Chapter 3 Part 4: Exploring Part II
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Chapter 3 Part 4: Exploring Part II
It was after the second hour mark—Abigail said it out loud because she knew ignoring time would make the walk back feel like a betrayal later—that they hit their first dead end.
It wasn’t a wall in the corridor. The corridor ended in a door.
Abigail’s pace slowed as if she were approaching an animal that might bolt. She aimed her light at the seam and then at Ethan, as if to say, Of course it’s a room.
Ethan smiled faintly behind his ear protection, a small crack in his seriousness. “Go ahead.”
They opened it and stepped in.
This room was longer, more like ten by twenty. Still worked stone, still plain, still no furniture, no altar, no inscription. Just space.
And three slimes.
They were clustered near the far wall, not spread out like the earlier two, and for a second it was enough to make the room feel smaller. Not because three slimes were truly dangerous to them now, but because three targets meant three decisions, three angles, three chances to waste a shot if they rushed.
Abigail’s light snapped from one to the next, assessing color before the fight even began.
One was green. One was blue. The third was purple, deep enough that it looked almost black until the beam settled.
Abigail’s eyebrows rose. “Okay,” she said, and it wasn’t fear, just the sharp note of new data. “That one’s… not in my mental list.”
Ethan didn’t comment on the color. He was already moving his feet to give them both clean lines. Abigail did the same without being told.
They picked an order, adjusted their spacing, and did not let the slimes close.
Abigail took the purple slime first, not because it was more dangerous, but because she didn’t like unknowns on the field. Ethan took the green. The blue was last.
Three shots. Three cores shattered. Three brief bursts of blue motes.
Then silence again.
They took the time in the room to do what a dead end forced them to do anyway: stop, breathe, and make sure the notes lined up. Abigail paced the room’s perimeter while Ethan bagged the manacite beads, and she wrote down the room’s dimensions with the kind of annoyed satisfaction someone got from proving a rule existed.
When they stepped back into the corridor, the dungeon was the same as it had been before they opened the door. No tracks. No residue. Nothing to suggest the slimes had ever been there except their own bags of manacite and the memory of gunshots.
They retraced their steps.
Not all the way back to the entrance chamber—just back to the last junction where they’d had more than one unexplored option. Their marks on the walls made it possible without guessing, even when the corridors tried to blur into each other. Abigail checked her notebook twice, once at the midpoint and once when they reached the junction, and when the arrows on the stone matched her notes she let out a short breath that sounded like relief only because it had been withheld.
“Okay,” she said. “Next one.”
Ethan looked at the available paths the way he looked at trails in the woods: not mystical, not ominous, just choices with consequences. They took the next route clockwise from the one they’d already charted, staying consistent because consistency was the only thing that turned a maze into a map.
The slimes didn’t thin out. If anything, the new branch felt slightly more populated, but not in a way that could be called a trend. Two singles showed up within the span of one corridor run, then nothing for a long stretch, then another door.
Abigail’s head turned toward it before she was even fully stopped.
Ethan saw it and sighed lightly. “You’re going to open every one.”
“If it’s here, it’s here,” she said. “And if we ignore it, we’re pretending it isn’t.”
The room beyond this door was small, another ten-by-ten, and empty.
Abigail still paced it. Still measured. Still took pictures. She didn’t get to be vindicated by a slime cluster every time, and the fact that the room was empty didn’t make it less important to her. If anything, it made it worse. An empty room was the dungeon refusing to reward curiosity with immediate payoff.
They moved on.
After that, Ethan stopped once and pulled a different box of shells out of his pack.
Abigail noticed immediately. “Switching?”
“Just to compare,” he said, not making it bigger than it was. He held up the buckshot, then glanced down the corridor where their lights ended. “Cleaner. But we have to be more deliberate. See what it feels like.”
Abigail nodded. “Do it on singles.”
They did.
The next slime was brown, and Ethan took his time with it. He didn’t slow because he was scared of the shot. He slowed because buckshot demanded intent. A narrower margin meant you couldn’t be lazy, and laziness was what the dungeon was quietly trying to coax out of them with repetition.
The shot hit true. The slime’s core shattered cleanly. The kill felt different—not more satisfying, just more controlled.
Abigail wrote a note without looking up. “One shot,” she said. “More precision.”
“And less forgiveness,” Ethan replied.
They kept the buckshot in rotation for a while, enough to build a comparison in their bodies rather than in theory. It didn’t change how often slimes appeared. It didn’t change how much attention they had to spend. It changed what happened inside that attention: more aiming, less reliance on spread.
The dungeon did not care.
By the time Abigail said, “Two hours,” again—this time with the weight of someone thinking about the return walk—they were far enough in that turning around felt like a separate task rather than an undo button. Their notes were longer now. Their bags held more manacite. Their shoulders felt the weight of packs and the constant pressure of helmet straps.
They came to another door.
The room beyond it was small, roughly ten meters on a side, with four slimes occupying the far half of the floor. Each reacted to the sudden light in its own slow way, bodies deforming as they began to move.
Abigail swept her beam across the room and registered four slimes by color: green, blue, brown, and orange.
“Same split,” Ethan said quietly.
They stepped just far enough inside to clear the doorway and both fired. The green slime ruptured immediately, its core shattering as blue motes dispersed and faded. At the same moment, Abigail’s pellets tore through the blue slime, deforming its body without striking the core, and it continued to move.
The brown and orange slimes kept advancing as the blue recoiled and flowed back into shape.
Abigail fired again, correcting her aim, and the blue slime shattered into blue motes as its core broke apart. At the same time, Ethan fired at the brown slime, tearing through its mass without finishing it.
Ethan fired again, his follow-up shot striking the brown slime’s core and breaking it apart into motes of blue. While Abigail shifted and fired once at the orange slime. The shot struck and deformed it, tearing away part of its mass, but it held together and continued forward.
Its surface drew inward as it closed the distance, tension building across its translucent body.
A thin lance of fire snapped forward without warning. Heat washed across Abigail’s face as the projectile scorched the stone a short distance to her left, leaving a blackened streak before dissipating.
Abigail laughed, sharp and startled. “Okay—so they can do that.”
They fired together. The orange slime burst apart under the combined shots, its core shattering as blue motes briefly washed through the room and faded.
The room settled back into stillness.
Ethan scanned the space, then the doorway, then the corridor beyond before lowering his shotgun. “We’re still standing,” he said.
Abigail lifted her phone and took a picture of the scorched stone while the mark was still fresh, while Ethan crouched to collect the drops.
He paused. “Abby.”
Abigail turned from the wall and stepped closer, angling her light down. Near where the blue slime had fallen sat the familiar pinpoint of manacite—and beside it, a small translucent pouch, gelatinous and intact, faintly tinted blue.
She crouched immediately, fatigue forgotten. “That’s not manacite,” she said. “That’s something else.”
Ethan bagged both items and stood. Abigail straightened, already working through the implications.
“That’s a new drop,” she said. “And it came from a normal slime.”
Ethan checked his watch. “Two and a half hours.”
Abigail glanced once more at the scorched mark, then down the corridor beyond the door. “Another thirty minutes,” she said. “That will make it three hours in, and since we know the way back, we’ll cover it faster than that. We backtracked after every dead end, so we’re closer than it feels.”
He considered that, then nodded. “Okay, thirty minutes.”
Abigail lifted her light and stepped forward.
The dungeon offered no response.
