They reached the fifth floor almost two hours after entering the dungeon. It was going to be a long day, and Ortho was already done with it. He wanted to strangle Luci for slowing them down so much, but every time he thought that way, he regretted it immediately.
The fifth floor was weird. Sharp rock formations dotted a grey landscape. Rock walls rose up dividing the floor into large chambers which ended in a flat roof of the same, grey material.
In fact, all dungeons were weird, both here and in the entirety of Hulh Hadem. Apparently, Anypaxia’s dungeon got weirder below floor seven, but Ortho hadn’t been below that due to whatever regulatory crap prevented E-rank dungeoneers from walking through the guarded entrance to the seven floor. Despite living his life in Huhl Hadem and his experiences up until the seventh floor in Anypaxia’s dungeon, he still found the fifth floor to be the weirdest of them all.
For starters, even though the whole thing looked like it was made of rock, it wasn’t.
“Here, watch this,” he said to Luci, who walked beside him on the paved path to the sixth floor.
They stopped, letting Wip walk off a little. The tall idiot’s hands had been trembling as he contained himself. He wanted so badly to explore this floor as it was his first time being here—he’d stated that repeatedly over the last fifteen minutes—but Luci had giving him enough of a verbal lashing to keep him in place.
Using both hands, Ortho slammed the butt of his shield into the “stone” ground beside the path. There was a dull thud, and his shield sunk in a little. When he pulled the shield back up, an indentation the shape of his shield’s rounded edge was left in the “stone”, which slowly sucked itself back into a shape resembling flat rock.
“That’s weird,” Luci commented. She leaned over the path to get a better look.
Ortho pointed in the distance. “Now look over there.”
Luci traced his finger to a collection of boulders. She squinted at first as nothing happened, but then some of the boulders began to shift a little. Unfolding from beneath one of the boulders’ rocky forms were six small legs. The boulder raised itself up, shuffled closer to the spot Ortho had stabbed on its scrabbly little legs, leaned this way and that as though searching for something, then dropped back down.
“I didn’t think they looked that much like rocks,” Luci whispered, then slapped a hand over her mouth.
Ortho let out a loud guffaw. “The olmenos can’t hear us. Or see us. Or smell us. The only sense they have is like a monster equivalent of gestalt sense. Wip’s fog is the only thing stopping them from sensing us.”
His face twisted into a scowl, then he shrugged and kept walking down the path. Ortho didn’t want to admit that Wip was doing something good for a change. The very thought of complimenting Wip made him want to punch something.
Luci followed shortly after. From that point onwards, she was nervously glancing at every single boulder they passed.
“Um, about the sensing stuff,” Luci stammered, “I think you might be mis—”
“Some grupp party I was in once said this floor was made of wax,” Ortho interrupted. “Smells like rot to me, just like the rest of the dungeon. So anyway, I tested it out by trying to set the place on fire. Bought an afto an everything just to put his dumb theory to the test. It didn’t light up. It isn’t wax. That guy still owes me a drink, and an afto.”
“Oh, he sounds so rude,” Luci said, grinning politely. “The person who didn’t pay for your drink.”
Ortho shrugged. “It’s fine. I knocked one of his teeth out. He had it coming.”
Luci’s smile faltered a little. “Oh, well, um, good for you.” She leaned in closer and whispered in Ortho’s ear. “Whatever you do, Mr. Ortho, please don’t tell Mr. Wip about the wax thing. The last thing I want is for him to test that theory.”
Just bringing Wip up again made Ortho’s nostrils twitch. He glanced up at the idiot walking in front of him, who he’d been trying to avoid looking at for the last half hour. For some reason, he was pulling out one afto after another. He inspected each one, cocking his head this way and that like a bird looking for a worm.
Ortho narrowed his eyes beneath his helmet. “Hey sister, does he bind those aftos before using them?”
“I don’t think so,” Luci said. “He uses too many of them and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him try to bind them.” She levelled a gaze at him. “You’re not the first person who’s helped him, um, procure aftos. And let’s just say that, before I met Wip, I’ve never had to kowtow to a forger before.”
“So he brutecharges them, huh?”
“Brutecharge?”
Ortho showed her the bangle on his wrist, on the arm that wasn’t holding his shield. “Usually, when you want to use an afto, you’ll flow your enma into it.”
He demonstrated this by created a gnarled stream of dim, brown enma and stretching it along his forearm into the bangle. Making his enma visible was for demonstration purposes only. Typically, he would run the unmelded form through his body as it was more efficient, easier to control, and undetectable without a scanner or some form of gestalt sense. That didn’t help with teaching the next generation, though—something which everyone in the Nubah Kilebhi tribe took great pride in doing.
“Under normal circumstances,” he went on, “your enma would be rejected by the aftocore. It fights back by attempting to possess your mind, driving you mad with delusions. For this reason, most people would just,” he released his enma and it vanished almost immediately, “give up before it drives them crazy.”
Luci furrowed her brows. “Possess your mind? That’s not at all what I was taught. The problem with trying to use an aftocore is that it is like trying to thread a needle with a tree. The hallucinogenic effect, or aposyndortion, is the mind and soul trying to come to terms with something completely foreign to itself, which is why you need to bind it first. That way you can gain a familiarity with it, to reduce stress on the user.”
“Right, but that doesn’t explain curses,” Ortho said.
“Well, curses are a manifestation of the aftos properties feeding back into the—”
“Yeah, yeah,” he groaned. “It’s pointless trying to figure out the scientific reasons for something that makes up its own rules. Monsters and dungeons, I mean.”
Luci pursed her lips. “Well, I suppose.”
“Look. It’s well known that curses try to shift your body to be more like the monster that you plucked the core from.”
“Yes, but there are exceptions.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Ortho said, waving a hand. “The thing is, the monsters are the core. Everything else is just the monster’s attempt to meet us in the middle between their rules and those of our world. Think about what happens when you extract the monster’s core from its body. You’re preventing it from returning to its source and respawning.”
Luci’s brows furrowed. “Well, that can be confirmed through experimentation. Lodestars, or monsters that create and manage a unique domain within a dungeon, tend to take longer to respawn than their more common counterparts once you remove the core.”
“Mhm. In other words, the monster is still there, in the core.”
“I can agree with that to an extent,” Luci said in a measured tone.
“Well, you should because it’s true. Seriously, why do kids think they know everything?”
“But, I don’t,” Luci protested. “I just read it in a book.”
Ortho puffed out his chest and eyed Luci sideways. “The Nubah Kilbebhi specialise in overcoming and suppressing curses. The harsh training that my tribe had to go through to achieve that goal would make a spoiled kid like you faint.”
“I am not spoiled!”
“Did you spend your whole life fighting monsters? Did you watch your friends get their faces ripped to shreds on their first scouting mission, or the person you liked going mad from aposyndortion when her wadis were bound to her? Then yeah, you’re spoiled.”
Luci’s mouth worked as she tried to argue. When it was obvious she had no response to that, she folded her arms, looked at the ground in front of her, and pouted.
Ortho huffed in content. “Anyway, let’s talk more practical.”
Luci’s features softened a little, and Ortho realised that it would have been easier to teach Luci by sticking to this topic instead of veering into the origins of monsters.
“The core tries to reject you when you use it.” Ortho ran his enma into his shield, though he didn’t make it visible this time. “But when you bind with it, you become connected to it in a sense. You can feel out where your enma needs to go as though it’s just a part of your own body. Do you ever think before moving your arm?”
“No,” Luci answered.
“That’s how using an afto feels once bound, because you and it come to an understanding. But it’s always fighting you, and you’re fighting back with your enma. It’s a constant struggle for control, one that’s made a little easier by directing your enma into an enma-infused material which then feeds it into the core.”
“You mean, huse?”
“Good. You’re learning something. The core and huse combined is what makes the afto easy to use. And then…”
With a swift motion, he swung his shield arm. The shield’s grips disconnected from the shield itself with a slight twist of his enma—at least, that was the only way he could describe the act. What remained was the two grips, held together by two silver bars that were offset from the back of his forearm and positioned parallel to each other. They were all made from silver-huse. The only way to distinguish the material from regular silver was the thin lines etched all along its surface, which glowed subtly as his enma flowed into the material. Doing so, he controlled the shield.
With one flow of enma going into one of the afto’s control inputs, he accelerated the shield. The input was invisible to everyone but Ortho who felt them out through his connection with the afto. With another flow, he spun the shield until the dog’s head imaged forged on its front was indecipherable. The shield shot off towards the cluster of jagged rocks Ortho had pointed out earlier.
Both of these controls were designed to perform only those tasks, accelerating and spinning. However, there was another control that had no specific task and allowed direct control of the afto with a bit of enma manipulation.
Ortho used that flow to directly manipulate the afto’s movements. Doing this, he rolled the spinning shield onto its side. He couldn’t explain exactly how he did this, just that it was done directly with his enma and it felt as natural as manipulating the shields with his hands.
The shield went up, then dived straight down between two jagged rocks. An olmenos was waiting between them, perfectly still and only distinguishable by the slight change in pattern going from one rock to the next. The shield struck down with vicious force, cracking the monster’s head like an egg.
With a flick of his wrist, Ortho made the shield return. He brought it high, slowed its descent by accelerating away from himself, then caught the shield with his free hand. He reattached the shield to the grips connecting bars by flowing a quick trickle of enma into a control dedicated to that purpose.
Ortho turned to Luci and grinned. “See? You control it just like it’s your own body.”
Luci, however, wasn’t watching him. She was gaping at the monster Ortho had just slain—or, more accurately, at the other olmenoses that were climbing out of the rocks. Part of their rocky exterior parted to reveal gaping maws filled with jagged teeth. Long, red tongues flicked out of them.
“Um, Mr. Ortho,” Luci stammered. “You probably already know this, but if you provoke an olmenos, a swarm of them will come out and hunt down dungeoneers. They can sniff you out through a fog by using their tongues.”
“Yeah, I do,” Ortho lied. The only times he’d come down to this floor, he’d either walked past the monsters in a fog or fought them outside of one. “This is actually a lesson for you, student.”
Luci turned on him, her eyes bulging. “What am I learning?”
“How to use your afto, of course!” he said.
“But it’s an amplifier! It doesn’t work like your shield.”
“Ah.” Ortho sought a better excuse. “Well, I’ll give you a demonstration instead.”
He prepared to throw his shield. Luci rested one end of her thin bag on the floor and held out a hand towards the monsters. The olmenoses scuttled towards them, slow and laboriously. They licked their chops the whole way with their long, red tongues.
“I got it!”
The air in front of the monsters shimmered. Goosebumps grew on Ortho’s exposed, unarmoured skin from a sudden rush of cold, as though the heat around him was being sucked away. Then, starting from a place just a few metres above the approaching monsters, flames shot down from the sky. It carpeted the grey, rocky land in searing chaos.
Ortho covered his face with his shield to ward off the intense heat. Licks of flame creeped towards him, visible as sideways from behind the shield. He counted at least ten heartbeats, gritting teeth behind his shield before it passed.
When it passed, he lowered the shield again and saw that everything was scorched black. He couldn’t believe his eyes, but the rocks looked like they’d melted, their sharp tops now dripping like wax. The monsters themselves were just grey blobs. A few more heartbeats passed and the edges of their melted-wax form sharpened to appear just like rocks—dead and in the process of returning to whatever form this cursed dungeon wanted them in. All that remained of the fight, if Ortho could call it that, was a horrible scent like burnt rubber.
Luci dropped her hand and a dense shield woven from her threads vanished from in front of her. Coughing away the burning smell, she croaked, “I think you destroyed their cores, Mr. Wip.”
Ortho turned to see Wip holding a red glove in one hand—it might have fit him well, if Wip had seven fingers that twisted at disturbing angles and poked out from places where fingers shouldn’t have been. Without even sniffing the afto, Ortho could tell this was the cause of the fire. He could also tell that it probably wasn’t meant to be that powerful and, judging by Wip’s hand being covered in red spots, it must have been brutecharged.
“Woops!” Wip said. Chuckling to himself, he tossed the warped afto aside. Then he pulled a sword out from his backpack, gripping it by the blade. “Alright, time to kill some more.”
Luci waved her hands in a panic. “No, absolutely not! We’re wasting too much time as it is. Let’s just get down to the seventh floor, okay? Also, please don’t drop your fog, Mr. Wip.”
“Woops!”
The rot and burnt rubber that had overwhelmed Ortho’s smell a moment ago faded dramatically. It was replaced by something reminiscent of a passing storm.
His upper lip curled, he turned on the path towards the next lomaw, the stairway down to the next floor. As he passed Wip, he bumped his armoured shoulder against the taller man. “You done showing off?” he growled.
“Nah, not yet,” Wip said. “We still haven’t fought any strong monsters.”
Ortho growled then stomped his way down the path. He wasn’t going to be shown up like this. Not by Wip. And when he got to the seventh floor, he was going to put that clown in his place.
