Re: Butterfly (Reincarnated as a Butterfly)

The descent resumed.

Rosslyn climbed, and Adon flew or stood on her upper back.

The downward climb this time was much less eventful—no sudden, radical shifts in the weather—than it had been before. Even the walls of the canyon seemed more uniform, with fewer jagged rocks than there had been earlier.

The space they descended through did not have half-formed, collapsed dungeon floors breaking up the uniformity. It seemed that, down this far, the Dungeon Core had yet to impose its will and craft its defenses.

Which raised the question, perennially at the back and now, increasingly at the forefront of Rosslyn's mind: Why did the Dungeon Core open this place up now?

It clearly wasn't ready for people to invade. The Dungeon Core had poured incredible resources into the earlier floors, but if the bottom floors were empty, and it felt so threatened by human intruders that it had deliberately caved in one of the floors above, why had it opened up at all?

There was nothing forcing the dungeon to do that. It could have remained here undetected.

This all seemed to reinforce the theory Rosslyn had half-believed in for some time now, that dungeons were connected in some way to the Demon Empire and sought to forward the Emperor's goals. In that case, the Dungeon Core had opened its home up early and risked its own safety just to help the Emperor.

But there were problems with this theory, problems Adon had highlighted for Rosslyn before. His previous incarnation's experience, plus the fact that monsters had never been seen fighting alongside demons, were strange factors that she had trouble accounting for.

Her mind dwelled on the subject, though. It had little else to occupy it amid the pitch darkness and the endless downward climb.

The Princess and the butterfly descended for hours uneventfully.

By the end, Rosslyn was almost wishing for an attack. She didn't want her and Adon's lives to be in danger, but the monotonous dark was maddening.

Adon saw it before Rosslyn noticed anything, when the pair neared the bottom of the chasm.

Rosslyn, I think we made it! he sent excitedly as the ground came into view.

Oh, thank the Goddess, Rosslyn thought quietly.

Adon agreed with her feeling. This climb had felt like it would never end. He had never been so pleased to see stone and earth in any of his lives. This hopefully meant there wouldn't be more monsters ahead for them—besides the giant spider from earlier, of course.

"That is great, Adon," Rosslyn replied in an energized but hushed voice. "Do you think I should just let myself fall the rest of the way?" She tried to look below them, at the roughly fifty feet they had yet to descend, but her eyes were almost completely useless. "If you can see the ground from here, perhaps I can handle the drop without any injuries with a little Mana in my knees." Her eyes returned to the wall she was climbing down as she waited for Adon's response.

Wait… Adon sent in a guarded voice.

He saw something. Maybe it was just a trick of the shadows. His vision, despite having multiple pairs of eyes that were adapted to different lighting conditions, was still significantly better when he wasn't in the dark.

But he could have sworn he spotted a flicker of movement.

He hesitated a moment.

Maybe it was just in my—no, there it goes again! Adon thought.

There's something down there, he sent at last. Give me a minute to try and figure out what I'm looking at?

Of course, Rosslyn thought, choosing not to speak aloud in case they might be overheard. Do you need me to cast some light? I could use magic for that.

There was an eagerness in her voice that told Adon that Rosslyn desperately did not want to be in the dark anymore. He hated to disappoint her.

Probably better not, Adon replied, sensing the slight glimmer of motion below once again. There's every chance that whatever is down there can see as well as you and just needs light—especially if the Dungeon Core was expecting a bunch of humans to come through here. It knows that people need light to navigate, so it might expect us to bring some of our own. It's possible that light will actually trigger an attack.

I never thought of that, she thought. She sounded a little impressed, and Adon felt a warmth inside him at the affirmation. He was good in this situation. He was more than useful; he was insightful. He had spent enough time surviving in the wild—albeit the wild of a kept garden—that he would not be taken by surprise easily, even in a place like this.

That's what I'm here for, he sent.

Adon took off from the Princess's back and fluttered down to get a closer look.

As he closed to within twenty-five feet, the walls of the valley he and the Princess were descending suddenly opened up. It wasn't so surprising, considering that Adon knew there had to be some sort of bottom region to this thing—but the sudden view, now that there was no stone barrier blocking his line of sight, was striking.

Instantly, though only in his Infrared Vision, Adon could see everything. On the ground, the flicker of movement he had seen before was completely visible.

And it wasn't just a flicker.

What his eyes had caught earlier was the edge of something massive and bizarre. Adon fluttered in little circles and stared at it for a few minutes, trying to understand.

In the bottom layer of the dungeon, there were a hundred or so of the Gold-Digging Ants from the floor the party had been exploring before Adon and Rosslyn were separated from the group. They were engaged in constant motion—but not moving toward anything discernible. Each ant followed the ones in front of it, in a big, seemingly endless circle.

Adon couldn't understand it. The fact that so many of the ants had survived the destruction of their level was a quasi-miraculous feat in and of itself, or so the ants would have probably perceived it if they were sapient life forms.

In fact, the ground at the bottom of the canyon, in most areas away from the ants, was littered with dead things that had fallen from some high place and crashed to their deaths. The ants' circling space, by contrast, had been trodden clean. Their repetitive motions were slowly digging small grooves into the ground where their feet had repeatedly stepped.

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Adon saw creatures from the level that had collapsed—a few Jackalopes that had been reduced to a collective smear of blood, fur, and antlers on impact, and some golden streaks of ants that had not been as lucky as the others—as well as corpses of creatures that he guessed came from the partially finished levels that Rosslyn had climbed past and through. Pieces of undead monsters from the level with those creatures, and heavily blubbered or furry things that had probably lived on the frozen level.

There were even some possibly experimental monsters that had crashed to the ground while contained within glass terrariums. There were some piranhas that lay rotting in a shallow pool of brackish water—too shallow for them to move and breathe in, which was probably why they were dead—surrounded by shattered glass; a semi-developed giant half-crocodile, half-fish creature, clearly dead, also surrounded by broken glass and with one huge glass shard jutting out of a bloody gash in its abdomen; and something even larger, with tentacles.

Adon stared at the gigantic, tentacled thing, which took up a vast chunk of the much larger, opened up cavern at the bottom of the valley. It looked like a young kraken.

Wait, I think I sense mental activity there…

The creature didn't twitch a tentacle while he was watching, though, and its eyes were clouded over in an obvious death sign.

Adon finally noticed motion near the top of its head. His eyes landed on a griffin. It had somehow found its way down here. It sat atop the kraken's massive dome, quietly and contentedly—from the wavelength of its thoughts—eating a hunk of the monster's brains. The griffin was the source of the brain activity Adon had sensed.

As Adon's eyes stared at the griffin, he waited for some sign of recognition, but the creature didn't seem to see him at all. Its night vision probably wasn't good enough for this space. The griffin had somehow found its way here and only located the kraken because of the slight odor of rot that wafted off of the squid-like monster.

Adon returned his focus to the strange spiraling motion of the big insects.

The ants were lucky that they hadn't suffered the same fate as so many of these other creatures, since they had no wings, and they were far too large to survive a fall the way normal sized ants would.

There was a massive broken piece of rubble near the circling ants that seemed as if it had been a chunk of tunnel for the creatures. There were holes dug through it like it had been a part of their network of burrows. Adon guessed that being inside of those spaces was how this group of ants had survived.

But what was with this constant motion? It was a massive waste of energy.

Maybe they're moving like this so they catch anything that tries to pass them by, Adon thought. It could be a direct instruction from the Dungeon Core, even, to make sure they catch us if we make it down here. If they're moving in big circles, maybe that makes them more likely to run into us physically? I'd guess that ants don't have good night vision, since most of the ants I've encountered moved around in daylight. These probably aren't an exception, considering that their floor was very well lit—although the dungeon had another reason for being designed that way…

He pulled his mind back from the brink of a tangent. Worrying about the illusionist spider could come later. It was time to report back to Rosslyn.

Adon fluttered back up the cliffside, landed beside Rosslyn, and quickly relayed all that he had seen at the canyon's bottom to the Princess.

"It sounds much safer than I was imagining," Rosslyn said quietly. "As soon as you left, I started to worry that I had sent you on your last scouting mission." She gave Adon an uneasy smile. "Some very unpleasant thoughts drifted through my head, worse the longer you were gone."

She was worried about me, Adon thought. Right. It was still a little surreal to think that he had become someone important to Rosslyn.

That's sweet of you, Rosslyn, he sent. The only slightly scary thing was all the different kinds of creepy monster corpses, but of course, they were already dead.

"It would have been sweeter of me to have gone with you," Rosslyn observed dryly. "I have grown too accustomed to letting you take these risks alone. But I believe you are correct that nothing you have described gives me any sense of danger. Your exploration does seem to confirm a common theory that dungeons can test out monsters to pick and choose what to develop into a full floor. You know, you could probably write a book one day, merely covering what you have seen and experienced in this place, if you wished—nothing about your secrets as a mystic beast—and I imagine it would sell extremely well. We have learned so much here… Anyway, thank you for checking our surroundings before I finish descending."

The ants, though? Adon sent.

"Oh, that is an ant death spiral," Rosslyn said with a little chuckle and a shrug of her shoulders. "It is uncommon, but there are accounts in our books of entomology back at the palace. Ants usually navigate using pheromones to lead each other. Sometimes, the lead ant loses the trail of pheromones they are following, and the ants begin simply following each other instead. Since they have little capacity for independent thought, ants can actually die of exhaustion this way."

What a ridiculous way to die, Adon replied.

"Convenient for us, though," Rosslyn said. "All we have to do is sneak around the borders of their circular movement pattern, and the ants should not pay us any mind." She grinned. "Finally. The Dungeon Core has to be somewhere in this final level. It began to feel as if we would never make it."

I never doubted you, Adon sent.

The cocky grin on the Princess's face softened into a different, more sincere smile.

"Nor I you," she said quietly. "Even when I was a little worried. Let us… make it out of this place together."

She extended her wrist for Adon to set down on, and he landed on her upper arm instead—so as not to get in the way of her climbing.

The Princess descended another twenty feet along the wall before Adon saw her gather Mana and push it through her legs. Then, without a word, she released her hold on the wall.

The air rushed by as the pair fell those last thirty feet straight down. Then they landed softly, Rosslyn bending her knees as well as reinforcing them with Mana, to best absorb the impact. Adon wasn't even shaken from his perch.

Could you please guide me? Rosslyn thought with a trace of nervousness. This place is even darker than the canyon above was, and I could no longer see my hand in front of my face for the last hour or so.

The butterfly noticed that in addition to the Princess sounding slightly anxious, her inner voice sounded tired. And she was breathing heavily. It was only to be expected, now that he thought of it.

She had been climbing for hours—maybe a full day, time was impossible to calculate in this place—without any meaningful rest.

I'll bring it up as soon as we get past these ants, he thought to himself. Don't want to rest too close to them…

Of course, Adon replied. Go to your right first. That's where the nearest wall is. It leads toward an open area, as far as I can see. But once the wall ends, you can just keep walking straight at the same angle to get past the ants…

The Princess and the butterfly muddled along for a few minutes. The underground space seemed like it could be quite large in all directions, despite coming as it did at the bottom of a valley. There were random stone formations like the one that Rosslyn ran her hand along to get an initial direction at Adon's suggestion. But there were no long walls nearby that would set an obvious boundary to narrow their exploration down a bit.

Adon relayed everything he saw to the Princess, but ultimately, it felt as if they didn't have a clue which direction to move in. The one obvious thing was just to avoid the ants. Hopefully, if they explored the space beyond where the ants lurked, they would come across some markers that would help them find the Dungeon Core. If not, at least they would have an obvious landmark to come back to, in the form of the spiraling ants.

As Rosslyn stepped past the frenzied creatures, however, the lighting at the dungeon's bottom suddenly changed.

Hundreds of crystals that were set in the stone surfaces all around suddenly lit up with violet light, illuminating the space.

I don't think we're alone, Adon sent.

The butterfly sensed a wave of thought pass through the air—directed, like his Telepathy, clearly a form of communication. He tried, but could not intercept it.

He could only tell that it was transmitted in the direction of the circling ants. The ants that seemed to slow in their circling motion as soon as the message was received…

Adon put two and two together and didn't like what he perceived.

Rosslyn, we need to move!

But the Princess was already running as the words left his mind.