Chapter 120: Humans from earth in dungeon
Right then, Jake’s system buzzed in front of him.
[DUNGEON IDENTIFICATION COMPLETE]
[DESIGNATION: THE IRON WARROOM]
[CLASSIFICATION: S-RANK - EXTREME DANGER]
[DUNGEON TYPE: MILITARY FORTRESS - FULLY OPERATIONAL]
[PRIMARY INHABITANTS: IRON BLOOD LEGION]
[ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE: STANDING MILITARY HIERARCHY]
[CONFIRMED RANKS PRESENT:]
[— SOLDIERS: CLASS C-B, ESTIMATED 400-600 UNITS]
[— CAPTAINS: CLASS A, ESTIMATED 80-120 UNITS]
[— WAR COMMANDERS: CLASS S, CONFIRMED 4 UNITS]
[— WARROOM GENERAL: CLASS UNKNOWN - INSUFFICIENT DATA]
[NOTE: IRON BLOOD LEGION OPERATES AS COORDINATED MILITARY UNIT, NOT STANDARD DUNGEON MONSTERS - TACTICAL AWARENESS, FORMATION COMBAT AND AMBUSH CAPABILITY CONFIRMED]
[NOTE: DUNGEON DOES NOT RESPAWN CASUALTIES - UNITS KILLED REMAIN DEAD]
[NOTE: PREVIOUS ENTRANT CASUALTIES ATTRIBUTED TO COORDINATED MILITARY RESPONSE RATHER THAN INDIVIDUAL MONSTER STRENGTH]
Jake read through it twice, the picture becoming considerably clearer than it had been thirty seconds ago.
Next screen appeared which made Jake let out a startled gasp.
[DIVINE ARTIFACT DETECTED: DEEP SECTOR - EXACT LOCATION UNCONFIRMED]
[ARTIFACT CLASSIFICATION: PRE-COVENANT ERA - ORIGIN UNKNOWN]
The math was brutal and simple.
A second screen appeared before he’d finished processing the first.
[NEW TASK ASSIGNED]
[TASK: CONQUER THE IRON WARROOM]
[OBJECTIVE: PENETRATE ALL FLOORS OF THE IRON WARROOM DUNGEON AND DEFEAT THE WARROOM GENERAL]
[SECONDARY OBJECTIVE: RETRIEVE THE DIVINE ARTIFACT FROM THE DEEP SECTOR]
[TASK DIFFICULTY: S-RANK]
[REWARD UPON COMPLETION:]
[— MAJOR CLASS ADVANCEMENT OPPORTUNITY]
[— DIVINE ARTIFACT ACQUISITION]
[— IRON WARROOM TITLE: UNLOCKS COMMAND ABILITIES OVER S-CLASS BASILIK]
[— SYSTEM EXPANSION: NEW ABILITY BRANCH UNLOCKED UPON COMPLETION]
[TIME LIMIT: NONE]
[RECOMMENDATION: APPROACH AS MILITARY OPERATION, NOT DUNGEON DIVE - ASSEMBLE CAPABLE FORCE AND PLAN ACCORDINGLY]
[ADDITIONAL NOTE: SERPENT KING AUTHORITY WILL NOT AFFECT ORC-CLASS CREATURES - PREPARE ALTERNATIVE STRATEGIES]
It took him moment to read all of it and he was lost in thought.
Ankerita came and shook his shoulder, saying, "Jake, are you all right?"
Jake came out of his stupor and then looked at her, "Ah, what?"
"Your expressions keep changing, are you all right?"
"Yes, I am."
Jake looked up at the openings and then at the ground around him, and his blood sense found nothing: no active presence behind those positions and no awareness directed at the group from above.
The dungeon was watching them arrive in some sense—dungeons always were—but whatever triggered the elevated response hadn’t triggered yet.
The main building’s ground floor was the only part of the structure with conventional access.
There were no windows above the first level, no external staircases, and no secondary entrances visible from the courtyard—just the single point of entry at the base, an opening in the wall that was tall enough for the structure’s proportions but would require the group to enter in reduced formation.
They went in.
The interior ground floor was a large open space that produced the same architectural dissonance as the exterior, the ceiling height and proportional width belonging to a tradition of construction that had nothing to do with castles or keeps or any building philosophy this world had developed. Jake moved through it reading the space the way he’d learned to read spaces in two lifetimes, cataloguing exits and structural features and the quality of the light coming from sources he couldn’t immediately identify—not torches, not lanterns, something that produced illumination from panels in the ceiling that had no visible fuel source.
Ankerita had gone very still.
Not the combat stillness of someone preparing for threat response—something more internal, her magical perception evidently finding something in the structure’s ambient presence that was producing a reaction she was working through. Jake watched her from the corner of his eye and waited.
"There’s something wrong with the fabric here," she said quietly.
"The way this space exists. It’s—displaced. Like something that belongs somewhere else has been placed here and the world around it never fully accepted it."
"A piece of another world dropped into this one," Jake said.
"Yes," Ankerita said. "Which is possible if the entity that created this had the power to—" she stopped, and whatever conclusion she’d reached clearly required more processing before she was prepared to voice it.
The squad appeared from a doorway in the structure’s far wall.
Jake’s initial perception registered them as creatures, his blood sense identifying multiple living presences with the elevated threat signature of trained combatants rather than monsters.
His eyes processed the visual data a fraction of a second later and produced an identification that his mind immediately rejected and then immediately accepted because the evidence was standing twenty meters away and looking back at him.
Human.
Or what had been human, or what had been designed to resemble human, or something that occupied the uncertain territory between those categories, where certainty became difficult.
The proportions were human.
The stance was human, the upright military bearing of people who had been trained to hold themselves a specific way, the slight forward lean of soldiers in ready state.
The uniforms were human in the most specific possible sense—green fabric cut in the configuration that Jake’s first life recognized as military field dress, the pockets and seams and collar design belonging to a tradition of garment construction that this world had never developed.
Everything else had changed.
Their skin had gone the flat black of something that had been altered rather than born that way, the color uniform and absolute in a way that natural variation never produced. Their eyes were red, not the red of inflammation or the red of certain magical mutations Jake had encountered, but lit from within with a quality that suggested the color was being generated rather than reflected. Their ears had been cut, not damaged—cut deliberately, the edges too clean for injury, both ears on every soldier reduced to half their natural height with a regularity that spoke of procedure. No hair anywhere on the exposed skin of their heads or hands. And the faces, which retained enough human structure to be recognizable as faces while having lost whatever individual variation produced personality in a human expression—all of them wearing the same flat attentiveness, identical in the specific way that things were identical when the differences had been removed rather than when they had never existed.
They were holding guns.
Not this world’s weapons. Not crossbows or magical implements or anything that belonged to the last eighteen years of Jake’s second life. Guns. The specific shape of military firearms, the barrel and grip and trigger assembly that Jake’s first life knew as a category of object that produced kinetic projectiles through chemical reaction, technology that this world had not developed and had no framework to produce.
Jake stood on the ground floor of a structure that shouldn’t exist and looked at soldiers who shouldn’t exist holding weapons that definitely shouldn’t exist and felt the particular vertigo of two lifetimes of separate knowledge colliding in a single moment of perception.
Maudlina reacted before anyone else moved.
"Barriers," she said, sharp and clear, the word going to her mages with authority.
The three mages in Ankerita’s contingent raised barriers simultaneously, overlapping planes of force snapping into existence around the group’s perimeter with the visible shimmer of actively maintained magical defense.
Jake stood behind the barrier and looked at the squad of altered humans across the floor with shock that he recognized as shock and was managing rather than being managed by the adrenaline of his blood-sense threat alert competing with the cognitive disruption of the recognition.
Ankerita was standing beside him with an expression that had moved past an eerie feeling into something harder, the look of a person who had suspected something deeply wrong and was now having the suspicion confirmed in the most direct possible way.
"They look like us," she said, and the words were quiet enough that only Jake caught them. "What they were before whatever changed them."
"Yes," Jake said.
"Which means whatever made this place brought people from our world here," she said.
"And did that to them."
The squad across the floor raised their weapons and the barrels oriented toward the barrier with the mechanical precision of soldiers following a targeting protocol, and Jake looked at the guns with the part of his mind that had grown up in a world where guns existed and understood what came next, and he reached for his shadow serpents.
