“To my understanding, there is no benefit to going inside a dungeon whatsoever. They’re traps. Their purpose is to simply kill whatever ends up within and drain them of whatever essence the particular dungeon happens to feed on.”

“What you’re saying makes it sound almost like…” I gulped dryly. “It’s a living thing?”

“They pretty much are. There are creatures living in the ocean that consist of multiple tiny organisms forming a colony of sorts to hunt better. I think the dungeons are something similar to that.” I think Amelia was trying to refer to siphonophores, like the Portuguese man-o-war.

A heavy silence fell over us. We were in mortal danger, and surely the deeper into the dungeon we’d go, the more dangerous it’d get. It’s not like we could just sit around either, or we’d starve to death in no time. There was nothing within the dungeon to eat.

The only way was forward.

“We can’t stop here.” I slowly stood up. “We have a journey to go on. If the dungeon truly is alive, that means it can also die.” I spoke softly, and there was no confidence present in my voice at all. Luckily, Amelia wasn’t an insensitive asshole, so she didn’t point it out.

“Hhhh…” A deep sigh followed as she slowly rose up. The clatter of her armor echoed in the corridor. “I suppose you’re right. We made a promise, too.”

“Yeah. We can’t let Amy down.” I smiled a bit more confidently and patted her arm.

The dungeon was a straight path. Sometimes it would open up into wider square-shaped rooms, but there were no twists or turns.

I was still a bit stuck on the concept of dungeons in video games, so I expected the corridor to split into a labyrinthine maze any time soon, and yet, it never did.

The corridor was somewhat dark, but the mana circuits on the walls provided us with light, and as expected, the deeper we went…the more signs of danger we saw.

There were scratches on the walls and a bunch of cleanly cut pieces of wood strewn all around the sides of the corridors. Some of the pieces of wood were clearly more worn out than others for whatever reason, and around the wooden pieces, there were dark stains on the walls or floor. Dried up blood, maybe?

The odd part about the stains was, that they were often somewhat geometric in shape. Perfect circles, straight lines. Some looked a bit like spearheads.

While there was certainly a sense of foreboding… It didn’t really feel outwardly dangerous in any sense outside the fact, that the air grew notably darker the further we went in, and there was this strange noise of some kind ringing in my ears growing louder step by step.

It was almost like whispers… but not quite. Not only that, but it was like someone was trying to speak to me, but instead of using words, there was simply… the concept behind the words or their intent being signaled to me.

I know. Total nonsense, but I can’t really put it any other way. Some bizarre messages were being sent to me… But I couldn’t honestly make out what they said.

There were no monsters in sight. Just wooden pieces all over, magic circuits and… stone walls. The dark shapes painted on the walls near the wooden pieces were growing a bit darker in color, however.

Somewhere along the way, I think I lost sense of time. I couldn’t figure out how long we had been walking in total silence anymore, quietly working our way deeper. The air was growing darker and somehow a bit heavier with each step further we took. The dimming corridor made me feel like we were traversing into the depths of the earth itself, even though we weren’t actually walking down a slope or stairs.

It was still a completely straight line.

Sometimes I thought I saw the darkness around us move around, almost like gas or dust of some kind, but whenever I’d properly focus on it, it seemed perfectly even again.

My observations were interrupted as I finally noticed something off. 

Amelia was panting like crazy. Sure, her armor was heavy-looking, but she was the head of the royal guard, so there was no way she was simply out of stamina.

“A-are you… alright?”

The fact that Amelia was unable to even reply properly was answer enough, something was wrong. Her eyes were bloodshot and wide. How did I not notice this earlier?!

There was something wrong with her breathing.

“Rrrgkkk…!”

It sounded like there was something lodged in her throat, preventing anything but a weak gurgling from escaping her windpipe.

I rushed over to her in a panic, only to see something very alarming.

Amelia’s exhalation was pitch black. There was some strange smoke coming out of her mouth every time she exhaled. That instant, I grabbed her arm and began running back. She was ragged, and it felt like all power had escaped her body.

Dragging a person who has little to no strength in her body is a lot of work. My feeble and crippled body was pushed to its absolute limits just to drag the barely walking Amelia out of the darkness to a brighter area.

Her armor clattered as I helped her rest on the floor in one of the wider rooms.

She was gasping dryly; the dark gas was coming out of her mouth still. It looked like soot, but more alarming than anything, the dark matter found its way inside her mouth and nostrils again whenever she’d breathe in. It was almost as if the strange substance were trying to force its way back into her.

Did she step on a trap or something?! Was this a curse of some kind…?! My mind began racing, so in a panic I began pulling off her armor pieces.

The sight was nothing short of disgusting.

There were dark splotches growing around her upper arms and chest. They had a horrid odor of rot to them. It was such a primal and disgusting smell, it caused me to dry heave the moment I caught a whiff of it.

I did my best to hold myself back from vomiting on the spot as I began to wipe the dark splotches off. I expected the darkness to be her skin rotting, but to my surprise it was instead a thin layer of liquid over it instead. The areas of her body that were covered with the filth were left red and had some little sores or bumps on them.

The black stuff was like paint with a slightly crunchy texture. The more I wiped off, the more of it began appearing on her. Instead of staying in one spot, the dark layer would shift around and form the splotches in different spots on her body. It was as if it had a mind of its own.

“W-what is this…!?” I pulled my hand back to take a proper look at the black mass. Upon closer inspection, there seemed to be very tiny hairs sticking out of it. They were twitching and writhing in a most disgusting manner, almost as if they were… legs? “I-insects…?!”

The darkness in the air seemed to grow stronger the deeper we went. Now, that I really thought about it, it didn’t make any sense.

We weren’t walking deeper. We were walking in a straight line. Why would the air grow darker?! Why did I not notice this earlier?!

The darkness was a swarm of incredibly tiny insects of some kind.

Was this dungeon their nest?

The deeper we went, the darker it got, meaning the insect swarm got denser. I had no idea how many of them were inside Amelia already!

A chill ran down my spine. I began wiping the bugs off of Amelia faster, she was coughing up more of the dark insect soot, and a fine thin layer of disgustingly murky liquid was slowly starting to drip out of Amelia’s nostrils and ears.

“AMELIA!!” My screaming got no response outside of weak coughs.

I could feel a familiar feeling rising my throat.

A growing anxiety was amassing and my mind began to race. It was like everywhere I looked, a mass of flies was coming right at us. I began wiping at Amelia, gasping dryly as a panic attack was about to take me over.

It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling to me. I experienced a few in the past.

It’s a really hard emotional state to explain or describe with words alone at that. I had my first one pretty young if I don’t remember wrong. I used to get them often in my early teenage years after I had recently been informed of how my life would be from then on. Coming into terms with my reality of being stuck at the hospital for the rest of my life pushed me into horrible mental states often.

Panic attacks never really made any sense to me. They usually started with my heart rate and breathing getting faster and more irregular. Then, even if I knew I was in no immediate danger or anything, my emotions went haywire and I lost control.

Everything became a blur, everything was terrifying, everything was an enemy. I often got stuck in a loop of fear and panic, which totally distorted my rational thinking. Even if I knew the reaction was harmful for me, I couldn’t stop it.

The most horrific thing about it, to me, was the feeling of losing control. Like someone else took over my body and kept feeding me fear, forcing more and more down my throat, even though I knew it made no sense at all.

That feeling of losing control is what started a negative loop for me. Having been told I’d be stuck in a hospital for the rest of my life robbed me of a large portion of my freedoms, so when I realized I could even lose control of my mental state, I began fearing panic attacks immensely… Which in turn caused me to have them more often.

It’s a bit challenging to explain… But the reason to why I’m explaining this, is because when you’ve experienced them multiple times, you’ll know when one is coming. It’s like… that feeling you get right before vomiting. You know it’s going to strike, but not exactly when.

Presently, I was close. Everything was moving so fast and even though I kept wiping, more bugs kept amassing.

Usually, when you’ve experienced panic attacks multiple times, you can try to come up with a method of breaking out of that loop. It’s usually something similar to breathing exercises or getting away from whatever was causing the panic attack. I had one too, but the fear of these gross bugs going into my lungs if I took a deep breath to calm myself down made me shiver with horror.

“I don’t know…! I don’t know! Amelia!! What can I do?!” I screamed desperately.

Just as my gasping got uncontrollable, I felt her hand. Amelia was grasping onto my fingers weakly, and her hand was shaking. I felt like there was an ice cube lodged in my throat. Amelia was the victim here…!!

“I was… What the hell was I…”

No. I needed to act. My panicked breathing got worse, so I put one of my fingers in my mouth and began biting with all the force I could muster. I found out it’s incredibly difficult to truly hurt yourself on purpose. You really need to put a lot of mental effort into it.

I kept biting. Focusing on the biting and the pain caused my breathing to gradually slow down. I could taste blood, but it didn’t taste like iron. I don’t know what witch blood consisted of, but it was a rather… soothing flavor even.

As my nerves finally calmed down, it finally hit me.  

This all made no sense at all. I walked ahead of Amelia.

I walked ahead!! And yet… I was unaffected! Why was only Amelia affected by this?! What was going on!? I began looking around myself.

Wooden pieces… and dark patterns all over the walls and floors.

Dark patterns… Maybe they weren’t dried up blood?! But instead…!!

I rushed to a perfect circle pattern on the ground, finding there was some worn out wood in a cross shape over it. If I imagined metal where the dark circle surrounded the wooden cross… it would have definitely looked like a small shield.

The murky pattern looked like only a shadow had been left of the metallic part, and the wooden part was untouched.

My line of sight jolted to Amelia and crawled to her in a mad dash, beginning to rip her remaining armor pieces off.

I suddenly became extremely aware of the cold beads of sweat gliding down my skin under the wolf coat as I saw the pieces of metal plating properly.

The insides of the arm-guards I pulled off first were coated in writhing dark worms.