Chapter 23:The Merged Floor
The seventeenth floor was a dissonant merge. The rough, natural cave walls of the upper levels began to intersect with dressed stone blocks—ancient, mortarless, and perfectly fitted. It looked as if a natural cavern had been violently bisected by a long-forgotten hallway, or a buried structure was slowly being consumed by the dungeon's growth. The air held the damp chill of a cave and the dry, dusty stillness of a tomb.
Azazel ran a hand along the seam where rugged rock met smooth, alien masonry. "Hey, Reginleif. What's up with the walls? The cave aspect is just... mixing with brickwork."
Reginleif examined the junction, her brow furrowed. "I don't know."
"Are you serious?" he asked, turning to her. In a world of power and monsters, this was what stumped her?
Before she could form a retort, the new environment introduced itself.
A low, grinding rumble echoed down the hybrid corridor, a sound of great weight moving with deliberate, crushing purpose. From a side passage formed of crumbling brick and stalactites, it emerged.
The Black Bearbug.
It was the size of a grizzly, but any resemblance to a natural creature ended there. Its body was a fortress of glossy, obsidian-black chitin, segmented like plate armor. Six powerful, claw-tipped legs carried its bulk with a surprising, ground-shaking grace. Its head was a nightmare of serrated mandibles, dripping a clear fluid that sizzled where it hit the stone. Faint red pinpoints of light burned in the depths of its armored skull. Most unsettling were the small, tear-shaped crystals studding its shell, which shimmered with a sickly internal light, pulsing in time with the dungeon's hidden heart.
It didn't roar. It assessed them with a chilling, insectoid intelligence, its glowing gaze sweeping from Azazel's kukri to Reginleif's readied stance.
Then it charged. Not with blind fury, but with the terrifying momentum of a landslide. It was fast for its size, closing the distance in a heartbeat, a front leg lashing out in a swipe meant to cleave Azazel in two.
He dove, the wind of the passing claw ruffling his hair. The impact where he'd stood shattered stone and brick alike. Can't parry that. Can't shadow-bind it. Not anymore.
"Flank it! Its legs!" he shouted, his voice tight. He was just a man with a knife now. The rules had changed.
Reginleif was already a blur. She used the uneven terrain—a fallen block here, a protruding rock there—to ricochet around the Bearbug's side. As it turned its massive head to track Azazel, she struck. A Piercing Feather, aimed with surgical precision, shot for the thinner armor at the joint of its middle leg. It struck with a sharp crack, and a fissure appeared in the chitin. The Bearbug shuddered, a pained, grinding hiss escaping its mandibles.
Enraged, it ignored Azazel and pivoted towards her. It raised a foreleg and stomped.
Earthquake Stomp.
The shockwave was physical. The floor—both natural stone and ancient brick—heaved. Reginleif was thrown off her feet, crashing into the wall. The air was knocked from her lungs.
The Bearbug pressed its advantage, mandibles gaping to crush her where she lay.
Azazel didn't have magic. He had timing. He sprinted, not at the head, but at the damaged leg. As the creature leaned forward to bite, he put all his weight and momentum behind a single, two-handed downward chop with his kukri, aiming for the crack Reginleif had made.
The blade bit deep into the joint. Black, viscous fluid spurted. The leg buckled. The Bearbug's lunge became a stumbling crash, its mandibles snapping shut inches from Reginleif's head, shattering the brick beside her.
Screeching in fury and pain, the monster thrashed. The crystals on its carapace flared brightly.
"Crystal Shard Burst."
With a sound like breaking glass, the tear-shaped crystals exploded outwards in a deadly hail of obsidian shrapnel.
Azazel threw himself flat behind a large stone block. He heard shards ping and shatter against it. Reginleif rolled into a recess in the wall, the projectiles whistling past.
In the moment after the burst, the Bearbug was vulnerable, its regenerating shell momentarily thin. It was also between them, facing Reginleif's alcove.
"Now!" Azazel roared.
Reginleif exploded from her cover. Not with a dagger thrust. She planted both hands on the floor and used a concentrated Wind Burst to launch herself upward, over the Bearbug's head. As she passed above its glowing red eye-stalks, she dropped, driving a dagger with all her weight into the base of its skull, where the armor plates met.
At the same moment, Azazel charged from the other side. He didn't aim for the body. He jammed his kukri into the gaping wound on the buckled leg and levered with all his might, using the weapon as a pry bar.
The Bearbug's world ended in a split-second pincer movement. Reginleif's dagger severed its nerve cord. Azazel's leverage tore the damaged leg clean off.
A final, grinding shudder wracked its massive form. The red light in its eyes died. It collapsed forward, a dead weight of armor and cooling ichor, its crystalline stubs already beginning to dim.
Silence, heavy and panting, filled the strange, merged hallway.
They had won. Without his Mythic. Through sheer, brutal coordination and exploiting a moment of opportunity.
As they caught their breath, a new, familiar sound reached them—a soft, gelatinous shlorp. From a crack in the ancient masonry, a massive, quivering blue form oozed into the corridor, blocking the path ahead.
A Great Slime. Its single core glowed with a predatory light, sensing easy prey tired from a hard fight.
---
The Great Slime quivered, a wall of translucent blue jelly blocking the hybrid corridor. Its core pulsed mockingly from within its depths.
Azazel and Reginleif attacked. He slashed with his kukri, shearing off a chunk of gelatinous flesh. Reginleif's daggers struck in a flurry, each stab leaving a momentary hole. But before they could pull their weapons back, the wounds sealed shut with a wet shloop, the stolen mass simply reforming from elsewhere in its body. They dodged its slow, engulfing lurches and struck again. And again. Each attack was met with perfect, silent regeneration.
Azazel stepped back, his breath coming hard. "There's something wrong with this one. It's not tiring. It's not losing mass."
Reginleif eyed the pulsing core, her expression grim. "This one has insane regeneration. We need to find a way to obliterate the core completely in one shot. Otherwise, we'll exhaust ourselves on jelly."
Azazel tried other tactics. He attempted to lure it onto unstable ground. He threw rocks to distract it. Nothing worked. The slime was a simple, perfect engine of consumption and repair.
"Azazel," Reginleif said, her voice cutting through his frustration. "I have an idea. Watch and learn."
Before he could question her, she moved. She didn't run at the slime. She ran up the wall of the mixed corridor, using a short burst of wind at her feet to gain extra height. She reached the apex of her jump, high above the slime, and inverted her body. Daggers held point-down, she aimed directly at the glowing core visible below the surface.
She didn't throw them. She fell.
As she dropped, she unleashed a continuous, focused torrent of wind pressure from her entire body, not outwards, but downwards, channeling it through her daggers. It wasn't an attack; it was a piston.
The air screamed. The force was so immense it visibly compressed the air between her and the slime into a shimmering lens.
She struck.
The high-pressure column hit the slime's surface and did not stop. It drove through the gelatinous body like a hydraulic press, transferring all its kinetic force directly into the core before the surrounding slime could even react to redistribute the mass.
There was a wet, percussive POP.
The slime didn't just split. It exploded. A shockwave of blue jelly splattered across the walls, floor, and ceiling. The core shattered into a thousand dull fragments. What remained was a shallow, empty crater in the stone floor.
Reginleif landed in a crouch amid the dripping remains, shaking slime from her blades. "What did you think of that idea?" she asked, a hint of smugness in her tired voice.
Azazel stared at the obliteration site. "You… you crushed it. You used pure force to bypass the body and shatter the core from the inside."
"It's one of the only sure ways to destroy a core that regenerates that fast," she said, wiping her face.
A new, different glugging sound echoed from a grate in the ancient brickwork. Another slime oozed forth. This one was clearer, almost transparent, its body shimmering with suspended water.
"Looks like there's another one," Reginleif sighed. "But it's a Water Slime. Well, this is going to be annoying."
The Water Slime didn't lurch. It contracted and then fired a high-pressure jet of water like a cannon. The stream sheared a chunk of rock from the wall. The duo scattered, diving for cover as more pressurized jets shot after them, forcing them into a frantic dance of dodges and rolls around the room.
Watch and learn, she says, Azazel thought, ducking behind a stone block as a water jet shattered its edge. And now we're running in circles against a water type. Water versus fire… I guess none of us have fire powers. Am I supposed to just… drown this annoying thing?
His eyes scanned their environment, then his mental inventory. An idea, crude and violent, clicked.
He reached into the violet shimmer of his cube. His hand emerged with an empty, thick-glass potion vial and their remaining flask of lantern oil. Working quickly behind cover, he uncorked both. He poured the oil into the vial, soaked a strip of bandage in the remaining oil, and stuffed it into the vial's neck, leaving a tail.
A makeshift Molotov cocktail.
"Cover me!" he yelled to Reginleif.
She responded by hurling a chunk of debris, drawing the slime's watery fire. Azazel lit the cloth tail with a spark from his tinderbox, stood, and hurled the vial in a high arc.
It shattered against the Water Slime's surface. The oil spread across its translucent form. The flame caught instantly, engulfing the upper hemisphere of the creature in roaring fire.
The slime didn't scream. It writhed, its body boiling and steaming violently. But it wasn't dying fast enough. It began to roll rapidly, trying to smother the flames against the ground and walls, spreading burning oil everywhere.
"It's going to put itself out or burn the whole place down!" Reginleif shouted.
Azazel focused. He still had one tool. "You Shadow."
The slime's own, flickering shadow cast by the flames was deep and clear. He commanded it, not to bind, but to rise. The darkness pulled up from the floor, forming four sheer, flat walls of solid shadow, boxing the burning slime into a confined, square space.
It couldn't roll. It could only thrash against the intangible, dark walls, trapped with the fire consuming it. The air filled with the hiss of superheated steam and the acrid smell of burning algae. Within the shadow-box, the water slime boiled away to nothing, its core cooking until it cracked and dissolved.
The shadow walls dissipated, revealing a scorched, damp patch on the floor and the smell of a chemical fire.
Reginleif looked from the stain to Azazel. "Isn't that a little overkill?"
"What, compared to you compressing one to death?" he shot back, breathing heavily.
"At least mine died instantly. Yours was… burned alive."
"It's a water slime," he said flatly. "It doesn't have a nervous system. It was a chemical reaction."
"Fair point," she conceded.
With the immediate threats gone, they took a moment to properly assess the seventeenth floor's merged architecture. Reginleif moved along the wall of ancient bricks, her hand held out.
"Azazel," she said, stopping where the brick met a natural rockfall. "There's a way here. I can feel it."
"You mean your wind Mythic can feel an air current," he stated.
"It's the same exact thing," she replied, pressing on a specific, slightly recessed brick.
With a grating of stone on stone, a section of the wall—bricks and all—swung inward, revealing a secret passage not on any map. The air that wafted out was older, drier, and carried the faint scent of dust and metal.
They entered, finding a short corridor that ended not in another room, but in a dead end. However, the space was occupied. In the center stood a life-sized, weathered stone statue of a robed figure, its features smoothed by time. And placed directly before it, as if in offering, was a single, chest.
---
In the dead-end chamber, the air was still and ancient. Azazel ignored the chest for a moment, his eyes on the weathered statue. He pulled out his small, battered notebook and a piece of charcoal, and began to sketch the robed figure's vague features and strange, ritualistic pose.
Reginleif watched him, one eyebrow arched. "What are you doing?"
"Drawing the weird statue," he muttered, his focus on the lines.
"Yeah, I've never seen one like it before either," she said, turning her attention to the iron-bound chest. She examined the lock, a complex, tarnished mechanism. She prodded it with a pick from her belt, frowned, then shrugged. She took a step back, aimed a powerful kick reinforced by a sharp gust of wind at the clasp, and broke it clean off with a loud crack.
Azazel didn't look up from his sketch. "What kind of thief are you? Can't even lockpick a chest properly."
"Sometimes," she said, brushing dust off her leg, "if you can't lockpick it, you just break it. Faster. Less fuss."
"Fine. So what's inside?"
She lifted the heavy lid. The dim light glinted on the contents. Inside, resting on crumbling velvet, were four items:
1. A dagger with a blade that seemed forged from captured moonlight—a translucent, ethereal green stone, smooth and sharp, set in a dark leather-wrapped hilt.
2. A golden cup, ornate and heavy, studded with small, deep-blue gemstones.
3. A scroll, sealed with a drop of faded red wax.
4. A pair of sleek, black fingerless gloves, made of a material that seemed to drink the light.
Reginleif didn't hesitate. Her hand shot out and claimed the moonstone dagger. It was lighter than air, balanced perfectly. She gave it an experimental twirl; it hummed silently, leaving a faint emerald trail in the air. Her old dagger was relegated to her belt in an instant. The golden cup was snatched up next and unceremoniously tossed into the violet portal of Azazel's inventory cube. "For selling," she stated.
Azazel closed his notebook and stepped forward. He took the remaining lot: the sealed scroll and the strange gloves. He tucked the scroll into his tunic and pulled the gloves on. They fit perfectly, snug and warm, and seemed to make his grip on his kukri feel more sure. He flexed his fingers. No magical surge, just a subtle, enhancing comfort.
The chamber had given up its secret. The statue kept its silent vigil over the now-empty chest.
Without another word, they turned and left the dead end, stepping back into the merged chaos of the seventeenth floor, one of them now armed with a blade of enchanted stone, the other with new, unknown tools. The path downward awaited.
End of Chapter 23