The dungeon was a dark blue color and was extremely cold. Every time I breathed out, white whispy smoke came from my mouth. The ground beneath my feet crunched and cracked as I stepped on it. Everything around me was ice, including the monster in the center of the room. It was literally a floating chunk of ice.

I preferred when the monsters in the dungeon were large or weird versions of animal I could find outside. This thing and the swords from before were just strange to even look at or take seriously. As if the ice cube heard my thoughts, it began attacking me by breaking a piece off its body and shooting it towards me. The projectile ice was jagged and sharp, but painfully slow. I dodged it by stepping to the side as it hit the ground harmlessly. The only way this thing could hurt me is if I stepped on the things it shot on the ground by accident.

Since it was made of ice in a cold dungeon, I reasoned that fire was probably its weakness and pulled out the fire sword. Instantly my surroundings started to warm up to a more comfortable temperature. It shot another ice shard my way and I slashed at the projectile. I missed as I was still getting used to using my left hand but the flames brushed by it and the ice shard melted into nothing. Just by getting close to it, the fire sword took out the enemy’s attack. It was time to find out if the same was true of the main body of the monster.

While walking up to it, I noticed that its body was a bit smaller than it was before. It was literally throwing parts of its body at me. Which made me wonder if I could kill it simply by dodging its attacks for long enough at a distance. When I was right in front of it, it started forming another shard to shoot at me but I slashed my sword at its body and cut into it. At first the blade only cut a fingernail length into its body despite me putting a decent amount of strength, then the flames got to work eating away at it and leaving behind a gaping hole. I kept at it until the sword went completely through and cut it half, both halves falling to the ground and disappearing.

Brute force didn’t work too well as these chunks of ice had an insane defense, but flames took them out in seconds. Meanwhile, the problem with the environment, the cold, was also solved by the sword. It seemed like the dungeon truly was custom made for my needs. I could save my energy by just holding my sword up to the enemies, practice swinging with my left hand on the ice shards, and all the bad parts of this dungeon that would make it a living hell for any other adventurer was negated by my awesome new sword.

The next room was the same but even easier as I realized I could just walk up to the monster without any sort of preparation, using my sword as a shield in case it managed to get an attack or two off before I cut it down. I still had my wooden divine shield by why even bother trying to block with that when the other strategy works just as well.

Normally if I encountered this sort of enemy in a dungeon, I’d feel it out with my shield while dodging or guarding against the projectiles. Since it was so hard, I doubt my spear would’ve done much so I would’ve used my bludgeon to bash it as much as I could, possibly doing some damage or maybe not. Then giving up after realizing I’d have to fight it again and leaving. Heck, the cold alone might’ve forced me to leave even before fighting this thing, not to mention how tough it was without fire.

Rooms three through six went the same way and I entered room seven to find two of them. Both of them shot their ice shards around the same time with coordination similar to the jumping lizards. If I dodged one way, the other one would towards the direction I was moving towards. Which was of no problem since they were so slow, but I didn’t underestimate them due to that slowness. The turtles taught me that these things became even more dangerous the more of them there were. My only comfort is that I didn’t have to dodge or block these projectiles, I could just melt them.

Like the sword enemies from the last dungeon, these ice cubes stayed exactly where I found them when I entered the room. So I could just walk around the perimeter of the room until they shot and then got up close and took them out one by one. By the time I reached floor ten and took down three of them, I started to wonder how far I needed to go.

Even with the fire sword keeping me warm, my feet were starting to get numb and I shivered. I had to sit down and warm them up by lifting them off the ground close to the sword for a bit before I could continue onto room eleven. A rest area could spawn any room now but I would much prefer that the item that was supposed to heal my arm would drop. Regrowing my arm was a bit more of a priority than a nice meal and some alcohol. Actually, I could go for some alcohol at this point.

Skipping over the next few floors since nothing new happened, I managed to reach floor fifteen. I expected there to be eight enemies in the room, following the trend of the previous rooms in a fairly wide space. That didn’t really happen, or at least, I wasn’t sure. Suddenly I was in a wide open space that several room fourteens could fit in.

I could see a few enemies around me, but the room seemed to go on for quite a bit and even had walls in the room separate from the boundary alongside giant ice crystals jutting out from the floor and ceiling. More enemies could be hidden behind them. No, more of them definitely were further in as I only counted five enemies around me who began a barrage of attacks towards me.

They were quite far away so I expected their attacks to lose power and fall down pointlessly, but they kept going in a straight line towards me from five different angles all at once. These attacks were magic based as they defied common sense, not that giant floating ice cubes shooting ice shards made sense either.

If not for the fact I could just lift up my sword and melt it all away, this attack would’ve been somewhat dangerous as it would have been awkward to dodge. While keeping my eyes on the other enemies, I went up to the one on the far right and took it down, melting away just from me holding my sword next to it. Just as I stepped over to take down the next one, I heard a strange noise behind me, which was another shard hitting the ground just behind me. Another one of the enemies had revealed itself from behind an ice crystal. Which made no difference other than me taking a look over my shoulder every so often as I took down the other five.

Except, every time I looked over my shoulder, I saw more of the monsters appearing from various spots. One, two, three, four, five I counted. More than eight total, that was for sure. What came next was simply me going from one of them to the other with no real danger. No more of them appeared while I was walking around, I checked thoroughly in all directions while moving to make sure I wouldn’t get stabbed in the back by one of these crystal ice shards.

And just like that, the fifteenth floor was cleared. Luckily, even some loot dropped from the last enemy I killed, some sort of grey ore that looked slightly different from the previous grey ore. Probably not anything valuable and the difference could be explained by the lighting and blue hue on everything, but I took it as it was still free money.

This was the farthest I had ever gone into the dungeon and still no items to help me. I had no clues of what this item was supposed to be either. Which was somewhat distressing as no matter how easy things have been so far, it was troubling to go this far into the dungeon. I took another break to warm my feet outside the next floor then entered it to find a rest area.

As soon as I saw the food, my stomach grumbled and I realized I hadn’t eaten anything since I woke up. More importantly, there was alcohol beside the food. It was only a single mug, which was cheap compared to the big liquor bottle and keg of ale I had found before but was good enough to suit my needs for now.

The room was also much warmer than the previous rooms. My foot warming session beforehand was wasted. I sat down on the floor and enjoyed the food and the alcohol, which was some sort of beer I had probably drank before. It was hard to remember as there were so many kinds of beers and the flavor fluctuated throughout the seasons. This beer was quite good as it was ice cold and had a strong yet clean flavor. It felt like the hoppers were crushed into dust, mixed in and then strained out completely throughout the fermentation process.

Whatever the fuck it was, it went down easy and the taste stayed on the tongue, melding quite well with the food. With a beer like this, I could chow down on rotting meat and still complement the flavor. Still tasting good on the second try as I barf it back up. It was just that good.

The only convenient part of having so little of the beer is that I didn’t have to carry it around the whole time, I polished it off with the rest of the food and set off. As nice as it was to find the rest area, that wasn’t the goal of my trip. My journey would bring me even deeper into the depths of the dungeon. It quickly became clear that the residents of the dungeon did not welcome my intrusion.

I had only seconds to react as a volley of ice spikes were launched my way as soon as I appeared in room seventeen. Not even with the flames on my sword could I dispel all of these attacks and I had to run off to the side, blocking the spikes in that direction with the sword, shield and simply by moving off to the side once I could. My arm hurt as the spikes that hit the shield exploded and covered my shield with ice.

My entire body went cold from this frost. These enemies weren’t trying to impale me with these spikes. They were intending to freeze me to death. There were like twenty of them just around the entrance and more deeper inside this massive room. Once I took down one of the enemies, I found another volley coming my way that was much easier to dodge. They had been in a half circle around the entrance which allowed them to ambush me, but they had lost the advantage of their position as I escaped their surround.

Another brush with death survived as I went through killing all the other monsters. A few more of them popped up deeper within the room trying to sneak attack me but I expected their appearance and avoided their attacks. Monsters weren’t the only ones learning from and countering repeat tactics. By the time I finished up with the room, I counted thirty enemies. A small army of monsters who almost took me out as soon as I entered.

This dungeon was becoming more and more brutal the further down I went. It was designed to take down far better people than me and I was just cheating myself this far with my weapon and a bit of divine intervention making sure I came to this dungeon in particular. When I went inside room eighteen I was more prepared for an ambush and immediately started running. I ran for only a few steps when I realized that there weren’t any enemies guarding the room’s entrance.

Or anywhere in the room for that matter. I looked around for a bit and found that the next room was already unlocked for me to go through. This was highly disconcerting. Only facing one really strong enemy that drops an elemental item and blocking the exit was the closest situation I could think of similar to this. Yet, the exit wasn’t sealed and the next room was open. So all the enemies were dead or never were there in the first place. Instead of continuing onto the next floor, I looked around the room a bit more.

Strangely enough, the room was absolutely huge. Like I could have fit half the damn town in this one room and it was pretty much a labyrinth of walls and crystals blocking my view of the whole place. Eventually, lost in the maze, I found my way back to where I started at the entrance of the room. Except, nothing looked familiar. The layout was different from when I first entered and I couldn’t see the portal to the next room straight ahead like before.

Which meant this was a different entrance to this room. Convergence. My dungeon had combined with another dungeon explorer’s dungeon, increasing the size and difficulty of the dungeon. The increased size and difficulty compensated for the fact that two people could work together and way more loot dropped during a convergence. However, that was also a point of conflict as random convergences often led to both adventurer’s fighting over loot or each other’s equipment, sometimes even to the death.

This other adventurer must have noticed convergence had happened and cleared out this room. Since he wasn’t here, waiting for me, he went ahead. Either he was confident in his skills, didn’t trust me, or wanted all the loot to themselves. I didn’t even want to imagine bumping into them since they cleared this entire room by themselves and had the guts to continue on. That or they just left after clearing this room.

Whichever it was, I had to go on to the next room. If I was lucky, this other adventurer would have already cleared it and moved on, allowing me free passage to go on until I get to the point where I get the item. At the same time, going even deeper into the dungeon with convergence as well was terrifying. This was a point of no return pretty much.

I had already decided to keep going until I got the item when I entered the dungeon and wasn’t going to change my mind yet. After a few minutes of backtracking, I entered converged room nineteen. There, I witnessed a scene that would haunt my coming days.

Just ahead of me was a group of what seemed like hundreds of ice cube enemies floating at both eye level and above, creating a wall of ice, no a dome of ice. All of it was surrounding a pillar with an item on top of it, some sort of ring. The dome had an entrance large enough for a human to walk through and a human was inside of the dome.

It was a young man who was wearing full plate armor without a helmet and carried a sword as large as his own body. He was looking around in shock at all of the enemies surrounding him and it seems like he had just gone in there. If I had gone into this room immediately I would have bumped into him during a more peaceful moment.

All of these ice monsters started forming projectiles at the same time and the young man reacted by holding out his arm and shooting a bolt of lightning. It struck the upper part of the dome and the ice crystals burst into flames that spread and took down an entire quarter of the enemies. The rest did not hesitate in their attacks and there wasn’t enough time to run. He was a wasp caught in a spider web.

He lifted up his greatsword and swept it around to take out around half of the ice shards while the other half directly hit his body. Frost covered his armor completely and his skin started turning blue as it chilled him to the bone. A silent scream was uttered from his body as he shot out another lightning bolt, destroying another wall. He tried moving his sword to block as the next volley came but his sword was frozen completely to the ground, along with his hand so he couldn’t let go or move.

This entire scene happened within seconds and I had no chance to even react as this fellow dungeon explorer turned to ice. And then, to my horror, the ice cubes merged together and turned into a wall made of ice, indistinguishable from the surroundings. This was a trap. There was bait in the form of that item in the middle of the dome and that young man fell for the trap. In his position, I might have fallen into the trap as well.

His death saved my life. Yet, my existence in the dungeon caused the convergence and therefore his death. It was depressing to think about as the death of a man I had never met might have died due to my actions. Though, it was pointless to wallow in sorrow. I had to avenge this man by taking out the remaining monsters that had killed him.

Perhaps I could still save him by unfreezing him with my sword. After all, the dungeon wasn’t absorbing him so he might not be dead yet. And if he wasn’t dead, I guess he won’t be needing that sword or plate armor. While trying to find out his identity and sending back any heirlooms or messages his family’s way of course. It would be wrong to just leave his body and possessions in the dungeon after all.