In the morning— not that we could properly tell it was such inside of the dungeon— we cleaned up and prepared to continue once more. Even if the room was safe, we still had to do our usual preventive measures. However, having five people available had ameliorated the stress of standing watch.

“So, we’re continuing down the hallway then?” I said, vocalizing what everyone else had to be thinking.

“Perry, Alain, keep up the trap detection. Vera, watch our flank. Mia and I will stay in the middle of our formation and try to pull back anyone from an unseen threat as fast as we can,” Javier commanded. We nodded in agreement and filed on ahead, entering a small room with a blue orb upon a pedestal at the center.

We stepped in cautiously, taking measure of the space. “So, do you sense any traps?” I asked, scanning the room with my electroreception. The only item buzzing with activity was the orb.

“Nope. This place seems safe, other than that obviously distracting orb in the center,” Alain said.

“Could that be something to take out of the dungeon?”

“That’s… a good question,” he replied, thoughts scrawling within his head. “Javier’s call to make.”

We motioned for the rest of the group to advance, leaving us standing a cautious distance from the centerpiece of the room. “I’d like to say that’s a trap, but would a trap be so openly displayed? Is the trap that it’s directing us to touch it and trigger the trap? The other ones were hidden, but this one is overtly calling to us. What’s your reading on the orb?” Javier thought aloud.

“It’s brimming with activity, whatever that means. Haven’t really seen that on non-living things before,” I said.

“It looks like if it’s been interacted with, that hasn’t been in any recent lifetime. It was covered in a coat of dust,” Alain said.

“Fine, let’s take a closer look,” Javier said. “Perry and Vera, lead the way, as the most durable of the group.”

I hate, hate, hated being the trap detector, but such was the burden of my skillset. Vera and I cautiously inched forward, my breath not leaving my mouth until I knew that things would be alright. It felt like my hair was rising from the energy in the air, the potent setup thrumming through my body. “Anything yet?” I asked Vera, wondering if she was seeing anything that I had missed from this side.

“Nope. Still looks like a blue ball,” she replied, shrugging. I stepped forward once again, fur already swollen in anticipation of an unexpected trap. I was maybe five steps away, Vera six. With one more step forward, the orb started to light up, letters projecting from the orb, hovering in the air above the surface.

“Back up,” I said, waving my arm back at the others. I couldn’t let anyone else get pulled into what was going on. At the sound of my words, light started swirling around the device and a halo of blue light surrounded Vera and I.

Above the blue orb, an unknown character periodically changed, the halo around our bodies growing deeper in color. “Defenses up,” I commanded, preparing for the impending impact. The halo condensed further and further, starting to spill towards the ceiling in concentric rising circles as Mia slammed into Vera, pushing her out of the halo and taking her place. The last circles condensed above us and the world distorted, my vision hazy.

I blinked a few times, trying to understand where I was— no, where we were. Mia was with me in an unknown room and we were alone, the rest of our party left behind.

The room we were within gave me echoes of the ruins we had dived into not too long ago. There were boxes lining the walls of the room, filled with moving pictures, each image unique to the other one, although my quick scan didn’t notice any reflecting the room we had just been in. That is to say, I didn’t see the rest of the team on any of the boxes’s images.

“What were you doing?” I said, slamming my fist against once of the tables. Mia wore a dazed look on her face, unable to respond to the room’s stimuli, let alone my words. “You could have been terribly injured. Maybe we still are. Maybe this is a dream.”

I didn’t want to believe that, but I had to be open to the possibility that the trap had done some strange things, problems inexplainable by our current understanding of the dungeon.

“No,” Mia said in a monotone voice. “This isn’t a dream. This is real.”

“Well, if this is real, snap out of it. Even if you made a reckless choice, you need to pull yourself together,” I demanded. I walked over to her, hands on both of her shoulders, staring down at her face. Her eyes were fixated on the ground of the room, mesmerized by the reflective surface.

“I… this was the closest I’ve been to death. I don’t know why I dove in like that,” she said, slowly looking up at me, tears welling down her eyes.

“But the thought of being worthless, and not being able to save Vera made me jump in and now we’re both here.”

“Maybe… maybe that’s for the better,” I offered. “Now both sets of the team have someone to absorb the brunt of the damage while we continue to explore. We can’t stay here, after all. We have to make our way back to the rest of the team, wherever they are.”

“But where is here?” she cried, burying her head in my chest. I patted her gently on the back, not sure how to proceed. This was a new situation. Javier’s breakdown had been a thing of controlled rage and grief, but whatever Mia was having was much more open and demanding of my own investment. Back in the village, I couldn’t say that I was even close enough to anyone to even walk into this situation, Levin not-withstanding, but this was not how Levin would have interacted in stress. He would have nervously laughed and we would have made jokes until the early morning, pretending that things were alright, and if that we continued to pretend, eventually the lie would become the new truth.

Mia, however, seemed to confront her despair head on and wallowed in it. I too was concerned about our separation from the group, but I didn’t know if we had the luxury to wallow in our grief, selfish thought that it was. We were in a dungeon, a dangerous place. Survival was our first priority.

Nonetheless, Mia was feeling how she felt, and that was perfectly valid. I just needed to figure out how to accommodate her feelings. “Do you want me to pat you on the back? Tell you things will be alright?” I asked, needing direction before I could continue along.

She grunted in conformation, no words leaving her lips, only messy sobs. “There there,” I said, rubbing her back. It was hard from her continued training efforts, well sculpted from hours spent under the sun. “We’ll get through whatever this is and we’ll find the rest of the team and no one will get hurt.”

That meager offering seemed to work as she pulled back, wiping the away the last of her tears and offering a weak smile. “Sorry, Perry. Just got overwhelmed there. Too many bad thoughts rushing to my head.”

“We all have those moments, Mia. Now let’s try to get a good sense of where we are.” Sure there were all the moving picture boxes, and underneath a few of them were slabs with raised squares, covered in those unknown characters that had been displaying off of the blue orb. There was one entrance to the room, and opposite it was an open metal box, with something glinting within it.

The room appeared to have had no one else go through it for quite some time, a thick layer of dust coating everything. I wouldn’t have even though about it if not for Alain’s words not long before. “So, I’ve taken measure of this room, and I have no idea what I’m looking at,” I said, turning back to Mia.

“I think I found one of those moving pictures that reflected the entrance cavern but the image changed. Let me look some more,” Mia replied, fixated on the walls.

I didn’t want to engage in redundant effort, so I moved over to the metal box, curious as to what the glittering thing was. Maybe if we were lucky, it would be just the item to bring back to the noble and once we found our way back to the rest of the team we could depart.

My fingers peered around into the insides of the box, feeling around for the glittering thing but my reach was too high, only swiping at air. Evidently it was smaller than I had thought. My fingers crawled down the inside walls of the box, making contact with a cold object, small, smooth and long. I squeezed my fingers around it, hoping to grasp it in its entirety and bring it out into the light for ease of review, but sometimes one’s plans don’t come to fruition.

I gasped as the item pierced through my skin, the cold metal swimming up my wrist. “What was that?” I said, rubbing at my skin. There was no signs of blood from the intrusion of my bodily invader, my flesh unmarred and looking whole. Did I just imagine it?

That would have been too easy.

[][][][][][][][]: Insufficient Authority

One of my boxes popped up in response to my question, and of course, it told me I didn’t have the proper authority to understand what had happened. Exactly what one wanted to see when delving through a dungeon. Perhaps I shouldn’t mention it to anyone else… not yet. Not until I understood it more. Not until I could actually explain what had happened to me. It was worthless to fill others with concern if I couldn’t vocalize what had happened.

“What was that, Perry?” Mia asked, looking back at me.

“Just uh, the box was colder than I expected for having been in this room.” My explanation must have made sense as she turned back to the boxes, no, they weren’t boxes. My eyes saw what I understood as boxes underneath, providing a convenient label. They were screens, for all the good the proper name meant to me. Knowing they were screens didn’t mean anything if we couldn’t find the moving picture that contained the rest of the team, if that would even do anything other than let us know they were alright.

“Perhaps we keep moving and come back to this room. I don’t know what else is worth viewing in here,” I said.

Mia tore herself away from the screens, turning back to my face. “Very well, Perry. Back to business.”

“Let me take the lead, of course. Can’t have you getting hurt on my watch or Javier will ensure I’ll never stand on my own feet again.” I took the lead out of the room into another cold hallway, not unlike the trapped one we had entered into this wing of the dungeon. My electroreception noticed dormant signals, if I could call it that, around the closed doors, but nothing else.

“Which one do you want to go into first?” I asked Mia, trying to give some autonomy back to her.

She blinked rapidly at me, eyes darting across the hallway. “Why not start with the left?” she said. We walked up towards the closed door and the metal slab slid into the ceiling. Guess that was what the activity I was sensing reflected.

Inside was a smaller room, slabs perpendicular to the wall with metal tables by their sides. Was this… no, it couldn’t be, could it?

“This is a bedroom, right?” Mia said, vocalizing our shared thought. “Weird. Why is there a bedroom in a dungeon? Did some sort of explorers before us decided they couldn’t rough it and convert a room into a safe place to sleep? That would be stupid of them.”

I didn’t share the same belief as her, but I wasn’t going to argue on it. “Who knows?” I said. “But this room doesn’t seem to have anything worth caring about. Onto the next?”

“Yup,” Mia replied, already moving across the hallway into the next room. The door slid up, and as I exited the first room, the door slid down once again. Looked like it was proximity based.

The other room had a square table at the center, a large horizontally bisected box against the wall, and lots of other smaller cabinets built into the wall adjacent to the large box. “I have no idea what this is, but we could open up the cabinets?” I offered.

“Eh. I don’t think if there is anything, it would be in here. This place looks like it’s never been used before.” The coat of dust covering the surfaces implied a similar state of disuse to the rest of the dungeon.

“Well, let’s keep moving then,” I said, unwilling to linger anymore in the room. The sense of disuse was growing my discomfort with the dungeon. The faster we were back with the others, the more I could reorient my concerns to survival instead of a more existential dread.

The third door opened into another hallway, although this one had transparent walls that overlooked into the large cavern we had original entered in. We were by the waterfall in the back, high in the air. “This might be our emergency exit,” I muttered.

“Maybe for me. I don’t know you’d get out, Perry,” Mia replied. “I’m certainly not leaving you behind.”

It only created more questions as to how we got this high compared to where we were, but who was to say. The dungeon was a thing of mystery. Just knowing the blue orb took us here was enough, for the moment. Finding the rest of the team was a priority to baseless speculation.

“Well, I appreciate that, Mia. Even if we’re separated from the rest of the team, we’re still together. We can’t get split up any further.” We continued down the hallway into another set of rooms, each more empty and devoid of anything interesting than the last. Wherever we were was devoid of monsters. That had the effect of putting us on edge while simultaneously keeping us calm, a hard state to maintain.

At the end was a final room, the only one we hadn’t viewed before. It was a dark room, a lone path standing over a lit platform, a screen at the back of the room playing a more familiar moving picture this time. It contained the rest of the team.

“Perry, that’s them,” Mia said, pointing frantically at the screen.

“I know, but how are we supposed to get there?” They were facing a giant monster compared to the one before, perhaps as tall as the initial cavern we had entered. They stood about ankle high, avoiding its many feet scurrying around the room, dodging its vicious palm strikes, unable to make meaningful dents with their attacks. Only Javier was truly injuring it, but that drew the attention of the monster to him further— it was hard to attack while consistently dodging.

I stared at the screen, hoping something would make sense, when I saw another box pop up in front of me.

Transfer to the room? [Yes] [No]

“Ready to go to them?” I asked Mia. She craned her head at me, staring at me as though I had gone mad, but then seemed to think better of it. It was a dungeon. Normal standards didn’t apply.

“If you say so, Perry. Let’s go save our team.”

I gingerly hit the box that said yes with my outstretched finger, and the blue halos surrounded our body once more. They condensed towards the roof, Mia having the good sense to not step out of the halos lest she get left behind, and in another flash, we were deposited in the room, amidst the chaotic fight.

“Perry, Mia, you’re alive?” Vera screamed, noticing our presence.

“We’ll talk more later, Vera,” I said, focusing on the large monster. This one’s face wasn’t featureless. It had two curved tusks protruding from its face. I wouldn’t have noticed that if not for the thread that spewed from the tusks at my position. I jumped out of the trajectory, unwilling to be trapped for it to step upon.

“How can we assist you best?” Mia asked. With a glance she had already taken measure of the situation. If her beak couldn’t break through the smaller one, the hopes of breaking through this large monster was even further out of reach.

“Do your best to find an opportunity to change the flow of the battle,” Alain said. “Javier’s really our hardest hitter. I’ve done what I can but I can’t get to the weak points for my more effective attacks. Its movements, slower that they are, are liable to crush me if I get caught in their trajectory.” He jumped out of the way of a swipe from the monster, heavily panting.

I didn’t know how long the fight had been going on for, but it was clear they were running dry, teetering on the threshold of using up all their stamina. Who knew how many rooms they fought through to get to here while we were studying the safe part of the dungeon.

We had been fortunate, to a degree, in our separation. They had the persistent danger, but awareness of what to expect. We were safe in the end but saddled with extra caution, uncertain of what had even happened.

I slid by one of the legs, sliding my spur against the skin but I failed to pierce the monster’s flesh, although I couldn’t say I was surprised at the outcome. I didn’t even think my venom would be potent enough for a creature of that size, but I couldn’t rule out the thought without trying it first.

Its feet triangulated around my position, threatening to pierce the ground in a staccato burst, a neat little triplet aimed for my body. Not even my Swollen Fur would adequately compensate for the pressure the legs would inflect upon my sternum, if the fight in the swamp was anything to go by.

That did not mean I was willing to court death, however. I sent an Electromute up towards the monster, seeing its limbs lock up, body shuddering to a halt.

“Don’t just sit there,” Javier said, a trained opportunist. “Get on it, Alain. We don’t know how much longer this will last.”

I wasn’t fond of the idea fading away while Alain was in motion, and I sent another Electromute at the monster, the rigid frame continuing to stay still in time for Alain to tear through two of the legs of the monster. He cut them at the middle joint, the body unable to resist from teetering over due to the distribution of weight no longer being present. Vera saw the perfect opportunity to contribute to the cause, rushing into a leg firmly affixed to the ground, detonating the swirling winds around her horns.

The body crumpled over towards the ground, a slow descent unable to be properly staved off as its body regained control. Its head slammed into the ground, tusk discharging the sticky threads around its body, form bound together under its own weight.

It strained at to break free of its own trap, but the limbs couldn’t break free from the self-imposed fetters. It wasn’t even worth Electromuting further. The boxes wouldn’t respond to such wounded prey being experimented upon.

The rest of the team found the nth wind of the day, surging to dismantle the giant monster further in a barrage of blows, leaving us alive, relatively unharmed and ready to get things over with. Alain had wrenched away the skin with a deft flick of his wrists, and Javier dug through its corpse, until he fished out a sphere the size of my head.

It had a similar range of electric activity compared to the sphere that had displaced us, but it was a solid shell covering a thrumming heart. I knew it was effectively inert, no matter how much my fingers gripped my arms, digging deep into my flesh as I counted the seconds before we were separated once more. “This is it. This is sufficient. This will get us a meeting. Let’s leave,” Javier said.

We were in consensus. None of us wished to linger any longer.