At the top of the stairs out of the water, there was a small stone chest. There were a couple of random charms within, but both Kaldalis and Courbois let Balrim and the DPS take their pick. As dungeon drops, they were higher Item Level than what the pair of them had crafted, but the random itemization meant that they would be trading important defensive stats for random affinities that would be unlikely to help.

Past the chest, there was another stone door, though this one was hanging from just one hinge, revealing a peek of what was beyond. The stone hall beyond was caved in, full of collapsed stone blocks, but to the left there was a darkened opening into a mud-walled natural tunnel, presumably the designated way forward.

“We ready to move?” Kaldalis asked as Balrim tossed him the fourth potion on cooldown, finally restoring him to full power.

“Are we doing the same all-out run as before?” Myrin asked, making a show of stretching like a track-and-field athlete before a sprint.

“We can slow down if you want,” Kaldalis said with a shrug. “We did save a lot of time on that boss by not wiping to it.”

Myrin waved him off. “Nah, it’s fine. I’m mostly just bitching for the sake of bitching. Gotta keep reminding everyone I’m short or you’ll just forget about me.”

The group shared a laugh at that, everyone reassuring Myrin that she was, in fact, unforgettable.

When they were ready, Kaldalis drew his glaive from his inventory. After having one-shotted the first boss, he felt a lot of the pressure to hurry drain away. Obviously, if they wanted their record to stand for a long time, they would need to bust their asses to save every second. Their current goal was to beat Voker’s run by a mile, which meant a gold split was good enough.

He had to manhandle the crooked stone door to get it out of the way, though after struggling with it for a second, Reno stepped up to help, and the two of them together moved it aside much more easily than he could alone. The metal hinge squeaked softly, but the crumbling stone it was set into came apart, and the whole door tumbled aside and landed flat on the floor with a deep clapping sound. As soon as it was cleared - and Kaldalis was sure it hadn’t landed on anyone’s toes - he took off down the tunnel, looking for trouble.

The first few feet of the tunnel was just a passage through damp mud, held open by thin white roots along the ceiling and walls. Kaldalis assumed the roots were from the trees in the jungle above them, but after being swallowed, he’d lost track of his own sense of direction.

Once the tunnel opened into the first natural chamber, it was like stepping into another world.

The room was like an underground swamp. There were trunks of gray material that looked like porous, barkless wood scattered around the space, and pale tufts of grass sprouting here and there out of the floor and lower parts of the walls. Around the bases of the not-trees there were flesh-toned bundles of thick reeds. The temperature felt ten degrees colder here than it had in the stone tunnels, and the dankness in the air turned to a thin mist over the muddy ground.

“Too spooky for me,” Courbois muttered from behind him.

“I can fix that,” Kaldalis said.

He took a deep breath and broke into a run. His feet squelched loudly in the mud with every step.

As soon as he was out in the open, he started yelling wordlessly, belting out the tune of a heavy metal guitar riff. As he ran, he swept his spear out wide, doing his best to be a big loud nuisance as he knocked the haft against the gray trunks and smacked the head through reeds and grasses as he went.

He heard someone laugh at him as he ran, but being a big loud nuisance paid off exactly how he hoped. The trash mobs in the room emerged, orienting on his off-key Iron Maiden guitar solo impression. He knew it wouldn’t put him permanently on their aggro list - he would need to strike them to secure a hold - but just running heedless of danger was as effective as ever for sight- and sound-aggroing everything in the room to draw them together.

The first foes he saw were flat snakelike creatures that detached themselves from the gray trunks, flopping to the ground and slithering after him, snapping at his heels. Their coloration and patterning matched the trunks perfectly as camouflage, rendering them nearly invisible even though they were each over twelve feet long. Their jaws were sideways, opening by splitting their heads in half, revealing disproportionately huge teeth.

Do not like, Kaldalis thought as he ran.

The next trash mob was the tufts of grass themselves. One of the tufts he struck in his effort to make noise actually took damage from the strike, suffering one hundred and nine physical damage and fifteen earth damage. That grass tuft - along with two others - uprooted itself, the grass itself stiffening to bladelike sharpness and charging at him on tiny rootlike legs. The other grasses in the area remained unmoving, revealing that not every tuft was a living foe.

There was only one of the third enemy in this room.

It was the only thing not making use of camouflage, and had instead been obscured by the trees and reeds in the area. Kaldalis immediately recognized it as a deer, but there were a number of things about it that were just wrong. First of all, it appeared wet, and as it looked up at him, its body wiggled and flowed like it was made of mud rather than merely coated in it. From atop its head, instead of a rack of antlers, rose a thick crown of the same flesh-toned reeds as the ones at the bases of the not-trees.

Despite being a deer-based creature, its response to him was to charge rather than flee.

There was a narrow passage at the far end of the room, and without a barrier to stop him, he plunged on through it, heedless of what he would find beyond.

The next room was much like the first, but slightly larger. It was more reeds and less of those woodlike trunk things. The lack of cover showed that there were three of the deer monsters, and as he ran into the room screaming, the only other foes that rose to meet him were two more tufts of living grass.

As he entered, he activated Sweeping Strikes and started flailing around. The ability guided the weapon to slash through the foes, doing between one hundred and two hundred damage to each foe he struck, and sticking them to him. As the enemies in the room converged on him, he swept his glaive through them as well, cleaving them all for damage to get their attention.

He crashed his way through the crowd of enemies into the room, and hooves cracked against his arms and shoulders, the strikes doing only eighty-nine physical damage and sixteen earth damage. They were relatively paltry hits compared to his hit point pool, and as he got through the group and emerged on the other side his next couple of sweeping strikes secured his hold on them all.

The far end of the room was blocked. There was obviously a passage there, but one of those thick not-trees had fallen against it, leaving only a pair of narrow edges open - not near enough space to squeeze through, even without a dozen monsters chasing him. From there, though, it was a simple matter to clean up. His friends caught up, and they fell into the same familiar pattern. Courbois peeled a couple of monsters off of his pack of foes, and everyone else beat the shit out of them until the EXP fell out. It only took a few minutes for the group to chew through everything.

The monsters' names all seemed ridiculous. Kaldalis found that the little grass monsters were called Bladed Muhly, and their attacks mostly consisted of just running at his shins, which was odd since they had the highest stats of the group. They were doing the most damage and resisting the most damage in turn. The muddy deer monsters were called Deerushes, which made sense, as their primary tactic seemed to be about speed: rushing in at speeds Kaldalis struggled to keep ahead of, making kiting the whole group of mobs much more challenging. Kaldalis assumed the snake things were actually a sort of eel, since they were called Porcineel, though they had no obvious piglike qualities. Their attacks were the most difficult to manage when one got close, as the giant sideways jaws came in at him from unexpected angles.

Once the fight was over, Kaldalis was only a few experience points away from level fifteen, which was an exciting distraction, but he was in the middle of a dungeon.

The only way up was forward.

“Do we need five minutes again?” Kaldalis asked as Balrim tossed him a heal.

“Maybe about forty-five seconds,” Balrim said, gesturing vaguely towards where he assumed the potion cooldown was on Balrim’s UI. “And then you both will be back at full.”

“Cool,” Kaldalis said, moving towards the blocked exit, “I’m going to get moving on this then.”

“Out of the way, tank boy,” Myrin said, muscling past him. “Let the people with decent strength stats handle this.”

Kaldalis raised his hand and took a step back as Myrin, Reno, and Ess stepped up to the log blocking the way. Reno and Ess took up positions at both ends while Myrin stepped up to the middle. With one heave, the three of them picked it up. The taller two on the ends hefted the log up to shoulder height. Myrin held both hands up above her head to support it from the center.

The three of them easily carried it out of the way, tossing it aside.

Kaldalis waited patiently for Balrim to finish getting Courbois back to full health, and then the group made their way onward to the next challenge.