D.J. Rintoul
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Re: Butterfly 3-71. The Level of the Dead
🕑 Added 2025-06-26 16:00:14 +0000 UTC“Adon?”
Rosslyn called out into the darkness.
Enough time had passed that she had finished the meat, wiped away any remnant of its juices, and almost begun to drift off to sleep. She had caught herself, of course. She wasn’t going to fall asleep inside the Dungeon.
Not while she was alone there, anyway.
Then Rosslyn began healing her hands. She had ignored the damage as best she could as she was climbing down the cliff face, but now that she was out of the cold, the ache was somehow more acute than it had been while she was in the frozen level.
The pain got worse as she healed—as dead skin fell away and was replaced by healthy tissue where she had been suffering from the beginnings of frostbite. Her new flesh could actually feel, while her bits of dead skin had been numb.
After the dead skin had sloughed off, and she had burned it—Rosslyn didn’t want Adon to associate that gross material with her—the Princess realized that a fair amount of time had passed. More than just a few minutes.
Where is Adon? How long has he been gone?
“Adon?” That was when she started calling his name, quietly at first, and then, after a few repetitions, rising to a near yell before she calmed herself.
She clenched her fists, fingernails biting into the palms of her hands, and forced herself to stop calling for him.
He is probably fine, and if there are any monsters still alive in this area, you will attract every single one if you get any louder. I do not even know if we are on a Dungeon floor or somewhere in between.
A fight would not necessarily be unwelcome. Rosslyn was back in fairly good condition. She could use a nap, but some exercise slaying monsters would not go amiss either. Still, it was unwise to invite such distractions.
The Dungeon was already challenging enough.
She started to rise from where she had been seated, eating the yeti. Then she sat back down for a moment and cleaned her greasy hands off as best she could on a piece of discarded yeti fur. There was no rush, as far as she knew. There was time for hygiene—until she heard a loud boom from somewhere else in the vicinity. A moment later, the ceiling and walls around her shook with the force of whatever had made the noise.
Rosslyn felt the reverberations vibrate up her legs, through her abdomen, up into her teeth, and she knew that somewhere, in a place not far from her, there had been an explosion.
In an instant, she ran through a set of possible causes in her mind—a gas explosion like what had happened on the level she and Adon had escaped, some sort of flame elemental if this area was another floor—but the most likely one was obvious immediately.
Did Adon do that? He would not risk another collapse unless he was in serious danger…
Rosslyn bolted upright. The tremors were still fading, but suddenly there was a renewed urgency about everything. Her right hand automatically went to her sword, and she drew it from the sheath. Then she thought about her environment—about how cramped the cave might be, wherever the action was going on. She put her sword back where it was and drew the dagger she had been using to cut the meat instead.
Then she rushed off following the path Adon had taken.
Rosslyn could not track Adon. He was stealthy by nature. Beyond the fact that he moved by flying through the air, with his powers, he could become invisible or more or less intangible when he wanted to be.
She worked by recalling where she had seen him going and then simply extrapolating.
Adon came out here, where would he turn next?
She knew that Adon was not looking to go back out to where they came in, mainly because they both knew what lay that way—they had bounced off of half the surfaces in that area when they made their landing.
Rosslyn pursed her lips. That still left two possible paths.
One of them was a side tunnel, and the other led deeper into the cliff face cave. She bet that Adon would have taken the one that took him further in. Even if he went down the tangential route, he wouldn’t still be exploring it all this time later. If it extended that far, he would have simply turned around and come back before now.
Another boom sounded, smaller this time, and shook the cavern walls slightly. Rosslyn barely felt it, but she did note that it seemed to come from the route she had selected.
She followed that path until she came to a fork. There must have been a lull in the combat, because no noise told her which way to go.
Of course it would be that way now, she thought. Simple choice. Left or right?
She could come up with any number of reasons for the one she chose. The left was likely to be a shallower cave, since its shape seemed like it would approach the space where Adon had left Rosslyn. The left was the one she had been taught to choose—always choose the left in an unknown place, just so that you and others trained along the same lines will know where you went.
But the former piece of reasoning could suggest Adon had not chosen the left, because if it was shallower—which was not guaranteed—he might have finished exploring it and gotten out before now. And the idea that Adon had the same approach to exploring that Rosslyn had been taught in the palace was implausible, to say the least.
If he’d been taught anything about exploring, he also would have placed some sort of marker on the walls to indicate which tunnels he had explored and which ones he had left alone. There was nothing. No physical indicator that would suggest he’d been in any of these places.
Ultimately, Rosslyn just went with her gut.
He took the path closer to me… I think he would have taken the path that led closer to me.
She took off down the left fork at a near full run, certain that the decreasing volume of the second explosion meant that Adon was running low on power—which could indicate that he was running out of time.
As she ran, Rosslyn heard nothing. A worrying silence.
Am I going the right way? she wondered. It is not too late to turn back yet…
She made herself keep running, dodging walls and almost tripping over stalagmites in her haste. She stubbed her toe and shattered one of them, but she did not allow herself to stop. There was some emergency deeper in one of these tunnels, and she would not fail to at least attempt to find the danger.
Then she heard it. A sign of hope.
There was a loud collision. Fire struck some other object with a sizzling thud. The noise was close.
Rosslyn had chosen the correct fork. Either that, or the fighting was just on the other side of a thin piece of stone wall. She would stand in front of Adon and his opponent shortly either way.
The Princess advanced a little more slowly now, her movements almost dance-like, on tiptoe. She wanted the element of surprise if she could have it. There was no honor in dealing with most of these monsters anyway, and if this creature was like the griffins, Adon would have conducted a negotiation with it himself already rather than resorting to violence.
A minute later, Rosslyn rounded a corner, and she suddenly saw everything—and instinctively stepped back a bit, to ensure that she would not be seen.
Adon was dancing through the air, flames spiraling in loops around his body, tongues of fire licking out and suddenly striking at monsters—walking skeletons that kept coming, approaching him undeterred by the touch of fire, already bearing the marks of multiple burns across their charred bones.
The flames were acting as limbs, merely pushing away the monsters.
He tried to destroy them with the explosions, Rosslyn assessed. They proved impervious.
The evidence of that was in the air—the smell of scorched flesh and bone—and on the ground. Pieces of bone strewn in piles of ashes lay adjacent to the walls. Scraps of blackened humanoid meat hung from hooks mounted on the wall or dangled from chains suspended from the ceiling. Those seemed to be enemies Adon had successfully destroyed, but his flames could not deal with these creatures of pure bone.
It takes incredibly intense flames to destroy bone completely, and they have to be sustained, not a quick flash of fire.
The reason why Adon had not simply left the scene of this violence was also visible at first glance.
A hulking, blue-black-skinned humanoid corpse monster stood back from the action, resting its foot against an extensive spiderweb. The web, Rosslyn saw, stretched to cover multiple walls of the chamber and hung in the air between Rosslyn and the creature—blocking Adon’s only apparent exit. The web glowed with purple mana that the monster was pushing in through its foot.
Rosslyn guessed that made it even more impassable than a spiderweb normally was for butterfly kind.
As she stood and watched, the monster—which she now noted had burn marks across patches of its back and was missing its left arm—concentrated more purple mana into its remaining arm. The power coalesced into the shape of a whip, and it struck out at Adon, or attempted to.
The butterfly managed to flick the skeletons all around it quickly back and then dodged to the side, avoiding the attack.
The undead thing jerked its arm back to attempt another whipping motion. At the same instant, the skeletons leaped toward Adon again.
Rosslyn sensed that this attack might get through Adon’s defenses. He appeared to her to be running low on power.
As she had that thought, every nerve ending in Rosslyn’s body suddenly woke up. She had watched for more than long enough. It was time to act. She poured a torrent of Mana into her dagger, and she instantly transformed it into the familiar light mana that she had used to such great effect in both this Dungeon and the Deformed Forest.
Divine Sword, Sixth Form, Edge of Light.
At the same time, she pushed mana into her legs. Her muscles almost bulged out of her skin with sudden strength. She braced for a single violent, decisive strike.
The monster seemed to sense something was wrong. It kept its whip hand raised, not swinging down, and it started to turn its head backward, to look in Rosslyn’s direction.
Her feet pushed off against the ground, and she shot forward, her motion almost certainly blurring for Adon and the monster.
Rosslyn’s dagger slashed sideways once, twice, and she barely felt as it made impact both times. There was almost no physical force whatsoever involved in using a blade imbued with the Edge of Light.
The Princess landed in the midst of the skeletons. They seemed to freeze as she touched down, and she assessed that they were the mindless minion type of monster. They would probably do nothing threatening without specific orders.
She turned her head slightly to catch the results of what she had done.
The spiderweb that had separated her from the scene of carnage tumbled down from where it hung in the air, the purple mana suddenly dissipating from the severed piece of webbing. Now Adon and Rosslyn could escape if necessary.
If necessary.
A split second later, the monster’s head tumbled off of its neck. Then the hulking blue-black body crashed down into the ground, sending bones, ashes, and dust that had been strewn about the floor flying in all directions.
The Princess turned to face forward again, in time to see the light of mana fading from the webbing in the other corners of the room and from around the skeleton monsters. Then their bodies simply tumbled into the stone floor.
Oh my Goddess, Adon sent. I’m so glad you came when you did.
“Me too,” Rosslyn said. “What exactly happened here?”
We landed in a level that was still under construction, Adon replied. He began to explain.
