The entrance of the dungeon was, unsurprisingly, right where they left it. A few things had changed, however. The room inset into the ground was still exposed to the sky, but there was no remaining cover over the opening. Kaldalis presumed that the initial Xorn attack had cleared the rest of the foliage over the entrance, since that was the way it was supposed to be revealed.

The group gathered in the room before the entrance and Balrim handed out their meals. They were mostly rice bowls, as the Talsar explained that they had the best duration for the material cost.

Kaldalis was quite happy with his, which was a little less of a fried rice and a little more of a bibimbap. Spicy dishes gave him a flat bonus to his Vigor, which provided him with general bonuses in all his important attributes. Balrim argued that it was less effective individually for hit points or armor than a focused food bonus, but the lesser benefits applying to both stats felt favorable to Kaldalis’ perspective.

He also liked spicy food, and as much as he might pretend he was being objective, his tastes were undeniably a contributing factor.

“Are we ready to rumble?” Kaldalis asked once he had his meal down and his buff ticking.

“Yeah, sure,” Courbois said, coughing. Her grey skin was darker, and slightly purplish, a tone Kaldalis recognized as the way Finnians flushed. Most likely from the heat of the spicy meal Balrim had presented her with. “For future reference, though, I think I’d like a DPS meal. You know, to help build aggro.”

“I’m a fan of this one,” Kaldalis admitted, “but we can certainly experiment with our options.”

“Experiment, yes,” SeventyEight agreed, smacking her lips with a grimace. “I would also like to do that.” She was apparently displeased with her own dish for some reason, though from looking at her and her empty bowl, he couldn’t figure out why.

Kaldalis led the group towards the dungeon entrance at the end of the room. As he crossed the threshold he got the familiar notification.

Leaden Halls of Ninurta

World first completion by Voker, Yosini, L’ry, and Osmosis

Record Clear Time is 193 minutes, 45 seconds by Voker, Yosini, L’ry, and Osmosis.

“Three fuckin’ hours?” Kaldalis asked with a laugh. “What did they do, take a nap in there halfway through? This is almost going to be too easy to beat.”

“Wait,” Reno said, furrowing her brow. “The second raid happened only a couple of hours after the notification came out to not run the dungeon. Did he… Did Voker see the notification and immediately run out here?”

“Fucking hell,” Courbois snarled. “He’s an even bigger asshole than I thought.”

“All we can do now is embarrass him,” Kaldalis said, though he had to struggle not to grind his teeth. “We run this and we go as fast as possible. Make his time look like they’re all fucking awful.”

He didn’t wait for a response, and broke into a jog down the stairwell into the dungeon.

Every second he saved now was another second their time would be shorter than Voker’s.

The stairwell descended into the ground for quite a distance, and in a straight line. Kaldalis began to fear that there had been a hidden door that they’d rushed past - or that they needed 70 stars to be able to reach the bottom of the stairs - but just before he would have stopped to confer with his friends, the bottom came into view.

It was different from above. The environment had obviously changed as they descended. At the top of the stairs there were cracks and chips, but things were mostly intact. The walls were square blocks, almost entirely intact, but for a few narrow cracks through with dirt had leaked in.

But as they descended, the dirt turned to mud. The cracks and chips in the stairs became worn and rounded. Here the air became dank and the walls became damp. What might have been moss on the ceiling was now algae-like green slime.

They were descending into the water table of the island. This tunnel cut into the aquifer, and they were now - but for a cracked and breaking stone wall - effectively underwater.

And as he led the group into the first room, and his dark vision expanded to show him what was before him, he noticed the vague salinity in the air.

They weren’t just supposed to be underwater.

This was near the ocean.

There were only three enemies in the first room. One of them was larger than the others. It had a crablike body, about five feet across, but instead of chitinous legs, it was crawling about on six fleshy tentacles. It still had big meaty claws on the front of it, but the smooth, slithery way it moved was eerily at odds with its shelled body.

The other two were familiar, though. Shelled lobster-like bodies were about the size of a small dog, dragging behind themselves spiraled nautilus shells, with a nest of twisting tentacles emerging from below its beady eyes.

“Hey, I know those guys,” Reno said, pointing at the smaller critters. “I recognize them from the stream when you got shipwrecked.”

“Nautilobsters,” Kaldalis confirmed with a nod. “Them being familiar doesn’t mean our job is different.”

“Yeah it does,” Myrin grumbled, brandishing her sword. “The revenge angle makes it more fun.”

“Clock is ticking,” Balrim said, gesturing to Kaldalis and Courbois. “We’re all waiting on the tanks to lead.”

Courbois laughed, deep and throaty. “Oh, sweet. DPS who wait for the tank to start? I’m gonna like it here.”

Kaldalis wanted to riff off of that joke, but Balrim was right. The clock was ticking. Every moment they were talking was a moment they weren’t getting ahead of Voker’s time.

Instead, he drew his spear and charged.

He quickly lashed out with his spear, grabbing the nautilobsters first and then lunging in at the tentacle crab. Each strike established aggro, and he moved to point the monsters away from his oncoming allies.

Of course, as soon as he saw them rushing in, he realized that they were here to speedrun.

“Gotta go fast,” he remarked, and then broke away from the monsters and ran away.

There was audible cursing behind him as he reached the far end of the room and rushed into the hallway beyond. There was no barrier - no door he had to open or puzzle to solve. This freed him up to keep on running, bolting down the hall and into the next chamber. Three more nautilobsters were arranged in this room, with two more creatures clinging to the walls.

Activating his Sweeping Strikes cooldown, he sprinted around the room, gathering these enemies up with smooth and efficient strikes, each one doing a little less than two hundred damage to them, giving him his initial burst of aggro.

With such a large pack gathered together, he felt confident that this was a fine time to stop and let everyone catch up.

The third type of enemy were weird shelled creatures that looked like dark-shelled clams, with what looked like dozens of chitinous legs emerging from their open shells. When Kaldalis pulled up to a stop, the two of them unfurled tails from their shells, with shrimplike fins on the end that the monsters lashed out at him with like paddles.

He got two more huge Sweeping Strikes hits across the whole group all together as his friends caught up.

“What’s first?” Courbois asked.

“Get the-” Kaldalis began, and then yelped and leaped back from a swinging tail fin. “Get the clam-spider things!”

From the damage output he was doing, the nautilobsters were the weakest foe, while the tentacle crab was probably the strongest. That put the clam spiders in the middle. But the clam spiders’ tails gave them more reach, making them the hardest to deal with. Even though the big claws of the crab and the snapping beaks at the center of the tentacle mass of the nautilobster’s faces were more intimidating, they didn’t have the speed to be really threatening.

As Courbois’s whirling staff hammered against the clam spiders and pulled them away, his safety was redoubled. Not only had she removed the more annoying foes, but she had the DPS at her back, pounding their damage into the enemies she’d pulled away.

He didn’t have to hold them still. As the monsters lunged in at him again, he was able to dance away and keep moving. He didn’t even need to maintain aggro, since he was staying ahead of the damage with ease, not needing Balrim’s healing. This meant that when the clam spiders fell - revealing them to be called Mushrimp - Courbois had no problem striking a few of his pack of foes just a couple of times to get their attention off of him.

In only a few short minutes, the trash was dispatched. The nautilobsters fell one at a time, and eventually the crowd attacking him thinned to the point that he started pushing damage on the tentacle crab in the middle of the fight, building aggro and chipping away at it until it was all that remained, and the damage dealers descended on it with gusto. Killing it revealed that it was called a crabtopus, and was worth a decent bump of exp in comparison to the others, despite the reduction that they brought on themselves with their party size.

“Pack one, cleared up,” Kaldalis said, dusting off his hands. “Ready to move on?”

“Pack one and two, asshole,” Balrim said with a smirk. “But if we’re trying to set a good time, I guess that’s the way.”

“Gotta go fast,” Kaldalis repeated. He didn’t wait for further response before dashing down the next hall, leading the way deeper into the dank dungeon.