Meeting a Girl in a Dungeon

After traveling through that mist covered door, Kantan was met with two puzzle rooms back to back. The first room had a riddle on the far wall that would need a verbal answer to complete. If you failed to get the right answer, the floor would begin to recede into the wall, which would start a timer. It wasn't a distinctly laid out timer, but more so the floor giving way to a spike trap. Each incorrect answer would speed up the rate at which the floor was pulled into the wall. Kantan had been able to come up with the answer to the riddle after a bit of thought, mainly since Veri wanted to see if he could do it.

The riddle wasn't overly challenging for him, mainly because she half spoiled it through her reactions to his thoughts. Any time he strayed from the right answer, he could feel a bit of glee through their mental bond. Kantan could tell that she enjoyed giving him the run around. He understood why though, as he would want to see people stumped before any riddles he had made. If he didn't have the answer sheet to all the puzzle rooms locked away in his mind, he might have stressed about it a bit more.

The second puzzle room was a bit more interactive, requiring him to light a series of torches along the walls. This was more a trial of agility and speed, as the room began to flood from the bottom as soon as he entered. One of the torches was lit as soon as he entered, and ever other torch needed to be lit. If you couldn't move through the water with the torch fast enough, while also making sure to keep it lit, the room would fill up and you would drown. The torches were a stark contrast to the normal lighting of the dungeon, which had immediately caught his eye. Normally the dungeon had ambient light bright enough to see, but with no light sources.

No-one knew why, but dungeons were always lit up one way or another. Some would have regularly spaced light sources like glowing crystals, while others would go the traditional route of torches. Either way, unless you were in a room that focused on darkness as a theme, you were always able to see in a dungeon. It was still common practice to bring light bracers though. Just because you could get a decent visual, doesn't mean it was perfect vision. Dungeons provided enough light to see enemies, but not words or art along the walls or floors. Without getting close or feeling the words that might be in a room, it could be almost impossible to see the finer details.

Once Kantan had lit the final torch, the water quickly receded into the floor of the last puzzle room. Weirdly enough, the water that had permeated his clothes and hair had flowed down his body with it. A quick check had left him completely dry despite the vigorous sloshing he had just gone through. He questioned Veri about it, and she responded in a way he couldn't refuse.

"For all of the people who have come through this room, each one who left complained of wet shoes. Not only that, they would constantly drag moisture all over my dungeon. You cannot imagine how many stray puddles I would need to hand clean after a part had been through this room." It was a part of dungeon life he had not expected, but came to understand. There were a lot of different factors to making sure groups didn't cross too often, and that if groups used a room back to back that it was reset easily. "Each room is meant to test you individually, atleast on this level it is. While I could kill more divers by leaving lasting effects after each room, less people would try their luck. I figured if I made some quality of diving changes that people would risk it just a bit more."

Kantan had found that Veri was actually pretty good at understanding parts of human psychology. It stemmed from thousands of years of tricking them into dying, but it could not be said that she didn't know how the greedy thought. "You know, I don't think I will ever get used to having such a pleasant voice constantly talk murder into my ear." He couldn't help but poke fun at her. He was slowly coming to terms with her style of speech, learning to take her sarcastic remarks in better strides.

"Its not ALL about the murder, just MOSTLY about the murder. To be fair though, I am not the one who is invading others' bodies for goodies." It seemed that she had thought about this a lot, but Kantan was quick to chase her statement.

"You have us there, but without us diving through your chambers you would cease to grow. With how much you are effected by chi deprivation, I bet new cores are basically slightly smarter rocks."

Veri sent a mental huff at him, but didn't seem truly offended. "I didn't try to actively kill EVERYONE who came in. Some of them were fun to watch, especially when they were a good group. It is fun to live vicariously through some of them, and to a degree I feel like I know them as good as they know each other."

This line of thought left Kantan reeling slightly, as the implications hit him. He genuinely didn't think that he could have survived such a lonely existence. Constantly seeing others engaging with each other, the comradeship, the triumph over struggle as a group. She had been forced to watch everyone else joke and play about together like a forced third wheel. "Well, now is your chance to truly live out the life of a dungeon diver. It is still through my eyes technically, but now you can actually speak your mind about it."

Kantan stepped up to the dark misty doorway to the next room, and continued his train of thought. "I've thought a bit about where we can go once we are out in the wild. If my grandfather either can't or isn't willing to help us, what are your thoughts on going to see other dungeons?"

At first he could feel the negative train of thought from her, but then it rapidly switched to exuberance. "If we go see other dungeons, I can see how much better I was than everyone else! We can also see a bunch of new ways to create traps and a bunch of new monsters."

At first Kantan was happy that she agreed, but the thought of being forced to fight a bunch of monsters for her amusement left him feeling a little weary. Deep down he knew that he would never have the option to live a peaceful life, even before he was forced into the dungeon. The path of a warrior would always have struggle and strife, it was simply unavoidable. He had just hoped that his journey would have been more streamlined in its path.

Deciding not to dwell on what he could not control, and knowing that he was nearing what should be the second to last room in the first floor he stopped messing around. In theory he should run into Lyra in the next room, which should be a combat room based on the dungeon's generation algorithm. He had learned that Veri restructured the entire dungeon so that each challenge was completely separate from every other challenge in the first floor. Once she had learned how to manipulate space with her chi to create teleportation effects, she had split the first floor into individual rooms.

After one last moment of hesitation, Kantan walked through the door to the next room. The teleportation was seamless, his foot coming down when he expected it to. There was no weird sensation when he was teleported by the dungeon, though apparently that wasn't how it always was. During her first iterations people would end up violently ill, or missing body parts when they came out the other side.

Kantan did a quick scan of the room and saw that it was not unlike the room he had fought the imp in. The main difference this time though, was that instead of the room simply containing a stone throne, it had four thick columns breaking up the space. The ceiling was double the height of all of the other rooms he had been in, and without his enhanced demonic eyes it would be exceptionally hard to see all the way to the top. In between each column was a tangled mass of webs that spread out to each of the four walls.

The webs stayed above the line of darkness, meaning most diver's wouldn't be able to see the danger right away. Kantan thanked that his eyes had evolved some night vision as a primal shudder passed over him. The hair on the back of his neck stood up, and he was able to tell that something strong was watching him. This was the first time he had felt his instincts blaring danger at him, even compared to when he had to fight the stone warrior. A few seconds went by as he continued to search the webs for the danger, his body tightening in response.

Slowly the sense of danger rose to an almost unbearable point, and just before he was about to jump away the soft sound of a footstep came from the adjacent wall. As soon as the muffled sound filled the room, the aura of danger seemed to physically move away from him. Like a spotlight he could feel, it shifted toward the source of the sound in almost an instant.

Stepping out of a mist covered doorway was a teenage girl with auburn colored hair. She held two short swords, one forward while the other had the blade running along her forearm defensively. Even if his eyes weren't able to see in the dark, he would have recognized her silhouetted stance in a heartbeat. She looked mostly unharmed, only a single bandage was wrapped around the bicep of the arm with the backward facing blade. It was the same arm that was adorned with a sect issued light bracer artifact, which cast a sphere of light out from her. The light highlighted the webs around the ceiling with silver glints, making them seem to have a metallic sheen to them.

She was scanning the room, and hadn't seemed to have spotted him upon her arrival. Kantan felt his heart un-clench in relief that she had made it thus far without too much trouble. Just as he was about to call out to her, a shadow shifted across the webs aggressively, causing the countless strands to shiver and shake. This pulled both of their attentions to the ceiling at the same time, though Kantan's eyes were the only ones to make out the threat entirely.

It was a spider, and not just any old spider, but a massive dog sized spider with blade-like legs. He would have thought the sharp legs would have cut the strands with each step, but it almost sounded like metal on metal as it walked. It was surprisingly fast, and it was bolting at Lyra with almost reckless abandon. A horrible clicking noise and a high pitched shrill scream echoed from hits fanged maw, returning the intense sense of danger his instincts had warned him about when he first entered.