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Over the span of the next week, Avan and his rabit companion roamed the crystal plane and developed a unique bond as they fought the crystal lizards. While Avan bombarded a newly discovered crystal lizard from cover with Akkalon's Touch and Akkalon's Spheres, his fluffy companion scanned the area for more lizards.

On the one hand, so that they would not be surprised, and on the other hand, so that Avan could march directly towards the next lizard after defeating the previous one.

Whenever possible, he had sent Horny on patrol while he had needed a few hours of sleep, and had practiced, trained and even cooked something small in some safe surroundings while his companion had also caught up on sleep.

A week of constant and routine fighting, sleeping, guarding and plumbing passed quickly.

Avan had found over twenty of these crystalline komodo dragons during the week, finished them off and superficially stripped them of their mana crystals.

He promptly distributed the free stat points generated by new levels into the magic-specific stats, thus raising his mana pool above the thousand threshold.

Also the collected crystals of the layer and the lizards had accumulated to a considerable pile, with the ulterior motive to maybe sell them later or even use them in some way together with him as a dungeon.

 

[Character Interface]

 

Sitting on a crystal with his arm resting on his knee and his hand holding his chin, Avan thought about his next steps.

Horny, who was sitting next to him on the floor, was gleefully munching on some of Avan's berries. The floor was otherwise very quiet, except for the occasional chewing of the furry companion, which could only be heard if one listened carefully.

"What now, what now..." He muttered thoughtfully, glancing over his surroundings and lingering on his dungeon creature. "This just doesn't look inviting..."

"And I can't even sense anything with my dungeon skills..."

Avan's problem was directly not ten meters in front of him in the wall of the crystal plane, whose location he had already spotted two days ago and had now sat down in front of it, pondering his next steps.

A very black hole, two meters in diameter, was located directly in front of him at ground level in the wall between the crystals and was, as far as Avan could tell, the only indication that the way to the next level continued here.

The problem he was now pondering was the uninviting feeling he couldn't shake and the fact that he couldn't see into the gloom or feel the slightest hint of it with his dungeon senses. The black hole in the wall was simply non-existent in his sphere of influence and gaped mysteriously and darkly before him.

Avan conjured up the last of his Lymia tea and sipped the still-steaming tea while holding his chin with his left hand and placing the teacup to his lips with his right, sipping the soothing and comforting tea.

So lost in thought, he glanced at his inventory and looked for some inspiration, or clue, no matter how ridiculous it seemed to him to even look for it in his inventory.

Shaking his head, and a few minutes and a tea less, he stood up and patted down his dusty leather armor, wrinkling his nose at the inherent odor flowing up from his armpits that he perceived. "I really need a fucking shower.... Shit, I smell bad." He continued in a nasal voice and could have sworn that even his fluffy crony was laughing at him.

Avan had spent the week finding nothing but dusty crystal and the crystal-covered komodo dragons on this level. "And that crystal sand in every crack.... BAH! To the abyss with it! Damn!" He cursed as he once again felt the fine sand-like dust on his skin, between his armor pieces, and all over and around him with every movement while standing and stretching.

"What the heck, I really need a bath, my drinking water is running low and brooding any longer won't do me any good. Well then, let's go, Horny..." He continued to his companion talking to himself and mentally went through his backpack, in which the last liter of water was.

Due to his ability to absorb environmental mana, he had actually been able to get by with three large drinking tubes and the berries he had previously collected and purchased. Nevertheless, the water had not been enough for him to waste it on daily needs such as washing, and fortunately he had not done so when he thought of the last liter of the precious good that lingered in the backpack on his back.

With a vague sense of impending unease that seemed to emanate from the exit of the plane, Avan strode with Horny into the blackness, still inwardly cursing all the crystal dust on his skin as he had done so many times in recent days.

As soon as he stepped into the cold radiating hole, all ambient light disappeared and he suddenly turned around in panic, since not a single ray and illumination behind him penetrated to him from the crystal plane. He spun around with a racing heartbeat and found himself facing an opponent he could not defeat just like that; total darkness and complete silence.

Nothing was visible and he couldn't even see his groping hand, which he had frantically stretched out trying to feel his surroundings. With another short interruption of his heartbeat, another thought followed.

"Horny! Horny? Are you still there?" He suddenly shouted anxiously into the silence and blackness, since he could no longer see his companion either. He was especially panicked by the fact that he could sense absolutely nothing with his physical or dungeon senses, as if he were floating in a vast nothingness.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck!" He cursed into nothingness, trying to master his helplessness. "Easy, calm down Avan..." He admonished himself and held both of his hands in front of him in the darkness to let them slide down in a calming gesture with the palms of his hands, taking deep breaths.

Okay, come on down... Just another level and certainly another test of Akkalon. Or the dungeon. Or whatever has been responsible for this so far... He mumbled in his thoughts and breathed in and out slowly in calm puffs. And Horny is certainly fine... I hope.

After a minute of calming down, he had come down enough to be able to think clearly again and to be able to think reasonably calm thoughts.

"Darkness, the absolute nothingness. Silence, no breath of wind, no light. Horny not there, hopefully landed somewhere else. Can't see anything, can't feel anything." He enumerated the facts to literally get another picture of the situation.

"Everything else there..." He continued, as he suddenly made a startling realization and cursed again inwardly, now careful not to draw attention to himself in case this environment was also inhabited by monsters.

Where the hell did my backpack go? He realized with surprise, no longer completely panicked, when he noticed the missing weight on his back.

He was also missing everything except his leather armor, which he wore on his body. Even his body odor, the sand that had annoyed him so much just a few minutes before, and simply everything except his clothes was missing.

"What the hell is going on here? And how?" He stared into the void, stunned, as he ran both hands over his shoulders to make sure he wasn't dealing with an illusion.

Suddenly, Avan jerked around as he heard a noise in the darkness directly behind him for the first time in minutes, or even hours. Crouching down and holding his fists forward, ready to fight, he turned his head from left to right and tried to see or hear anything that could have caused this scratching sound.

Before he could form another thought, he felt a damp, musty and cold breath on his right ear and jumped forward, startled, and turned around to look at the creature that had just come so close.

In contrast to before, he could now actually make out a light scratching sound approaching him, which seemed to be slowly approaching him from the front. As if something sharp-edged would scratch on a metal surface.

With cold goose bumps running down his back and over his skin, Avan concentrated on the encounter with whatever creature seemed to be playing its tricks on him.

With full concentration of his own senses and as a dungeon, he squinted his eyes slightly and stared into the darkness as he slowly made out a contour that seemed impossibly dark and black against the emptiness, as if it were even blacker and darker. The silhouette seemed to literally absorb the darkness around it, billowing with an absolute darkness and blackness that Avan could never have imagined and that even dwarfed his surroundings.

When the creature came to a screeching halt not five meters in front of him, he could make out something more and guess the shape of the creature, whose head vaguely reminded him of a midnight black raven, but with a touch of dead and bones highlighted by the feathers under its skin.

The creature in front of him looked as if it had come out of a horror movie, as it stood there hunched unnaturally in front of him and seemed to stare at him with a slight bone-colored glow in its eye sockets, while its arms seemed to drag on the ground with their loosely thirty-centimeter-long claws.

The entire creature stood completely still and frozen in front of him, and if it weren't for the very creepy and gentle movement of the raven's head, which seemed to very slowly bend sideways to the left, and the glint in its eyes, Avan could have mistaken it for a statue.

Before he could react, the creature suddenly disappeared with a loud metallic scratch, and Avan could not understand what had just happened.

The shock prevented any human reaction and he still could not see anything, but felt the irrepressible pain creeping and yet rapidly reaching his brain as he opened his mouth to a silent scream and fell to his knees.

He cried out loudly as something landed with a wet thud on the floor to his right and a warm sticky liquid ran down his upper right body.

With an almost inhuman scream, and as he had never heard anyone scream before, Avan realized that in a ripping motion his right arm had just fallen to the floor, separated from his shoulder, and in the first moment of shock he had understood nothing of what had happened.

With his left hand, screaming in panic, he felt the stump of his right arm, which ended directly at his shoulder, and the blood ran in streams through his fingers. The event had finally reached his consciousness and before he could form another thought, it rumbled out of his throat and Avan's dark world spun to give him a brief moment and view of his body as his head rolled across the black floor in front of his headless body.

His mouth was still open to scream, but nothing more than a bloody gurgle came out without existing vocal cords and a functioning lung.

Behind his headless and kneeling body stood the horror figure of a bony raven creature, licking its dark glistening claws with a disgusting gesture, while it seemed to stare silently into his eyes, sneering.

What...! He could not even finish his thought as darkness overtook him and he drifted off to his death.

---

Panic-stricken, Avan stood upright with his heart beating out of his chest and, in a panic and in very quick movements, ran his hand over his right arm and up to his head, which, as usual, was sitting on his neck and body where it belonged. Sweat ran into his eyes while his chest and heart throbbed loudly in stabbing movements and it felt as if the veins and arteries in his body were about to burst as fast as his heart's blood shot through them.

"What the hell!" He cried out in fear as he sat there feeling himself and trying to process what he had just experienced.

A childish and partly creepy throaty laugh sounded and resounded as if through a room to him from the front.

Shocked to be alive and with a brain that could not comprehend what he had just been through, Avan raised his head and stared directly into a child's face of a small nondescript and black-haired boy who seemed to be sitting at a table in front of him in an infinite expanse, laughing at him in amusement.

The boy, not even twelve years old, who had turned only the right half of his face towards him, grinned at him with obvious amusement with the right half of his mouth, while Avan could not see the left half of his head.

Slowly, the boy, who gradually no longer seemed to look quite like a boy, turned his head in his direction, and Avan involuntarily had to back up, even though he couldn't do it very well in a half-sitting, half-lying position.

What was now staring and grinning at him in its entirety no longer remotely resembled a human boy, but much more like a half and gnawed corpse, one half of which had kept itself perfectly alive, while the other contained only bones and a familiar glow in the eye.

"There is my guest at last. I hope my creature has treated you ... duly and... brought to me in one piece whole, yes?" Laughed in a playful boyish voice as the bony half of his face rattled, adding a bony element to the voice that immediately sent a violent goosebump down Avan's spine.

"Oh, now don't be like that! How else are you to be summoned before the god of death?" He grinned at Avan in his half-dead and half-perfect face.

With his mouth open, and extreme tension in his shoulders and body, he stared at the self-named god of death, confronted with a premonition of death rushing towards him at any moment, if he even misbehaved.

Visibly annoyed, as if the being in front of him were indeed a small petulant child who was denied something, the latter crossed his bony arm with his human arm in front of his equally half-bony chest.

"Well, making such big waves at your arrival and then not even possessing manners. Pah, so be it." The half-dead boy told him, offended. "I wanted to see for myself what's up with this little human who seems to make such waves and upset the fabric."

With his left bony hand and an equally bony finger, the god of death tapped the black table in front of him and stared at him calculatingly.

"Well, if he's already allowed that to happen, I might as well get in on the action a bit..." it said to itself, only to flick its human right finger in Avan's direction.

Before Avan could say anything back, the surroundings before his eyes dissolved and frayed into renewed darkness, until a kind of mana strand reached him and he heard a whispering, now masculine and deep booming voice at his ear and at the same time from all around him.

"I allowed myself the liberty once to modify the next level... a bit. A little death never hurts! Let's see how you handle my little test like this." Laughed the deep voice and disappeared with an echo as Avan found himself sitting on the ground stunned in front of a green wooded plain, his companion still nowhere to be seen.

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