Surviving as a Broken Hero

Chapter 18 – Fire and Flames (1)

[[Enemy Defeated!

+150 XP]]

[[Current XP: 3975/4000]]

Huff, Huff.

Save for the sound of us catching our breaths, the arena was silent.

“Now what?”

I asked, looking at Velle.

She straightened her robes as Bernard approached us, little puffs of dirt falling from her clothes.

“I don’t know… that should be it.”

The dungeon hadn’t given us any sort of completion message or reward. All we had received was the initial XP reward for killing the ogre.

“I was worried there for a second, but nice work there, Aizen.”

Bernard clapped his hand over my shoulder, having picked up his sword that had fallen where the ogre’s head had been.

“I think we’ve got a pretty good composition here.”

While I didn’t necessarily disagree with him, I was wary about why the dungeon hadn’t given us a completion message yet.

“Hey, Bernard, was that it?”

He scratched his head, his lips forming a slight grimace.

“Well, I sure hope it was. It’s only supposed to be a beginner dungeon, after all…”

As if in response to his words, a flickering system message appeared before each of us in a flickering gold and blue box, as if the normal System and the Second System that I had been becoming familiar with were warring over the same message box.

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{{Congratulation on… Cle… Unlocking… the dungeon’s extra level!]]

We hadn’t done anything special to warrant such a message, we had only cleared the dungeon in the way that was clearly laid out before us.

{{Stand by… Extra level starting!]]

KKKKKKKK!

The entire arena shook and chunks of debris fell from the ceiling.

I stumbled on the floor as it shook below me.

KKKKKKKK!

I was just in time to see a large stalactite falling from the ceiling towards me, stumbling and falling out of the way of it.

Bernard and Velle were in a similar state, Velle clinging onto Bernard, who had stabbed his sword into the floor and was using it as a sort of pillar for support.

Crash!

As the stalactite slammed into the ground, I felt the floor give way below me and the arena crumble away as we fell into a dark void.

I was whisked away from Bernard and Velle in a rush of air as they became dots in the distance and faded away.

The air whipped at my hair and clothes, stinging my skin with its coolness.

Though all I could see was an inky darkness around me, I was still able to see myself as if I were in a well-lit room.

Then, a gray, stony floor rose to meet me, taking up my vision as far as I could see.

From a pinprick of gray light to an endless, stone sea, the floor grew closer and closer and I felt the cool rush of air subsiding as some force brought me to a slow halt and deposited me onto the ground.

Vwoom.

After stepping foot on the hard, cracked stone of the floor, the endless sea of gray rapidly constricted in on itself around me, leaving me on a small, round stone platform in the middle of the inky black void.

{{Error… Dungeon bounds… Extra Level Starting!]]

The gold and blue box warred with itself again in a staticky message that faded into view in front of me.

‘What?’

Extra or hidden rooms inside dungeons were not necessarily unheard of, but I had not heard of one appearing in such a fashion without any sort of special action from the people clearing the dungeon. What was more concerning was that the Second System appeared to have had some sort of hand in whatever was going on.

The stone platform elongated on one side into a walkway that extended far ahead into the void, and spots of light cascaded from a point far above, stopping at the level of the platform I stood on and slithering towards me.

As the lights met the platform, they pulled themselves out of the darkness as strange, white-silhouetted shadows of goblins and wolves, charging toward me in complete silence.

My mana was still low, and goblins and wolves would have normally been easy pickings, but their complete lack of sounds or reactions was unnerving.

Their weapons of light were stopped easily enough by my earthen gauntlet, and they exploded and faded away into the darkness with even my light blows.

However, going only by sight, I wasn’t able to watch behind myself at all times, and pain lashed at my legs and sides as their weapons hit me and left grazing marks against my skin.

Haaah…

Not long later, my breathing was again the only sound to accompany me as I knelt on the floor and supported myself with one hand.

I had taken on about ten of the creatures and believed that any more would have been the death of me. It was as if the dungeon knew I was at my limit.

‘Fuck… Where did the others go?’

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I was worried about what might have happened to the other two. Would they be facing the same type of situation that I was or would they have their difficulty scaled accordingly?

Seeing as Velle was a mage, I was also worried that she might be nearly out of mana from the ogre encounter. We had fought the monster without any regard for conserving resources, believing it to be the end of the dungeon, after all.

There was just that strangely illuminated darkness left. The monsters had given no XP.

Approaching the edge of the platform, I reached out my hand tentatively towards the darkness. From the way the stone beneath me seemed to shift and change shapes, I had a theory that the darkness wasn’t a void around me but rather a structure made of an abyss-like material that shifted and moved to reveal passages and routes to progress.

Sure enough, my hand made contact with a hard, smooth surface at the edge of the platform. The substance gave a little and had an almost plastic-like texture.

‘Is this a wall of some sort? A shifting labyrinth? Or just one big, shifting mass?’

I imagined something out of a movie where a labyrinth constantly shifted in my mind. If that was the case, could I possibly break down the walls blocking my progress?

The earthen gauntlet took very little energy to maintain, to the point that it was almost negligible when I wasn’t summoning or shifting it. It rested around my hand comfortably, almost like a second skin.

I used it to hit the wall, unassisted by any skills from either System, as my resources were already dangerously low.

Vwom.

My fist impacted the wall almost gently, despite the fact that I had swung at it with all the strength I could muster. The wall depressed slightly and gently bounced back into shape, almost like some sort of memory foam.

Even if it was a labyrinth, the end result was the same: I wouldn’t be able to break my way through it.

I resolved myself to heading down the evident pathway and walked forward with some caution, though I knew it was a tunnel, the void-like walls still made me feel as if I were walking on a platform suspended in space.

As I walked down the pathway, faint lights began playing out on the walls, different from the lights that had converged to assault me previously.

The lights I saw sparkled and exploded in seemingly distant bursts of blue and gold. It reminded me of the fireworks that used to shoot off around holidays back on Earth.

The explosions of gold and blue continued even more chaotically while I continued down the tunnel.

An almost sulfur-like smell wafted down the length of the tunnel, increasing with every passing moment.

After a few more steps, the explosions lessened, and a streak of golden light shot off down the tunnel, leaving behind a mass of blue light that collapsed in on itself with a slow but sure speed until it was almost gone completely.

I followed the gold streak of light down the tunnel, nearing the end of the path.

As I approached the darkness at the end of the path, the walls split apart again and revealed another circular room.

At the center of the room, a pinprick of blueish-white light floated, the golden light hovering above it on the void-like ceiling.

There were a couple of things that were clear to me at that point:

First, whatever sort of secret dungeon I was in was highly abnormal and didn’t seem to have been entirely intentional, which brought up the question of how the usually flawless System could have intentions or mistakes, or what might be able to interfere with it.

Second, the entire dungeon had some meaning behind it that was eluding me. Was it trying to tell me something, or was it something that had been created or triggered based on something else that wasn’t meant to talk to me specifically?

Still, the blue and gold lights waited, otherwise inert. They had infinite patience, and I had to go forward at some point unless I wanted to die down there.

I stepped into the room with the two lights.