Chapter 20: Hunger and Instinct
The stairs to the thirteenth floor were shorter, ending not in another cavern or crypt, but in a vast, open space that defied the dungeon's logic. A false sky of shimmering, purplish crystal stretched high above, casting a gloomy twilight over a landscape of jagged rock spires and deep, shadowed ravines. A thin, constant wind whistled through the stone teeth, carrying a dry, metallic scent.
It was a hunter's floor. Open sight lines, sudden drop-offs, and plenty of high perches.
They didn't have to wait long.
The first sign was a shadow blotting out the faint crystal-light from above. Then a second. A shrill, piercing cry echoed, answered by another from a different spire.
Harpies.
Three of them descended on ragged, leathery wings. They were humanoid from the waist up, with sharp, predatory features and wild, matted hair. Their lower halves were the taloned legs of birds of prey. In their clawed hands, they clutched crude spears of bone and sharpened stone.
Before Azazel could settle into a stance, movement flickered at the base of the nearest rock spire. A dozen small, fluffy shapes hopped into view.
Elemental Rabbits.
They were the size of house cats, with fur in impossible colors: shifting cobalt blue, smoldering ember-orange, mossy green. Their eyes glowed with a gentle, magical light. They twitched their noses, looking around with an air of innocent curiosity.
"Oh!" Reginleif breathed, a genuine smile touching her lips for the first time in days. She lowered her dagger slightly. "The rabbits… they're so cute."
Azazel's response was instant and devoid of all sentiment. His kukri flashed out in a horizontal arc as he took a single, decisive step forward.
Thwick. Thwick-thwick.
Three rabbit heads, one blue, one orange, one green, tumbled to the rocky ground. Their bodies took another hop before collapsing. The air filled with a brief, sharp scent—ozone, ash, and crushed pine—before fading.
Reginleif flinched as if struck. "Azazel! What the hell?"
He didn't look at her. His eyes were on the remaining rabbits, whose adorable twitching had stopped. Their glowing eyes fixed on him, and the gentle light hardened into something malevolent. The fluffy fur on their backs stood on end, crackling with elemental energy.
"Cute," Azazel spat, shifting his weight as the harpies began their shrieking dive. "And super fucking dangerous. Read the room, Reginleif!"
The remaining nine rabbits moved. They didn't scatter. They attacked. The blue ones opened their mouths, and needles of solidified ice shot forth with the force of crossbow bolts. The orange ones exhaled, and tiny, condensed fireballs streaked through the air. The green ones stamped their feet, and thorny vines erupted from the bare stone, lashing towards Azazel's legs.
He was already moving, a blur of controlled evasion. He ducked under a ice needle, felt the heat of a fireball singe his hair as he twisted past. A vine wrapped around his ankle; he severed it with a downward chop and kept going, closing the distance with the cluster. His kukri was a butcher's tool—efficient, brutal, and final. He didn't fight the rabbits; he eradicated them. A diagonal slash bisected a fire-rabbit, its body bursting into a harmless puff of smoke and embers. A quick reverse grip stab put down an ice-rabbit mid-leap.
He was a storm of pragmatic violence against the tide of deceptive fluff and elemental spit.
Above, the harpies saw their opening. With shrieks of triumph, they folded their wings and dove, spears aimed at the distracted Azazel's back.
They forgot about Reginleif.
The moment of shocked disappointment on her face was gone, burned away by cold fury—at herself for the lapse, and at the situation. As the lead harpy entered her range, she didn't throw a dagger. She punched the air.
A focused Wind Fist, a compact bullet of compressed air, shot upward. It didn't hit the harpy's body. It hit the base of its wing mid-downstroke. There was a sickening crack of bone and membrane. The harpy screamed, its dive spiraling into an uncontrolled crash into a spire.
The second harpy pulled up, screeching in alarm. Reginleif was already a step ahead. She leapt onto a low rock, pushed off, and used a controlled gust to alter her trajectory in mid-air, meeting the harpy's climb. Her daggers were a silver scissor-snap around its throat. She landed lightly as it thudded to the ground behind her.
The third harpy, wiser, banked hard and rose out of reach, pelting them with a volley of sharpened bone fragments from a distance.
Azazel stomped the last green rabbit into a pulp of vines and gore. He looked up, gauging the harpy's height. Too high for a throw, too erratic for a shadow bind.
"Annoying," he grunted.
Reginleif wiped harpy blood from her cheek. "My turn."
She sheathed her daggers, planted her feet wide, and raised both hands toward the circling creature. She took a deep, slow breath, her focus absolute. The whistling wind in the chasms stilled, as if drawn into her. The air around her hands visibly warped.
The harpy sensed the building power and tried to flee, beating its wings frantically.
It was too late.
"Piercing Feather: Storm Needle."
It wasn't a single projectile. It was a volley. Dozens of hair-thin strands of hyper-compressed wind erupted from her fingertips with a sound like tearing silk. They created a widening cone of certain death. The harpy had nowhere to go. The needles shredded its wings, peppered its body, and found its heart and skull multiple times over. It dropped from the false sky like a ragged sack of meat and feathers.
Silence returned to the rocky spires, broken only by the faint, dying crackle of elemental energy from the rabbit corpses.
Azazel cleaned his kukri on the fur of a blue rabbit, his expression unreadable. Reginleif retrieved her daggers, her movements stiff. She avoided looking at the cute, dismembered bodies.
"Never assume," Azazel said finally, his voice a low gravel. "The dungeon doesn't do 'cute.' It does 'deadly.' Sometimes with a fluffy coating."
Reginleif gave a tight, single nod. No argument. The lesson was written in rabbit blood and harpy feathers.
Without another word, they moved through the eerie rock forest, their senses stretched taut. The thirteenth floor had introduced its rule: deception is a weapon. They found the descending stairs tucked behind a waterfall of glowing, harmless lichen at the far end of the chasm.
The fourteenth floor awaited below, a deeper darkness swallowing the scant light from above. They exchanged a glance—a silent acknowledgment of the reset vigilance—and began their descent.
____
The fourteenth floor was a claustrophobic maze of intersecting tunnels and low-ceilinged caverns, the air thick with the scent of damp fur and ozone. It was a floor of skittering hordes.
The first wave was a pack of Blue Dire Wolves, their frost-tinged fur bristling, fangs dripping with a cold mist. They attacked with a pack hunter's intelligence, trying to flank and separate. Azazel and Reginleif fought back-to-back, a brutal study in contrasting styles. His movements were economical, every slash of his kukri meant to cripple or kill, using the wolves' own momentum against them. Hers was a whirlwind of evasive grace and sudden, lethal precision, her daggers finding throats and eyes between the lunges.
No sooner had the last wolf fallen with a frozen whimper than a new threat emerged from side tunnels. More Elemental Rabbits, these ones with crackling yellow fur that sparked with static electricity. They attacked not with projectiles, but by turning the floor into a hazardous field of jumping electrical arcs.
The fight was a grueling, long battle of attrition. They couldn't stand still. Azazel used You Shadow to trip and tangle, creating openings for Reginleif to dart in and eliminate the sparking pests with well-thrown daggers or pinpoint Piercing Feathers. It was exhausting, energy-draining work, leaving them singed, panting, and low on stamina.
They pushed on, clearing the immediate area before a new sound reached them—a chorus of chittering clicks and the scrape of tools on stone. Kobolds. A warren of them, small, reptilian humanoids wielding rusted picks and jagged knives, swarmed from a dug-out nest. The fight was less about skill and more about relentless, messy pressure. It was a slog, a brutal exercise in stamina management against numerous, weak, but frenzied foes.
By the time the last kobold fled squealing into the dark, the duo was running on fumes. They needed to stop.
"We clear a corner and camp," Azazel stated, his voice rough. "No arguments."
For the next hour, they methodically swept a branching network of three connected caverns, dispatching a few stray rabbits and a lone, wounded wolf. It was secure. As secure as anything in a living dungeon could be.
In the smallest, most defensible cavern, Azazel finally shrugged off his pack. Without ceremony, he pulled out the carcasses of several elemental rabbits.
Reginleif stared. "Are we really going to eat that?"
Azazel paused, skinning knife in hand, and looked at her as if she'd asked if the sky was up. "What kind of question is that? It's meat. Fresh kill. It'll taste great. Better than hardtack."
He worked with a practiced, unsettling efficiency. The colorful fur came away, revealing lean, strangely marbled meat that shimmered faintly with residual energy. He built a small, contained fire from a resinous dungeon fungus he'd pocketed, skewered the meat, and began to cook it. The smell that rose was not unpleasant—a gamey scent overlaid with hints of whatever element the rabbit had wielded: a whisper of ozone, a faint herbal tang.
Reginleif watched, her hunger warring with her revulsion.
"Why do you know how to do things like this?"
Azazel didn't look up, rotating the skewer. "When it comes to surviving outdoors, I excel at it."
Outdoors, he thought, the memory a cold stone in his gut. What am I talking about? In broken buildings. Like a homeless man. I had to figure it out. The recollection was a blurred montage of urban decay—a shelled-out apartment in a city whose name he'd forced himself to forget. The gnawing emptiness that wasn't just hunger but the void left by a collapsed world. He remembered trapping a scrawny pigeon in a rubble-strewn lot, the struggle to kill it, pluck it, cook it over a can of burning trash. The taste of desperation and feathers.
There were other things. Things you don't talk about. Things that look back at you from the puddle before you eat them. He pushed the memory down, deep. It had no place here.
His focus returned to the rabbit. How many kinds of monster meat are even edible here? This was a new equation. But the principle was the same: protein was protein. Hunger was the ultimate sauce.
He handed Reginleif a skewer of well-cooked, glistening meat. She hesitated, then took it, biting into it with the cautious determination of someone taking medicine. Her eyes widened slightly. It was… fine. Gamey, a bit tough, but warm and filling. The strange elemental aftertaste was faint, more a tingle on the tongue than a flavor.
They ate in silence, the simple act of consuming their foes a quiet victory in itself. The food settled in their stomachs, a solid warmth pushing back the dungeon's pervasive chill and fatigue.
After eating, they fell into the routine of rest. Checking gear, tightening straps, sharpening blades. The mundane tasks were a ritual, a way to reclaim a sliver of control in the uncontrolled dark.
With equipment tended to and bodies reluctantly rested, they packed up the remains of their camp. The fire was smothered, the evidence of their stay erased. They stood before the dark maw of a descending tunnel, the only exit from the cleared caverns.
The fifteenth floor awaited, a deeper unknown. Azazel glanced at Reginleif, gave a single, curt nod, and led the way down.