Chapter 297: S-Rank Dungeon (3)

A roar rolled up the shaft like a furnace blast, and then another crashed over it from a different throat. The sound multiplied into a storm of voices—goblins shrieking, orcs bellowing, skeletons clacking their jaws as if laughter could kill.

Hundreds of Common monsters poured from the tunnels and vaulted ridges of stone, all of them angling for the same target. Ketal fell through the warm, stale air, let his body twist once, then touched down lightly.

The floor heaved as a dull boom went out from under his feet. The shock ran in a ripple across the cavern and made the stone flex like a drumhead. The first ranks of monsters lost their footing and went tumbling. A second wave slammed into the first and folded, and the whole front became a tangle of limbs.

“I have seen enough of you to last several lifetimes,” Ketal said, almost apologetic.

If it had been up to him, he would have ignored them. However, the Guildmaster had been clear: the Dungeon’s mechanism would not open the way until every monster on the current floor was dead. The rule was inelegant. It was also simple, and simple rules were easy to satisfy.

He closed his hand into a fist. Myst curled to his knuckles and pressed outward without a sound. He punched the air in front of him. The pressure went forward as a shell of wind. It burst in the middle of the horde and turned bodies into pieces. The remaining force rolled out as a ring and took the legs out from anything still standing.

In a single exchange, more than a hundred broke and did not rise. On their own, these were the sort of creatures a competent mercenary learned to read like weather. In numbers, even weak things forced respect. A normal warrior would have needed time to sort the press and carve a path that kept his flanks from closing on him.

However, Ketal was not a normal warrior. His fists rose and fell at a pace that never looked hurried. Each strike swept away a clot of enemies. The remnants tried to regroup and found only fists in their way. In the time it would take to tell someone not to panic, the cavern was half clear. In a few minutes more, there were no monsters left to hear their own roars fade.

The last skeleton dropped with a brittle clatter. A hush fell that was not silence, just the absence of a certain kind of hunger. The floor shuddered. Stone sighed and slid aside. A downward stair opened, steps cut with care into a shaft veined with ore.

Ketal descended. Another wide chamber waited for him. It looked like the first—a bowl of rock with smooth walls, no pillars, and no cover to turn to advantage—except that the things which moved in it were not the same. Ogres worked their shoulders and split their lips around their tusks. Griffins raked the ground with bladed talons. Werewolves paced in arcs, muscles moving in ripples under their hides until the arcs tightened and pointed at him. They charged at Ketal.

So the description was correct,

he thought as he slid past a griffin’s beak and let a werewolf’s claws whistle past his ribs.

The Monster Nest lived up to its name. It was less a Dungeon built around tricks than a warehouse for living enemies. They were not all thrown into one place to make a single, ridiculous knot. Floors divided species and ranks. Each level had its own swarm.

The first floor had been the home of the usual rabble—skeletons, orcs, goblins, and the like. A Novice fighter could hold an edge there if he had good footing and a clear head.

The second floor was a step up. Ogres, griffins, werewolves—monsters that sat cleanly in the Rare tier. An Advanced combatant could survive them, but only if he hated wasting effort and liked being exhausted.

As the floors went down, the ranks climbed. The first floor held only weak monsters, making it surprisingly accessible for an S-Rank Dungeon. Many came to challenge it, eager to prove their strength. However, most of them never returned.

A thousand monsters charged all at once, exactly as the stories said. There was no cover anywhere inside the cavern, only a vast, barren plain, and no time given to prepare. When crushed beneath the sheer weight of numbers, even weak monsters could not be underestimated. A single moment of carelessness could kill even the strong.

In fact, a faction under Spellweaver had perished on the first floor, despite each of them being Advanced mages. However, for Ketal, it was hardly a problem. Monsters were smashed and sent flying. It took less than thirty minutes to sweep away all thousand of them.

When the last of them finally stopped trying to rise, the floor opened again. The third floor welcomed Ketal with a different kind of silence, the kind that fell when something in the room was intelligent enough to wonder if the challenger would notice it.

Two-Headed Ogres watched him with two sets of eyes. Wraiths condensed and thinned as if breathing. Death Knights sat very still and then drew their swords with a patience that promised precision. Headless riders, Dullahans, turned their helms in their palms and set them on their necks, then fastened the straps and swung into their saddles.

This is where the Mercenary King turned back,

Ketal thought.

An army of powerful monsters stood in front of Ketal. Even the highest-level Transcendents could be pushed backward by weight alone. One mistake at the wrong time could become three wounds, then five, then an opening that never closed. However, Ketal felt the interest, not pressure.

“Some of you are new to me,” he admitted to himself, and let that count as praise.

The exchange took longer than the first two floors because some things on this floor understood how to trade guard for damage and when to refuse both. That only made the cleanup more satisfying. When the floor finally acknowledged that there were no opponents left to test him, it opened.

The fourth stair led to a floor no one had charted, and no map existed. Ketal smiled and felt his pulse pick up.

“Good,” he murmured. He descended with a boy’s bright expectation.

They greeted him with a sound like rocks breaking under water. Seven long necks lifted from a body as thick as a house. Each snake head opened its mouth and tasted the air with a forked tongue that glistened with something worse than poison.

It was a Hydra, and it was not alone. There was also a human with the head of a bull, known as a Minotaur, along with a Giant Worm, a Basilisk, and even a Medusa. Beyond these were countless other creatures he had never seen before, monsters straight out of myth.

Ketal did not need an appraiser to tell him what they were. The pressure in the chamber shifted as he looked across them. No one here sat below the Transcendent tier.

There were more than a hundred. The Holy Sword made a sound before it could stop itself.

“This is a catastrophe,” it whispered. “If this floor opens, and a Hero does not arrive immediately, half the surface could be swept clean.”

The Hydra hissed, and the Minotaur bellowed, and the Giant Worm shook the ground. They came in a ragged wave. Ketal moved with a small smile at the edge of his mouth.

The first to reach him was the bull-headed man. The Minotaur lifted a great axe and chopped downward with both arms. Ketal’s fist rose to meet it. Steel leaped apart like dry bark torn by hand. The broken halves of the axe spun away, and Ketal’s knuckles carried through the gap and hammered the Minotaur’s chest. The creature flew backward and plowed a trench with its back.

However, it did not die. It twitched on the floor as if trying to stand. It did not stand, but it had not shattered either.

“Oh?” Ketal said, eyebrows lifting. “You endured that?”

He had not put his whole weight behind the punch. However, he had not pulled it either. The fact that the Minotaur was not a stain against the wall pleased him.

The Giant Worm hit the ground where he had been and chewed air. He stepped sideways off the line. The Medusa came gliding in, belly dragging, eyes bright with malice.

Medusa flared its hair. The snakes struck in a fan, their mouths opening and closing in a stutter that felt like a chant. A curse went with the motion, old and heavy, the kind that made men stop moving and stay that way forever.

“Oh,” Ketal said. He caught it by the hair. The snakes whipped and tangled around his forearm and failed to find flesh.

He twisted. Bone and spine gave way. Its body thumped and slid. The curse unraveled where it had been taking hold, and the stone the spell had coaxed toward his skin crumbled to dust. Seven heads snapped at once. The Hydra’s bite was the kind that turned iron to chalk. Teeth shattered against Ketal’s skin and rained white chips. He laughed outright.

“When you catch a snake,” he said, “another snake always follows.”

He brought the axe around in a low, whistling arc. Three Hydra heads left their necks at the same time. The creature jerked away with a scream that ran along the stone like a saw.

Ketal’s eyes widened with delight as the necks bubbled and the flesh writhed, the heads reforming as though they were being inflated from within by a bellows.

The stories had said this was how a Hydra died: cut off every head at once, or do not bother. Otherwise, the creature would eat the damage and come back willing to try again. Its peculiarity had forced teams of Transcendent fighters to work together to finish a single one.

“This is magnificent!” he said as he started to laugh and could not help himself.

The floor was full of monsters that had stepped straight out of the pages left by people who believed that fear should have names. His heart beat faster in the way a boy’s did before he climbed a wall he was not supposed to climb. Taken one by one, any of these could ruin a city. Taken together, they would unmake a map.

To Ketal, they looked like a feast.

“This is joy!” he said. “Absolute joy!”

He laughed and rose into the fight. His movement began to change. The easy, neat economy that he wore in the world Outside loosened, as if something behind his shoulders had been waiting to exhale and finally remembered how.

***

Near the mouth of the Dungeon, the Guildmaster waited with his hands behind his back and his jaw tight enough to ache.

His secretary fluttered up behind him on quick wings. The fairy’s face was pale, which was hard to read because her face was always pale, but her mouth made a shape that should have belonged to a much older woman.

“Guildmaster,” she said. “Why are you standing here?”

“I gave you instructions,” he said, not turning.

“I executed them,” she said. “There is nothing more to do at the moment. Are you waiting?”

“I am,” he said. “He is below. I will move the instant he calls.”

She looked at the rope coils and the harness he had laid ready and pinched the bridge of her nose. “You are truly going this far to earn that person’s favor?”

“We need it,” the Guildmaster said. “I don’t understand why you fear him. He is exceedingly reasonable.”

“You do not know what you are looking at,” the fairy whispered. “That being is layered and overlapped. Parts of him do not fit together, and those parts are still moving. He is wrong in ways I do not have words for. I do not want to look at him again.”

She had begged out of the meeting in the reception room and had not been ashamed of that. The Guildmaster stroked his beard and nodded once.

“I understand,” he said. “You are saying he is a monster, one of a kind, and that noticing the shape of him feels like pressing your face too close to an engine. That is fine. It is not our most important problem.”

In a world like this one, the question that mattered most was simple: which way he swung the blade.

“If he is a monster and on our side,” the Guildmaster said, “then the rest is decoration. If he speaks clearly and keeps his promises, I will not refuse him.”

The fairy made a sound that was not a word. Logic and instinct were not having the same conversation. What she had seen layered over Ketal did not fit into any of the categories she used for comfort.

“He is helping us,” she said at last. “That part is true.”

“Then we will go with that,” the Guildmaster said. He looked at the hole again and listened. “I am waiting because, strength or not, this place is unknown. He could return at any time. I intend to be here to answer.”

“Do as you like,” the fairy said, and turned to go finish the unpleasant work of counting wounds and dead.

Just then, the ground thumped under their feet. They both stopped and looked down in the same instant. The thump came again. It was not a rhythm one could set your watch by. It was not a single impact either. The mountain seemed to breathe, and each breath shoved the dirt sideways.

“Do not say this is coming from the Dungeon,” the fairy said.

The Guildmaster did not answer. He put his palm on the ground and felt the way a farmer did, hunting for water. The tremor ran up through the bones of his wrist.

“It is coming from below,” he said. “That is not possible.”

Dungeons were separated spaces. The things that happened inside them did not move the world outside. However, the ground jumped so hard that the coils of rope rattled and the harness slipped half a finger on the stone.

The Guildmaster and the fairy stared at each other.

“What is going on...?” the Guildmaster muttered softly.

“He told you he is not human!” the fairy said.

***

Ketal laughed as he plunged into the horde like a man running downhill. Monsters shattered against him, only to break again when they tried to reform their lines. He crushed, scattered, and cut, never slowing for an instant.

The Holy Sword’s voice came brittle with shock. “Wait.”

He did not stop moving. The sword talked anyway.

“Something is wrong,” it said. “Your power feels different.”

His movement had shifted from the clean, sparing lines he used in the world above to something that felt wilder without being sloppy. The strength he was using did not fall off in quality. It climbed in a way that made the blade spirit’s imaginary skin crawl.

“Have you been holding back this entire time?” it asked Ketal, aghast.

“No,” he said, and drove his fist through the Minotaur’s chest. Bone cracked. The bull-headed thing fell and made the ground shake.

“I have fought in earnest. I have used my full strength,” he said, stepping out of a Basilisk’s stare as if it were a thrown net and not a curse that had made graveyards full of statues. “If I had not, some of the enemies we faced would have killed me.”

“Then what is this?” the Holy Sword pressed. “Your movement now is—”

“Fighting in earnest is not the same as removing every brake,” he said.

Outside, he had been suppressing himself without thinking about it. It was the same instinct that kept a man from swinging a bat at full strength while he walked through a room full of priceless glass. Just because one could, did not mean one should. The more one loved what was in the room, the more careful their hands became.

For Ketal, fantasy itself was the most valuable thing the world held. He had hungered for it for so long that when he finally stepped into a place that gave him the taste honestly, he refused to smash it under his own heel.

Every time he fought aboveground, some part of him had been leaning away from damage. He had made subconscious choices to bend, to drift, to waste a little power in the name of not kicking over the scenery. He could break a wall anytime he liked. He preferred not to break the museum just because he wanted to see how hard he could swing.

Thankfully, the Dungeon did not ask that of him. Nothing lived here that was not a monster. There were no small things to crush by accident and mourn later. There were no villages hiding behind the next ridge. There were no children trying to sleep. There were only enemies and the space between them. He could move without worrying about the cost.

“So I will,” he said.

He smiled like a man who had taken off a heavy pack and forgotten what it felt like to stand straight.