The dungeon forest felt too animated.
Every step crackled with noise, and underfoot they dealt with roots twisting, ferns swaying, sucking moss damp with false dew and moisture. It was like walking into a painting that hadn’t decided if it wanted to be beautiful or nightmarish, and certainly wasn't fucking dry yet. The air itself pulsed faintly with the rhythm Alex had sensed outside, the same cycle of aether that made Alex begin to think it was the dungeon itself. Some sort of awareness that was threaded into the world around them.
It probably is. He thought.
The raid party moved through the biome slowly and carefully. The squad was spread wide in a loose formation, covering ground but never losing line of sight with the others. Alex led his squad’s sweep at the front, his eyes glowing faintly as his [Aether Sight] burned across the undergrowth, watching the unnatural flows of dungeon energy writhe through soil, air, and tree-trunk.
The forest was massive. He hadn’t even glimpsed its exact edge from the cavern’s mouth, only the treeline stretching out until it abruptly stopped on either side to give way to newer biomes instead.
But he had seen enough to make some conclusions.
“Three things,” Alex said quietly to not alert any threat, but loud enough for those next to him to hear, and for the linked squad formations around him to relay his words. “One, the city’s our end goal. No way around that. Makes sense for the System to always put the main prize at the center.”
“That much was obvious,” Allie stated from his flank, though she kept her eyes scanning.
“Two,” Alex continued, ignoring her condescending tone, “these biomes aren’t just for show. Forest, tundra, desert, lake, all circling the city like points on a compass. I’d bet money each one’s got a hidden objective or trial tied to it.”
“You’re saying… what? That clearing all of them is what we should focus on? Will it make things easier for the final objective?” Devon asked in a half-whisper.
“Not easier exactly,” Alex said. “Rewarded is probably the best word. Think back to the Dark Den, its hidden objective there gave me dungeon points and breathing room.” He remained vague, once more The System restricting what exactly he could say given that Ghrukk and his team hadn’t completed the Dark Den dungeon themselves. “Same deal here, I’d wager. Each biome’s a gamble. If we want maximum payout, we clear them all.”
Garret snorted. “Optional side quests in a murder-mountain. Love it.”
“Exactly,” Alex said before returning to refocus everyone’s attention to the objective. “We conserve our big hits. Don’t burn cooldowns, and don’t overextend. If the city is just the first floor, then blowing everything early means we’re walking in crippled to the big boss at the end. Which means, less dungeon points, less experience, and lots of blood, pain and death.”
Death... that silenced even Allie’s sass. Grim nods passed through the line, agreement forged more out of necessity than optimism of their chances. So they swept the forest, performing two hours of tight switchbacks and systematic clearing. Boots pressing faint trails into soft earth, eyes sharp for the glowing “tell” of a hidden dungeon objective. The deeper they went, the quieter the lush life of woods became. Birds hushed. Insects stopped singing. Like the forest was tensing up, waiting.
Then came the first scream. It wasn’t human, but also sounded like no animal Alex had ever heard. The cry was high and sharp, then cut off too suddenly.
“Left flank,” Rynel hissed, he arrow nocked instantly.
Alex’s gaze snapped over, [Aether Sight] focusing, he saw it before the others. A ripple of ambient energy shuddered like a stone striking water. Then the thing came lumbering out of the trees.
A bear—no that wasn’t right, it looked almost like the mossling creature’s Alex had encoutnered near the Elven city. Yet where before the mossling was entirely made of some plant material of various kinds, this bear was flesh and furr, like one would expect, but also different.
Its bulk was massive, nearly nine feet tall at the shoulder, fur slicked black and gleaming. Its muscles bulged unnaturally, veins laced with a faint green glow of earthly aether. But it wasn’t the body that made Alex’s throat dry, it was the vines.
Dozens of them sprouted from its back, writhing like serpents, tipped with thorn clusters that glistened like metal razors. They snapped and curled independently, almost alive in their own right. He wasn’t sure what the thing was, and his mind struggled to reconcile the reality of seeing Pooh slapped together with a pissed off, fucked up Venasaur.
Then the beast roared again, and the forest answered.
Shapes crashed through the undergrowth from all sides, revealing more of the bear-beasts. Some the size of normal black bears, others easily rivaling horses or larger. Their vines lashed, slicing through ferns and saplings like scythe blades. Alex’s eyes widened as his [Aether Sight] gauged their power levels. Obby put in data overlays in his vision, giving readouts based on his aether perceptions.
Most were late Mortal Tier. Some… early Adept.
“All squads, regroup now!” Eric’s shout stretched across the clearing.
The command came too late, the first bear charged, vines whipping outward like a storm of knives.
Alex shouted a curse, his azure-blue aura flaring sharp against his skin. “Hybrid beasts?,” he muttered. “The dungeon just threw us its opening hand, and its a straight flush filled with hybrid bear-plants?”
The forest had erupted into chaos, mages clashing with the ursine-beasts from the left side. Alex’s focus narrowed as one of the largest of the beasts broke free of the treeline and made straight for him. Its roar rattled his ribs, and shook bark loose from the nearby trees.
A big one. Of course it’s mine.
It moved like a bear but strangely, every muscle swollen to grotesque proportions, back arched beneath the mass of writhing vines. The thorns shimmered with energy, sharp enough to glint in the half-light.
The first whip-like vine came faster than he expected.
He slid sideways, aether sparking against a hastily erected [Wave Shield] as the vine carved a deep trench through the earth where he’d stood. Another snapped in from the left, forcing him back with a snap-crack of air. He darted in, trying to close the gap, but each lunge was turned aside by the beast’s reach from its vines. Every time he thought he had an angle, a vine uncoiled and struck out, cutting him off, driving him back.
It was as fighting a wall of thorns, and every step forward brought three more whips snapping at his flesh.
Alex spat into the dirt. Alright. Fine. Play it your way. His hand flashed with energy as he completed the aether pattern for [Earth Bind].
The dirt rippled as blue tendrils surged upward, from the ground snapping around the beast’s forelegs and hindquarters like chains. It bellowed, thrashing against the bindings, but for a moment it was locked in place, giving exactly the window Alex needed.
He shot forward, the [Demon Asura Style]’s blue-purple aura igniting over his skin, and his fist crashing into the beast’s ribcage. Bone flexed under his fist from the impact, it large body absorbing the blow. He sent another strike, then another, each fist shuddering through the beast’s body with great force, but not enough to be lethal. Not nearly enough.
The vines shrieked. The tendrils of his [Earth Bind] snapped.
The creature tore itself free, tearing the chains from the earth and sending stone shards flying as it staggered upright again. Alex jumped back just in time to avoid being gutted by a whip of thorns, his chest heaving. His skin prickled, his muscles groaning as the [Demon Asura Style]’s caustic energy dug into him. The martial style’s third-tier side-effect was as merciless as he remembered it to be back in its second-tier. The feeling he got from the corruptive energy was like his flesh was being clawed at, every nerve burning, every joint screaming from an invisible workout that never ended.
But the pain kept his head clear, sharp. The itch, the burn, it anchored him in the storm of wrath that always accompanied the use of the martial style.
“Alright then, lets keep going.” Alex growled.
He surged forward, fists hammering into the creature’s defenses again and again. His knuckles split, blood smearing fur, causing it to smoke from the poisonous effects of his upgraded Wyrm-heart constitution. The beast had the bulk and vitality to withstand the worse of the poisoned blood, especially since Alex hadn’t boosted its potency by spending aether in its production, yet that wasn’t all the bear had to contend with. He had his new poison blood, and his martial style’s passive igniting along with it; [Burning Strike], which injected even more caustic energy into the creature’s body. Both effect stacked together wonderfully.
The more he fought with his opponent, the hotter it burned, the deeper it rotted. Sparks spat from Alex’s aura with every punch, each strike was a double dose injection of slow-acting destruction.
He smiled as he watched the vines falter, just for a breath, but it was enough.
“[Wrath Siphon].”
At the activation of his new martial skill, his aether pulsed dark red, threads of energy swirling down his arms, attaching themselves to the beast and disappearing into it’s body. In his mind, Alex could feel a new connection to his target. It wasn’t as powerful as his bond with Obby, nowhere near that level, but it was something, like his imprint on his storage bracelet; a small magical link.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Each of his strikes now bit into the beast on contact, teeth sinking deep and tearing away its life force, siphoning strength from the beast itself. He felt the flow of its aether surging into his own body with each hit, like a rush hot liquor down his veins. Strength coming to him, and life taken from it.
The beast shifted tactics. It hunched, pulling its vines inward, fur shimmering with earth-hardening aether, its hide stiffening into something like dense bark or stone. A desperate defense, but not enough to stop Alex.
His fists pummeled through the guard, [Burning Strike] and his poisoned blood both eating away at the reinforced fur. Every impact landed harder than the last, [Wrath Siphon] bleeding the beast dry of its fight, sapping its vitality. Alex’s muscles screamed, his aura sparked wildly, but he didn’t stop.
One last blow crashed down, and the beast’s skull cracked. A wet, ugly sound, and causing purple ichor to spray across the dirt. The monster shuddered once and fell, vines twitching weakly before curling down to the floor, limp.
Alex stood over it, chest heaving, aura guttering down to faint embers. His fist dripped ichor and blood.
A blue notification blinked into his vision;
Alex mentally swiped away the screen and exhaled with a groan. “One down.”
All around him, the forest still rang with roars and steel as the fight went on. And a half dozen more to go...
Just a couple minutes later, the last of the bear-chimeras went down with a final wet crunch as Ghrukk’s halberd split its ribcage, spilling its insides across the ground. A shudder rolled through the forest, the echoes of the battle bleeding off into silence. One by one, the raid party regrouped, shaking gore from blades, muttering short curses or quick laughs under their breath.
The right flank wandered over soon after, weapons still clean, expressions flat. Lance clapped his broad sword-blade against his palm. “We barely saw a shadow.”
“There was nothing for us to fight,” Kate sounded annoyed. “They all broke through on the left side.”
No one argued these facts. It was obvious the chimeras had only attacked one side of the raid party, leaving the area to the right untouched. Everyone was itching for a fight, so it left them restless. There was nothing they could do about it though, so they simply continued on.
The party pressed deeper, spreading into their staggered formation once more. Leaves crunched, pine needles snapped under boots. The rhythm of marching and scanning was only broken when Tom-Tom gave a sharp hiss, his tail flicking, and another small knot of chimera-beasts lumbered out from between the trees.
This time Alex was already moving before the beasts finished their roars. He slid low, aura flaring dark-blue, [Wrath Siphon] already activating with a large chimera-bear his marked target. His first blow cracked against its jaw, siphon-tendrils of energy curling into his arms, pulling life from the beast’s insides. The creature staggered, vines whipping about frantically. Alex ducked through the storm of plantlife, hammering fists into its flank.
[Burning Strike] surged through its fur, but so did the Chimera’s defenses.
Its fur darkened, hardening into bark-like plates that formed in bands across its body. Alex snarled, driving another hook into its ribs. The impact sent a shockwave rattling its torso, wrath-siphon-teeth biting deeper. The defense wasn’t enough, just like last the last fight. It crumpled under his barrage, blood and ichor streaking across the dirt.
Alex stood over the corpse of his enemy, breathing hard, sweat dripping from his chin, as the kill notification blinked in his periphery. But he wasn’t looking at it. He was watching the treeline.
Because once again, it was only the left side that had fought and bled. The right flank lingered untouched. Not a single vine tentacled beast had drifted near them.
He wiped purple residue from his knuckles against the grass as he scanned the area, eyes narrowing. “They’re herding us.”
Selka frowned, wiping her dagger clean as well. “What?”
“Think about it,” Alex said, gesturing at the battlefield. “Two encounters now, all beasts pressing left, trying to drive us in one direction.” He pointed through the forest, toward the distant heart of the hollow mountain. “Straight toward the city.”
The squad shifted uneasily under his observation, glancing at each other.
“Could be coincidence,” Lance offered, though even he didn’t sound convinced.
“Or The System,” Devon muttered from the back. “It does like funneling people toward objectives, right?”
“Or territorial beasts,” Zach countered. “We could be walking through their nesting grounds. Doesn’t mean there’s some grand plan.”
While everyone added in their own thoughts and theories, Alex didn’t give an answer right away. His gaze lingered on the mist-shrouded silhouette of the ruined city he had seen from the cave mouth, just barely visible through thick fog. A dull rhythm pulsed faintly against his [Aether Sight], the same unnatural cadence he’d sensed outside.
Coincidence? Or a leash around our necks, tugging us to a predetermined path? He thought to himself. He didn’t spend to much time musing over the question, because he knew they would get their answer sooner rather than later.
***
Another crack of bone, another spray of purple ichor. Alex stood over the twitching chimera, chest rising with steady breaths, knuckles wet and stinging painfully. The System’s kill screen blinked in his vision, tallying the experience and dungeon points, but he hardly cared. His eyes were fixed on the corpse.
This time, the beast’s bark-like skin had been forming before he even moved in to fight, creeping across its frame like living armor as if it knew what kind of attacks he’d use. But that wasn’t all. Halfway through the fight, it had shifted its weight just before his strikes landed, sidestepping his combination of blows as though it had seen it before. Alex had still overpowered it, but there was no denying the difference. The Chimera had adapted to him in some way.
And once again, the attack had come from only one side of their formation, solidifying the idea that it was not coincidence. Earlier, the first two times they fought such beasts, they’d been pressed from the left. Now, the party had been on a return path through the area, having reach one side of the large forest and circling back to continue their precise sweep. The beasts this time surged only from the right. A pattern was emerging, and Alex couldn’t ignore it.
He wiped his hand across the tall grass, frowning, and spoke low to the others as they regrouped. “These things aren’t just dumb dungeon animals. They’re reacting to my skills, learning my attacks. And just as we thought, it’s not a random, scattered attack we are dealing with, they’re only coming from one direction every time. They’re keeping us pushed away from a specific area, for sure.”
Obby’s laughter chittered in his skull. “Heeheehee. Smart meatboy finally catching on. Maybe they don’t like you sniffing around where you shouldn’t.”
Alex ground his teeth but didn’t respond. He’d long stopped expecting useful explanations from the little rock, and his paranoia regarding the item’s true plans was still at an all time high from the incident with the golden energy, a conversation topic Alex still hadn’t broached.
The others, however, stirred with their own opinions. Ghrukk spat to the side, blade resting on his shoulder. “Territory defense. Nothing more. They’re beasts. Smarter than normal, sure, but still beasts. They don’t want us stepping where they claim as home.”
Rynel shook his head, stringing another arrow against his bowstring to keep at the ready, eyes narrowed. “Or maybe there’s something here worth guarding. Natural treasure, rare cores, some kind of resource? Makes sense that predators would stake ground over something valuable.”
Holly glanced between them, her brows knit. “That, or we’re walking straight into a trap that The System is laying for us. It is a dungeon. These creatures are not necessarily natural, they are created and used for the dungeon’s purpose, they’re not bound by normal rules.”
Alex let their words hang for a moment before voicing the thought burning a hole through his mind. “Or maybe there’s an objective here, as I have said before. Something they don’t want us finding. Something important enough that the Chimera are throwing themselves at us just to keep us away from it.”
That got silence. Even Ghrukk shifted uneasily, his tusked jaw grinding as he thought. Alex straightened, gaze hard as he turned toward the deeper forest. “If that’s the case… then I want it. Whatever they’re keeping from us, it has to be worth a lot. So, I say that we don’t stop here. We dig in further, double down. We find the heart of it.”
The raid party abandoned the cautious sweep pattern they had started with. No more wasted circles combing the whole area, or carefully searching the forest edges. Now, they became a spearpoint, a living wedge of steel and aether driven straight into the heart of the Chimera’s resistance, and the beasts responded.
Where before they’d clashed with the raid party in groups of four or five across a long stretch of forest, now they broke against eight or nine beasts in a pack, in quick succession. The underbrush never stayed quiet for long, shortly after one group of Chimera fell, the next came crashing through the treeline, snarling and heaving their thorned vines forward.
But, numbers alone weren’t enough to stop the raid party. Together, Alex and the others tore through them with grit and practiced teamwork. Spells burned through vines, steel carved along bone through muscles and fur, and Alex himself smashed skulls beneath his fists, his blood still humming with the aftereffects of his Wyrm-heart upgrade.
But the problem wasn’t the numbers. It was what the beasts were becoming.
Alex cursed under his breath as his fist smashed into another bear-thing’s ribs, feeling the flames of [Burning Strike] skitter uselessly across the already-hardened bark like skin. The adaptation that had once appeared mid-fight was now began to be present from the very start. What was worse, was that it didn’t simply resist his Martial Style’s skill, it appeared to be neutralizing it. And, every single one of the chimera;s had it, their bodies already braced against his favored passive. And it wasn’t just him.
The newest packs erupted in choking clouds of spores the moment Selka or Holly lunged in close. The spores created a haze of sharpened death that proved effective at slowing the two mage’s immense speed. Zach had been forced back too, blades snapping through the air but never landing clean as the haze turned his shadow movements into sluggish fumblings.
Garret grunted as he locked his shield with one of the brutes, the weapon set between the new appendage each of the beasts had; large tusks jutting from their mouths. Ohe held firm for a few seconds, only to have the shield wrenched sideways, the beast hooking the ivory protrusion of its jaw under the rim of his shield and throwing him into the dirt. Doran fared no better, his stocky frame lifted skyward for an instant before crashing down under the force of another tusk hooked in his thick armor.
“All tanks, brace in pairs!” Eric shouted, lightning crackling at his fingertips as he blasted the beast off Garret. “Don’t let them isolate you!”
And then there was Allie. Her blinding light spell had once been a boon, removing the beast’s eyesight, scattering the packs like frightened animals. Now, some of them blinked straight through it with pupils narrowing under strange, slick eyelids that flashed in the glare like mirrored glass.
Alex landed another punch, teeth bared in fury, and his thoughts twisted down dark conclusions. This wasn’t simple instinct on the part of the arcane beasts. This wasn’t them learning the way typical animals learned. This was directed change. As though The System itself was rewriting the beasts, improving them piece by piece, evolutionary improvements that normally took generations of breeding, collapsing into minutes instead of centuries.
And worse, it was changes directed at making their skills useless. Every change was tailored against them. His [Burning Strike], Selka and Holly’s speed, Garret’s shield and Doran’s armor, Allie’s spell. It wasn’t random mutation like typical earth evolution, it was a direct countermeasures bred in real time.
“They’re not simply adapting,” Alex growled aloud as he tore his fist back from another thickly hardened ribcage. “They’re evolving against us.”
“Ohhh, now this is fun. Let’s see how long before they’re better at being you than you are, meatboy.”
How about helping us here? If I die, you die, remember?
“What do you want me to do about it? This is The System, the dungeon.”
Alex hated Obby’s answer, because he was right, again. The pebble couldn’t do anything about their predicament, this was all the System’s doing.
At the rate these things were changing, it wouldn’t be long before brute force wouldn’t be enough. The raid party was up against a sword that was growing sharper and sharper with every clash. And somewhere deeper ahead… Alex knew there had to be a reason for it.