The Serpent’s Heart drummed distantly. The pulse was accompanied by a waxing and waning in the intensity of the red light that came from the network of warm veins that covered the walls. The illumination travelled up the tunnels and the veins, basking the party in rhythmic light. They advanced deeper, the last bits of daylight disappearing and being replaced with the ever denser network of red, until nothing besides the overlapping veins was visible anymore.

Reysha poked the walls, first with her fingers, then with her dagger. In both cases the strange, pulsing material gave underneath, like a sack filled with water. “Ya gotta wonder how hard you’d have to tear at this to break it open.”

“It’s a dungeon, its structure is unassailable,” Aclysia stated.

“Ya say that, but do you remember the Deathhound tearing through the boss room door?” Reysha hesitated for a moment. “Or did I hallucinate that?”

“You did not,” Apexus assured her.

“Thank fuck,” the redhead exhaled and looked ahead. “Difficult to coordinate in this environment.”

Apexus only nodded. The ground was just as much covered in the veins as the walls were. In the first place, there was no solid difference between ground and walls, the tunnel describing an imperfect cylindrical shape that cut through the ground in a curved path. Currently they were heading downwards, the light always pulsing in their direction. The constant changing of the light levels made it difficult to let their eyes adjust. Whatever was ahead, it only was visible for the brief moment the light travelled through. Then, the darkness swallowed it all.

The footing was bad, the visibility terrible, and there was little space to navigate. Far from optimal conditions.

“Korith, lead,” Apexus decided, trusting his instincts. The kobold let out an affirmative squeak. Apexus dropped to the back of the party, taking the rear. The pulsing ground dulled his tremor sense, but it was still the best they had in case there was an ambush.

Step for step, they continued. The tunnel’s winding eventually became more aggressive. Each curve was another obstacle to finding what was ahead. They turned a corner and Korith stopped. “D-do you see that?” the blonde asked.

Apexus and Reysha strained their eyes. Up ahead, a part of the ceiling was cut open. A bloody red liquid flowed from the cut vein, gathering in thick streams on the ground, hiding the local knot of overlapping vessels under a crimson pool.

“Aclysia,” Apexus only had to say the singular word for the metal fairy to step behind Korith. The advantage of having a tiny frontliner was just how easy it was to aim over her head. For a few seconds, Aclysia considered which spell to use. Palm extended; she loosed a simple Bolt.

The golden spell travelled down the corridor, contesting the reign of the pulses, until it hit the pond. A long hiss sounded down the tunnel, more aggressive than of liquid evaporating alone. Everyone readied their weapons. The pool roiled. The beating light hid the blood. They saw a pillar of crimson. They saw a maw form at the tip. They saw a serpentine body of pure liquid rushing towards them.

Korith planted her feet as firmly as she could and gripped her hammer with both hands. Golden eyes stared ahead. The pace of the creature lagged behind the light. It was hidden once again, then revealed again just as it opened its maw. Liquid flesh split with a squelching sound, revealing a toothless maw with a second set of jaws within. Dagger-like shards of bone protruded from the internal one, only four of them, big enough to secure a grip.

None of the nervousness remained in Korith’s body language. The enemy was before her and hesitation was death. She brought her weapon upwards and turned the head of the bloody serpent into a splatter on the wall.

Reysha didn’t even have time to quip on the monster’s apparent weakness. The head was regenerated within a blink. Korith’s momentum turned her halfway. A deliberate decision that allowed her to bring her tail between her head and the monster’s maw. The creature took the bait, its crystalline eyes focusing on the appendage. Red scales turned as grey as steel. Teeth grinded on an armour they could not break.

A terrible screaming sound filled the cave, loud and unnatural. Reysha rammed her left hand into the head of the monster. Magic whirled around the upper segment of each of her digits, encasing the thick protrusions of the demonic limb in an excavating edge. Blood sprayed as fine mist from the wound.

Apexus twisted around when he felt movement behind them. A smaller serpent, still over three metres long and as thick as Apexus’ torso, had appeared. The direct lunge at his back, he redirected sideways. Flow Manipulation turned the attack into self-harm. Head splattering on the wall, the liquid creature simply let that segment of its body drop and a new head bubbled to the surface.

The humanoid chimera immediately smacked it across the head. Force rippled through the liquid body, bolstered by his Ki, and exploded the creature from within. All over, the surface burst open and the barely coherent body of the creature turned into a geyser of red that seeped swiftly into the ground. Nothing was left behind.

Ahead, Reysha and Korith had dispatched the first snake. “Whyyyy?” Korith whined, wiping blood off her face. That freed her eyes, for the most part, but her golden hair and face only became more covered in the thick crimson.

The tiger girl scratched the back of her head awkwardly. Black skin and thick claws turned back into brown and nails. “In my defence, it fucking worked.”

“Yes but… still,” Korith did not have to put into words why she was upset. No one appreciated being sprayed with viscera. “Did you at least get food out of it?”

“Kinda?” Reysha raised a blood red gemstone. A core, that much was clear. Its presence prompted Apexus to search for something similar on the ground. It took a moment, but he located it. Like the cores of other magical creatures, the energy coming from it was intensely concentrated. “Is it safe?” the tiger girl had the presence of mind to ask.

Apexus, after digesting the gemstone, nodded. “Typical elemental core,” he told her. A point of personal disappointment. Elementals were too far removed from biological structures to net him anything usable, typically speaking. These enemies appeared to be no exception. They had the ability to manipulate the blood in these walls, but not to generate it. Even if Apexus bothered to grow and learn that particular ability, it would not be useful as an acquisition.

Reysha mirthfully popped the gem into her mouth and sucked on it like hard candy. It gradually dissolved, releasing the magic into her. She moaned, the intense taste of magic reminding her of what she had been missing out on for so long. “Thish hitsh the shpoooot,” she slurred, not even bothering to keep her hand from creeping between her legs. “Ooooh, fuuuck, yessshhhh.”

“Find your centre,” Apexus cautioned the swaying Rogue. “No sex until we find a safe place.”

“Ooooh-okay,” Reysha swallowed the last of her enriched saliva. Then she gestured for Korith to keep heading down the corridor.

They continued on, occasionally fighting more of the monsters. The Bloody Serpents relied on their creepiness and the unsteady environment to back them up. Neither worked well on the party, who had fought much worse before. The regenerative abilities of the creatures were bothersome, but could be exhausted through constant pressure.

“It appears the pulsing always points in the direction of the exit,” Aclysia noted, after they came across the third junction. “We will not get fully lost, even if the pheromones fade.”

“Fortunate, I am unsure if I’d be able to maintain the path we followed in my mind indefinitely,” Aclysia commented. “Perhaps we should acquire paper on our next shopping trip.” After a moment’s thought, she sighed.

“Yeah, I hate spending money too,” Korith said.

“That’s not my issue. The paper in the city will be pressed using slave labour at some point of production. It strikes me as distasteful to acquire wares born from such a system.”

Apexus had to give that some thought. “To eat the fruit of the evil tree, because it is convenient,” he said. “When is it justified to compromise for the sake of one’s desires? Can it ever be?”

“There ya go being a monk again,” Reysha giggled. She immediately stopped when several more enemies sprouted from the walls.

Korith rushed ahead, leaping straight into a coiling mass of three of the Bloody Serpents. “For Hoard!” she shouted. A copper flame spread along the head of her warhammer. The fire stuck tightly to it, even as she slammed through the intertwined and melded bodies of the snakes. Only when it hit the ground did it fan out into a carpet of low-glow, copper flame. The flickering fire seemed to vibrate. Its flow increased. Then, it finally exploded. A sound like a small gong getting struck echoed in the tunnel, swiftly swallowed by the veiny walls. The Bloody Serpents were catapulted upwards, burned and shoved simultaneously.

Reysha struck over the head of the kobold. Ramming her demonic hand into the head of one and separating the neck of another with her axe, she retrieved one core and caused a second to fall to the floor along the viscera. The last of the knot of Bloody Serpents was swiftly dispatched by Korith after it landed.

“Think this is going to get hard anytime soon?” Reysha checked out the core. The fingers she held it in swiftly reverted from the black, leathery texture of demon hide to the same brown, striped skin as the rest of her.

“According to the level bracket on the map, we should have appropriate difficulty with the later half of the dungeon, if we make it that deep.” Aclysia turned her attention to the kobold. “We are resource restricted for the first time.”

“S-sorry?” Korith stammered.

“Don’t apologize for being closest to the designs the gods have created.”

“So, I’m a freak, huh?” Reysha asked with a huge grin.

“A crass exaggeration of me calling Korith normal – albeit not entirely inaccurate. The Noir condition does change you from the default of your species.” Aclysia hesitated for a moment. “I must wonder if the possibility of the affliction was within the plans of the gods or if it is another aspect of the evolution of their creation.”

“No clue – say, squishy, wanna try and get it too?” Reysha asked.

“No… no, I kinda like eating normal food, having normal eyes, and… you know, not suffering from slutty hunger pangs.” Korith tossed the two cores she found on the ground over to Reysha. The redhead caught them both, then flicked one further down the line to Apexus. The humanoid chimera caught it in his fist. By the time he opened the hand again, the core was most of the way under the membrane.

Reysha popped both monster remains into her mouth. “More for ush thehn – say, bubble butt, how long ya think we can sustain Korith on what we have?”

“By my estimations, we’ll have enough stag meat to remain fed for about six days. She is not as voracious as either of you.”

“Being big is such a waste of resources. Hoard was wise to make his servants small.” Korith nodded sagely.

“Being big does indeed require additional nourishment,” Apexus said, before casually backhanding a Bloody Serpent that had tried to sneak up on him. One proper strike to the head, and the amalgam of dungeon blood was only seeping splatters. The core bounced off the wall and landed in his carefully placed palm. ‘How much would I struggle with these without the proper skills?’ he wondered.

The answer was likely quite a lot. Reysha made it look easy, ripping the cores out with her hand. While Apexus’ own limbs had the necessary combination of sturdiness and regeneration to pull off the same feat, to push so seamlessly through the surface she required the Edge Martial Art. Similarly, he was blasting apart their structural integrity with the Rippling Palm. Korith’s Copper Strike and defensive skills also made her way more effective. Aclysia’s capacity at killing these things had hardly been tested. She was conserving her mana in case anyone got injured.

With pure stats, they would have been hacking and slashing away at these things. They would have still come out victorious, it would have been much harder though.

‘I best continue my learning,’ Apexus thought.

“I understand now why they thought we were crazy when we said we’d go here,” Korith continued the conversation. “To the normal person, this really is a creepy hellhole. I mean, even I find it ewwy.” She poked a particularly thick vein with her weapon.

“I wonder how many individuals over the years deemed themselves worthy of the challenge and were devoured,” Apexus thought out loud. He had learned enough about human nature to know that some would see the death trap as a challenge. “Even more I wonder if any ever succeeded.”

“Unlikely but not entirely impossible. The gap between a complete novice in combat and a level 10 creature is large but not insurmountable, given proper planning, equipment, and luck,” Aclysia responded. “However, considering what passes for an art of war in these parts…”

Reysha burst out laughing when she recalled the eloquent dance of the Felmer. “They all fucking died.”

“Their arrogance is no excuse to be mirthful in their demise, Reysha!”

“Sorry, sorry… but isn’t it though?”

“It depends on the type of arrogance,” Aclysia conceded just a little ground. “Further, it is not entirely certain whether the Walled Ports would be of a similarly esoteric combat doctrine. If they have to fend off pirates on a regular basis, given their smaller size, they should have a working guard core.”

“Our welcoming committee struck me as disciplined. I do not know about their combat ability. Neither am I sure if they need to be good warriors. The structure of the city makes it easily defended from enemies within and without.”

“We can ask around after we get back. Looking forward to only eating stag meat for the next couple of days, squishy?”

“…No…”