41 Entering the dungeon

"Well, how do we open this door anyway?" Emilia asked as she and Althaia were currently trying to force it open with their bare hands.

"Certainly not this way, I guess. Yoru, has anyone told how we are able to enter it?" Iris handed the question over to me, she looked like she also just wanted to brute force it. If the other two hadn't been faster than her, she would have been the one stupidly pushing against it now.

"Actually Lisa told me how to open it, it uses a special locking mechanism. All you have to do is channel a bit of your celestial energy into the big stone that looks like a door knob. This door doesn't even belong to the dungeon itself though. Humans have installed it to keep unknown people from entering it by accident. Seems like that has happened a couple times in the past."

Satisfied with my answer, Iris approached the stone and laid her hands upon it. The "stone" is a celestial device to unlock the door and is more like a refined tool than an ordinary stone. As soon as Iris let her celestial energy flow into it, a clicking sound could be heard. With that, the rather huge door could even be opened by a single person, basically opening by itself.

I took my first look into the dungeon and the only description that came to my mind was: creepy. Not because of the lack of lighting or anything, but the general atmosphere. The cave was actually lit decently well by what appeared to be small stones infused with celestial energy hanging from the ceiling. If those were installed by humans or belonged to the dungeon itself, I couldn't tell. We could only be thankful for those as without them we would need to carry at least a couple torches.

Despite that it looked rather eerie, a weird liquid dripped from the greenish walls in an unregularly tact. Also the stench was something else, it took us a while of getting used to before anyone dared to go further.

Iris finally stepped into the dungeon and with our leader in, we all followed along. Once all of us were in, the giant door closed itself slowly again. It probably closes itself after a certain amount of time passed, there should be no way of it knowing if everyone got in. Despite thinking like this, it still managed to creep me out by a lot and not only me. I could tell how the two healers very visible shuttering as they were also the ones closest to the door.

As Iris and the two boys ignored it however, we soon had to catch up to them again. So far the dungeon didn't have any diversion from the regular path, just a straight corridor going forward. Thanks to the narrowness of it, we wouldn't even been able to fit in the carriage if we wanted. Not that it would have fit through the door anyway. For regular people it was still wide enough though. Its height however far surpassed its width. There were easily a couple meters between the floor and the ceiling.

We walked in this corridor for a solid while without encountering anything, until we finally met a split in the path. It divided into two directions and like experienced adventurers we went for the right one first since we couldn't see any difference between the two choices anyway. This path wasn't any narrower than the main one we came from and after having walked along it for a while, I wouldn't have been able to tell which one we were on by pure appearance.

Once we had been walking for around two hours, we decided to take a break. Iris seemed kind of disappointed that nothing happened until now. She went in here with the attitude to fight something immediately but aside from walking, it was actually rather boring. Emilia and Althaia even had started to chat out of boredom once their initial fear of the dungeon settled down a bit. The boys also joined in on them and with every other step our formation broke apart more and more. It seemed more like a tea party than a dungeon adventure.

I read Iris annoyance right of her face this whole time, but I didn't dare to say anything. She might have snapped any minute and even after cooling down for a bit she still seemed rather annoyed. Obviously, since the experience so far was far from our expectations. Maybe by taking the other path, we might have ran into something sooner, but the split in paths was still around an hour walk from the entrance. It just felt odd.

Iris seemed to have decided against telling the others, they probably hadn't figured out the reason for her bad mood. We wanted to start walking again but a moment before we did, Julian leaned against the wall and something rather unexpected happened.

The wall gave in and turned around a middle axis. It looked like a trap door and Julian fell right for it. Instead of standing, he now sat on the floor where we thought the wall to be a second earlier. Iris and Lander took on a battle stance to prepare for what was coming but nothing aside from the door opening happened. The startled Julian also got back on his feet and drew his weapon, namely his fists. All of us just stood there in awkward silence.

We waited for a while and inspected the trap door further. But in the end we couldn't find out what it was hiding or how it was even made in the first place. Our only choice seemed to be following where this new path went. Iris immediately decided for a change of plan. For now, we would be following this new path and see where it let. At this point she looked like she would do anything for a fight.

We weren't given any information about the structure of the dungeon itself but my best guess would be that the long corridors are kind of like an entrance hall for other rooms. If my theory was correct, there should be other similar doors all around the corridor which we hadn't noticed so far. But we would have to confirm this later on, as we just went for this one for now.

And after just two minutes by foot we would discover how right I was with my guess. In front of us it stood menacingly, readying its weapon:

The first monster we would fight as a group.