Ank

“Are you sure this [Dungeon] is a good one to enter right now? I mean, you’re all only [Level: 18], and these places can be really dangerous”, I talked by experience.

“Well, we’re here to level up too, and not hold the two of you back”, Jao explained, as he checked his equipment for a last time. “Plus, you two are here for us too, right?”, he smiled, confidently. “Just take care of us the same way you were doing until now; let us do most of the fight without dying; and everything will be okay.”

“Don’t worry~”, I said, as my sister and I raised our thumbs.

“We won’t jump in to kill the weaklings even if they tore off your limbs~”, Hunah added in the same way.

“No, please, don’t let the monsters tore off our limbs”, Nif replied, almost scared.

“Uh? Why not? You need to struggle to gain [Experience Points] and everything, and you even have Tapa to glue back your limbs, right?”, I asked, for even if Taffy seemed to be an exception at everything, if she could grow new limbs from nothing, a common healer could at least glue them back, right?

“I can’t ‘glue back our limbs’!”, the fix girl talked back, as shocked as her companion before.

“Fuck, they would let the monsters just quarter us?!”, Nif was still in disbelief.

“Well, well, they understand it now” the blue-haired human tranquilized his friends, and turned to the snake-skull-shaped cave entrance before us, the [Dungeon] existing right in a desolated and dry land, green only visible in the horizon behind us, the opposite direction leading to a complete sand desert. “Let’s go now, we have a quest to conclude.”

We all stepped forward, green flames enveloped us all, and when our feet touched the ground, we were already somewhere else, just like that. It wasn’t a surprise that none of neither my sister nor I noticed that we were entering inside Incute’s pocket dimension back then.

Yes, neither of us had forgotten Incute, but we were waiting for that quest to end before talking about her, so we would have some reputation beyond the rich kids who bought their way to the 90^th rank, and made a poor adventuring [Party] shit their pants like a pair of bullies…

Also, just like Incute’s herbivore-creature-themed dungeon, the Sssssssspace! [Dungeon] interior reflected its exterior. Which meant, it was creepy: a giant slithering reptile floating in a dark space like the night sky, but dead, its tail being just bones, while its head was fleshy and intact, the extension in between, a transition of these two states. It seemed we had been teleported to almost the tip of the tail, on a bony spine.

Still, it was amazing.

My eyes darted all around, as I absorbed the image of all the 800 stars, and the weird multicolored night clouds, and at the center of everything, the massive ball of fire that was the sun; orbiting around it, the planet we all lived in, Cipact, the moon, and the only other planet out there, Altecuh. I reached for Hunah’s hand, and when we looked at each other, the wonder clear in our eyes, we smiled.

“This must be the most beautiful view after you”, I reached for her ear and whispered; to what my twin sister’s grip on my hand got tighter, and her smile larger.

“Beware: if you fall off the snake’s body, it can be hard to get back on”, Jao explained, taking the lead, and walking deeper into the enormous corpse. “This [Dungeon] has not awakened, so it's not really friendly with the guild, we won’t find much comfort or understanding here, but because it has so many floors, the difficulty won’t be really steep.”

“Been here before?”, I asked, not summoning anything just yet, so my monsters couldn’t steal the [Party]’s kills.

“No, it’s just the description we received from the quest paper”, the blue-haired human explained. I was about to hum in acceptance, when the [Party] leader added, his smile transpiring way less confidence: “Also, this [Dungeon] in particular is quite infamous withing the Beginner’s City…”

“What do you mean?”, I asked again.

“This is where the 10^th Guild Master’s [Party] was killed off”, Nif replied, checking every direction before him with all of his eight eyes simultaneously, all tensed up.

“Back then, some kind of outside power seemed to have invaded the [Dungeon]”, Tapa continued the explanation, once the two ahead of us seemed to be 100% immersed on the [Dungeon] diving. “The invaders, two weird monsters, showed up right after Guild Master’s [Party] killed the last boss here, impeded them from leaving the [Dungeon], and showed themselves to be really tough. One of the Guild Master’s [Party] members, however, was some kind of priest, and had a dimensional spell, and managed to send Guild Master back in the last moment. For a time, this place was sealed off by the guild, but after he became strong enough, the 10^th Guild Master came here with the 1^st, came back here, and they killed one of the invaders. The corpses were never found, and one of the two monsters disappeared, though.”

“…What the fuck, isn’t this a super ominous signal?”, I asked, even my sleepy eyes widening as much as they could.

“Yeah, and I’m quite sure the plot of the illusion contained within the magic-tether-rock we bought is basically the same”, Hunah added, pointing that the magical piece of art we watched at night inside our tent had a dangerously similar plot-line, but instead of a [Dungeon], it happened inside a mansion, and instead of an adventurers’ [Party], the previously massacred ones had been an innocent family.

“Kuhuhu!”, Tapa laughed. “Relax, relax! We wouldn’t have been sent here if the place hadn’t been confirmed safe; even if they are few, every [Party] that manages to level up enough to reach 90^th rank in the Beginner’s City come here to take their rank up test. Since the incident, this [Dungeon] had been completed many times before with no problems!”

“Said the mansion seller…”, I started.

“To the unsuspecting newcomers who would become the next victims~”, Hunah completed.

“Now, this is scary enough already. Please stop completing each other’s phrases”, Nif scolded, looking back at us and stopping on his tracks, our little talk seeming to have got to him.

“Ah~ sorry, sorry. It’s just that, you see? In the story, the killers were a pair of twins…” I started to explain.

“…And they did this all the time”, Hunah concluded the explanation, and we both shrugged.

“I said stop, man!”, the eight-eyed man shouted back, but everyone, even him, seemed to have relaxed a bit.

Not long after this, I saw the entire [Party] climbing down the spine of the enormous dead snake, and entering the cavernous corpse… And only then it clicked inside my head, and I immediately sprung into action:

“Fuck, [Dissection]!”, I touched the skeletal spine beneath my feet and conjured.

[Dissection failed; you didn’t defeat this object (dungeon scenery)!]

[Dissection failed; this object (dungeon scenery) isn’t, nor as ever been alive!]

“Oh, well… the last boss of this [Dungeon] should be [Level: 100], so there’s still hope”, I commented, getting up and following after the others, and the sounds of battle down beneath and in the first floor of the [Dungeon], a battlefield of [Level: 18] adventurers, and a bunch of serpent monsters that looked like pots [Xical, Level: 10].