Jonathan’s eyes opened to total darkness. He stood upon a strange, mushy surface, but despite his advanced senses, he could not determine what it was. Taking a step, he found that it was some sort of liquid, as a bit splashed around audibly.
Unable to determine what was happening, Jonathan started walking, extending a field of his Void energy around himself. Not enough to damage anything, but enough to sense where he was at a basic level.
A few shapes, vaguely humanoid in nature, surrounded him. However, none of them were moving, and were saturated with elemental Death. Clearly not undead, it seemed like they were simply corpses. He raised an eyebrow. Damn,this is already getting dark.
Suddenly, a line of blazing pain carved itself into the front of his armor, piercing through its defences and into his skin. With reflexes honed by dozens of battles, he lashed out, extending a massive gauntlet of the Void around his hand. Something hissed as his attack blew a chunk out of it, splattering him with viscous blood. Other than that, there was no sign of anything being there.
Jonathan immediately used his Third Eye of Exal’drin, but to his horror, nothing happened. With nothing else to do, he expelled a nova of his element in all directions, wasting five or six times the amount that it should have taken to kill his foe. Despite this, it did the job, and the sound of a body hitting the ground with a liquid squelch came from his left.
Jonathan bent down, and reached out, feeling a fleshy lump beneath his gauntlets, oozing blood. Without any sense other than touch to detect it, as his Void senses didn’t work on the corpse, he ran his hands along the bulk of the thing. It was quite large, at least a dozen feet long, and that was with the chunks taken out of it by his earlier attacks. A strange sensation tingled at the tips of his hands as he ran them along the body, as if there was something there, just out of reach. However, when he pressed harder, he found nothing, save for what he already knew.
Already, this floor was looking to be a nightmare, even if the enemies weren’t especially powerful. One of his greatest advantages were his senses, honed to a level beyond most at his level. They were essentially useless here, as touch could not extend beyond his skin, no matter how sensitive it was.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
He circled the massive corpse a few times, but found nothing else of note. Disturbingly, its shape was uniform, without any limbs to be found, or a head. Somehow, it had still been able to hit him. Jonathan didn’t really want to think about how that was possible.
He waited for a few minutes, hoping for one of his allies to arrive. Nothing happened, meaning that either they were trapped in separate instances of the dungeon, or had decided to stay outside. Either way, the result was the same. He was alone here, in this horror filled expanse of darkness.
Jonathan started walking away from the corpse, feeling the same, uniform ground beneath his feet as he went. There was no change in the environment, with only a few corpses, identical to the previous ones, providing any sort of contrast to the boggy ground.
Minutes passed by as disquietingly as hours, with only the faint splashes from below and the feeling of muck beneath his feet telling him that he was, in fact, moving. Complete darkness shrouded his vision, made even more constricting by the faint sounds of his breathing reverberating within his helmet. His reflexes were balanced on a razor’s edge, with the knowledge that he could be attacked at any moment, without warning.
After some time, a faint premonition wormed its way into his corresponding with a tiny pinprick of pain near his neck. That was the only warning he got of an incoming strike. He rolled away, but even then, his neck was sliced open to the bone, his vertebrae clattering as they nearly fell apart.
Jonathan gagged on a torrent of blood from severed arteries and veins, even as his skin knitted itself back together. Lashing out with a whip of pure destruction, Jonathan raked the air around him with the Void, hearing a satisfying snap as the whip sliced clean through his adversary. In hindsight, he could have done this earlier, but his dismay at the cessation of his senses had, in a rare turn of events, led to his fear being prioritized over reason.
The creatures that haunted this nightmare realm seemed to have immensely lopsided stats, powerful enough to slice through his skin with ease, but so weak that a single expression of elemental energy could kill them in an instant. Of course, the Void was powerful, but it wasn’t that powerful.
Now that he knew how to predict the attacks, he was a bit more confident of his chances of survival. With the bulk of the fear blunted, Jonathan noticed something a lot more heartening. The essence gain from his kills was immense. Just two of the monsters had given him almost a third of the essence towards another level. It looked like it was the opposite of the Mediocrity challenge, with the essence gain increased rather than decreased due to the environment. If the monsters kept coming, and Jonathan survived, he would be seeing a marked increase in his stats.
