Chapter 45: Chapter 45: Nightmare

The echoing chaos of the room behind her vanished immediately, replaced by silent nothingness. To even call it a lack of noise felt painfully lacking, more so actively oppressive than merely just empty, as if sound itself didn't exist here.

Light itself was also absent, as all the fox could see was the door behind her and a void in every other direction.

There was no boss, no enemies, no players, no monsters, no treasure.

Nothing.

The concept of “nothing” was all that existed here.

And yet…

Invisible and silent, some force tugged at her. Something compelled her to step deeper into this empty space. Completely intangible in nature, as nothing existed to physically move her.

Curiosity got the better of the nearly-dead fox, and against her better judgement, she nervously stepped forward.

No ground could be felt beneath her feet, but all the same, she did not fall. The door behind her moved further and further away, so she was moving despite the lack of feedback from her surroundings.

She stepped in further, her steps growing longer and longer even as her feet moved no faster, that urge still pulling her deeper into the abyss.

And she went along behind it, the Gloom Mage having never been one to shy away from acting on poor impulses and against common sensibilities.

The door was now so far away that she could no longer find it, leaving her without any manner of landmark in the cold nothingness embracing her. Or perhaps there had never been a door to begin with…?

Tugged along like a fish on a line, too bloodied to offer any real resistance to the silent call from still deeper within the void.

It felt like she’d walked for hours, but in truth she’d entered only moments ago.

Footsteps following footsteps, ever onwards, ever forwards, never ceasing.

She walked until the unheard voice stopped calling out, and even then she walked further still, lost in the darkness but feeling something. Something other than her in this place that stretched on forever.

The first sound she’d made since she entered the boss room was a tiny grunt, as she walked directly forwards, meeting a wall dead ahead of her as she smacked facefirst into it.

“Gah, who’s…?!”

She almost leapt out of her own skin, hairs standing on end as she jolted up like a surprised cat, fumbling with her staff as she looked around herself.

Of course, she found nothing at all. Or rather, there should have been nothing to find here. But ahead of her now sat a single room, four perfectly identical walls of white stone arranged in a square, an unassuming doorway sitting exactly in the middle of the one closest to her, light emanating from the stonework and yet somehow still not filling the unlit space around it.

Curious, she tried to pull the door open. It clattered noisily but refused to budge, an oversized lock frozen against the handle holding it tightly shut.

“Hmm… Hazard Flash…?”

Her mana regenerated to the point she wasn’t quite helpless, bracing her hand against the lock as she attempted to blast it open. The smoke cloud it left was thicker than usual, the fox coughing and waving it away, only to find the lock completely unfazed and undamaged from the point-blank explosion.

She grunted, giving it a few more for good measure, the mysterious room wholly unconcerned with her attempts at brute-forcing her entry.

A memory popped into her head from before the avalanche of other things she’d needed to concern herself about, the caster digging around in her cluttered bag for a long few moments, looking for something.

When she pulled it free again, she once again had the little gift she’d been handed the night before. A small, frozen key, unassuming and forgettable.

There wasn’t even a chance to try and see if it fit into the keyhole, as the moment the key was freed from her inventory it leapt from her hand straight into the lock, not waiting for her to dawdle on putting it where it so clearly belonged.

The lock released, and rather than open the door to allow her in, the room itself began to unravel, walls twisting unnaturally as the chamber instead entirely reconstructed itself around her.

Endless abyss in every direction was replaced by more recognizable brick and cobble, a thick rug covering the entire floor of the smallish room, a torch hanging from the perfect center of each wall as the ceiling hung claustrophobically low overhead.

Two other items shared the reshaped room with her. A large chest, a familiar sight at the end of a dungeon like the ones she’d done before, sat pressed against the opposite wall. And in the perfect center of the room, between her and the reward she’d come for, stood a statue.

It took up the entire height of the room, from floor to ceiling exactly, like the room had been made just to accommodate it. Obsidian and black granite composed the structure that filled most all of the space here, the dark surface hungrily drinking up all of the light that touched it, almost appearing to be a hole in space rather than a physical object.

Four separate faces stared outwards from it, each one bearing a different expression, all of which appeared to be different depictions of pain or despair.

“…are you the boss…?”

Monica cautiously stepped closer, having not been given anything to fight yet but still being shown what must have been the boss reward chest right in front of her.

She’d scarcely taken a single step forward before a repose was offered.

The hazy glass eyes of the statues many faces cleared, now filled with a light like a bonfire, blazing with an energy and ferocity that nothing else here had been close to.

“Cursebearer. Plaguebringer. Doomsayer. Deathcaller.”

Each of the heads spoke in sequence, each bearing the same booming voice which echoed through the entire rest of the room, each deafening to try and listen to as they rung in her ears.

“I… guess you mean me? Not the most flattering titles though, and I haven’t really done any plagues as far as I can remember.”

They denied her an answer, though there wasn’t exactly anyone else here for them to be talking to otherwise.

“You who endured this castle’s trials. You who dived its depths. You who sought its secrets. You who bested its challengers.”

Her mind rolled back to her journey through the frozen castle, mostly consisting of racing through it as fast as possible and blowing her way through walls to bypass everything inside it.

“…y-yeah, I did all that, sure.”

“Wounded. Drained. Alone. Yet still, victorious.”

“I can’t deny any of that, not really feeling the best here…”

“You who have come here first before all others. You who comes here stained in blood. You who have known the same death you distribute. You who will be given a gift.”

Her ears perked up quickly.

“A gift? As in you’ll let me just take the chest and go, right? No fight, no nothing?”

“A curse. A weapon. A blasphemy. A gift.”

The statue rumbled, the voices growing more and more silent as the four sides of the structure parted, glassy eyes once more turning hazy and empty as they revealed a pedestal in the statue’s center.

Atop it sat only a single item. A scroll.

She snatched it up immediately, the parchment somehow heavier in her hands than other skill scrolls had felt before, as if the paper itself was also made of granite.

The chest that had been waiting for her so patiently was popped open as well, it’s contents much less exciting than the room’s other reward.

- Dungeon Clear token

- First Dungeon Clear token

[Primonilise: +3000 (+2000 for first guild to clear). Current score: 5972.]

The caster blinked several dozen times as the points were entered into the score, completely dwarfing anything else they’d managed to do so far in the event up until now, almost taking her mind off of how badly this entire dungeon had gone for her specifically.

With the chest opened and her “normal” reward claimed, the locked door behind her opened once more, showing the empty bridge she’d the entrance had been on.

She looked back at the scroll in her hand, heavy in her hand, the tightly-bound parchment seemingly twitching, like it had a heartbeat all its own.

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Despite every muscle in her body being against her choice, she opened the scroll.

[Sealed Skill Scroll: Nightmare Trance]

It burned away in her hands as she learned the skill within it, eyes dancing over the page, lighting up like Christmas lights as she read through her real reward.

She practically sprinted back outside, still close to death as she rushed back to the rest of her guild.

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Elise skidded backwards by just an inch, legs faltering just slightly as a massive greatsword struck into her shields, already trying to push back as she bashed the attacker aside, arms heavy as she panted loudly.

“Gnnn… y-you all okay…?

“Never… never better…!”

Prim was equally worn down, doing her best to deal with the stragglers leaking through the Vanguard’s blockade, her oversized mallet getting slower as she just barely managed to knock another player off the side of the pathway.

Even Glass was starting to have issues, their bloodlust alone keeping them moving as the slugged their way through an entire party, heavy breathing their own reply.

Silk still did their best, firing Silkshot after Silkshot around their front line as they stopped up the line further, doing a wonderful job of stemming the flow of new bodies.

But even so, they remained only four people. They’d been pushed back almost the full length of the bottom pathway by now, struggling to just hold their position at all, a handful of players starting to actually get past their two part defenses as Glass chased after them alone, the others not nearly fast enough to keep up with him.

“Have you- hngh..! -heard from M-Moni at all…?” I-I don’t know how much longer we can hold for her…”

“Not a word yet, no. Just… hoping she made it through up there…”

“Chk! Chkchk chk!”

“Hey, don’t yell at me, I’m just as worried about her!”

The tiny arachnid refused to let the others worry about whether or not their fifth member was alright, doing their best to keep morale high even under the constant assault they were enduring on her behalf.

High morale could only go so far though, and the mob had seemingly not shrunk at all in the half hour they’d held the bridge, only finding more enemies to throw at them, many of them having had plenty of time to sit back and study how to get around the unmoving wall of an elf stopping up the pathway.

“Leyline P-Protection! Ah, Prim, another group got o-over…!”

“Hells, working on it…!”

The Berserker did her best to speed after a trio that had slipped through their tank’s lockdown, already far behind them as they hopped up the tall staircase ahead, her hammer just barely managing to clip a fourth and flatten them.

A slow trickle became a full-scale flood, more and more players managing to force their way through as the party did their best to not get trampled under the stampede.

Several levels up, their Brawler held their own remarkably well, mowing through the hordes that reached him, though most of them simply bypassed them altogether, having no interest in throwing themselves into a fight they couldn’t win, especially when they provided even less of a wall than the elf below.

The situation only got worse from there, the blockade finally broken as the full force of the mob streamed through, storming up the massive chamber towards the boss door and their quarry behind it.

But before even a single soul could come close to completing the climb, a booming sound echoed downwards, loud enough to shut out the sounds of storming footfalls and clashing weapons, demanding all attention be focused upwards towards it.

The boss door, previously as silent and unmoving as the grave, had swung wide open, freezing cold gales whipping out from behind it, blowing those closest to it away.

Every one of the players within the room froze in place, none of them expecting something to emerge, all of them waiting for whatever lied within.

“I-Is that Moni…?”

“I… don’t know, I can’t see…”

There was silence, whispers and breathing the only sounds as the winds grew quiet, no one willing to make a sound as they tried to peer over the side of the bridge and find what had emerged from the dungeon’s final chamber.

None of them had to wait long, as what could only be the boss appeared.

No dragon roared out from its den, no forgotten knight charged forth with their blade drawn, no monster or beast that could be described appeared as the entity stepped up to the edge of the bridge above.

A void moved forwards, light being swallowed whole by an empty hole in space, inky black tendrils dragging along behind it, something blighted and eldritch in nature forcing itself into existence.

Before so much as a single cry could be let out, it leapt from the edge, firing itself down at the masses that had raced towards its den, an alien screech crying out from somewhere within its imperceptible form.

Tendrils grabbed at other bridges and burrowed into the wall, racing downwards on millions of scuttling, insectoid legs protruding haphazardly out of its misshapen mass.

The sounds of its advance were soon met with cries of terror, the players who had been so determined to scale the tower now scrambling downwards with all the energy they could muster, some of them even casting themselves off the sides to avoid the approaching horror, every living soul that had made it this far now running blindly for their lives.

What had been a semi-organized mob fight was no complete chaos, the remaining members of Primonilise finding themselves shoved aside by people without an ounce of fighting spirit left in them, panic and hysteria driving them all away.

“Gnnn… can’t… move at all…”

“G-Glass! Don’t worry, w-we’ll… nnn…!”

“We can’t move here either, all these damn scared animals are a lot pushier coming back this way…!”

“Chk! Chkchk!”

Silk alone was able to get free of being trampled, leaping to the wall and quickly scuttling upwards, directly towards the unknown entity barreling towards them all.

“W-Wait, Silk, no, you c-can’t-”

Elise tried to call out to the brave spiderling, but her words were silenced as more and more bodies tumbled over top of her, keeping her from pulling them back to safety.

The other players were barely even running at this point, moving like they were being dragged away, some of them on all fours as they scraped and clawed back towards the exit, none of them even seemingly aware of their surroundings as more and more of them slipped off the sides into the chasm below.

It was nearly on top of them by now, the guild barely able to move again now as the horde had thinned enough to no longer keep them pinned in place, all of them pushing their way out towards the exit through the remaining mass of other guilds.

Prim’s monocle whirred out, trying to get any information on what was coming towards them, while Glass simply tried to launch themselves over top of the crowds, with Elise as the only soul not trying to flee, still trying to save Silk as they ascended the room.

Not one of them was fast enough though, four new tendrils firing outwards too fast to dodge, each of them grabbing one of Primonilise’s members and lifting them upwards, several dozen more firing past them and knocking the players too slow to escape aside effortlessly as the horror landed down hard.

Glass and Elise struggled violently, held tightly in place as they were ensnared, unable to even attack the rampaging boss as they were caught.

Their crafter however remained mostly motionless, too busy studying the flood of information her Master’s Eye provided, watching as each of the falling, screaming players each wore a status effect she’d never seen before now.

[Fear].

A wave of understanding bubbling up finally as her gaze turned to the eldritch abomination that had grabbed them, staring at the status screen she was given for it.

“…Monica?”

Part of the writhing mass of unlit space twisted towards her as she spoke, a voice ringing in her head as it replied.

“Sorry I took so long!~”

Silk firmly wedged themselves atop their transformed summoner happily, the other two rapidly glancing back and forth between Prim and the horror holding them as they processed who this “boss” was.

The walking nightmare named Monica Furdel barreled forwards, her guildmates held aloft beside her as she charged after the mob that had spent the entire dungeon terrorizing her, the horrific void of a Gloom Mage laughing manically as her voice came out as wails that echoed throughout the castle, finally becoming the secret boss they’d all expected her to be.

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