The first thing the heroes encountered on this floor was silence. Absolute, palpable silence. Not like the white room—there was emptiness there. Here was... death. The death of sound, the death of movement, the death of life itself.
The hero stepped inside, and cold hit him in the face. Not the usual dungeon cold. A cosmic cold. The kind that froze not the body, but the soul.
They stood in a huge circular hall. The floor was black marble, polished to a mirror shine. The walls soared upward, disappearing into the darkness. And above them...
A dome.
A glass dome through which space was visible. But not the space seen from Earth—bright, full of stars. This was dead. Black. The stars were dim dots, barely discernible in the endless darkness. Some were replaced by black holes—invisible chasms that distorted the space around them.
Telescopes lined the hall. Dozens of them—from small ones on tripods to enormous ones the size of a tower. All pointed at different parts of the sky. Next to each were star charts, but all the stars were crossed out. With red lines. Like names on a list of the dead.
"What the..." Medusa began, but her voice was too loud in the silence. She fell silent.
The hero looked around. Figures sat near some of the telescopes. Motionless. He approached the nearest one.
A dead body. Dried, mummified. It sat on a chair, staring into the eyepiece of the telescope. The eyes were burned out—empty sockets from which black marks stretched, like frozen tears. The mouth was open in a silent scream.
"Astronomer," Dolor whispered. "Looked too long."
The hero looked around. There were many such bodies. Dozens. Some were sitting, some were lying on the floor. All were looking at telescopes. All with burned-out eyes.
Medusa approached the map on the wall. A huge map of the starry sky. Every star was marked, named, numbered. And every one was crossed out.
"All dead," she read the inscription at the bottom of the map. "'Catalog of Extinct Stars. Last update: the end of time.'"
The cold intensified. The hero felt the temperature drop. His breath turned to steam. His fingers began to go numb.
"We need to find a way out," he said. "Quickly. We can't stay here long."
But there was no way out. Only the dome overhead, the telescopes, and the dead bodies.
The hero approached one of the telescopes. A small one, on a tripod. Next to him lay a plaque: "Star HD 140283. One of the oldest. Faded 2.3 billion years ago."
He leaned over and looked through the eyepiece.
A flash of light.
The hero was no longer in the observatory. He was... in space. Floating in the void, weightless, freezing. A star hung before him.
An old one. A red giant, bloated, dying. Its light was dim, flickering. Its surface pulsated like a heart in agony.
And the hero felt it.
Pain. Unbearable, cosmic pain. The star's core was shrinking, collapsing under its own weight. The outer layers were tearing away, flying into the void. The star was dying—slowly, painfully, over millions of years.
Loneliness. Absolute loneliness. All the other stars around it had long since faded. It was the last one in its galaxy. Dying in the darkness, unseen, unmourned.
Cold. So cold that matter froze, atoms stopped moving. Death by entropy.
The hero screamed, but there was no sound. There was no sound in space. Only pain, loneliness, cold.
The star flared one last time—weakly, pitifully—and went out.
Darkness.
The hero woke up on the observatory floor. His body was shaking, his heart pounding. He gasped for icy air.
Medusa leaned over him.
"You fell! What happened?"
The hero couldn't answer. The memory of the star's death burned in his consciousness. He felt its pain, its loneliness. Millions of years of agony, compressed into a single instant.
"Don't look," he finally croaked. "Don't look through the telescopes." But Medusa had already moved away. She was drawn to another telescope. A larger one, aimed at a different part of the sky.
"Medusa, no!" the hero cried, trying to rise.
She leaned toward the eyepiece.
Medusa saw a galaxy.
Spiraling, beautiful, billions of stars orbiting the center. But at the center was no star. A black hole. Supermassive, invisible, but its presence distorted everything around it.
And it was consuming the galaxy.
Medusa watched as star after star was sucked into the hole. As their light stretched, reddened, vanished. As entire solar systems were torn apart by tidal forces. Planets, moons, asteroids—all transformed into spaghettification of matter, sucked into the abyss.
Billions of lives. Perhaps. Civilizations, cultures, histories—all erased. Consumed. Vanished beyond the event horizon, where time stands still and space collapses.
And worst of all—indifference. The universe didn't care. The black hole wasn't evil or cruel. It simply was. It consumed because that was its nature. The galaxy wasn't dying out of hatred. Simply because that's how the laws of physics work.
Medusa recoiled from the telescope. She fell to her knees. Tears streamed down her cheeks.
"Everything's dead," she whispered. "Everything... everything's dead..."
The hero crawled toward her and hugged her.
"Medusa, this isn't here. It's far away. Billions of light years."
"But it's real," she looked at him with empty eyes. "Everything dies. Even stars. Even galaxies. Everything ends. What's the point?.."
The hero didn't know what to say. He could still feel the death of a star in his memory. And now Medusa felt the death of a galaxy.
Dolor stood to the side. He was looking at the third telescope. The largest of those at the edges of the room. The plaque read: "Gargantua. Supermassive black hole. Event horizon radius: 1 billion kilometers."
"Dolor, don't," the hero warned.
But Dolor wasn't listening. He walked up to the telescope and looked through the eyepiece.
At first, nothing. Only darkness.
Then Dolor felt the pull. An invisible force pulling him forward. Toward the telescope. Through the telescope. Toward what was beyond.
A black hole.
It wasn't black. An accretion disk swirled around it—matter heated to millions of degrees, emitting x-rays. But the center was completely dark. A gap in reality. A place where space folds in on itself, where time stands still.
And it pulled.
Dolor felt his body begin to stretch. Arms, legs, torso—everything stretching into long threads, rushing toward the hole. Spaghettification. He was being torn apart, but slowly, painfully.
And worst of all, he couldn't die. Falling into a black hole lasted an eternity from the observer's perspective. He would fall, stretch, tear apart—infinitely, never reaching the event horizon.
Eternal agony. Endless suffering. For Dolor, the God of Suffering, this was... familiar.
— NO!
The hero grabbed Dolor by the shoulder, tearing him away from the telescope. The warrior collapsed to the floor, breathing heavily. His body was whole, but his eyes... his eyes saw infinity.
— "I saw," Dolor croaked. "I saw an eternity of suffering. Even I... even I cannot bear this."
The hero helped him up. All three stood, shivering—from the cold, from terror, from the cosmic scale of death they had just experienced.
— "We must leave," the hero said. "Now."
But there was still no way out.
In the center of the room stood a telescope. Enormous, the size of a tower. Its tube extended upward, toward the dome, aimed at a specific point in the sky. Beside it lay a plaque, larger than the others:
"The Last Star. The only one remaining in the universe. Age: 10^100 years after the Big Bang. Status: dying."
The hero looked at the telescope. Then at Medusa and Dolor.
"I think the exit is that way," he said, pointing at the telescope.
"Are you sure?" Medusa was still trembling.
"No. But there's no other way."
He approached the telescope. The stairs led up to a platform with an eyepiece. The hero began to climb. The steps were icy underfoot. Medusa and Dolor remained below, watching.
The hero reached the platform. The eyepiece was enormous—the size of his head. He leaned over and looked inside.
Emptiness.
Absolute emptiness. Not like the white room. Not like the void between times. This was the death of space itself.
Somewhere far away, in an unimaginable distance, a point of light smoldered. A tiny, faint, last star in the universe. A red dwarf, barely warmer than the cosmic background.
There was nothing around it. No planets, no asteroids, no matter. Everything had long since disintegrated, disintegrated into atoms, atoms into particles, particles into radiation. Even black holes evaporated via Hawking radiation.
Only this star. The last. Lonely. Dying.
The hero watched it fade. Second by second (but seconds had no meaning here—time had almost stopped in this dead universe), the star lost light, heat, energy.
And finally—it died.
Complete darkness.
Absolute, final, eternal darkness.
The end.
The hero felt it. Not just the death of a star. The death of everything. The death of the universe. Heat death. Maximum entropy. Nothing more could happen, because there was no energy left for change.
An eternity of darkness and cold.
He should have been afraid. He should have screamed. But instead he felt... peace. A strange, quiet peace. After everything—the pain, the deaths, the suffering—this was the end. The real end.
And in this end, there was no pain.
Only silence.
The hero closed his eyes. Accepted.
Everything dies. Even universes. And that's... normal. It's natural. The end is inevitable. But that doesn't mean the journey was meaningless.
He opened his eyes.
The darkness began to dissipate.
Not because light appeared. But because... after the absolute end, something was changing.
A dot appeared in the void. Tiny, but bright. Incredibly bright. It pulsed, grew, expanded.
A new universe? A new Big Bang? Or just a glimpse of something beyond comprehension?
The hero didn't know. But he saw it. After the end, there was... something.
He stepped away from the telescope.
The observatory had changed. The cold had receded. The bodies of the astronomers had vanished. The telescopes remained, but they no longer pulled, no longer beckoned to look.
A door opened in the dome above. Literally opened—the glass parted, forming a passage.
Medusa and Dolor looked up.
"Is this the exit?" Medusa asked.
"Yes," the hero descended the stairs. "This is the exit."
"What did you see?"
The hero looked at her. At Dolor. Around the observatory.
"The end," he answered simply. "The end of everything. But after the end... there was something else."
Medusa nodded. She didn't fully understand, but she felt it. Dolor nodded too—silently, as always.
A staircase appeared of its own accord—a spiral, leading upward, to a passage in the dome.
They began to ascend. Step by step, leaving the observatory of dead stars.
The hero turned around one last time. He looked at the central telescope. At the dome above, where dead stars were visible.
"Everything dies," he whispered. "Even the stars. Even us. But that doesn't make the journey meaningless."
Medusa took his hand.
"No," she agreed. "It doesn't."
They exited through the dome, into the next corridor of the dungeon.
The observatory was left behind. Quiet, cold, full of dead stars.
But they were alive.
Here. Now.
And they continued to climb upward.
Much later, when they had gone far enough, Medusa asked:
"Did you really see something? After the end?"
The hero paused.
"I don't know. Maybe it was an illusion. Or hope. Or simply a desire to believe that there is something more after the end."
"But do you believe?"
The hero looked ahead, at the dark dungeon corridor stretching into the unknown.
"Yes," he replied. "I believe. Because otherwise, what's the point of going on?"
Medusa smiled. Weakly, but sincerely.
"Then let's go."
And they set off.