A Jaded Life

The dungeon turned out to be an oddity. The biggest thing was that the enemies we faced always came in these un-Observe-able linked groups, even if a group might only be composed of five monsters, it was just as impossible to Observe as the tide of giant rats we had faced in the first place. Similarly, the walls looked like stone, felt like stone when I touched them, it even smelled like stone and while I didn’t try tasting them, I had no doubt that they would taste like stone, too. But, when I tried to use my Earth Magic to manipulate them, or even to sense them with my Earth Sense, I was getting nothing, less than I’d get when I tried to use Earth Magic on the air.

Lastly, and in an amusing twist the least odd of the dungeon’s oddities so far, were the floral dangers lining the walls. Sure, the vast majority of the fungi, vines and even flowers lining the wall were perfectly harmless, the few that were not were a bit of a problem. Mostly because they didn’t appear to be magical to my senses, didn’t have an apparent soul nor anything that readily distinguished them from the rest until we were right next to them and they let out a puff of pollen, a cloud of spores or some other unpleasant effect. Most were fairly easy to defend against by controlling the air carrying the crap the plants poofed out away from us, but when one of the flowers suddenly decided to spit a stream of some acidic compound in Silva’s general direction, I realised that things in this place were truly weird.

Nothing was clearer evidence of that than Silva’s utter brutality and ruthless savagery as we tore through the place. I hadn’t seen her this incensed, ever. She had always been calm and controlled, rarely doing worse than growling at people who annoyed her and in combat, her focus had initially been to keep me safe until her web of protection expanded to cover Lia, Alex and, to a much greater extent, Luna. Always protective, guarding, with a quick snuffle and snuggle if one of us felt down. Never like this, which really made me wonder what brought this on.

Forming theories, between destroying various critters swarming out of the walls, was easy though I had no real way beyond asking her which of my theories might be the correct one. And asking her, while she was in this mood, didn’t seem to be the right call, instead, we all wandered after her, protecting her back and making sure that none of the dungeon’s monsters got by her.

On the positive side, I had a feeling that the dungeon wasn’t quite like the others I had encountered thus far. The enemies always came in numbers, either swarming out of some nook or crevice or popping out in some other way, their numbers turning fairly simple and basic foes into challenges. But that wasn’t even the weirdest if it all. No, that particular crown went to the egg that remained behind after the group with the least numbers we had faced thus far, a group of five giant spiders, faded back into the dungeon, just sitting there in its pristine, off-white glory.

Only to crack when lightly touched, revealing some spider silk, a web-shaped pendant made of some chitinous material and a few spider stingers, complete with attached venom sacks. It was about as close to the old trope of a dungeon’s treasure chest as I had ever seen on the Road to Purgatory, making me wonder just what was going on here. Did the Dungeon somehow scale its difficulty, trying to make things challenging for us by way of numbers and the spiders had been a mini-boss, scaled up to be challenging by multiplying it by five? It sounded fairly ludicrous but I couldn’t really see an alternative unless this was all some sort of spore-induced hallucination.

To make matters worse, the dungeon was just a single, simple cavern, without any additional features. Thanks to its strange immunity to Earth Magic, I couldn’t even keep track of the path we were taking, or even sense the soil the rock must have been embedded in. To my senses, it was almost as if we were walking through a passage surrounded by nothing, a space that I couldn’t sense in any way, shape or form. Given how much I had recently been working on my magical senses, their absence was disturbing. To make matters worse, the cave was winding in fairly unpredictable ways, ascending and descending randomly, making me feel as if I was utterly lost - despite only walking down what amounted to a single corridor.

The only things breaking up the monotony of slate-grey stone were the monsters jumping out of random, often seemingly too small, crevices and the flowers. Oh, the impossible flowers, they started to give me a headache just thinking about them. Why would plants that grew deep underground, without any of the ordinary pollinating insects around or even without any light at all, have large, green leaves and these beautiful and incredibly aromatic blossoms? The few times I had allowed myself to scent the air for magic, their supposedly mundane smell made me just a little light-headed, inviting me to relax and just admire the flowers.

It had to be a trap but neither Alex nor Luna or I could find anything supernatural about these flowers, they didn’t appear to be magical, Alex couldn’t find anything of alchemical and even Luna could only shrug her shoulders after looking at them with her Eyes of the Lunar Maiden. Supposedly mundane and yet, very clearly not.

To make matters worse, when Luna tried to use her magic on one of the flowers growing here, she failed. The flower, despite looking like an ordinary thing that wasn’t special at all, didn’t even register to her Life Magic, meaning that the flower wasn’t alive in a magical sense. Instead, Luna told me that the flower felt and reacted to her magic just like the stone beneath us, not giving any feedback at all. By this point, I was starting to consider the entire dungeon as an oddity and only wanted to find out what was waiting for us at the end.

Even my earlier idea to catch a few of the local monsters and use them for our experiments had died a quiet death, mostly when I managed to get my hands on a giant rat crippled by our furious canine. Whether I was using Blood Magic or Mind Magic, there was little I could do to interact with the creature. On the other hand, when I experimentally tried to rip the blood from its body with my Blood Magic, it worked without issue. Similarly, when I simply struck another one with a blast of Mind Magic, the thing slumped over and stopped moving.

The biggest oddity, at least to my mind, occurred when I tried using Death Magic on one, once focusing on its body, once using Soul Sight in an attempt to get at the thing’s soul, even if I couldn’t really perceive it. I knew where to channel my magic and by that point, I wanted to get some sort of result, so I didn’t even care that I would feel the backlash from the Death Magic for an hour or two. I just wanted the thing’s soul to fade from this world.

Alas, Death Magic targetting the body worked reasonably well, the thing died readily enough, though I had a feeling that was primarily because I had put enough power into the attack to harm a creature around level sixty seriously. While I couldn’t be certain about the level of power one of these rats had, I would put them around level thirty, maybe forty, making up for their lacking individual qualities by sheer weight of numbers. Still, the thing had died easily enough.

However, the one I tried to kill by channelling Death Magic into its Soul was different. It simply took the attack without even a flinch and didn’t react to the two follow-up strikes either, despite there being enough power involved to make me woozy. Either my attacks never got close to the things Soul or it was immune to Death Magic in some strange way. The first felt unlikely, as the Soul should be anchored to its body and I had used enough power to flood the entirety of it, so I should have hit if it was there, the other was just as unlikely, as the Death Magic I had used had been enough to harm its body, I could see the disruptive effects on it, mostly because I was feeling them myself.

This whole dungeon was strange but at least its strangeness meant that we received a decent chunk of EXP, enough to push me up to level eighty-six. It didn’t make up for its sheer weirdness but it was a nice consolation gift.