They didn't get three steps closer before the ground shivered.
Not the cinematic rumble of a boss warning, but the awkward, squelching kind of tremor you feel in your teeth before your instincts start screaming. Mira stopped first, blade halfway drawn, eyes narrowing. Athena froze beside her, a flask halfway out of her coat. Tobias walked straight into Mira's back.
"Hey—what the hell, you—oh," he said.
The sand ahead of the tower had begun to bubble—literally bubble, like a boiling pot of crimson syrup. It churned, glistening wet, and then a shadow rose from beneath, long and sinuous. Eight legs, all wrong angles, and twitching joints, followed by a head too small for its body, crowned with blinking eyes that looked like they belonged to different species. It pulled itself out of the ground like something being born through a dimensional hernia.
"What the actual shit is that?" Tobias breathed.
"I hate it," Athena said immediately. "I hate it with every cell in my body."
The thing screeched—not a roar, but a jittery static blast of radio frequencies and angry plumbing sounds. It smelled like rusted bile and sea foam and microwave-burnt meat. The creature stood ten feet tall, covered in fleshy plates of bioluminescent bone. And it was fast. It didn't charge. It skipped, like it couldn't decide on a direction fast enough, and then chose every direction at once.
"I'm gonna need something bigger than this sword," Mira muttered as she raised it anyway.
"You're gonna need therapy," Athena replied, already uncorking a flask labeled "EX-WIFE MIX."
Tobias just screamed.
The creature lunged. Mira met it with steel and reflexes, ducking low and sliding under the first leg-swipe, blade flashing out to deflect the second. Sparks flew, but this thing wasn't metal—it bled. Her blade sliced across it and came back wet. Black-red ooze hit the sand and hissed like it was angry to be out of its host.
Athena hurled her flask. The liquid exploded into green fire, coating the creature's face and sending it skittering back on five legs. It hissed again—one of its eyes popped like a water balloon.
"Ha! I named that one 'Alimony.' Satisfying as hell."
Tobias finally snapped out of it. "Okay, okay, uh—mana pressure's off the charts, this thing isn't dungeon-born, its signature's all wrong! I think—it's external!"
"What the hell does that mean?" Mira yelled, slicing another limb as it shot toward her like a whip.
"I think it came from outside the Trinity Dungeon!"
Why did I know that?
There was a long pause as they all dodged, parried, screamed, and scrambled.
Then Athena shouted, "Okay, but what kind of tourist spawns in to eat people without even saying hi?!"
The creature did not answer. It unhinged its jaw—wrongly. Vertically. A whirlpool of teeth spun inside its throat, and the air around it began to warp. Mira slammed her sword into the sand, anchoring herself as the suction started pulling them all forward.
Tobias, nearly airborne, screamed, "WHAT EVEN IS THIS THING?!"
—Cut to the dungeon core chamber—
Gazei, spectral, draped over his lava-rock recliner, blinked. A dozen monitoring panes flared up at once.
It's great that he can recreate anything that he's damn pleased with.
"What the hell are these human beings facing there?" he asked. The last hour has been eventful, to say the least. Humans and other races invade his home.
80% are already dead, and their mania taste way too good. He squinted, zooming in on the Blood Sand Beach feed.
"Is that—? No. That's not mine. That's not ours. What the actual—Eleanor, Alexis, somebody gets in here!"
No answer. He sighed. "Figures. Off doin' Yuri bait again."
The creature lunged again on-screen. Mira met it head-on, looking like a death goddess with a bad attitude. Athena was dancing through the fire, laughing like a woman who owed the IRS nothing. Tobias was flailing and panicking, but—credit where it was due—he was doing it while casting.
Gazei narrowed his eyes.
"I'm pretty sure this thing came from outside the dungeon. We've got another foreign invader—and not the sexy kind."
He flicked through the data.
"No summoning rune. No leyline anchor. Just poof, suddenly there, like a Black man running from a crazy bitch with a frying pan."
Pause.
"... No offense, that's just the speed metric. It's fast. I mean really fast."
The screen showed the monster somersaulting sideways, then doubling itself—two bodies now, one phasing through solid matter, the other shrieking as it chased the trio.
Gazei exhaled.
"Well, shit. We've got a rogue import. Better start prepping a reaction squad... If those three don't nuke it first."
He grinned.
"And people say adventurers are expendable."
—
The monster split down the middle—not like a wound, but like it had decided two forms just weren't enough. It peeled itself open, revealing an interior mass of twitching ribs and pinkish, tongue-like appendages that flailed like drowning eels.
Out of that mass, something shot forward: a tendril shaped like a lance, barbed and vibrating with mana so dense it whined in the air. Mira saw it first and moved—not away, but toward it, intercepting it with the flat of her sword, grunting as the shock ran through her bones like lightning through wet steel. She screamed, not out of pain, but to keep the focus—because if she let go, it would've impaled Tobias clean through. He was behind her, still channeling something too big for his frame, lines of runes burning into his arms like tattoos carved by a god with poor handwriting.
Athena flanked left, faster than she had any right to be, especially with half her coat singed and one boot missing. She hurled a bottle filled with the violet flame, then another filled with bone powder then pulled a dagger carved from some dead thing's femur and jammed it into the creature's nearest leg. "That should keep your ass grounded!" she roared, even as black blood sprayed across her face like tar. She didn't flinch. She grinned. "We're not dying pretty, so at least let it be loud."
The beast shrieked. Its secondary jaw opened and emitted a cone of corrosive mist, which coated the sand and made the air burn. Mira turned back just long enough to shout, "Tobias, now! If you've got a spell, cast it, or I swear I will come back from the grave just to slap the nerd out of you!"
Tobias didn't answer with words—he let go.
The glyphs around him detonated outward, forming a lattice of impossible geometry. Reality bent around the diagram he drew with his own lifeblood, the ambient mana pulled in like breath to lungs. His voice rose—not in a chant, but a scream that cracked with force. "Temporal lock! Vector containment! Absolute rupture!"
The ground folded. The monster howled. Chains of pure mana burst from the earth, binding it mid-lunge, just as Athena hurled her last flask—a small, unmarked thing that shimmered like liquefied starlight. It hit the core of the beast's chest—and exploded silently.
It didn't just die. It unmade. The creature collapsed inward on itself, ribs folding, eyes melting, mass shuddering like a deflating nightmare. Its limbs twitched, and then there was nothing but steaming blood and the reek of burnt ozone.
But the silence that followed wasn't a victory. It was a receipt.
Mira collapsed first—her left arm gone at the elbow, her skin blistered from magical backlash. She hit the ground on her knees, smiled, then tipped forward without a sound.
Athena stayed upright longer. Her hands were still clenched into fists, even though half her ribcage was open to the air and her right eye had burst somewhere during the last explosion. She muttered something—maybe a curse, maybe a recipe—then sat down like a drunk, leaning back against the cooling corpse, exhaling a final, trembling laugh.
Tobias stayed conscious just long enough to crawl to them. His hands dragged through the sand like broken tools. Blood poured from his eyes, nose, and mouth, and his legs didn't work anymore. But he got there. He touched Mira's shoulder. Then Athena's boot.
He smiled.
"I was finally useful."
And then he, too, stopped breathing.
—
Gazei stared at the feed. All three of his monitors blinked once. Then twice. Then went dark.
The silence lingered.
He leaned forward in his spectral recliner, one eyebrow twitching.
"They... won?" he asked, no one in particular. "They actually beat it?"
A pause.
"But they're dead. All of them. Completely, utterly, meat-slapped into the afterlife."
Gazei had over two hundred monitors, all showing the outer layers of the first floor. The path that would be at the beginning of every single MMORPG in existence. And all the Pathfinders—thanks, random dead guy, for the terminology—were six feet under.
"Well, whatever," Gazei said somberly. He was a dungeon core. Humans were going to come in regardless. Still, the male dungeon core wanted someone to activate the tower. He spent a good fifty hours making the design.
Designed after every game he'd ever data-mined, they were spread across each ring, zone, and 'safe' stop. The Trinity Tower—not that bronze knockoff—was built high enough for a Pathfinder to survey the surrounding environment… once you climbed it, that is.
When activated, these towers glowed with bright blue light, and their pronged tips split open like a satellite dish. A true beacon.
You couldn't just stroll into one, either. You had to beat the Guardian boss at the base. Basically a mini-raid encounter. Can't skip it either. Trinity Towers had to be scaled manually, climbing their wickerwork walls via platforms—platforms that only appeared after you beat the Guardian Boss.
Obstacles included spiked vines, aggressive fauna, air-glyph defenses, and swarms of enemies sometimes numbering in the thousands.
There's a bit too much Koera in the system but it was fair at the time.
Once you reached the top and beat the Tower Boss, the real reward appeared:
Tri-Slate Terminal is a device that lets a Pathfinder upload the tower's regional data directly into their Tri-Slate. That meant a full, detailed map of the surrounding area.
But towers served even greater purposes. Depending on how long it took to defeat the Tower Boss, the Tri-Slate would unlock a rare item:
A City-Building Blueprint.
A reward item that came in three ranks: One Star, Two Star, and Three Star. A single Blueprint gave the user the legal claim and structural design to find or expand a Guild City at the base of the claimed tower.
And owning a city? That was real power. Not prestige fluff—actual survival.
The first floor of the Trinity Dungeon was simply too massive for anyone to clear in a single day. It took a month—a full month—to travel from one ring to another if you followed the right path.
The key word being if.
The ecology of the Trinity Dungeon was hostile at best. Nearly every native species engaged in predatory behavior. Even the vegetation was carnivorous. Carnivorous with patience. That may or may not take after his wives.
Not only that, but time worked differently here. Thanks to the thousands of dead Pathfinders, Gazei had enough data to confirm something horrifyingly cracked.
Inside the dungeon, time moved at 365.24 times the rate of the outer world.
Dummy terms? One day out here was an entire year in there.
So yeah. Towers weren't just useful. They were essential. Claimed towers became true safe zones. No monsters would attack them unless provoked by one of the local tribes. Each one provided a mechanical bonus:
Increased mana density within its radius.
The [Mana State] buff: improved stamina and concentration recovery, and heightened mental clarity.
A built-in ranged attack system capable of Basic Mana Pulse Cannon fire, with a minimum range of 5,000 yards.
A detection radius of 100,000 yards, able to locate any target within range.
And, if multiple towers were claimed by the same Tri-Slate user in close proximity, those towers would network, bolstering one another. Each linked tower increased the detection and offensive range by 500,000 yards.
"…Shit," Gazei muttered, standing up. "That is way too unfair..."
He glanced around. Still no Alexis. Still no Eleanor. Just him. Watching the corpses of three of the best adventurers he'd ever seen.
Not that the list was extensive, mind you.
"This place is starting to feel like a Black Friday sale at a cursed Walmart," he sighed. "Rogue entities just showing up to throw hands and ruin the furniture."
He looked again at the last frame of footage—Mira's sword embedded in the sand, Athena's scorched flask still fizzing beside her, and Tobias's outstretched hand reaching for them both.
He didn't say anything for a moment.
Then, softly: "You did good, kids."
He called up a fresh taskline.
"Girls, get over here. We got something to do." The man put down the call crystal and paused. He'd forgotten something.
"Ayo—I forgot about the voice." Gazei pressed a rune and instantly the notifications came pouring in:
▸ +14,600,000 Dungeon Points Earned
▸ 337 Monster Kills Logged
▸ 300 Pathfinder Deaths Logged
▸ 3 Named Pathfinder Deaths Logged: Mira, Athena Hex, Tobias Finch
▸ Pathfinder Kill Ratio vs Foreign Monster [W]
▸ Rare Item Unlocked: [Coastal Bunker-Type Blueprint – Tier ★★]
▸ Dungeon Ecology Adjusted: Regional Hostility Level Reduced by 2%
He nodded once.
And then, music started playing. Slow. Triumphant. Something orchestral and synthetic. Familiar in the best possible way.
Gazei smirked.
"…I played way too much San Andreas."
The music shifted. It wasn't just ambiance anymore—it was part of a system trigger.
A booming System Announcement voiced a wisp cut across the entire dungeon, projected through mana frequency and spectral nodes. Anyone near the first layer—tribes, Pathfinders, beasts, even the sleeping cores—heard it loud and clear.
[ Tri-ANNOUNCEMENT –ALERT]
PATHFINDER ACCOMPLISHMENT RECOGNIZED
▸ Mira, Athena Hex, and Tobias Finch have discovered the first Trinity Tower within the Blood Sand Region.
▸ They are the first Pathfinders to defeat a Guardian Boss.
▸ [Trinity Tower #003] is now been opened.
▸ [Tri-Slate Terminal] has been awarded to Mira, Athena Hex, and Tobias Finch.
🔓 New Questline Unlocked: Frontier Expansion [Main Expedition Quest]
▸ Quest available at: Tri-Guild Hall Entrance
▸ Completing this Expedition will reward Resource Crates, Exclusive Blueprints, and Respect Reputation across all Factions.
🔹 Status Update:
▸ Mira – [RESPECT +]
▸ Athena Hex – [RESPECT +]
▸ Tobias Finch – [RESPECT +]
The music crescendoed, and Gazei watched the notifications stack like a mountain. His eyes lingered on the last one.
▸ 3 Entries Recorded
▸ Status: DECEASED
▸ Historical Status: Locked in System Memory
"Goddamn," Gazei muttered, rubbing his face. "I won't accept this."
He stood there for a moment longer.
Then: "Aight. Let's bring them back."