Silent Moonlight (5)
“Dallon, hold on a second.”
A gentle hand grasped his arm, halting him.
Sienna spoke with a hint of suspicion in her voice.
“Could this be a trap? The scavenger creatures on the third floor of the labyrinth wouldn’t just leave bodies lying around.”
“It is suspicious,” Lucia chimed in, her eyes scanning the scene. “Even if the armor is hard to remove, there’s no sign anyone touched the expensive weapons or backpacks.”
She wasn’t wrong. Twenty or so bodies lay conspicuously in the middle of the swamp. It could be the aftermath of a battle, but it was just as likely a trap.
“I’ve heard of explorers who take special potions to feign death, only to ambush others,” Lucia added.
It reminded Dallon of a senior paladin who had been betrayed by his comrades while fighting demons, all for the holy sword he wielded. Betrayal and ambushes were not uncommon in the labyrinth, where strength was the only law.
Unlike the surface, where some semblance of order existed, the labyrinth was a lawless zone. Crimes went unpunished if they couldn’t be proven, and it wasn’t rare for disputes to end in death to avoid complications.
No wonder the unofficial leading cause of death for explorers wasn’t monsters, but other explorers.
Dallon had been cautious of ambushes and traps during his previous ventures into the labyrinth.
“So, is there a problem?” he asked.
”…Huh?”
But that was a long time ago. Dallon strode forward confidently, leaving Sienna’s hesitant hand to fall away.
“Well, who would worry about whom?” she muttered.
His skin was impervious to anything short of a dragon’s claw, and his regenerative abilities could heal crushed organs in an instant. There was no one on the third floor who could pose a threat to him.
Dallon spread his senses, scanning the area as he approached the group of explorers.
There was nothing to worry about. His senses detected no threats, and if anyone was pretending to be dead, he would simply make it permanent.
The bodies, seemingly intact at first glance, were too far gone to be faking. Their skin was riddled with tiny holes, as if long, thin worms had burrowed through them.
“Such a gruesome end,” Felber muttered, prodding a corpse with his staff.
“I’ve seen similar illustrations in ancient texts,” he continued. “Creatures that drain souls with invisible tendrils. Could it be the work of a Tentacle Maw?”
“Indeed,” Dallon replied.
“Those are supposed to inhabit the fifth floor… Something must be seriously wrong in the deeper levels.”
Dallon nudged a corpse with his foot, revealing a face twisted in agony as congealed fluids dripped away.
Soon, the rest of the group began examining the scene.
Their brief investigation concluded that this was no battlefield. It was a massacre.
“This wasn’t a fight,” Lucia said. “It was a slaughter.”
The Tentacle Maw, a predator from the fifth floor, was a formidable foe. Its vitality rivaled that of a demon, and its movements were explosively powerful, capable of standing toe-to-toe with a true dragon.
Yet among the decomposing bodies, not one explorer was above the third rank. Nearly half the party should have been on the first floor, making them no match for such a predator.
“Steel swords fit for town guards, necklaces with flimsy protective spells… Their gear is trash, unfit for the third floor.”
“Why did they come down here? Crossing the Scorching Desert isn’t easy,” someone pondered.
“The exit was blocked,” Dallon replied.
With a flick of his hand, he incinerated the sticky residue clinging to a corpse. Lucia tilted her head in confusion.
“The exit? Oh, the Barrier Tower.”
“Exactly. With no way up, they came down.”
The news had come from Inouko Todd, a messenger of the Golden Palace, who reported that the Barrier Tower’s collapse had sealed the labyrinth’s entrances.
This meant not only that entry was blocked, but also that explorers already inside had no way out. The safe zones centered around the exits had vanished.
“Rather than wait for the Barrier Tower to be restored, they hoped to find another way out. The most well-known route is through the rift, so they descended to the third floor.”
The problem was that creatures from the deeper levels had already taken over the third floor.
Both the Scorching Desert and the Bottomless Swamp were perilous, but the predators from the fifth floor were nightmares in comparison.
Yet questions remained. Even as empty shells drained of their souls, the bodies should have been devoured by the scavenger creatures of the third floor. Instead, they lay untouched, slowly decomposing.
“Come to think of it, we haven’t encountered a single creature in days.”
Creatures from the deeper levels emerging through the rift, explorer parties dying in their attempt to escape, and the absence of native third-floor creatures—these were unprecedented events.
The puzzle pieces in Dallon’s mind hinted at another looming challenge.
For now, they would continue onward. After cremating the bodies, the group moved on.
It was their fifth day in the labyrinth.
The encounter with the explorer party wasn’t an isolated incident.
From the fifth day onward, they found at least one, sometimes up to three, decimated parties each day.
These groups ranged from ten to thirty explorers, all meeting a gruesome end.
“Ugh…”
On the eighth day, they found a party reduced to nothing but equipment, gnawed away by tiny insects.
On the tenth day, they passed a scene where bodies were haphazardly mixed, as if bitten in half.
They encountered more cases where the Tentacle Maw had consumed souls, leaving behind empty shells. Occasionally, they found not just explorer parties, but also large groups of native creatures, all dead.
After witnessing over fifty such scenes, Dallon and his group reached a conclusion.
“It seems Falcion is about to be screwed,” Dallon remarked.
“You always have a way with words at the strangest times,” Sienna said, poking the crackling campfire with a stick.
Dallon scratched his nose. Was he wrong?
“He’s not wrong,” Lucia said. “It seems the labyrinth’s creatures have all moved upward.”
This was the conclusion Dallon and his group had reached over the past fortnight.
The creatures from the deeper levels hadn’t just disrupted the ecosystem of the Bottomless Swamp. They had likely absorbed all the swamp’s creatures into their ranks and ascended to the second floor.
Nothing else could explain the complete absence of the countless creatures that made up the swamp’s food chain.
The occasional signs of the deeper creatures’ “meals” also pointed toward the entrance to the second floor.
“It’s definitely strange,” Sienna mused. “You said the labyrinth’s creatures rarely move between floors, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Could they be under some kind of spell? Do the deeper creatures have the power to enthrall others?”
Dallon shook his head, chewing on a sausage. There were two possibilities.
One was the work of Enaxagus. The other was the emergence of an unknown factor.
The former was impossible. The evil god and his archdemons were barred from interfering with the labyrinth. If they could, the Stone of Wishes would have long fallen into their hands, and the world would have already ended.
“Then it’s an unknown factor,” Dallon thought.
Driving out the creatures from the deeper levels implied a being of at least archdemon-level power.
If it could drive them all to the lower levels, it might be a being rivaling the evil god.
Was there such a presence in the labyrinth’s depths? Dallon pondered.
He had only explored up to the fifth floor. The seventh floor, where the Stone of Wishes lay, and the sixth floor, known as the Abyss, were beyond his experience.
“Anyway, our priority is the Stone of Wishes, right? We’re not going to hunt creatures on the upper floors,” Sienna said, skewering a piece of dried fish on a stick.
Dallon nodded. This was a race against time. Turning back wasn’t an option.
“Then there’s nothing to worry about. The grand barrier is intact, so it should hold for a while, right?”
“Indeed. The Golden Palace must have noticed something by now. They’ll figure something out,” Dallon replied.
In his experience, the defenses of the labyrinth city were formidable.
In every cycle, the fortress city, known as humanity’s last bastion, had withstood the onslaught of malevolent gods for a time. This time, the labyrinth city had acquired resources more powerful than ever before.
Allies like the Tsar Kingdom and the High Orc tribes had joined forces, along with the distant Eastern Elf Kingdom, the Holy Knights, and even the ancient dragons.
“Come to think of it, this is the first time Bourbon has officially allied with the labyrinth city.”
Though they had maintained a lukewarm friendship due to the Feathered Witch, the dragon had never formed a solid alliance in any cycle. Even now, despite various dealings, it had remained neutral until just before the battle with the Dragon God.
The reason the ancient dragon, who had lived for thousands of years, broke its own code was simple. Sienna had presented a new contract to Bourbon, who had come to save her due to an ancestral pact.
“So, what exactly was the deal?”
“Curious, are you?”
Sienna smiled, chewing on a piece of dried fish. Dalen shrugged. Of course, he was curious. How had they managed to persuade a dragon thousands of years old?
“We promised to find the remains of the Ancestor Witch.”
“The Ancestor Witch?”
“Yes. The first Feathered Witch who died in the Dream King’s underground palace.”
The Dream King’s underground palace. Dalen stroked his chin in silence. It was no easy task. The palace was a massive tomb built on the island of the Shadow Elves across the eastern sea. When the elves were still powerful, diplomatic reasons made it difficult to enter, and now, with it conquered by the Rafilem, it was completely inaccessible.
Even setting aside the difficulty of breaching the underground palace, to retrieve the remains, they would first have to defeat the Rafilem and their forces crossing the sea.
In essence, fulfilling the contract meant overcoming the apocalypse first. This implied that for Bourbon to claim the reward, he would have to voluntarily help prevent the end of the world.
“Was that your plan?”
“Who knows?”
Sienna’s eyes curved into a crescent shape, her long eyelashes more captivating than usual in the flickering firelight.
“Once you sign, it’s done. A verbal contract is still a contract.”
“Seems like a pretty unfair deal to me.”
“Is there such a thing?”
In an instant, her smile vanished, replaced by a feigned innocence. Dalen let out a disbelieving chuckle.
The crackling of the fire masked his low laughter. After a brief silence, Sienna spoke again.
“The Dream King’s underground palace. Will you come with me?”