The team trudged onward, deeper and deeper into the depths of the dungeon. Packs of smaller monsters became the norm for the dungeon they faced; like seasoned professionals, they adapted. In their experience, dungeons tended to run along one of two tracks when it came to the monsters that inhabited them. Smaller and more numerous monsters that were everywhere throughout the dungeon, or mid to large-sized monsters that tended to occupy specific chambers and areas. Sometimes it was a mix of the two or something altogether different, but on the whole, dungeons tended to follow one of those two tracks. Each pack the team destroyed on their journey deeper into the dungeon didn't alleviate their nerves; if anything, it was the opposite.

  Rumours and theories swirled through the barracks, much as they did anywhere people gathered, especially people who spent their lives fighting. One such rumour was that smaller packs of monsters, or smaller monsters in general, meant the boss at the end of the dungeon would be much, much worse. As if the dungeon were a venomous creature, saving its venom for the big finish.

  Victor glanced to his sides, checking the corners as he moved into the newest chamber. The latest of a dozen such chambers they had pushed through. He stepped carefully, shield raised high and sword held ready. Eyes darted around the chamber, not just his, but the entire team was on high alert, and constant ambushes had kept them all on edge. Chipping away at them. Victor rapidly catalogued his surroundings, dismissing most things as nothing, and a few things earning a flex of his perception to make certain it wasn't a threat. The last thing he wanted right now was another close call. There had been too many of those already today.

  The chamber was simple blank stone, which normally wouldn't have warranted the level of suspicion it was receiving, but Victor could name half a dozen monsters that utilized illusions or stealth Skills just off the top of his head. Sofia could probably name even more. In the end, the blank stone surfaces of the room seemed to hold no hidden surprises for them. It was much the same as other rooms they had passed through, blank stone walls, lit by glowing stones embedded in the walls, rather like torches. The soft blue light the stones emitted only added to the eeriness that seemed to pervade the dungeon. There was something about it that set Victor's teeth on edge, something he couldn't quite put his finger on. The lights were the least of the concerns in the chamber; however, there was something far more disconcerting.

  The feature of this particular chamber that drew the most wary glances from the team wasn't the odd blue stones; it wasn't the stone walls that, on closer inspection, almost seemed to be slowly melting. Instead, what drew the gaze of everyone present was the black veil that hung in the entrance to the next chamber, marking the one they were in as something of a waiting room. Dark and impenetrable as a moonless night, the sight of that hung shadow filled the entire team with a pointed and pervasive sense of dread. It was a strange thing, a flat plane that gave a feeling of a sort of solidity, stability, but that it could be pushed through like a thin membrane. All while seeming to have an endless depth to the human eye, as if staring into the veil was staring out into the endless abyss. The feeling reminded Victor of the time he'd fallen off a boat as a child. Looking down into the dark depths, unable to see the bottom. There was a feeling of endlessness, a worry of what might lurk in those depths. Thalassaphobia. He hadn't liked boats much after that experience, and he didn't much like this veil now.

  "Well, that's new, not sure I like it much." Alex's voice broke the tense silence that had settled over the group when the veil came into sight.

  "Not it," Matt called out from the rear of the group.

  "What?" Victor turned to look at the stringy archer who'd spoken, turning away from the veil and its worries.

  "I call it not." Matt grinned at the group, "For going through the creepy black stuff first."

  “Matt?" Victor pinched his brow.

  "Yes, Vic?"

  "Shut up." The whole team laughed at the put-upon expression on Matt's face, and the tension that had been hanging over them shattered like glass. The group collectively relaxed a few degrees, and the surety of their experience began to reassert itself. They were a tight-knit group, and every one of them trusted the others with their lives and with the safety of the whole. Life and death were the norm and not the exception; like every group that set foot in a dungeon, they knew that. Sometimes they just needed to be reminded of that. In the dumbest way possible.

  Victor faced front before locking eyes with Alex, who stood steadfastly at his side as always. The two men shared a nod before beginning the slow march across the chamber towards the veil, shields up, eyes wide, blades ready. The rest of the team fell into step behind the two frontliners.

  A moment of hesitation seized Victor as he stood before the veil, only inches away from the unknown that lay behind that endless black. He took a deep breath, steadying himself once again for what felt like the millionth time since they'd entered this dungeon. Preparing to step through the void in front of him, his blade reached the veil first. The tip of it vanished in the inky darkness. His shield was next to follow into the black, and a glance to his side showed him Alex's weapon gradually vanishing as well. For a moment, not for the first time and likely not the last, Victor wondered if he was making a mistake. Rather than chew over the same series of thoughts again, he steeled himself and plunged into the darkness of the veil before he could second guess himself again. For a split second, there was a strange feeling of expansion and retraction, of bone chilling cold. Then it passed, and Victor was on the other side of the veil.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  ——-

  Victor charged out of the veil, taking space so his comrades behind him would have room to exit and get their bearings. He was certain it was the boss's chamber he was entering. He was not wrong. The chamber was massive, several hundred feet across at the very least, and more of the same blank stone they'd seen elsewhere made up the walls. There was something wrong with the walls; they looked to be slowly liquefying, melting. That was disturbing in the extreme. Dungeon stone was extraordinarily tough; a Ranker could break through some of it if they were strong enough or had the right Skill set, but to see it slowly deteriorating like this? That was not helping settle his nerves any. Nor was the sight of what he assumed was the Boss in the center of the chamber. Coiled there on the stone floor was the single largest snake Victor had ever seen or heard of. The massive ophidian was covered in slate grey scales from snout to tail tip; it looked disturbingly similar to the coloration of dungeon stone. Blazing yellow eyes glared at him from across the chamber, slit pupils tracked him as he stepped further into the chamber. There was intelligence in those eyes, not the intelligence of a person as he knew it, but vicious animal cunning.

  The monster shifted slightly and its jaws cracked open, long tongue snaking out with a soft hiss, tasting the air. That was accompanied by a blast of air so rancid Victor scrunched his nose to keep his eyes from watering.

  "What's wrong with it?" Sophia's shuddering question made Victor look deeper as the rest of his team appeared from the veil. His gaze sharpened as he flexed his perception. The moment he did it was blatantly obvious there was something wrong, deeply wrong. It was as if he was looking at one of those pictures that became more and more horrifying the longer you looked and the more attention you paid to the details that weren't quite right. Those weren't marbles the dead-eyed child was playing with; that wasn't coffee in the mug of the elderly man with the easy grin spread just a little too wide. And yes, his wife's teeth did look uncomfortably sharp.

  Patches of black riddled the monster's scaled form; those dark spots he'd dismissed as simply being part of the snake's scale pattern were actually patches of hard chitin. Chitin pushed out from beneath the monster's scales. Now that he was looking, he could see that discarded remnant scales littered the floor of the chamber around the beast. What Victor had thought was the lower jaw of the snake was quickly proven to be something more akin to mandibles when the snake raised its head and the lower jaw split open in some grotesque caricature of a jaw. A piercing hiss ripped through the air of the cavern as the monster made its displeasure with the intruders known. The snake's coils tightened as it reared back into a defensive posture, ready, waiting.

  "Ew, that's just wrong." Matt and Dave's voices echoed each other's sentiments as they entered the boss's chamber.

  "Ugly, maybe. It'll die just like anything else, though." Then there was Alex, stoic as always. He was certain that if he looked over to check, Sofia would be nodding along as well. The siblings agreed more often than not, thankfully. Victor didn't want to think about the dynamic that arguing siblings would have brought to their team. He'd seen that play out a few times, and it was always a coin toss between whether it worked out well or horribly. The team was assembled, which was a good thing since the boss looked like it was getting impatient and wanted to start the party.

  Victor grinned as the adrenaline began to surge in his veins. He loved a good fight, and it looked like he was about to get one. The adrenaline banished some of the worries from his mind as he focused on the battle that was a bout to begin. The enemy was right in front of him; all he had to do to reach his goal was remove the obstacle between him and it. It was clean and simple, even if it might not be as easy as he'd like. It was something he could do, something he could actively affect.

  "Yeah, no. Don't want nothing to do with all that bug-snake action over there. Let's knock off early and go home, yeah?" No one answered Matt. A heavy sigh escaped the ranger while he drew an arrow, knocking it to the string of his bow. As often as he cracked jokes and tossed out sarcasm like it was free candy at a carnival, he knew when it was time to be serious and go to work. The boss giving them the evil moti from across the chamber was a good sign that it was time to close his mouth and get ready to put some work in.

  The hiss of an arrow splitting the air marked the start of the battle.

  Victor thundered forward towards the monster, with Alex by his side. Spells and arrows flew overhead courtesy of Sofia, Matt, and Dave on the backline.

  It was a strategy that suited them well and had worked for them often enough in the past. So well that it had become one of their cornerstone strategies. Particularly against large single monsters. The lack of a traditional healer in their team, coupled with having an additional frontliner in Alex, made the dynamic of their team vastly different from that of a standard Banner team made up of tank, support and damage on a four or five-man crew. Having the frontliners let their backline be much more aggressive than they might be otherwise, as the presence of Alex let them dedicate more attention to pouring more damage onto the monster. Many of their staple strategies, in fact, revolved around their team's capability to bombard the enemy with projectiles from the safety provided by Victor and Alex. A choice made even easier because of Sofia, rapid fire spells were a relatively new specialty of hers.

  The opening salvo worked to perfection. Victor and Alex hit the monster’s coils right as the first spell volley landed. The head of the beast snapped back reflexively, more out of shock than pain or injury, and the force of Sofia’s spell burst splashed harmlessly off the scaled hide.

  Victor's feet hammered the stone with a weight he'd never possessed before becoming System-initiated. He planted, led with the shield, and dug in as the monster's tail hit him dead center. A kinetic impact that would have pulped a car, much less a man. It slid him back a foot and sent a lightning bolt through his shoulder, but he absorbed it, redirected the force, and barely skidded an inch.

  Alex met the coils of the snake next, and Alex made a show of not budging an inch even as the snake heaved its heavy body against them. He grinned at the snake, then buried his sword in its side, digging in between the scales, twisting just enough to split the seam. The snake recoiled, shedding a plume of blue ichor, and Victor almost laughed at how textbook it had been. The monster's head, though, was pure nightmare—those mandibles were already open, and something about the green glow deep in its throat said, projectiles incoming.

  “INCOMING!” Victor’s voice cracked across the chamber like a whip.

  He needn’t have worried.

  A translucent blue barrier sprang up directly in front of the snake's face courtesy of Sophia. After her bout with Aiden during his assessment and the time they'd spent working with him in the dungeons since she'd come to learn that what she lacked wasn't offence, it was defensive options. If she'd been able to hold the man even for a few moments, she might have been able to do something more than she had. The times their battles in the dungeon had been closer, or resulted in injuries when they might not have, had pushed her to action. The hours she'd spent in the archive and train rooms to learn her [Mana Barrier] were already paying dividends.

  The snake reared back farther in preparation, then its strange jaws splayed open, and it belched up a sickly green mass of what looked like acid. The mass slammed into the barrier, and cracks spider webbed its translucent surface. A second projectile shattered the barrier, casting glimmering shards of mana and droplets of acid over the area. Victor ducked under his shield to protect his eyes.