Something was not right with this scenario. There’d been nothing inside that window slit when Velik was climbing past it. The dark was no obstacle to his vision, and he knew it had just been an empty, dusty room in there. The lizard that crawled out was one thing. It was small and could have been clinging to the wall inside the tower.

This frog monster thing was something else entirely. It was too big to hide, and it smelled too foul for him to have missed it. Its skin was dark and spotted with white bumps that resembled constellations across the night sky, and its eyes gleamed like twin moons as its tongue dragged him in. Its mouth was big enough to swallow him in one gulp, and it definitely hadn’t been there two seconds ago.

Velik’s initial reaction was to just kill the damn thing. It wasn’t that strong. A single [Dread Lance] would probably do it, and even that felt like overkill. A bit of spear work would be enough to overpower this particular monster without stressing his resources.

And yet, he hesitated. Velik did not understand what had happened, or where he was. Something told him he wasn’t on the other side of that arrow slit, if for no other reason than he didn’t physically fit through it. The frog had used some sort of magic to draw him in, and he was afraid that if he killed it, he’d end up trapped with its corpse.

At the same time, letting himself get reeled in and eaten was obviously not the answer. Velik drew his dagger of afflictions, the one the system called the Sixth Plague, and slashed it across the frog’s tongue. A single stroke severed the meaty appendage, and it triggered the dagger’s many enchantments. [Bleeding] ensured the wound wouldn’t close. [Weakness] imbued fatigue in the frog’s muscles. [Blinding] stole its vision.

To top it all off, his own skill, [Burden of the Beast], kicked in as well. The frog let out a squealing croak of mixed pain, surprise, and sudden, unexpected exertion as the magic swept over its body. Velik watched it warily, wondering what other kinds of skills he could expect from the monster, but it seemed to be struggling under the weight of his one dagger strike.

Okay, what do I know about this? It’s obviously a dungeon monster. I’m inside the dungeon right now. It pulled me in, somehow. There are no doors in this room that I can see, though there could easily be one behind the monster. It’s more than big enough to hide one. The only other way out is the window slit, but that’s eight inches wide at best and I’m not fitting through there without breaking stuff.

The monster was big, but it didn’t fill the entire room—another hint that something funky was going on. Velik couldn’t see any good reason for a room this big to even be in the watchtower, though he supposed dungeon architecture could be to blame. Either way, it had the benefit of letting him skirt around the no doubt multi-ton monster to look for an exit.

The frog tried to shift in place to keep itself pointed at Velik, but he was too fast for it to do more than blink before he disappeared. A confused, pained croak came out of its mouth, followed by a billowing cloud of noxious yellow-green gas. Other than the rank smell assaulting his sensitive nose, it was completely ineffective.

He circled the monster, then frowned when no door revealed itself. If the way out wasn’t behind the frog, then the only place left to look was beneath its bulk. While Velik could probably shove it aside, he thought it would be easier to just stab his spear into its backside. The moment the steel penetrated flesh, the frog lurched forward. It tumbled into a heavy crash that ended with its body slapping against the wall.

“That sounded… wet,” Velik said, somewhat uncomfortable at the noise.

There was no trap door under the frog’s ass either, which meant it was the window or nothing. A glance over at it showed him what he expected to see, mountains coated in trees and a dark, star-studded sky that still had a few hours to dawn. It must have used some sort of magical illusion to hide itself, but that doesn’t explain how it pulled me through the window.

This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

On impulse, Velik skirted around the frog again and approached the window. A few light stabs to inflict [Burden of the Beast] secured it in place, as well as ensuring it was blinded and weakened. Blood turned gray from mixing with the slime coating on the frog’s skin dribbled out in steady spurts from the wounds, but it was such a massive monster that it was in no danger of bleeding out any time soon.

The view didn’t change, but when Velik called out for Torwin, he didn’t get a response. Experimentally, he poked at the opening with his spear. The air stretched and twisted as he pressed against it, but the spear failed to make it past the window. “What in the hell,” he muttered, throwing a glance back at the collapsed frog in the corner.

Either the frog was the source of the magic, or the dungeon was. He couldn’t kill the dungeon from where he was, which left just the monster. Unfortunately, Velik had no idea what it was and he’d long ago lost [Identify]. It was part of [Apex Hunter] now, but the part of the skill that told him what he was fighting had been discarded when it had shifted from being an active skill to part of a passive.

All the bestiaries he’d gone through in preparation for his iron trials with the Monster Hunters Guild had been stuffed with weak, common monsters, things that hunters who were barely level 25 could reasonably expect to encounter. This monster, whatever it was, hadn’t been in there. Velik really only had two options: wait and hope for Torwin to rescue him, or start breaking things and see what happened.

He could be patient when a hunt required it, but waiting for someone else to save him wasn’t how he did things. Brandishing his spear, he turned on the frog. For something that big, it was best to claim the kill in a single blow. [Dread Lance] blasted the frog monster into chunks of meat, painting the entire room black and green.

[You have slain a pocket hopper (level 34).]

[You have been awarded 1 decarma.]

The room immediately started melting, like a wax candle held too close to a hearth fire. The walls sagged and the ceiling started to splash down in great blobs of soft granite. At the same time, the floor tore open, dropping chunks of frog meat into a black abyss. Before Velik could fall in, the magic keeping him contained unraveled.

The illusion, if that was what it had been, popped, and he found himself standing somewhere new. Velik had expected to either be left trapped in the room, where he’d be forced to break down a wall to escape, or to be returned to the outside of the watchtower. Instead, he was in what appeared to be a massive arena with a few dozen monsters in cages arrayed in a semicircle a hundred feet away.

Uh… What the hell?

On some unseen signal, the cage doors swung open, freeing a whole horde. At the same time, a new notification appeared.

[You have entered the domain of a champion elite: Kulkorax the Pit Master.]

* * *

Torwin stared up at where Velik had been sucked into a window far too small to let him through for a long moment. “Oh, fuck me. Of course it fucking is. Morgus, smite this damn dungeon right now. Son of a bitch.”

It was a dimensional dungeon, one that regarded physical laws regarding space and geometry as suggestions to be ignored. Walking through a door, then back across it wouldn’t lead him back to the room he’d started in. Impossibly long hallways that went on for miles without end were to be expected. At some point, he’d probably walk through a door, only to find himself on the ceiling of the next room and already falling through the air.

Even worse, the monsters wouldn’t be hindered by any of this. The dungeon would move them around at will, stacking the odds in its favor and denying the hunters trapped inside any sort of rest or reprieve. There were no safe rooms and no way to make one, not when a monster could teleport on top of them at any given moment.

And of course the rookie hunter was in there on his own. Velik had no experience with this kind of challenge, and Torwin had no way to rescue him. If the dungeon was smart, and dimensional dungeons always were, it would keep them separated. The only thing to do was keep breaking things and killing monsters to force the dungeon to burn mana until it had nothing left. Only once it was completely drained would they be able to find each other and the core.

All the supplies were in Velik’s spatial storage, too. Starvation was a very real danger if Torwin went in there, but he couldn’t just abandon Velik. With just the two of them, it would be a race against time to drain the dungeon before exhaustion won out. That was a challenge Velik would surely fail on his own.

No, the only way to save Velik was to get in there himself and cause as much destruction as possible. Still silently cursing, Torwin took a few steps back, then launched himself forward at a run. He hit the wall at full speed and took six long steps straight up it. He reached the closest arrow slit, then felt the dungeon pull at him the instant his hand crossed the threshold.

Here we go…