As the town burned, an alert was sent to the minds and souls of everyone still alive in the burning wreck of a town. Their God was furious that they had, in a moment of weakness, allowed an adult, and a blasphemous monster of all things, to enter the shrine.

Their God demanded that they step up their game, and after that, it demanded one more thing. They would, after quenching the flames, need to make one last final offering. All who yet lived would need to march into the shrine, be they young or old, sick or healthy, and offer themselves up to the Harvest God.

They would be taken from their weak, mortal lives and remade in the image that their God wanted, one that would be better suited for whatever task their God demanded of them. And they, all as one, obeyed. Their fatigue was washed away in a display of rare divine intervention, and they set to work stamping out the flames.

They would have much work to do, though, and little time and resources to work with.

…

“Okay, then.” Lyrhea walked forward towards the large doors that stood ajar before her. It was almost too simple, and that set her into a bad mood. There was no way in hell that this was going to go well.

Step by step she moved onwards, reaching the open doors and bracing herself for the twist that she fully expected was coming, and yet despite that apprehension, the big reveal of the doors slamming shut and locking her in a room to be flooded with angry fauna did not come to pass. This caused Lyrhea no shortage of concern, and she slowed her pace as she got closer and closer, bracing herself more and more as she eventually reached the doors and walked through them.

She now was moving at a snail’s pace, and she looked around, her head on a swivel as she made it past the door frame. She managed to make it several meters past the door that was but one part of an airlock system with a massive arena in between before the door finally slammed shut.

She heard the loud, raucous laughter of an unknown being before the laughter ended abruptly and was replaced with the sound of frantic movement and a series of creative curses that would be more fitting if they were said by a sailor than by some unseen force of nature. After a short while, the door behind her opened up again and the arena she had passed through without a scratch and without any encounters revealed itself again.

She looked back towards the arena, the first area she would have had to fight through to get into the main part of the Dungeon, and then looked around while holding her arms out. She walked around a bit, gesturing towards the open, seemingly empty arena and then t the walls and the other things around herself before shaking her head and sighing.

“You can’t honestly expect me to just walk back into an obvious kill box, can you?”

There was a bit of bluster from the unseen source of the voice before it began to insist that there was by no means any danger back the way that she had come and that she really needed to check out the décor there again and to be a bit slower with her movements.

“I was literally moving at a crawl just moments before going through that door!” Lyrhea yelled while pointing at the open door, which had now sported a new feature. The door now had a green, glowing arrow shape on each part of the two-part door, and as the door opened inwards toward the arena, the meaning behind those signs was clear as could be. “If you can’t be asked to shut that door before someone gets through it, then its not my damn problem, you fuckwit!”

The voice on the other side gave more empty, hollow promises about how the way forward (the real way forward that Lyrhea was already taking, mind you) was in fact not the real way forward and that if she wanted to kill the core of the Dungeon she would need to go back into the arena (which it repeatedly refused to call an arena) and look around for a ‘special key’ that could be inserted into one of the arena’s wall to let her reach the true path.

Lyrhea, of course, was not buying it. She wasn’t a genius, sure, but she wasn’t born yesterday, so the bluster and bluffing of a force intent on her own death was not going to be enough to dissuade her from moving forward.

Lyrhea disregarded the voice from all around herself and tried to move deeper, but another vice added more spice to the mix and gave Lyrhea a massive headache that she would need to deal with.

[“Oh, no you don’t!”] the Snake-God interjected, locking Lyrhea’s ability to move. [“You’re going to go back in there and kick some ass. I expect you to embarrass that fool of a God thoroughly, so go back into that arena and show that God of the Dark Harvest that my Chosen is better than his Chosen!”]

“Can…. I… Refuse…?” Lyrhea managed to get out as her body began to move back towards the arena against her will.

[“No. No, you cannot. Now go kill some stuff. Entertain me, and humiliate my enemies.”]

Before Lyrhea could muster much of a retort to this, her body was flung back into the arena as though it had been tossed by a massive hand, and the only managed to regain her control of her own body after she had fully entered the arena again and the doors had slammed shut, locking her inside with the crowd she had known was already there, to begin with.

She picked herself up off of the ground and dusted herself off, looked around, and sighed again.

“See if I love you or respect you again after this, Snake.” she spat.

[“I don’t demand or want those things from my followers, by the way. Not that I have any aside from you.”] Her patron said calmly. [“I want your obedience. At least until you are strong enough to be worth granting more freedom and independence. Now, dance, my little Chosen. Dance.”]