It looked like a banquet hall, with festivities in full swing. Various figures from the paintings in the hallway sat around a massive oaken table, carousing, even as hints of their true nature emerged the longer Jonathan looked at them. Wriggling tentacles protruding from coat sleeves, and eyes that came in colors beyond the norm. Jonathan strode into the room, but went unnoticed. Presumably, everyone there thought he was a guest.
At the head of the table, a man sat, middle aged with dark hair and neat, elegant clothes. He looked completely normal, without any strange mutations. However, Jonathan was sure that he was the most corrupted of the lot. As soon as he set eyes upon Jonathan, his eyes twinkled, not with joy, but with a strange, sinister light.
“Welcome to my abode!” The ruler boomed, causing the others to turn to Jonathan. “You’ve met a few of my daughters, I see?”
“I have,” Jonathan replied. “What of it?”
The other man smiled. “They can get quite lonely without anyone else to play with. They can’t kill each other, you see. I forbade it long ago. They have to find guests to… sate their hunger upon.”
Jonathan frowned. “What is this place? Who are you?”
The smile turned predatory. “Right. How remiss of me. I am Georgescu the Third, Vessel of Org’Ysoth, Scourge of the Astral Plane.”
Suddenly, a titanic aura pressed down upon Jonathan, the castle fading away until he was looking up at a beast beyond comprehension, a writhing mass of claws, flesh and horror that gyrated through the darkness. A massive eye gazed down at him, an eye in which entire galaxies swam. Jonathan’s mind nearly collapsed beneath the gaze, but before he could fully register what he was looking at, it disappeared, and he found himself back in the banquet hall. He had the distinct feeling that only his limited senses had saved him from annihilation.
“I will not fight you,” Georgescu declared. “As you can see, it would hardly be fair. You may battle my subjects instead. Your universe’s System sent you here, did it not?”
Jonathan frowned, trying to hide the terror still clogging his mind. “Here? Isn’t this a dungeon?”
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
The vessel of what Jonathan was now sure was an outer god like Exal’drin laughed derisively. “Your System is lazy. It likes to cut corners when it can. What better destination for a dungeon challenge purported to be unknown, than a place truly unknown?”
“So this isn’t still the Infinite Hells?”
Georgescu shook his head. “I don’t even know what that is. You’re in one of my pocket realms, where I play with the weak. Dozens of your kind have come here before, all from the same universe. I learned after slaughtering the first few that your System grants gifts, if I play along.”
Jonathan nodded. “Alright. What do I need to do?”
A faint hint of power leaked out of the other man, as well as a feral grin. “Entertain me. That’s all.”
The world warped, and Georgescu disappeared. The banquet hall changed with the spatial warping, the people turning more bestial in appearance, their clothes ripping as the monsters inside were revealed. They threw themselves at each other with feral abandon, splattering the room with blood and viscera. Jonathan was caught up in the fray, and judging by the speeds of the beings around him, they were all close to his level of strength. With nothing else to do, he used Smite, and dove into the battle, his gauntlets glowing with purple fire. It was time to show his true power, Georgescu be damned.
With his Divinity flooding his body with the sweet power of the gods themselves, Jonathan was better equipped to face off against the host of twisted beasts that were engaged in the orgy of destruction before him. His fists hurtled towards his nearest enemy, a four legged centaur, with the body of a horse mixed with that of an octopus. Instead of arms, two tentacles extended outwards, grasping onto maces made out of bone and flesh, chunks of meat still affixed to the yellowing skeleton beneath. Each swing built up massive amounts of power, due to the elastic nature of the monster’s arms.
Jonathan ducked under the threshing strikes, watching as they pulped two other fighters nearby. His fist shot up towards the monster’s chin, and lifted the beast off the ground, shooting it up towards the arched ceiling above. A spike of the Void followed it, penetrating the monster’s skull. It flopped around as it flew through the air, before collapsing to the ground a few dozen feet distant, quickly ground into bone shards and bloody dust by the nearest abominations.
A pair of grotesque, leering chimeras of humans and lizards leaped towards Jonathan, their claws extended, glowing with the light of madness. A strange, flickering orange and black light, it represented an element Jonathan had no experience with. The air around it bent and warped in strange ways, perspectives changing and reappearing in the blink of an eye. Such was the effect that when Jonathan began to dodge, one of the claws was already there, about to slice through the neck joint on his armor. Knowing the powers of the monsters in this dungeon, such a feat was more than possible. After all, his armor was only Tier 3 in strength.
