Astral Escape, a Scientific Progression Fantasy.

I hear a shift as the pipes move, and this space fills with a chilling mist and diving through a curtain of fire the blue drake lunges at me. I jump backward but not quickly enough the snapping teeth of the drake ripping a chunk out of my thumb as its teeth punch through the relatively thinner material of my gauntlets.

I scream out in pain and shield my hand with my forearms as I backstep away but the blue drake comes right with me as it begins a flurry of sweeps with its claws. I shield my much more delicate organs with my forearms, yet that only makes my now exposed thumb burn with pain as the mist sinks into it.

I grit my teeth as I scramble to make sure the next thing that isn't punched through isn't my kidney or my heart.

Remembering my earlier idea, I quickly switch off the currently fairly useless heat beam, and struggle to flip on my cold beam. Any actions with my hand a lot more painful with a chunk ripped out of my hand.

Continuing to block and back away, but consciously staying on the tile covered in icy mist despite the excruciating pain it causes my hand, I wait for just the right moment to strike. When the drake slams a claw onto the ice before it raises it again, I set my coldbeam onto its claw.

Empowered by the icy environment instead of weakened like on the red tiles a clump of ice growing on the contact point of the beam quickly sticks one of the drakes deadly claws to the ground.

Shocked and stuck in place for a bit I take that opportunity to back to a safer distance, and reaim my icy beam at the drake while it is stuck. After all, it doesn't have the large advantage to dealing with my ice that the red drake had, and unlike the green drake it doesn't have a large advantage in the next environment.

Fairly quickly getting over its shock it smashes its other claw into its ice covered clump and rushes toward me. But the time it was stuck gave me a fair bit of distance and every time its claws crash toward the ground I take that oppurtintiy to make it stumble or freeze, and while the quickly moving drakes previously were able to evade my beam, the close quarters, and its need to dodge, allows me to greatly slow down its approach.

Eventually reaching me it lunges toward my non-injured hand with its teeth but with ample time to prepare for its halting and stumbling arrival. I take both of my heavily armored elbows and smash them into the head of the drake as its teeth lunge for me.

Its body plunges down, helped along with my sweeping feet as it crashes to the floor unfortunately also slamming into my boots on the way, but I grit my teeth and bear it as I take its position on the floor as a wonderful opportunity to grow ice on all sorts of pieces of its body. Taking care to specifically nail down all the joints and places that would generate the force necessary to smash off its icy shackles and weights. While also not covering it completely, preparing for the next step.

The blue drake writhes underneath the ice, and I hear many sections crack, but with a careful application of ice on the cracking areas and a judicious armored elbow to the face I keep it dazed and tied up enough that it gets more and more stuck.

Of course being surrounded by the icy mist means that all of the snapped teeth and presumed bruises from being battered go away pretty quick, but I have a similar if lesser healing and the increasing lock down means that the infrequent attempts to damage me are ineffective. Hells I feel worse about the gap in my armor from the bite damn near giving me frostbite than about its physical blows.

But the icy mist being converted into healing, lets me keep on top of that. Although thankfully enough I won't have to deal with it long.

Soon enough I hear a clank and a swivel and book it away to a blank tile, I get splashed with many a bit of acid which stings but when I look back I take heart in the fact that I'm much better off.

Trapped by my ice, the carefully exposed scales of the blue drake become pitted before melting. I see organs and bones exposed as it writhes in pain beneath my ice.

I smile, once I saw it a few times it was fairly easy to see the pattern on the tiles, blank tiles become red ones, red ones become blue, and blue ones become green. It would ordinarily be quite hard to stall one opponent out for enough time that the tile would change. But once there was no more drakes to interrupt me the path was open. It was possible for me to use the blue drakes inability to break the ice with anything other than physicality, unlike the red drake, to trap it in place so that the acid, that the green drake was immune to could melt it to pieces.

A quite elegant victory, but as I think this I realize I can't celebrate too soon, as I hear a crack and begin to see the blue drake slowly, achingly crawling toward me, the icy shell I created broken. The drake melting like candy in the sun but not accepting death.

Claw after claw it drags its blackened body towards me, breathing little gusts of cold to turn the raining acid into something a bit easier to manage. But it isn't enough, it doesn't even get halfway before one of its legs collapses. Its head laid out on the floor, its eyes lock with mine before it dies, its eyes dulled, and empty.

Yet despite that it seems to stare into me, to demand that I feel something, that there is some mark for my struggle, that I do not die with you spotless, that I do not die for nothing.

Yet I stand, healed, the only remnant of that drake's existence a somewhat pained thumb, and I can't bring myself to care.

At the end of the day it was an animal, they deserve as much love as anything else, but I can bring myself to eat them because I understand that they don't matter as much. That they are wonderful, but lesser. The simple fact that I can eat them proves that they are lesser.

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And hells below does it feel nice to kill something without this twist in my gut, it was my life or theirs, and their life wasn't worth as much.

Grabbing some bits of all the corpses, I stuff it into a bag, and keep on walking to the next horror show I must endure.

—

After navigating my way through the pipes and the gouts of acid, along the way healing most of my injuries, although not being able to deal with the structural damage in my armor. I end up in a strange non descript room.

Inside there is a chest studded with gold and gems, and on the other side of it is a door but one firmly closed.

Remembering pieces of the vision about this accursed dungeon rewarding people, I'm guessing that at least one of the rules I can't quite understand, that allow me to not instantly die from the walls closing in on me, is responsible for a necessitated reward.

Similar to how earlier gold coins fell from the ceiling and dinged off my helmet when I fought those strangely violent rabbit hybrids.

From the visions it's pretty clear it can be a bit spiteful with how everything manifests. I'm guessing I didn't get anything amazing from the weird rabbits earlier due to the now clearly sentient dungeon screwing me over.

Considering the so far reluctance to reward me and the outright cheating, nickel and diming, and fuckery I've seen I don't trust this "reward" as far as I can throw it, I bet I get a poison with a nice label of healing tincture placed on top.

Man do I even want to grab anything in this chest, it's undoubtedly going to be either worthless or actively harmful. Oh well I might as well, even something it deems worthless could be extremely useful for my experiments. This dungeon is an entirely different paradigm from what I've seen previously in the Astral, no reason another man's trash can't become my treasure.

Approaching the treasure chest I smell something weird like the warm rotting meat you get when someone thaws food for too long. Ugh is there going to be a random arrangement of rotten meat?

Whatever, wanting to get it over with I take the lid and flip it over with a quick motion, OH WHAT THE FUC-

With a sudden motion I see an arrangement of teeth, and guts clamp down on my hand as I scream out in pain.

But that pain is soon overcome with rage, as I scream a vibrant "FUCK YOU", and activate both gauntlets simultaneously freezing and heating up the weird flesh box before slamming my armored foot into it and cracking the ridiculous thing like a rotten egg.

I gasp breathing in and out like I'm starving for air even as I know I don't need it, the sheer anger roiling of me cooking the strange flesh box I thought was a chest.

To put it simply fuck this shit, it didn't even hurt that bad its weird teeth barely pierced my armor, it was just a giant middle finger to me. Who the fuck expects that a damned box is a fucking giant toothy maw!!

Hells below, breathe in and out, in and out Tara, Ug, eventually I manage to calm down enough not to cook that miserable little box. If I've gone through this I should at least get something! So I start to paw through the still a bit hot wooden mouth thingy.

What the fuck even is this, how did this even evolve, I get camouflage but for how long do chests need to exist for animals to start specifically looking like them, have chests been around for fucking eons.

God all of this place's evolution is a fucking mystery in a half. In the visions earlier I saw humans in them. Many of them were odd, with strange clothes, unnatural skin colors, or outrageously large, small, even slender long ears like those elf body mod enthusiasts.

That reminds me of something, of someone, of innocence, and overly shiny men … Quickly as I think of such things a splitting headache overtakes me before quickly fading.

What was I thinking about again? Of yeah the improbability of seeing humans, most aliens look nothing like humans, the only usual connecting tissue being social bonds, a high level of intelligence, and the ability to affect their environment.

Technically some of the Umor have a vaguely humanoid shape, but that's only when they send specifically designed diplomats.

Hells below are they disturbing, imagine deciding at birth that your kid will be precision designed to be extremely good at one job. What if they hate it?

Regardless, the sheer variety within specific groups is also strange. One human-like species would be weird enough but multiple within one space is downright bizarre. Was it just heavy body modification, no that wouldn't make any sense, they were walking around with staffs and swords not guns and kevlar.

But how, It's generally theorized that multiple different sapient species on a planet is rare due to overlapping niches, and sapient species ability to alter their environment for the better.

In most fossil records of sapient species' original planets the space faring species usually out competed any other sapients that cropped up.

After all, if you can eat anything, something else that also eats anything that does it worse than you usually dies.

So why were there seemingly more than one species, did one like photosynthesize it's nutrients and thus not compete for resources. Is it just early, and they haven't killed each other yet? What is all this crap it doesn't make any fucking sense.

Alright Tara, you're going on a tangent to distract yourself from digging through a corpse but it isn't ,making anything better, hells your new found anger is making it a lot worse by heating up the meat.

Okay I just need to kee- wait a second what is this a flesh pocket, it feels almost like a stomach but there's no acid. Reaching further in, I see through the little light that peaks out from behind my helmet what looks to be the slightly melted and definitely shattered remains of a bunch of glass vials, with a bunch of multicolored liquids along the bottom and a weird rock.

Oh fucking hell I know what this is, it's another thing like the random shower of gold coins, the dungeon is probably forced to give me something, it just gave me something wrapped around a monster whose vicious end would break what's inside.

That's why it wasn't much of a fight, it wasn't meant to be a fight, it was meant to be me breaking it so hard I also broke everything inside too.

I suspected that my prize would be lackluster or dangerous to use, but for it to straight up be a danger in and of itself, and fragile enough that I also destroy its contents is a new low. Man I wish I could talk to it, if only to tell it off and understand how any of these rules work. It's driving me crazy to know that there's something going on that's just close enough to think about but with not nearly enough evidence to make any sense of it.

Now what am I supposed to do with these miscellaneous liquids? It's not exactly like it's a good idea to mix medicine, much less whatever magic BS is in these. Plus for all I know everything along the bottom of this is just complicated poison. Wouldn't be the first or even the second time this stupid dungeon fucked with the rewards its bizarrely compelled to give.

Oh well, I'll gather all these up in iron vials, and try to separate and study them later, I'm not exactly going to chug them but with some careful testing maybe I can figure out what they do, and try to replicate them if they're useful.

At the very least I have this weird rock, throwing my hand in there. I pick up the rock only to be surprised when that rock suddenly gives off a bright glow. In my shock I drop it, and when I pick it up again it no longer glows.

Huh fascinating it seems like a simple magical item, after pressing it a couple times I see that the behavior is consistent, when touched by me it either begins releasing light or stops. Interesting I don't see any runes, how is it doing this, I wonder what are the steps to make something like this, would you just expect it really hard to glow when touched?

Hah sadly that shall be for another time. Packing the stone in, and carefully making and stoppering the mixed together liquid at the bottom of the weird living chest thing. I make for the last room to use its gouts of energy to heal up my minor injuries before heading to the next room.

—

I stand before an almost purified specimen of a lion. I would call it simplified if each piece of its simplicity did not make it more perfect, did not make it more alien, and horrific. While still yet being the unmistakable majestic force of a lion. Its eyes do not hold anything but pure emptiness and it is crowned by light and burning rays of concentrated fire. Upon its back are downy wings, and its face in contrast with the pure white of the rest of its body is a thick golden mask of something that almost looks real but is unmistakably impossible, each twitch of my frantic eyes changing what its face looks like.

A booming thrum emanates from behind its impossible mask, less sounding like a person, and more like the thunder decided to speak, it says "Be not afraid child, I shall make this painless"