It can be tempting to search out a dungeon for the title and potential class upgrade from destroying it, but the momentary benefit to an individual is heavily outweighed by the potential long term benefit of it continuing to exist. Therefore, nearly every country on Neptus has a law forbidding the destruction of a dungeon for any reason or under any provocation. Dungeons are a limited resource. Once destroyed, they cannot be replaced.


    <hr>


    The Veori royal dungeon was far from any city, deep in the north desert. To the east, the western dragon mountains stood against the horizon, guarding this side of the river that flowed north and split Mount Ryenzo and the main cluster of mountains from their cousins.


    The river didn’t quite reach the center of the continent—yet. Once the seascourge surged against Veor, that river would swiftly divide the continent in two, leaving the eastern mountains around Mount Ryenzo fully separated from the remainder as the ocean devoured the desert and lesser mountains alike.


    But for now, seascourge and dragons alike were far from reaching Meliarn, and the only people Jair needed to be concerned with were Eythron and his companions.


    Jair, Raina, Lilin, and Carn arrived at Meliarn''s outer gate, an archway carved into the side of a stone outcropping, to find Eythron already there. He didn''t know how to open the entrance, but was making a good start on carving it open by force. His sword flashed and danced, slicing away chunks of stone one strip at a time.


    “You plan to cut through the whole door this way? Have you considered a bigger weapon?”


    Eythron didn''t respond. After a few more fruitless attempts at communication, Jair went ahead and opened the dungeon entrance for him, pressing his hand against the keystones in proper sequence with a quick burst of mana to each.


    No point waiting around for Eythron to break in. He’d inevitably succeed in the end anyway. May as well get on with things.


    The grand entrance to Meliarn opened, gates dissolving away and leaving behind an opening that looked very much like a chasm into an endless abyss.


    "I don''t suppose you''re ready to tell me why you''re running into the nearest dungeon you can find without any preparation whatsoever?"


    "I need it." Eythron’s voice was distant, as though his attention was elsewhere, and he stepped forward.


    Jair followed, Raina at his side, Lilin and Carn trailing along behind.


    Meliarn’s entrance hall was a massive marble cavern, floor paved smooth with pink and crimson-streaked marble, the walls were smooth and gleaming, and the curved ceiling asymmetrical just enough to leave an implication of natural formation without the actual nature part.


    The upper floor was made of curving stone and marble passages, all vaulted and carved with abstract patterns of wind and dust. It was a beautiful place, perhaps one of the most beautiful in Veor. It had a timeless elegance to it which some of Vaes City''s more spectacular architecture could match, but taken to extents no human craftsman could accomplish.


    Beautiful, but impersonal. Complex and intricate, with something subtly inhuman about it.


    The angles weren’t quite right, the proportions were more off the longer you stared at it. As though they''d been scribbled by a child rather than created by an architect.. but even that was more human than this. The angles, the proportions, Meliarn was masterfully manufactured but there was no sense of true aesthetic to it.


    Jair could appreciate the ways it presented itself but it was clearly an unpaired dungeon that had never known a living avatar.


    Should he feel bad for it, or just use it as the weapon he intended it to be?


    Eythron stood in the center of the entry room, eyes fixed blankly ahead, head tilted as though listening.


    “Okay, old man, we’re here. Does that mean you can think clearly now?”


    “I need it,” Eythron repeated softly, head turning this way and that.


    “Do you really?”


    “I always assumed we’d have a bit more post-graduation experience before seeing the inside of one of these," Raina mused, looking around.


    Jair tried to imagine the place as though he were entering it for the first time, instead of the familiar battleground where so many of his life-or-death confrontations had taken place. He’d probably spent nearly as much time fighting in Meliarn as in the Oriad.


    The best part about a fight taking place in a dungeon was that the entrance formed an automatic shelf of its own. Back when he had to struggle to control his landing point in the timeline by anything more precise than a week or more, having a clear designated starting point for the whole encounter was invaluable.


    But before that?


    “I don’t know if I can remember what I expected from life after graduation,” Jair admitted. “As a trained mageblade, assuming we survived the plague and escaped Sekir’s rampage…”


    If he hadn’t broken away from the previous sequence of events, the major chaos would have been right around the time of his graduation.


    “We’d probably have been recruited to one of the Veori defence expeditions.” Thinking about it, if he’d been someone with any other soulspell, he’d have probably ended up as one of Sekir’s mundane subordinates. One more mage doing what he was ordered and going where he was sent.


    If he’d escaped Sekir’s vendetta, he’d have been qualified for a broad range of positions from adventuring or military to any number of research or exploration positions requiring magical flexibility and a basic ability to defend oneself.


    Mageblade was a prestigious and rare class, with stringent requirements and precise training methodologies. Most people who managed to stumble on the class on their own never even reached second tier, let alone ascended.


    “What even is a dungeon?” Lilin asked. “I know what the stories say, it''s like a building but it grows on its own and has monsters appear in it that want to eat you. But what is it?"


    "You might think of it as a monster of its own."


    Lilin looked around at the dungeon’s entrance hall. "If it were a monster shouldn’t it have more teeth?"


    "Sometimes. Its form depends on what the avatar is, sometimes it''s a person, other times it''s someone''s idea of a monster or perfect creature. More often than anything it''s just a person."


    "That''s not what she asked," Raina said. "You''re leading her astray by deliberately obscuring the facts."


    "It’s true that a dungeon takes on the aspect of the first thing it consumes and then adjusts it from there."


    "How do we know it''s the first thing? No one has ever seen a dungeon''s beginning. For all we know, they''ve been here longer than we have."


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    "They have been." Jair remembered Mercurios with his records going back thousands of years.


    "So how can you tell which imprint is actually the first one? Or that it’s what matters?"


    "Because I bound one to myself in the past, and as the prime avatar of a dungeon I knew everything it knew."


    Which was... strange, after disconnecting. Now that he was a completely separate entity from his far away dungeon, he couldn''t recall more than a few faint echoes, mere remnants. The dungeon’s knowledge stayed with it while Jair himself was left with only his personal memories.


    "What does that mean, for you to be prime avatar?" Lilin asked. “What kind of avatar are you? You don''t turn into a giant bear, do you?"


    "Why would I become a bear? Even if I were going to transform into something inhuman it would at least be vaguely humanish. I might add fur or claws but it wouldn''t be fundamentally a different species.”


    Lilin looked disappointed. “Do you at least grow huge and untouchable?”


    “Not exactly. Being bound to a dungeon core does provide some protection, but I could still be destroyed. And if I leave the dungeon’s domain, it’s a perpetual drain on my soul. I could augment myself in any number of ways, but at the core an avatar is always a single thing—whatever thing they originally were. Then more is added on: a tail or wings, fur or scales, maybe give it the power to breathe fire or emanate ice from its claws.”


    “I never knew you were dungeon-bound,” Raina said, looking him over again as if expecting him to sprout claws on the spot.


    “I’ve done and been a lot of things. Some more easily reversed than others.”


    “What was it like?”


    “Being a dungeon is probably the closest to being a god, just a god of a very small domain and limited in ways that no true god would ever allow. I could create and destroy at will, as long as I had the materials necessary and remained within the dungeon. Outside, I was only myself.”


    Which was a shame. If he could have gone up against Ryenzo with fire-dragon scales and frost-dragon breath, if he could have created a mythical deity weapon… but the core could not be removed from the dungeon, and by binding himself to it he made the dungeon his home as well.


    To leave it was weakness and pain. Emptiness. Incompletion.


    “So every dungeon has a tiny god in it?” Lilin asked.


    “No. Dungeons aren’t intelligent. They only remix things in whatever chaotic ways work. Like rapidfire evolution at work. The creatures that do best at killing or retaining visitors grow stronger and those who’re destroyed are less likely to be remade.” Jair shivered. He remembered all too well the sensations of each of his dungeon''s creatures as its death echoed through him. The way each one surged as it upgraded.


    “It was so strong,” he murmured. “I lived as each one of them. But they were also disconnected from me. I was an impassive observer with absolute investment in the outcome. I had to care, because to not care was a betrayal of my existence, but as long as I could improve things I had to do so without mercy for whatever I may destroy in the process.”


    Raina stood closer by his side. “Sounds overwhelming.”


    “I can’t say it’s something I want to repeat.” In a way, he could sympathize with the old dragon for being such a grumpy creature. Living by himself in a dungeon for millennia left very little that he could say or do to break out of the monotony.


    Jair shook off the memories as Raina nudged him with an elbow. "You there?"


    He smiled and shook his head. "I''m fine. Thank you. This place is just... dungeons in general, they feel..."


    "But there''s nothing to be afraid of here, right?" Lilin asked, glancing around at the grand pillars and paintings and carvings.


    “Not in the entry room, no. Dungeons will test you occasionally if you linger, but they won’t generally kill you. The monsters will try, but more skirmishes to lure you in deeper. The whole purpose of the dungeon’s internal ecosystem is to entice you to stay as long as possible so it has the best chance of siphoning your entire soul. That’s why it creates such powerful and valuable items progressively the deeper in you go, and why so many monsters fight to capture rather than kill. If people are satisfied with their results after spending weeks in the dungeon and come back again for more, that’s more chance for the dungeon to finish its meal.”


    Lilin shivered. “That sounds like the exact opposite of safe.”


    “A dungeon of Meliarn’s strength will take around a year and a half to fully convert a standard soul if you’re mainly sitting and only reacting when necessary to protect yourself. Stronger dungeons like Oronthire can do it faster. More active use of soulspells or heavier draw on magic, straining yourself physically with intense fighting, those all wear you down faster. The regular avatar battles a few times a floor are designed to push you to your limits, but provide even better rewards than usual. All a trade. Everyone’s gambling that they’ll be the one to come out on top. But I’ve seen too many addicted adventurers who just keep coming back until they disappear into a dungeon for good.”


    “You’re sure I should be in this thing at all?”


    “Do you anticipate becoming a combat-obsessed thrill-chaser?”


    “Well, no, but what if something drags me in and I have no choice?”


    “I’ll find you. Or revert to before it happened.” He wasn’t sure why he could revert soul damage to anyone but himself, but he’d verified on multiple occasions that the only damage retained on a soul level when reverting was that done to him. Same thing with improvements. For anyone but Jair himself, all changes were undone when he reverted.


    At least, until Maelstrom. Damage he did still tended to be partially healed when reverting, but the parts that Maelstrom consumed remained with him. He wasn’t sure how that worked now that Maelstrom was no longer missing pieces of its soulmap, though.


    Now, with the ability to bring people along with him, he could also retain soul-level changes for them…both for the better and worse. It was a simple question of whether whatever they’d learned was worth more to keep than the soul changes.


    The dungeon went on for miles in every direction, sprawling out and down and off in random directions, each section its own distinct type of challenge. It would be much easier to revert to a time when they were together than to hunt someone down who’d been taken into its depths.


    At one point in his life, Jair spent several lifetimes just exploring Meliarn''s depths. The varied challenges, monsters, traps, and mazelike layout made it endlessly entertaining for a bored time looper.


    But anything grows familiar after enough repetition, and Jair''s capabilities had quickly outstripped the dungeon''s challenges. Meliarn could grow and adapt, but like any dungeon it had no true intelligence.


    A dungeon only reacted to its visitors, never preempted them. It evolved to keep them moving as long as possible, burn as much energy as they could. Its only aim was to keep people within its influence a few more minutes, hours, days, until it could consume them entirely.


    Jair''s ability to revert time meant he couldn''t be truly trapped. Whenever his soul started to wear down, he could simply turn back time to the moment right after he entered the dungeon and step back outside to recover before coming back for more.


    Eythron, who’d been ignoring their conversation, smiled then, a smile full of predatory hunger. He turned without a word and walked briskly down the leftmost passage.


    "Wait here,” he told Lilin. “I''m going after him."


    "Should I come with you, or stay here?" Raina took a step to follow, but hesitated.


    “Up to you.” Jair shrugged one shoulder. "Whichever you prefer."


    “He can handle himself,” Carn said, stepping over to put a hand on Raina’s shoulder. “We would only be getting in his way. Better to stick together.”


    Raina looked torn, but nodded and stepped back. "Go. Talk to him. Maybe he''ll listen to you."


    "I hope so."


    Eythron wasn’t listening to anything at the moment. He was walking now, though, instead of running, which was progress.


    Jair jogged to catch up with his mentor. “What is it you need? Fighting the monsters? Avatars? Some particular essence or material?”


    “The dungeon core.”


    “What do you need it for?"


    Eythron ignored him.


    Jair stepped in front of him when he didn’t answer. "See, you pretty specifically told me you don''t want to be bound to a dungeon.”


    Eythron didn’t answer, only continued walking.


    Jair walked backwards as he kept the conversation going. “So when you say you need the core with a look like that on your face, I''m not sure you''re in a position to be making good decisions for yourself."


    "Help me, if you truly consider yourself my friend. Leave if you must. But my path is onward." It was the most he said in one piece since they arrived in Veor.


    "I don''t believe you have the necessary—"


    Eythron didn''t stop, and Jair shook his head. There was no point in trying to talk to him.


    "Will it help if I take you straight to the core, or do you need to fight the monsters and lose some fragments of your soul first to make you in the mood for it?"


    "Direct route would help."


    “If I do this, you have to promise to talk to me after.”


    Eythron stopped moving, eyes finally fixing on Jair properly. “Agreed.”


    Jair stabbed him. Eythron’s soul fought him a moment, then they reappeared in the core room in a flare of black-green fire.


    <hr>