Chapter XLI – Men in the midst of grey bricks.

Lots of bricks. A whole lot more gray. Blue bits of battered slime. A little bit more gray. The essence of an insignificant, minor dungeon as the one that Brown and co had found themselves in could be described as such.

“So, this is it, young man?” Brown looked around the aforementioned scene while their unexpected guests did their best to psychologically recover from being slimed so suddenly. “I must say, these ‘dungeons’ seem to be quite underwhelming.”

Shinasi himself was busy searching for any loot, but he too had reached a disappointing conclusion. “Normally there are a whole lot more encounters. Another party must have visited recently.” He patted the familiar gray brick of the dungeon. “Plus, these minor dungeons are nothing too impressive. Believe me, I think you’d be impressed if you ever saw the dungeons near the Imperial capital.” For now however, his party was stuck in a place that wouldn’t look amiss on a dungeon crawler made for the Commodore 64.

Ayomide’s eyes shined with curiosity. “Oh? How’d those in the capital look like?”

Shinasi erred and hummed for a while before his head dejectedly slanted down. “To be truthful,” he was normally not above making fabrications about his exploits, being quite below it in fact, but Ayomide wasn’t any old wench in the tavern “the Minor Curry Dungeon is the only dungeon I’ve been into. There is only the one at the peak of Mount Curry that’s nearby.”

“Boo.” Ayomide gave a playful slap to Shinasi’s unguarded shoulder. “What a lousy adventurer you are.”

“I’m sure the young man is better off not entering even bigger dungeons.” Still unable to clear the association between ‘dungeon’ and ‘incarceration’, Brown wasn’t too comfortable with staying in the drab underground basement. “God forbid, I don’t get why you’d willingly throw yourself in a dungeon.”

“Indeed, I believe that we are too slow for people breaking out of prison.” One of their new acquaintances, Rabanowicz, looked ready to smash some skulls with her book. “I know not why we are here, but I do know that I have committed no crimes in the eyes of state or the One Above.”

Her partner-in-crime Watanabe did his best to make her lower her dangerous weapon of literature. “Doctor, we aren’t breaking anyone out of anywhere. I’ll give you the detailed explanation later, but we are mostly safe save for those slimes that just attacked us.”

“What the gentleman over there just said.” Shinasi was surprised at how much he could agree with the otherworlder. “This is a place to battle monsters and loot some loot. I don’t know why you two are here, but weird things always tend to happen with you otherworlders… Like the place you just got up from.” A few of the bricks on the wall had shifted from where Watanabe had been crouching, the weight of his whole body causing the bricks to somewhat go inwards into another room. “I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen that here.” Shinasi approached the newly formed dent in the wall for a closer look. He kicked and prodded the bricks for a while until they collapsed and revealed a dark corridor. “Ayomide, shed us some light please?”

Ayomide pushed through the small crowd to [Luminate] the corridor. Her lamination revealed that this corridor was not formed of gray bricks like the rest of the dungeon, but another form of gray stone that continuously stretched on for seemingly no end. The only thing breaking it apart were the scant cracks on the wall which had the occasional drop of water escape between them. It wasn’t the most inviting of all sights, to say the least. Looking at such a sight, reasonable people would nope out and not enter. People in works of fantasy, however, tend to go into any place as long as it’s interesting enough and the plot demands it. “Old man,” Shinasi stared at the secret passageway with lust: lust for loot “I think we just hit the jackpot.”

Brown looked at the dark corridor for a second before turning back. He wasn’t a coward; he was just a rational human being who didn’t run on fantasy logic. “We have a mission, remember? We can’t go around being distracted by every divergence that comes our way.”

“Yes, I’d rather not get eaten by the boogeymen or whatnot that lie there.” Just one peek at the unending darkness was enough for Ayomide to shiver.

“While the prospect of a dungeon is exciting, I’d like it if we could be lead outside and to the closest human settlement.” Watanabe closed the discussion with this final statement.

“Aw, c’mon…” Shinasi was outvoted 4-to-1. The rules of democracy dictated that they should return back, and return back he’d do if he didn’t suddenly hear the ground below him rumble. “Do- I’m not drunk, am I?! The ground is shaking!”

“I’m as sober as the Lord made me and I can confirm that the ground is shaking!” Brown and the rest of the party scrambled to hold on to the walls while the tremor got closer and closer. Eventually the rumble turned into noises of metal scraping into each other, a hellish noise akin to nails on a blackboard. “Oh Lord, please grant us some of your endless mercy!”

“Ah… Help us, oh help us… Adohe…” Desperate times called for desperate prayer from Rabanowicz. No matter how much she prayed though, she apparently didn’t have enough levels in Prayer to stop what was coming at them smashing the last few bricks that had been left unsmashed. It barged into the room from the corridor, suddenly halting once it made it into the middle.

“What hath God wrought?!”

“This…” Watanabe had to pause so that he could find the appropriate group of words to explain the thing in front of them “This giant death robot apparently!” He had managed to perfectly convey what was in front of them: a giant metal cube running on threads with three arms attached to the right, left and front of the cube. The top of the cube had a shiny, enigmatic black sphere which seemed to be continuously rotating around. Its body had a few markings on the brink of erasure: some sort of red rectangle, the numbers ‘4’ and ‘2’ in Arabic numerals, and other text-like markings which had become illegible due to how faded and scratched they were. Its body was rusty and dusty in general, showing that whoever or whatever made this machine had forgotten about it a long while ago.

“The giant death what-” The giant death robot in question used one of its many arms to slap Ayomide away, sending her away to a wall on the other side of the dungeon room. She crashed onto the wall before bouncing back onto the floor in an unrefined fashion. “The giant death bastard!”

“Why is this in this crappy minor dungeon?!” Shinasi rushed forward to help the battered Ayomide get back on her feet. He put his shield between them and the robot. “Are you fine?”

“I’ve been finer-” The aptly-nicknamed giant death robot once more rudely interrupted Ayomide’s speech, this time with rapid gunfire. One if its arms supported a multi-barreled weapon which spun around while readying itself do deliver more-than-suppressive fire.

Whirr-ra-tatatata…tatataclickclickclickclickclick!

Thankfully its systems didn’t seem to work too well for actually killing people. The giant death robot’s gun was focused on the brightest thing in the room: Ayomide’s lamination spell which floated way above her. All of its two-hundred bullets had made way for the ceiling, excavating a large hole through the bricks. Loose chunks of brick and rock rained down from the ceiling which hit the robot’s unsuspecting victims right on their heads. Thankfully no big chunks had dropped down, otherwise there would have been a sudden rise in traumatic head injuries in the Minor Curry Dungeon area.

“What do we do with this… thing?!” Brown got up from his crouched position. “Shinasi, do you know anything about this?”

Shinasi quickly spat out a small piece of rubble that had sneakily made its way into his mouth. “Pweh- My instincts are telling me that we should leg it!” As if the giant death robot had heard Shinasi’s intentions for escape, it quickly drove its threads towards the poor adventurer while making the ground rumble once more. He’d have become human meat paste if not for the timely intervention of Ayomide and a healthy dose of wind magic pushing him away.

“This thing definitely seems faster than us!” Ayomide took out the steel knife, courtesy of the late Watanabe Generico, and pointed it towards the giant death robot as if she was David challenging Goliath. “I don’t think our legs are gonna be carrying us as fast as we need them to.”

There was a temporary bout of silence. Brown, the old man, was in one corner without any magic or overpowered abilities and items to protect himself. Shinasi and Ayomide were in another corner, with the revolutionary catgirl on a limited supply of magic and Shinasi on a limited supply of skill. The errant otherworlders, Watanabe and Rabanowicz, were still busy trying to understand their situation. The giant death robot stared them down, trying to kill them for reasons that had been long forgotten. Its machinery whirred and stirred, echoes of an age long past.

Then all hell broke loose.