Rainbow Sky Slide

For our evolutions, Heather and I required a whole host of lower-level materials like Bull Rush spines, Cattery stems, Ghost residue (unaffectionately called Ghost goo by adventurers), and Mummy wrappings. Those we could - and did - obtain by wandering about, completing regular quests. Four of the items we needed required two separate dungeons, however. Heather needed five Angel’s feathers and a Demon Bull’s horn, while I needed an Angel’s halo and five Demon cores.

There were a couple of different dungeons within the Kingdom of Asteria that had Demon Bulls in them, either as guardians or as random monsters, but only one dungeon with an Angel. That dungeon also happened to be the closest one to the city we were based out of, so we decided to visit it first.

I say it was closest to our city, but that didn’t mean it was close. We first had to travel a week to another city - Flint City, which was on the Western border of Asteria. On its far side was a mountain range that separated Asteria from Quantar, and the C-ranked dungeon we needed started at the base of those mountains.

The dungeon was called Rainbow Sky Slide, and it was my first introduction to the fact that dungeons had names. It made sense, honestly, but I wasn’t sure what to make of the naming convention.

Naturally, we did our research first. Upon reaching Flint City, we headed directly to its branch of the Adventurer’s Guild and let them know we’d be staying there for a while. Then we entered the Guild library to research Rainbow Sky Slide.

It seemed to be a field-type dungeon, which I took to mean that the interior managed to look like it was outside. Strangely, because I came from a world with video games that could easily replicate this sort of thing, I was the only one who wasn’t completely baffled by the idea.

“What do you mean it looks like you’re outside?” Nero argued with one of the adventurers we’d asked about it. “Aren’t you inside?”

The adventurer gave an aggrieved sigh. “Look, kid, you’ll get it when you see it. Yeah, you’re inside, but it looks like you’re outside. You can’t find any walls. You just gotta look for the stairs. That’s why you need to bring a compass.” He left before Nero could press him any further on the subject, meaning I got to listen to my Master grumble about impossibilities.

The monsters inhabiting the dungeon seemed to be primarily wind-aspected creatures, with some light-aspected monsters present at the upper levels. Unlike the dungeon we'd encountered before, this one went up rather than down, and the guardian on the top floor stood in front of the entrance to a long slide. Many parties, unless they specifically needed something from the guardian, simply ran past it and dove down the slide.

The guardian was an Angel, a level sixty light-aspected monster with high defense. When its health got low, it would create a shield that blocked all damage for two minutes, and cutting winds would fill the area around it, causing steady but mild damage for the duration of the shield. In other words, it was a heal check. If you lacked a healer, you could buy healing potions, and we did, but healing potions in this world were vastly inferior to light-aspected healing magic, and they were expensive to boot.

However, we didn’t expect to need the potions. Fay was a powerful healer already, and I wasn’t bad either. Between the two of us, we should easily pass the heal check.

"Alright! Let's go for a full clear!" Nero cried as we entered the dungeon. Alicia clutched her sword tightly and followed.

We found ourselves in a meadow. Even though we’d just a second ago been entering a large, stone door in the side of a mountain, we now stood in a broad, open space filled with spring flowers, lush green grass, and the occasional tree. In the distance, we could see small buildings that looked like cottages dotting the landscape. Even to me, it was a weird experience. As we walked through the door, each of us immediately turned to look at the door we’d passed through and found nothing but more meadow.

“I like this dungeon,” Heather immediately decided. Although she rarely flew as a human, she still preferred open spaces like this.

Alicia’s fear seemed to have taken a hit, too, by the stark difference between her first dungeon experience and this one visually. The tension had mostly left her frame, and she sounded noticeably happier as she asked Heather, “Would you mind flying up and seeing if there’s a height limit?”

“Of course, Master.” Heather floated up, the gentle breeze ruffling her dress as she did. Although she wore shorts under her dress, we still looked away as she rose above us. It just felt weird to look up someone’s dress, regardless of whether there was anything to see.

Several minutes later, Heather landed back beside us and shook her head. “It could be that there is a ceiling somewhere, but the air got thin without me encountering any,” she reported.

Like the non-Euclidean geometry, it made no sense. It was in line with what our research had told us to expect, though, so we checked our compass, checked the map, and headed toward a specific cottage.

The first floor of Rainbow Sky Slide mostly had Dandy Lions and Hydrageas occupying it. Dandy Lions were essentially extra fluffy lions with wind magic. They weren’t very aggressive, and some people even tamed them as pets, because they were very cute. In the dungeon, they mostly ran from us, but if we happened across a pride of them, they would sometimes attack. Their wind magic was powerful, but their fluffy bodies caught fire easily, so we had no trouble killing them when needed.

Hydrageas were more troublesome.

Like Dandy Lions, non-adventurers sometimes kept Hydrageas. Unlike Dandy Lions, people didn’t do this because they were cute. Although Hydrageas looked like beautiful flowers, their real value lay in their poison. Small amounts of it could be used as an anasthetic, so people kept them in secure gardens to harvest the drug for doctors and less reputable citizens.

Here in the dungeon, Hydrangeas grew in clumps of shimmering, glittering air that one had to avoid breathing in lest they be afflicted with a powerful Sleep condition. Hydrageas didn’t eat people. They just put them to sleep. However, Dandy Lions were immune to their poison, so the two worked nicely together, the Hydrageas putting people to sleep and the Dandy Lions eating them.

It wasn’t as though there was no danger, but it was a far more relaxed feel than the dungeon we’d encountered before. We meandered through it, finding ourselves going slower than expected simply because it was hard to feel any sense of urgency here. At last, however, we came to the cottage the map said would lead to the second floor. We entered, climbed the stairs, and found ourselves in another meadow instead of the cottage’s second story.

This meadow was filled with mist. We all sniffed it experimentally. Apparently, this mist sometimes became dangerous in high quantities, and adventurers were urged to take cover within one of the cottages if the mist smelled sweet. Luckily, it smelled like nothing, so we once more checked the map and continued.

The second floor introduced Wild Horns, the evolved version of Horned Rabbits. They weren’t very cute, in my opinion. Their fur was coarser, and they were the size of small bears. Wild Horns were solitary creatures, though, so we didn’t have to worry about encountering more than one at a time. We’d read that when they encountered each other, they would either immediately go different directions or reproduce, and if we encountered any doing the latter, we should just avert our eyes and keep moving, because they could keep at it for a full day, and they didn’t drop anything useful enough to warrant deciding to fight two angry Wild Horns at once.

Rainbow Sky Slide was a ten-level dungeon, and the first eight levels were all very similar. The mist grew thicker in each one, and each floor introduced a new type of monster in addition to all the previous ones, but it was generally pretty easy. I understood why I’d heard it called a ‘beginner dungeon.’

On the ninth floor, the mist grew so thick that we couldn’t see each other, even when we were right next to each other. It was scary, really, but at the same time, records showed that there weren’t any monsters on the ninth floor. It was, instead, simply a long maze that the party had to navigate blind.

Nero and I both had some scouting skills, so our party was fine. If we got separated, I could use Intuition to locate the shortest route to the others, and Nero could use his skills to locate the nearest living creatures (and tell what they were), giving him a similar result.

Even groups without any scouting skills could pass the ninth floor, thanks to the work of their predecessors. Since it was impossible to see where you were going, the map for the floor was a series of numbered instructions that often made no sense. It was full of things like:

1. Walk fifteen meters North.
2. Turn clockwise 45 degrees and walk three meters.
3. Turn counterclockwise 180 degrees and walk two meters.
NOTE: DO NOT turn clockwise or simply walk one meter in the previous step! DON'T TRY TO MATH!

I got the feeling the people writing the instructions had met a lot of people who had trouble following instructions. 

So long as one carefully and accurately followed the instructions, they would find themselves suddenly on the tenth floor within two hours without ever having gone up any stairs. However, if a party messed up and didn’t have any scouting skills, they could become lost forever. I really had to wonder what kind of party had first cleared this dungeon. It must have been terrifying to step from the misty but navigable eighth floor to the impossible ninth floor. Parties nowadays took the ninth floor as a bit of a joke, but that was only possibly because we had such thorough instructions.

At last, two weeks after we’d first entered, we reached the tenth floor and the guardian. As advertised, we took one step, bracing ourselves for the possibility that we’d gotten the instructions wrong somehow and would have to use our skills to find our way out, then another step, and found ourselves suddenly in a brightly-lit, gorgeous area.

It looked like we were on top of the world. The ground below us was squishy and made of what looked like clouds, and here and there we saw the tops of mountains poking through. The sky above us was endlessly blue, and prismatic light reflected off crystalline ice structures that hung in the air, supported by seemingly nothing.

In the center of it all were two things.

One was a flat, crystal structure that led into the clouds. The slide. The other, standing in front of it, was our target: an Angel. It was tall - taller than Justice by a few inches and far taller than any of the rest of us - and almost all white. It had one enormous pair of feathered wings, marble features, and a golden spear. It didn’t appear to have any specific sex - it was naked, but there was nothing there, like your stereotypical alien.

I was immediately disappointed. Angels could spawn with or without halos. It was a guaranteed drop from those with one, but it was guaranteed not to drop if the Angel didn’t have one, and this one did not. We would have to run this dungeon again after this.

We could, in theory, simply wait. At least one or two parties entered this dungeon every day, so there were plenty of other parties here. We wouldn’t have to wait more than a day or two at most for another party to come through. If they killed the Angel, we could then wait for the guardian to respawn and see if the next one had a halo.

However, most people didn’t clear this dungeon for the Angel’s materials. Besides, we were also here to level Fay and Justice, so running it a few more times wasn’t a bad thing. We attacked the Angel. We may as well get some feathers, since we were here.