Hopping Celestial Fox

“Oh… That’s where the smell is coming from…” Frank muttered, his expression in pain from the horrible stench.

I wanted to puke, just being in the same dungeon as these things. Enhanced senses sucked sometimes.

We were looking at a group of vaguely humanoid piles of rot loitering around the cavern. There were about a dozen of them and luckily, none of them seemed to have noticed us yet. I absolutely did not want to fight any of these things in a melee. Good thing we had Casey with us.

“Let’s see what happens, then…” Casey murmured. “Might as well just wash away the whole room.”

She raised her staff, narrowed her eyes, and released the purifying wave, larger than usual, covering the entire cavern in white.

I saw galaxies full of–

The whiteness dissipated and all the rot and corruption was nowhere to be found. Only a regular old cavern with moss lay before us. And instead of the rot zombies, there were pale humanoid bodies laying on the ground, motionless.

“Uh…”

The three of us exchanged an uneasy glance.

Leaving piles of bones behind was one thing – it was easy to imagine that they were like the skeleton replicas in biology class, after all – but seeing actual corpses was just unnerving. After all, everything around us was real now. These could have been real people turned to undead by… something. Maybe the virus, maybe something else.

“Hellooo…? Are you… uh, alive?” Frank called out.

The bodies continued to lie there, completely motionless.

“Right… I guess they are the same as the skeletons. Just more… intact…?” he tried.

I shook my head.

“Let’s just keep going,” I said, trying to ignore the uneasy feeling of this whole dungeon.

We did so and ran into several more groups of these zombies, which Casey dutifully cleansed from afar without us having to engage with them at all.

With the staff, we really didn’t need to worry at all about anything in this dungeon. Part of me felt like we were cheating, but at the same time… When I thought about all these zombies being real people at some point, I couldn’t help but think we were saving them. Releasing them from their torment and finally giving them peace.

With that in mind, fighting them normally would just be cruel, wouldn’t it?

Yeah… This wasn’t just a game, after all.

It didn’t take long for us to reach the end of the second floor of the dungeon with yet another set of stairs going down. The transition to the third floor was very stark, just like the transition to the second floor.

The wiggling moss with eyes turned to full-on rotting tentacles covered in eyes sprouting from the walls. They clearly noticed us and began squirming and growling in our direction.

“Okay, fuck! Are we in a horror movie or something? Because this is getting a little over the top!” Frank complained.

Casey lifted her staff without a word and blasted the wall tentacles with the divine crystal, leaving nothing but regular moss behind once again.

“I feel like this dungeon is a test of one’s sanity…” Casey said, her tone deadpan. “If we didn’t have the Pandemia, I would have refused to go beyond the first floor.”

“Yeah, me too…” I admitted.

“Well, nothing for it… Let’s see what’s in here,” Frank grumbled with a sigh. “If the first floor had skeletons, and the second had zombies, then this one… Ghosts, maybe?”

“Then we really wouldn’t be able to do anything against them without the staff, would we…?” I said.

“Yeah, probably not… Good thing we have it then!”

With that, we entered the third floor, still firmly on guard despite having the ultimate weapon on our side.

We soon discovered that Frank had been mistaken.

There were no ghosts. No, instead, we ran into some kind of amalgamation of the two previous enemy types. A sickly yellow skeleton with chunks of rotten flesh attached to it, wielding a rusty, chipped trident.

“Oh… I guess this must be the final floor,” Frank murmured.

I gave a slow nod.

“They are probably supposed to combine the abilities of both the skeletons and the zombies… Whatever those might be.”

Both of us then glanced at Casey expectantly. She merely raised her staff once again and let loose the same wave of light in our foe’s direction.

As expected, the skeleton-zombie hybrid toppled over when it hit him and didn’t move anymore.

The missing pieces of flesh right next to the unblemished, cleansed flesh made this an even more unnerving sight than the defeated zombies.

“You know… It’s probably obvious, but trying this on the fish zombies in Abyground is probably going to have the same result, isn’t it?” Frank said with a grimace.

I clenched my fist.

“Maybe not…?” My own words weren’t convincing to me.

“We need to find the cure as soon as possible,” Casey said through gritted teeth. “And if the mini-boss down here doesn’t have it, then we’ll just have to go fight the boss in Abyground.”

“This detour was probably pointless, wasn’t it…? Everything we try is pointless except fighting the boss…” My tone was sour and defeated. I really hated precognition.

“Pointless? No way! Did you forget? The Pandemia with the crystal worked! It did cure everyone!” Frank argued.

“I mean… Not everyone…”

“Well, aside from those who were in space at the time, I guess,” Frank grumbled. “But hey! Maybe the dream is a bait! Maybe the boss doesn’t even have any cure and we’ll need to go and visit all the remaining infected and blast them with the crystal one by one.”

Both Casey and I grimaced.

“I hope it doesn’t come to that… We would never be sure whether we missed someone,” she grumbled.

 I winced.

Going around and curing people one by one would be very tedious and would definitely expose us to the world. And as Casey had said, if we missed just one, the virus could then begin spreading all over again and we would be back at square one.

“We’ll see, I guess.”

With that, we kept going. On our way through the third floor, we kept running into more of these skeleton-zombies and the rotting wall tentacles and Casey purified all of them without fail. They barely even registered as a threat at this point.

It didn’t take long for us to arrive at what we could only assume was the final boss room of the dungeon. A giant double door made out of the same rusty metal the tridents were, covered in the same rot tentacles. Casey immediately cleansed the wiggling eye-filled abominations without a second thought.

“Right, so… Boss time. This might be the guy who wrote all the mysterious text upstairs…” Frank mused.

“It could also be completely unrelated,” Casey argued.

“True, but… Well, let’s just assume it is the same guy,” Frank said, crossing his arms. “What do we do? Do we just purify him just like everyone else? Or do we fight him normally?”

I frowned.

“I don’t see a reason why we don’t just purify him like the rest.” I glanced behind us with a grimace. “If only to help them rest in peace…”

“Uh, I guess, you’re right… Dammit, I was hoping we could somehow figure out how to cure the undead without killing them. And since he was a researcher and everything…”

“I don’t think that’s possible,” Casey said, a pained expression on her face. “I think they are all far too gone to save them.”

“I…” Frank sighed. “Yeah, I guess so…”

Truthfully, I also wanted to find a way to save them, if only so we would have a way to turn fully zombified people on Earth back to normal if it ever came to that. But at this point, I didn’t think we could. We had to hurry up to save them before they turned into zombies wholesale.

“Alright, I guess we’re going in and blasting him with holy magic then.” Frank nodded and reached out to the door.

“Wait.” I stopped him. “Just in case the boss is somehow immune, we should prepare.”

“Right… sure.”

We spent the next few minutes checking our equipment, making sure we had all our safety nets in place, and going over our battle strategy just in case things went south.

Five minutes later, Frank pushed open the big door.