Aster Loka
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Chapter 67
🕑 Added 2022-02-01 19:16:06 +0000 UTC"So I have two things on our to-do list next while we wait for my interview," Levi told Gordon as they headed out of the empty Ice dungeon. "I got a new treasure map, and it’s local, so we should do that right away in case anyone else is going for it. I also want to visit a local Destruction dungeon to check out the Rust Scarab stats. Though that one could wait a bit. It might be better to grab something from this dungeon first since there'll always be more Destruction dungeons."
"Anything big like the centipedes, or just a lot more little things?" Gordon eyed his car. "It's getting tricky to fit everyone as it is."
Levi paused to think. “I’m not entirely certain. I’ve never been in a Dark dungeon personally, they’re one of those whose frustrations outweighed their usefulness. Control dungeons are infuriating, but their rewards are incredibly powerful and valuable. Dark dungeons… from what I’ve heard, they’re just plain annoying without offering much in return.”
Dark power stones and tokens could still be used in crafting, but tended to add effects that could better be described as curses instead of any benefit. An armor that emitted darkness sounded cool in theory, but in practice it made it hard to see anything and made you look very out of place wherever you went. Dark aspect attacks didn't add much in the way of benefit either. A Dark Slash left a lingering line of damage behind, but it was all too easy to end up trapped by your own attacks and creating obstacles to your own progress, or for allies to stumble upon them.
Unless you were fighting on your own and entirely surrounded, Dark tended to be more trouble than it was worth. There had to be other ways to make Dark useful, no power was universally useless, but Levi didn't know what they were. Levi knew a few people who specialized in Dark, making use of the few Dark objects that had survived, but their tactics were very different from his own and he'd never studied them deeply.
“Dark dungeons are one of the few to break the universal lighting standards across dungeons, with areas of deep shadow that make it all but impossible to see. Fortunately, I have a way to deal with that problem. Just stick close to me and you’ll be fine.”
The magnifying-glass-esque Beast lens he’d rigged together would show any creature regardless of how it was obscured. And since they were between dungeons at the moment, he could probably fix up some kind of headband/eye-patch rig to hold it in place and free up his hands. The biggest holdup would be that the input part of the wand making up the handle would need to remain in contact with his skin, but with creative application of force…
"What are you doing?" Gordon asked, as Levi carefully bent the handle of his beast glass against the wall of the dungeon.
"I need to be able to see things, and don't want to go around holding this in front of my face the whole time." He retrieved one of his ruined pairs of jeans from the bag.
"Why did you save that?" Gordon asked.
"You never throw out anything that could be useful." Levi sliced a strip from the leg long enough for his purpose, tied the handle of the lens to it, then bent the handle more sharply back so it wouldn't slip out. Once satisfied, he slipped it around his head, but it was still a bit loose and didn't stay in place. He added another knot to the back, snugging it down.
"You look ridiculous."
"I'll take alive over looks any day." The lens was too heavy for the fabric to hold it quite firmly enough, and it kept slipping down Levi's cheek. He continued making small adjustments until it stayed mostly in the right place. He ran and jumped, but the movements kept jostling it out of place.
He added a second strip of fabric, holding it down in place, and that worked better. It was an unwieldy sort of construction, not one that he would trust to stand up to direct conflict, but at least now he could run and jump and swing his sword without losing his ability to see enemies.
"Good enough."
"Please tell me you'll take it off before we go back into the city."
"Sometimes it's better to go all in on looking ridiculous. If you pretend to be normal, people will look at you strange. If you look insane, they'll look the other way and avoid you."
"I feel like I should try to argue against that."
"Maybe you should. But we're traveling with a menagerie of dungeon creatures. Anyone looking at us is going to get an eyeful whether we act the part or not."
But Levi did remove the makeshift helmet before they exited the dungeon.
"Does the location have anything to do with what sort of dungeon it is?" Gordon asked. “Or is it completely random?”
"We've never found a correlation. There’s nothing particularly destructive about the usual places, or anything particularly cold about this spot."
Gordon glanced back over his shoulder at the drifting wisp of barely-visible frost in the air, denoting the Ice dungeon’s entrance. "Where do dungeons come from in the first place?"
"No one knows."
"How long have they been around?"
"A few months, by our best guesses. There may have been a few around before then, but--"
"The Bermuda triangle? Is that a dungeon?"
Levi shrugged. "It might be. I'm not the person to ask."
"Why now?"
"No one knows. But the distribution of leveled dungeons remains consistent with the hypothesis that they appeared around the start of this year at the earliest."
"Couldn't they have been hiding for centuries without being noticed?"
"No. Some, those out in the middle of nowhere, you could make that argument. But the ones appearing in the middle of a street, or inside a building? No one could possibly have overlooked those forever. If people regularly disappeared from a place, it would gain a reputation very quickly, and we'd have heard about it. Something changed in the past year to make these dungeon entrances show up. And the demon portals after."
"Like what?"
Levi shrugged. "No one knows. Perhaps one of our space probes or transmissions reached an alien civilization with portal abilities, and they decided to come pick up a new territory. Perhaps there've always been hundreds of dungeon rifts hanging out in space and we just happened to run into a swarm that got caught in the planet’s gravity. Perhaps it was deific interference, or a cult actually managed to summon something they didn't know how to put back. There are as many theories as there are people making things up, and I don't know that any of them are close to the mark."
"So the world may be ending due to any number of factors, but we don’t know what they are?”
"We can figure out how and why after we survive it."
"Don't you think the how and why may be important for figuring out how to survive?"
"Could be. Not my department. I slice demons and shield civilians. I'm not the sort to sift through theories to find answers to big metaphysical questions. Give me a powerset to play with, and I'll find the best way to make it work for me. But questions of aliens or gods? Above my pay grade."
