WHAT MONSTERS TO EXPECT ON EACH FLOOR:

FLOOR 1: So-called “crusty” slimes. These monsters might seem weak and brainless, but a small ground of them could easily kill a typical villager. Some are crafty and even outright vicious. One favorite tactic of theirs is to band together and engulf groups of adventurers—another is to drop from the ceiling and devour them by the face.

FLOOR 2: More playful shapeshifters predominate. Slimes begin to harden into facsimile creatures. Expect traps and snares, slimes firing themselves as projectiles, increased absorption, thorough combination. If a slime drops onto your head on this floor, it is NOT trying to devour you—do NOT drive it away with ordinary blows. The slime is suffocating you and will change its state of matter according to your response. As yet, we have found no consistent counter-strategy for this. Avoid such attacks if possible.

FLOOR 3: Slimes unite more fully with their environment. Expect living labyrinths, golems, and creatures which resemble fusions of existing monsters and animals. Slimes also begin to take on elemental powers, firing magic attacks. They begin to approach mortal intelligence and unpredictable strategies, which will change from year to year. Rely on your instinct.

FLOOR 4: The cascade and the “village.” We recommend that you turn back before reaching this floor.

FLOOR 5: There is no proof of anyone having found the dungeon core.

Yes there was.

An oral report can’t necessarily be trusted—but an oral report from someone so bedraggled and transcendentally convinced of his own suffering at least deserved to be remembered.

One journeyman had gone down into the dungeon without anyone’s knowledge, only to come up all of a sudden in the middle of the night, at death’s door. On the doorstep of Arnaul and Catamaug’s great-grandparents, he described a dungeon core hanging from a vast vaulted ceiling, from a chandelier’s chain, surrounded by dense and twinkling light...something heavenly...and then, at their feet, he died.

Hours later, his body disappeared. This could have been related, or it may have been a routine random act of chaos from some stray demon. Still, the story was not deemed worthy of official, outsider-oriented record.

***

On the second floor, the moss was slimes. The mushrooms were slimes. The walls, which had already slightly been slimes, were now more and more slimes. Because everything was slimes, everything moved—whether in slight vibrations or full-on jiggling. And everything was crafty. Everything would shift at least a nudge’s worth of space away from an adventurer’s hand.

Hours after the divers had arrived and slain, thuds and grunts rocked the chamber. They were pounding the living walls with their armor, sword hilts, bootheels, and just-plain elbows.

Linzy the monk and Hue the summoner stood at one part of the roughly semicircular room, elbowing the wall with coordination and deliberation, as if targeting a mortal’s pressure points. The rest shouted with barbarian yelps, whipping the wall for all they were worth.

Nyx was having a hard time handling their wimpy thin sword with confidence. This would’ve been so much easier with the bludgeon-like Hellrazor, but here they were panting loud and vigorously poking.

When Ethel slinked over to them, they expected to hear something about how cool the flora and fauna of this cavern had been. Which wasn’t even true—I mean, how could slime creatures shaped like un-slime be even theoretically cool at this point? Everything they were seeing was a variation on the same organism, which all blurred together, monster into wall, at some point. And while the slimes were perhaps getting more intelligent, that just meant more fractures and aches for Lark to heal.

Instead Ethel just murmured, “I didn’t miss this part.”

Nyx quirked their mouth to the side, unequivocally. They didn’t love this, nor did they hate it—it was acceptable.

Ethel started pummeling the wall with her knees, hands in pockets. It looked kind of lazy because it was. Nyx guessed she didn’t want to start bleeding again from the side of her head. Lark could heal it, but, y’know, kind of unappealing.

“Any stronger?” said Ethel.

Nyx shook their head. Why would Ethel ask this? They had yet to find any alcoves where Nyx could absorb souls in peace—though they did both know that there had to be some, usable with enough intelligence and care.

“Did I help at all, last night?” said Ethel.

Nyx remembered. As was routine for every dungeon, the divers took night-watching shifts. Ethel and Catamaug had stayed up, but after a few hours of waiting, Ethel insisted on taking her leave and staying close to Nyx. Nyx had been writhing in their sleep, feeling centipedes crawl between nerves and bones, but after that the writhing stopped.

“Yeah,” said Nyx, “but please don’t do it again.”

Because it did no good for the team as a whole.

Because Nyx wasn’t going to have an Ethel forever.

Ethel reluctantly nodded and took a step away.

***

The cycle of fighting and cleaning continued, its end too distant to be actively cared about.

“Augh!” Lark cried in a room they thought had been made battle-free. She fell onto her palms and began to moan in agony. The rest of the divers turned around for her. Ragnorre brightened her glowing fists. The medic’s ankle, raised and bleeding fast, had been caught in a hard slime vise.

The first one to act after Ragnorre was Dulcen, who ran to Lark and reached his arms around the vise. It was alive—it drove its teeth deeper. Lark reached around Dulcen to pull him off, calling him an idiot, asshole, and a thousand other words. He kept his grip on the vise until it cracked and died, the slime’s soul erupting in the air like a harmless sparkler.

The vise collapsed into rock. Lark’s foot had not quite fallen off, so she healed herself. Ragnorre cheered and nobody paid it attention. The rest of them moved on wordlessly.

Not long after that, the ceiling swung down like an avenging arm and swiped through Catamaug, chewing through armor and rending his flesh. There was enough of his arm left to salvage, but still he complained that his nerves hadn’t been re-done right and that the feeling of numb ache would never leave him. Lark told him bitterly, “You think I don’t have that?”

They cleaned the walls of a tight, crusty room, aware of how much everything reeked and how humid and sweaty this maze to the center of the earth could get. Lark walked around with Ragnorre’s lantern in hand, going, checking, healing. For the first time, she adopted something approaching a bedside manner—thanks to the divers, and encouraging advice close to the ear.

As she sat with glowing hands cupped around Nyx’s ankles, she whispered, “You’re going to go far.”

Nyx looked at her glumly. Obviously this was a double entendre about Nyx being a demon and practically going into the cosmos, for untold billions of years.

“I just pray you use yourself for good,” Lark continued. “Even just for five mortals. Just for something small.”

Nyx remained stoic. Lark remained pretty bad at giving encouragement.

That night the electric lantern glowed on, gently flickering. Dulcen and Nyx stayed up. Everyone else remained fast asleep. The way to the next chamber seemed to hover in the darkness beside them, just an arm’s length away, a clattering howl echoing from it now and then.

They sat with their knees to their chins and a hand over their weapons, neither with anything really to say.

Then a neuron fired in Nyx’s demon brain: something in the room had moved. And in that fraction of a fraction of a second’s awareness, Nyx asked themself if it would be suspicious for them to act on it before Dulcen.

Their conclusion was that it wouldn’t be suspicious, just vaguely impressive and quickly forgotten. They hopped upright, drew their sword, and brandished it in an arc.

Dulcen still hadn’t moved.

“It’s just Hue,” he said. They both turned their heads to the figure that had just arisen, and yeah, it was just Hue.

It was just the suspicious weird summoner of the group here to greet two party members when they were sort of on their own.