Chapter 6: Destroying the dungeon
The burning swords in his hands flickered, his own flames pulling back slightly as if they recognised something above them in the hierarchy of fire and had the instinct to recede.
His confident stance broke, one foot stepping back involuntarily, his face doing something Leon had genuinely never seen it do before.
Pure terror.
"Wait—" The word came out before he could stop it.
The tornado didn’t listen though.
It consumed the three charging party members first, swallowing them mid stride, their talents and skills simply ceasing to matter at the scale of what hit them.
Then it kept expanding, climbing the walls and spreading across the dungeon floor.
Stone blackened. Cracks split along the dungeon walls where the hot temperature became too much to hold.
The floor buckled, and dungeon answered the tornado with its own voice.
A deep, resonant groan moved through the stone around him, the kind of sound that didn’t come from any single point but from everywhere at once, from the floor beneath his boots and the ceiling above his head and the walls pressing in on either side.
Dust rained down in thin curtains. A crack split along the ceiling with a sharp report.
Leon’s eyes went wide.
[Level 20 player killed...]
[+100 EXP]
[Level 18 player killed...]
[+80 EXP]
The notifications detonated across his vision in rapid succession, bright and insistent, stacking one on top of the other before he could process a single one.
He tried to read them, but his eyes wouldn’t cooperate. The letters blurred at the edges and then the edges blurred too, and then the whole world tilted sideways as something hit him from the inside.
A wave of dizziness, almost like the ground had shifted beneath him without actually moving.
He grunted. His knees found the floor before he’d made any decision to put them there, the impact jarring up through both legs, the golden sword scraping stone as his grip loosened.
’How much mana...’ he thought, the words forming slowly through the fog pressing in behind his eyes. ’How much mana did that single attack drain from me...?’
He turned his head.
Ran was to his left, or what was left of him now. His body was charred completely, blackened down to the shape of a person and nothing else.
His party members were the same. Three shapes on the dungeon floor that had stopped being people and become outlines.
Leon stared at them, his eyes trembling slightly.
But then, the rumbling worsened.
It came without warning, the whole corridor shuddering violently, and then a massive chunk of rock fell from the ceiling, landing on Ran’s body with a loud thud.
What was left of Ran disappeared instantly, the body scattering into a wide spread of pale ash that pushed outward from the point of impact and then settled.
Leon stumbled back without meaning to.
He didn’t think, quickly pulling every fragment of strength left in him up from wherever it had retreated to and forced his legs to move, turning away from the ash and running, driving himself forward into the corridor ahead.
More of the ceiling came down.
Burning rocks, superheated by what the tornado had done to the surrounding stone, dropped one after another in heavy impacts that shook the floor each time.
The first one landed two metres to his right. The second closer. He twisted away from a third without breaking his stride, the heat washing across his arm as it hit the ground beside him.
He kept running.
His legs felt wrong. Heavy in the way that had nothing to do with his muscles and everything to do with what was left in his mana reserves, which was almost nothing.
His body had started sending signals he didn’t have time to listen to. Weakness in his hands. A faint trembling in his calves. The dizziness hovering at the edges of his vision, waiting.
The dungeon door was ahead of him, or what was left of it.
Thick flames had swallowed the entrance entirely, climbing the stone frame from floor to ceiling and pressing outward in both directions along the wall.
Rocks had fallen across the base of it, heavy and irregular, stacked in a way that left no gap, no margin, nothing that could be called a way through without being generous about the definition.
Leon gritted his teeth.
He raised the sword.
Something in the blade responded before he’d finished deciding to swing, the golden light along its edge sharpening all at once, pulling itself into something concentrated and directional, very different from the wide consuming burn of before.
He swung, and a clean golden crescent arc shot out of the blade, closing the distance to the door in a fraction of a second.
It hit the wall like a verdict, and it immediately came apart, disintegrating in pieces.
Leon didn’t stop moving. He hit the floor at a run and jumped, clearing the last of the fallen rocks, and then the dungeon was behind him and cold night air was hitting his face and his boots were finding grass instead of blackened stone.
He landed hard. His legs almost didn’t hold. He forced them to, barely, stumbling two steps before he caught himself and turned around.
The dungeon gate stood behind him.
It was a thick round stone set into nothing, dark brown and massive, the kind of thing that looked like it had been there long before anything else in the surrounding landscape and intended to remain long after.
Its entrance was dark red, the colour deep and uniform, and behind it there was nothing. No corridor. No dungeon. Just the frame, and the red, and the empty space where everything he’d just survived should have been visible.
It looked like a door to nowhere, standing alone in the open air.
Then it shattered.
No sound preceded it. One moment it was standing, and the next the stone was coming apart in every direction at once, fragments spinning outward, and through the gap where it had been brilliant golden flames erupted.
They blasted to the sky, forming a golden mushroom shape that bloomed outward at the top like a crown.
