Darryl looked up at the spire of light, as small snowflakes gingerly floated in the air and his warm breath steadily made small clouds of mist muddle his vision before rapidly dissipating.

The spire, appearing so warm and welcoming in the otherwise cold area he was in, felt deceptively false. There was no warmth radiating from it, just light. It felt like false advertisement, Darryl thought, still dazed from what just happened.

One moment he had been walking his dog, the next everything had just… disappeared.

The houses and all other human-made structures had just flattened themselves into the Earth instantaneously. Trees were still there, but nigh everything else was gone.

People had died.

People had died instantly, thousands of them.

Actually, if the message that played itself in his head was telling the truth, it wasn't thousands. It hadn’t just been this city, this was a world-wide phenomenon. Meaning that the death toll had been…

Billions.

A number so incomprehensibly large that Darryl couldn’t quite grasp what it meant. Which was probably a good thing, considering what witnessing one death had done to him. If he could conceive of the deaths of billions, he might have broken down on the spot.

But no. One death would already suffice to do that.

One bloody, way too slow and way too agonizing death.

His dog, Rex, who had been taking a piss right as it happened, had been sliced clean in half by the street light as it disappeared into the ground.

His hind legs, still peeing, had flopped over in an almost comedic manner. But only two thumbs length of flesh had been carved away, meaning that the head and heart hadn’t been erased. That half of Rex hadn’t just fallen over dead.

He had to live through that maimed state for several minutes. Several goddamned minutes. Several agonizing, numbing, incomprehensible minutes as he had whined, panted and bled out from his waist while his organs slowly slipped out.

Several minutes as Darryl had tried to stop the bleeding and somehow shove the two parts of his dog back together, as if anyone could’ve saved Rex if Darryl had just bought more time. As if there were still ambulances around, let alone vets.

He had cried loudly and shamelessly.

He had screamed in anger while tears still flooded wildly.

He had pleaded and begged to the sky and the strange voice in his head, to fix his dog and undo all of this.

But as Rex slowly accepted his fate and spent his last moments staring at Darryl with a relenting look that almost seemed like his dog meant to reassure and soothe him, and almost unnoticeably died a minute later, Darryl had mirrored his dog almost perfectly.

His anger and panic had violently been released until nothing was left. He had cried out his sadness, until he was left in a hollow depressed state. Almost as if he had died himself, feeling nothing but the slow but relentless groping of the cold on his skin.

He didn’t know how long he had been there, just staring at the space in front of him and the now empty eye of Rex still looking at him. He didn’t know how long the spire of light had been there. He only knew that at some point, the biting cold of this January morning had forced him out of his apathetic state.

He had then dug up the nearest patch of unfrozen dirt where a building stood not too long ago, buried Rex in a shallow grave, and then started walking.

Darryl hadn’t really listened to the broadcast in his head. He had been too angry and distracted to really listen. But he knew that the big spire of light was an entrance, and that if you got far enough you could…

Reclaim the planet? He didn’t remember the exact details, but that part he could still parse from his jumbled memories.

He wouldn’t have remembered anything had he been told in English, but the voice had talked to him in a strange language he could somehow innately understand. Or rather, the meaning and intent of the words had been directly embedded into his head and parsed into English by his own comprehension, meaning that he couldn’t actually scream over the voice. He could only forget what he ‘heard’ the natural way.

Which was unfortunately most of whatever the voice had said.

Darryl had never been that bright, even when trying to learn and remember. The hollow state he was in hadn’t helped either. Only the few things that had stood out he recalled. Reclaiming Earth, and something about the dungeon and the entrance. And then there was something else. Someth-

Darryl’s concentration popped like a bubble, his mind failing him at the first distraction. He absentmindedly glanced over in the direction of the sound, his consciousness slowly following his senses.

“Hey! Hey! H-”

“Ah, you heard me. Good, I was afraid I was going to wait for the next random pedestrian to help me out.” The man said.

Well, man. Though already developing some early masculine features, the boy was still decisively a teenager. Lanky and probably none too tall even if he were standing up. Which he wasn’t because…

His leg was twisted in an unnatural angle, the skin already purple.

Ouch, that looked painful.

After a moment of confusion about the surreal situation of a boy with broken leg and a smile on his face, though upon a second look it was a forced grin on a pale face, Darryl rushed over quickly.

“Are you alright? What happened?”

“Yes, I’m doing just dandy as you can clearly tell.” The boy gasped between sharp breaths. “I just love a good crawl over ice-cold streets, the state of my leg is unrelated."

The teen said it with just a hint of anger in his jovial voice, but the situation was outlandish enough that Darryl could tell he was probably being sarcastic. Probably, Darryl was never too savvy about that stuff.

Not sure what to do, he hovered his hands over the boy’s leg, almost as if he was preparing something the moment it suddenly moved, and fidgeted.

“Erm, I could get you to a hospital, but…”

“But you didn’t bring a shovel.” The kid remarked. “And I don’t think you’d unearth any doctors even if you had.”

“Right.” Darryl said seriously. “No hospital. I’m afraid I don’t know any first aid either. Do you…?”

“I actually put my hopes on that there.” The teen said, nodding to the pillar of light. “They said it was a dungeon, and honestly it looks more like a teleportation beacon than an entrance. Meaning, there might be healers or healing items in there. Even if there aren’t, at least it’s probably warmer in there.”

“Not that I’m complaining about the cold, my leg hurt a lot more before it got frostbitten numb. Which is probably a bad thing, but damn if it made crawling onwards easier on me.” The teen said. “Now, if you mind being so kind to help me get there faster? I don’t know how much longer we have, but the dungeon might be closing any minute now for all I know.”

“Closing?” Darryl said, half shocked and half trying to juggle the on-going conundrum of the broken leg and the new topic that had just appeared.

“Yeah, you know? Those openings will only be open for one hour, like the message said.” The teen said. “And if my phone hadn’t broken in the fall, I’d know how much time we’d have to chitchat before that hour is up. But I don’t, and I don’t want to be fashionably late for this.”

“So…” The kid said, hesitantly stretching his hands towards Darryl as he kept staring at the kid hesitantly. Then it clicked and he quickly kneeled and turned around.

The kid wrapped his arms around Darryl’s neck and Darryl lifted him off the ground, his hands cupping the kid’s legs. Darryl started walking, the breath in his neck and the hisses at every slight bob and rub of the broken leg against Darryl’s hinting at the kid being in a lot more pain than he let on.

“So…” Darryl hesitantly said. “If you don’t mind me asking, how…?”

“The leg?”

Darryl nodded.

“Well, you probably noticed that all the buildings went away. Quite rapidly too, I may add.” The teen said. “And if you were standing on top of one, you weren’t softly let down or teleported to the ground or something.”

“Ah.” Darryl responded.

“Yeah. I was lucky that I was on the roof of a single-floored building, but it was a nasty fall that completely caught me by surprise nonetheless.”

“I see.” Darryl said. “And, uhm, what’s your name?”

“Ah, I guess I haven’t said, have I? Been kinda distracted by other things, so I hope you don’t mind.” The kid said. “My name is Ben.”

“Darryl.” Darryl said. “And you should probably not talk so much, considering your situation.”

“Nonsense. My leg needs rest and no stress, but my mouth isn’t below the waist so it should be fine.”

Darryl hummed a non-committing agreement as he trudged on. The spire was rapidly growing closer.

“Are those stairs? Guess I’m lucky I found myself a noble steed before getting here, amirite?”

Darryl looked at Ben.

“Uhm, I mean… I didn’t mean it like that.” Ben said flustered. “Please don’t drop me.”

“I wouldn’t do that.” Darryl said, his gait unwavering as he returned his attention to the stairs.

They descended down the well-lit staircase, the sky soon disappearing from view as they went deeper and deeper. The walls were covered in old-looking murals that Darryl didn’t pay too much mind to, instead focusing on the steps in front of him and touching Ben’s bad leg as little as possible.

Ben on the other hand looked around eagerly. “Wow, it goes down so deep. I’m really glad I didn’t have to crawl my way here, now. And it’s warm. Well, warmer. That’s nice. Would you look at all those glyphs, I wonder what they mean? Is this like the first riddle or something? We need to solve the story before we progress or something?”

“I’ll leave that to you, I’ll just keep walking.” Darryl said, not paying any more heed to the images etched into the walls than before.

A few minutes later, the riddle proved fictional as a large metal door appeared. Darryl looked at it, and oddly enough he could see text pop up in his mind-eye.

Kua-tin. The predominant race of the Borand cooperation.

“Is that supposed to be a joke?” Ben said, half-chuckling.

“What is?” Darryl wondered.

“Never mind. Just wondering if they had heard me and added that last bit in response.”

“Ah. Maybe. I just see some race name and their company.”

“Ah.” Ben said. “Maybe they did add it. Guess I shouldn’t consider an AI capable of generating a world-sized dungeon in moments to be incapable of understanding what I’m saying and responding to it.”

Darryl shrugged, walked to the door, pondered a bit and then resigned himself to shoving it open with his shoulder. Fortunately, the door opened smoothly into a similarly large hallway well-lit by torches.

Darryl, seeing it was an one-way street for now, didn’t ponder too long on this simple situation and just started walking towards the intersection up ahead. The door automatically closed behind them.