Mad Hatter's Guide to Clearing The Game
Chapter 164: Ch162. [World Quest] (22) - The real story (3)

Chapter 164: Ch162. [World Quest] (22) - The real story (3)

Floor 100

The air didn’t move.

It didn’t need to, the weight of it was enough to drag it around.

Diego fell on his knees, the lack of light was ambient, sourceless, dark and ghostly.

There seemed to be no walls. Only a slow, rhythmic pulse beneath the floor.

One beat, then another, then another.

Each one louder than the last.

His body trembled, but not from fear. It was from something more final than that.

He couldn’t tell where the pain ended and he began, his shirt was torn, soaked in blood, and one arm hung uselessly at his side.

It didn’t matter how many times Diego healed himself with the [Holy Light], the stitched-eye man would beat and mangle him as many times equally.

And the Boss hadn’t moved.

Behind it, the stitched-eyed man leaned against an obsidian pillar, watching Diego with a faint smile on what should’ve been his face.

"You’re still breathing." His voice was warm. Pleased, even. "That surprises me."

Diego pushed himself upright with one good hand, panting, and then activated [Holy Light] once again.

"I... Can’t... Die..." He whispered.

"No." The man cooed, stepping forward. "But you can come close enough to forget you were alive."

He extended a hand, and one of the boss’s chains twitched ever so slightly.

Diego raised his mending arm, focusing his will on it, and light exploded from his palm.

[Holy Light]

The ceiling cracked, the floor splintered, the chained Boss flinched, and Diego screamed.

Not from casting the skill, not from pain.

But from what he saw.

For a moment, the Boss’s eyes opened, and it screeched.

There were no irises, just depth.

Endless, endless depth, and something... Moving inside of it. Not crawling, just... Shifting.

Like an idea trying to wake up.

Floor 62

The not-Miles stood at the edge, unmoving. Then, he took a step forward.

The dungeon didn’t react like it should have. No rumble, no resistance, no folding of the space to push the intruder away. Instead, the air folded in on itself, reality bending slightly around his movement.

Sarissa felt it in her lungs, a pressure, like her breath had been pulled inward.

Mara aimed down the scope of [Trifle], her hands steady, but her body taut as a drawn wire.

"Don’t." Sarissa whispered.

"He’s not real!" Mara hushed with urgency. "That’s not him."

"I know." Sarissa rebuked. "But something else is."

The not-Miles smiled wider, and his body... Flickered. It only lasted a second, but it was enough.

His frame became longer, then shorter, then longer again. His smile tore sideways, cutting too far into his cheek, his hair shimmered black-red-black, like flame caught in oil, and underneath it all, there was something like a presence.

A weight pressing on Sarissa’s mind, like staring too long into a dark mirror and seeing something blink back.

He didn’t speak. All he did was raise a hand and point at Sarissa.

The gesture was casual, but her knees buckled slightly as the air turned thick, charged with energy.

And then he vanished.

No noise, no flash of light, just gone.

The air rushed back into the space where he had been, and it felt like coming up from underwater.

"That wasn’t a projection." Mara lowered the rifle an inch.

"No." Sarissa shook her head slowly. "That was a message."

"To whom?"

"To us."

They stared across the chasm for a moment longer, but nothing moved. The echoes across the vast emptiness continued, though.

Half-formed sounds and flickering phantoms, like someone remembering something painful in slow motion.

"We can’t go back the way we came." Mara looked behind, and the path was barred. The corridor was now nothing but a wall of dark and solid flesh-like stone.

"I’m not sure we came from anywhere." Sarissa touched her own chest, then the ground. "The dungeon folded us here."

"Folded?"

"Like paper. Like thought." Sarissa turned, eyes scanning the walls. "Can’t you feel the way we didn’t walk towards here? And even though we did move, it still feels like..."

"Like we didn’t, yeah." Mara shuddered. "If this place didn’t give me the creeps before, now it definitely does."

"We have to find a way to meet Dee and Miles." Sarissa’s lips thinned into a straight line.

They began to move, keeping to the edge of the precipice.

Time shifted oddly, it wasn’t minutes or hours anymore. Just moments, broken and stitched together by the dungeon’s will, in which they walked by not walking. The air thickened and thinned as if breathing, and sometimes Mara swore the path behind them curled shut like a wound healing over.

Then they saw it.

A vein, a path into the wall that looked and pulsed like one, contracting and expanding, as if the dungeon’s air moved through it.

"You think this is...?" Mara reached toward it as Sarissa looked, then hesitated.

"It’s a path." Sarissa said. "But..."

"What?"

Sarissa didn’t answer. Instead, she pressed her hand to the inner wall of the path.

The moment her palm touched it, something screamed inside her skull. Not sound, just meaning. A chorus of whispers too old to carry language anymore, and the vein throbbed.

Soon after, it became larger, as if giving passage to the two, and for the briefest of moments, she heard the clangor of metal.

"I think we must go through that." Sarissa held her breath. "I hear fighting."

"You want to go into that?" Mara blinked.

"You see any other way?" Sarissa stepped forward, then glanced back.

"Fuck me sideways..." Mara let out a defeated sigh. "Okay, let’s go then.

They entered, and the moment they did, the temperature dropped. Not to cold, but to absence. Like warmth itself had been swallowed. Their steps made no noise, the air was thick with pressure, both women found themselves breathing slower, shallower.

The corridor moved as they walked. It shifted around them, bending left, then descending at sharper and sharper angles, as if the vein had a purpose, a destination buried so deep in the dungeon’s body that even the system had stopped keeping track.

At one point, the pulse aligned with their footsteps, and every step triggered another throb, as if the path was feeding off them, growing warmer with their motion.

Mara touched the wall once, and it felt like skin.

Eventually, the descent stopped. As they stood at the threshold of an opening, the wall split open vertically, slow and organic, peeling apart with a slick sound, revealing...

A stone landing.

Carved and ancient-looking, circular, with signs etched into the floor that moved when looked at directly, and across the landing, another precipice.

From that distance, far beyond, the sound of something happening.

Voices, combat.

Sarissa’s breath caught in her throat, she knew that voice.

"Miles..." She whispered.

They stepped out onto the landing, and the floor beneath their boots hummed faintly, as if recognizing them.

Mara raised her rifle.

Sarissa’s hand hovered above her blade.

***

Floor 99

The sound of fighting had already stopped, and for a moment, the world was suspended between the echoes of violence and the stillness of silence.

Then, they arrived.

Sarissa and Mara stepped out of the vein.

They emerged through a jagged opening in the wall of Floor 99, partially hidden by stalagmites.

Mara felt the tension hanging in the air first.

It was heavy with pressure, like walking into a room mid-sentence of an awkward conversation.

Sarissa held her breath and stepped forward, and Mara followed her gaze.

Shinji stood before them, facing Miles in a fight to the death.