Chapter 35: Chapter 34: The counter-force reaction

“I’m so tired.

I’ve been here for too many years. I’ve seen too many young faces vanish into the clawing dark.

— It’s always the young ones. The old people, the ones who made it to maturity, they never die. There’s a cut-off period. I think that if you manage to get past twenty-eight as an adventurer, you’re likely to make it all the way to retirement. By then, you know the ropes, you know the game that’s being played, you know how much you can bite off.

But before that age, the numbers are…”

The man sighs.

“- Tiring.”

The room is quiet.

“Given our recent economic success these last few generations, but the persistent crises on our doorsteps, families have been booming. The average family here has five kids, you know? I know a few folks who cracked a full dozen.”

He shakes his head.

“In the big cities, it isn’t disease that takes them. It isn’t usually hunger. It isn’t war or anything of the sort. It’s the dungeons.

Statistically, of every group of ten adventurers who enter a dungeon, four of them will die there before they turn twenty-eight.

But those who return bring such wealth and prosperity to our society that families just grieve and then return their focus to their remaining children, one of whom inevitably also wants to become an adventurer too, in honor of their dead siblings. I've seen it happen a hundred times.

Then it continues. It’s a meat-grinder.

Our entire economy, our cities, our houses, the bread we eat, the water we drink, the beds that I can’t fall asleep on at night anymore, they’re all paid for with the blood and the screams of the young. We just… we just throw them into the hole and say that it’s okay, because they chose to go there themselves.

But did they really? Do they really know what it’s like down there? Or do they only know what we tell them it's like?

Four out of ten young faces who enter a dungeon won’t make it back out.

How can anyone ever sleep at night? I don’t understand anymore.”