Chapter 96: Speed Run, Safe Strat
As Kir had come to spend subjective weeks down here, the dungeon had started to make a weird sort of sense to him. For one thing, even if the features of the dungeon weren’t consistent, there were tendencies. Like the tendency of the portals between floors to become either larger or more numerous the "higher" up they went.
Some doors led to dead-end floors; places with no discoverable way in or out. It was exploring and backtracking out of these floors that had taken most of their time, so even though they’d been through more than a dozen floors, largely by air, there was no way to tell how far they were from the exit.
The only way Kir could guess they were advancing toward the surface was that the floors were steadily growing more and more alive.
They hadn’t seen any indications of civilization since the bottom floor, but they had encountered a few signs of dead people, mostly bits of equipment or bodies. The preserved journal that Stella had found had turned out to be indecipherable.
The one thing Kir could tell for sure was that it was dated up to a certain point, with each corner bearing consistent markers, and the writer of it had taken great pains to write extensive notes, with sketches. It was full from front to back.
Little of what was recorded in its later sketches matched anything he’d seen down here, so he wondered if some of the floors had changed or if he was looking at information from elsewhere. But if he had to guess, the writer had been something of an adventurer. The more he stared into the unreadable words, the more he felt committed to making sure the journal would make it out intact.
If he could only make sure he and Stella made it out alive.
"First floor where we aren’t seeing grotesques and somehow I feel like I’m going to miss fighting them," Kir said as he peered over the ridge of the rocky, dried-up river beds.
Ambushing prey at the entrances was a favored tactic of those creatures that had been trapped in their biomes for generations. Here, a conflagration of perhaps two dozen dragons laid curled around the way out.
Each was bigger than him, even in his war form. Their upper scales were brown, but with blue tinges to the edges, and while none of them breathed fire, their razor-sharp teeth and the yellow-red tinge to their saliva suggested they had other painful ways to kill.
An apex predator like a dragon, shouldn’t have been there. Not unless dragons weren’t the apex predator of this floor. Or not unless something else was going on that he didn’t understand.