We’d been descending the stairs for fifteen minutes before we encountered a break in their monotony in the shape of a small nook on the side.

I’d expected an ambush, or something, or more enemies appearing from deeper below—I’d made a handful of my army follow us just in case—but nothing had happened so far.

Inside the nook, there were two benches on each side, with a water fountain carved into the far wall. A phrase was carved at the base of the fountain in a strange, cursive script.

My eyes glossed over the words as I read them—each individual letter was strange to me, but I could still read the message on the whole.

Beyond lies the hall of the Argent Warrior. Be welcome in his house, traveler, and may ye bask in his glory!

It was strange. If I squinted, the script reverted into an unintelligible mess, but if I relaxed, I could read it with ease.

This had to be the translation layer that the System provided. I hadn’t encountered it before, since except for a few hold-outs, Common was and had been the dominant language across the plane since the Ancient era.

The kids had noticed it quickly, as not only did they not speak Common, but they didn’t even speak the same languages, which I found rather baffling.

“This is interesting,” I finally said, breaking away from the script. “I can’t recall any references to an ‘Argent Warrior’ in anything that I’ve read.” I looked at Cam. “Have you…?”

He’d been making his own research into the history of my world, so it felt prudent to ask. Cam thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Pretty sure I didn’t, but I didn’t really focus on gods. If this is even about gods.”

I cupped my chin, humming thoughtfully. “I might be, but not gods that we’re concerned about. The style is rather different from what we have back home.”

“Another world, then?” Sarah asked.

“That’s one possibility—that the dungeon, or this part of the dungeon at least, is on another world. Or it could be that the dungeon simply transplanted this swamp and everything beneath it into itself.” I paused. “Or it could have made it from scratch, and created a whole mythos just to make it convincing.” I wasn’t sure which option I liked the most. All of them involved mind-boggling amounts of power being thrown around, but I was getting slowly used to that. Still, the sheer scale…

A deep yearning suffused my being. I’d never been one to crave power, but seeing how the dungeon wielded its own… Even if it had ‘merely’ transplanted this location instead of creating it, it was still power beyond what I’d ever imagined possible.

Right now, the only hint I had in that direction was Origin mana. The dungeon had to be utilizing it somehow, because there was only so much you could do with the Aspects alone. I’d stood at the pinnacle of two of them, and the greatest workings I could do paled before a middling spell, if I empowered it with a strand of Origin. It was increasingly apparent, however, that empowering spells with Origin was only scratching the surface of what this strange non-Aspect could do.

Maybe I should have just stuck to my tower and continued to experiment with Origin instead of setting off on an adventure. But it was too late to go back at this point.

I returned my thoughts back to the temple. There wasn’t anything else of interest in the nook—it was clearly meant to be a place for pilgrims to rest, but as no one in our group was actually alive, we pressed on and continued the descent.

“How deep even is this place,” Sarah exclaimed at some point. “Like really, we must have been going down for, what, half an hour?”

Time limit: 8 hours 36 minutes

“Or thereabouts,” I said, checking the task screen. I hadn’t checked when we entered, but it must have been somewhere around the 9 hour mark.

“Unless the stairs go on for another six hours, we’re probably well ahead on time,” Alexis noted.

“Yeah, I don’t imagine the dungeon expected we’d find the temple so fast”, Shiro said. “The whole undead horde probably messed up its plans.”

“I don’t see how we could have defeated all those monsters without the undead, though. With how many there were at the end, we’d definitely have been overrun.” Sarah said.

“That might have been an adaptation,” I said. “Actually, it must have been an adaptation. Their numbers only started growing exponentially when I began raising them.”

“Huh. So you only made it worse.”

“Did I? In the end, the fighting was trivialized, even if the dungeon technically increased the difficulty.”

“It’s probably intelligent, but not all that smart,” David said concluded.

“Also,” I said, pointing to the task screen, “easily offended.”

Time limit: 2 hours 32 minutes

“Did it just—,” Shiro began, “what an ass—”

He was interrupted by Sarah’s hand clamping his mouth shut. “Let’s not insult the dungeon any more than necessary, okay?”

“Gotta admit, though, I didn’t think it’d just spy on us like that,” David said somewhat sheepishly.

“We are, technically, inside of it. It probably can’t help but see and hear everything that’s going on.”

We passed by three more resting points. Sarah, for whatever reason, insisted on calling them shrines. Each had its own little line of cryptic mythos regarding the Argent Warrior, which contained absolutely nothing of substance.

Finally, with an hour and a half left on the clock, and probably a mile under the surface, the grand stairway opened into a gigantic hall that must have been a hundred yards across, peppered with some twenty-odd thick stone pillars that held up the ceiling.

A red carpet spread out from the stairs to the other end of the room. I braced myself, expecting something to happen, and took the final step off the stairs.

Nothing happened.

We followed the carpet in silence, Alexis taking point to scout for traps or anything suspicious. I had the few Wights I’d taken with me spread out through the room to search for hidden enemies. The pillars obscured much of the view, and there was a decent chance the dungeon would want to ambush us on the last leg of the race.

“Holy shit,” Alexis said, suddenly stopping and going tense. By the time we’d caught up to her, her shoulders had relaxed again. “The altar is ahead, but there’s this big-ass statue just behind it. Thought it was a monster for a second.”

My eyes weren’t as good as hers, especially in this dim lighting, so it took a bit more walking until I could see what she’d seen.”

When I did, I immediately understood why she’d panicked. At twenty feet tall, the statue towered above the hall, just barely not reaching the ceiling.

The shape was humanoid, but that’s where the similarities with humans ended. Its head reminded me more of the alligators outside than of any human I’d ever seen. It had a long tail as well, and its body was covered in scales, each painstakingly carved. Its armor was shaped to look like leather, but a closer inspection revealed to be stone as well.

The statue was so lifelike, I’d have thought it an actual being if it hadn’t been for Alexis’s warning.

“This all but confirms the temple can’t have been from home,” I said quietly, not wanting to disturb the heavy atmosphere in the hall. “And if the statue depicts a god, it cannot have been one of ours. There are species other than humans, but nothing that looks like this.”

At the statue’s feet lay an altar, draped with colorful fabrics. We approached it in silence, the tension in the air palpable. I could feel the Wights moving about, but they gave no signals, so I could only assume we were alone in the room. Still, I couldn’t relax. There was no way the dungeon would make this easy for us.

We stopped at the edge of the dais, and I motioned for Shiro to go forward. He’d kept the spear, having slung across his back with a makeshift belt. Alexis stepped to the side, off the carpet, and readied her bow as she kneeled next to a pillar. Sarah summoned her sword and patted Winnie’s head with her other hand. David’s daggers twirled. Sarah, Winnie and David followed close behind Shiro as he climbed the stairs.

Cam and I remained in the back. I clutched my staff and readied a few defensive spells. I cast a quick shield of Force on Shiro, but kept everything else back. I was worried the dungeon would take anything more as an attack and strike back. I wanted to avoid a fight, if it could be done.

Shiro climbed each step carefully, checking for traps and finding none. He was soon before the altar, and he brought the spear to his hand, slowly bringing it to rest on top of the altar.

A few things happened in quick succession.

First, an arrow flew, Alexis having seen the threat and reacted immediately. Unfortunately, it did absolutely nothing as the gigantic clawed hand of the status came crashing towards the altar. Less than an inch from touching the altar, the spear was ripped from Shiro’s hand, the Force shield barely protecting his fingers from having been taken along with the spear.

In an instant, the statue had come to life, retrieved the spear—it’s spear. In his hands, it was back to the original length we’d found it in.

Cursing under my breath, I let loose the Mass Haste spell I’d been holding on to and felt the world slow down around me. It seemed my earlier restraint had been for nothing, but the situation was salvageable. Big as it was, the giant had to be a mana construct, and they always had a weakness. I activated Soul Sight, and—

The giant statue was not, in fact, a mana construct. It was a living creature with a proper mind and soul. Which was an absolutely baffling discovery, because sticking a soul and a mind to a stone was not supposed to be possible.

Gargoyles existed, of course. We’d fought some not long ago, but like any other dungeon creature, once it died, it would dissolve into mana, which would then return to the dungeon for it to spawn new monsters—they weren’t really alive, merely constructs made by the dungeon, so they didn’t have to follow the rules imposed by nature.

There was a reason all my minions were made of flesh and bone. They were needed to anchor a soul to this world, or it would quickly disappear into the Beyond.

There was an alternative, like how I’d made my phylactery, but I could tell at a glance this wasn’t the case here. No, the stone lizardman’s soul was directly anchored to the stone.

Worst of all, both mind and soul were shielded. The dungeon, it seemed, had had enough of me taking the easy way out, so the only way we could defeat the lizardman was with brute force.

Said lizardman was also preparing to swing again, so I wasn’t in a position to wonder on how the hell the dungeon had managed something I’d been trying to do for years. Instead, I worked to shield the three Heroes and one bear from getting skewered by the giant’s spear.

A fireball passed next to my head—and a decent one, I had to admit. Cam was improving at a fast pace. Unfortunately, while it took the statue in the chest, it did nothing to stop his momentum, nor to truly harm the statue at all. Stone wasn’t exactly known to burn, and the force of the explosion was weak before the behemoth.

David was quick, disappearing from the front and reappearing behind the giant, slashing at its shins rather ineffectively. More arrows flew from Alexis, but they were merely an annoyance.

Sarah ducked as the spear flew past her head, but Shiro, perhaps unwisely, stepped forward, trying to catch the shaft and block its path.

Luckily for him, he was only sent flying into a pillar.

Seeing the uselessness of his attacks, David retreated, appearing next to Alexis shortly after. Sarah hopped onto Winnie, spurring him to run off the dais and towards where Shiro had fallen.

The statue, at least, was in no hurry. It held the spear with one hand and regarded us coldly. To my Haste-addled mind, the passing of time felt like molasses. I thought, and thought, and thought some more, trying to come up with a plan.

If all else failed, I had Mind Spike, but it required too much Mana, and I wasn’t certain the giant wasn’t protected against attacks like this.

The statue’s eyes narrowed, locking in on the sprinting knight and bear pair, and he began to move. He rushed towards them, completely ignoring Alexis and David, who were closer. An idea sparked in my mind.

Leave Shiro. Weave through the pillars, I sent to Sarah, using the link I had with all my undead. She hesitated for a moment, then directed Winnie away from their original route. The giant was hot on their trail.

Using the same link, I relayed my plan to the rest of the group. It was simple and short enough that it took but a moment. Then we got to work.

Sarah and Winnie continued to weave through the pillars, the living statue following close. He did, however, suffer from the same fate big creatures usually did. Changing their momentum was hard, and he struggled with the constantly changing directions.

That wasn’t to say that he hadn’t nearly gotten the two.

On one particular turn, Sarah did a full 180 turn around a pillar. The giant used the pillar to aid in said turn, and at that moment, Cam and I struck.

Most attacks using Force pushed energy towards the target, but that didn’t mean the reverse wasn’t possible. In this case, the attack was a rather simple spell that pulled the target towards the user. In this case, the target was the giant’s foot—the one currently touching the ground.

Already unstable from the turn, and with his foot yanked out from under him, the giant crashed heavily onto the ground. His grip on the spear loosened as he tried to push himself back up.

That was enough for David to appear next to him and hug the sphere. Instantly, the spear morphed to fit its new user, and the giant’s hand squeezed around empty air. A heartbeat later, David was on the dais, spear in hand.

Not waiting another second, he smashed it down on the altar.

A moment later, everything went black.