Kaldalis emerged from the next narrow hallway into another room. He braced himself, ready to deal with another pack of monsters, but the room was larger than any he’d entered so far, and seemed empty from where he stood. He was once again aware of the limited range of his vision globe as the room vanished into darkness ahead.

“That’s ominous,” he said, though he found himself whispering, intimidated by the darkness that enveloped him. “I’m sure nothing awful is about to happen to me.”

He considered his options when faced with the darkness of the enormous room. His instinct was to walk straight across, since that was the most likely direction to the exit. Logic dictated that he would be better served by hugging one of the walls. On the edge of the room, he was more likely to avoid getting the attention of any enemies that might be in the room. But creeping around the edge of the room was not an interesting thing to do. It didn’t feel right. He was in front of an audience right?

“I’m doing this for you all, you know,” Kaldalis said, as he stepped out into the room, moving straight through the middle of it. His voice had a tired, hopeless tone to it. “I hope you all appreciate that I don’t think this is smart, but I’m doing it for you, the people. My audience, who care more for excitement and adventure than my personal safety. Like, I know this is stupid, but I’m doing it anyway. Get ready to clip it when I die hilariously. Tell your friends in Discord about my sacrifice.”

The room was bigger than he expected. He got so far in that the entryway he came in through vanished into darkness behind him, with no sign of the wall in front of him. He hesitated at that point, knowing that the passage he’d entered through was only a few feet beyond the curtain of darkness. That curtain was about sixty feet behind him, and with no walls visible ahead or to either side, the room was at least one-hundred and twenty feet on each side.

As he looked around he noticed that the floor itself had a rough texture he had previously not noticed in the hallways. He crouched down and saw that it wasn’t lichen or moss on the stone, but some sort of foul-smelling detritus. He saw that it was clinging to the bottom of his armored boots, and so he was reluctant to touch it with his bare fingers to examine it closer. Whatever it was, it was a lightish grey color, and there were uncovered patches where he could see that the more familiar greenish-hued stone beneath.

He didn’t know enough about this world to figure out what this was supposed to be, or what this was supposed to tell him about this room. Was this a giant dumping room, and some giant worm-monster had slithered through, eating the garbage and pooping out this residue? Was this some sort of factory room, crusted with the residue of ancient pollution? Was it a by-product from some alchemical process, spilled across the floor of the room in whatever calamity led this place to be a monster-swarmed ruin instead of a bustling business? There was no way to know for sure.

His next step was made much more carefully, keeping an eye out for some sort of source for this gunk. He eventually came to a giant pillar sticking out of what his sense of spatial awareness told him was the center of the room. It was about six feet wide, and vanished into the darkness above him, beyond the range of his circle of vision. The bottom three feet were crusted with that greyish gunk, but it was clean above that level, and made of a dark-hued stone that didn’t match with what he’d seen on the floors and walls. He’d seen this stone used for pillars in a room he’d gone through earlier, but hadn’t been able to decide what it was for. Was this pillar added later, when the builders had run out of the greenish stone that made up the rest of the construction? Was this stone magical in some way? If he knew some magic words, would it light up and illuminate the room? Was it a defense system?

“I’ve never said this before, but I find myself wishing that I had been an anthropological archaeologist like I wanted to be as a kid, and able to make more educated guesses about shit like this.” He shook his head with a smirk. “How often do you say something like that? Generally speaking, younger versions of myself are idiots and make terrible decisions.” He gestured around himself. “Like, remember when younger Kaldalis decided to sprint ahead of his friends and got separated from them for like an hour of being stuck in a labyrinth, slowly bleeding out resources until his inevitable death? What a moron that guy was, right?”

Unfortunately, the darkness had no response, and while he felt a little satisfaction at making the humorous observation, without the feedback of an audience, it felt hollow. Was his chat getting spammed with laughter emotes? Was everyone rolling their eyes and yelling “cringe” at him? He didn’t know, and likely never would.

Kaldalis picked his way carefully around the giant pillar. Without external references, he felt like he was stepping back out into the featureless void as he walked away from it. It really felt like a void, too. As the pillar vanished behind him, he was surrounded by featureless darkness again. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled with the sensation of being watched. Now that he was aware of it, the darkness went from mysterious to oppressive. It was no longer a curtain hiding something for him to find for his audience, it was a smothering horror lurking just out of vision, waiting for the most dramatic time to strike.

He felt like his eyes were playing tricks on him. He could have sworn that the radius of his vision was shrinking. Were those faces out there in the dark? He couldn’t tell.

The worst part was the silence. In the real world, when Dylan found himself in near-darkness with the sensation of being watched, he would start making noise just to make noise. He would sing the first 80s song that came to mind at the top of his voice, and the silliness would outweigh the fear. It was hard to be afraid of nothing while belting out some Journey or Bon Jovi.

The problem was that he wasn’t afraid of nothing.

In the real world, there weren’t hostile monsters. Wild animals avoided humans, and making a lot of noise ensured that you couldn’t sneak up on one and startle it into an attack. The only real monster was man, and the average human could be best described as “mostly harmless” by an intelligent observer. Beyond that, murderers often chose their victims for a reason, rather than just pouncing on and stabbing someone they encountered in a darkened room.

In this world, though, there were monsters. If he started making a lot of noise, especially in a room this large, he could draw the attention of a dozen monsters clinging to the ceiling far above, or just out of aggro range in the dark around him. If he sang out to the darkness about a small town girl living in a lonely world, the darkness might respond with a flood of angry leviabeetles.

Not that he needed to avoid that at all costs - he wasn’t necessarily afraid of a fight, or even death - but that was the best-case scenario. It would be great to face something he’d faced before, and thereby know what the solution was. In a dark void like this, with the feeling of being watched still tingling on the back of his neck, what he feared was the unknown. Facing some new threat he could never anticipate or react to properly before it was too late.

The core of it was Fear of the Dark.

He allowed himself a quiet chuckle at that. Not an 80s song, but-

He silenced his internal monologue as the far wall finally came into view. More than a wall, it was another of those gates, and he immediately began to panic. He hadn’t found any gears so far on this path. He thought those might have just been a part of the earlier parts of the dungeon, as he hadn’t encountered any yet. This place hadn’t been covered in moss, so the shiny gears should have stood out to him if he saw them. That meant there hadn’t been any. And that meant there were no opportunities for him to find one. He couldn’t possibly need one now, right?

He calmed himself down and stepped up to the wall where the opening panel was, revealing the gearbox inside. For a brief moment, he thought it was complete, and a pull on the chain would open the way, but after that first glance, he saw the one spot where a single gear was missing.

“Fuck.” He grimaced and turned around. “If I were the one fucking gear in this massive fuckoff room, where would I-”

There were two floating disks in the darkness behind him. Animal eyes standing out in the inky blackness. Terrifyingly high off the ground. It was looking right at him, and it had to be seventy or eighty feet tall.

Of course. There had been one gear they’d found that wasn’t off of the floor. It had been dropped by the beetle boss.

If he wanted to get out of the room, he was going to have to fight whatever that was.

And unless he’d missed some trapdoor or secret entrance where his friends could rejoin him, he was going to have to do it alone.

As he stared, he heard a halting, chirruping sound, almost like a bird doing Morse code. The sounds were sharp and while not loud, they had physical weight behind them, almost like waves on the ocean. With that, he apparently triggered the boss reveal, and Kaldalis’s vision radius expanded, slowly filling the room.

The room itself was huge. At least three hundred feet on a side, with four more of those giant pillars at the corners of the room. The stone walls on the left and right side were decorated with more of the same abstract mural as they’d encountered earlier, but on a much larger scale. His brain struggled to decode the scenes depicted through the panic caused by the monster he was now facing down alone. The one on the left side looked like a citywide dance party, with a smile on every face and a drink in every hand, and curving lines coming from instruments and permeating and enveloping every building and flowing around every humanoid figure. The right side was the same party but through a dark mirror; every face was not laughing, but was screaming, and instead of music, the curving lines were flames, engulfing and consuming every building and figure.

Fortunately, the darkness didn’t uncover an eighty-foot monster looming over him. The enemy was hanging upside-down from the ceiling, but it was still nearly twenty-five feet long from the tip of its fanged maw to the end of its stubby legs. It was a chiraptor, but on the grandest possible scale. The thick scales running over it sharpened to spikes. Its clawed hands were enormous, and the arms were thick as tree trunks. It opened its maw, revealing its snakelike fangs - nearly four feet long - and the serrated teeth behind them, and let loose another barrage of those chittering sounds at him.

The creature let go of the ceiling and dropped to the floor, doing a lazy flip on the way down to land on its feet. Where other chiraptor’s feet had been stunted and unable to support their weight on their own, this one was different. Its feet looked like that of a gorilla, with almost handlike feet at the ends of stubby but thick legs. It landed on all fours at first, and then reared up on those stubby hind legs. Its forelimbs’ fingers flexed, and claws nearly six feet long clacked against each other.

Kaldalis found himself with only one option as the creature began to haltingly lumber towards him.

Be Quick or be Dead.