“I asked the exact same questions you did,” said Ethel with unreasonable, words-spilling-out-of-her-head excitement. “Except more of them, like about dragon migration, and the biology of slimes, and how the mineral complex could be used to...”

Nyx let the words drift off. Once Ethel hit a pause, Nyx sighed, “Yeah. I guess if I’d actually bothered to ask about normal Darshannan stuff, I would’ve been just as successful.”

The two were sitting in the rock pews of the dungeon core, waiting for Hue to quit kneeling in silence so that Ragnorre could kneel in silence. Basking in the eerie, shifting glow of the core made them feel like this was an aquarium for perverse molds.

“Did you ask about soul gems?” said Ethel with a wink.

“No... No! Dammit, that gave me a good one,” said Nyx, palm slapped against their head. “Why would people from another world spontaneously develop tangible, magical souls anyway? It’s weird! I’m sure it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but having the question at all is so irritating!”

Hue rose and left his spot before the core. Ragnorre glanced at the spot, but continued picking her ear.

“Uh...oops. I was supposed to ask about her too,” said Nyx.

“That’s okay,” said Ethel. “I asked for you.”

“And it said?”

“That it would have to probe her body, mind and soul to get a better idea of what she’s made of, or from, or by.”

“Hmmmrgh...” Nyx looked at the careless Ragnorre and grimaced. Much like their question about soul gems, none of the questions related to Ragnorre and her wacky powers had seemed important before entering this dungeon. Now, though, they were overwhelming—because before they’d seemed like hopeless, dead questions. Questions better left untroubled, for the sake of not rousing Nyx’s neuroses.

But now they were too flagrant to ignore. Suddenly there was a lead, bait on the hook to Earth...

Nyx stood up, cracked their knuckles, and prepared an elaborate speech about the wrath of the twelve hells with which to convince Ragnorre to kneel before the dungeon core and at least attempt to answer these things.

Probably good that Nyx didn’t say all that, because Nyx’s combined confusion and exhaustion made them positive that if they had said it, their fear of Ragnorre would show through.

“Looks like we’re done here!” cried Ragnorre, breaking the silence.

Everyone looked at each other. Nyx squinted and sighed like a behemoth.

“Oh, I get it. You want me to...?”

“Yeah,” said Nyx.

In a single bound, Ragnorre jumped and squatted before the core. Her eyes glowed and dimmed. It took two seconds. “Okay!” she said, standing up again.

“Wait, but—”

Ragnorre faced the core and started winding up a punch. “Now that everyone’s totally done, I can try and be...”

Nyx reached for her leg, but phased through. “Stop—”

“The strongest...!!”

She took a running start, leaped, and glitch-ratcheted her jump height to bring her even with the core. Then, fist snarling with electricity and pixels, she punched it square-on.

Filling everyone with horror.

Destroying the dungeon core wouldn’t just mean killing off the slimes it produced. It’d also take a chunk of the world ecosystem out with it, not to mention creating a chasm in the planet that could only filled by civilization-ending earthquakes and tsunamis. Not to mention the chaos that unfurls when one of the twenty-four mystical pillars of the known world crumbles...

Wait, the core wasn’t crumbling at all.

Ah, of course. Silly scared dungeon divers. Her fist had merely phased through, and now Ragnorre was just kind of floating there. She wasn’t destroying the core at all! She was just, um, feeling its innards.

Then Ragnorre resolidified her body, including the arm still stuck in the core. Her body dangled by her elbow.

The inside of the dungeon core began, crack by crack, to break.

Lark was so frightened and angered that she looked dead already. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?” she shouted, marching forward with tempestuous fury.

“Gotta kill the dungeon core to make sure nobody gets hurt again! And to be stronger...”

“BUT THE COSMIC ECOSYSTEM!”

Hue looked mildly concerned, but within the span of a minute he had already come to terms with this disaster and was now rocking on his heels.

Ethel, meanwhile, began to hyperventilate, and Nyx, putting an arm around her shoulders, was too close to her not to share her fear in this moment.

“We have plenty of time to flee,” said Hue, to reassure them. “It’s not collapsing, not immediately...”

That didn’t help Ethel at all. She tried to slow her breathing with her hands.

“Can you give us something that’s reassuring on, like, a bigger timescale?” said Nyx, leering over at Hue.

“Of course. A dungeon core was destroyed right around the turn of last millennium, and the cataclysms only really got bad fifty years later.”

This whole time, the core had been shattering from the inside out, its fissures spreading until, finally, in a near-silent move, it broke into so much glowing dust.

The pieces piddled to the ground, much less impressive than they expected.

It happened just as if a chandelier had fallen within a great church: nothing else shattered and nothing else moved.

Ragnorre skillfully backflipped her way onto the ground again. With a thumbs-up and a hand on her hip, she cried, “Crisis averted~!”

“NOT SO FAST!”

From the entrance of the dungeon core’s inner sanctum, a weirdly defiant voice rang out. The divers turned and watched as a short silhouette shuffled down the aisle, his feet dragging noisily across the stone.

It was Agi, his injured wings spitting feathers. His face was strained. If he were human, he’d have been panting fiercely.

“There is a new crisis waiting for you at home,” he hollered from midway down the aisle.

He would have benefitted from a cell phone.