Noah looked at it.

His head still ached slightly. His arms were tired from the bow work and the sword exchanges both. His mana reserves weren’t empty but they weren’t full either.

But across that room was another door.

And beyond that door was whatever this dungeon had been hiding at its center.

"Yeah," Noah said. "Let’s go. But before that’s lets collect their dead bodies...but there are too many."

Damien smirk. "Don’t worry. I have brought another storage storage device. "He pulled out a big brown color pouch from his waistband.

"See, this one have bigger space. No problem for us. I got it from master."

"Damn! You lucky bastard." Noah couldn’t help but comment.

"Haha! I am not that lucky. Now let’s collect them." Damien said with chuckled. 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

Both of them work faster and put those dead bodies inside the storage pouch.

"No treasure here."

"Yeah. Let’s go further." Damien said while looking at the door on other side.

Both of them nodded at each other and moved forward.

The second door opened easier than the first.

It swung open with a lower groan and they stepped through into what waited on the other side.

It was like a huge tunnel of cave.

Long and wide. Much wider than any passage they had walked so far. The ceiling rose high enough that the top of it disappeared into shadow even with the crystal clusters running along both walls.

Their footsteps echoed differently here, spreading out instead of bouncing back tight like they did in the narrower corridors.

Noah looked up at the ceiling as they walked.

That was when he heard them.

A dry rustling sound from somewhere above.

Dark shapes dropped from the ceiling.

They were bats, but not the ordinary kind. These were large, with wingspans wider than

Noah’s arm reach and bodies the size of a small dog, their skin a deep grey and their eyes reflecting the crystal light as twin points of pale red. They came down in a loose group, screeching, wings beating the air into a chaos of displaced sound.

It was loud and sudden and deeply unpleasant.

Noah threw his arm up to cover his face as the wings came close.

Damien’s blade was already out. He cut through the nearest two in a single exchange, their bodies dropping to the tunnel floor with dull impacts. Noah got his sword free and took the one angling toward his left side, catching it mid-dive with a short horizontal cut.

They weren’t strong. Fast and disorienting.

Within two minutes the screeching had stopped.

Noah lowered his arm and looked at the mess on the tunnel floor.

"Ugly things," he said.

"Mm," Damien agreed, already moving forward.

---

The kobolds came shortly after.

A group of them emerged from a side alcove midway through the tunnel. They were slightly more organized than the goblins had been, moving in a loose formation with crude spears held forward. Their scales were a dull brownish color, their posture hunched but deliberate.

They lasted about as long as the bats had.

Damien went straight through the formation without slowing his pace. Noah picked off the two that broke away from the sides before they could circle around.

They killed them easily.

Noah stored the bodies and kept walking.

He was getting tired. His mana felt thinner than it had at the start. Still workable but noticeably reduced from what he had walked in with.

He said nothing about it and kept up with Damien’s pace.

---

The tunnel branched three ways near its far end.

Left, center, right. All of them continuing deeper into the dungeon, all of them identical in appearance. No sounds coming from any of them. No crystal density difference, no air movement to indicate which one went further and which ones ended early.

Noah looked at all three and then looked at Damien.

He remembered something and reached into his pocket.

He pulled out his adventurer’s guild card and flipped it over. On the back was a small indented surface. He pressed it and a faint holographic screen bloomed upward from the card, pale blue and slightly transparent, about the size of a large book held open.

A map.

Rough and automatically generated, nothing more than the paths they had walked rendered as simple lines, but accurate. He could see the entrance at the top, the passages they had taken, the two large rooms, the tunnel they were standing in now.

It also showed the three branches ahead. Unlabeled. Unknown.

Damien looked over at it briefly.

"Isn’t it useful," he said.

"Guild got some standard apparently," Noah replied, putting the card away. "At least we can find our way back no matter how deep we went inside."

Damien studied the three paths for a moment.

Then he went center.

Noah had stopped asking why. Damien chose on instinct and his instincts had gotten them this far without walking into a dead end. Noah simply fell into step behind him and trusted it.

Protagonist logic, he thought to himself. It works until it doesn’t.

---

The center path was shorter than expected.

It turned twice and then opened without warning into a large space, bigger than the goblin room had been, the ceiling lost entirely in shadow above them.

And at the far end of this space was another door.

Similar iron construction. Same age and same weight in its appearance.

But this one was not fully closed.

It was open. Just slightly. A gap of maybe half a meter between the door’s edge and the frame, darkness visible through it, and from somewhere beyond that darkness came a sound.

Noah slowed.

"Someone might already be in there," he said quietly.

Damien’s expression had already shifted. Alert, focused, his voice dropping to match Noah’s. "Yeah. Could be another adventurer group. Could be something else."

They approached the door slowly.

Damien eased it open another half meter with one hand, just enough to pass through without the hinges groaning. Both of them slipped inside.

The room was enormous.

But then Noah saw something.

He grabbed Damien’s sleeve without thinking and pulled him sideways behind a large boulder that sat near the entrance, one of several scattered across the upper level of the room.

They both hide behind it.

Noah cursed inside. ’I knew it! This was going to be another arc of the game’s storyline!’