More and more of the eight-legged beasts hit the ground with a thud.
A deep, primal fear coursed through Ryan’s body as they drew closer. These spiders were the stuff of nightmares. Each one was over four feet tall, with eight ruby-colored eyes that stared everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Foot-long fangs hung from what Ryan could only assume was the head. Venom dripped from each fang and sizzled as it hit the stone floor. Somewhere, deep in the back of his mind, Ryan was puzzled by how similar these spiders looked to those on earth. Their anatomy resembled a black widow, without the distinctive red marking.
Vivian raised her arms as warm, golden light surrounded the group. “Mass Shield!”
The nearest spider skittered towards Vivian in the blink of an eye, aiming to skewer her with one of its legs. Ariel lashed out with her spear, cleaving through two of the legs as it passed her. Ryan clicked off the safety and switched his rife’s firing mode to burst. He aimed at the center of the beast’s eyes and pulled the trigger in a single fluid motion. Three bullets tore through the air with a roar like a jet-plane. He felt the dampened kick of the recoil that he had become accustomed to.
Ryan wasn’t sure what exactly he had expected to happen when he had fired. Despite Gizmo’s assurances, he was sure that the bullets would hit the thick chitin protecting the spider and bounce off. Like the military had learned the hard way when they first entered the portals. What he hadn’t expected was the bullets to shred through the spider’s oversized head like it was paper.
One of the bullets must have hit something vital because less than a second after Ryan had fired the spider dropped to the floor in a heap.
“Holy shit. Remind me to ask Gizmo for one of those next time we stop by the shop!” Lee yelled in surprise.
The spiders hesitated when they saw one of their spider-kin killed. That hesitation turned into fury when Ryan put six more bullets into a second spider. At some unknown signal, the spiders screeched in unison and bolted towards the group.
“Run!”
The group took off at a sprint down the same tunnel they had come through. Spiders poured through the opening and scattered in all directions. Their movements were a blur. They were fast. Faster than Ryan. His eyes struggled to keep track of even just a single spider. They skittered up the walls and across the ceiling as the group ran as hard as they could.
The clinking of chitin plates and fangs grew closer and closer as the spiders gained on the party. Ryan shot burst after burst as he ran. He didn’t stop to aim, the mass of spiders was so thick that every bullet found a mark. Not that it mattered, for every creature he dropped, another took its place.
The party rounded a corner and ran straight into a wall of solid obsidian that hadn’t been there before.
Lee paled as he rammed his shoulder into the wall to no effect. “What the—”
“We have to find a way to get past the wall!” Vivian sounded desperate.
Ariel struck the wall with her spear while Ryan shot burst after burst into it. Neither Ariel nor Ryan’s attacks could even make a scratch in the obsidian.
Ryan removed the mostly empty magazine before strapping in a new one he pulled from his vest. “Guess we’re fighting then.”
* * *
Lee took his place at the front of the group, his shield held up high. Ariel and Ryan took up places behind him, covering his right and left side. Vivian stood at the back, staff in hand, ready to heal wounds that were sure to come.
The wall of obsidian, despite derailing their grand escape, would come in useful. With their backs to the wall and a narrow tunnel to funnel the spiders, they had created an effective kill zone. Nothing could sneak up behind them, which meant they only had to focus on defending a single direction.
The group watched as the wriggling black mass of bodies ran towards them. When they were 20 feet away, Lee raised one foot in the air. Green mist covered his armored leg, and he roared as he slammed it into the ground. The force of the impact created a crater, and the green mist spread from his leg to the ground around them. “Earthquake!”
A ripple started from where Lee’s foot hit the ground and spread outward. The waves started out small but increased in size every second. Each of the two-foot waves of earth struck the spiders with the force of a small car. The sound of twisting metal filled the tunnel as waves of rock and stone broke the spider’s charge.
“Ryan, aim for the ones on the ceiling! Ariel, help me kill the ones on the ground and the walls!” Lee shouted.
The next few minutes were the longest of Ryan’s life. Dozens of spiders skittered across the ceiling as Ryan blew through magazine after magazine. Each pull of the trigger killed one of the monsters, but the tide of black bodies seemed unending.
Lee and Ariel were doing a little better. They were able to alternate area-of-effect spells to maximize damage, taking out many spiders at once. The few that managed to get through the trio’s defenses were badly damaged and killed by Vivian.
* * *
Ariel launched her spear at the last surviving spider, pinning it against the wall. The spider screeched in pain and anger as Lee put a sword through one of its eyes. He continued to stab until the creature stilled.
“I’m going to be pulling spider guts out of my hair for weeks,” Ariel groaned.
“You mean I’m going to be pulling spider guts out of your hair for weeks,” Ryan grinned.
She grumbled in agreement. “Damn right you are.”
The group laughed together while Vivian passed around a canteen filled with water. Everyone took long, blissful gulps. They spent half an hour sifting through the bodies for monster cores. Ryan collected over a dozen, while the rest of the group each found twice as many. They were rich!
Lee eyed the group, shifting uncomfortably, “so, do we keep going?”
Vivian pointed a thumb at the solid wall of obsidian behind them, “can’t exactly go backward can we?”
Lee slapped his face with the palm of his hand as Vivian giggled and took hold of his hand.
“Forward then.”
It took them fifteen minutes to walk back to the chamber from before. This time the group didn’t leave the safety of the tunnel until Ryan had fired half a magazine at the pitch-black ceiling. When nothing dropped down to attack them they proceeded to make their way across the room.
The chamber was a mess. Sections of the wall and ceiling had fallen during the chaos. Rubble littered the ground. Several of the stone coffins were cracked in half, revealing their contents.
Ariel pushed Ryan towards one of the broken coffins. “Go check it out!”
Ryan immediately spun around and ran to hide behind Lee. “What, no way! You go check it out!” he said pointing back at Ariel.
Lee’s eyes widened in panic as Ariel’s gaze shifted to him. “Wait—get away from me man, I ain’t going anywhere near those things. I don’t fuck with zombies!”
Vivian let out a sigh and walked towards the nearest coffin. “Buncha babies,” she muttered under her breath. “I swear you all are—whoa.”
The trio waited to see if anything would jump out and bite Vivian’s face off. Once they were certain that they weren’t dealing with zombies they sauntered over to the coffin.
Inside the coffin lay a perfectly preserved skeleton covered in a suit of gold and silver armor. A skeletal hand clasped the most beautiful sword that Ryan had ever seen. The blade was a deep black, the color of obsidian, and the golden pommel was encrusted in gemstones. The power that radiated out from the coffin was overwhelming. Suppressive. Dark.
“That has to be A-ranked gear. At least.” Vivian said in awe.
Lee’s eyes had glazed over. “I need this.”
His eyes took on a manic look as he reached for the sword.
“I wouldn’t touch that if I were you,” a voice called out from behind them.
The words shook everyone out of their trance. They looked at each other, blinking their eyes as they remembered where they were. They turned around towards the direction that the voice had come from, hands gripping their weapons.
A man walked out of the same tunnel they had come from. “The armor is cursed.” He gestured towards the rest of the stone coffins with a hand. “They all are.”
Ryan took a closer look at the man as he walked over to the wall opposite them. He was about the same height as Ryan. The youth of his face was at odds with his voice. He had sunken cheeks and pale skin and he wore no visible armor except for a cloak. Ryan couldn’t sense a shred of power coming from the man. Could he be ungifted? No, that’s impossible. Ungifted couldn’t survive in the dungeons.
The man spoke again, pointing at words written on the wall that Ryan hadn’t seen before. “Pone hic defuit qui illud iudicium meum.”
“Here lay those that have failed my trial” whispered Vivian.
“Who are you?” Ryan asked.
The man turned around. A kind smile covered his face. “You can call me Lucifer.”
“What do you want from us?” Ryan probed.
Lucifer shook his head. “From you? Nothing.” The man walked past the group and headed into the tunnel in front of them. As he disappeared into the shadows, his voice echoed across the chamber. “You can not give me what I seek.”
The group gawked as the man left. Several seconds passed before Ariel asked the question everyone had been thinking. “Guys, do you think he’s like uhhh … trying to steal our dungeon?”
Lee scratched his head. “I don’t think so. If he wanted to do that, he could have waited till we had defeated the boss. Or not told us about the cursed armor.”
Ryan replaced the empty magazine clip from his rifle. Five left. “Either way, we should probably follow him.”
Lee led the group through the new tunnel, moving at a faster pace than before. They traveled for over an hour without any sign of the cloaked man.
More time passed.
The group ran into several clusters of spiders, but nothing as large as the horde they had first seen. Ryan, Ariel, and Lee worked together to dispatch them easily, suffering only minor cuts.
There was a moment of panic when Ryan’s leg was bitten by an enormous centipede-looking creature. The bite injected a paralytic, making it hard for him to breathe, and impossible to move. Lee had offered to suck the venom out, but Vivian literally pulled him by the ear and placed him in time-out. She grumbled something about idiots before filling an IV bag with one of the antidote potions they had gotten from the lizard dungeon. It delayed them a quarter of an hour, but after a couple of Heals Ryan was good to go.
* * *
They had been traveling in the dark so long that Ryan had to recast his eight-hour buffs. They were tired and hungry. Only the knowledge that they had been walking for over eight hours kept them from heading back to the entrance portal.
Lee pointed to a light in the distance. It was faint, like the light from a torch or a campsite. “Look over there, the tunnel seems to end. Might be another chamber?”
The group exited the tunnel and walked into a massive room. Thousands of pillars littered the space, each holding a lighted torch. The pillars were taller than any skyscraper Ryan had ever seen. The room was so large that he couldn’t see walls in any direction. The gray stone that made up the ground and pillars was weathered. Like it had sat there for longer than the world had been alive. Ryan looked up and saw the same starry blackness that he had seen when they had first entered the dungeon.
They walked for hours. They had no idea where they were going, but some force seemed to be pulling them in a direction. The room and pillars were endless.
Voices from up ahead snapped them out of the trance-like state that the group had fallen into. As they got closer they could make out the shapes of people huddled around a fire. The smell of food made them forget all sense of danger as they ran towards the campfire.
As they approached the camp, they saw a team of three sitting on the ground talking amongst themselves. They all wore armor and held spears. Reborn. Ryan couldn’t understand what they were saying. “They’re speaking Korean I think. I can pick up bits and pieces. Ugh, I should have paid more attention in class.” Vivan groaned.
One of the men looked at the group and started talking to them. After several moments, when it became clear that they couldn’t understand him, the man shrugged and sat back down.
“Maybe we should see if someone in the other camps speaks English?” Ariel asked.
“Other camps?”
Ryan’s eyes widened as he looked in the direction that Ariel had been pointing. There were at least a dozen campfires spread around the floor of the dungeon. People of all different ethnicities and races were gathered or sleeping around the fires. All of them were obviously dungeoneers. They all wore massive plates of armor, hardened leather or mage robes, and carried weapons.
“What are they doing here?” Ryan asked in awe.
“Waiting for those doors to open I bet,” Lee whispered. He pointed to a set of intricate doors that seemed to stretch into the heavens.
A voice in Ryan’s head snapped him out of his daze. He could see out of the corner of his eye that everyone else had heard it also. He felt Lee tense up next to him. The voice was ancient and filled with power. The words were slow as if speaking for the very first time.
“The ... Trial ... Begins"
