Chapter 41: 37. Godling Dungeon (I)

Jay woke up in another dungeon.

But not quite.

He could sense the linoleum floor beneath him was made of magic. So were the classroom walls and the student desks surrounding him. It had a vibrancy to it that was sort of loose. Just sturdy enough to hold him up but definitely not comparable to the Toyreveler Dungeon pocket dimension.

The mere fact that he could sense the mana itself spoke of YoAnna’s inefficiency with domains. It had been an honest self-assessment from the godling. This was all new stuff to Jay, of course. But he had to account for every advantage he could leverage into an opportunity with a dash of Luckrun charm.

Getting to his feet, Jay saw that he was alone. That hadn’t been a thing since leaving his house yesterday night for the party. It was very unnerving to get separated from Kleo, but the domain was designed to test him specifically. Before he moved, he took a few minutes to breathe and gather his wits.

He turned apprehension, fear, anxiety, and everything negative into positives. He embraced it rather than run from it. Jay centered himself with a few long breaths, entering the zone he’d touch on with parkour or street dance sessions. It was akin to an artist preparing themselves to create great works.

There would be no song for this occasion.

He had no real audience to impress upon. There would only be YoAnna, and possibly Kleo, watching him. But that didn’t invite the playful and more musical side of Jay.

Some works required silence.

Wordlessly, Jay assessed the room. The student chairs fused to their tables were lined in three rows of four. Exactly twelve seats. On each table was a symbol. The table he found himself nearest bore the symbol of a playful monkey flipped upside down. He looked up and found a message left for him on the whiteboard.

He’d come back for it soon. First, he walked around the classroom. He memorized each animal symbol. In total: Monkey, Owl, Ox, Dragon, Tiger, Crow, Bat, Pig, Rooster, Dog, Elephant, Snake. Jay figured they were the boons YoAnna assigned to each of her Champions without explanation. Technically, Dragon was a mythical creature, so it was notable that Frank got it. The guy deserved that special treatment after making some big sacrifices.

Jay searched the rest of the room. He tried to open the cabinets. The doors wouldn’t budge. There was most likely nothing inside. Heck, he bet there wasn’t even space in there. It was a facsimile of the real thing. The same went with trying to open the drawers on the teacher’s desk.

There were no weapons. No tools were to be found. The walls had old-school motivational posters. But it was all propaganda YoAnna was pushing on him. Stuff about friendship was better than romance and that subjects should trust their future goddess to know what was best. Jay was in too serious of a mood to joke about it now.

He stored it in the back of his head to humiliate YoAnna later.

He didn’t like being so serious. It was not his usual role to play. But the circumstances were absolutely against his favor. Without even having to read the info YoAnna left for him, he knew how deeply she screwed him over.

He had no great gravity magic here.

Jay turned to the whiteboards to read YoAnna’s messages thoroughly.

Hello, Jay. Welcome to my domain. This specific area was designed for Champions to practice their greater powers at later ranks and train my use of domain abilities. You may notice it’s a little shoddy at the moment, but I’m putting most of my energy into dungeon challenges rather than realism. This will serve as a good test run (haha, Luckrun Test Run) and the graveyard of your infatuation with me.

Here I list my three challenges and your great concerns:

 

• Defeat my Haunting Siren. She’ll be on the hunt for you.

• Survive the traps I’ve set. I bet this will wrap things up.

• Find Kleo. She’s bound here somewhere as our classic damsel.

 

Oh, and one more teensy tiny thing I’ve managed to slip in. You can’t use your Skills. Your Attributes are enough, anyway. Hee hee heee! Thank you for taking part, and I’ll be delighted when you lose. >:^)

P.S. Playing the role of a villainess is wearing me out. I hope to make this up to you with a friendly, unromantic hang-out at the mall sometime next month. It’ll be fun!

Jay choked on air.

“Dammit, YoAnna,” he groaned. “How am I supposed to be maximum serious if your most effective weapon is being a goofball?”

At least she wasn’t wearing black leather pants.

Although, that would be a nice look on her.

Jay shook his head. He refocused on every crucial information YoAnna gave him. The Haunting Siren sounded like a huge threat to him. YoAnna must’ve designed that specifically with him in mind. The traps would be a problem, depending on how well she hid them. The obvious first course of action was to find Kleo.

Since Kleo’s rescue was the obvious first action, Jay punted that to the end of his bjectives. His Skills were barred, but his Talents weren’t. He had no idea what [Faerie Master] had as perks specifically, but he could feel Kleo’s exact direction. He also felt that she was okay. Agitated but not harmed.

She would have to wait. Hunting the Siren came first.

Jay flipped his monkey desk and kicked where the leg connected to the frame. His above-average Strength and superhuman Agility snapped it free with two good hits. Golden white motes of mana floated from the damage wrought from the table before solidifying into their new forms.

A few test swings told him the table leg would be an adequate weapon. He snapped off another as a backup, slipping it into the back of his shorts. It was a sucky move on YoAnna’s part to take him into her domain with nothing but his basketball shorts, tee, and patio slippers. Jay supposed he’d have to adapt and overcome like a good dungeon crawler.

He pushed open the classroom door with his weapon. It creaked like the hinges had been rusted for years. Once silence fell again, Jay pushed his hearing to the max and listened for anything in the hallway. He heard nothing. The silence was unnerving. He could faintly catch Kleo’s angry yells and cussing somewhere to his left.

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He turned right instead.

The hallway was a wrecked environment. It had holes in the ceiling wider than Jay’s shoulders. Water puddled over the floor. Nature was reclaiming the place where the corners held big leafy bushes with vines creeping down over the wall lockers. When Jay reached a perfect beam of sunlight piercing through the ceiling, he stopped.

The spot underneath the light was preternaturally clean. The light was a perfect circle, too, matching the shape of the ceiling. Now that he saw it, the wreckage and grasp of nature were too perfectly placed. It almost seemed to encourage Jay to step into this specific light before moving past this section of the hallway. Moving around the light would put him in a bush or have him step on a puddle of water.

Jay sighed.

He used his spare table leg to poke the light.

A giant feminine hand with fingers that could wrap around his torso slammed down. Jay was barely fast enough to move back as it clawed at the floor, grasping at nothing. Then it disappeared through the hole it came from. Jay took a minute to recollect his composure from that jumpscare.

He poked the light again.

The hand returned. It slammed into the floor, scratching it with claw-like nails. When it had a hold of nothing but air, it swooped back up.

Jay poked the light a third time.

He received the same result. Hand down. Slam. Desperate grasping. Nothing to show for it. Back up it went with its long and slender fingers.

Nothing changed in the process. He could be sure that the trap would act the same each time it was triggered.

But Jay triggered the trap twenty more times. It was kind of fun and creepy to watch. Like coming back to a creepypasta because it was so weird, it was fascinating. Interestingly enough, he realized there was a cooldown period a few seconds long after so much testing.

He triggered the trap again and bounded across soon as the arm cleared. He came out safe on the other end. He tried that multiple times until he was very sure of the timing.

Before he moved on, he tapped the bushes with his spare table leg. Nothing. He tapped the puddle at different spots. Nothing. He memorized this trap section as Don’t Go Into the Light, or DGITL, and kept on dungeon crawling.

The hallway got darker. 

The light from DGITL was a faint source of illumination behind him. No candlelight, wall torches, or burning braziers appeared ahead. Jay felt a familiarity with the sight. It was a poor representation of the abyss, but it was undoubtedly a dark concern. His eyes wouldn’t do. But his sense of gravity might.

Jay closed his eyes and extended his sixth sense. The magical one that was quick to notice the loose vibrancy of YoAnna’s domain. It might help him spot traps faster, too. The DGITL trap was a solid formation, something he couldn’t sense as abnormal. He didn’t have trap-sensing abilities and wasn’t a [Mage] who could see through magical constructs. To his gravity sense, it seemed normal, too.

That was YoAnna’s first weakness. Her traps were too perfect. Using his sense of gravity, Jay could feel these weird nodes and lines barely holding the domain together. Like it was reliant on hopes, prayers, and duct tape. Magically simulated gravity was still gravity, and as it pressed down, it gave Jay an image of the hallway in his head.

Like the superhero Daredevil, but with gravity instead of sound.

Be that Jay’s Perception stat was his highest stat, the image in his head was pretty clear thirty feet out in all directions. It got a little hazier every teen feet beyond that. He could still feel something about one hundred and fifty feet away. About half the length of a football field. But he would have to concentrate hard to get a detailed report at max range.

Thus, Jay would walk for thirty feet. Stop. Then he’d scan the hallway in front of him. He was taken aback by what he’d found. YoAnna had littered the hallway with a lot of traps. One or two every thirty feet. Which worked out for Jay as he triggered each one on purpose. These turned out to be more conventional.

Traps based on stepping on a tile released darts from the walls. Jay caught on to where the magic stopped being vibrant around the trigger and the release mechanisms. Just like DGITL, they could reset themselves and be triggered again.

Tripwire traps would reset on their own as well. Ankle height. Knee height. It didn’t matter. After the swinging log came down, the wires whipped across the hall and reconnected. The log returned to its slot in the ceiling. It didn’t even get covered. The darkness hid it.

The pitfall traps turned out the easiest to notice. The gravity on them was both solid and not at the same time. The magic held together tightly, becoming imperceivable. But the tiles sagged ever so slightly toward the waiting pit instead of being on the even plane with the rest of the floor.

Jay kept account of each trap as he crept deeper into the dungeon’s heart. He took his time to ensure he understood the triggers for each trap he came across, pushing himself to memorize their locations, and forced himself to account for the timing for when they went on cooldown during the reset. He also practiced extending and withdrawing his Perception as quickly as possible.

In his practice, he discovered he could deafen himself willingly. He took a long time to tap the floor with his table leg and withdraw his hearing. It wasn’t easy at first. Instinctually, it didn’t seem right to take away his sense of hearing. But having superhuman Perception didn’t just add to his range. It also enhanced his control. He found he was able to reduce all his senses considerably.

Something entered his max range during one of Jay’s extended surveys forward. He’d been waiting for it to come out, but perceiving it as a gravity image in his head was a little nightmarish. YoAnna had some demons inside of her.

The Haunting Siren had YoAnna’s likeness. It had height, grace, and perhaps the traces of her beauty but tarnished. Is limbs were a tad too long. Its fingers were too thin and pointy. It padded toward Jay on bare feet, making not a sound. Worst yet, its mouth hung open, the chin reaching down past the clavicle.

It turned out he could use his [Identify] talent with gravity imaging if he focused hard enough.

[Identifying]: Haunting Siren, Level 26–She’s hidden in the dark for a reason, a creature of shame and love shaped in the mirror of her creator’s domain. Beware of her enthusiasm towards men, especially any named Jay Luckrun. Or she’ll attack fiercely with claws, jagged teeth lining an extended jaw, and deadly speed. She’ll be the death of you if she catches you outright.

“Jay,” she said with Her sweet voice. “It may be dark now, but I’m sure our love will light the way.”

“You’re wrong for this, YoAnna,” Jay said with a nervous chuckle. “Hella wrong.”

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