Dungeons

Yesterday we reached the entrance to the dungeon a bit earlier than expected due to being woken up early by those monsters. Anyways we set up camp when we got there whilst a few of the party went out to hunt for gains to be made into rations so that we have less chance of starving in the dungeon.

When the sun rose, we all got up and prepared to enter the dungeon.

The entrance itself was that of a large grey dried out looking tree that had been hollowed out as a stone staircase lead downwards, which is going to be really annoying on my scales, and there was only darkness that awaited.

Everyone made sure that everything they might need was in place. My dagger was hanging on the left side of my waist while a satchel was slung diagonally down to my right, filled with a few mana and health recovery potions and some rations.

With everyone ready, we began our descent into the darkness of the dungeon.

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As the party descended down the cracked stone stairs, some of us ignited the torch's we had prepared before.

As the light from the fires and brightened up our surroundings, we could see many cracks on the walls and the ceiling. One of the female wolf-kin went up to the wall and inspected it.

"These don't feel like cracks, they don't have the texture of stone, nor do they look like them. In fact, they seem to be protruding from the wall rather than forming in it."

Everyone seemed slightly troubled by this information. I looked down at the "cracks" and saw that she was right, looking around at all of them the seemed to cast a shadow when the light of the torches shone down on them.

I leaned over and pinched one between my left index finger and thumb and tugged upwards. As I did so I felt the "Crack" strain momentarily before snaping off. I brought it up to my face to get a better glance and Cythistia comes over and inspects it with me.

"This looks like a tree root." She said in concern.

The others then started to tear the supposed roots off the surroundings and everyone came to the same conclusion. We couldn't deduce much more from this, but as I looked down, I saw that the roots had started to reform as some of the dust on the ground slowly converged, reconstructing the root.

I then blew on the root and some dust seemed to have peeled off of it. I continued to blow on it but there just seemed to be no end. I turned slightly to one of the torches and decided to see what would happen to the root.

The second a spark from the torch landed on the piece of root it instantaneously lit up in a blaze, turning into smoke in mere seconds. Everyone saw this and decided to put out their torches in case one of them got dropped and such a thing happened again, igniting the whole place up in an inferno.

That left us without a source of light, that was until one a pair of the mages conjured a ball of light. They explained that the reason they didn't do so before was due to the higher mana consumption needed to maintain said light.

After this incident we kept going deeper into the dungeon and eventually found ourselves in a cave, one without any of the roots we found earlier, and deduced that we had finally reached the first floor.

Like the stairs we'd just descended, it was also made of stone, except it had a much more natural formation to it, like it was a real cave, which it wasn't. Despite all appearances, it wasn't actually a real cave system as dungeon's tend to create worldly and otherworldly structures inside of them, such as this cave for example.

Disregarding the formation of dungeons, the mages sent another orb of light forth to brighten our vision in the cave. As for the rest of us, using the light we had available, we inspected our immediate surroundings to find any traces of that mysterious root we found in the stairs. Apart from what came off of the stairs themselves, we couldn't find any but that didn't mean we wouldn't find any later.

When the light orb reached the middle of the room, we discovered that there we three tunnels branching off into different directions. One to the left, on to the right and one straight ahead.

"Alright, let's set up a camp here and make this the base of our operations!" Shouted the leader of this expedition, a male deer-kin named Denosin.

Everyone then began setting up a main campsite so that we had a base of operations to return to without having to spend days returning to the city. This would help us as we could leave a group of people to guard the camp whilst the rest of us went out and cleared the dungeon.

It took the rest of the day but we managed to get the camp set up before preparing dinner. While most of us ate our food, ten of the members gathered and discussed how we should handle this dungeon. I assumed that they were the leaders of our group and would brief us on what they discuss tomorrow.

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We woke up in the morning and were ordered to gather around in a line and column formation after breakfast.

"Listen up!" Denosin shouted, "Last night, we talked about how we're going to tackle this place and came up with a plan. We'll split up into ten teams of ten. Six of those will go out and explore each day while the remaining four will stay behind and guard the camp in shifts. As for how we'll split you all up into your own platoons, that will be decided shortly."

'Oh god, I can tell this'll go on for at least an hour.' I thought as my shoulders sagged slightly, and I could see out of the corner of my eyes that a few others were doing this as well. 'Well, at least I'm not the only one who feels this pain.'

The deer-kin continued shouting, "Just so you know, what your platoon will be doing will change over time. Also, we'll be here until we clear this dungeon, if you have any complaint TOO BAD! You chose to come here so you stay until the task is complete!"

"As for how we clear the dungeon, I shall explain that now for those who don't know why we might be doing this." He then began to go on about how dungeons work and why they even exist at all.

A basic run down of dungeons that most people don't know is that they were created by a group of ancient gods from before the reforming of the world as a way to get back at the new gods for banishing them to the old lands. The ancient gods, at least the ones that got sealed, placed a curse upon the lands which manifested in the form of dungeons.

I leaned all this from my father who taught me the basic overview of the history of dungeons and how they work. That's not what I was hearing but to be fair this information is incredibly old, nearly as old as the land we traverse.

Anyways, he explained that they were a phenomenon with no known origin but that they could become extremely volatile if left unchecked as the monsters inside would overflow and wreak havoc anywhere and everywhere they went. And the only way to stop this was to clear the dungeon and take away its core.

Which is what we were here to do, kill anything and everything we saw until we reached the next floors and repeated that until we get to the last floor where a boss monster was waiting. We would then find kill said boss and take away its core, which was extremely valuable.

In the end we were told to split into several groups based on our skills, melee, ranged or magic. A triangle was formed and a few people, including myself, went in between the larger congregations of people to say that we could be both. I noticed that Dorrak stayed in the middle, meaning that he was able to fill in any role that his platoon may need.

I went in between melee and magic where three others joined me, making a total of four. As for Cythistia, I saw her going in between the range and magic groups with another pair of people.

After that we were all assigned into groups under our platoon leaders, and I just so happened to be with Cythistia under were Denosin's command along with another ranged person, two melee fighters three mages and a range and melee fighter, who looked like they would be some sort of assassin.

Every group then spent the rest of the day getting to know each other. Night fell and we all fell asleep, ready to venture into the depths of the dungeon the following morning.