BLOOD CURSE ACADEMIA - PREVIOUS DRAFT EDITION -

Chapter XLVI (46)- Monsters of the World Dungeon

The dungeon’s top levels were as dry and hot and boring as usual. Kizu managed to locate a couple traps by using the enchanted atlas, but each was pretty obvious and easily avoided, even without the book’s help. He wondered if those vampire spawn he had trapped down in one of the traps were still down there. The thought raised his caution whenever their party stumbled close to a pit trap. He doubted the monsters remembered him warmly, and the last thing they needed was to encounter vampire spawn with a grudge this early into their delve.

While Kizu trudged forward in pensive silence, his attention absorbed by the dungeon’s atlas, Basil hummed to himself while playing around with his arm’s structure and Ione snored from her spot on her giant lizard’s back. Mort crouched on Kizu’s head, fascinated by the World Dungeon’s tunnels. Feeling Mort's curiosity, Kizu had feared the monkey might leap from his head to try to get a better look at the dangerous liquid flames at the bottom of the crevasses they passed. Thankfully, they stopped seeing fire rivers after the first hour or so into their journey.

Looking up from the book, Kizu frowned as they took a turn. The air smelled different down the passageway. Instead of sulfur, it smelled almost like rancid dirt. The stone tunnel’s coloring went from coal black to an ashy gray. But occasionally Kizu spotted glowing green cracks in the walls. It was as if the mundane walls hid something far more sinister behind them.

“Where are we?” Ione asked, yawning and rubbing her eyes. “I can’t see a thing down here.”

Out of the way from the rivers of liquid fire, the passages had dimmed to complete darkness save for the occasional crack in the wall. Not a problem for Kizu or Mort. And he suspected Basil saw perfectly fine in the dark as well.

“Use a light spell,” Basil suggested.

“Never learned one,” Ione said. “Hold on.”

Ione fell off the back of her lizard and began feeling up the ground. She brought out the chalk she had stolen from Kizu and sketched a summoning circle. Kizu found it amazing she managed something so complex while completely blind.

When she finished, the circle glowed and then dissolved into hundreds of fireflies. They dispersed in a small radius around them, giving an eerie glow to the tunnels.

“There,” Ione said, flopping back on her lizard and tucking the skin flaps back over her. “Now I can see where we’re going. Why is it so much colder now? The chill woke me up.”

Kizu hadn’t noticed it until she mentioned it, but the temperature had dropped considerably. He shrugged and continued walking.

“Probably because we’ve moved away from the magma tunnels,” Basil said.

“How far is it?”

Kizu looked down at his atlas. “We’re maybe a third of the way there. It’s hard to tell with the tunnels shifting so much. The further we descend, the more active the dungeon seems to be.”

Then, as they spoke, two dozen of the firefly lights winked out of existence. The party stopped abruptly. Kizu unsheathed Sojan, keeping it pointed in the direction the lights had disappeared.

Nothing happened. Kizu looked down at his atlas. He saw no notes about traps. But there were a few unfamiliar words scrawled in the margins of the page. He also didn’t see any alternative paths leading forward. They could wait until the passages shifted and hope for a new path. But Kizu’s patience was running thin.

“Send some more of your fireflies over there,” Kizu said.

Ione grumbled about the waste of her resources but did as he asked.

Each firefly winked out of existence as soon as it passed through an invisible threshold.

“Spooky,” Basil said. “Let me try something.”

His left hand started to glow slightly. Then he tore off the tip of his finger. He tossed it forward.

This time, Kizu heard an audible chomp as the glowing fingertip disappeared midair.

Kizu stared into the dark. Despite his excellent dark vision, he saw nothing. He glanced at Mort on his shoulder, but the monkey looked as perplexed as he felt. Then Kizu drew out one of the dozens of potions he had prepared. He threw it forward. There was a shattering of glass as it disappeared. Then a roar of flames. The heat made them all stumble back slightly.

When the flames died out, a scorched creature lay on the ground of the cavern. The bulk of the creature was a head with an unhinged jaw that stretched half a dozen meters, easily enough to reach the ground from the cavern’s ceiling.

“Did you kill it?” Ione asked.

Kizu shrugged, uncertain. It looked dead.

She got down from her lizard and nudged it with a foot. The burned skin flickered slightly transparent at her touch. Upon not seeing any other reaction from the monster, she got down on her hands and knees and began to study it up close.

“It looks like the main body is the size of a human child while its unhinged jaw hangs loose about twice the size of an adult,” Ione said, lifting up an arm of burned skin. Instead of a hand, the creature had boney hooks protruding from its wrists. “I think it uses these talons to cling to ceilings and wait for prey to walk into its open mouth.”

“A bit lazy for a magical creature,” Basil commented.

“About as lazy as a mage jumping instead of walking. These things must be extraordinarily clever. And they’re incredibly energy efficient. I hope we can find some alive. Next time, don’t go killing it so quickly.”

Kizu rolled his eyes then walked past the monster’s corpse, Basil right behind him. After a moment’s hesitation, Ione climbed back on the back of her giant lizard and followed them.

On alert after the invisible monster, Kizu made certain to keep Ione’s fireflies in front of him at all times. Twice more they encountered the monsters.

“I wonder what they hunt,” Ione said, examining an invisible alive one. “They aren’t actually all that big and it looks like they hardly ever move, so they probably don’t need that much food. But they still need something.”

“Vampiric spawn?” Kizu suggested. “Or worms?”

“Maybe,” Ione said, sounding doubtful.

But her question was answered a few hours later. They entered a cavern full of luminescent mushrooms that glowed a vivid turquoise. White creatures slightly larger than mice with rounded bodies scurried around on the ground. Their hair bristled up like a porcupine when Kizu got near them.

“Sonney!” Ione exclaimed upon seeing the little creatures. She crouched down near one perched on a rock. “If you keep one with you, they’re said to increase your luck considerably.”

“I’ve never heard of a sonney,” Basil said, eyeing one. “What kind of luck do you mean? Isn’t it incredibly difficult to measure someone’s luck determined by magic?”

“It’s classified as a magical creature. They’re extremely rare, only spotted in pockets in the World Dungeon. Overworld breeding doesn’t work for most of the magical creatures down here. Sonney are the same.”

Kizu picked one up like he would a porcupine, using two fingers to grab it by its stub of a tail’s underside. It squirmed, but its belly was completely without quills so he placed it on his palm. It calmed down. Mort hummed from his shoulder, looking down at it quizzically.

Ione gently took it from him. She cradled it in her arms like a baby.

“I think we should camp here,” Basil said. “If they manage to survive here safely, it should be fine for us.”

Ione agreed quickly, obviously wanting to study the creatures more thoroughly. Kizu, while a bit tired, didn’t want to stop so soon into their expedition. They had only traveled a few hours. Every minute they wasted was a minute that the World Dungeon had to shift, changing the route to his sister.

But the two of them insisted on resting. And if he abandoned them, they would be left without any sort of guide out of the World Dungeon. They could end up trapped indefinitely.

Forced into resting, Kizu found a vertical alcove in the stoney cavern’s wall and wedged himself in alongside the blanket he had packed. Mort curled up alongside him. The glow of the mushrooms, albeit widespread, was dim enough for him to slip into a doze.

Condescension dripped from the cavern’s ceiling. A drop fell on his face, waking him with a start. The little sonney creatures still darted around the patches of turquoise mushrooms. As Kizu crawled out of his hiding spot, he saw Ione, asleep on the ground next to a dozen of the little rodents. But every trace of Basil was gone. It was as if the changeling had never even joined them.

“Ione,” he said, nudging her with his boot. “What happened to Basil?”

She turned over, causing her little sleeping companions to scurry away, but wanting to be left alone. It took another minute of prodding before she finally rubbed her eyes and looked around.

“I don’t know,” she said lamely. “He offered to take the first watch. Last I saw, he was sitting over there.” She pointed at a rock jutting out of the ground.

Kizu cautiously approached the rock but found nothing. Just a normal smooth large stone. He wondered if the magical rodents had anything to do with Basil’s disappearance. He eyed a nearby one with suspicion. But when he mentioned the thought to Ione, she shot it down immediately, insisting that the creatures were harmless.

Ione summoned a dog with patches of white and red hair. But even with its help, they found nothing. Ione was baffled. She insisted that, at the very least, the animal should be able to pick up on Basil’s fragrant perfumes.

“He must be somewhere,” Kizu said. “People don’t just disappear.”

But they found no sign of him. After an hour of searching, Kizu decided to do something desperate. He went to his pack, ready to use the enchanted dagger to see if it held any answers. But, as he shuffled through his things, he realized something terrible. His atlas of the World Dungeon was missing.