Rune Seeker

The portal closed with a soft pop behind Hiral, the last one through, and a strange shiver ran up his spine, settling in between his shoulder blades. An instinct had him turning around at where the portal had been, and he caught Seeyela looking at the same spot.

What was that?

Seeyela met his eyes, then shook her head and turned her attention to their surroundings.

Whatever the feeling had been, it was gone now, so Hiral followed suit, finding himself in a kind of waiting lobby, just like with the other dungeons.

The wild dungeons must have some similarities with regular dungeons. I wonder why it’s named differently…

Before he had a chance to consider an answer to his own question, a new notification window appeared in front of him.

The Buried City – Wild Dungeon

D-Rank

Top Clear Times

YYY : --:--

ZZZ : --:--

Attempt Dungeon?

Yes / No

“This confirms it’s D-Rank,” Seena said with a small sigh of relief. “Anybody need a minute before we get started?”

Hiral answered by activating Foundational Split, his tattoos and Meridian Lines peeling off his skin and billowing out as smoke-like solar energy to either side of him. When Left and Right were once again part of the group, he nodded at Seena.

“All ready here,” Nivian said, and the others nodded.

“Good. Remember what we practiced,” Seena said, then slapped her hand on the Yes button of the notification window.

The plain, false walls of the waiting lobby faded away like a thick fog, and then suddenly the ground shook so violently it threw Hiral to his knees. He hit and rolled, another tremor shaking the rock tunnel and causing small stones to fall from the ceiling, while a wall of dust roared at them from ahead.

“Incoming!” Seena shouted as Nivian appeared in front of her, shield up to block the worst of it. After the trials of the previous dungeons, the rest of the party smoothly fell in line behind them, instincts and reactions overcoming the trembling ground. Hiral pushed out a small dome of Rejection around them.

The roaring wave of dust washed over them with deafening ferocity. Both Wule and Seena put a hand on Nivian’s back to support him, while Hiral forced more energy into his rune to protect their flanks.

One second, two, three. The pressure built, Hiral’s ears popping, and then, just like that, it was past.

Hiral glanced behind him, half-expecting to see a wall or fallen pile of rubble, but instead the tunnel continued on long into the darkness.

When and where are we? This doesn’t look like a city, though judging by the cavern, we’re definitely underground.

“Everybody okay?” Seena asked, her voice shockingly clear—almost like it was in Hiral’s head—while another crash echoed from ahead. This time, the tremor under their feet was far less violent. Whatever had happened, the worst was over—for the moment.

“We’re fine,” Wule said after doing a quick visual check of the others.

“That was unexpected,” Nivian said. “In every other dungeon, we had to move forward before things got crazy.”

“Maybe one of the differences with wild dungeons,” Hiral said, but then focused on his hearing, something catching his attention. He quickly held up a hand to ask for quiet from the others, and… yes… there it was. “I hear… screaming. Panic. Something is going on ahead of us.” He pointed down the tunnel towards where the wall of dust had come from.

“I think we’re about to find out another difference with wild dungeons,” Seena said. She tapped Nivian on the shoulder, and the tank immediately started forward.

Wule and Seena followed right behind Nivian, with Right and Yanily taking up the corner points of the arrow formation. A little further back, Hiral jogged beside Seeyela, his RHCs in his hands, while Left kept watch at the rear. Nobody spoke as they moved, their eyes peeled for whatever was making the noise.

The rough-hewn cavern wall quickly turned to chiseled rock, the familiar glowing roots on both sides, though there were no obvious signs of support keeping the ceiling up. No, that’s not right. There’s a rune carved into the wall there. And another one there… They’re all over the place.

Hiral’s eyes settled on the rune as his mind turned over what they could mean, but he quickly snapped his gaze away. The last thing he needed was to explode if he figured out what the rune meant and learned it—Nivian would never let him hear the end of it. He could puzzle out what it was later.

“Something ahead,” Nivian said from the front of the group.

“I can hear the screaming now too,” Seena said. “Shouting as well. What kind of dungeon did we jump into?”

The answer came a few seconds later when the party emerged from the relatively small tunnel into a massive cavern, easily hundreds of feet tall. The roots from the tunnel joined thousands more like them to illuminate a full-fledged city built underground. Nearest them, small, squat buildings that looked like homes hugged each other and stretched in both directions, each no larger than two or three stories. Beyond them, though, far larger buildings reached for the ceiling, some of them having to be ten or more stories tall. Despite the height, they still retained the rather plain, square look of the closest homes, though the way the roots wrapped around them…

It's art. They used the glowing roots to decorate the simple buildings.

Hiral pulled his eyes away from the strange beauty of the illuminated city, the atmosphere almost festive in other circumstances, and found the source of the panic: the huge hole in the cavern ceiling. While the whole cavern had to easily be several miles long, and about half that wide, a large chunk of the ceiling was missing from around the middle. Giant hunks of stone lay barely visible in the heart of the city, the true devastation mostly hidden by the closest buildings.

Worse, though, was the pounding rain pouring down through the half-mile-wide gap above, and the dark shapes dropping down into the cavern with the water.

“Those better not be what I think they are,” Wule said, everybody else having noticed the same thing Hiral did.

“I don’t think they’re the Enemy,” Hiral said. “We can see them, and our PIMs aren’t going crazy with warnings.”

“Yeah, well, whatever they are, they’re not the only things in this dungeon,” Nivian interrupted, pulling everybody’s attention back down to ground level. “Look.”

Hiral looked ahead of the tank, down the street, to find possibly the last thing he expected to in a dungeon.

A child.

Tear-streaked and bloody, the kid stumbled along the road, his right hand cupping his other arm like it hurt him.

“Mommy!? Daddy?” the kid called, his voice somehow crystal clear over the turmoil. “Mommy, I’m scared. Where are you, Mommy?”

“I…” Yanily started. “I don’t want to fight that… that kid. We don’t have to, right?”

Hiral watched the child a second longer until his View ability kicked in.

Small Child—Low-E-Rank—Non-Combatant

“It’s not a monster,” Hiral said.

“No, but that is!” Left said, pointing at something loping across the rooftops in the direction of the child.

“GO!” Seena shouted.

The party rushed forward, Nivian’s form blurring and stretching out as he used his movement ability.

“Graaaah!” the monster snarled as it vaulted from the roof at the child, only to find Nivian’s shield in its path.

Bones crunched from the impact, and the tank twisted his body with the monster’s momentum, flipping it past him—and the child—to send it crashing into the building across the street.

Shiny black fur, blades along its joints, and long arms. The thing was some kind of large monkey, and it rolled to its feet with a snarl. Wickedly curved teeth lined its mouth as it hooted at Nivian in anger and pounded on the ground with its one good arm, the other hanging broken in the wrong direction. Easily up to Nivian’s chest, the thing probably weighed twice what any of the party did, and from the shadows leaping across the roofs, it wasn’t alone.

(Elite) Bladed Frenzy Monkey – Low-D-Rank

Not waiting to see what it would do, Hiral brought his RHC up in a practiced motion and pulled the trigger. A bolt like concentrated sunlight tore out of the barrel and crossed the distance in the blink of an eye, whapping into the side of the monkey’s skull with enough force for the sound of cracking bone to echo down the street. A cry of pain and the thing fell sideways, though it forced itself to stay on its feet—dazed but still alive.

Nivian’s triple-lash whip snapped out, thorns tearing patches of fur out as it raked across the monster’s body, leaving only a sliver of red in its health bar. The beast turned an angry glare on the tank, only for a bolt from Hiral’s other RHC to slam into its side and drop it to the ground, its health bar completely drained.

Just because one monkey was finished, though, didn’t mean the child was safe. A whole mob of the unruly primates was dropping into the street around him and Nivian in a hooting fury. And it wasn’t just the half-dozen or so monkeys around them that were the threat—more rushed down the street straight at the party.

“Sis, slow those down with me,” Seena ordered as she spotted the reinforcements. “Nivian, get their attention. Rest of you, do your jobs.”

Solar energy immediately began to gather in the two sisters, while Right and Yanily completely vanished, only to reappear beside Nivian as the tank used his Swarm Tactics ability.

“Go and keep the monkeys off Seena and Seeyela while they do their thing,” Hiral said to Left, lifting his weapons to aim at the monkeys around Nivian, Yanily, and Right. With a nod of understanding, Left dashed off, and Hiral noted his One-Man Army passive ability had already engaged. Without anybody close to him, the 20% damage bonus on top of the first stack of Killing Spreewas going to make his new and improved RHCs dish out some serious damage.

“Let’s see how high I can stack it,” he mumbled to himself, then pulled his triggers.