Chapter 17: Fused Threat
After a quick rest, the ache of the tenth floor still clinging to their muscles, Azazel and Reginleif descended into the eleventh. The oppressive sorrow of the knight's chamber was gone, replaced by a different, almost sterile atmosphere. The floor was a network of wide, smooth corridors and square, empty rooms hewn from grey stone. It felt less like a natural dungeon and more like... a barracks.
They rounded a corner into one such room and stopped. Two monsters stood in the center.
The first was a Walking Armor—a suit of empty, dented plate mail standing upright, a chipped longsword gripped in its gauntlets. It turned its helmeted head toward them with a hollow, metallic groan.
The second was a Great Slime. It was a massive, quivering mass of translucent blue jelly, easily the size of a horse, that pulsed with a slow, gelatinous rhythm. A single, large core glowed deep within its center.
Azazel stared. He blinked. A slow, incredulous smirk spread across his face. "Is this dungeon fucking with us? Before, a boss fight to the death with tragic knights. Now it's sending... walking laundry and a giant blue booger? What is this, some kind of joke?"
Reginleif kept her eyes on the monsters, daggers already in hand. "It doesn't matter, Azazel. We need to keep our guard up. This is a dungeon. Expect the unexpected."
Yeah, she's right, Azazel thought, his smirk fading as he drew his kukri. Expect the unexpected. But still... this is a joke, right?
"Ya, I get it, Reginleif," he said, settling into a fighting stance.
The fight began predictably enough. The Walking Armor was slow but sturdy, its sword strokes powerful but telegraphed. Azazel danced around it, his kukri scraping against steel, looking for a weak spot in the joints. Reginleif took on the Slime. It was slow, but its jelly body absorbed her initial slashes, the wounds closing almost instantly. She had to dodge its attempts to engulf her, which came in sudden, lurching surges.
They whittled them down. Azazel finally wrenched the Armor's helmet off with a tendril of shadow and drove his kukri into the empty space within, causing the whole suit to clatter to the ground in a heap. Reginleif had managed to pierce the Slime's core with a well-aimed Piercing Feather, making it shudder violently and shrink, its blue hue darkening with pain.
It was on the verge of dissolution. Then, in a desperate, shocking move, the wounded Great Slime gave a final, violent heave. Instead of attacking, it launched itself through the air, not at the adventurers, but at the pile of disassembled armor.
"Oh shit," Azazel breathed, taking a step back. "That doesn't look good."
The blue jelly engulfed the metal plates with a wet, sucking sound. It didn't just coat the armor—it infused it, squeezing into every joint, every crevice, filling the hollow suit. The metal plates began to rise, pulled together by the slime's body acting as a terrible, living glue. The glowing core settled where the heart would be, visible now through the helmet's visor like a sinister blue eye. In its fist, the slime-reinforced gauntlet gripped the sword, the blade now dripping with corrosive blue gel.
"Wait," Reginleif whispered, her eyes wide with dawning horror. "Where have I read about this before..."
"The Bestiary," Azazel said, his voice tight. "The slime is using the armor as a survival mechanism. It's devouring the structure to protect its core. They're fusing. The cores are becoming one."
"All of that is true," Reginleif said, her knuckles white on her daggers. "But what about the part where it gets stronger?"
Azazel watched as the Fused Armor-Slime Abomination stood to its full, daunting height, blue jelly oozing from its seams, its movements no longer clunky but eerily fluid and strong. "We find out," he said grimly, "when we fight it."
Reginleif thought, Of course he'd say that.
She didn't wait. She became a blur of motion, closing the distance in a heartbeat. She didn't strike with a blade. Instead, she planted her feet, drew in a deep breath, and thrust both palms forward. A concussive blast of wind erupted point-blank into the creature's chest—a Wind Pressure attack. The force was immense, slamming the fused monster back with a metallic crash against the stone wall, stunning it momentarily.
Seizing the opening, she flicked both wrists. "Piercing Feather!" Multiple feathers of condensed wind shot from her daggers, aimed directly at the glowing core in its chest. They struck with a sound like ringing steel. The monster staggered, but the feathers merely sank partway into the viscous, jelly-reinforced metal around the core before dissipating. It had tanked the attack.
A deep, gurgling roar emanated from its helmet. It pushed off the wall, ignoring the shallow punctures, and charged her, its gel-dripping sword raised for a crushing blow. She was too close to dodge fully.
Azazel was there. He crossed the room, his kukri meeting the falling sword in a shower of sparks and sizzling blue slime. The force was tremendous, vibrating up his arm. "You Shadow!" he growled. The monster's own shadow, cast by the dungeon's faint light, erupted and coiled around its legs. It stumbled, its charge broken.
For good measure, and to create space, Azazel slammed his free hand—still tender from the Black Ice backlash—against the floor. A jagged path of pitch-black ice shot across the stone, not to freeze the monster, but to form a slick, freezing barrier between it and Reginleif. "Back!" he yelled.
He moved aside. Reginleif hadn't been retreating. She had been charging. While he fought, she had been drawing in the air of the room, compressing it around her in a visible, swirling vortex that pulled at their clothes and made their ears pop. The air grew thin, hard to breathe.
Her eyes were locked on the struggling monster. She held a single dagger pointed forward, around which the compressed wind whirled with a high-pitched, screaming intensity.
"(Ex) Piercing Feather Loom."
It wasn't a shot. It was a release. A single, foot-long shard of hyper-compressed air, visible as a rippling distortion, lanced across the room. It made no sound until it hit, because it consumed all sound in its path.
It struck the Fused Abomination's chest. There was no clang, no squelch. There was a pulse of silent force, followed by a deafening CRACK-BOOM as the pressure destabilized.
The creature didn't just fall apart. The section of its torso containing the core obliterated. The armor plates blasted outward, some embedding themselves in the walls. The blue slime, severed from its core, instantly liquefied into a harmless, spreading puddle. The fused core, a lump of metal shot through with crystalline blue slag, clattered across the floor and rolled to a stop at Azazel's foot.
The ringing in their ears slowly subsided. Azazel looked down, then picked up the still-warm, fused core. It was ugly, complex, and hummed with a residual, unstable energy. "Well," he said, hefting it. "This thing is cool looking."
Reginleif was bent over, hands on her knees, breathing in deep, ragged gulps of the thin air. She looked up at him, her face pale from exertion. "Are you serious right now?"
"What?" Azazel said, genuinely confused, turning the core over in his hands.
She just shook her head, too tired to explain.
With the immediate threat gone, they took stock. Their potions were low. Azazel's rations were nearly gone, and his body ached from channeling the deep cold again. Reginleif was clearly drained from her technique. The dungeon stretched on, but their supplies did not.
"We're running on fumes," Azazel stated, the adrenaline fading to reveal a deep weariness. "If the twelfth floor has anything worse than that," he gestured to the scattered, steaming remains, "we're in trouble."
Reginleif nodded, sheathing her daggers with a final, tired sigh. "The dungeon isn't a race. It's a marathon. We need to resupply."
The decision was unanimous and pragmatic. They would go back. The eleventh floor had been pushed, a new limit tested. They turned their backs on the path leading deeper down and began the long trek back up through the conquered floors, toward sunlight, solid food, and a merchant who might give them a few coins for a weird, fused core and a very ugly warhammer.
---
Azazel and Reginleif went straight to the guild, the weight of the dungeon still clinging to their clothes and the fused core a heavy lump in Azazel's pouch. The familiar dog-eared receptionist looked up from her ledger, her cheerful smile faltering as she took in their dust-stained, weary appearance.
"Back so soon? And from the deeper floors, by the look of you," she noted.
"We hit a wall," Azazel said, his voice flat with fatigue. He didn't bother with pleasantries. He reached into his pouch and placed the fused monster core on the polished wooden counter with a solid thunk.
The receptionist's eyes widened. She leaned in, peering at the unnatural amalgamation of crystallized slime essence and corroded metal. "A fusion core. This is… uncommon for the middle floors. How did you get this? Did you two fight off a fusion event?"
"Yeah," Azazel confirmed. "Great Slime and a Walking Armor. They got desperate."
The receptionist looked from the core to Azazel, then to Reginleif, her professional demeanor tinged with new respect and a flicker of concern. "What are you going to do with it?"
Azazel gave her a look that said the question was stupid. "What do you think? I'm going to sell it to you."
"Right, of course. Let me appraise it." She took the core carefully in gloved hands, placing it under a brass-hooded device with several glowing lenses. She murmured incantations, and the core hummed in response, emitting a faint, dual-tone light. The process took several minutes. Reginleif stood silently beside Azazel, arms crossed, while he leaned on the counter, radiating impatience.
Finally, the receptionist straightened up. "Stable, but volatile. The fusion is permanent and the mana signature is conflictual, which limits its use in refined enchantment. However, for raw power conduits or certain destructive alchemical reagents…" She tapped a small brass abacus. "The guild can offer twenty gold for it."
Azazel did the mental math. It was a small fortune for a single drop. More than enough to restock for weeks. "Deal."
As she counted out the heavy gold coins, Azazel remembered the other item. He pulled the tarnished silver adventurer's tag from another pocket and placed it on the counter beside the coins.
"We also found this. On the tenth floor."
The receptionist froze, her hand hovering over the gold. She picked up the tag, her fingers tracing the engraved name. Her face paled. "Alistair of the Dawn's Watch… This adventurer was from the eastern kingdom. He was reported missing… five years ago. A Silver-rank solo operative, considered very capable for his rank. His last known whereabouts were near a border village a hundred miles from here." She looked up, her eyes sharp with confusion and disbelief. "But you said you found this in the dungeon?"
Azazel rephrased, his tone deliberate. "Yes. On the boss of the tenth floor. The boss that came back."
The guild girl's professional composure cracked. "No. That's impossible. Once a floor guardian is defeated, it is gone. That is how every dungeon core operates. There are… special-type dungeons with different rules, rumored. But the Fresh Tears Dungeon is classified as a normal-type. It has been for a century of records."
Here we go, Azazel thought, filing away the crucial information. Dungeons have types. Special and Normal. At least they can identify them.
"What you said is true," Azazel conceded, leaning forward. "For a normal dungeon. But there is another way a guardian could return."
Reginleif, who had been listening quietly, shifted her weight, her full attention on him now.
The receptionist, looking thoroughly unsettled, pulled out a fresh report sheet and began writing. "How?"
"Simple," Azazel said, laying out his theory. "He didn't 'come back.' He became the boss. He was an adventurer who died on the tenth floor. If you die on a floor with a strong enough will—or a strong enough curse—and the dungeon's mana is right… you don't just become a random Hollow. You can become the new floor guardian. An undead replacement. That's my theory."
The guild girl stared at him, her pen still. The logic was horrifying, but it fit the facts far better than a broken universal rule. She slowly wrote it down. "I… see. Thank you for your report. This will be forwarded to the research division. I'll be taking the silver guild tag into our records now, for closure."
"Fine," Azazel said, scooping up the twenty gold coins. They vanished into the violet shimmer of his cube.
---
Outside, the late afternoon sun felt alien after the dungeon's eternal twilight. As they walked toward the blacksmith's quarter, Reginleif broke the silence.
"So the boss on the tenth floor… he was a person. A Silver-rank. Before he became… that."
"Yeah," Azazel said, his gaze on the cobblestones. His last whereabouts were at a village. How did he end up in the dungeon, specifically on the tenth floor? The question itched at him. A good, thorough person might investigate. Trace his steps. Find out what happened in that village five years ago.
But what good will that do me? he thought, the cynicism rising like a familiar shield. I don't know how long that dude has been down there. I don't know what he did or what was done to him. Playing detective for a ghost gets you killed. He felt the weight of the gold in his metaphysical storage. We got paid. We got stronger. That's the transaction.
I should let this go. Accept that he died a shitty death in a dark place. The only reason I'd ever deal with this is if someone tries to fuck with me because of that guy. But for now… he's just a memory. A warning.
They entered the blacksmith's shop, the air thick with heat and the ringing of hammers. Azazel summoned the ugly warhammer and dropped it on the counter with a dismissive clang.
The burly smith eyed it, then them. "Not your style?"
"We'll take whatever you can give us for scrap," Azazel said.
After a brief, gruff negotiation, they walked out with a handful of extra silver coins. The hammer was someone else's problem now.
Finally, they returned to the inn. The familiar room felt like a sanctuary. The silence between them was comfortable, worn smooth by shared exhaustion and unspoken understanding.
Azazel sank onto his bed, the events of the deep floors replaying in his mind—the sorrowful knight, the desperate fusion, the chilling revelation of his own Black Ice. Reginleif methodically began cleaning and sharpening her daggers, the rhythmic scrape of stone on metal a calming sound.
Tomorrow was a blank page. Maybe a simple, normal quest on the surface. Bounty on some local pests. Something straightforward.
Or maybe, after a good night's sleep and a full resupply, they'd look at that dark dungeon entrance again. The eleventh floor was cleared. The twelfth awaited.
For now, there was only the profound luxury of rest.
End of Chapter