Chapter 134: 134 – Strange Machinations

She flipped it up into the air, murmuring “Homunculus Eye…” as she traced its path. When the coin reached the apex of its flight it stopped dead for just a split-second longer than it should’ve, emitting a brief, just barely noticeable flash of light before it fell. On the way down it began to emit a whistle, flashing once more just before it hit the ground.

It didn’t clatter about, or just stop on impact - the coin bounced right into her forehead at the same force she had thrown it with, only losing its strange coating when it bounced the second time. 

“Ow!” Zefaris exclaimed, more out of surprise than pain. She grabbed the coin, instinctively rubbing her forehead with her free hand as she muttered to herself, “What in the…”

The coin was completely pristine, it didn’t even have the scuff mark that landing on the hard floor should have caused. Zefaris couldn’t help grinning at this success, even if there was no way to know if it would work the way she wanted it to until she actually tried. With that in mind, she slipped the coin into the gap between her belt and her trousers before unholstering Pentacle and reloading the fired chambers, observing the door as she performed the repetitious motion. The glyph had already lit up to its full extent ready to open at her approach, and knowing that she likely wouldn’t get many opportunities to rest until the next intermediary chamber, Zefaris also took the time to retrieve the bottle of mead-elixir from her backpack and down a good long glug of the substance.

After that she walked straight through the door, Pentacle in her right hand and bayonet in the left in a reverse grip. She used the stone-like strength bestowed to her left arm to support her right, holding the bayonet such that it pointed forwards. 

It swung open and slammed shut instantly and without any noise as expected, leading her into a corridor that stretched on for some time before it took a right-angle bend to the right. Following the corridor, Zefaris couldn’t help but feel a sense of foreboding, as if something was watching her. There was no sound of skittering feet, no moving shadows, not even a flicker of the many lightgems, which shone red rather than the usual bright white. Disconcerting as it was at first, she appreciated the improved visibility. 

The turn led her down an egregiously long staircase, which itself only stopped at a landing exactly fifty-seven stairs down - she counted, if only to keep herself focused. More stairs, only fifteen down before another straight corridor. Amidst the crushing silence of this strange, dismal place, Zefaris couldn’t help turning her head at every little noise, every little flicker of a dying lightgem. There were stretches of corridor where she just walked for minutes at a time, and others yet when she kept being presented with binary choices of path. The first time she chose left, only to walk through and realize the choice was fake - the two paths rejoined only meters later.

The second time it was less obvious, but still noticeable. Still, a fake choice. 

The third time, the fourth - it became increasingly obfuscated, with longer detours and such, but that didn’t change the fact she could just explore both paths to figure it out. 

Was the dungeon just playing with her?

Then, there was the fifth one. 

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It was a binary choice as before, only… The lightgem that pointed to the left-hand path kept blinking back and forth between white and red. On one hand, it could be a trap. On the other, even just approaching the left-hand path seemed to upset whatever intelligence was orchestrating this farcical labyrinth. In fact, just looking down that way made strange scraping echo from past the walls and the ground shudder beneath her feet.

Zefaris chose the left-hand path, the rumbling intensifying with each step she took. It led her to a staircase that seemed to go on forever, or at least for too long to see the bottom. The light became deeper and deeper red as she traversed the stairway, until she was plunged into an utter darkness that even the Homunculus Eye couldn’t extract sight from, for there was no light to see.

Thus, she simply breathed. She knew well that Fog had a slight luminescence, she had seen it before.

After all, that had been their only source of light that night, back at the tavern.

When she looked back, Zefaris saw that there was no path back - only a wall. Deciding that the dungeon must be moving pieces around as she advanced, she gave up on trying to form a mental map.

Instead, she decided to count her own steps. Six-hundred sixteen Sage-damned steps later, she finally descended one last staircase and found a glyph door. It led into an entirely barren intermediary chamber, one that was nothing more than a barren chamber with a door at the other end.

The door’s glyph seemed to be lighting up very slowly at her approach, until the chamber itself seemed to move within the dungeon’s mechanism, nearly knocking her off her feet in the process. When Zefaris regained her footing, she saw that the door was fully lit up and clearly ready to open, yet still she hesitated. From beyond it came a whole host of horrible noises, from stomping and screeching to cracking and squelching, as if the many locusts within the next chamber were already facing another opponent.

She once more took up the same combat stance with Pentacle in her right and the bayonet in the left, using the left arm to support the right as she cautiously approached the door. At the other side, she was greeted by an image of slaughter the likes of which she hadn’t seen in quite a while, painted on the canvas of an ideal defensive battlefield.

It was a long hallway, full of cover and vantage points created from a combination of floor pillars and hive matter, as if in this one chamber the dungeon had been coerced into cooperating with the locusts.

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