Chapter 32: White Dungeon

Rhe moment Jet crossed the surface of the white vortex, the world seemed to fold around him.

There was no gradual transition, no tunnel of light or sensation of traveling through some enormous distance; one instant he was sprinting beside Frey through the middle of Zenith City’s Awakener District, with car alarms screaming and people shouting behind them, and the next an enormous invisible pressure squeezed around his entire body.

His stomach twisted violently, his sense of direction disappeared, and for a fraction of a second he couldn’t tell whether he was falling, flying, or being pulled apart from every direction at once.

Then his boots slammed onto something solid. Jet stumbled forward two steps before regaining his balance, the Vorpal Blade still safely inside his System Inventory, and immediately raised his head.

The sounds of Zenith City were gone. No engines, no voices, no alarms, not even the distant hum of a metropolis filled with millions of people.

Instead, a cold silence surrounded him, and when Frey appeared beside him a heartbeat later and almost crashed shoulder-first into his back, the two childhood friends found themselves standing in the middle of a broad cobblestone road belonging to a town that looked as though humanity had abandoned it decades ago.

"Fuck!" Frey caught himself by grabbing Jet’s shoulder, straightened, and immediately looked behind them as though expecting the Dungeon entrance to still be sitting there.

There was nothing. The white vortex had disappeared entirely, leaving only another stretch of cracked cobblestone and several ruined houses behind them.

Frey rubbed his chest and grimaced. "Nobody told me entering a Dungeon feels like getting stuffed through a pipe and fired out the other end. How the hell do Raiders do this every day?"

Jet glanced at him, relieved despite himself that Frey’s first instinct after being thrown into another dimension was still to complain. "Most people don’t describe interdimensional transportation like plumbing."

Frey gave him a serious look. "That’s because most people aren’t honest."

Jet snorted softly before turning his attention back toward their surroundings, and only then did he properly take in the place the Dungeon had deposited them.

The town stretched in every direction beneath a dull, colorless sky. Most of the buildings were two or three stories tall, constructed from old grey stone reinforced with dark timber frames that had long since started rotting.

Roofs had collapsed inward, wooden shutters hung from rusted hinges, and several windows were nothing more than black holes overlooking the empty streets.

A broken wagon had overturned beside a dried fountain farther ahead, one wheel missing while the other leaned against the axle at an angle. Abandoned merchant stalls occupied the edges of what looked like an old marketplace, their canvas coverings long gone and their counters buried beneath a thin layer of pale dust.

A rusted iron sign creaked slowly above the entrance of what might once have been an inn, although Jet couldn’t feel any wind against his clothes.

Farther into the town, beyond rows of crooked rooftops and narrow streets, the upper portion of a stone bell tower could be seen rising above everything else.

There was no sun overhead, no visible moon, and no obvious source of illumination, yet the entire Dungeon remained trapped beneath an unnatural grey daylight.

Beyond the outer buildings, some streets simply vanished into thick white fog that formed an impenetrable wall around the distant edges of the settlement.

Before either of them could move farther, a familiar chime sounded inside Jet’s head and translucent System text appeared in front of his vision, Frey also received the same information.

[Dungeon Entry Confirmed.]

[White Dungeon Detected.]

[Dungeon: Ruins of Greyhaven.]

[Recommended Star Rank: 1-Star — 2-Star.]

[Dungeon Objective: Eliminate the Dungeon Boss.]

Jet’s eyes moved across the information only once before the display began fading away. Nothing there was particularly surprising.

He had spent ten years living in a world where Dungeons had become an unavoidable part of civilization even though he’d never possessed the qualifications to personally raid one.

There were nine officially recognized Dungeon colors: White, Green, Blue, Yellow, Orange, Red, Violet, Black, and finally Crimson.

White Dungeons stood at the absolute bottom of that hierarchy and were generally entered by 1-Star and 2-Star Raiders, while Crimson Dungeons stood so far above ordinary supernatural threats that their appearance could trigger international emergency protocols.

Even in his previous life, Jet had never personally seen one.

Crimson wasn’t the sort of Dungeon that ordinary people gathered around to watch Raiders enter. It was the kind of event governments monitored, Guilds mobilized for, and O.R.D.O. treated as a potential world-level catastrophe.

Greyhaven, fortunately, was only White. That made it weak by Dungeon standards, but Jet knew better than to mistake weak for safe.

The ordinary monsters inhabiting a Dungeon generally possessed strength corresponding to its color, but the Boss was usually different. Under the standard pattern recognized by O.R.D.O., a Dungeon Boss possessed strength approximately one Color above the Dungeon containing it.

Somewhere inside this abandoned town, therefore, a Green-Class monster was most likely waiting for them.

That difference was one of the reasons registered Raiders were normally expected to enter Dungeons in teams of at least two or more rather than casually wandering inside alone.

A properly prepared 1-Star Raider could handle White-Class monsters, but facing a Green-Class Boss alone was an entirely different problem.

There were exceptions to all of those rules, abnormal Dungeons, mutated Bosses, unstable Gates but Jet had no intention of standing around explaining decades of Dungeon theory to himself.

The important parts were simple enough. White was the weakest, Crimson was the highest, Greyhaven was appropriate for people around their current Star Rank, and whatever ruled this place would probably be stronger than everything they encountered on the way there.

Frey had apparently reached a much simpler conclusion.

He slowly turned in place with both hands tucked into his trouser pockets, looking from the dried fountain to the collapsed houses and then toward the distant bell tower before letting out a long whistle.

"You know, when I imagined my first Dungeon, I expected something cooler."

Jet looked toward him with an expression that made it clear he couldn’t believe this was the first thing Frey had decided to say. "We’re standing inside another dimension."

Frey nodded thoughtfully, looked around once more, then pointed toward a house whose roof had completely collapsed through its second floor. "Yeah, but it’s a shitty town. Where’s the giant underground palace? Floating islands? Rivers of lava? Maybe some dragon sleeping on enough gold to bankrupt a country? This looks like somebody abandoned a medieval neighborhood halfway through demolition."

Jet shook his head and started walking toward the marketplace. "You’ve been inside for about two minutes."

Frey fell into step beside him. "Two very disappointing minutes."

Jet glanced at him. "You nearly fell over when we entered."

"That part was interesting," Frey replied immediately. "The scenery is what I’m criticizing."

Their footsteps echoed quietly against the cobblestones as they moved deeper into Greyhaven.

Jet kept his pace relaxed, but his attention remained on the buildings around them, particularly the windows and alleyways where the pale daylight failed to reach.

The Dungeon was far too quiet.

Even abandoned places usually had something, wind, animals, insects, loose wood creaking under its own weight but Greyhaven possessed none of it.

Frey seemed to notice the silence as well because his joking gradually faded, his eyes beginning to move more carefully between the rooftops.

"So what’s the brilliant S-Rank plan?" he asked after another few seconds. "Walk around until we find whatever ugly thing owns this place?" Jet kept watching the buildings.

"Find the Boss eventually, yes, but we’re not rushing straight toward it without knowing what’s living here."

Frey gave him a sideways glance. "That sounded almost responsible. Since when did you become the cautious one?"

Jet’s mouth twitched. "Since I discovered monsters can actually kill me."

"Very profound."

"You’ll understand when something tries to bite your face off."

Frey opened his mouth to answer, but Jet suddenly stopped walking and raised one hand.