Chapter 052: Recon by force

The fifth layer housed a significant population of pretty much all creatures we encountered thus far, with emphasis on butterflies.

Which was a major pain, especially when we discovered that the Dungeon Master modified some of them into a Variant (called simply Demon Butterflies, he obviously lacked creativity). They specialized in illusions.

Of course, it would be a much bigger problem if we didn’t have two amalthians. Sure, we didn’t have the sheer physical strength of orcs, drakons, pureblooded succubi and so on, but we had our own advantages.

At least until it turned out that the resident Servant managed to fool even our improved senses. It was a subtle magic, as expected from a Butterfly Maiden. We figured out we were being led around after wasting a lot of time.

After we broke it we managed to track the Servant and kill her. This made the route down open before us. It’s time for level six.

I must say that this was a nice change of pace to have the enemy get overwhelmed by us, rather than the other way around. Even if our skill levels barely changed.

***

Level six was… different.

A natural looking cave was replaced with what obviously looked like a mine. There were wooden supports, torches, even what looked like rails for a minecart to carry ore around.

Interesting.

“No way, there was a mine beneath the cave?!” Simea gawked at the surprising sight.

Eh, noobs.

“No.” I answered. “The Dungeons are a living disturbances in Light and Dark alike. After one starts to grow, said disturbance causes things to spawn near him. When it expands, it can dig out small... locations. In most cases born from collective memory of local mortals. There was probably a mine somewhere near, one that made a small fragment of it spawn near the Dungeon and ended up swallowed by it.”

“It might even be The Descent.” Leria added. “It’s quite close and a lot of people know about it so it imprinted itself on the local Dark.”

Very soon we discovered that said splinter location that the Dungeon devoured must’ve included a significant chunk of the Descent.

Undead. And a lot of them. Mostly former miners (of course, they weren’t ‘real’ miners and never were alive).

Well, it was still like… Iron V? Ok, a shitload of them, but be honest there. There is no way they could be a threat to us. If anything, they made us waste time.

We were already getting tired. Ok, maybe not Leria but she wasn’t human (well, technically she wasn’t, but I refused to acknowledge that in face of her brute force and inhuman tirelessness). The rest of us (even elves and beastmen) were. Maybe one more level and we’ll have to rest for a while.

We murdered our way through legions of undead until we reached another Servant. Strong looking undead with some flesh still on his bones. He commanded a lot of undead, while defending the shaft down to the next floor..

It took us few minutes to take them all down. It looked like the enemies were slowly getting stronger with every step we made towards the Core.

The existence of a mine level seemed like another major boon. There was a lot of ore there. And, if we manage to… convince the Master to cooperate, reaching the place should be less dangerous.

Another level. At least the mineshaft had stairs next to the walls.

***

We decided to rest on level seven. There were ways to secure a room, to temporarily take it out of the Master’s jurisdiction. Obviously, we came prepared. We could sleep a bit without things constantly paying us a visit.

Second day was more of the same. Five more levels of the mine. Lots of Undead. First only workers, then more and more warriors and even Legionnaires from the Black Tomb.

Weird.

Well, I guess that once upon a time there must’ve been a significant Bonehead-worshippers presence in the area and the Dungeon had the luck of running into them. It become even more possible when we started encountering low grade daemons of the Tomb.

Nothing really troublesome. Bonehead was into quantity (and diversity) more than into quality. A Lifestealing Wraith Servant guarded the descent into level thirteen gave us some trouble , but we managed to defeat him in the end.

Then, the surroundings suddenly shifted.

***

Tyrant’s Hold.

Don’t ask me how that happened, but the Dungeon somehow managed to ‘steal’ the idea of Tyrant’s Hold from the local Dark.

Similar type of stone bricks, symbols of Overtyrant here and there and even a shrine… Most of it was actually empty. It reminded me of ‘relief levels’ in some bigger Dungeons, where certain places were created with the visitor’s rest in mind. Sometimes entire villages grew there. Interesting for the Dungeon Master to create it so early. Hmph.

The few creatures that we did encounter were obviously taken from other levels and quickly spawned to give us some trouble. They failed. Not really supposed to happen on a relief level, but I guess he only inherited faint memories of them but failed to put them in context.

We decided to spend night here. There were even beds in an underground building seemingly made to look like barracks. We could as well use the occasion to rest for a while.

That Leria seemed determined to spend an evening praying at a more or less authentic shrine to Overtyrant (rather than the improvised thing we had in real Hold) was a factor as well.

***

Third day.

We descended into level fourteen to find… well, something strange. The new biome we entered was obviously taken from a place we didn’t know. It looked like some ancient temple. Sumerian maybe? The stone that was used to construct it looked rather primitive and was covered in various symbols.

Cuneiform writing? Nah. It didn’t look like it, and besides, the only civilization in the area to use it was the First Empire and I doubt that the Dungeon managed to dig so far back. Pictograms, but definitely not egyptian.

It was hard to describe or even pinpoint in my mind, but the carvings were… wrong. Obscene. Maybe even blasphemous. They were something that shouldn’t be. There was nothing my mind could point towards and say ‘this is wrong’, but as a whole, it was just wrong.

It’s fucking eldritch, isn’t it?

Fuck my life, why can’t we just visit some decent places?! Somewhere without tentacled things awaiting everywhere?!

I looked at Leria, hoping for some answers.

“Don’t ask me. First time I’ve seen a place like this.”

“There are ruins like that, in the mountains we live in.” Vaera spoke up. “Haunted, supposedly. Dragonbrides forbid others from entering and even dragons prefer to leave them undisturbed.”

Hmph. If the most backward elves have some knowledge about it, it might have been knowledge inherited from the Xylian Dominion. This would suggest that they are remnants of a species or civilization that their machine legions annihilated during their rise to power.

Ugh. This age was like… a historic womb of dread. Everything born from it bound to be evil. Only the worst and most terrible creatures managed to survive the fall of the First Empire. It says a lot that Xylians - a literal archetype of an empire of evil for today’s civilization - though they were mostly a lesser evil back then.

We managed to make a few steps before… something emerged.

It was a sun.

Well, more or less. A levitating symbol of a sun. Yellow ball, with smaller yellow bits floating around it, like rays. I appraised it.

Corrupted Symbol of Sun. Very basic description that tells me nothing about its nature. Ugh.

Suddenly it went black. Almost immediately. The blackness was so overwhelming that it began swallowing the light around it. Then it fired a hex.

Death Magic. Or something similar. What’s worse, an Area of Effect and quite strong. Not enough to be a threat, but certainly enough to be painful. Syna fired an Arcane Bullet right in the middle of it.

It almost broke. There were cracks on its surface and for a second I thought it would break completely. Darkness around it surged and the cracks started disappearing. Is it healing itself and/or growing stronger based on how much light it devours?

Well, no way. Destroyer Bolt connects right in the middle of it as well, and the Symbol breaks completely.

Looks like we just left the realm of instakilling things. There is a rather significant jump since the last combat-oriented layer.

***

Soon we managed to get a gist of this layer. Corrupted Symbols of the Sun were… well, almost everywhere. From time to time they were helped by Hollow People.

They looked creepy. “People with hollow eyes” taken too far. They were literally hollow. It was like a skin taken from a person and then animated. They lacked heads. Their chests were obviously hollow. They were of undead nature and devoured the lifeforce of everything that was alive and near them. God only knows how they were able to walk or fight like that.

I know nothing about the ancient civilization that the Dungeon stole this place from. And you know what? I want it to stay like that.

No Servant on the end of the fourteenth layer. Weird. We marched to the next one, starting the fifteenth layer.

New enemy. Tzikimi Ghost. It was... like a ghost. A patrticularly creepy one. Take some amorphous mass with barely discernible human faces on the surface, and then… twist it into a roughly humanoid form. It seemed to fight perpetually against itself, permanently on the verge of untangling itself and returning to its natural, formless state. They lacked lower limbs, instead they levitated around.

Also, they stole life at a short range (meekly) or on touch (quite strongly), could phase through solid matter - your standard ghosting through walls, for example, and if you let them ‘live’ for too long, they summoned their friends. Their description was purposefully mysterious, but…

...well, I saw enough ‘purposefully mysterious’ descriptions in World’s Requiem and know DFI well. They were remnants of the ‘Tzikimi’ people. Either Xylian Dominion did something mean to them - which was unlikely, since it prefered to simply order their machines to exterminate every man, woman and child they encounter in front of them - or some magical disaster happened or they tried to ascend into a higher state of existence. And failed miserably.

Probably some already higher being managed to persuade them that sacrificing souls and generally being chaotic evil is a sure way of achieving utopia. Would explain the eldritch feeling to the place. People never learn, do they?

The Servant guarding the way into the eighteenth layer was a Hollow Man. He wore tattered remnants of clothing that portrayed some significance when alive. He was also surrounded by four Corrupted Symbols of Sun, all of them in hard to reach places somewhere high atop the walls.

It was actually a painful battle. Syna and I managed to take down Symbols quickly only to discover that the Servant could summon them back. The rest tried to corner the Servant only to discover that it could summon crowds of Hollow People as well. We managed to overpower him in the end, but it was slower than I thought and cost us more power than I expected. We were forced to make a brief rest at the start of the eighteenth layer to recuperate.

“So… now it’s these Tzikimi people, right? Master?” Lena had been playing with Toothy while we rested and turned toward me.

Her recent developments were making me a bit afraid lately, I must admit. She clearly disliked the need to call me master even if it was faked. To the point that she decided to avoid it by opening her mouth to me as little as possible.

Well, I guess that there was a reason why she got a servile daemon of Shadow as a familiar. A servant of the Imperial Goddess in perpetual, angst-powered rebellion against… well, everything. Social and political systems, religious organizations… also physical laws and gender identity.

Though she didn’t expect the last thing from her followers, this world probably wasn’t going to go that direction any time soon as most gods happily personified the most stereotyped views on their gender. Not to mention 90% of local religions being led by Elder Patriarchs With Awesome Beards And Tons Of Children.

Shadow tended to give her gifts to very particular type of people… unless he wanted to piss you off and make you rebel against her. Which happened more often than his priests wanted to admit.

“What do you mean?” I wasn’t in a mood for trying to decrypt an enigma.

“Just how many ‘ancient civilizations’ are there in this world? Waiting to be unearthed?”

I chuckled.

“Well, a lot. I can easily name fifty different fallen civilizations, at least in World’s Requiem.” Both Simea and Lena gave me a shocking looks. “What? It’s that sort of world. People build their civilization, it exists for some time and then suddenly bam - collapse. Imperium and the whole world around it that is mostly shaped by its influence remained around for like three thousand years but there were much older ancient civilizations around.”

“First Empire.” Leria commented. “I heard someone from the cult mentioning it. It existed longer, right?”

“Well, it existed for fifteen thousand years. And was the first country in history. While also being first and last to control pretty much entire world.” I had knowledge transcending even well-learned historians of this world, at least in certain points. It was heavily dependent on whether DFI changed something important. Because I already knew they changed details. “Essentially ancient Sumer with cuneiform writing and stone steles. Ruled by dragons that were worshipped as gods, with every city surrounding a lair of one. Also, magic was mostly forbidden aside from dragons themselves and their servants.”

“Oh? Then my religion is the oldest one?” Vaera suddenly got activated by words ‘dragons’ and ‘worshipped’. Ugh.

“Don’t get too happy, they weren’t the same dragons. A tiniest newborn ancient dragon would be a formidable threat to ten or so of your dragons together with their worshippers.”

The strongest… well, if you searched in backstory, then the word ‘Dragonspine’ in the name of the mountains should, probably, be taken literally. Probably one of their few eldest ones fell around here in the last war of the First Empire and the rest simply transmuted him into mountains (which was a common way of burying their elders). They never stopped growing and those of them that were around for fifteen thousand years or so were… formidable. As in “when they soar into the skies they eclipsed the sun and caused winds on the level of tornadoes with their every wingbeat” formidable.

“But then they disappeared. A great mystery.” Leria concluded, with a sigh. Welp.

“To be exact, they were attacked by the first Dark One of the Darkness. A splinter force of a failed Creation, a gestalt consciousness created merely from negative emotions. They let it grow too strong before they understood its true nature. In the end they managed to destroy most of it and splinter the rest, but most of their empire perished together with almost the entire leadership so it kinda dissolved.” I said. “Said splinters mostly gave birth to oldest and most terrible Aberrants. The strongest one, however, and the only one to have remnants of the former Dark One’s mind is imprisoned beneath the Imperial’s capital.” And is a damn fine quest-giver. Paid well. Too bad you had to be Imperium’s best buddy for it to let you anywhere near Vault beneath the Imperial Library.

Only then I saw the eyes of NPCs. Leria and Syna looked like they just saw a ghost.

Oops.

“You… better keep this to yourself.” Leria finally said.

I guess that while most of it would be considered a great breakthrough for scientific community as a whole, Imperium might be… displeased by people accidentally divulging their greatest secrets.

So much about secrecy. There are literally millions of people who know about the Vault. About what lies in the middle of Glass Forest. What caused the creation of the Valley of Ashes. What Imperium did in the Archives (one of their most serious screw-ups, admittedly). The fifth God of Pentagram.

Makes me wonder how long will it take for the Imperium to stop silencing people knowing too much and simply face that the secrecy can no longer be upheld. Even if the masquerade was beneficial to people as a whole. And in most cases it was.

Oh God, I hope the Worldeater isn’t a thing, the Menorian Empire sealed him only by making people forget he existed - which was achieved by a collective suicide of more than one hundred million people done overnight - in a desperate hope that when he’ll be uncovered in the far future, the world will be able to slay it. If there is a Dark One about to be unleashed upon the world… then we are so fucked that it’s not even funny.

“Well… then there was a period of chaos and upstart murderous civilizations heavily tainted by the aftermath of Dark One incursion. Then the Xylian Dominion and several contemporary civilizations that rose by exterminating or enslaving and then working to death most other people. Then they fell, wiped out in but a few days by probably the most powerful civilization to ever exist on this world.” That wasn’t even a civilization, more like a fully sentient and sapient AI that cosplayed as one and managed to fool everyone. Though he paid nice for his quests, I had to admit that much. “Elves, their former slaves, rose to prominence. Then humans came, with a greater penchant for theology and mysticism which meant their gods were simply better. Elves mostly fell. Another period of strife ended with the rise of the Old Empire. Then it was broken by the Dawn War. The current Imperium rose. And fell. Rose. And fell. Finally Apostasy and then current, almost postapocalyptic age, in which the world is trying to recuperate from the aftermath of the Apostasy and dozens of local Decemvirates ruining things. In short.”

It was like… ten thousand years or so. Twenty five including the First Empire (though very little was left of it, as time wasn’t merciful). So yeah, that was VERY short version.

DFI did a lot to make their world adventure friendly, huh.

“Well, these Tzikimi, as far as I know, raised up in the first major period of chaos. After the First Empire got rekt by the first Dark One.” Seriously, let’s hope that the DFI was nice enough to retcon the fact it was merely one of them, serving as a advanced guard of an incoming army. With more being en route, all of them Black Crystal-grade threats to entire world. Ugh. That again, I was yet to see local equivalent of Menorian Empire, so it might have been that they truly were retconned. Or were a DFI addition to the lore in World’s Requiem, if this world was real. “They seemingly controlled the area between this place and the area from which Vaera came, and they got murdered by Xyls. “ I shrugged. “I doubt they were of some significance. Though DFI loved to use various elusive civilizations of the time as sources of many crazy, ancient plot devices. Bloodletter Plague was from that time as well.”

“So, essentially, the older the ruins, the more possible it is that there is something in them that can cause a terrifying death to us and everything we ever hold dear.” Simea concluded. “Seriously, you talk too much. “

Ugh. Thank you for reminding me.

***

On the eighteenth layer we met two new enemies. Tzikimi Stone Guardian, which was a… well, stone guardian. Tall, stone figure. Like an ore golem, only this one was obviously sculpted by a mortal’s hand.

If Tzikimi looked like them, they were weird. Much too long arms, a bit too many eyes, lack of lower limbs and instead their body fusing into one long fleshy… pillar or something. The whole thing levitated. That’s a major nope to me, seriously. Even Ambryxis citizens wouldn’t fuck it, and that said a lot. If it even had a hole to be fucked.

The other enemy was a Corrupted Radiant Shard. Similar to… now that I think about it, it’s pretty similar to my familiar. Floating, uneven balls which seemed to project unnerving light. The colour was different - golden instead of white - but the rest was almost suspiciously similar.

Curiously, most of them were made into… lighting. The Tzikimis literally summoned tons of them, sculpted them and then INSTALLED THEM into slots in the ceiling to serve as lighting. Due to their weird light that seemed to reinforce other mobs, we were forced to purposefully destroy every single light source on this level.

Wonderful, really. Especially when Tzikimi Ghosts started using said darkness to sneak up on us and suddenly steal our lifeforce.

We reached the nineteenth layer without major problems (but with a shitload of minor ones) and with some loot. Mostly jewelry and magical junk, weird and rare enough to be of some value. The Servant was a bigger and meaner Ghost, surrounded by friends. We managed to defeat them, but it took us a short while.

Five more layers.

We descended through the stairway leading down and…

Oh God, why them?

Decemvirate.

The Dungeon stole the idea of a Decemvirate base from common consciousness of local population and used it as a layer biome. The jump right from the ancient temple-like structure into a deep steampunk was… shocking.

Ugh, I’m going to have a talk with the Dungeon Master about keeping layers in a chronological order. It doesn’t make sense if he keeps it like that.

Most enemies on the nineteenth layer were Drones. They were humans or members of another sapient species, augmented with rather crude mechanisms and with some sort of controlling device on their head. Their eyes stared at us emptily.

Well, they were essentially mindwiped and cost efficient labour slaves. Coordinated by a sort of hive-mind that was suspiciously close to what in the technological world would be considered an AI. Some of them seemed to do various types of labour, for example repairing the place and so on (mostly meaningless, just a part of the decor).

Some of the Decemvirates used such types of labour. The one that controlled the region of Ambryxis - called the Dragon - was very much into them. After the revolutionaries caught him, they sealed his magic and imprisoned him in a prison of glass in the middle of the town square. Essentially a massive bottle, with only one entrance, big enough to give him food and water.

They disposed of him properly only after the bottle filled with his own feces to the point where it started to pour out. He literally drowned in it. Publicly. He couldn’t even kill himself earlier by biting off his tongue because they sealed his ‘active’ magic, but not all the passive spells and hexes he weaved into himself to make himself semi-immortal. The revolutions, it seems, are not civilized.

The few enemies that weren’t Drones were Scout Machines. Essentially spider-like machines, maybe a meter in diameter, with a self-repeatable… well, I wasn’t precisely sure what kind of weapon this was, but it worked pretty much like rifle. Or a musket, if one were to judge from the caliber and type of ammunition. Which meant that if we weren’t using lots of defensive magic, it could get painful.

Modern ammo was small caliber when compared to early munition. So it merely made holes instead of separating limbs. One of the least appreciated ways the world got more civilized nowadays. But it seemed that Decemvirate wanted to make a statement about their approach to rebellious population and general enemies. And that took the form of simple scouts, deployed en masse in hope that at least some would return. How do the heavier warmachines looked like?

Apostasy was a truly horrible period. Period.

At our current level they actually were a problem if we let them swarm us. However we adjusted our tactics accordingly. If bigger group came, the ranged part of the group (namely me and Syna) focused on eliminating them as soon as possible, starting from those most to the right. Arcane Bullets and Destroyer Bolts in a single salvo was more than enough to make them break.

Vaera was mostly delegated to buffing. The rest held Drones at bay.

The Servant guarding the way down was a pain. Not yet major (still five levels in front of us), but still a pain. It was a heavily augmented and improved Scout, made almost thrice as big but, curiously, without much better weaponry. It managed to jump around the area, easily climbing the walls of the room we fought it in, while repeatedly calling for backup. Which included swarms of Drones and additional Scout Machines.

We managed to corner him in the end. Syna used her Guide Bullet to target joints in his legs. After three were shot off, his agility collapsed enough for Leria to catch up to him. She managed to turn him upside down and then rammed her sword repeatedly, targeting the weak points.

He failed to escape. Soon enough it broke, and we casually swiped the floor with the remaining opponents.

Down we go. Layer twenty. Four left to the Core.