the time being. In a best case scenario, I'd be back on my feet in a few days, but considering the approaching extermination of the Dungeon the guild had scheduled, I couldn't fully discount the possibility of Gyle not getting around to it until after things blew over, and if that was the case, it was entirely possible he'd hang me out to dry since I'd no longer have value to him. If that was the case, I'd have to figure something out myself, not that I was going to voice those fears to Lance. It was not an ideal situation to find myself in.

“You know we can't let this happen again, though, right?” Lance's voice snapped me from my pessimistic thoughts, “Things got bad. We can't let ourselves get into a situation like that again.”

“And how exactly do you plan on preventing that?” I countered, “The way I see it, with this Dungeon, the only way would be to not go back into it.”

“We need to prepare better from here on out: more supplies, more countermeasures, more backup plans in case things go wrong. We've been slacking since we lost Randy.”

“I've told you how many times now? I'm not Randy. I'm not suited to being a leader. I've been doing the best I can, but my mind just doesn't work like his did.

“Give me the biggest, most dangerous monster you can find, and I'll fight it to the death if I have to, but ask me to come up with some complex strategy with backup plans and countermeasures for every conceivable thing that could go wrong, and you might as well be asking a manual laborer about advanced magical theory. I know how to fight, and I know how to move. I don't know how to lead.”

“You have been saying that, haven't you.”

“Repeatedly.”

With a sigh, he leaned back in his chair. Then he asked an obvious question, “Do you really think I'd do that much better a job?”

“Yes!” I practically shouted, a decision I instantly regretted as I began to cough.

Once I recovered, I continued, “Yes, I do. A far better job.”

There was a reason things had moved smoother back before Randy had died. There was a reason I'd joined this adventuring group in the first place. I was an impulsive adrenaline junkie who relied on instincts more than anything, and I could admit that. I worked best when I had someone calm, collected, and methodical, someone like Randy, to keep me in check. It was part of the reason why things had been so hard since his and Muri's deaths. I was no leader.

“I see,” he said with yet another sigh, “Okay, if you say so. I don't share your confidence in me, but I'll see what I can do.”

“Aye, boss!” I cheered, ignoring the pain and allowing myself to slip back into my normal persona while also giving my friend a salute, “At your service!”

“Aye? What are we, sailors?”

“By the System I hope not! If that's your first order, I think I'll be skipping the country after all. Ugh, I hate water.”

As much as it hurt, we both laughed at that. Then, I fell serious once more.

“Hey,” I started, “if you're sure about this, I've got two pieces of advice for you.”

“What?”

“First, rely on Lawrence. As much of an awkward mess as he can be, he's got a good head on his shoulders. Using that effectively was beyond me, but something tells me you'll have better luck with that. It could help with those plans and countermeasures you were talking about.”

He nodded, and asked, “What's the other thing?”

I deflated at his words, reluctant to admit what I was about to. Then, I said what I was going to anyway.

“As much as I hate to say it, the Dungeon is too strong for us as we are, and it seems to be growing faster than us, too. I don't know; maybe your better planning can help, but permanent enhancers, plans, and equipment aside, we're struggling hard. I was toying with an idea before handing off leadership to you, but now that I have, it's your call.”

“What idea?”

“Adding another member to the group.”

The way he looked at me communicated clearly that he'd never even considered the possibility, and his next words spoke to the same, “Who, though? It's not like there's a whole lot of people around here that'd be strong enough to actually help. In fact, I can't think of a single person. Is there a guard or something you want to poach from Gyle?”

“No, they'd all either fill the same roles as you or Autumn. There wouldn't be a point.”

“Then, who?”

There was one person we could potentially grab up who'd actually be useful, but they weren't without their own problems, and I certainly had reservations about the idea. Still, an extra body could help. Before I could explain who it was and my reasoning for choosing them to Lance, however, there was another knock on my door. It was Lawrence, and from the look on his face, I could only assume he either had bad news or was both constipated and running a high fever. Considering he was here and not on a toilet or bedridden himself, it was probably the former.

And things were just starting to look up, too, I silently complained to myself.