Chapter 306
The Primordial Dungeon has an immense stretch of red desert, where tall dunes are all you can see around for hundreds of miles.
Wind has carved the dunes into long, low ridges that all lean in the same direction, as if the entire desert has decided to march somewhere and forgotten halfway. The sand itself is a deep, rusted red, fine enough to ride the air at the slightest gust, and at certain hours — when the dim light of the Primordial Dungeon catches it at an angle no real sun would ever take — it looks less like a desert and more like the dried blood of something colossal. Nothing grows. Nothing crawls. The only sound is the hiss of grains shifting against grains, and even that has a hollow quality, as if the dunes were paper-thin and the world beneath them were holding its breath.
But then, if you venture far enough, you come by small ruins, so small that you can easily miss them if you don’t use a Skill or you’re not monitoring your surroundings at all times.
You can find a dozen half-demolished columns and a few crippled statues. But the most important thing is that each of these artificial formations has a temple-like structure. It’s small, again barely noticeable from a distance, almost smaller than the broken-up columns.
Yet, if you descend the steps of those ruins, you’ll enter what Sir Maximilian has described as the ‘Intermediate Ground’ of the Primordial Dungeon.
Most Dungeons are a repetition of rooms—if not one giant room—and, unless there’s a Shadow Mimic, the monsters are rather predictable. In fact, monsters are much more predictable than traps, for example.
Traps can net you interesting materials, whereas monsters can reward you with both materials and Skills.
Well, in a normal Dungeon, that is.
For some reason, Primordial Dungeons can contain Skills, but their monsters never give up Skill Crystals upon death.
It’s one of the many weird details of Primordial Dungeons that Sir Maximilian both studied and confirmed on the field.
Anyway, inside the ruins of this Original Primordial Dungeon, there’s a massive underground network of chambers, infinitely long corridors that can go up, down, left, right, spiral, curve, and all the twists and turns one can picture. And the chambers, too, are irregular, labyrinthic at times, and, most importantly, dangerous as hell.
A Dungeon rarely has more than a dozen types of monsters at once. And even then, it can be very easy to map all possible scenarios after an expert dives it once or twice.
That’s not the case for the Intermediate Ground. While the Early Ground was littered with only Minor Nightmares of Apocalypse, the Intermediate Ground has so far been much, much nastier. But worse than strong monsters there’s only one thing, extremely rare to find in the wild nowadays: unpredictable monsters.
And the Vanguard groups know very well how unpredictable monsters can and will wipe out your entire team.
Captain Lagrange looks at the Leader of Champions of the first-year of the Academy and his team.
They look prepared, self-assured, and really strong.
The chance of them dying is sky-high , the man thinks.
It’s exactly the self-confident types like them, the prodigies, that die like dogs in Dungeons like this one. He has dived into four of the seven Dungeons that Sir Maximilian has found. He has lost countless people in doing so, and almost all of them after they reached the Intermediate Ground.
I hate giving The Lesson .
But he knows that without it, the Champions might all die on their first day. And he’d like to avoid having that pinned on him.
He’s not one of the crazy bastards of the main Vanguard group, about a hundred and fifty men who cycle their ranks as fast as they can and have cleared the most ruins and accumulated the most resources at the cost of a sky-high fatality rate.
He’s methodical. Calm.
As long as they kill enough monsters, the Dungeon will slowly start—that’s his strategy. Perfectly aligned with the Knight Commander.
Each of the teams currently spread across the Intermediate Grounds has a name in the reports they send back to the Knight Commander. Captain Lagrange’s people are Team Five — the slowest of the rotations and, he will not deny, the safest. His job is not to clear ruins. His job is to take the unblooded and the cocky, evaluate who adapts the fastest, and send those people up to the other teams. Those who don’t adapt usually don’t need a transfer order. Cloud’s team has been assigned to him because, according to the Knight Commander, they were the most likely to cause trouble.
The chamber is wider than it had looked from outside, the kind of wide that only registers properly once you have placed fifty people inside it and there is still space to step around them. The walls are stone the color of bone, etched with a script no one in the group can read, and the seams between the blocks are so tight that even after however many centuries the Primordial Dungeon has been spinning, a knife would not fit between two of them. A broad stone basin sits at the center of the room, dry, its rim chipped where one of the Shields earlier today smashed a cocoon-thing off it. Lights have been planted at each corner and at the two corridor mouths: the Knights are not taking chances on the dark.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
And so, Captain Lagrange has to explain how this works and how to behave to all the newbies assigned to him.
“Listen up,” the tall man says in his black armor, “this is the most important bit of information you’ll ever receive in this forsaken Dungeon. Your lives depend on it. I’ve seen countless confident people like you die—and before you even think it, even stronger people than you died like dogs when faced with these Dungeons.”
Captain Lagrange has sat all of them on the ground, ordering them to listen in silence while he gives The Lesson.
“So, first, the monsters here change all the time . You’ll face giant insects, Undead, creatures you’ve never seen before, and a bunch of abominations that are hard to describe.”
The Champions and the Dark Champions do not seem impressed by any of that.
“But the most dangerous thing is that the real threat is intelligent . There are many Nightmares that hide around the monsters. And not the kind you’ve seen out there. Those are the easy bastards. Here, you’ll find several kinds of them whose only reason to exist is to cut you from hip to shoulder and eat your heart off your fresh corpse.”
Captain Lagrange awaits a reaction that doesn’t come.
Somewhere far down one of the corridors, water drips at a rhythm that nobody can quite tune out. Each drop arrives a fraction later than expected — long enough for the listener to think it has stopped — and then arrives anyway. Captain Lagrange’s voice fills the rest of the silence, hard and slow and unhurried, the way a man speaks when he has buried friends and has no intention of burying these particular children.
“They’re stronger, possess different abilities based on their type, and, again, are hidden among other monsters that will try their best to kill you and everybody around you in the most efficient and brutal way you can imagine.”
The Champions and the Dark Champions just stare back.
Captain Lagrange looks at them and then spots a face he doesn’t recognize from his reports.
“Wait, who are you?” He asks, pointing his finger.
“Lancelot, sir. Jacob’s Squire.”
Captain Lagrange was not informed of this guy, but it doesn’t matter.
“Whatever,” the Captain says. “You will only observe until I say so. I don’t have time to train you on the field. You’ll be allowed to go your merry way during the breaks since the Knight Commander informed me your lot is crazy enough to think you have time to train your Skills between bouts of combat.”
“Does that mean you have no intention of letting us participate in a fight?” Delefagus asks.
“No. No intention whatsoever. You’re not only incompetent, but you’d be fighting alongside my men and risk getting them all killed.”
For reasons that he doesn’t understand, he sees Delefagus laugh and smack Jacob Cloud’s shoulder.
“You goddamn bastard,” Delefagus says to Jacob. “How do you do this every single time? What monstrosity have you sold your life to?”
They must really not like the fact that they’re going to be doing anything , Captain Lagrange muses. They probably thought they were coming here to save the day .
And so, Captain Lagrange turns toward his second.
“Junt,” Captain Lagrange says, “put all the Shields up ahead and let’s get a move.”
The man called Junt is a short and stocky man with a large staff that looks like a branch off a cursed tree in his hand. At the top, the staff hugs a sickly-green gem.
Junt shouts with a squeaky voice, “Let’s go, bastards! It’s time to die again!”
Team Five consists of around fifty men and women of all races, all of them Knights with a few Adventurers in their mix. In an operation this big, there is no way to organize the kind of small team that would usually dive in a Dungeon. One needs multiple people covering every base so as not to be caught by surprise by what the Dungeon will throw at them.
Jacob’s group is at the end of the column as they enter a very narrow corridor. An Infernal woman goes up to them and says, “Stay at least thirty feet away from the group. I don’t give a rat’s ass if you can’t see. We need space to back up in case a horde of monsters gets here.”
“Sure,” Jacob says, gesturing at the others to stay back.
The woman, Narzla, frowns.
“You have no problem with that?”
“No,” Jacob smiles and turns toward the others. “Hey guys, you have any problems?”
“Nope,” Korrath, the giant black-scaled Dragonkin, says, walking forward. “And Miss… Narzla , is that how you say your name?”
“Yes?” Narzla is confused by the question. And how do they know her name, even?
“I am a Shield with a Rainbow Skill focused on defense. If you need my help, please do count on me.”
The woman looks at the Dragonkin and then realizes, “You’re a damned Cultist .”
She was almost tricked by the manners into telling Captain Lagrange that this guy looked solid.
“Heh, I tried,” he shrugs, throwing a punch at Jacob’s shoulder. “It’ll be for next time, then.”
Narzla ignores the Dragonkin and stays back, making sure they stay where they’re told to.
This is her second Primordial Dungeon—in a way, she’s a veteran. And she knows just how unpredictable these Dungeons can get. She bets that the guys behind her will do anything to get a glimpse, possibly even breaking the rules. And Captain Lagrange can’t wait for them to try so that he can send their asses back to Ashenmere.
“Vyrrak,” she hears Jacob’s voice. “Who’s got the cards? Did you bring them?”
“I have a deck, lad,” she hears the Dwarf say.
“I’m not playing on that obscene thing,” she sees the tall Elf reply. “You’re disgusting, Dwarf.”
“Boomgar, put away the cards with the naked women. They’re weird. And Veyrissa, let him be.”
Surprisingly, it’s not Jacob Cloud giving those orders, but the ex-Leader of the Dark Champions, Nimirea.
Suddenly, they all get one card, look at it, and hide it in their pocket.
“Alright, let’s start,” Jacob says. “Who gets the first guess?”
“I never do,” a big young man says.
“Alright, Kai, you go.”
“I think you have a King of Elves,” Kai narrows his eyes at Jacob.
“Wrong.”
“Damn it,” Kai sighs.
“You should really pick up a few perception Skills,” Jacob comments.
What are they doing? We’re probably going to meet monsters soon. Why are they—
All the newbies lose their mind at the chance of seeing the kind of horrors and treasures one can find in a Primordial Dungeon.
And only then it registers with Narzla what they’re actually doing.
“Are you guys playing cards ?!”