Duskbound

The fleshy coating on the walls wasn't uniform in any way. It had varying texture, smooth in some places and rough in others, and a smattering of scars. There were long, jagged slices that had healed into puckered scars and small circles from where it had been stabbed or punctured all over. Veins as thick as Velik's arm formed massive webs, sometimes standing out in distinct ridges along the walls.

One thing he hadn't seen up until this moment was an eye. In fact, even with his mental stat pushing his perception far beyond normal human limits, he wasn't entirely sure that was what he was looking at now. It was nothing more than a small black pinprick in the skin to casual observation, easily mistaken for a speck of dirt on the wall.

He would have thought the same if he hadn't caught the flicker of movement as he walked by. Even then, it was only because he was using [Night Vision] to navigate that the motion popped out to him. Something about the way it reduced the whole world to black and white outlines made it visible in a way that a full spectrum of colors didn't.

He peered at it, finger poised an inch away, and wondered if he was just imagining things. The speck only superficially resembled an eye, and since he'd started paying attention, it hadn't moved at all. As much as he doubted himself, though, he couldn't honestly say he found the idea of the tunnel being laced with eyes that were watching his every move all that surprising.

It made sense, in a twisted sort of way. The whole dungeon was covered in a layer of flesh. There was no reason it couldn't have other parts of a human as well, and lots of them. It would also explain how the dungeon kept track of the monster hunters who came to destroy it, not that he was necessarily here for that. He just wanted his compass to start working so he could find Chalin, and so far, he'd seen nothing to prove his childhood friend was here.

Except, maybe I did? There was another champion elite, but since I couldn't recover the seed, I don't know if it was Chalin's or not.

His only options were to press forward and hope to find answers, or to give up and leave. If he gave up, he might as well keep walking until the frontier was a thousand miles behind him. After so many years, he needed these answers. He'd do anything for them, take stupid risks against monsters far stronger than he had any right to face, all just to get one step closer to the truth.

The way he understood dungeon architecture to work meant there was probably one more champion in front of a core chamber at the very least, possibly multiple champions he might have to fight his way through. Once he reached the core chamber, he'd smash the core and the dungeon would die. Then, presumably, it would stop interfering with his compass.

If he found Chalin here, then he'd have reached his goal. If not, he could keep going unhindered and the world was a slightly better place with one less source of monsters. Truthfully, he wasn't sure this dungeon was the only one in the area. It seemed to produce only two specific types of monsters, and he'd seen a far greater variety in the deep wood.

He explored for another hour or two, slowly building up his mental map of the caves. Occasionally, he found more of those sallow sac-like flaps hanging off the walls, always empty. Sometimes, he'd see little spots of fluid that hadn't quite dried, either puddled in the sac itself or on the ground beneath it.

What he didn't see was whatever had come out of that sac, but he assumed it was all the centipedes that had tried to bury him under sheer numbers. If this was some sort of breeding ground, it explained why they'd come at him in waves. Some had torn their way free from their sacs faster than others, and some had been closer to where he was fighting.

It wasn't until he got deeper that he started seeing something different: sacs that were still full. Velik couldn't tell what exactly was in them—the skin was too thick and leathery, or maybe it was just a quirk of [Night Vision]—but they couldn't all be the same monster. Some of the sacs were the size of his head. Others, he could have fit fully inside with room to spare.

Every time he found one, he sliced it open with his spear and made sure to kill the half-formed monster inside. Usually, it was some twisted amalgamation of limbs, bones, and organs put together in no discernable pattern. Sometimes, the creature was alive when he cut it free of the sac, forcing him to kill it. The system itself didn't seem to have a good answer to what the monsters were, instead labeling them as malformed fleshlings, level 1.

Some sort of failed monster? Or maybe it just wasn't done yet.

The idea that he was killing monsters before they could even finish developing didn't bother him at all, and Velik went out of his way to destroy every single sac he could find just in case whatever was inside wasn't dead yet. It slowed him down somewhat, but he reasoned that an extra hour or two now could save him months of hunting in the future. The reality was probably a lot more complicated, but he wasn't interested in that.

Things were going well. He destroyed the sacs as he found them, and, occasionally, an actual monster would get in his way. There were no more invisible walls that tried to melt his skin off his face if he attacked them, and the centipedes were much easier to defeat than the scorplings had been. The only problem was that, for all his poking around, he still hadn't found what he was actually here for.

He came into a chamber that looked like it was full of melting candles, each one four or five feet wide and stretching all the way to the roof of the cavern. The fleshy covering sagged over itself in great, floppy folds, and rather than the monster-sized sacs he'd been seeing before, everything was covered in strands of some snot-like substance.

Enjoy new chapters from empire

Well, this might be the most disgusting thing I've ever seen.

Embedded into the mucus were thousands and thousands of little gray orbs, no bigger around than his thumbnail. They were bunched up into clusters that hung off the pillars, draped over the flesh like strings of pennants. Velik frowned and wished he had a way to throw just a bit of light into the room, just to see what color everything really was. [Dread Lance] hadn't kept that property of [Phalanx], unfortunately, though he supposed if he was willing to detonate one against a pillar, he'd get a brief flicker in the instant the energy spread outwards.

A flicker of movement overhead caught his eye. Velik looked up to see a small hole in the ceiling with a monster crawling out of it. It had four legs and two smaller, delicate arms, and was shaped something like a spider, only with more sharp edges on the joints. There was just one, and [Apex Hunter] was completely confident that it wasn't a threat. He doubted it was even level 10.

The monster skittered across the roof of the cavern according to some indecipherable logic until it reached one of the fleshy pillars, then it climbed down, unhooked a cluster of the orbs by severing the mucus line connecting it to the rest. Its task finished, it hoisted the orbs onto its back and scaled its way back up to the ceiling, where it disappeared back into the same hole it had emerged from.

"What the hell was that?" he said, not even realizing he'd spoken it out loud until after he'd already said it.

Cautiously, he reached out with his spear and hooked one of the orb clusters, cutting it free by using [Shape Shifting] to curve the tip of the spear into something that resembled a sickle. It wasn't often he missed [Identify], but right now, he wished the skill hadn't been folded into [Apex Predator]. It had contributed a strong sense of intuition about monsters, and in a lot of ways [Identify] couldn't, but the tradeoff was that it didn't help much for stuff like this.

The mucus gluing the orbs together started to stretch and separate as he brought the cluster closer. Despite that, none of the orbs actually fell loose. Is it some sort of food for the monsters? They kind of look like fruit, but I've never seen a vegetarian monster before.

He plucked one of the orbs loose from the cluster and squeezed it between his fingers. Immediately, it burst apart and a system notification popped up.

[You have slain a seed of corruption (level 1).]

Velik regarded the goo on his fingers with disdain and flicked it away, then dropped the rest of the cluster onto the ground. Mercilessly, he stomped the seeds until they were nothing but paste. Then he looked around the room with an appraising gaze, mentally calculating how long it would take to destroy them all.

I wonder what will show up to try to stop me.Nôv(el)B\\jnn

He reached out with his spear to bring down another cluster, then stomped it underfoot.