Beneath the Dragoneye Moons

2916 Years after Elaine became a professor at the School of Sorcery and Spellcraft

There was one area we’d avoided in our long lives. One place we’d waited on, delayed on. One last grand source of entertainment that would only be fresh once, that promised levels no matter how strong we were. Auri had visited a few times herself, but we wanted one big fresh trip.

The kindest oddity, the everflowing font of wealth and experience.

It was time for us to visit The Dungeon. Endless levels, countless challenges.

“Everyone ready?” Iona asked.

“Brrpt!”

“Yes.” Fenrir growled. Dude had never stopped growing, thank goodness for his shrink skill.

“Let’s do it!” I said, bouncing from foot to foot.

We walked through the valley under the watchful gaze of all the creatures surrounding the edges, protectively waiting for their people inside to come out. Nobody was on the lookout for us, but nearly every monster and beast here knew Auri and Fenrir. Our levels were a second deterrent, as were the silvery masks tied behind our heads.

If anyone wanted to fight with four Classers in the final stretch to divinity, they’d deeply regret it.

Auri fluttered around us, chirping happily as she narrated all of her great stories from her exploration of The Dungeon, explaining all the fun we were going to have and places she was excited we’d see. We paused in front of the swirling purple portal, ignoring a group that popped out behind us. Iona grabbed my hand as Auri landed on my shoulders. Fenrir shrunk down and slinked next to Iona, and she put a hand on his head.

“All set?” She asked, getting a chorus of assents.

“Go.” She said, I touched the portal, and the four of us were sucked into The Dungeon, for one last grand adventure.

One last epic adventure before we focused our attention on Lun’kat, and tried to fulfill Iona’s divine quest.

[Welcome to The Dungeon! You are on the 1st floor.]

We’d exited the portal in a large, damp cave. The floor had been smoothed over by generations of footprints passing by, and wasn’t that interesting? To our knowledge, the dungeon was regenerated every time people entered an instance. Damage done by a party on one level didn’t carry over the next time. The cave was entirely enclosed, with a silver portal on the other side both the exit, and the ability to descend to the next level. A tiny snake hissed threateningly at us in the middle of the cavern, the only threat to us here.

[Snake - Level 1] was all the System had for me, and I didn’t recognize the species. The type of snake was either so rare it had never been found, extinct, or something The Dungeon had created specifically for people on the first floor. It wasn’t even clear if the snake was venomous! The markings suggested it, the lack of fangs and the narrow head implied otherwise. Then again, coral snakes and such were venomous without the standard markings… and Auri torched the snake.

[*ding!* Your party has slain a [Snake (Poison - level 1)]!]

Huh. Advanced element pre-level 8. Well, this was the dungeon.

“Brrrpt!!” Auri had already flown over to the portal, which had turned from silver to purple, indicating that the ‘puzzle’ of the floor had been completed and we could move on.

“Hold up Auri!” I complained. “We just got here, give us a minute to look around!”

Iona blinked and shook her head.

“That was weird.” She complained, massaging the bridge of her nose.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Trying to peek at the snake’s status gave me the grandmother of all headaches instead of information.” She said. “Something about them not being real is playing merry havoc with my blessing.”

I pursed my lips.

“Want to bet if we encounter an underground civilization here, that you won’t be able to understand them either? Because their language isn’t ‘spoken under the moons’?”

Iona looked horrified at the idea.

“That’s… probably more true than I would’ve guessed.” She said.

“Brrrrpt!” Auri complained, smacking the exit with her wings. Her ever-present halo of rocks circling her sped up, spinning faster in her excitement.

“I think if we don’t get a move on, Auri’s going to combust with excited frustration.” I said. Iona grinned.

“We can’t have that now, can we? Let’s go!”

We all touched the portal, and got sucked down to the second level. Another cave, with a purple portal a little further away. No silver lock on it. The floor had a few bioluminescent mushrooms, and Auri started to excitedly explain what they did.

“Brrpt brrpt BRPT!” She said. A single bent, rusty nail was created out of nothing high above us, and dropped down onto my head. Our spoils for defeating the previous floor. I put it into a trophy room we’d set aside explicitly for this expedition, on the place marked ‘floor 1’. A good memento of our trip down here, for however long it would last.

Perhaps we’d be able to take it with us, or recreate the room and the memories in our divine realm.

I was a little torn. Part of me wanted to investigate and explore myself, to get practice for the deeper levels where none of us had been, where there were no stories. On the other ‘the big glowing mushrooms will puff a little and maybe give you a cough’ wasn’t exactly groundbreaking news, and this was Auri’s domain to cheerfully chirp over.

“Should we burn them all or carefully step over them?” Iona asked with a twinkle in her eyes. We both knew exactly what would happen when we suggested pyromania as an answer to a problem. Predictably, the cavern erupted with flames, and we stepped through the portal a moment later. I snatched a coin - looked vaguely elvish, exactly a gram of arcanite in the center, but I’d need to consult with a museum to see if it was from a historical era - out of the air, and we continued down into the depths.

Auri helped us blaze through the challenges, not that anything was particularly difficult at our level. We were facing down challenges meant for people at level 30, not 3800, and I was on board with the idea of ‘skip the boring stuff until we get to the interesting puzzles.’

We slowed down after a puzzle board game, where we had to play against a master without knowing the rules ourselves. After discovering the secret rule of ‘beating up the game pieces when they attack removes them’, we were able to awkwardly power our way through. Auri paused at the gate.

“...Brrrpt.” She reluctantly admitted. I stifled a laugh.

“Ah, this floor then?” I cheekily asked. Auri shot me a dirty look, and perched on my shoulder with wide eyes.

“Brrpt?” She asked.

“Sure, head on in. Anyone else?” I asked as I opened up [Manor]. Auri went in, and after a fraction of a second, Iona went and joined her with a wink in my direction. The ‘we don’t want to make Auri feel bad by being the only one left out’ one.

Being this old was weird. We were mature enough to not let anything like this bother us, but considerate enough not to want to leave each other alone either. Fenrir and I entered through the portal, and found ourselves deep under the ocean, inside a small air bubble. Fish swam in great colorful schools around us, darting in and out of coral reefs. Sharks swam in the great depths, octopuses hid in shadows, and the sun was glinting through the water, giving off the impression of a tropical paradise. All of the animals registered at level 1025, and the dungeon had hit on one of its ‘natural’ difficulty spikes.

Stolen novel; please report.

Absolute hell on Pallos for a phoenix though. This was the level Auri and her friends had gotten stuck on for months and prompted my first visit to the Phoenix Peaks. They had tried to boil the ocean away, but it had all rained back down before they’d gotten anywhere. It made me wonder if we’d eventually encounter a level where we started underwater, and would have to rapidly adapt.

I wouldn’t put it past the Dungeon.

“Fenrir, want to go hunting?” I asked, gesturing to the great bounty swimming just out of reach. His grin was predatory, and Lightning started to spark along his armored wings.

“Gladly.” He said before shooting off. The force of him entering the water sent out a deadly shockwave that stunned half the fish a moment before he was on them, a peerless predator in the ocean depths.

Some floors were for Auri, Iona dominated others. This was one clearly going to be a Fenrir special. I sat down on a rock, kicked off my shoes to wiggle my toes in the sand, and watched the water turn red.

Soon, we’d get to a floor that would challenge us.

Soon, we’d get to a floor where we’d start leveling.

We hadn’t even finished materializing out of the portal before a hypersonic barrage of poisoned darts was sent our way.

I dropped a [Shield] in the way and fired Radiance around. Fenrir looked bored as the darts clattered off his armor. Iona plucked a few out of the air, using her shield to block a few heading towards me, and letting the rest ping off her armor.

Auri? Auri fell on her usual reflex of ‘kill it with fire’, which went poorly. We’d been dropped in a large pond of waist-high oil, and the slightest spark would’ve been enough to ignite the entire thing, let alone Auri throwing around [Fireballs] like confetti. We found ourselves in the middle of a lake of fire, with Iona and Fenrir starting to sweat.

Iona transformed herself into the shimmering gleam of moonlight on a clear day, and Fenrir used his elemental transformation to get turned into a raw avatar of Lightning. Fire couldn’t destroy moonlight, although the interactions it had with Lightning made my head hurt at times.

Auri would, naturally, protest both, but her bullshit didn’t count. We started to wade through the fire and the flames. Thank goodness for my increased lung and blood oxygenation capacity, along with my immunity to fire. I didn’t need to get turned into stars, or go [Lightspeed]. I got a moment to look around the place.

We’d been dropped off in a pitch black, sealed room, with just the lake of oil. The place was like an improved mineshaft or underground lair. Mostly bedrock, but with significant amounts of metal to help smooth and shape the place. A single large bank-vault like door was the only exit.

There were a number of small tunnels circling the place with tiny openings, and I could see the tail end of a number of kobolds running away. It was easy to piece together what had happened. An ambush, hitting us from multiple points, but not standing to fight. They’d be back.

The fires burned themselves out a moment later, suggesting restricted airflow. We flew over the oil, through the smoggy fumes, and Iona went through the vault door. We all joined her a moment later, and the two of them dropped their elemental transformations. I took in a deep breath, then started to cough as the fumes rushed into the hallway I found myself in. Iona pounded me on the back with a wry grin.

Which was when the ceiling dropped on us. A flicker of primal fear flashed through Iona’s eyes, her worst nightmare made manifest. It didn’t stop her from reaching up and bracing herself, and catching the entire falling mountain. The weight drove her to one knee, and I did my best to grab and hold part of it up myself.

“Don’t expand.” Iona gasped out to Fenrir. He started to raise Ice pillars in front of us, and Auri mimicked the same with Lava behind us, hardening and forming pillars to support the ceiling.

A minute of remodeling later, and we were standing in a makeshift cave. I was sketching out the model of the place as far as [The World Around Me] let me see.

“Bear traps are invisible in this room here. The ceiling looks rigged to fall in these corridors. The floor is an illusion in these places, and I’m suspicious of it. At these levels, we should all survive a fall, if we didn’t have our own flight skills. There’s got to be something more. Acidic slimes are slowly melting through the dungeon in these places. Half of me wants to say we can wait and the problem will go away. The rest of me thinks it’s a timer - if they melt too much, we’re going to be in trouble. The rest rooms are all traps. Needles on every chair, under every pillow. These rooms have pipes leading to them, the moment we enter they’ll try to flood us out. Pretty weak, but I almost think it’s designed to let us lower our guard.”

“Or electrocute us.” Iona said. “One central Lightning Classer could hit us across whatever room we end up in.” Unsaid was the futility of most of these traps with my constant healing. Simply trying to power through everything was a terrible idea that encouraged bad habits.

“Or electrocute us.” I agreed. “Gas pipes in these rooms. Boulder traps here, here, and here. With everything else going on, I’d bet the food in these rooms are poisoned. Three kobolds in a suit of armor here.” I looked up to Iona apologetically.

“They’re wearing a Valkyrie’s suit of armor.” I said softly. “I don’t know if The Dungeon generated it, or if they’re reusing it, but I think we should go for it either way.”

The great thing about The Dungeon - everything inside it was ‘real’, and could be taken with no consequences.

“We’ll take it.” Iona grimly agreed. I went back to the map.

“Steam here, and too many kobolds hiding in the walls for it to not turn nasty. The botanical garden has layers of traps. Standard ones in plain sight, slightly hidden ones in the trees and bushes, and naturally, the entire thing is poisonous. It doesn’t end at three layers. The ceiling is rigged to fall and the floor is too thin. The walls are filled with explosives.”

Iona stared at the map.

“I hate this level already. Please tell me there’s good news.”

I grinned and looked at Auri.

Nobody here was real in a sense. [Oath] didn’t apply.

“You’re skinny enough to fit through their side tunnels. Want to go hunting?”

“BRRRPT!”

The Dungeon only got meaner from there. We were shrunk down to about six inches tall on one floor. A bureaucracy level, where we simply had to sit and fill out tedious paperwork. Even at our speeds, it took four months to work through everything. They took particular malicious delight in sending us back to the start for missing a never-stated rule. The ‘countdown’ floor was sadistic at the time, but hilarious after. I could see why nobody ever talked about it outside The Dungeon.

Pressing a button started a timer. Pressing it again reset the timer.

The portal unlocked from silver to purple when the timer hit 0… three weeks after we’d started the puzzle. We kept resetting it, assuming letting it hit 0 would result in us failing.

I swear The Dungeon was a little sadistic.

It wasn’t all misery.

We took to an endless monster horde with relish, and a grand zombie assault was just plain fun. There was a medical level where we had to save as many people as possible, which took just a thought when I realized what was going on. A flight obstacle course with gravity pads was trivial to fly through. One floor had only Iona able to see and communicate, with the rest of us needing to follow her directions. Super weird how The Dungeon could cut off [The World Around Me], but hey, those were the rules.

In the end, we leveled.

I leveled.

[*ding!* [The Elaine] leveled up! 3894 -> 3895! Only 201 levels to go! +1073 Strength, +1073 Dexterity, +4302 Speed, +4302 Vitality, +10757 Mana, +53783 Mana Regeneration, +21512 Magic Power, +21512 Magic Control per level!

We can do it!]

The Dungeon had been a grand old time, and we’d gotten a good number of hard-fought levels out of it. We were all approaching the final levels, at the peak of Immortals on Pallos. My journey was nearing its end, and I wanted to share some of it for future generations. Perhaps I’d inspire more children when I was beyond the mortal coil, perhaps some [Historians] would like to study what I did and thought. A first-hand account of the Remus Republic would be considered priceless in some circles.

I sat down to write my memoirs at The School of Sorcery and Spellcraft, and I’d gotten everyone to help me out. Artemis, Amber, Iona, Sara, Auri, Nina, even Night was willing to come along, smiling that I’d managed to overtake him in levels once again. He ‘only’ had another 7-9000 years to go.

We spent ages talking and reminiscing over everything, with cookies and hard liquor. We laughed, we cried, we remembered.

At the end of the day, writing was a lonely, solitary occupation.

I sat down by myself with quill and parchment in hand. I stared at the blank paper, wondering how to start, where to start. My life on Earth? Pallos? No, the time Papilion found me, that was the true start.

But before I could write the start of the journey, I had to decide what I wanted to call the story. How I wanted to frame it. I wrote down a half-dozen names and scratched them out, before the rising moons gave me the last burst of inspiration I needed. I dipped my quill in the ink, and scratched out the first few words, the title of my memoir. The first thing I’d seen on Pallos and our final challenge. The bookends of my adventure.

Beneath the Dragoneye Moons.