We started downward. Our footsteps echoed strangely as we walked: not in weird directions like the big cave we just left, but muffled, as if something was stopping the sound from fully hitting the walls. It was disorienting.
The stairs continued down for hours, probably. It definitely felt like it. Fortunately, there were plenty of guttering torches lighting our way.
After a long span of tense silence, I piped up. "How many floors are there?"
Kael shook his head. "It depends. Dungeons have a mind of their own, in a way. Whole floors can appear or disappear, so we have to constantly update our records on what is discovered here. Some floors repeat after a while, others are never seen again."
"I've read about this place," Tessa chimed in. "Is this the Castle floor?"
"Yep. This one's almost always here."
I scratched my head. "And nobody knows how or why this happens."
Hask grunted. "Nope. Not a clue. Not for lack of trying."
I sighed internally. This whole dungeon thing sounded more and more bizarre with every new detail. "So…the whole world has almost no actual knowledge of the purpose of dungeons, and barely understands how they function. And yet the aforementioned whole world fully depends on them for its survival."
"Yep."
I shook my head disbelievingly. "That sounds like a huge load of-"
Silence.
I was definitely still talking. I could feel my mouth moving, but there was no sound.
I looked at my companions, who were also speaking, without any noise.
Then the disorientation hit. I felt dizzy, my sight warping. I leaned heavily against the stone banister, worried about tumbling over.
As my vision swam, I saw a look of recognition on Alara's face. That was mixed with something that looked like fear. She pulled a glass orb from her pack and focused on it. She was also clearly affected by whatever this was. But I watched her utter a silent command, and the orb began to glow.
My brain stabilized. I could see clearly, and I could hear the ambient sounds of stone again.
"You have sixty seconds, Kael." Her words were flat, monotone. It didn't even sound like her normal aloof voice. Something in her tone was even more clipped than usual and she was clearly struggling to stay professional.
Kael nodded, setting immediately to work. He observed the area around him; something seemed to catch his eye, and to my disbelief, he leapt up onto the bannister. He clipped a metal box onto his belt and hit a button. There was a loud whirring; a rope exploded from the device, thunked into the stone wall about fifty feet up, and pulled Kael into the air.
He pulled a hook from his belt and slammed it into the stone the second his boots made contact. Feet supporting him, he held onto the hook, still attached to the rope. He used his free hand to brush away rock dust and grime from a stone block, revealing a glowing purple stone. "Tinkering Art: Mechanical Suspension. Activate."
His voice was calm. Trained. I was once again deeply impressed.
The light from the stone faded. He ripped his hook from the wall and carefully used his rope device to rappel to the stairs below. "43 seconds! New record!"
I looked up at the spot where the glow had been, a question on my lips. "What…was that?"
To my surprise, it was Alara who spoke, voice still completely flat. "Magical disorientation. It's a naturally occurring trap, but monsters like to use it to pounce on their prey while they're dizzy and deaf. If Thunder Hawk hadn't come through here already, we'd probably be dealing with them. I used a nullification spell to stop the magic so Kael could find and disarm it."
That sounded terrifying. "Is nullification Janitor magic?"
Her mouth tightened into a frown. "No."
I left it at that.
Kael returned to where we were standing. "I've suspended the trap. It'll be running again in an hour or so. There was nothing functionally broken with it, so it wasn't worth fully disarming."
Hask grunted approvingly. "Nice work you two. I think we're near the bottom. Let's go."
As promised, we eventually caught up with SCRUB, who was waiting patiently at the bottom of the stairs, where a plain wooden door waited. He beeped cheerily in greeting. Kael knelt down and placed a hand on him. He stayed there for a long moment. "Door's clean, no traps. He unlocked it for us. Good job, SCRUB."
More happy beeps. Despite everything, it made me happy.
"You taught him to unlock doors?" Tessa asked, looking over at Kael with excitement.
Kael nodded and sighed. "Unfortunately, he also noted that there's something dangerous beyond the door. Couldn't tell what."
Hask approached the door. "Well, there's only one way to find out. Lorne. Take point."
His voice carried no uncertainty, and that worried me, but I approached the door anyway.
I saw that it was very, very old. In a way that the cave and tunnels above were not. The caves were ancient, but this was ancient and intentional. That was a big difference. The door itself was splintered and cracked with age; the iron banding and hinges rusted over, but still functional.
I pushed open the door and stepped just over the threshold.
Whatever expectations I had about the room beyond were quickly subverted.
The room beyond was a great hall.
Not enormous, but large enough that our lamplight struggled with the far end of it. The ceiling vaulted high overhead and vanished into shadow between narrow stone arches that belonged in a cathedral more than a dungeon. The architecture was recognizable in the same way a corpse is recognizable. Technically correct. Fundamentally wrong.
The arches were too narrow. The ceiling too high for the floor space. The angles where the walls met didn't quite line up if I looked directly at them for too long.
So I stopped doing that.
The floor was flagstone worn smooth by age into shallow depressions. Long stone tables ran the length of the hall in rows. Not really furniture. More like someone's approximation of furniture. Like whoever built this place had once heard a description of a great hall secondhand and decided that was sufficient research.
It felt imitative.
Like the room understood the concept of people without understanding people themselves.
The monsters were everywhere.
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Slumped against walls. Draped across the stone tables. Collapsed in heaps between them. Dozens of bodies scattered through the hall beneath the weak torchlight.
The light did no favors.
The worst part was how human they looked at first glance.
My brain kept trying to arrange them into familiar shapes. Someone asleep at a table. Someone resting against a wall. Someone collapsed from exhaustion.
Then I'd notice an arm with too many joints in it. A spine bent at an angle no spine should bend. Limbs stretched too long for the bodies attached to them.
"Hollows." Hask's voice was certain but grave.
Apparently whatever the mana saturation did to living things down here, it believed in excess.
At the far end of the hall sat the largest one.
It rested atop a raised stone platform that might once have been a throne or might simply have been a larger piece of rock somebody got ambitious about. The thing seated there was massive, even slumped motionless. Long limbs draped over the stone with an awful sort of symmetry. Its skull tilted slightly downward like it had died mid-thought.
Hask stared at it for a few seconds. "Dead." His voice echoed strangely through the hall.
I noticed afterward that he never looked directly at the creature again. Kept it lingering at the edge of his vision instead while we moved through the room. The way people watch cliffs they don't entirely trust.
Fair instinct.
The silence here felt different from the tunnels.
The tunnels had been empty. This room felt quiet in the deliberate way a room goes quiet after terrible news. Like something important had happened here a very long time ago and the walls had never fully recovered from it.
Even the shadows behaved badly.
They stretched strangely across the arches overhead, moving in ways that didn't quite match the lamps in our hands. After a while I stopped trying to follow them directly. There are limits to curiosity. Mine generally began where architecture starts behaving maliciously.
I wasn't frightened.
Not exactly.
What I felt was older than fear and harder to explain. Like walking into a place where history had rotted but never actually died. As though the hall itself remembered something everyone else had wisely forgotten.
I kept that observation to myself. "What are Hollows?"
My question reverberated through the hall, but didn't echo all the way back to me.
"A mid-tier undead." The foreman said it as though it didn't sound fully insane. "People who are warped and drained by a curse or dark magic. Quite literally hollowed out, hence the name."
I continued to look around the room, the hairs on the back of my neck standing upright. "We have to clean this?"
"Yep."
I kept my resigned sigh to myself. I was already so tired.
I reached into my pack for the Grime Reaper, but Hask stopped me. "That won't work here. Tessa, do your thing."
She stepped forward, assuming the same stance she had before. "That which flows unseen, be witnessed! That which corrupts in silence, be named! By the Third Principle of Arcane Revelation and the Undeniable Theorem of Visible Flux — show yourself! Cleansing Art:"
Again with the pause.
"Mana Sight, activate!"
The room was once again filled with clouds and swirling channels of magical energy, and they bore even heavier signs of corruption here. What was different here was that some of the mana seemed to be flowing from, and heavily concentrated in, every one of the Hollows.
Tessa explained, "Hollows are creatures made up of more magic than flesh. So they need to be dissolved and cleaned with stronger chem than Grime Reaper. That king guy looks like we might need to break a curse before we remove him. His mana concentration is huge."
A chemical stronger than Grime Reaper? I shuddered at the thought of my flesh burning earlier and imagined it being even worse.
"Check your pack!"
I did so. In a pocket next to the Grime Reaper, I found a bottle labelled with a name that instantly told me it was the right one. "The Exorcist."
Hask had walked over to examine one of the Hollows. "Used to dissolve undead, ghosts and mana phantoms."
Utterly insane. All of it. "Sounds like whoever created it had a sense of humor."
Kael exhaled sharply through his nose, amused. "A sense of gallows humor, maybe." He stared at me with that look of 'get it?!'
"That's funny."
Hask barked at us to get to work.
Cleansing the Hollows was at least similar to the Veilworm clean-up in process. Bucket, water (I filled it successfully this time), and mop.
The chemical reaction of The Exorcist on the bodies was far more violent than that of Grime Reaper: in addition to sizzling and bubbling, the corpses burst into magical flame, and I had to put a cloth over my face to block out the smell.
It took a couple of hours before we got almost all of the Hollows cleaned and the mana streams scrubbed.
Finally we stood before the King. Even in death, the monster was imposing. He had clearly been killed from a distance, judging by the several arrows jutting from his chest that had faint mana signatures. Clean, efficient.
As Tessa said, just hitting the corpse with The Exorcist didn't do anything other than seep to the floor and make us jump away as to not get our boots dissolved. "I got this. Alara, help me?"
Tessa and Alara stood in front of the corpse. Tessa began to speak again. I could practically hear Kael's eyeroll. "By the Undeniable Theorem of Visible Flux, the Third Principle of Arcane Revelation, the Fourth Rite of Unbinding, the Seventh Postulate of Hexological Removal, and the Absolute and Irrefutable Declaration of Cleansing Intent—"
Alara remained silent the whole time, hands outstretched, her expression still disturbingly neutral. But when it became clear that Tessa was about to actually cast the spell, her voice joined in. "Cleansing Art: Total Purge, Activate!"
I watched the swirling mana around the corpse begin to swirl erratically, expanding to twice its original size before rapidly shrinking, condensing into a tiny glowing ball. It then winked out of existence entirely.
Amazing.
The rest of the clean up was business as usual.
Once Hask was fully satisfied, we broke for a rest, opting not to sit in any of the chairs, eating and drinking on the floor instead.
As I dug into another delicious sandwich, I contemplated my next question. "Alara…"
I watched her look over at me, seemingly surprised that I would speak to her. "How is it that you're able to help Tessa? Isn't her magic different than yours?"
Alara's expression did not change, but she looked away and refused to respond.
Tessa did it for her. "Alara was a mage before she came here. Her magic was already powerful, and because she's super cool and talented, she was able to adapt to different styles of Janitorial magic."
Alara did not respond to the compliment.
"I'm way better at it. But Alara is pretty good. And she can do healing magic, which I can't."
I bit into my sandwich again to avoid having to break the awkward silence now present between myself and my elven companion. I chewed both my food and my words.
As we rested, Kael sent SCRUB out again to search for traps. Hask had said the entrance to the next floor was nearby.
The following hours passed with all the urgency of an exceptionally sleepy tortoise. Every floor we descended to was stranger than the last, the monsters grosser, the traps more elaborate.
We ventured through a floor that was just an evil carnival, with vampires dressed as clowns. I unlocked a new fear there. My first one, ostensibly.
At one point we were in a swamp. A whole, outdoor, dirty, nasty swamp. With sky and everything. Apparently dungeon magic could just do this. I'm pretty sure we dissolved and mopped up a dead witch, but the floors were all blending together for me by that point.
There was a floor that was just an endless void of water, which we only were able to venture through thanks to strange devices in Kael's back that let us breathe. There was nothing to clean, but I knew deep down there was something…somewhere. I unlocked a second new fear there.
I also got extremely familiar with all of my chemicals. Slime-Be-Gone, Banish Brand Multi-purpose Cleaner, Dispello, and more. I was getting a persistent light-headedness that even Ojola's delicious food couldn't help with.
One eternity later, and I'm positive it was an eternity, we sat together in a stone chamber before a massive set of stone double doors. I was told that the Dungeon Core was beyond them.
Finally. Almost done.
We had managed to pry one of the doors slightly open, and Kael sent SCRUB through to scout.
Out of curiosity, I checked my skill array. Everything was still the same. "MOP PROFICIENCY I" sat on the screen like it was mocking me.
Hask spoke quietly. "Pay attention when we go in, Callister. Most important part."
His next words carried pride. "I don't know why we got this job. This ain't a Class Two Dungeon anymore... But you've all done well. I'm proud of you."
We sat in silence, all of us smiling (except Alara, who just looked exhausted and grumpy). I was shocked to hear Hask speak so sentimentally.
It was at this point that SCRUB returned, beeping urgently. Kael startled and hurried over to see what was the matter. As he touched the back of the machine, I saw his face become concerned, then worried, then fill with what looked like dread.
He returned to us, but said nothing for a long moment. A long enough moment that Hask had to prompt him. "Lithwell."
Kael snapped to; evidently he'd been lost in thought. He bit his lower lip nervously.
"Something is very, very wrong."