Dungeon Discovery

After finsihing the goblins, I realized how late it was; the sun had set quite a while ago. As I calmed down, my fatigue made itself known. I was distracted by the thought of getting stronger, but if I didn't sleep I would only get weaker. Reclaiming my bag that I had dropped at the start of the battle, I climbed into a nearby tree and fell asleep.

• • •

After I woke up, I jumped out of the tree I was in and resumed my travel. Sadly, I didn't see any more monsters walking around in the open like those goblins, and any other monsters I found were too weak to bother with. I was travelling north, away from Rontu's mountain, and I eventually found something odd.

'There are even less monsters here' I thought to myself. Near Blacksummit town there aren't many strong monsters, but where I was now had even less. The forest looked the same, multitudes of trees with many low hanging branches, but all the almost all the animal tracks had disappeared and the sound of birds were rarer. Once I noticed this, I travelled into the area with fewer beasts, because something that could cause almost everything to avoid this place must be strong. The thought did cross my mind that if it was a monster causing this it would probably be too strong for me to defeat, but the reward of a strong mana stone to get a massive boost was worth the risk in my opinion; I could always run away if it was too strong.

After spending most of my morning following the lower density of monsters, I finally found what is most likely to be responsible for this. It was a picturesque hill, sporting a thick coating of lush green grass and a strange tree that had a peculiar red-brown trunk and an abundance of pink flowers that I couldn't recognise. It looked too perfect and beautiful; so perfect that it was out of place. It felt similar to poisonous flowers, their pretty exterior hiding the danger they pose. The hill was in the middle of a clearing, and even the clearing looked strange. The foliage of the surrounding trees stopped suddenly a certain distance from the hill, as if there was an invisible barrier preventing them from growing any further. After circling the hill from outside the clearing, I saw that there was the opening to a large cave in the west side of the hill, but the insides were strangely dark; too dark for me to see anything inside it. On top of all the strange features of the area, the entire clearing also had a strange aura suffusing it, which made me even more wary.

Having finished my lunch and observed no changes throughout my meal, I changed into my werewolf form and retrieved my weapons before walking into the clearing. Once I stepped out of the cover of the trees there was a reaction the previously passive aura and I got ready to run, but nothing came out of the cave. I never relaxed for the next few minutes, but nothing ever changed. I felt like the cavern was taunting me for being so cautious, but whatever was in there was obviously unusually powerful. When nothing happened even after 10 minutes, I finally started moving closer to the cavern.

Detecting no further changes to the aura, I didn't stop walking until I was infront of the ragged mouth of the cave. I was extremely stressed as even when I got closer, the choking darkness hadn't retreated from the cave and I still couldn't see anything inside. I could try to sneak in at one of the sides of the cave, but if I did it would be much easier to block my escape as I would have one less direction to run, so I positioned myself in the middle of the cave. Gathering my courage, I walked slowly into the cave, muffling my steps as much as possible, my doubly enhanced senses searching for any sign of an attack.

After I shuffled a metre into the cave, I was getting even more flustered and embarrased. Flustered because the darkness still hadn't changed, I couldn't see anything deeper into the cave even though it was still close to noon; embarrased because nothing had attacked me. It really felt as if the cave was taunting me. Once I got to the curtain of darkness, a quite 'Fwumph' made me leap backwards in a panic, but as I looked to the source of the noise I saw a magical red flame flickering atop a stone column covered in carvings. This was followed by more flames lighting up until the entire cave was lit up, revealing an imposing set of double doors. At three metres in height, the doors were a similar colour to of the trunk of the tree above the hill, and were covered with metal studs. Realizing what I was looking at I said "There's a dungeon here?!" in shock. This wasn't very close to Blacksummit town, but definitely should've been discovered by now. And, she had never heard of a dungeon having such a fancy entrance; as the clearing was clearly created by the dungeon, as well as the spontaneously appearing flames. Not waiting for me to sort out my thoughts, the doors opened inwards, revealing a stone stairway descending into the ground.