The pack was going to kill him one day.
Not a monster, not a dungeon trap, not even the gods themselves with all their divine indifference. No. It was going to be the pack. Specifically, the one currently digging into the space between his shoulder blades like a serrated promise, stuffed to bursting with four adventurers worth of loot, provisions, spare weapons, and what he was fairly certain was somebody's dirty laundry.
Aise Leonhardt shifted the straps, rolled his shoulders against the protest of muscles that had long since given up on complaining properly, and kept walking.
'Forty three steps to the next rest marker. Just forty three steps.'
He counted them. He always counted them. It was the only arithmetic that mattered out here, in the long stretch of trail between Carveth Village and whatever dungeon mouth the party had decided was worth bleeding toward this week. Numbers did not lie, did not change depending on who was telling them, and more importantly, numbers did not look at him the way Doran did.
Speaking of.
"Oi. Leonhardt." The voice came from somewhere ahead, big and self satisfied the way only a B rank adventurer two villages removed from anything interesting could manage to sound. Doran Vel, broad as a barn door and roughly as thoughtful, had stopped walking to look back at him with an expression that suggested mild contempt was actually affection in his personal language. "You're dragging again. Pick your feet up."
"I'm picking them up," Aise said, pleasantly.
"Pick them up more."
He picked them up more.
This was the shape of his days. He was twenty two years old, assessed at F rank on his fifteenth birthday like every other person born in the Crowned Continent, and had walked away from the Assessment Hall in Carveth with a designation so unremarkable that the assessment clerk had looked almost apologetic writing it down. No gift. No elemental affinity. No combat projection index above the baseline threshold. Just a body that happened to be slightly more durable than average, a pain tolerance that had been built through years of carrying things nobody else wanted to carry, and a face that some people called handsome on days when the light was good, though those people were usually his mother and she had been dead for three years.
So. Pack mule it was.
It paid. Not well, obviously, it paid the way things paid when the person being paid had absolutely no leverage, which was to say just barely enough to stay alive and slightly less than enough to feel dignified doing it. But Carveth was not a village that offered extensive alternatives to people without gifts. You farmed, you traded, you joined a party as support, or you left. Leaving required money. Money required work. Work, for him, meant this. The perpetual arithmetic of survival.
He had gotten clever about it, though.
That was the thing about being underestimated consistently and completely. People stopped watching you. Doran and the rest of them, Sera the wind blade, Pell the shield carrier who somehow ranked higher than Aise despite having the personality of wet stone, and the archer whose name Aise genuinely could not remember after four months of working together, they watched each other. They watched the dungeon mouths. They watched for threats along the trail.
They did not watch him redistribute weight.
It had started small. A smoked meat portion here, a second waterskin there, things that could be justified if questioned because who was going to interrogate a pack mule's rationing decisions in the middle of a dungeon? Nobody with a B rank designation spent their cognitive resources worrying about the logistics carrier. That was the social contract. Aise was furniture. Furniture did not steal. Furniture did not think.
Furniture, however, did eat, and so did he, and the smoked meat was excellent.
He shifted the pack again as they descended toward the dungeon, a C rank designation posted outside a cave mouth that smelled of old stone and the particular mineral dampness that gathered in places where mana concentrated underground. The posting board at the mouth was weathered, the rank marker a faded blue disc nailed slightly crooked.
[C RANK DUNGEON — CREVASSE OF PALE STONE — AUTHORIZED ENTRY: C RANK AND ABOVE — ESTIMATED DEPTH: SEVEN FLOORS — KNOWN THREATS: STONE CRAWLERS, PALE HOUNDS, FLOOR GUARDIAN DESIGNATION UNKNOWN]
"Home sweet home," Sera said, cracking her knuckles. She was the one Aise liked best, which was not saying much, but she had once handed him a piece of flatbread without being asked and had never commented on the redistribution, either because she hadn't noticed or because she had and found it reasonable. He preferred not to know which.
"Standard formation," Doran announced, already pulling his weapon, a broadsword that was genuinely impressive if you admired things that were large and blunt. "Leonhardt, you stay two lengths back from Pell at all times. You go down, we lose the supplies."
'Not we lose Leonhardt. We lose the supplies.'
"Understood," Aise said.
They went in.
---
The first three floors were unremarkable.
Stone crawlers were ugly creatures, all pale shell and clicking mandibles, but they were slow and they were predictable and they died efficiently under Sera's wind blades and the archer's arrows. Pell absorbed the hits that slipped through. Doran killed things that were already dying. Aise stayed two lengths behind Pell and watched the walls and the ceiling and the floors with the particular attentiveness that came from knowing that if something went wrong, nobody was going to prioritize him.
Floor four felt different.
It was subtle at first, the way the temperature dropped two degrees more than it should have, the way the mana density in the air thickened until breathing felt like drinking. Aise noticed because he had nothing else to do in dungeons but notice things. He was not fighting. He was carrying.
"Feels heavier in here," he offered, from two lengths behind Pell.
"Dungeons feel heavy," Pell said. This was one of his longer sentences.
But by floor five, even Doran had gone quiet.
The stone crawlers on this floor were larger. Not by a little. The shell thickness on the first one they encountered was visibly wrong for the designation, and when Doran's broadsword hit it, the crack of contact was different, denser, and the creature did not stagger the way it should have. It turned. It had friends.
They managed floor five.
Floor six was where the world changed.
The chamber they stepped into was cathedral large, ceiling lost somewhere in darkness above them, and in the center of it stood something that had no business existing in a C rank dungeon. It was roughly humanoid in shape, if you were being generous and had very poor eyesight. Pale stone skin, three meters tall, joints that moved wrong, and eyes that were hollow and dark and somehow still watching them with the specific quality of attention that apex predators saved for things they had already decided to eat.
Sera said something that was not a word.
The assessment board materialized in the air at the dungeon mouth, visible to nobody because they were six floors underground, and if anyone had been standing at the entrance looking at the external status marker, they would have watched it flicker from blue to amber to red in the span of a breath.
What happened in the chamber was fast and very loud and went badly almost immediately.
The archer went down on the first charge, not dead, alive enough to be screaming, which in some ways was worse for morale. Pell's shield cracked along a fault line that the manufacturer would have guaranteed would never crack. Sera's wind blades cut and the creature bled something dark and slow and simply did not care. Doran was shouting tactical instructions that made increasingly less sense as the tactical situation deteriorated past the point where instructions were useful.
Aise had already done the math.
He was F rank. He had a heavy pack. He had a pain tolerance built from years of carrying other people's burdens and a body that was, marginally, more durable than average. He had no gift, no weapon worth mentioning, no combat index above baseline.
What he had was the exit. He knew exactly where it was because he always knew where the exit was. That was not cowardice. That was arithmetic.
He dropped the pack.
Doran screamed something at him about the supplies. The creature's attention shifted, briefly, toward the crash of the pack hitting stone, and in that brief window Sera grabbed the archer and Pell grabbed Sera and Doran grabbed nothing because Doran was still shouting, but they were all moving now, moving toward the floor five access point, every man with whatever version of himself he could manage to carry.
The access points between floors in a dungeon worked on a logic of proximity and survival need. They found floor five. They found floor four. Somewhere between floors three and two the party stopped being a party in any meaningful sense and became four separate individuals making four separate calculations about what they were willing to do to reach the surface.
Aise was not included in any of those calculations.
He understood this when he reached the floor two access point and found it empty.
Not the access point itself. Just, the people who had been his employers and his company and his nominal protection for four months, simply, gone. Moving faster than him because they were not carrying the pack he had already dropped, because they were not F rank and their bodies moved with the easy efficiency of people whose god given gifts extended to the basic function of their legs, because he had never factored into their survival math as a person, only as a liability.
The dungeon groaned.
That was the only way to describe the sound, a long, resonant, structural complaint that moved through the stone beneath his feet and the stone above his head and the stone in every direction he was not running. Something was happening to the dungeon itself. The mana density spiked so sharply that his eyes watered and the air tasted like copper and lightning and the particular burnt quality of mana systems operating far outside their intended parameters.
He ran.
He was good at running. Not gifted, nothing so elegant, but the same relentless durability that made him useful as a pack mule made him useful at moving through pain and through fear and through the gathering dark of a dungeon that was actively becoming something it had not been when they entered it. He hit the floor one access point and he went through it and he came out in a passage that was narrower than it should have been and sloping wrong, and the exit, the cave mouth, the faded blue disc on the posting board outside, was not where it was supposed to be.
The dungeon had shifted.
He stood in the passage for three full seconds doing absolutely nothing, which was the correct response to a situation that had no correct response, and then the stone behind him cracked and something that was not a stone crawler and was not the pale guardian and was entirely new came through the crack with the specific energy of something that had been waiting behind a door for a very long time and was pleased to finally have the door open.
Aise ran in the only direction available.
The passage ended at a ledge.
He came to the edge of it without meaning to, momentum and darkness conspiring, and his foot found nothing where it expected stone and for a lurching, stomach dropping moment he was simply falling, grabbing at the edge and finding it, fingers screaming, body hanging over a drop that disappeared into black so complete it might as well have been a void.
The thing behind him was not running. It was walking. Patient. Deliberate.
He looked down into the dark.
He looked back at the thing.
He thought, with the specific clarity that arrives in moments when thinking is almost certainly not useful anymore, that if he fell from this height, the drop would kill him quickly. Clean. He would not become whatever the alternative was. The things you left behind when a dungeon creature fed long enough on a human body, the things they found afterward, those were not whole. There was a dignity to whole, even if the whole was a corpse.
'Well,' he thought. 'At least I stopped cheating on the rations.'
He let go.
---
The dark took him.
And then, with no transition that his brain could parse, the dark gave him back.
He was lying on stone. This much registered first, the specific temperature of it, cool and dry, and the texture under his palms when his hands moved instinctively to push himself upright. He pushed. He came up. He stood there with his heart doing something that was arguably too fast and too loud to be medically reassuring, and he looked at his hands, then at his arms, then at the rest of himself.
Whole.
He was whole. Completely, inexplicably, whole.
The space around him was large and cavernous but not dark, lit by something ambient and sourceless that gave everything the quality of early morning before the sun has fully committed. The stone here was different from the dungeon above, darker, threaded with veins of something that pulsed very faintly blue. The air tasted of nothing. Not copper, not mineral damp, not mana overload. Simply, nothing, which was after the last hour arguably the finest thing he had ever breathed.
He turned.
She was sitting perhaps ten meters away from him, in a natural alcove in the stone, and she was, she was.
He stopped thinking in complete sentences for a moment.
She sat with her eyes closed and her hands folded in her lap with the particular quality of stillness that distinguished genuine repose from performance. Her hair fell around her in waves of gold that darkened at the ends into something between rose and flame, the color of sunrise at the edges, soft and striking at once. Her face was the kind of face that painters spent careers attempting and usually settled for suggesting, features balanced with a precision that seemed less like genetics and more like intention, like something had decided to make something beautiful and had not stopped partway through. She wore armor that gleamed white and silver and gold, plate worked with an artistry that made the equipment Doran carried look like something a child had assembled from kitchen implements, and beneath the armor, the shape of her was, she was.
Aise looked at the ceiling briefly.
Then he looked at the floor.
Then he looked at her again because the ceiling and the floor were both significantly less interesting.
He opened his mouth.
The screen appeared before the words did.
It was translucent, blue edged, hovering in the air between him and the alcove with the casual confidence of something that had been doing this for a very long time and found his surprise mildly tedious. Text assembled itself across it in lines that his eyes tracked automatically, the way eyes tracked things that announced themselves with light.
[WELCOME! YOU HAVE ENTERED THE DUNGEON OF ORIGIN.]
[DUNGEON OF ORIGIN — DESIGNATION: UNRANKED. CLASSIFICATION: BEYOND EXISTING SYSTEMS. ACCESS: EXCLUSIVE — BOUND TO ONE INDIVIDUAL PER EPOCH.]
[BINDING PROCESS: COMPLETE.]
[HOST DESIGNATION: AISE LEONHARDT. BINDING CONFIRMED.]
[INITIAL ASSESSMENT — COMMENCING]
[NAME: AISE LEONHARDT]
[AGE: 22]
[RANK: F — CURRENT SYSTEM DESIGNATION]
[GIFT: NONE — REGISTERED]
[COMBAT PROJECTION INDEX: 4 — BASELINE HUMAN THRESHOLD: 5]
[PHYSICAL ASSESSMENT:
STRENGTH — 11 / ENDURANCE — 19 / AGILITY — 13 / PAIN THRESHOLD — EXCEPTIONAL, UNREGISTERED IN STANDARD METRICS / VITALITY — 14]
[COGNITIVE ASSESSMENT:
SPATIAL AWARENESS — ABOVE AVERAGE / TACTICAL CALCULATION UNDER STRESS — HIGH / ADAPTABILITY INDEX — REMARKABLE / SURVIVAL INSTINCT — RATED: EXCEPTIONAL]
[NOTE FROM SYSTEM: HOST PRESENTS AS F RANK BY CONVENTIONAL DESIGNATION. CONVENTIONAL DESIGNATION IS INSUFFICIENT. HOST'S LATENT CAPACITY EXCEEDS CURRENT MEASURABLE THRESHOLDS. GIFT ABSENCE IS NOT DEFICIENCY — GIFT ABSENCE IS VACANCY. VACANCY CAN BE FILLED.]
[DUNGEON OF ORIGIN FUNCTION: TO FILL WHAT THE GODS LEFT EMPTY.]
[COMPANION AND GUIDE ASSIGNED: ASTARTE.]
[RELATIONSHIP DESIGNATION: GUIDE — SUBJECT TO DEVELOPMENT BASED ON HOST INTERACTION AND PROGRESS.]
[FINAL NOTE:]
[WELCOME TO THE BEGINNING.]
The screen held for another moment and then dissolved, quietly, the way light left a room when a candle went out.
Across the alcove, the woman, Astarte, sat with her eyes still closed, chest rising and falling in the slow rhythm of someone who had been waiting long enough that waiting had become simply another state of being.
Aise stood in the cavernous silence of a dungeon that apparently existed outside the known world, bound to it by a system he had never heard of, assessed in terms that suggested everything he had been told about himself since he was fifteen was not wrong but simply pointed at the wrong thing, with a companion assigned to him whose face and form he was going to have significant difficulty thinking professionally about, and he arrived at the only conclusion available to a man who had just fallen off a cliff, died, not died, and been informed by a glowing screen that his vacancy was the point.
"What," he said, to nobody in particular, to the stone and the pulsing blue veins and the ambient sourceless light and the impossible woman in the alcove.
"The actual fuck."