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78 - The Underwater Temple: Dark Labyrinth
🕑 Added 2023-05-25 17:27:23 +0000 UTCI followed the corridor for a while, the featureless walls glowing an eerie purple due to my void javelins. I occasionally stopped to look for anything out of place, but the hallway was as boring as could be, perfectly square, leading deeper into the darkness. Eventually, I came to a cross in the path. I had to choose between three different ways to continue, one to the left, one to the right, and another going straight. I couldn’t see any discernable difference between each path, but it slowly dawned on me that my way down might not be as straightforward as I’d thought.
I summoned some more javelins, sending them careening down each of the paths, but aside from the left path taking a turn after a bit, I couldn’t see anything of worth. I redoubled my efforts at looking for clues hoping to find a hint, however small, that would lead me down the correct path. I crawled up and down the walls, looking for markings, differences in stone, tiny writing, or maybe even a helpful arrow.
After a while of fruitless searching, I stood back at the crossroads, none the wiser. I weighed my options, but there was no obvious advantage to picking either path, so eventually I just shrugged and went down the left path. After about a minute of careful advancing, I came to the bend in the hallway, which was turning left. The wall was a bit charred from where my javelin had hit the wall, giving me an idea.
I quickly ran back to the crossroad, pulled out one of the fruits from the third layer in my inventory, and put it about a meter into the path, clearly visible. This was probably some sort of maze, and since I didn’t have any tools to make a map, this way I could at the very least mark the paths I’d been to before. I had a ton of the fruits left since I was usually gorging myself on monsters, making the fruits expendable.
I backtracked to the bend and kept following the hallway, making sure to keep an eye out for any hints. I continued following the path, occasionally taking a turn until I was faced with a dead end. I tried looking for any hidden switches or something of the sort, but after once again finding nothing, I sighed and started backtracking to the original crossroad. I had a feeling this maze would get extremely annoying.
I eventually made it back and went down the right path this time, leaving a fruit behind to mark my passage. This hallway looked just like all the others, which is to say, extremely boring. I had to force myself to pay attention several times as my concentration started to wane. I could only take so much of looking at the same, featureless walls. I was just thinking of ways to make this entire thing a bit more exciting for myself, when I felt something click below me.
I barely felt it, but since I was so used to feeling even the slightest vibration in the ground, it felt like a loud bang in the silence. I immediately jumped back since ominous clicks in a dungeon could only mean one thing. The ceiling fell and smashed into the ground with a mighty crash, leaving me standing a few feet away with an incredulous expression.
Holy shit, I’d been expecting traps in some shape or form, but wasn’t that a bit overkill?
The trigger had been barely noticeable, and instead of the expected poisoned arrows from a wall, swinging axes, collapsing ground into spikes, or a boulder rolling down the hallway, the system put traps in here with crazy lethality. There was no way a normal traveler could have dodged that. If I wasn’t so adept at feeling vibrations in the ground, I’d be flatter than a pancake now, and deader too. It would appear that this maze wasn’t quite as boring as I’d initially thought.
I wondered why I’d been able to follow the other path to its termination point without triggering any traps on the way. Were there simply no traps? Were only some of the hallways trapped? Were there any hints about whether or not a hallway was trapped?
I waited quite a while for the trap to reset itself, but it never went back into the ceiling, making this hallway essentially barred. I, once again, went back to the crossroad. With no other choices left, I went straight ahead this time, leaving a fruit in my wake. Just like the other hallways, this one was completely featureless. I carefully inched forward, taking my time in order to be ready when another trap triggered. Eventually, I remembered that I could just climb the walls and continued my exploration on the ceiling. The trap I’d triggered earlier seemed to react to a weight passing over it, which hopefully meant that the mechanisms were all on the floor.
After a while, I came upon another split. This time my choices were to go either left or right and I once again went left first. I scrutinized the walls around the split, looking for any signs or hints, but found nothing. The fruit I pulled out of my inventory fell to the floor as I continued on my merry way down the hallway. About one minute into this one, I suddenly felt like the air was charged and I stopped. It was an odd feeling like electricity suffused the space before me.
I backed up a bit and shot a javelin forward, which passed through the area unhindered and eventually exploded further down when it hit a wall. I shot another one at the floor to see if I could trigger whatever it was by force, but aside from the explosion caused by me, nothing happened. I tried sending a few other spells down the hall or at the floor, such as a poison spear and several infused magical bolts. Eventually, I resorted to chucking a fruit, which finally triggered the trap for some reason.
I was blinded as a thick bolt of lightning struck the fruit, completely obliterating it. Holy shit, this dungeon wasn’t fucking about with its trap. So far I’d only seen two, and both of them looked quite lethal. I could have probably survived the lightning, but I wasn’t about to test that theory. I threw another fruit after a while and, seeing as this one wasn’t brutally electrocuted, I dared to continue.
After disabling two more traps, I once again hit a dead end… sort of. As I rounded a corner in the path, I was faced with a wall. But, this one wasn’t a boring flat surface like everything else in this damn dungeon. No, this wall had stuff carved into it. A picture! Probably. It obviously was only part of a whole, like a lone puzzle piece, it didn’t really make sense without seeing the rest of it.
The carving depicted a scaly thing, and that was all I could really glean from what little I could see. What was more interesting was the small system window that popped up as soon as I laid eyes on the wall.
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From which, formed the first Leviathans.
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The sentence was, similar to the picture, part of a whole and didn’t make any sense at all. I committed the passage to my memory and looked at a small pedestal that stood in front of the wall. A small object sat on top, beckoning me to collect it. I immediately jumped back and watched the thing with distrust.
The traps in this dungeon were deadly. Too deadly for my taste. And whatever this thing was, it most likely was hooked up to some kind of trap. I tried to think of a smart way to figure out what kind of trap it was, but eventually just resorted to throwing fruits at it to see what happened. I chucked a fruit which, thanks to my much-improved agility score, hit the pedestal on my first try, causing the thing on top to fall off the pedestal. I quickly pulled back a bit more and watched the area warily.
Eventually, it became clear that there was no trap here and I cautiously approached. The thing it turned out, was a scale. It was about the size of a human hand, which meant it had to have come from something decently big. There were no more floating system tooltips that conveniently described what this was, but it was obviously important, so I put it in my inventory.
And then, once again faced with the fact that this was a dead end anyway, I started backtracking.
