Chapter 12: What Is Waiting For Us Down There
Azazel and Reginleif descended to the fifth floor. The air grew colder, damper, and carried a faint, mineral smell, like the inside of a deep well. The oppressive sense of observation they'd felt before was now a palpable weight.
"In here feels strange," Azazel muttered, his hand resting on his kukri. The ambient energy wasn't just powerful here; it felt watchful.
"Ya," Reginleif whispered back, her own eyes scanning the glistening, uneven walls. "This is our first time being in a real dungeon."
Azazel's mind raced, trying to ground the surreal experience in logic. So this is a dungeon. I fought monsters on the floor above. This place walks like a training ground—progressively harder challenges, loot drops, distinct floors. But the problem is, this is real. It's not some cartoon, game, or book. The pain is real. The death would be real. To be honest, she and I are completely walking around with no plan in mind. So how about we try to get rich in this hellhole? At least that's a goal.
The need for structure, for control in the chaos, rose up in him. He stopped walking and turned to Reginleif, the torchlight flickering across their serious faces.
"Hey, Reginleif. We need to lay down some ground rules here. This place gives me the creeps. It's like something is just logging us from every corner."
As they walked, she nodded. "Yeah, I know how you feel."
"Okay. Here are the rules for our survival in whatever this hellhole has," he said, his voice low and firm. "Rule number one: don't die. Obvious, but it's the prime directive. Rule number two: always try to fight back-to-back with each other. Our coordination is our biggest weapon. Rule number three: if shit gets tough, we get the fuck out. No pride, no greed. We retreat, regroup, and live to dive another day. Okay, Reginleif?"
Reginleif gave a small, knowing smirk. "Oh, by the way, don't forget your own rules. I've known the kind of people who make rules and then break them the moment it gets convenient."
"Don't worry," Azazel said, his gaze steady. "These are survival rules. We will absolutely follow them."
I'm not gonna break my rules,he thought, the conviction ironclad. Those rules are our lifeline.
Their conversation was cut short as they entered a wider, low-ceilinged cavern. The floor was covered in shallow, reflective puddles. From these puddles, small shapes began to rise. Dozens of them.
Tearlings.They were exactly as the Bestiary had described: fragile, droplet-like creatures with shimmering, tiny faces, hovering just above the water's surface. They made a soft, collective weeping sound.
"Looks like our welcoming committee," Azazel said, shifting into a fighting stance.
The Tearlings attacked not with ferocity, but with irritating persistence. They zipped through the air, launching Splash attacks—small jets of pressurized water that stung like needles and soaked through clothing. The moment Azazel or Reginleif swung at one, it would use Flee, dissolving back into a puddle only to re-form elsewhere.
It was a battle of attrition and frustration. Azazel's Youshadow was less effective against foes that could simply vanish. Reginleif found her wind gusts scattering them but rarely landing a solid hit.
"We need to break their pattern!" Reginleif called out, deflecting a spray of water with a gust.
Azazel saw it. The Tearlings always re-formed from the largest puddles. "The water! Disrupt the source!"
Back-to-back, as per rule two, they changed tactics. Reginleif focused, not on the creatures, but on the cavern floor. She summoned a powerful, swirling vortex of wind that swept across the puddles, churning and dispersing the water into mist. The Tearlings' frantic re-formation faltered; their bodies became unstable, shimmering like mirages.
This was the opening. Azazel moved, not with sweeping strikes, but with precise, fast jabs of his kukri. Each thrust popped a destabilized Tearling like a water balloon. With their habitat destroyed and their numbers rapidly thinning, the remaining few gave a final, collective sigh and melted away, leaving the cavern still and damp.
Panting slightly more from annoyance than exertion, they searched the chamber. In a dry alcove, half-hidden behind a stalagmite, they found a small, iron-bound chest. It wasn't trapped.
Inside was a meager haul: a handful of tarnished copper coins, a rusted short sword broken at the hilt, and two small, uncut gemstones that glimmered with a faint inner light—low-quality dungeon quartz, but sellable.
"Not exactly a king's ransom," Azazel said, pocketing the gems.
"But it's a start," Reginleif replied, scooping up the coins. "And we followed the rules. We're still alive."
They looked toward the descending tunnel ahead, the dungeon's deeper darkness beckoning. The rules were set. The first real test was passed. Now, the real dive began.
____
The air on the sixth floor grew warmer and carried a sharp, acidic tang. The stone underfoot was scarred with shallow, bubbling puddles of a viscous, iridescent fluid. From the shadows of crumbling pillars, a skittering sound arose.
A dozen creatures scuttled into the dim torchlight. Cracked Shell Crawlers. They were the size of large dogs, their insectoid bodies encased in segmented, stone-like carapaces that were fissured with glowing cracks. A viscous, magical fluid—their corrosive Tear Leak—wept from these cracks, sizzling where it dripped onto the floor.
"Shell Crawlers," Azazel identified, his voice tight. "On the sixth floor. Okay. Don't let that juice touch you."
Before he could move, Reginleif stepped forward, her posture shifting. She didn't summon a gust or a blade of wind. She held out a hand, fingers splayed, and the air around her fingertips shimmered with intense, focused pressure.
"Piercing Feathers," she intoned.
With a sound like a hundred feathers being fired at once, a barrage of shimmering, dagger-like projectiles—compressed air forged into impossibly hard, translucent shapes—streaked across the chamber. They struck the lead Crawlers with pinpoint accuracy, not exploding, but drilling. The brittle shells, vulnerable to concentrated force, shattered under the assault. Three Crawlers fell instantly, their corrosive innards spilling out in a steaming, foul-smelling flood.
Azazel stared, momentarily stunned. She's been holding out on me. That's a cool-looking move. The name's so damn basic, though.
But the thought was followed by a deeper, instinctual understanding. Piercing Feathers wasn't just a technique; it was a Mythic Root—a unique expression of power branched directly from the Qliphoth Seed within her. This move was woven into the very legend of her being. It could not be taught or forgotten; it was hers alone, a legacy from the master who had first awakened her wind.
Reginleif herself felt a surge of fierce satisfaction mixed with caution. I knew I could manifest the feathers, but this many, this precisely… The dungeon's dense energy is amplifying my focus. But I need to be careful. Don't want to use all the air in here and suffocate us. I wonder what my master would say, seeing me use her gift in a place like this.
The remaining Crawlers, enraged, surged forward. Their Weak Bites were negligible, but their advance was a tide of leaking, slowing poison.
"Back-to-back!" Azazel yelled, rule two snapping him into action.
They fell into formation. Reginleif became a turret of precise, deadly wind. Feathers of compressed air zipped and whirred, shattering legs and piercing eye clusters, carefully aimed to avoid the larger, messy body explosions.
Azazel was the shield and the cleaner. When a Crawler got too close, leaking a trail of corrosive tears, he used Youshadow not to bind, but to manipulate. He solidified the creature's own shadow into a slippery ramp, causing it to skid and tumble away from them, buying Reginleif another second to take aim. For those that breached her barrage, he met them with brutal, efficient strikes of his kukri, aiming for the cracks in their shells, leveraging their weakness. The dark aura around his blade seemed to make the corrosive tears evaporate on contact with a hiss of nullifying energy.
It was a symphony of precision and adaptation. In five frantic minutes, the skittering horde was reduced to twitching limbs and pools of sizzling, magical fluid.
Catching their breath in the acidic air, they moved to harvest. Reginleif used the tip of her dagger to carefully pry loose intact, large pieces of the brittle, stone-like carapace. "Alchemists grind this for fortification potions," she explained, her voice slightly strained from the exertion.
Azazel, using a cloth to protect his hand, collected vials of the less-contaminated Tear Leak. "Corrosive agent. Might be useful."
Loot gathered, they looked at the ominous archway leading downward. The seventh floor awaited. The rules had held. But as they descended into deeper, unknown darkness, a new, unspoken question hung between them: what unique, rooted power did this dungeon hold, and what would it demand from them in return?
___
The air on the seventh floor was different. It wasn't just heavier or more dangerous—it was silent. A profound, watchful quiet that swallowed the sound of their breathing. The passages here were smoother, carved by something other than time, and faint, ghostly veins of blue light pulsed within the walls like dormant nerves.
They hadn't gone far when Reginleif stopped, her hand closing on Azazel's arm. Her knuckles were white. "Something is here," she breathed, not in fear, but in the certainty of a predator sensing a larger one. "It's not attacking. It's... waiting."
Azazel felt it too. The oppressive stillness wasn't empty; it was full. It was the same instinct that had screamed at him in moments before a raid—the feeling of eyes in the dark, of a trigger about to be pulled. This wasn't a monster to fight. It was a presence to survive.
"Rule three," he said, his voice barely a whisper in the consuming silence. "We're leaving. Now."
The climb back to the surface was a blur of tense shoulders and the palpable feeling of being watched until the very moment daylight hit their faces. The vast, open sky over the Scarred Heaths felt like a gasp of relief.
---
Back in the Korvath guild hall, with the weight of their substantial silver payout in his pocket, Azazel approached the receptionist. "We need a map. For the dungeon in the Scarred Heaths. The fissure."
The dog-eared girl smiled, pulling a slender tube from a shelf. "Ah! The Fresh Tears Dungeon. Not many go there—bit of a weird reputation." She unrolled the parchment across the counter.
It was beautifully detailed, showing chambers, notes on Tearling pools and Crawler nests. Azazel's eyes scanned it, analyzing it like a tactical blueprint, until they hit the bottom.
His finger stabbed the parchment. "Wait. This only goes to twenty floors."
"Yes," she said cheerfully. "That's the official depth!"
Azazel's blood ran cold. Official depth. Not the actual depth. He leaned forward, his voice dropping, the casual pretense gone. "What happens after twenty?"
The receptionist's cheerful demeanor faltered. Her ears dipped slightly. "Oh, well… no one maps past that. It's not… it's not done."
"Why not?" The question was a blade.
She glanced around, then leaned in, her voice a conspiratorial whisper that did nothing to soften the blow. "Because, sir… parties that have tried to map the lower floors… they don't come back with maps. They come back changed. Or they don't come back at all. The ones who do… they say the dungeon stops testing your strength around floor ten. After that…" she swallowed, "…it starts testing something else. Your mind. Your memories. What you're made of. The twentieth floor isn't a barrier. It's a warning."
Azazel stared at her, then down at the map. The silent, waiting pressure of the seventh floor—the feeling of being seen—crystallized into a terrifying understanding.
The dungeon didn't just have monsters.
It had anintelligence.
And on the seventh floor,it had looked right back at him.
He rolled up the map, the parchment crisp and final in his hands. The cliff's edge of their ambition had just revealed a much darker drop below.
End of Chapter 12