The following morning arrived clear and bright, the mountain air crisp and calm around the ruins of Kadiyan Village. The first rays of dawn filtered through the dense canopy above, scattering dappled light across the forest floor.
Birds sang cheerfully from the treetops, and a gentle breeze rustled through the leaves with a soft, whispering sigh. The whole world seemed still half-asleep, wrapped in peaceful tranquility.
Yet deep within this serene woodland, something foul lurked beneath the calm. Hidden in a mountain hollow roughly 1.5 miles southeast of the ruined village of Kadiyan, a dark cave sat in silence.
Its entrance was an irregular oval shape, like the gaping maw of some grotesque beast, radiating a cold and sinister air. This was the surface entrance to the legendary micro-dungeon.
Outside the cave, on a patch of open ground, a dozen goblins huddled around an enormous iron cauldron. Inside it, a thick green liquid bubbled and churned, filling the air with a pungent, rancid stench.
The smell was overwhelming, like rotting meat mixed with some unidentifiable herb, enough to turn the stomach of anyone who caught a whiff. Yet the green-skinned creatures stared at the pot with glittering, greedy eyes, drool streaming freely from between their jagged teeth.
The goblins crowded eagerly around the cauldron, stirring the foul brew with crude wooden ladles, their bumpy green nostrils twitching as they inhaled the reeking vapor with obvious relish.
Scattered among the goblins were several strange creatures of a different kind. Their bodies were semi-translucent, each roughly the size of a large refrigerator, and they left glistening, sticky trails wherever they moved.
They had no fixed shape, their mass constantly shifting and morphing, one moment flattening into a wide disc, the next moment rising into a small mound. Had it not been for the beetles, earthworms, and ants being slowly enveloped and digested within their bodies, no one would have guessed that these seemingly harmless blobs of green jelly were living monsters at all.
Slimes. One of the most common low-tier magical creatures found in dungeons, renowned for their exceptional resistance to physical attacks, a natural consequence of their fluid, shapeless bodies.
Just beyond this unremarkable monster camp, silent figures materialized from the shadows of the surrounding forest. Their eyes were cold, their gazes utterly devoid of warmth as they looked upon the creatures below.
It was the Ice Hawks Company, all five of them, fully armed and ready.
Felix pressed himself behind the thick trunk of an oak tree. Through the gaps in the leaves, his green eyes studied the layout of the monster den with careful precision.
Around him, Orum, Melina, Ronald, and Raygore each kept to their own cover, watching the camp from a distance.
"A mixed camp of different monster types. This is truly a dungeon's signature," Felix reflected quietly. As a veteran adventurer, he understood the nature of dungeons well.
After years of study, scholars had concluded that every dungeon and labyrinth was, in some sense, alive. These structures could spontaneously generate monsters, and their internal spaces expanded over time. A dungeon that contained a hundred rooms one day might have sprouted fifty more within three days.
Under the dungeon's influence, monster species that would normally be hostile to one another formed temporary clusters, uniting to assault any adventurers who ventured inside.
Felix counted the enemies: thirteen goblins, four slimes.
Since they were all weak, low-tier creatures, his tactical plan was straightforward. A sudden ambush, direct assault. Their group of five was more than enough to crush these rabble with ease.
At that moment, the goblins waiting for their meal chattered away in their guttural tongue, gurgling sounds tumbling over one another.
"We caught another kid today!"
"Oh yeah! This is great!"
"Hurry up and cook it already, I can't wait!"
The goblins drooled thickly, jostling each other in their impatience. Their hideous faces shone with excitement and greed, completely absorbed in anticipation of their meal.
It was at precisely their most unguarded moment that one of the goblins noticed a figure walking slowly toward the camp.
He was a young man of striking beauty, with a cascade of brilliant golden hair and pale, finely sculpted features. He wore an elegant white short-sleeved cotton robe beneath a carefully treated hardened leather cuirass. Sunlight caught his golden hair and set it gleaming, lending him an air of innate nobility.
"A human! More food walking right to us!"
The goblins shrieked with excitement. Felix's arrival ignited their appetite all over again. They dropped their ladles, snatched up their rusted blades and daggers, and surged forward to mob the seemingly delectable human.
Felix, however, showed not a trace of fear. He slowed to a halt roughly twenty meters from the goblin horde.
He closed his eyes. An overwhelming power surged and swelled behind his eyelids, building to a roiling crescendo. His body trembled, not from fear, but from the tide of energy coursing through him. In his veins, the silver dragon bloodline was boiling.
Then Felix snapped his eyes open.
Where his irises had once been a clear, calm blue, they now blazed with a fierce golden light, split by vertical pupils.
The eyes of a dragon. Imperious, noble, inviolable.
A crushing aura of draconic majesty descended without warning.
It rolled across the monster camp like a tidal wave, like a mountain falling from the sky. Every goblin and slime in the clearing convulsed violently, their bodies reacting beyond their control, shuddering as though struck by an invisible hammer.
Terror flooded their eyes. The savage expressions that had twisted their faces moments ago collapsed into pure, helpless panic.
Dragon Pressure. This was the new ability Felix had awakened after his dragon blood surged further to life during his life-or-death battle against the Minotaur. It allowed him to project draconic authority and paralyze weaker creatures with fear.
The goblins let out strangled, trembling cries, their legs giving way beneath them. As low-tier creatures, they had no defense against the primal terror of a dragon bloodline. It was etched into their very instincts, inescapable and absolute.
Felix's Dragon Pressure was a pale shadow of what a true dragon could unleash, but holding these goblins helpless for even a few seconds was enough. In battle, locking down an entire group for mere seconds could mean the difference between a fair fight and a one-sided slaughter.
"Now!" Felix said in a low, sharp voice.
Three figures launched forward in an instant: Raygore, Orum, and Melina.
Each of them gripped a standard-issue steel sword as they tore into the monster camp like three deadly whirlwinds. Since the acid from slimes was known to corrode metal rapidly, Orum's halberd and Raygore's greatsword had been left behind in favor of cheaper standard-issue swords and war hammers to minimize losses.
The ground shook with thunderous force as Raygore activated his combat technique and charged like an unstoppable battering ram straight into the thickest cluster of enemies. His war hammer swept a wide arc, and goblins exploded into paste.
Green-flecked flesh flew through the air in a grotesque spray, painting the ground in a horrible mural of red and green.
From the shadows, Melina appeared before a goblin as if from nowhere. Her sword and dagger flashed in a simultaneous cross-slash, disemboweling it cleanly.
Several goblins scrambled to attack her from behind with their rusted weapons, only to be torn apart by a figure that cut straight through them, reducing them to chunks of scattered meat.
That was Orum, wielding dual steel swords, charging recklessly forward with total abandon against opponents who posed no real threat to him.
A strange, wet sound reached Orum's ears from the flank. He glanced over to see a slime hurling itself at him. He swung his sword in a horizontal slash, the force behind it shearing the slime's upper half clean off and sending it flying. But the lower half showed no sign of pain whatsoever and continued lurching toward him.
He remembered Felix's warning from before the assault. Attack the slime's core.
Orum stamped down hard and leaped into the air, clearing the slime's lunge. As he rose, he fixed his eyes on the creature's lower half, peering into its semi-transparent body.
Amid the half-digested insect husks and bone fragments within, he spotted a pitch-black sphere, hard as stone.
That had to be the core.
As Orum descended, he drove his sword downward in a single thrust. The slime's body writhed and twisted, the round black sphere rolling frantically through its mass to evade the strike, but Orum was too fast. The blade landed without fail, splitting the core cleanly in two.
The slime's body stiffened instantly, then spread across the floor in a puddle of acid that flowed outward in every direction.
A notification appeared at the center of Orum's vision:
[You have slain 1 Slime.]
[Claimable Stage Reward: Beast Organ "Highly Corrosive Body Fluid."]
[Next Stage Reward: Slay 10 Slimes to receive a Slime Beast Organ Upgrade.]
"Highly Corrosive Body Fluid?" Orum frowned and looked down at the standard-issue sword in his hand.
The blade was already smoking faintly, emitting a soft hissing sound. The green liquid splattered onto it from the slime was visibly eating into the steel, corroding it at a pace he could watch with the naked eye.
Within seconds, the once-bright blade had begun to blacken and discolor, its surface pitting and cratering under the assault.
He thought it over. The Beast Organ was powerful, certainly, but taking it right now didn't feel right. Slime acid had an exceptionally strong corrosive effect on metal. In certain situations, that kind of ability could produce remarkable results.
If an enemy's weapons and armor were eaten away mid-battle, the fight would become almost trivially easy.
As long as he could control it perfectly, it might be manageable.
But if he couldn't control it at all, the consequences for everyday life would be rather significant. Every time he broke a sweat, his clothing would dissolve off his body. He'd be wandering around naked.
Orum imagined himself standing stark bare in the middle of a crowded street and shuddered hard.
Better to ask the system panel exactly how this organ behaved before committing to it. Could it be switched on and off at will?
The entire chain of thought took only a split second. In the next instant, Orum was already moving again, cleaving a goblin's skull apart with one clean stroke.
The goblin let out a final strangled shriek, and crimson blood splattered outward.
The panel notification flashed in his vision:
[Goblin Kill Count +1.]
By now, the battle across the camp was nearly over. Felix's Dragon Pressure had proven devastatingly effective. The low-tier creatures had been caught completely off-guard under the suppressive force, and the majority had been cut down in moments.
Melina drifted like a dark phantom through the horde, each movement claiming another life. Raygore was a wrecking ball in human form, leaving a trail of bodies and shattered flesh wherever he passed.
Ronald, though primarily holding back in a support role, had contributed his share of goblin skulls caved in by his war hammer, and the results were no less gruesome for being occasional.
In only a few minutes, the Ice Hawks Company had wiped the entire monster camp from the face of the earth.
Goblin corpses and slime remains lay scattered across the ground, and the mingled blood and acid spreading between them had formed a nauseating swamp underfoot.
"Time to collect the loot!" Ronald rubbed his palms together with enthusiasm, eyes glittering at the prospect of coin.
The most valuable items on goblins were their right ears, which could be exchanged for bounty at the adventurers' hall, two silver coins per ear.
For slimes, the most prized part was the core. Adventurers inevitably had to destroy the core during a fight, but even shattered core fragments were valuable magical materials.
Each pound of core fragments was worth two gold coins, equivalent to twenty days of hard labor for a common worker in Blackwater Town.
Ronald produced a small knife and several sealed vials from his pack. A veteran of many hauls, he worked with practiced efficiency, carefully gathering the core fragments and sealing them away.
Orum and the others spread out through the camp to scavenge for anything else of value. They searched every corner of the goblin den, overturning every loose stone and rummaging through every shadow.
The results were profoundly disappointing. Tattered hides, corroded weapon scraps, and revolting scraps of unidentifiable food. Nothing more.
"Damn it all. These things are criminally poor," Ronald muttered, looking deeply disgruntled. "Not one gemstone ring worth a copper. What a waste of effort."
Melina shook her head. "Can't be helped. Monsters that spawn near a dungeon tend to be worth less than those found in the wild. That's just how it is."
"All right. Let's head inside." Felix straightened his gear and turned his gaze toward the dark mouth of the cave. "We still don't know what kind of treasure this dungeon holds."
The group gathered their spoils and moved toward the entrance.
It was more foreboding up close than it had seemed from a distance. The cave looked as though sunlight had not touched its interior in ten thousand years.
A steady draft of cold air breathed out of the darkness, carrying the damp smell of rot and age. The walls were thick with moss, and droplets of water fell from the ceiling at irregular intervals.
"Light the torches and follow my lead," Melina said, pulling a fat-soaked torch from her pack. Felix used a minor magical technique to light it with ease.
The torchlight leaped and danced across the stone walls, illuminating the cave around them. Runes were carved into the rock, old beyond reckoning, worn nearly smooth with time but still radiating a faint, mysterious energy.
"These runes look ancient," Ronald said, reaching out to run a hand along the carvings on the wall.
"Could be remnants from ten thousand years ago."
"Don't touch the walls, Ronald," Melina said sharply. Ronald pulled his hand back at once.
The group fell into a combat formation and pressed forward into the dungeon's depths. The torchlight threw shifting shadows across the stone, and Melina held her torch raised high as the orange light pushed against the darkness ahead.
Her expression had become unusually serious, her black eyes intent with a focus Orum rarely saw in her. Her beast ears twitched with quiet alertness.
"Stay close to me from here on," Melina said, turning back to look at the group.
Her voice echoed in the corridor, carrying an authority that invited no argument. Her ears trembled slightly at the tips, a sign she had entered a heightened state of vigilance.
As the group's sole Wanderer, dungeon exploration was her domain. In an environment like this, she was their eyes and their judgment.
Her tone grew heavier. "Do not wander. Do not step on any raised stones in the floor. Do not touch any mechanisms you see. Do you understand?"
The concern beneath her words was plain. Dungeons were riddled with traps and triggers, and a single careless step could be fatal. This was not a matter to be taken lightly.
"Understood," said Orum and the others, all nodding seriously.
They followed Melina into the dark.
The interior was more spacious than expected.
The air was thick with the smell of dampness and decay, and water dripped from stalactites overhead with a faint, rhythmic patter. The micro-dungeon's underground layout consisted of a series of chambers connected by deep, shadowed corridors.
The first room was relatively safe, an empty stone hall with long-rotted torch brackets mounted on the walls. The second was somewhat larger, its floor strewn with shattered pottery and rotted wooden crates. Melina inspected it thoroughly before signaling the group to move on.
The third room, however, stopped her cold.
Her ears snapped upright. Her eyes turned razor sharp. Every trained instinct she possessed as a Wanderer fired at once, screaming that something was wrong.
"Whatever you do, don't step on that raised stone," she said, pointing to a slightly elevated slab on the floor, noticeably higher than the surrounding tiles by just a few millimeters.
Her arm then swept toward the far wall, where a row of nearly invisible apertures were concealed in the rock.
Anyone without professional training would never have noticed them. "Arrow slits. Step on the trigger and the wall shoots."
She dropped her voice further. "That door straight ahead reeks of gunpowder. Don't open it under any circumstances, or whoever touches it will be blown apart. We take the side door."
Ronald lurched backward at those words, putting considerable distance between himself and the forward-facing door.
"By the God of Dawn, this dungeon is terrifying!" He wiped the sweat from his forehead, thanking whatever fortune had kept him from walking up and pulling that handle.
Orum felt a quiet chill run through him. Without Melina's professional eye, they would have triggered at least three traps by now.
She proved her worth at every step. Under her guidance, the group navigated around trap after trap, reaching deeper into the dungeon without losing anyone. Her pace was meticulous, every footfall deliberate.
At intervals she crouched to examine irregularities in the floor, or pressed close to the wall and listened for the faint sounds of mechanisms held under tension.
"The trap density here is higher than I expected," she murmured. "We're getting close to the dungeon's core."
After pushing through several more chambers, they arrived at a branching passage. Melina led them down a long, deep corridor that immediately made Orum uneasy. On one side of the corridor, the floor dropped away into a chasm of absolute darkness, with no railing or barrier of any kind.
On the other side, a solid stone wall ran the length of the passage, broken at regular intervals by recessed alcoves, each roughly two meters deep and tall enough for a standing adult.
The corridor was barely three meters wide. To glance over the open edge was to look into a black void with no visible bottom, the very image of an abyss.
"What are these alcoves for?" Felix asked, studying the recesses in the wall with a puzzled look.
"Could be decorative. Or they could be..." Melina began.
She stopped.
She stared at the corridor ahead. Her ears shot straight up.
From somewhere above came a deep, rolling rumble.
The blood drained from her face. A flash of alarm crossed her eyes.
The rumbling grew louder. It built and swelled, like approaching thunder, like the roar of some immense beast, reverberating through the narrow corridor and filling it completely.
The entire dungeon began to tremble. Grit and stone chips rained from the ceiling.
Before the others had processed what was happening, Melina spun around with a look of pure, blazing urgency on her face.
"Get into the alcoves! Now!"
There was a desperation in her voice unlike anything Orum had heard from her before. Something vital and primal, like a person screaming a warning over the sound of an oncoming train.
The group moved as though jolted by lightning. Melina was already dragging people by the arm, shoving them toward the recesses. Orum didn't fully understand what was coming yet, but Melina's hand closed around his arm and hauled him into the nearest alcove before he could think. Felix and Ronald dove into the adjacent one. Raygore's huge frame forced itself into another, barely squeezing inside.
Then it appeared.
From behind them, a colossal iron sphere came thundering down the corridor with a sound like the end of the world.
It was perfectly smooth, clearly the product of magical construction. It moved at breathtaking speed, crushing every raised stone in its path to powder, the collision producing a deafening roar that pressed on the eardrums like a physical force.
The sphere must have weighed tens of tons at minimum. As it rolled, the entire dungeon seemed to buckle under its passing. The ceiling shed great slabs of rock. The floor cracked and buckled in its wake, leaving behind a deep furrow where it had passed over. Every step it crossed was pulverized to rubble.
Felix, Ronald, and the others broke out in cold sweat. Without Melina's warning, a direct hit from that sphere would have reduced every one of them to paste. Not a doubt in the world about it.
"What in the name of every god is that mechanism?!" Ronald's voice shook audibly. He had never seen anything so monstrous in all his years as an adventurer. This wasn't a dungeon. It was an abattoir.
The memory of himself running his hand cheerfully along the wall not twenty minutes ago made Ronald's face go chalk white. No amount of gold would ever convince him to touch a dungeon wall again.
Orum, pressed flat against the back of the alcove, felt the same staggered disbelief.
"This dungeon is completely insane," he thought. "A rolling boulder trap that size? One hit and you're gone, full stop."
He could feel the vibration of the iron sphere's passage through the stone at his back, and the physical proximity of something that massive moving that fast, with nothing between him and it but the depth of a recess in the wall, made his heart pound in a way battles rarely managed.
The iron sphere thundered onward and slowly, mercifully, its roar faded into the distance. The trembling subsided. The stone dust settled. Silence reclaimed the dungeon.
Melina eased her head out of the alcove first, scanning the corridor carefully before signaling that it was safe to emerge.
"Oh, God of Dawn above..."
Ronald pressed a hand to his chest. His legs were still unsteady, and the cold sweat on his forehead was slow to dry. For one terrible instant back there, he had genuinely believed he was going to die in this hole.
Felix stared at the deep groove the sphere had carved into the corridor floor and drew a long, slow breath. "If Melina hadn't reacted in time, we'd all be dead," he said quietly.
"This is what dungeons truly are," Melina replied, her voice still carrying a faint tremor. "One mistake, and you don't walk away."
Then, with visible effort, she let the fear go. A hint of anticipation crept back into her expression.
"But the end of the dungeon should be just ahead of us now."