Chapter 82: Dungeon Camping
By the end of the sixth floor, Kir was reaching the end of his physical stamina. Mana-wise, he was great, but his body just wasn’t going to keep up with all the kilometers-long marching through all sorts of biomes and weather patterns and fights.
They’d just passed through the icy biome after an encounter with with white, furry creatures that looked like roided-out bears with gorilla arms only to arrive at a strange, lush zone that was made of ghostly white, petrified trees rising high into the heavens. From the higher ones poured waterfalls, and a gentle misting rain seemed to fall everywhere.
Lilypad-like plants, each with their own little ecosystem, comprised the majority of their walking space, some connected by bridges of wood that had been nailed into their green flesh. As they walked, Kir noticed that the light was fading.
So these places do have a day and night cycle, he thought to himself. Then he noticed a large split in the lilypad ahead of him.
Below, the fall descended so far that it was pitch black without anything but trunks and stalks visible.
"What happens when you fall?" Kir asked.
Ata replied, "Same thing as what happens if anyone crosses the edge of a room’s zone. If you’re lucky, you land somewhere random in this dungeon. If you’re unlucky, you come back inside out or in pieces or wind up somewhere completely different. And if you’re really unlucky, you fall into a grote room and wind up being food."
"Grote?" Kir asked.
"It’s short for ’grotesque,’" Ata explained. "Deeper dungeons aren’t as pretty as the stuff we’re getting up here... and the monsters, well..." She shuddered. "Once in a while someone brings up a grotesque corpse. I saw one last year and... let’s just say it would turn anyone’s stomach inside out. They say there are even ones that can speak, or scream, and lure adventurers in before devouring them."
"And here I thought this place was starting to make sense," Kir said. "I’m guessing there are more ways to be unlucky than lucky?"
"Yep!" Ata patted him on the back, making him jitter back from the edge he was looking over. "Don’t worry that smart little Academy brain of yours, new guy. The dungeons are something wondrously beyond all reason and comprehension. Learn to roll with it."