’Fine,’ Tristan thought, letting go of the heavy iron lock. ’We do it the old-fashioned way.’
His newly awakened core was already aching, completely drained from simply testing the lock’s conceptual structure. Magic was out. Mundane criminality was in.
He turned back to the small, rotting cot he’d been chained to and crouched down. Running his hands along the underside, he found a splintered wooden plank supporting the thin mattress. He twisted it back and forth, the cheap wood groaning in protest until a long, rigid shard finally snapped off in his hand.
It was crude. His hands were shaking from the lingering weakness of his malnourished body. But seventeen years of gaming and memorizing completely useless trivia had actually left him with a decent theoretical grasp on medieval tumbler locks.
He slid the splinter into the keyhole.
It took him ten agonizing minutes in the dark. Ten minutes of prodding, twisting, snapping off pieces of the splinter when they got too soft, and cursing under his breath. But finally, the heavy internal latch gave way with a deeply satisfying chunk.
Tristan slowly pushed the iron door open. It groaned on its hinges, the sound echoing down the pitch-black corridor like a gunshot.
Tristan let out a slow breath. Before stepping out, he reached down and scooped up the heavy length of iron chain that had previously bound his ankles. He wrapped it twice around his right forearm, leaving a few feet of heavy links dangling from his grip like a makeshift flail.
He stepped out into the corridor, keeping his back pressed against the cold stone wall, and began to make his way in the direction he remembered the guards entering from.
Level Two was essentially a long, carved tunnel lined with iron bars on either side. In the pitch black, it felt like walking through a graveyard. He could hear the shifting of bodies, the clinking of chains, and the low, raspy breathing of the other inmates.
"Hey."
Tristan paused. The voice came from the cell immediately to his left. It sounded like it belonged to a man who had smoked gravel for thirty years.
"Hey, gold-eyes," the voice rasped out of the dark.
Tristan didn’t answer, gripping his chain a little tighter.
"Don’t ignore me, kid, I heard the door," the prisoner grunted. "Listen. When you get up to the first level, the crawlers are gonna smell you in about ten seconds. When they tear your throat out, do me a solid and try to die near the air grate, yeah?"
Tristan blinked into the darkness. "...Why?"
"You’re a Verneuil," the man said matter-of-factly. "Those boots are pure dragon-hide leather. My left toe is freezing off. I want ’em."
Another voice chuckled from a cell across the hall. "He’s right, kid. The monsters only eat the meat. Leave the boots."
"I’m a size nine," Tristan whispered back, deadpan. "You want me to double-knot the laces so they’re easier to pull through the grate?"
"Oh, would you? That’s mighty thoughtful of you, kid. Safe travels."
"Thanks. Enjoy the rust," Tristan muttered, shaking his head as he continued down the dark hall.
A few other prisoners murmured as he passed, but none raised an alarm. Most were completely apathetic; the general consensus in the dark seemed to be that Tristan was simply a free meal walking itself up to the monsters on Level One. Why bother calling the guards when nature was about to do the executioner’s job for them?
Eventually, the orderly, man-made stonework of the cell block ended.
The floor lost its smoothness, giving way to uneven, jagged rock. The smell of the air changed abruptly, too. The stale scent of unwashed bodies and rust was replaced by a thick, metallic tang of ozone, damp earth, and something undeniably foul, like rotting meat left out in the sun.
He had reached Level One. The filter.
Tristan carefully stepped out of the corridor and found himself standing in a massive, cavernous space. Even with his eyes adjusted to the dark, the scale of it was disorienting.
It wasn’t a single path leading up. The cavern wall was riddled with massive, gaping tunnels, branching off in a dozen different directions. Some sloped upwards, some spiraled down. It was a geographical nightmare.
’Ah, crap,’ Tristan thought, a cold sweat breaking out on his neck.
In Flamecrest Legacy, the Verneuil Dungeon was practically a footnote. It wasn’t a main story hub. You could visit it in maybe one or two obscure side-quests, and even then, you only saw the entrance. Because of that, his encyclopedic knowledge of the game’s maps was entirely useless here. He was completely, utterly blind.
If he picked a tunnel at random, he might end up walking towards the surface. Or, he might take a tunnel that plunged straight down to Level Four, where monsters that could swallow a house were casually taking naps.
’Think, Tristan. Think.’
He wasn’t an action hero. He had zero combat experience, a starved body, and a core that was refilling at a snail’s pace. Wandering through a pitch-black labyrinth full of monsters was suicide.
’The guards come through here to hunt for artifacts and patrol the cells,’ he reasoned. ’All I have to do is find a nice, secure crevice near the entrance, hide, and wait. When a patrol comes through, I just tail them out from a safe distance.’
It was cowardly. It was passive. It was absolutely perfect.
Tristan nodded to himself and took a step toward a jagged cluster of stalagmites near the cavern wall, looking for a place to wedge himself into.
His boot came down.
Splash.
He froze. He had stepped directly into a shallow puddle of stagnant water. In the dead silence of the cavern, the sound was deafening.
From the absolute darkness of a tunnel directly above him, a low, guttural chittering began.
It sounded like wet stones grinding together, followed instantly by the erratic, skittering clicks of sharp claws scrambling against solid rock.
Tristan’s blood ran cold. The smell of rotting meat suddenly grew overpowering.
Something dropped from the ceiling, landing heavily on the stone floor about twenty feet away. It was low to the ground, a pale, hairless silhouette barely discernible against the dark. It had too many limbs, six thick, double-jointed legs that twitched with unnatural, jerky speed.
It didn’t have eyes. Just a smooth, pale upper skull and a lower jaw split into three separate mandibles, constantly snapping as it tasted the air.
The Prowler shrieked. And before Tristan could even raise his weapon, it lunged.