Chapter 18: Maw of Hell

The sight was disgustingly beautiful.

His situation was bountifully dreadful.

He was literally on the summit of the Maw of Hell...

’Does this place get off on starting me off in the worst situations possible? First the Corrupted Lands, then some alleyway facedown in glass, and now this?!’

’Can I put in a ticket or something...?’

It was the world of a game, after all.

Still...

’I guess it’s better than if I spawned in the River of Blood.’

That was something...

As for the Maw of Hell... The name may seem a little grand for something on the first level of the dungeon with far more dangerous and damning zones on the floors beyond, it was still aptly named. After all, this place was the newbie killer, and the first generation of Divers had been the naivest and weakest of them all.

While Peace didn’t have any proof beyond some of the game lore, which he now wished he’d paid a little more attention to, this place got its name because first-generation Divers who ventured here would never return, earning the place its title.

Of course, a stronger Diver didn’t have to worry about the zone at all.

But Peace was anything but strong.

He was weak and woefully underprepared for this situation despite preparing as much as he could.

Peace didn’t expect a smooth, easy experience, but being dropped in the most dangerous quadrant at probably the most dangerous place in said quadrant... that wasn’t something he’d been expecting.

And now, seeing it in person rather than through a pixelated game screen, it was clear that the effect it had on Divers over the years wasn’t the only reason for its name. The place itself looked worthy of it.

The Maw of Hell wasn’t entirely figurative, per se...

’It’s terrifying as fuck!’

Beneath Peace sprawled a gigantic mountain of stained, egg-white skulls, femora, fibulae, tibiae, and humeri tightly packed together into an all-encompassing mound of death.

He was currently standing near the edge of the mountain’s incline, overlooking the rest of the Skeletal Plains... which was quite the ironic name considering the mountain he stood on.

Of course, the name still fit, as the mass of bones beneath him seemed to stretch down for three kilometers along a modest slope before eventually flattening out and fading into the horizon...

The air was surprisingly clear, and Peace could see unnervingly far, probably because this was a night biome, which enhanced nearly every aspect of him, even if only slightly.

Far... far off to his right, he could see the crushed bone powder that had coalesced to form the Bone Desert, a vast, true plain broken only by knolls of white powder. Frequent storms churned up the fine dust and made it hard to see deep into the vast expanse, but the billowing edge of that mass, which looked almost like smoke, was enough to ward off any thoughts of entering.

Letting his gaze drift straight ahead, he could see the spires of massive ribs jutting out of the ground like a multitude of obelisks. While they seemed relatively small from this distance, he surmised that each stood roughly thirty meters tall.

As if that weren’t terrifying enough, the ends of the ribs had been frayed and shaved into spikes, giving them an especially uninviting look.

How they had formed and what beast they had come from wasn’t entirely known, but Peace was thankful that whatever they belonged to was long gone.

Below him, nearly every inch of ground, except for the desert, which was made of bone dust, was covered in tiny pelletal bones. Peace was obviously too far away to spot the more nuanced differences, but he could tell they were tightly packed phalanxes and phalanges, mixed with countless other wrist, hand, ankle, and foot bones.

A little off to the side, he spotted the River of Blood, coursing toward the horizon, its red current flowing into nothingness.

He couldn’t really see beyond the river, but he knew it wasn’t the end of the Skeletal Plains.

Peace lifted his gaze and stared at the disgusting, yet beautiful, red sky and the bloody moon that seemed to claim dominion over it.

Thankfully, there weren’t any clouds nearby, so he wouldn’t be subjected to the field effect just yet, but he could already imagine the haze of red mist gathering overhead before raining pellets of corrosive blood from the sky.

Still, the red sky draped a crimson hue across the bones, making them look as though they’d been freshly bloodied.

There was also one last structure Peace knew was around...

The boss room.

Each floor of the dungeon was separated into quadrants... These quadrants were typically unique, and each had several sub-areas within it.

And each quadrant had a boss, which was housed in a Domain...

Killing that boss was the only way to advance to a higher level. Thankfully, the Domain acted as a sort of confinement, so the boss couldn’t escape and wreak havoc on the weak Divers.

’But still...’

From atop the mountain, Peace slowly turned and faced the only reason anyone would willingly brave this harrowing place of absolute agony.

He felt incredibly small as he looked up at the gigantic skeletal palace known as the Bone Temple behind him.

’Holy hell.’

A vast amount of bones had somehow been condensed into bricks and laid together to form a massive staircase that climbed upward toward an empty void serving as the entrance to the fiend’s Domain.

Then, on either side of the staircase stood two walls of meshed-together bone that fanned outward, their upper reaches meeting only at the top of the stairs. The walls were lined with large sternums lying sideways and gigantic coccyges planted upright to form a sort of crenellation.

Soon, a terrifying cold swept across the area as bones began to rattle and clink together.

At the top of the stairs, Peace watched as the first skeletal hand burst out of the ground, gripped the surrounding mass, and began hauling itself up. Soon, rifts fractured the floor all around the temple.

Peace turned and looked down the mountain only to see much the same sight unfolding everywhere else.

Bony beasts were clawing their way up from the underworld...

The dungeon was awakening.