Eli sat for a good thirty minutes just watching the frog to make sure this wasn’t some trick. He didn’t think it was, but he needed to do something until Lucy woke up, so he stared, and he stared, and towards the end of his intimidation attempt he tried to increase the menacing-ness of his stare. There was no reaction from the frog; it was at the top of a waterfall with its eyes closed and Eli swore its front legs were shaking.

  “Well,” Beau said, with a bit of a wild look in his eye, “That was terrifying”

  “I agree,” Cody chimed in, “I’m still not sure exactly what happened.”

  “I’ll do my best to fill you in,” Eli said sadly since everyone looked despondent. “The frog’s tongue attack was coming so I reacted. I've seen attacks like that before in that first dungeon I was in so I knew what it was going to do. I conjured a bladed cudgel and smashed into the attack as fast as I could, but I wasn’t fast enough to stop it entirely.” Eli then walked over to Lucy and apologized right as she was waking up, then he walked off by himself a few yards away from the others.

  Lucy looked a little crazy-eyed as she was coming to and asked everyone what had happened, she could remember the frog showing up but that was about it. They quickly told her what had happened and how Eli had stopped it from eating her and scared it off, then she asked them why he apologized and they all shrugged. No one answered her but they all knew, Eli felt responsible for them, at least responsible for their safety when he was around anyway. They all saw him as a paragon of power and if he let one of them get hurt while he was there, they would lose respect for him and more importantly, at least to Eli, he would lose respect for himself. They left him alone for a few minutes then they all walked to the next pond at a relaxed but tense pace.

  The same thing happened when the next stone disappeared, but this time it was a snake, a very large, very long snake. Its scales were light grey and tan and they looked rough instead of smooth. Its head and biggest part of its body were five feet tall and its fangs were blades instead of just sharp on the end. Although its whole body seemed dull and stone-like, its eyes were bright yellow with the glimmer of intelligence and malice. It was taking its time slithering to them, it was looking at each of them carefully, assessing how it should approach. Before it got close to them, the frog let out a little croak that echoed through the basin, it was not enough to shake the ground this time. It seemed it was warning the snake without wanting to be threatening to Eli.

  Of course Eli wasn’t going to let this happen and he blinked right in front of the frog and put his finger over his lips in a silencing gesture. Then he blinked back to right in front of the snake, he had his cudgel in his hand and there was black-purple lightning arcing off him, mainly between his arm and legs to his weapon and back. The snake hesitated for just a second, then decided to try and coil up for a strike, but as soon as Eli noticed that it wasn’t going to run he forced magic into his legs and dashed forward in an instant, cutting the snake almost in half. It flailed about on the ground, the bottom half still kind of attached but unmoving making the top half of the snake drag the bottom half.

  It wasn’t cut in the exact middle; it may have just been the bottom third, and after the snake's shock and flailing stopped, it bit the bottom part of its body off and ate it. The missing third of its body was healing at a visible rate, it wasn’t quick, but it was visibly regrowing. Eli looked back at Bethany and Beau with a raised eyebrow, he didn’t say anything but his look said, “You can handle this one”. To distract the snake while they got into a good position he threw his cudgel at its head then dashed forward at a section of its body and crashed into it, elbow first, breaking some ribs. When they got set a second later Eli blinked away back to in-front of the frog, this time facing away to keep an eye on the two now fighting the snake.

  The frog tensed when he noticed that Eli had arrived back in-front of him, but it did nothing, it noticed he wasn’t facing toward it, he was watching his companions fight the venomous stone snake. The snake's name was probably unknown to these humans, but its new fighting partners were obviously avoiding its teeth and breath so they might know about the venom. The frog was impressed with the two humans' teamwork, the slow one using stone and fire magic made a tempting target while the other was fast enough to intercept any attack if the snake didn’t focus on them. It showed that this group knew each other, which was different to most groups who entered dungeons.

  Although the frog was surprised that anyone was here, when the dungeon was empty all dungeon creatures were asleep. They would only be aware of the passage of time as a number in their system screens, but they never felt that passage while sleeping. This is why it was such a shock when the frog had woken up to people entering the dungeon for the first time in over 12,000 years. The system was supposed to erase dungeons after their 100 year run, allowing 1 new dungeon a year and recycling them after their time had passed. As a dungeon creature he would be asleep until a similar type creature was made in a new dungeon then he would have another 100 year job until the next one.

  The frog was originally something else, an amphibious species on a newly integrated planet. While the people on the planet seemed to handle the new system well enough, they were just barely surviving. The monsters got too strong too fast and they were just strong enough to survive but they were not thriving, then when the system allowed the rest of the universe to communicate with them, everything fell apart. The frog twitched and refocused, when the human in front of it got angry while watching the fight that was happening in the distance with the snake. The frog had almost forgotten it was there while reminiscing about the past. It forced itself to focus since the human was almost certainly a ‘heartless’ and if it wanted to, it could kill the frog permanently, regardless of dungeon resets.

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  Eli was watching the fight but he was using magic sense on the frog, there wasn’t much to unpack with its magic. It felt like a copy of something, maybe copy was the wrong word, more like it wasn’t the source. Maybe it was a projection for dungeon purposes and its soul was stored elsewhere, which would explain how the dungeon would always be able to reset no matter how many times you killed the monsters. You didn’t actually kill them, you just stopped the projection, which meant that monsters could be like that as well, maybe the planet functioned a bit like a dungeon in that regard. He just hadn't noticed since the sources were so far away on the planet, well that was his guess anyways, maybe only dungeon monsters were derived from beings with souls, he had no way to be sure.

  As he finished his thoughts, the fight with the snake ended with Bethany driving her spear through one eye and out the other. It was a good move set up almost perfectly by Beau and his slow moving antagonism. He is glad his people are still strong enough to help, since he was sure he would have to do the fifth and last floor completely solo. He thought about it and decided that he would have them help with the puzzle too, he was too overprotective at times and they needed to grow through experiences that included deadly dangers. Also, there was a good chance that the dungeon rewards would be better the more things they had participated in. Aside from all that, he would feel better about himself when one of them fell asleep from the neural stone.

  Eli carried one stone and Bethany, Beau, and Cody carried the others, doing their best to not touch them with their skin. When the next stone vanished in the water, it appeared that nothing happened, there wasn’t a monster coming to attack them. This didn’t feel right to them and they just waited for a moment, then another moment, but with nothing happening there wasn’t much to do.

  “Should we just go to the next one?” Cody asked. “I don’t see or hear anything.”

  Eli glanced up at the frog, it hadn’t moved and its eyes were still closed, except when he looked closer, one eye was open just the tiniest bit. It was hard to tell but he thought it was looking toward the other side of the first layer. It was too far for him to really sense but if it was more of an ambush predator, then it would lay in wait instead of rushing at them. The theme seemed to be poisons animals which were surprisingly analogous to the animals they had before the system. Some of those animals, spiders, and reptiles would vary on how they would attack and what kind of poison or toxin they would use. He even remembered a bird from somewhere that would eat poisonous insects then use that poison to cover its feathers in a poisonous oil.

  “We should be fine to go ahead, it's probably laying in wait for us somewhere. I’ll notice it before it hits us.” Eli said. He was not as confident as he sounded but he wanted them to focus on carrying the stones other than looking around. They gathered the three remaining stones and moved on to the next pond, they were less chipper than last time and every step from everyone was filled with hesitation.

  Arriving at the third pond, they stopped to check the area around them before putting the stones in the water, just to be sure that if something was going to jump out, it would have to be from far away. They placed the stones in the water and got lucky, having the first one vanish immediately followed by the sound of deep voices laughing. It was a classic villain laugh, slow and full of menacing psychopathy, the laugh made everyone but Eli freeze. He felt the small amount of compulsion to stay still as the hex took hold and drained his strength, or at least it tried to. Eli’s will was not something a normal area of effect hex spell could hope to overcome so he did his best impersonation of a scared person and waited for the hexer to get closer.

  To everyone’s surprise, the hexer was not a human, but a lizard or dino man, kind of like a bearded dragon head with an anthropomorphic body. It had long fingers and toes ending in claws and was holding a staff with a black gem on top. It drew Eli’s attention since it looked like the wood staff had grown around the gem instead of it being mounted on it and his ideas for a staff for Stevens started spinning. However, he needed to focus so he closed his eyes and felt with his magic sense, reaching for the hidden monster which he found slowly creeping up on them from the opposite side of the hexer. It was a big lizard, with longer limbs like a Komodo dragon which meant it probably was supposed to represent disease since their saliva was said to have been filled with deadly bacteria.

  Thinking of baiting the lizard sneaking up on them he conjured a wood avatar and had it attack the hexer, not kill it, but distract and injure where possible. The hexer was clearly not ready for this since its hex’s drain disrupted magic enough to make it hard to use magic yourself. After feeling it for a second before his will shrugged it off, he felt like it would have taken several seconds to cast anything if he was still in the hex’s grip. Eli’s avatar was playing with the hexer, keeping it distracted, which turned out to also keep the giant lizard distracted because it didn’t notice when he cast an air detonation near one of its back legs. The spell tore off the legs and left a large burn spot on its whole side.

  The fight between the avatar and the hexer became bizarre as they both just stood there holding the staff with both hands while staring at each other as if they were both trying to use it against the other. It being a draw in will-power was surprising to Eli since that meant that that fraction of his will that the avatar got, was the same amount that this hexer had. While that was happening they seemed to calm down and just as they sighed, the giant komodo dragon-like lizard pounced. Well, it tried to pounce, but your rear legs are important for a pounce, so it ended up being more like a body roll in the group's general direction. It looked like Beau was getting some control back since he put a small stone wall in the way to direct the monster to the side of where they were standing.

  “Hey, thessse are mine to kill” the hexer said with a heavy lisp you would expect from a cartoon snake.

  “Ksss hss kss kikthsss” the large lizard said in whatever language that was.

  The hexer was still struggling with the avatar but replied without breaking eye contact, “No, it doessssn’t matter if you were brought in firssssst, you took too long, I have dibssss.”

  The giant lizard gave the hexer a surprisingly human-looking flat look and made more hisses, clicks, and smacks with its mouth.

  “Ok, I get three,” the hexer said as it glanced away from the avatar. “I’ll take the men, you can have the women.”

  More noises from the giant lizard.

  “I know they are skinny, but I got to them firsssst.”