Chapter 197: Forward Progress

“I don’t exactly have all of forever to spend down here, so let’s do this the most efficient way,” Garth said as they rested against the wall of the dungeon. This particular place had smooth cobbled walls that stood straight up, unlike the previous layer of the dungeon.

A dungeon was created as an extradimensional spore burrowed through the planet’s crust, looking for the juicy center to feed off of. This particular dungeon had an unknown number of layers, and was mutated as hell.

A normal dungeon would form floors like growth rings, with mazes and monsters built around the core steadily working it’s way down.

Unfortunately, this particular dungeon was retarded.

Its monsters were few and far between, and rarely more than a nuisance. The biggest problem was that the dungeon had mutated a penchant for being fucking mind-bendingly devious, throwing Laws at them non-stop from room to room.

Right now they were resting in a hallway, stuck between a room where the shortest distance between two points wasn’t a straight line, and the unknown. Garth glanced over at the previous room. Several times he’d nearly reached out and poked the back of his own head as he tried to stumble through the invisible maze of warped space, but he didn’t know if it was TimeCop rules or not, so he didn’t tap himself on the back of the head.

Everyone knows the movies get time-travel right, right?

Garth shuddered and looked ahead, using a mote of light on the tip of his finger to shed light on the passageway. It looked like they were in a level of Dungeon Hack. A room behind them, and flat, smooth stone walls ahead, leading to Beladia knew what.

Garth ran a finger across the dusty floor. At least the floor was dusty. That was a good sign. No tracks leading anywhere and no shiny floor, suggesting no gelatinous cubes…or guys with brooms.

“Let’s take it easy for the rest of the day to get our mental strength back,” Garth said, creating a lamp plant. “These rooms are taking more out of us than meets the eye.”

Alicia was staring out into the hallway, and her gaze flickered back to him.

“I’m hungry.”

“Boy, you got trapped in a dungeon with the right guy,” Garth said, clapping his hands together and manifesting a wooden bowl overflowing with fruits and vegetables in between the two of them.

As they ate, Garth considered the dungeon, and how they could escape from it. Dungeons were extradimensional, simply burrowing up wasn’t going to cut it. Burrowing toward the core, perhaps?

He held out his hand and had a root begin to work its way through the stone. Bits of rock fell away as the root dug. A minute later, Garth retracted the root and inspected his work. There was a small hole in the wall, slowly closing over time.

Hmm, heals itself.

That wasn’t a huge impediment. A tunnel big enough to walk through would either heal very slowly, or not at all. All Garth needed to do was make a core-sniffing root and have it cut them a direct tunnel to the core.

Garth weighed the cons. There was every possibility that punching straight through rooms would lead the root to go through some unpredictable terrain, like the previous room, where a straight line wasn’t. it might even interact with the root itself in unforeseen ways, like making it a man-eating monster, or unleash some horde of tiny, flesh-eating, reality-warping beetles that would follow the root back to him.

Well, that last one seemed unlikely, but just as unlikely as everything else around here.

The long and short of it was, Garth was going to have to traverse the maze one way or the other, and a method to reduce the total number of sadistic rooms he had to go through would be a huge bonus, outweighing the potential risks. There were huge risks entering each individual room, therefore less rooms amounted to less risks.

“I’m gonna try taking us through the walls,” Garth said between bites of fresh corn.

Alicia glanced up from her food, and followed his gaze to the wall. “Okay.”

Garth glanced over at her as she put her head down and kept eating.

“No opinion?”

“What do you want from me?” she snapped, a hint of ire in her voice. “I’m totally out of my depth here. Have been since the beginning, just now I know it!”

Alicia’s eyes were brimming with tears of frustration. The stress was started to get to her.

“Aww…” Garth pulled her into his lap. “I have no idea what I’m doing, either, I just kinda...keep going out of sheer stubbornness. Anyway, just keep treading water, and one day you’ll amaze yourself with how far you’ve gotten. You’re the first Denton to go offplanet, after all.”

“Don’t treat me like a child.”

Garth started petting her head, enjoying the way she softened under his ministrations.

“Don’t treat me like a pet either,” She purred, tucking her legs in despite herself, curling up in his lap.

“Hmm…” Garth mused as he pet her hair. “How about we have dessert and a nap before we keep going?”

“That sounds nice.” Alicia said in a small voice.

Garth stood with the slender girl in his arms.

“What-“

He tossed her into the air, and she managed a panicked squawk, clawing the air for an instant before landing on a hastily assembled bed made of one hundred percent biodegradable plant matter. The four post bed took up the entire hallway, but nobody else was using it, so it shouldn’t be a problem.

Garth collapsed into the soft covers beside her.

“so what do you want for desssert?” He asked, putting his hand under his head and pulling the sexiest pose he could think of. Alicia watched him fumble into position with a raised brow and a hint of a smirk.

“Grapes, pomegranates….me?”

“Grapes,” She said immediately.

“Oh,” Garth said, frowning. He didn’t exactly have a plan for her choosing anything other than his delicious, nutritious jism.

“Well I guess – ack!” Garth’s surprised shout was cut off by Alicia’s cherry red lips as she jumped on top of him, her warm thighs cinching around his waist.

****

“Okay then, tunneling it is,” Garth said, facing the wall, arms akimbo.

Dessert had been a slam dunk, and the nap afterwards had been pretty great too. They were rested, in a good place, and ready to face more of the dungeon’s Mind-fucks.

Shoulda called this place Mind-fuck dungeon. Matter of fact, That’s exactly what I’m going to do when I get out of here. I’m going to rename it.

Garth pulled out his recipe for a goblin sniffer, and tried tuning it to sniff out dungeon core.

The yellow daffodil tested the air a moment, then solidly turned to the right, down the hall they would have to go to press further into the dungeon.

Ah, yes…smells rely on air. What I need is something that picks up high frequency waves from the core itself.

Garth sat in front of the wall and began designing a satellite dish plant. Something orchid-like with large, delicate petals that could feel the signals a core put out.

If there are such things.

After a good hour of testing ideas, Garth summoned a large purple flower with gigantic petals and trembling pistil, after a couple moments looking around, it eventually turned like someone had grabbed it and pointed it down and to the left, at a gentle fifteen degree slope.

The core was much farther sideways than it was down, If the dish-flower was working properly. That made sense, given that the dungeon was a dud. It should have reached the planet’s core hundreds of years ago and imploded the planet. This suggested to Garth that it probably had a terrible sense of down as a result of it’s mutation.

Once Garth was fairly certain the plant wasn’t bullshitting him, he walked fifty feet down the hall and used triangulation to estimate the distance to the core.

About twelve miles, give or take, depending on whether or not on or both sides of the triangle were curly-Q’ed all to hell and back. After that, it was a simple matter to key a tunneling root to bore a hole through the wall, carrying the sensor along with it.

Garth didn’t bother to make the plant sentient, only able to carry out it’s simple task. In a place like this, being able to overthink things was probably more of a liability than it was a blessing.

Garth took a step back and raised his hand, creating a new dish-plant with tunneling roots. He funneled mana into it, and the seven foot wide hallway was soon flooded with biomass as the oversized bulldozer of a plant began chewing through the wall, carrying it’s core-sensing dish along with it.

As the plant went, it deposited quick-hardening resin on the walls, keeping them from healing closed, and forming a nice smooth, plastic-y tunnel for them to follow.

Garth took a minute to clear the rubble out of the way, then peered down the dimly lit tunnel. He sent a ball of magical light down it, not seeing anything that screamed bad news.

“Ready?” Garth asked.

Alicia nodded, following him into the hole he’d made in the wall.

***

The dungeon became sentient with a start, it’s first experience was sharp pain, like a nasty toothache. It could see everything at once, but its focus was narrowed down to the two lanky figures walked down the tunnel that was being bored through it.

The angle they were travelling at was aimed straight for it’s Core, it realized in a moment of panic. The purple one in front locked his legs and the tunnel started shaking. The strange plant-creature kept tunneling forward, heedless.

I have to stop them, but how?

The dungeon inspected the tunneling plant creature, and spotted the complex workings of mana in its makeup.

That seems easy.

The dungeon pulled mana in around the purple man and a series of spear-like pieces of wood leapt from the organic coating along the edge of the painful wound in the dungeon’s walls.

The dungeon looked at the second intruder, about to repeat the process, when it noticed that the purple one was uninjured.

The wooden spears failed to penetrate the man’s tougher-than-possible skin, instead slamming him against the side of the tunnel and causing the tunnel to shake violently.

The dungeon was frustrated and angry, causing the tunnel to shake and shift as the purple thing tried to drag itself to its feet.

Well, if that’s how it wants to play.

The dungeon summoned a massive wooden fist that shot down from above the little purple man, aiming to scramble his brain and squish his organs against his pathetic tunnel.

The man was squished, but something was wrong. Even more pain spread through the area where the purple creature was squished.

He was still alive, and he was doing something, and it hurt…a little.

Die, die, die, die!

Ironwood fists far bigger than the pathetic purple creature slammed down from the ceiling, intent on turning him into a paste, and the more he hit the purple man, the more the purple man hurt him back.

Not one to lose, the dungeon reeled back for an epic smash, gathering all the mana it could. The little purple man was tough, but he had a pretty good idea of how tough now, all he needed to do was surpass the strength of his bones and crush his entire body to a paste under the weight of countless tons of rock…

Something caught the dungeon’s attention.

The smaller one, with the amazing booty tightly packed into black pants, was electrocuting herself, smoke rising where her hair was catching fire.

Lightning was coursing along her entire body, flickering in her eyes. She was screaming in pain, anger, and pleasure all at once.

This gave the dungeon pause.

I didn’t do that.

Why is she hurting herself?

Well, it’s not important to me what one pathetic creature does to itself before the end, I have to finish of the intruder here before I get to the other one.

Why is she hurting herself?

An old pathetic creature’s voice settled into the back of the dungeon’s mind.

Latch onto every inconsistency and tenaciously cling to it. Follow it no matter where it leads, or how horrifying the result is.

Why was she hurting herself?

The dungeon redirected its attention to the purple man, and experimentally thwacked him with an ironwood fist.

It hurt.

Why did it hurt when he hit the purple man?

Am I the purple man?

No, I’m the dungeon.

The purple man raised an experimental hand and waved it around the room.

I’m both?

Who is the purple man?

No, I’m the Dungeon!

A sudden overwhelming thought staggered the dungeon, making the tunnel shake and the battered purple man fall to his knees.

That’s right. I have to be the dungeon. If I weren’t that would mean I wasn’t real. I’m real… unless the dungeon is making me think that.

I’m the dungeon. If I doubt this I will cease to exist!

Death? Death from not believing in oneself?

No. A core of pride formed in the dungeon’s will. Either I am, or I am not. Nothing I believe in this moment will change that.

Under the direction of the dungeon, the purple man got back to his feet, stumbling blindly through the tunnel.

And just like that. the dungeon’s mind ceased to exist, painlessly returning to nothingness.

***

Garth stumbled the last couple steps out of the range of the Law, wanting to lose his lunch, but under too much pressure to vomit. He turned back and snaked out a tendril of vine back into the tunnel, where Alicia was crackling with blue-white energy, smoke rising off her body.

The damn Law tricked you into thinking you were the dungeon and using your abilities to cause self-harm. It was a particularly nasty room they were passing through the influence of.

Garth’s vine wound around Alicia’s waist and dragged her violently down the tunnel, slamming into his chest.

“Are you alright?” Garth asked, looking into her eyes.

She was panting desperately, tremors arcing through her body, followed by tiny bolts of lightning.

“It’s fine,” she said breathlessly, her eyes flickering with lightning as she looked up at him. “It’s fine. I’m a Conduit. I’m almost completely immune.”

“Oh, good,” Garth said, holding up a finger. “Gimme a second.”

He pushed her off, turned over and threw up.

He, as the dungeon, had just committed suicide, ceasing to exist to prove a point, and it had messed him up, a little.

Mind-fuck dungeon, indeed.