Chapter 24: The Hounds' Gauntlet
The silence of the seventeenth floor's merged halls was a palpable thing, a held breath after their discovery. They left the mysterious statue and its empty chest behind—a curious footnote in a chapter of survival. The descent to the eighteenth floor was a constricted spiral of seamless, dark basalt, the air growing cooler and drier with each step.
They emerged into a vision of alien beauty.
The eighteenth floor was a single, colossal geode. Every surface—walls, vaulted ceiling, the very ground beneath their boots—was encrusted with enormous, jagged amethyst crystals. They glowed with an internal, violet pulse that cast shifting, haunting shadows. The sheer, breathtaking magnificence of it was matched only by its acoustic cruelty. A scuffed boot echoed for three seconds. A sharp breath became a chorus. It was a place where sound itself was a weapon of confusion.
The floor's inhabitants were born of that splendor and dissonance: Crystal Scarabs. Monstrous beetles the size of wolves, their carapaces not chitin, but perfect, faceted amethyst. They moved with a horrifying, skittering speed, their crystalline legs a staccato percussion on the stone. Worse, the light refracting through their bodies and the glowing environment created multiple, shimmering afterimages. A scarab would seem to dart left, only for the real attack to come from the right, its gem-like mandibles capable of shearing through steel.
The fight was a brutal exercise in sensory overload. Reginleif, after one near-miss from a phantom, did the unthinkable. She closed her eyes. Her head tilted, her Mythic extending not as a weapon, but as a sonar net of air pressure. She felt the displacement, the unique tap-tap-tap-scrape of a two-hundred-pound crystal beetle moving at speed. When the afterimage blurred, she didn't flinch. When the true mandibles snapped for her throat a half-second later, she was already pivoting, her new moonstone dagger meeting the amethyst in a shower of violet sparks and a sharp ping. The otherworldly keen of the green blade notched the living crystal. She used the rebound to spin inside its guard, her second dagger finding the soft, dark joint between its head and thorax with a wet crunch.
Azazel fought with the grim economy of a man who could not afford a single wasted motion. He let the disorienting chaos wash over him, standing almost still in the center of the skittering storm. He trusted his peripheral vision and pure, animal reflex. A glittering set of jaws would materialize from a refraction; he'd lean back just enough for the mandibles to whistle past his face, then his kukri would rise in a short, brutal arc, parrying the follow-up strike from a second leg trying to gut him. He used their own momentum as a weapon, guiding a lunge so the creature's own charge impaled it on a spear-like wall crystal. It was a violent, minimalist dance—a series of precise deflections and sudden, fatal redirections.
When the last scarab shattered into a pile of dull, lifeless crystal shards, the great geode fell into a true, ringing silence. In the very center of the chamber, as if placed on a stage, sat a chest. Not hidden, but displayed. It was made of dark, lacquered wood, its corners and latch banded in untarnished silver.
Reginleif approached, her senses extended for traps. She found none. The lock was simple, almost inviting. She lifted the lid.
The amethyst light gleamed on wealth. Not historical artifacts or cryptic scrolls. Mercenary treasure. Neat, brick-like stacks of gold coins, each stamped with the stern profile of a forgotten king. Small velvet bags, their tops loose, spilling over with raw gemstones: rubies like congealed blood, sapphires the color of a deep sky, emeralds holding forest shadows within their facets. A fortune in pure, liquid asset.
No words passed between them. A look, sharp and understanding, was all that was needed. They worked with the swift, silent efficiency of professionals. Coins and gemstones vanished into the bottomless violet space of Azazel's inventory cube. The weight was not on their backs, but in their minds—a tangible result. This was the dream that lured fools to their deaths and made legends of the lucky. It was the dungeon's contract: risk everything, and you might carry a king's ransom out of the dark.
The thrill of acquisition was a potent stimulant. It pushed back the fatigue, narrowed their focus to the next step, the next threshold. They found the exit quickly—another basalt staircase, this one slick with mineral seepage. They descended, the brilliant violet glow fading above them, replaced by a rising, wet miasma.
The nineteenth floor was a visceral assault on the senses after the geode's sterile beauty.
It was a sunken, swampy cavern. The air was a broth of humidity, the iron-tang of blood, the rot of stagnant water, and the pungent, sweet-spore scent of colossal, phosphorescent fungi that provided the only light—a sickly, pervasive green that made everything look faintly necrotic. The ground was a treacherous mix of sucking mud, hidden pools, and slippery, gnarled roots. This was not a place of grandeur. It was a festering hunting ground.
They saw the eyes first. Dozens of pinpricks of reflected green light, hovering in the murk. Then the shadows detached, resolving into forms.
To the left, a pack of Blue Dire Wolves, their frost-tinged fur clumped with swamp muck, breaths puffing visible, icy mist that coated the ground with treacherous rime.
To the right, a pack of Green Fin Wolves, leaner and sleeker, moving with a predator's fluid grace. The razor-sharp bony fins along their spines knifed through the air, evolved for silent movement in water, now deadly blades on land.
And in the center, waiting, were the Hunting Dogs, Type B. They were larger, their bodies dense with coiled muscle under short, brindled fur. But these were no natural animals. They were walking armories. From their shoulders erupted forward-curving scythes of blackened bone. Jagged spikes thrust from their elbows and knees. A crest of serrated blades ran down their spines, designed to eviscerate anything they rammed. Their eyes held not feral hunger, but a cold, calculating malice. These were living traps, engineered for slaughter.
The three groups did not snarl at each other. In a chilling display of the dungeon's malevolent will, they formed a loose, coordinated semicircle. The hunt was on.
The Blue Dire Wolves attacked first, a wave of freezing fury. They lunged not just to bite, but to shape the battlefield, their exhaled mist flash-freezing patches of mud and water, forcing Azazel and Reginleif into constant, precarious footwork. A wolf would leap from the green gloom; Azazel would meet it not with a dodge, but with a solid, rising parry, his kukri blade clacking against its snapping jaw, twisting its head aside. In the same motion, before the beast's paws touched the ground, his off-hand dagger would plunge into the exposed stretch of its neck.
The Green Fin Wolves were opportunists. They used the terrain, melting into the inky pools only to erupt behind or beside their prey. One burst from the water directly behind Reginleif with a silken ripple. She didn't turn. She dropped into a crouch, the wolf passing over her. As it did, she parried a slashing strike from its dorsal fin with her moonstone dagger, the green blade scoring a glowing line down the bone, while her other dagger stabbed up between its ribs.
But the Hunting Dogs were the conductors of this deadly symphony. They didn't lunge with the wolves. They advanced with a terrifying, measured purpose, their bladed formations closing the space. One Dog charged low, its shoulder-scythe sweeping in to hamstring Azazel. He couldn't jump back—a Blue Wolf was already there. Instead, he planted his lead foot, rooted himself, and brought his kukri down in a heavy, diagonal parry. Steel met bone-scythe with a teeth-jarring screech, deflecting the blow down into the mud. The impact shuddered up his arm. Before he could riposte, a second Dog was already there, thrusting its bladed elbow in a vicious, short-range punch at his floating ribs.
Reginleif was his shadow. She didn't block the elbow—impossible from her angle. She parried the Dog's other foreleg as it braced for the thrust, a sharp, precise knock to its fetlock. The creature's balance faltered for a fraction of a second. The killing elbow-strike went wide, and Azazel's kukri, already in motion from the first parry, buried itself in the Dog's exposed side.
The cavern became a cacophony of desperate defense turned lethal. The fight was a blinding, deafening symphony of parries. The clash-screech of kukri on bone-scythe. The spang and whine of dagger deflecting frost-fang or fin-blade. The crack of a well-timed bootheel to a wolf's jaw, more a brutal redirect than an attack. They were a single organism under siege—Azazel the immutable shield, a fortress of deflections creating tiny, shimmering windows of vulnerability; Reginleif the lethal needle, darting through those windows with her glowing green dagger, each strike aimed with surgical, fatal precision.
A Hunting Dog would launch into a spinning charge, becoming a whirlwind of protruding blades. Azazel would step into it, his movements a frantic, flawless series of micro-parries—knocking a spine-blade high here, deflecting an elbow-spike low there—disrupting the deadly spin's core balance for a half-second. That was all Reginleif needed to dart in and sever a critical hamstring. The creature would crash, thrashing, and be finished.
It was relentless. It was exhausting. It was the purest test of their combined skill, pushed to the absolute limit.
Finally, it came down to the last, largest Hunting Dog and the alpha of the Fin Wolves, fighting not as animals, but as the dungeon's final, coordinated will. The Dog charged Azazel in a straight, bladed ram. The Wolf leapt for Reginleif's throat in a silent, green-streaked arc.
They moved as one.
Azazel crossed his kukri and dagger in an 'X' before him, bracing for impact. The Dog's shoulder-scythe slammed into the intersection with a sound like a hammer on an anvil. He held, skidding back through the mud, muscles screaming.
At the same instant, Reginleif didn't dodge the wolf. She dropped her center of gravity and thrust both palms forward. A focused Wind Burst erupted, not to hurt, but to parry the wolf's momentum in mid-air, arresting its leap inches from her face.
In the suspended second of held forces, they struck.
Reginleif's moonstone dagger, driven by the same hand that had halted the wolf, flashed up and into the Hunting Dog's open, roaring maw, piercing the soft palate and into its brain.
Azazel, shoving the suddenly limp Dog aside, pivoted and his kukri lashed out in a reverse grip, catching the staggered alpha Wolf across the spine as it fell, severing the cord.
Silence.
Not the echoing silence of the geode, but a thick, swallowing quiet, broken only by the drip of water and their own ragged, heaving breaths. The swamp-cavern was a charnel house. They stood back-to-back in the center of it, weapons dripping, clothes stained with muck and blood, their bodies trembling with the aftershock of adrenaline and extreme exertion. They had run the gauntlet. And they had survived.
---
The following hour was a grim, methodical mop-up. The nineteenth floor was a labyrinth, and pockets of resistance remained. They moved with a new, telepathic synergy, a product of the trial they'd just endured. After clearing a fourth scattered pack—two Fin Wolves and a lone, wounded Hunting Dog—Azazel cleaned his kukri on a patch of less-filthy moss.
"It's because we're close to the twentieth, isn't it?" His voice was a hoarse rasp. "The boss floor. That's why there's so many different hounds. A final screening. A gauntlet before the gatekeeper."
Reginleif, checking the edge of her moonstone blade, nodded. "Yes. Pretty much. Honestly, the variety… it's kind of weird. But it's a dungeon. We can't understand what it does when it comes to protecting its heart. Its logic isn't ours. It just… tests."
Azazel let out a short, sharp laugh that held no trace of humor. "Hah. You got that right. And we're just a couple of thieves who showed up to loot the place."
"To be honest with you," Reginleif said, her voice dropping, the professional edge softening with fatigue, "it feels weird. Our pacing. How deep we've come, how fast. Most parties… they'd be on floor five right now, celebrating."
"This isn't 'most parties,'" Azazel stated, his tone flat, final. He looked at her, his eyes dark in the fungal glow. "This is called survival instinct. You and I? We haven't been living. We've been surviving. So this?" He gestured vaguely at the carnage around them, at the descending dark ahead. "This is normal. This is the only pace we know."
Reginleif fell silent, but her mind raced. Survival instinct? Yes, back in the kingdom, I was surviving, hiding from the Brotherhood's whispers. But the dungeon… it's a different calculus. She remembered stories of proper adventurers—methodical, cautious. They mapped for weeks. They retreated to sunlight after two floors. They celebrated small victories. Azazel treated the dungeon like an enemy fortress to be sacked in a single, brutal campaign. Every rest was a logistical calculation from his notebook. 'We have X rations, Y potions, we can push Z floors.' It was relentless.
I have no choice, she thought, a familiar, cold resolve crystallizing in her chest. I need to get stronger. Faster. I need to be ready. I need to get my…
She severed the thought, a mental door slamming shut on a private, painful truth.
"Did you say something, Reginleif?" Azazel's senses, even drained, missed little.
"I've swept the floor with my wind," she replied, her voice snapping back to its practical clip. "I can feel the last three packs. Their breathing, their heat. I know their positions. Exactly."
"Okay," Azazel said, sheathing his kukri and flexing his hands in the strange, light-drinking gloves. A flicker of something—partnership, acknowledgment—passed through his eyes. "Then we finish it. Together. Like always."
Together. The word echoed in Azazel's mind as they moved out into the fungal gloom. Even if I've only known you for a handful of weeks. You have your reasons for sticking with this suicide march. Having someone… it's a tactical variable. A liability, a distraction, but also a force multiplier. The purely analytical part of his brain coldly assessed the facts. The deeper, more honest part whispered: The truth is, I was just using you for information at the start. And I still need more. But right now… the only map I have, the only 'guidebook,' is the ghost of every isekai story I ever skimmed. And the first rule was always the same: conquer the dungeon. So that's the plan. Until the world gives me a better one.
The final cleanup was a brutal exhibit of their honed coordination. With Reginleif's wind-sense painting a perfect, real-time map in her mind, they became the ultimate predators. They set ambushes for the ambushers. They funneled disoriented packs into choke points of their own choosing. Azazel's unmagical, viciously pragmatic blade-work meshed seamlessly with Reginleif's impossible angles and the chilling, silent efficiency of her moonstone dagger. Within the hour, the nineteenth floor held no more living threats. The silence was permanent.
---
Complete and total exhaustion descended, a leaden weight that made the very air feel thick. In a relatively dry, high-walled alcove far from the stagnant water, they made a cold camp. The risk of a fire attracting something from the deeper black was too great.
Azazel moved first, the primal driver of sustenance overriding the desire to simply collapse. From the violet shimmer of the cube, he pulled the least-damaged carcass of a Green Fin Wolf. The meat would be tough, stringy, and likely tainted by the swamp's toxins, but it was calories. He worked silently, skinning and butchering with his kukri, the blade now as much a tool as a weapon. He carefully avoided the glands near the bony fin. Using the last of their dry tinder and a spark from his flint, he lit a small, miserly pile of peeled fungus stalks. The flame was weak and burned with a faint blue luminescence, providing more eerie light than warmth.
The smell of roasting meat—gamey, pungent, wild—slowly filled the alcove. Reginleif watched the blue flames, her new dagger resting across her knees, its ethereal green glow a soft, alien counterpoint.
They ate without ceremony, tearing into the tough, smoky flesh. It was fuel, not a feast. As the crude calories hit their systems, their minds, against their will, began to transition. The immediate fight was over. The next one loomed, massive and definitive. Strategy began to seep into the silence.
"The boss," Azazel said finally, voice rough. He didn't need to elaborate. The twentieth floor was the only horizon that mattered now. "Two heads. One fire, one poison gas. That's the guild's intel. The wall."
Reginleif nodded, wiping a smear of grease from her chin. "A bottleneck. They wipe full parties there."
"We're not a party. We're two." He poked the feeble blue fire with a stick. "The fire we can deal with. See it, dodge it. The gas is the problem. It doesn't aim. It fills. It chokes, blinds, melts you from the inside. No amount of 'survival instinct' beats breathing acid."
"What's the plan?" she asked, her eyes reflecting the low, cold flames.
Azazel looked directly at her, his gaze intense, stripped of all pretense. "You control the gas."
She froze, a strip of half-chewed meat forgotten in her hand. "What?"
"Your Mythic. It's wind. Pressure. Perception. You don't just throw sharp air. You shape it. You feel the rats through solid stone." He leaned forward, the blue light carving deep shadows in his face. "When the gas head exhales, you contain it. You build a wall of compressed air in front of us. You push the cloud back. You twist it into a vortex around its own damn head. You don't fight the gas." His voice dropped to a whisper. "You steal it. You turn its own weapon into its cage."
Reginleif stared at him, the sheer, terrifying scale of the task settling on her shoulders like a physical yoke. To feel for traps was one thing. To manipulate a light breeze for a ricochet was another. But to actively contain and redirect the breath weapon of a dungeon boss, in the midst of a life-or-death melee, while maintaining a perfect defensive dome around them… it would require a focus and output she'd never attempted. It would take everything.
"That's… a precision order," she said slowly, the words heavy. "It would consume all my concentration. I wouldn't be able to attack. To move."
"You won't need to," Azazel said, his gaze never wavering. It was a statement of terrifying faith. "You'll be creating the only opening I will get. You keep the gas off us and shoved down its own throat. I'll handle the rest."
Handle the rest. Meaning he would single-handedly engage a giant, two-headed hound monster—likely enraged and disoriented by its own reflected poison—while she stood utterly defenseless, a vessel of pure concentration. The trust it demanded was absolute, and far more frightening than any blade or fang.
She didn't voice agreement. She didn't voice doubt. The plan was insane, but it was the only one that addressed their core weakness. After a long moment, she gave a single, slow, decisive nod. The decision was made.
They finished the grim meal in silence, the plan now a tangible thing between them, as real as the weapons in their hands. The uncertain future had collapsed int