Chapter Text
Dungeon air always tasted different to Zahna. Even as soon as you crossed the threshold, it wasn't that there was a staleness to the air, like one would expect underground. In a way, the air was almost more alive. It tasted electric on her tongue, like air during a storm, but without the motion she associated with that.
It was nice going into a dungeon alone. Modern dungeons, of course, required full groups of adventurers to clear. Those dungeons had Artifact Cores to ensure that there were enough mobs to face a group of any size, and to ensure that the monsters would not actually risk injuring anyone. You just wouldn't be allowed to enter if you didn't have the requisite group. But there was a certain peace to not having all those people around. The dungeon Zahna was in right now was a natural dungeon, and as such, technically posed a threat to her.
Technically.
The dungeon was a simple two room affair. It was just connected caves filled with a natural ambient light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. Its walls were smooth, and lacked any of the stalactites and stalagmites that marked a cave formed by water. The first room had held three bipedal serpentkin Zahna had already cut through.
Now it was time for the boss. The creature in front of her was one she had gotten used to seeing. The first and final boss of this dungeon. She was fascinating to look at. Not like the monsters Zahna saw in artifact dungeons. Those mostly looked like humanoid suits of armor. This dungeon boss was a lamiaform, so she had the body of a twenty foot green and blue scaled serpent from the hips down.
Above the hips, however, she had the figure of a beautiful woman wearing silken armor. She was so beautiful that Zahna wished that dungeon mobs were people, not just mindless automata controlled by the dungeon. The fact that the lamiaform had the head of a cobra made her appearance more enticing, not less.
In books that Zahna read between runs, bosses like this one became intelligent through some foul magic and seduced young heroines into compromising positions. People said those books were deviant, but they weren't yet outlawed, so Zahna still enjoyed them. If that made her a deviant, she'd proudly wear that title.
Her love of other women already earned it in some eyes. Her use of transformation magic to get a proper body for herself earned it in others.
Zahna took a deep breath and raised her blade, pointing it at the monster. “Hey there again, Severine,” she said. “Would you consider dropping your good loot today?”
The lamiaform stared at her wordlessly while the blade gave Zahna the creature’s stats. She rolled her eyes. It was impossible to get Echoblades to stop the preamble, and half of it was wasted energy on boosting Zahna’s ego.
I can tell you’re back in the Dungeon of Nameless Dreams! This dungeon is beneath your power, but I understand that you might want to enjoy an easy time. Let’s delve into what this creature can do to make sure you’re adequately prepared, Zahna! Don’t worry, I have the information available for you, although an adventurer as talented you doesn’t need this information!
Severine, the Shifting Scales
Level: 5 (Boss)
Attributes
Strength: C
Agility: A
Speed: A
Vitality: D
Energy: A
Willpower: S (Dungeon Mob, has Immutable Will)
Known Abilities:
- Venom Strikes: Severine’s attacks carry a paralytic venom that slow their victim, degrading Agility and Speed by one grade. During phase two, this can stack a second time.
- Poison Nova: Severine sends out a wave of poison that rolls along the ground, dealing damage and applying a weakening poison degrades Strength and Vitality by one grade. During phase two, this can stack a second time.
- Second Phase: Once Severine is near death, she will heal and sprout two additional heads. Her Strength and Vitality increase to B grade.
As you can see, well within your power. Would you like to review your own stats?
“Sure,” Zahna said to the sword. She knew what to expect, but her mother had been an adventurer before her. One of mom’s rules had been “Always check your stats before a fight.” Her mother had been old school, running dungeons before the Echoblades came into wide use, so a lot of those rules didn’t matter… but Zahna still followed them.
She hoped to one day be half the adventurer her mother had been.
Great! I’m happy to help you make sure you are making the best decisions in this fight, although I know you already have this!
Zahna
Level: 1
Class: Null (Echoblade Handles class abilities)
Attributes
Strength: C
Agility: B
Speed: B
Vitality: A
Energy: D
Willpower: Null (Echoblade Handles willpower)
Known Abilities:
- Echoblade: Zahna wields an Echoblade. It has a level of 20. Her Echoblade handles her movements in combat, providing her with superior fighting skills, making her more than a match for any foe! She has a Premium Tier Leyline link to the Artificer’s Guild, allowing her Echoblade access to the combined strength and skills of 100 Warrior Spirits!
- Wraithforged Armor: In combination with her Echoblade, Zahna is wearing Wraithforged Armor. It has a level of 20, and increases Zahna’s Strength, Agility, Speed, and Vitality to match her level. (Grades remain unchanged). Requires the Echoblade to function.
- Classless: Zahna has no class, and needs none because her Echoblade and Wraithforged Armor handles fighting for her!
- Experience Sharing: Zahna’s experience gained goes into her Echoblade and Wraithforged Armor, strengthening both! 10% of Experience gained goes back to the Artificer’s Guild.
As you can see, the bonuses I provide more than make up for the level gap, and your superior vitality should resist the venom attacks of the Lamiaform, although I still will make sure we evade its attacks. Shall we begin?
Zahna answered by raising the Echoblade overhead and stepping into Severine's room. The moment she entered the room, the dungeon mob reacted. Hissing and slithering forward, low to the ground, her arms spread wide and claws stretched out, Severine was fast.
Attribute grades were based on level. Zahna’s speed was technically only one grade lower than Severine. However, Severine was four levels ahead of Zahna. In terms of speed, this wouldn't even be a contest. Really, in any area, Zahna had no chance against this creature.
Except she had an Echoblade.
The blade slashed down to parry the creature's claws. Easily batting the attacks aside. Zahna could feel the movement through her arm, could feel her body take the action, but she wasn't involved in anything going on below her neck right now. She leapt over the creature's head, slashing down and drawing a thin line of blood from the creature's skull, landing behind it. The Lamiaform hissed and turned, but Zahna's Echoblade lashed out again.
The creature reared back, a line of blood appearing on its chest. The Lamiaform let loose a poisoned nova, and Zahna's Echoblade pulled her up to leap over the creature's roiling poison. It lashed out again, catching the creature in the arm, and with the difference in power between the creature and the blade, Zahna was able to disarm the creature in the most literal possible way from that one strike.
As it had been for the past thirty days, the fight was easy. Almost boring. The Echoblade tapped into the vestiges of deceased adventurers. It couldn’t think, not really. It just could imitate what those past adventurers would have most likely done in response to any given scenario, and provide some of their powers. Zahna had just gotten the Knight type blade, giving her melee fighting skills without magic.
The Lamiaform started to shift into phase two, but it took more than a few seconds to make the shift. Zahna’s blade thrust towards the boss’s heart, and it died, bright red blood spurting from the wound and splashing across the walls. Another boss slain.
This was everything Zahna had wanted her entire life. She was an adventurer. Her mother was her hero. This had been her dream. To finally get everything she ever wanted by fighting in dungeons and earning riches and fame and having the skills needed to stand with others like her if a true threat to the world ever arose again.
So why did it feel so fucking hollow?
She bent down as the boss’s body dissolved back into the dungeon that spawned it, blood clearing away as well. It all turned to vapor that looked like blue steam, and as Zahna inhaled it went into her lungs. That substance was not actually steam, but was condensed mana that was colloquially known as experience. When breathed in, it could fortify the body and be used to form a core that would allow for a proper class to develop.
Of course, Zahna's experience all flowed instead into the Echoblade she held.
What was left behind was a crystal on the ground about the size of Zahna's hand. A mob heart. She picked it up and crushed it, holding her breath as if doing so would somehow alter the whims of the dungeon to favor her.
Loot:
Venomous Sword (Applies poison damage on melee strikes.)
Serpent Egg x3 (Throw at an enemy to summon a serpent that will attack them, dealing poison damage)
2 Silver, 3 Copper
“Damn it,” Zahna said, but there was no heat to the words. She dropped the useless items to the ground. She still wanted the mount’s summoning stone to drop. This was where her mother had gotten it. The winged serpent mount that she had ridden into battle for most of her career. That was all Zahna really wanted at this point. She wasn't even sure what she would do when it finally dropped. And part of her wondered if it still would.
Still, what else was there to do?
Dungeoning had lost its fun ages ago. She could level up her sword still. Twenty was by no means the maximum. But so what? Just go to another dungeon that was actually level appropriate, and wait for four other random people so that she could go through? No one did parties or guilds anymore, not the way they used to. The primary benefit to that was it gave you a group of people you got to know and learned to work with and fight alongside. But when the Echoblade did the fighting for you, you didn't need that community. All that was left were the difficult parts, such as scheduling multiple people and handling any conflicts that arose.
So she had quit and come here. She wanted that damn mount. It was about the only thing she cared about-
“Who are you?”
The voice came out of nowhere and startled Zahna so badly she leapt a full foot into the air. When she turned back to the entrance of the boss's room, there was a woman standing there. She wore a thick cloak and hood hiding her features. “Gods of Sun and Void,” Zahna said, her heart beating like a blacksmith’s apprentice, fast and irregular and unskilled. “Who are you?”
“I believe I asked first,” the woman said. “You have come here every day for several weeks now. Why?”
"Why do you care?" Zahna asked. "And how do you know? Have you been watching me?"
"I know some things about this dungeon. I have been watching it for far longer than you've been coming here." There was something odd about her voice, although Zahna couldn't quite place it. "I might be able to help, but I need to know what you want."
“Okay, sure. Why not?” Zahna said, getting frustrated. She knew she didn’t look like much right now. Her blond hair was cropped close to her head to keep it out of the way of her Echoblade. She kept her blade and armor simple, although both had a slight sepia tint to them that she couldn’t seem to get the gear to rid itself of. She was dirty from weeks of camping, and she was irritated because the weeks out here hadn’t magically fixed her restless malady.
She just wanted to go and get to an inn tonight. Have a real bath with hot water. Find a cute girl at a tavern and pretend she was going to work up the courage to ask for a dance, then fail to do so and instead crawl into the tavern bed and read a smutty novel about dungeon monsters and finger-fuck herself cross-eyed.
But instead this woman was stalling her.
"Well, then, what is it you desire?" the woman asked.
"I'm here for the mount." Zahna said, "The Midnight serpent this dungeon used to drop. My mother had it, and I was hoping to get one for myself.”
“So you keep coming back, week after week?” the woman asked.
"Of course I do," Zahna said. “It has a low drop chance, obviously. It's a mount. I have to keep trying.”
“And what if I offered it to you?” the woman said. “If I told you that this mount dropped from this dungeon years ago, and I had one I could give you right now. Would you take it?”
"What kind of question is that?" Zahna asked. Now she was really getting annoyed, and she ran her hands through her scratchy, poorly cut hair, realizing how badly she wanted to grow it out. “No. Obviously not.”
“Why not?” the woman asked. She hadn’t moved this entire conversation. Zahna’s irritation was starting to boil over.
“Because if I just wanted to buy it, I’d still be running Artifact Dungeons for money until I could afford it!” Zahna snapped. “But I want to earn it, same way my mother did.”
“Why?” the woman asked. “You don’t need to earn it. It could be handed to you.”
“Because it feels wrong,” Zahna said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go.”
The woman raised her hand and clenched her fist. There was a sound of stone grinding against stone followed by a horrific boom that shook the dungeon air. “No,” the woman said.
Zahna froze for the first time realizing that maybe annoyance was not the appropriate emotional response to a mysterious woman appearing in an out-of-the-way dungeon. "What did you just do?" Zahna asked.
"I closed the entrance. I don't want us to be disturbed." She did so in the casual tones of someone saying she cooked dinner over fire, while describing an act so contrary to reason she might as well have said she flew to the sun and back on the power of her own screams.
"That's not possible," Zahna said. "Only a dungeon can close its own entrance."
“Correct.”
Zahna took a deep breath. “Who… are you?”
“I am an avatar of the Dungeon of Nameless Dreams." The woman said. She started to disrobe, moving slowly. "You are the first adventurer in quite some time to run my dungeon more than once. I wanted to know why."
“And… now that you have?” Zahna asked. Zahna had started to worry that it wasn't going to be possible. She was glad that the dungeon was giving her a chance. This whole thing was surreal as hell.
Dungeons didn't talk to people.
Most people didn't even believe that natural dungeons were sentient beings, arguing that they were more like natural processes that had been replaced by human creation and were no longer needed. Artificial dungeons weren’t sentient, any more than the Echoblades were, so why would the natural ones?
Zahna was in the camp that believed they had intelligence but had never thought that she'd talk to an avatar of one, whatever that even meant.
Also, a small part of her was aware she was talking to what was, technically, both a woman and a monster, and said monster woman was stripping in front of her.
The woman pulled her robe aside, revealing… a disappointingly human figure. The Avatar was beautiful, to be sure. She was green, and covered in scales from head to toe, and had red and blue feathers in place of hair. Her bust was curvaceous to match her hips, her lips full although flat and expressionless, and her eyes yellow and slitted in a cross-like pattern. She wore clothes under that, a silk wrap dress that hugged her chest enticingly and ended well above her knees to allow for mobility and showed off thighs Zahna could die happy between.
She looked very much like a woman who just had some scales and feathers. Part of Zahna had hoped she’d look more… monstrous.
Get a grip on your desires, girl, Zahna chided yourself. She can control this dungeon, if she wishes to trap you here forever she could oh gods of Sun and Void why is that making you more turned on?
“I am going to offer you a deal,” the Avatar said, unaware of Zahna’s inner monologue. “You and I will spar. If you win, I will make it so the Mount you seek has a chance to drop from Severine. It was never going to drop without this intervention, but now I will make it possible.”
“Thank you,” Zahna said. “And if I lose?” She dreaded the answer to that question.
"If you lose, you will cast aside your Echoblade and your Wraithforged armor. You will not touch those fucking devices again for a year and a day.”
That caught Zahna off guard. She'd expected something worse and hoped for something hotter. "Why? Apologies, I don't mean to object. I just don't understand the request."
The Avatar met Zahna's gaze, and she felt herself shrink a bit. The woman looked so contemptuous right now. Her lips twisted in a sneer, like they were discussing something profoundly distasteful.
"I do not require comprehension for compliance," the Avatar said, her voice as smooth as a blade sliding into a beating heart. "I merely require obedience. Do we have an accord?"
"What if I say no?"
“Then I re-open the dungeon, and you walk out. I do not change the chance of the mount dropping, so you will never get what you desire and will have no reason to return.”
“Do I have time to think about it?” Zahna asked.
“No. This is your only chance.”
Zahna pointed her Echoblade at the avatar. It sensed her intent and gave her a readout.
I don’t have prior information on this particular being, but I can read her energy very well! Good news is, you are still more than capable of handling her!
Severine, the Shifting Scales
Level: Estimate of 10 (Boss)
Attributes
Strength: B
Agility: A
Speed: S
Vitality: A
Energy: SSS
Willpower (assumed): S (Dungeon Mob, has Immutable Will)
Known Abilities:
- None. However, the Echos within me have fought dungeon avatars before. We can reasonably expect her to have summoning abilities, as well as the venom abilities of Severine. She also likely can form Venom Cores to create spell effects. Expect shapeshifting as well, possibly into a serpentine form.
Her level cannot be higher than 10 based on my readings. With your armor and blade being level 20, she cannot reasonably fight you and win.
"You’re intelligent." Zahna said. "My power exceeds yours by an order of magnitude, I’m twice your level. I don’t want you to die.”
“"You are hardly even Iron Rank," the Avatar said, using the older method of talking about stats from before the system. The system was far older than the Echoblades. Zahna's mother had used them. As had her mother before her. But the dungeon was likely far older than any person Zahna had ever met. “That… thing is powerful. You are not.”
"Still, it's hardly a fair fight," Zahna said.
“That is correct,” the avatar said. She folded her arms behind her back, grabbing her elbows. “I will fight you without using any of my mob hearts or my hands.”
“That’s not what I meant!” Zahna shook her head. “I’ve never believed I could talk to a dungeon! I don’t want to kill you the day we meet.”
“You will not. Even if this body dies, I am not the dungeon. I am her Avatar. A fragment of her mind and of her power. She can reform me, the same as any other mob.”
“Fine,” Zahna said. She’d done her due diligence, and she was ready to get on with this. “Can we talk more after the fight? Win or lose?”
“Perhaps,” the Avatar said. “We shall see how I feel. Allow me to slip into something more comfortable.”
Before Zahna could ask what the avatar meant, her body started to shift. While her arms remained behind her back, a tail unfurled from between her legs. Stretching out a good eight feet behind the figure and ending in a cruel scythe-like blade. Her feet became digigrade, putting the woman up on wide, demonic hooves. Four tentacles unfurled from her back, each twice as long as her arms ended in a starfish-like appendage that flexed to taste the air.
Zahna went weak in the knees, and didn’t want to interrogate exactly which emotion made her heart race.
She went into a crouch, pointing her blade at the Avatar… and it wavered in her grip.
What?
The Avatar moved.
She crossed the distance between herself and Zahna in a flash. Zahna brought the blade up to block the woman's strike, but the woman's hands were still behind her back. There was no blade to parry. Instead, the woman leaned in for a headbutt, and Zahna's Echoblade barely pulled her out of the way. The woman pressed the advantage, her tentacles lashing out from the sides, and the Echoblade went wild in Zahna's grasp, twisting and turning, trying to parry the attacks.
The fight was happening almost faster than Zahna could follow. The way high-level fights with the Echoblade always felt. But she could also tell it was different. The Echoblade's movements were swift and faster than the avatar, but also erratic. The avatar ducked and wove, easily evading Zahna's strikes. Just when it felt like the Echoblade was getting a grip on the fight, the Avatar grabbed onto the ceiling with two tentacles and swung in, kicking Zahna in the chest hard, sending her flying back across the room.
Zahna hit the back wall and coughed as she spat something up, and a coppery taste filled her mouth. The Echoblade sprang up before the avatar could reclose the distance, intercepting a charge that… didn’t come.
Instead the Avatar’s tentacles lashed in from both sides, grabbing Zahna’s wrist and twisting hard. Zahna screamed in pain, and the blade fell from her grip. The Avatar whirled Zahna around, pressing her face into the stone wall of the dungeon.
Then one of the tentacles came rushing at the back of Zahna’s skull. At the last second it diverted, punching a hole in the stone wall next to Zahna’s head. Zahna coughed as she was showered with stone dust, and then the Avatar was there, right behind Zahna, pressing her into the stone again. “I expected a real fight. Where is your power now?” the Avatar growled in Zahna’s ear. Her voice was deeper now, more resonant, and filled with a sadistic hunger.
“I-I-I need my sword.” Zahna stammered over the words, acutely aware this creature could do anything it wanted to her. Once again she was weak in the knees, and once again she did not try to interrogate the emotion behind that.
“So your power is on the floor?” the Avatar asked. Her breath was hot against the back of Zahna’s neck.
“Yes!” Zahna gasped.
“Wrong,” the Avatar growled. “If I can take away your power by disarming you, where is your power?”
“I don’t have any!” Zahna shouted. “The sword has the power, not me!”
“Good girl,” the Avatar said, purring the words, and now Zahna was certain what emotion she was feeling from this. She probably should be trembling with fear, but right now what she wanted was for the Avatar to ravish her.
Or at least not kill her. That’d be nice.
Instead, the Avatar let her go, and Zahna let out a sigh of relief that certainly had no tinges of disappointment in it. No ma'am, no disappointment at all, nothing like that. She was very normal about what had just happened.
“How did you do that?” Zahna asked. “You didn’t get that much more powerful, did you?”
“This form doesn’t increase my power in the slightest. I’m just more comfortable fighting in it,” the Avatar said. “But I have something you lack.”
“What is it?” Zahna asked.
“Skill.” She shook her head and finally moved her hands away from her back, forming a pair of tongs from the air. She walked over to Zahna’s dropped Echoblade, moving to pick it up with the appliance. “This thing knows nothing. It acts purely on probabilities. A skilled warrior will defeat one every time. On top of that, I do not have a body plan most of the souls it mimics have seen before. It cannot model the probabilities without prior context.”
“But-“ Zahna said, but the Avatar kept talking.
“Normally, that armor would protect you for long enough to win regardless with the power difference, but the link requires you to hold the blade. Once I grabbed your wrist, nothing protected you against the effects of leverage. That’s the difference between us. Disarm you? You’re an untrained warrior in a fancy tin can. Disarm me? I’m still an Avatar. Now.” She turned to face Zahna fully. “Strip.”
For a moment Zahna turned bright red, her heart becoming a woodpecker on a mission… and then she remembered the deal included removing the Wraithforged Armor. “What will you do with them?” Zahna said, moving to grab her buckles.
“I promised you a year and a day. I should have made you keep off them for your life, but I knew you would reject that. Once your time has passed, you can come back and retrieve them if you so wish.”
“Why?” Zahna asked. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because you showed a willingness to persist when you didn’t get what you wanted immediately,” the Avatar said. “That is a rare trait. I believe that you will find what you truly want if you have to learn how to fight.”
“I know how to fight,” Zahna said. The next moment, she put her breastplate on the floor. The breastplate she had discarded because she had just lost a battle. The battle she had lost because she didn’t know how to fight without the Echoblade. “Well, I do,” Zahna said, not meeting the Avatar’s gaze. “I’m not strong without it, but I can remember the fights. I know how they go.”
“No. You do not. You know nothing.”
“Then teach me,” Zahna said.
The Avatar froze, and for the first time seemed shocked. “What?”
“There are people who fight without Echoblades. I know they exist, but they are not common, and I don't know how to find them. "But seeing you just now…" she trailed off, at a loss for words. "Please, I'm begging you."
“You would be a Dungeon Knight?” the Avatar asked.
“I don’t know what that means,” Zahna said. “I can guess, but…”
“That would be your class. You would become a Dungeon Knight. Not right away. You’d start as my squire. You’d have to form your core. It will allow you to learn my skills. You would not share in my power, but you would be empowered within my halls, and you could lead my mobs outside of my dungeon. You would be my creature, for me to command. If you would disobey, I will cast you out, and you’ll need to forge a new class.”
“Yes,” Zahna said. “Yes, I would.”
“You will never touch one of those things again,” the Avatar said. “I will not have my Knight be beholden to such a device.”
“Done,” Zahna said, not even hesitating to think.
“I will not be a kind mistress. I will be cruel. I will punish you when you fail. I will praise you when you succeed. You will be my hound, and I will sic you where you’re needed.”
“Agreed.” Her heart was racing still, but now it was fear. Fear that the Avatar would cast her out. Fear that the Avatar would reject her.
That fight had been the first fight in years where Zahna had felt something. Multiple things. Many of them confusing. But she’d felt alive in a way she never had before. She’d felt something stir, and not just in her loins. She’d felt the old craving, the desire to be an adventurer, and like a beast that had been locked away she was now ravenous for that feeling yet again.
The Avatar got a faraway look, and then a new voice sounded. It was feminine, and sounded like the Avatar, but was…. More. More layered, more textured, more emotional. And it wasn’t with her ears that Zahna heard it. It was with her whole being that this word was heard, and for the first time Zahna knew the dungeon herself was speaking.
<Kneel.>
Zahna did without hesitation. The Avatar picked up the discarded venomous sword that had dropped from Severine. She walked over and placed it on Zahna’s shoulders, first right, then left.
“You will be tested,” the Avatar said. “You will be tried. She will give you freely anything you need to survive, but she will give you no power you do not earn.”
“I accept,” Zahna said.
“Then rise. Tomorrow begins the first day of your testing. If you are unworthy, you will be discarded. I expect you to prove otherwise.” the Avatar spread her fingers, and once again the door ground near the entrance to open the dungeon. “Gather your belongings. You will be back by morning.”
“Thank you. And… what should I call you?”
“Aletha,” the Avatar said. “It is both my name and the one she wishes to be known by. Now. Go. We have much to prepare before you return.”
Zahna ran for the first time in years without her Wraithforged armor. Her legs were burning in seconds. Her lungs were burning in minutes.
It felt like being alive.