Dungeon Hunter: Act I

Actual Answers

~Dungeon 16 cleared for the first time by Just Friends~

Fuck.

We'd done it. Granted, we'd killed four people to do it. Five people, if you counted the Minotaur.

I was still debating that. I'd assumed the beast had been generated by the Dungeon. Though... Xanthe was a lizard person who'd clearly had sentience and intelligence, and all the other creatures in Twilight had also been a type of being. What if the Minotaur was just another race that hadn't accomplished the same thing Xanthe's people hadn't? When it had spoken, it had said it couldn't surrender. So if the Minotaur had been real, and not an NPC, we had killed what was essentially a slave, unable to escape the invisible constraints placed upon them, put up to the firing squad. If the "first time" in the Dungeon announcement meant what it said, would the Minotaur be destined to die again and again and never be able to break free?

If that was the case, I wasn't even sure about how I'd feel. It was a far crueller fate than anything else I could really imagine.

I wanted to feel elation that we'd cleared the Dungeon, but I couldn't summon the emotion. Just a weird sense of resignation.

We'd been dealt such random shit since we entered the Gate that when the world fell away into infinite empty white before this clear announcement, it was actually kind of anticlimactic. Part of me had been expecting another series of challenges or some impossible to understand puzzle to follow.

Ending it here was... bad writing. No two ways about it.

This simply reinforced my opinion that this entire thing sucked, not just as a Dungeon but as entertainment. Really now. What was engaging about watching a handful of people standing around humming and hawing over what to do with a ball of yarn? Add to that, making the labyrinth so large that even had there been other players in the Dungeon, which was likely considering the time that had passed, that we'd run into only four meant that it was highly probable most of the other people who'd entered would end up dying of malnutrition. That was akin to watching grass grow, if by grow you meant "die from not being watered."

It paled in comparison to the CBD Dungeon Wren had described. An arctic winter biome and monsters in snow ambushing you when you least expected it? Now that was entertainment. Well, at least when it was happening to someone else and they weren't real people. On a TV show or in a book, I'd have eaten that right up. But this Dungeon was...

What wasted potential. Everything really just felt like whoever had developed this had read the CliffsNotes about Theseus and dragged and dropped random shit onto their canvas.

Wren appeared before me as the wall popped out of existence like the snap of the fingers. A piece of weight fell from my shoulders upon seeing her. The time alone in the room hadn't been too hard on her.

She looked stunned, her hazel eyes wide in awe, though I noted those same eyes were a little reddened. Had she been crying? My heart hurt. I told myself we'd make finding her family a top priority.

As she gaped at our voidlike surroundings, I was glad she was still capable of childlike wonder. We hadn't robbed her of that with all the awful things she'd been complicit in as a member of our party. I still didn't know exactly what we'd do with the corpses we'd stored in our inventories. Bury them somewhere in Brisbane? Dump them in front of a funeral home and hope for the best? We'd definitely not be tossing them into the Brisbane River as per Jye's suggestion.

Nexus available

Huh. That was completely new. I'd long since stopped being surprised by sudden reveals like this. However, that it was a notification, not an announcement, piqued my interest. It had to be for our eyes only. For those who had cleared Dungeons. I didn't want to jump the gun but a Nexus sounded very much like a fast travel hub. Should I be concerned that I didn't think waypoints seemed beyond the pale these days?