It takes about six seconds for Smashy to grab the short end of the rectangle and lift the thing. Well, try at least. Despite being shorter than a dwarf and thin as an elf, and mere finger thick, the metal was significantly heavier than it appeared.

“Give me a hand,” he grunts to the other two fighters. All of them were fit guys, and while Smashy was the strongest of them, they all had a decent lift. As each grips a section of the squat panel, they bend down to lift with proper form. The hengeyokai raises his palm toward the metal, and the amount it lightens is nearly imperceptible. Shooty and Stabby give each other a knowing look. Definitely a wizard.

“On three,” says Smashy, not having let up on the panel in the slightest. “One, two, three!”

Managing to get the metal plate up to the forty-five degree mark or so, the three stall out when they run out of leverage. Darting in under them, the hengeyokai slips into the gap between the metal and the ground and pushes his entire body against the panel. The extra fifty kilograms of force or so is enough for the adventurers to change their grip and put their efforts into pushing the metal over.

Rocks slide out of the way, but the weight of the rectangle is enough to keep it planted on the riverbed. The whole thing flips over, revealing a hatch sunk into the panel. A turn-crank to open up locks holding the mechanism closed is set into the doorway, an empty space deeper than the metal itself separating it from the hatch proper to allow for hands to grip it.

“If I could trouble you one more time, could you turn that valve for me?”

“You got it,” says Smashy instantly, grabbing the wheel.

Stabby puts a hand on his shoulder, looks at the monkey-looking thing, and intervenes, “First give us some more information about the cave. Then he can turn it.”

“Fine,” gripes the hengeyokai, “it’s got at least three floors, there’s slimes in it, and there’s a wizard girl up there already.”

Shooty shakes his head at Stabby, who lets go of Smashy, who immediately starts straining against the valve handle.

“What was this thing closed by, a giant?” he complains, changing his grip to hold onto one of the spokes of the handle. He places his foot in the indentation of the panel, his foot going down into where there should be rock, and presses against the metal with all his strength.

Nothing happens.

“Close enough,” the tailed guy says, “maybe if someone was on the other end the thing would turn. Rotational force and all that.”

Stabby gestures for Shooty to try it. Using a bow took a lot of upper body strength, or at least that’s what Stabby told himself. Clearly there was no other reason that Shooty was stronger than him. Just because he was more focused on hitting the right place instead of hitting far away, and spent more of his time playing the knife-hand drinking game than shooting targets. Nothing to do with diet and exercise.

“Oh wait, there’s a latch. Let me just flip that.”

With a sudden lurch, the wheel turns and both the men pushing against it fall over. The entire team spends the seconds to stand up and scowl at the hengeyokai before Smashy just turns the handle enough that something underneath them clanks.

The edges of the rectangle hiss, air drawing into an empty space. Slimes ignore everything about this, as wagons continue to come up to the cliff face and drop their contents onto the garbage disposal below, completely ignorant of any change in the environment whatsoever.

Stepping off the door, which is clearly was at this point, Shooty finally asks the obvious question.

“What is this?”

“Oh, this is just a transport box. It’s what’s inside that matters. Like people.”

Smashy steps off the box as well, then looks at it as though for the first time. Considering that he had been in the throes of lift-madness previously, it may as well have been. He hadn’t been paying attention to what he was lifting, or what he was pressing. What mattered was that it was heavy, and he was straining his muscles to move it. That was what he spent his time doing, pushing his raw strength to the limit, being able to wield a hammer like a chef wields a knife. Now though, he could see this thing’s true nature.

“That’s solid mithril. It’s supposed to be light though, why is it so heavy?”

“Like I said, it’s what’s inside that matters.”

On its own, the door flips upward. The fist width chunk of mithril rotates toward the sky, revealing a horrific mishmash of limbs in a depth far deeper than basic geometry would indicate. No blood, no smell, just limbs around a tailed torso facing downward into the base of the box.

The coffin.

For several seconds, they just stare. Stabby acts first, pulling out a serrated knife and slicing into the clearly evil hengeyokai. It’s a glancing blow though, and doesn’t even provoke a reaction. Shooty and Smashy act simultaneously a second later, drawing their weapons and stepping into action. Shooty goes perpendicular from the river, getting Stabby and Smashy out of the line of fire, and launches an arrow into the creature. Similarly to the first strike, this is a glancing blow; the arrow barely scratches against the side of the hengeyokai’s head, ripping a line of flesh away from the mouth.

Smashy reaches the creature shortly after the arrow. Following its trajectory, he swings his hammer two-handed toward the exposed maw, serrated teeth grinning at his approach. Right into the jaw, and the follow through sees several teeth joining the hammer in passing away from the creature’s head.

“Tha’ was a mishtake,” he says, spitting several dislodged chunks into the smooth stones of the riverbed. Without taking his eyes off the two of them in melee range, the creature slides his tail along the rocks and flings them up toward Smashy’s face. Reflexively, he moves his hammer in front of his eyes to block the projectiles, and misses the fact that the hengeyokai is charging right through him. Stabby swears, and stabs toward the fleeing creature, scoring a gash on his side, but fails to slow the hengeyokai in the slightest.

Before any of them can actually react, the creature has a sizable lead on them up the path toward the cave it had just told them about.

“After him!” Stabby yells, following his own advice. Smashy is a hair slower, and Shooty fires a few more pot-shots at the fleeing creature before breaking out into a full run, but the chase is on, plus two arrows through the torso on the fleeing side.

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

About twenty seconds after everyone has left, the torso stuffed into the bottom left corner of the container gasps for breath. A moment later, an invisible pressure erupts from the center of the mithril. This, the slimes notice. Burrowed deep in the wall across from the dungeon, the red slime shudders, and the colony shudders with it. Cautious offshoots break away from the feeding frenzy in the dump to investigate this source of raw energy.

A green slime mindlessly enters the area affected by the pressure, while purple slimes loiter around the edge. Nothing happens for long seconds, but then the body within the box, the one the adventurers didn’t realize was in one piece, gasps for air as well. The green slime quivers, nothing happening to its sense other than a feeling that it had been eating. Outside the radius, the purples quiver with anticipation, ready to bombard the green one should it prove a threat to the colony.

“Augh damn it that hurt. I’m pretty sure that fifty-four broke my pelvis shoving me in here, and probably my spine when it closed the lid.”

“At least you’re still in one piece, you fragile baby.”

“Yes, I have different design specs than all of you. Don’t forget that my group is essential.”

“Yeah and without my group you’re useless.”

“Just fix my bones so I can get out of this deathtrap.”

Unable to process sound, or much of anything at all, the green slime quivers again. It starts to feel full, something it had never even thought existed up to this point. Granted, it hadn’t thought anything up to this point. Typically a green slime would split when it was full, but it simply didn’t have the raw material necessary for that. It’s biology wouldn’t allow for a split, so it had no choice but to remain as it was.

Sitting up above the lid of the box, another creature looks around. It sees blank stone, a ball of fire, and a couple splashes of color dotting the pile of garbage in the distance. Not much to look at, for sure.

“Well this place is a dump. I’m not in danger of dying anymore, you can turn the heal juice off.”

“I’m not doing that until my limbs are in an approximation of the right place. I’m used to these ones, I don’t want to have to acclimate to a whole new nervous system.”

“Fiiine, give me a second to stretch my legs and I’ll do your jigsaw puzzle.”

Stepping out of the box, or more accurately falling over onto the ground outside the box, the creature looks around at the bigger picture. Under the ball of fire, there were trees. On the opposite side from the ball of fire, also trees. Away from the trash piles, there was a thirty-one running away from some armed humans. Seemed pretty typical.

“You better appreciate this, no way could a fifty-four or fifty-one muster the physical deftness to put these disparate chunks of flesh back together.”

“Oh no, the horror of having to rely upon a fellow forty-five.”

“Well there aren’t any other forty-fives around here, now are there?”

“Of course not, you haven’t done your job yet.”

With that the creature ran out of retorts.

“Now you can drop the heal field. I don’t plan on doing ‘my job’ until the boss has an idea of what we need. That stuff hurts.”

Slimes across the ravine stop shuddering. The purple slimes return to the refuse pile. Without some strange energy acting upon it, nothing would happen to the green slime they were targeting.

Another creature, nearly physically identical to the other, stands up from the box. It stretches its arms up to the sky, tail flung as far back as it could reach.

“Augh, limbs. So much nicer to be able to stand up and do literally anything other than stare at the same space until I suffocate into unconsciousness.”

“I’m just glad I didn’t die.”

“The recon team was a thirty-one and a forty-five, there was no way we were going to be stuck in there long enough for you to be non-recoverable.”

“Oh yeah? Our thirty-one is getting chased up a mountain by an angry mob.”

“Hm. Three humans isn’t enough for it to be classified as an angry mob. Maybe an angry gang.”

“That’s still enough to distract it away from us. They have way more safeguards. Where’s the forty-five anyway?”

“Good question. We should ask the thirty-one.”

The two creatures follow the Mcs up to the dungeon, leaving the slime behind. It was full when it was in the aura. It was losing that now. It had instincts to pursue the feeling of ‘full’. It had instincts to split. It couldn’t split, because it didn’t have nutrients. It had full, and now it was losing it. Something breaks in the slime. An encompassing need flows over it, the need to consume anything. Everything.

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

Torchlight illuminates the black gemstone. It examines the subsumed piece of onyx with interest. It was new, certainly. Last it had inspected the dungeon, the core had either missed this piece, or it wasn’t there. It wasn’t sure which, as it had several concerns at the time. This was not something it had prior experience with in its previous location, probably because it had never attempted to network a gem into itself.

It was like having a whole new container for mana. Sources and outward flows were like threads of power connecting a gem to each individual object. For some reason each individual room of this dungeon was a tiny source of mana, just enough to balance the flow to each slime. It didn’t know how, and it was loath to demolish anything that provides additional power, even if it was a thing that offended it's aesthetic sensibilities most grievously.

Just like its own gem core, this new one had a link to each and every thing in the dungeon. None of the connections, however, were active, save for a single flow to its own core. With a slight bit of prodding, the core manages to adjust the link to the room the gem was sitting in to active. On its end, the source deactivates. Its source from the onyx didn’t grow more powerful, so it appeared that the gem was now the beneficiary to that particular room without its own cost to the main core increasing. In the short term, this was a great discovery. It could shunt the incoming mana to the other gem, which would be able to solidify the mana normally, while it burnt through the shattered form. Once that was done, it could revert the sources back to its own gem and grow back to its previous glory.

Distractingly, the creature from earlier runs up onto the puzzle switch, stands on it, and the moment it depresses charges straight into the door headfirst. A moment later, the door opens and it charges in, the door slamming shut behind it.

“That could have gone better.”

“They may be double doors, but they're still made of stone. Why wouldn't you at least use your foot to try and kick it open?”

“Like it would have made a difference either way.”

“How's your head?”

“Made of pain. What do you actually care?”

“I don’t. Why are you back so soon?”

“I brought gifts, in the form of humans. They want to kill me, so I’ll be going inward. Open doors for me, would you?”

“A dungeon core does not simply open a path for a non-contracted monster! That is a terrible precedent to set.”

“If they catch up to me in the first room, you aren’t going to get anything out of them. Nothing. Do you want that?”

“Fine. I want you out as soon as is feasible.”

“I have an idea for that actually.”

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

“Is she dead?” asks Smashy. The girl is familiar. She always threw insults at them or rude gestures when she saw them. Smashy found it hilarious, since Stabby definitely deserved it. Now, she was laying unconscious on a stone slab, beaten repeatedly by stones, with her actual state of survival unknown.

“Her heart’s beating,” states Shooty. He was the closest thing they had to a medic, though they’d had to wait precious seconds for him to catch up. That hengeyokai had fled into the dungeon immediately, and probably had traps set up inside already. Dungeons usually weren’t very dangerous on their own, assuming you were going into one close to your power level, but if there was an actual intelect behind the design, there could be quite a deadly danger indeed.

“This is Hierarchy brand bullshit. We come up to this, and the murderous psychopath shapeshifter we meet has used this particular girl as a glorified doorstop? It’s like a divine joke,” Stabby gripes. “She had better pull through, because I’m banned from their store so I can’t give them that bastard’s head as a condolence gift.”

Shooty stands up. “Well we aren’t going to be any use here. We either go back to town to get her medical attention, or we chase down the perpetrator. I vote we go kick some ass.”

“You had me at ass,” says Smashy.

“That’s the last thing he said,” remarks Stabby dryly, stepping on the raised platform.

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

Several seconds later, the two creatures reach the entrance. Closed again, of course.

“Hey, this is probably why thirty-one called you.”

“Broken human. Of course. I wonder which one of them asked it to save their daughter or what have you.”

“Doesn’t really matter, does it? Any human has the same privilege setting.”

“True. I’ll just get to work then.”