“Jie! Turn into a parachute! Slow us down!” I screamed. The air rushing past me was nearly deafening. Did Jie even know what a parachute was, or had that particular technology not reached this world yet? Even if he did know, a parachute was probably too expensive or too mechanically complex for him to transform into.
Still, it was the best idea I had. So despite my doubts I scrabbled at the shield buckled to my arm, trying to coax the Mimic into changing form.
“Looks like my Obstacle Run Challenge trap wasn’t so silly after all, now was it?” asked Tatzel, her smug voice following me as I fell further down the chasm. Her words were clear and crisp despite the roar of the wind in my ears. “It would’ve posed little difficulty to a properly Leveled adventure, but I suppose this is just what happens when one hands over all of their Levels to a Succubus.”
I ignored her for now. “Jie! Transform! Do something!” I yelled. I tried to sound authoritative, but my voice cracked mid-command.
“Why did you hand over your Levels to Aeshma, anyway?” Tatzel continued languidly. “Did she threaten you? Were you kidnapped? Oh, and please try to answer quickly, before you smash into the ground and die.”
“Jie, come on! Parachute! Bedsheet! Tarp! Any–”
Apparently Jie knew “tarp”. The planks of the buckler went limp beneath my hands as the Mimic popped into a large sheet of canvas, which caught in the air and billowed upward.
My stomach swooped as we decelerated, and I was acutely aware of how sweaty my palms were – but I kept my grip on the Mimic. After a few agonizing seconds our descent stabilized to a manageable velocity. Manageable, but still terrifying. My heart was thumping loudly in my chest.
Now that I wasn’t in imminent danger, I looked around the chasm. Down here the walls were lined with more grimy, stained glass windows, all letting in the strange off-golden light that had permeated the main chamber of the Dungeon. Massive stone pillars rose up around the sides of the chasm, all connected by taut, criss-crossing lengths of mossy chain.
My mouth went dry. It was sheer luck that I hadn’t collided with one of the chains already. Now that Jie was slowing my descent, it would probably be survivable. But with how fast I was falling earlier, my body would’ve been cut clean in half.
“Roland? Are you still there?” Tatzel asked. “I only ask because by my estimate, you should’ve hit the ground about five seconds ago. But I didn’t hear the crash.”
I considered not responding. If Tatzel thought I was already dead, maybe it would improve my chances of survival. At the very least, I could get a bit of peace and quiet before another one of the Dungeon’s traps did me in. But I thought of Aeshma and sighed. Whatever the Succubus was doing right now, she’d do it better without Tatzel taunting her the whole time. And realistically, I knew that my best shot of survival was Aeshma somehow coming to my rescue.
“Roland? Helloooo?” Tatzel’s voice echoed across the chasm.
“Yup, still here.”
There was a brief silence. Then: “Oh. Drat.”
I had to keep Tatzel’s attention on me for as long as possible. Maybe I could get under her skin, just like she did to Aeshma. “This must be pretty embarrassing for you. I mean, your trap couldn’t even kill a Level Zero Reborn and his vermin Monster.”
Jie let out an offended squeak. I quietly shushed him.
“Oh, my trap worked fine. You’re still going to die down there, just not from the fall itself. Once its venom runs its course… oh, oops, I’ve said too much! That was a bit of a spoiler, I guess. You’ll find out on your own soon enough,” said Tatzel matter-of-factly.
Venom? I didn’t like the sound of that. And my provocation hadn’t worked nearly as well as I’d hoped it would. I’d have to try a different tack. “So uh… seeing as I’m going to die, maybe you can tell me how that works?”
“Excuse me?” Tatzel sneered.
“Dying. When a Reborn dies, do they get ported to another world after this one? Or back to their original world? Or… is this the end of the line?”
Jie and I drifted past a hole in the chasm wall, which had obviously at one point held another stained glass window. The frame was empty, though, and the hole had been taken over by an enormous tree root which intruded from somewhere outside the chasm. Sickly golden light trickled in around the edges, where the root didn’t totally plug the hole.
The warm breeze that hit me as I floated past smelt strongly of soil and ozone.It was strangely nauseating. Whatever was outside the Dungeon did not agree with me.
Tatzel laughed. “There’s not a soul alive who could answer that for you. And if you bring the dead back, they only remember what happened up to the point that they died. So even Necromancers don’t… oh, hold on, would you? Aeshma is about to–”
“No, wait!” I shouted. If Aeshma was about to do something interesting, this was exactly the time I needed to keep Tatzel focused on me. And if there was one thing I knew about Tatzel from our brief interactions so far, it was that she liked the sound of her own voice. “I mean… hold on, if you can bring back the dead, that means they’re coming from somewhere, right? Like, their souls or whatever are still accessible. So where do they go?”
Tatzel chuckled. “Well, Roland, there’s actually quite a lot of debate on that topic. It’s not something that can be answered in the short amount of time we have to talk about it before you die. But I personally am of the opinion that what a Necromancer calls back is not truly the soul of the deceased, but rather a magical fascimile thereof, which is identical to the soul unto the instant of death. It’s all quite complicated, and I wouldn’t expect someone like you to be able to understand. But this would resolve the question of…”
She wasn’t too difficult to tune out once she’d settled comfortably into her rant. I decided it would be safest just to let her drone on and give the occasional “uh-huh”, “wow”, and “oh, really?” while I tried to spy the ground somewhere below me. Minutes passed in this fashion until, through the fog and now-dim light from the distant windows, I could see something coming into focus below. Solid ground!
But as I drifted closer, the sight didn’t bring me much solace.
The bottom of the chasm was piled wall-to-wall with bones. Some were bleached white, while others had the sallow hue of a recent death. Here and there I could make out entire skeletons. All of them looked approximately Human-sized, though some sported skeletal wings and tails. Elsewhere there seemed to be sorted piles of femurs, ribs, and smaller bones I didn’t recognize by name.
My feet hit the bone-pile sooner than I thought. I didn’t land quite right and toppled forward, banging up both of my knees and scattering a couple loose femurs in the process.
Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.
Tatzel abruptly stopped pontificating in my ear, then asked, “Wait, did I hear something? Did you reach… Queen be graceful, how long have we been talking? Where has that Succubus snuck off to?” The PA cut out before I had a chance to get a word in.
I was alone in the bone pit.
Well, not entirely alone. Jie coiled back down my arm, looking like a bizarre tarp-jellyfish, and congealing back into the form of a banged-up wooden shield.
And it wasn’t entirely a bone pit, either. Among the bones were various inorganic bits and bobs: plate armor, dented and twisted beyond repair; swords, spears, maces, and an array of other weapons, all of them rusted out, rotted, or otherwise too damaged to be of any use. Not that it mattered. Even a fully functional martial weapon would’ve been rendered all but useless in my Level Zero hands.
A clattering sound echoed through the chasm – the sound of bones shifting, somewhere deep in the bone pile. I froze and waited for some horrible creature to rise up from underneath me. Seconds passed, then a minute.
Nothing happened.
I forced myself to relax. What Tatzel had said earlier about me dying down here had put me on-edge. But it wouldn’t do me any good to freeze up at the slightest noise. I had to keep cool and collected.
I surveyed the chamber, trying to look tactically instead of focusing on how gross it was to be standing on a pile of the dead. The chasm stretched out to either side of me. To my back was a solid stone wall and far ahead of me was another, with nothing but piled bones in the middle. And yet… I noticed that maybe thirty feet ahead of me, there was a dip in the surface of the bone pile.
I rushed forward to take a look – and there, right in the middle of the floor, was a round, circular pit maybe fifteen feet across. The bone pile had sunk into it, forming a steep ramp leading down to a lower floor. With no other exit in sight, this seemed like my best option. Besides, I figured it was better to get out of here while Tatzel was still focused on Aeshma. The ramp was too steep to walk down, so I sat down in preparation to scoot my way to the lower floor.
My butt collided with something hard and cold. I immediately stood back up. What I had almost sat on was clenched in the hand of a large, Human skeleton.
It was a gun.
I scooped it up. It was a pistol, black and modern-looking, but beyond that I didn’t know what to make of it. I’d never touched a gun before, let alone shot one. Frankly, they made me kind of nervous. But… I figured it couldn’t be harder to use than a Flare Disk.
Did it even have any bullets in it? Could I check the magazine? There was a button on the side that I didn’t think was the trigger…
CHUK
This gun stuff wasn’t so complicated. The mag slipped out into my hand; there were two bullets inside. I smirked at how cool I knew I looked. Now that the gun was empty, I tried pulling the trigger so that I’d know how much force I had to use when it was time to actually shoot it.
BANG
I guess there was a bullet already in the chamber. Jie chirped at me disapprovingly as I rubbed my ringing ears one at a time, careful to keep the gun at arms length.
“Excuse me, Human, would you keep it down in there?” Tatzel asked over the PA. “Whatever you’re doing is so loud, I heard it all the way from the Boss room. The noise disturbed me.”
I replaced the magazine and pulled the gun’s slide as gingerly as I could before letting it clunk back into position. Hopefully that had loaded it properly, but I guess I wasn’t sure. “It was even louder here, trust me. Why’re you talking to me, anyway? Can’t find Aeshma?”
“Our Succubus friend found her way into yet another service tunnel, where I can’t see her. I suppose she thinks she can find a shortcut to the bottom of the crevasse, to save you.” Tatzel snorted. “Unfortunately, shortcut or no, you’re a long way down. There’s no way she’ll find you before… he does.”
I didn’t give her the satisfaction of asking who “he” was. I dug the Flare Disk out of my pocket. Between it and the gun, I had three shots total. Three shots, to get me back up to Aeshma – or out of the Dungeon entirely. And I was already dead tired.
Another dull clatter echoed through the chasm. Something was moving through the bone pile. I sat back down and let myself slide down the ramp and into the tunnel below.
The tunnel was almost perfectly round. Roots punctured through the walls, cracking the tile murals that had once lined their surfaces. The floor was tiled as well, and kind of slippery under my feet. There was a small alcove in the wall every few feet, inset in which was a small, humanoid statue, depicting the same glowing-eyed, female figure as the seer statue I’d noted earlier.
Normally I would’ve felt claustrophobic in a place like this, but after so long free-falling through the chasm, it had an almost cozy charm. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to let my guard down. I brandished my gun in front of me as I carefully picked my way down the tunnel. “Tatzel, you keep saying that I’m going to die horribly down here,” I said. “But aside from that, uh, magical door guy–”
“Brainzorgia.”
“Right, besides him and whoever’s hanging out in the bone pile upstairs, the Dungeon seems like it’s basically undefended. It doesn’t seem like I’m in much danger at all down here.”
“You’re correct. I deigned not to have my Dungeon crawling with useless, low-Level goons,” Tatzel sneered. “Suffice it to say that I’m running the Threshold a little differently than my predecessors did.”
I was approaching a fork in the tunnel. Two paths, left or right, with a seer statue stuck right between them. Its eyes twinkled purple as Tatzel’s voice echoed past me. “You’ll see just how undefended the Queen’s Threshold is soon enough. Which way will you go, Roland? Left or right? Choose wisely…”
The two branches of the tunnel looked identical in every way. “Is this a maze?” I asked.
“Oh, how astute of you,” said Tatzel.
“I think you can just stick to one wall of a maze and you’ll eventually get out, right? As long as it’s not a fancy one with freestanding walls or anything. And I assume you blew your budget on whatever that creature is down here, instead of on making a complicated puzzle. So… I guess I’ll just keep sticking to the left until I get to the end?”
Tatzel’s silence confirmed my suspicions. I entered the left branch of the maze. There were a few stone pipes protruding from the ceiling, and as I walked underneath I heard a distant metallic thwunk – but nothing came out of the pipe. It was lucky that we disabled the arrow pipe earlier, otherwise that would’ve gotten me right in the noggin. I resolved to pay more attention to my surroundings as I trudged onward, hugging the leftmost wall all the while.
After a minute or so Tatzel piped up, “You really don’t know very much about our mutual acquaintance’s past, do you? About Aeshma?”
“I know enough! And what I don’t know, I can ask her once we get out of the Dungeon,” I said.
“You’re not even getting out of that tunnel,” Tatzel laughed. “Not with what’s coming for you… can you hear it?”
I couldn’t hear anything except for my breathing and Tatzel’s snorts over the PA. Was anything even chasing me, or was Tatzel just trying to get on my nerves? I picked up my pace nonetheless.
“In any case, I am astounded that Aeshma was able to keep a Human around so long without killing him. She’s quite the dangerous character… the burning and slaughter and rampaging I mentioned earlier were just the tip of the iceberg.”
I made another left down a hallway clogged tight with roots. Behind me, far away but not nearly far enough for my liking, I heard a sound like the snapping of multiple large wooden boughs. Whatever was coming for me was big.
“So what do you think, hm? Do you trust Aeshma, despite everything I’ve told you?” asked Tatzel.
I sighed. “That was all a long time ago. Even if Aeshma did some bad stuff back at Camp… she’s different now.” Sweat was starting to bead on my brow. The sounds of cracking wood had stopped, but the quiet that replaced it was almost more frightening. “What do you care, anyway? Why does it matter what some random guy thinks about your old bunkmate? Especially some random guy who you think will be dead in five minutes.”
“I feel like I’ve formed a real bond with you, Roland. I’m genuinely interested in how you feel.” Tatzel paused, and there was a sound like scraping stone. “Oh, nevermind, that’s not right. I just needed you to talk so that my friend could triangulate your position.”
SRUCKKSH
Behind me came the sound of splintering wood and something heavy sliding over stone. I hazarded a glance over my shoulder, only to make direct eye contact with a pair of eyes as large as dinner plates.
A great green serpent stared me down, its body as wide as the tunnel itself. It bared its fangs in a hideous grin, then barrelled towards me.
Handgun
-------------
Item Level 1
Usage tags: Held, loading, mechanical
Damage type: Varies
Range: Medium
Special: Damage type and magnitude depends on the loaded ammunition. Special ammunition can endow additional effects.
