The dungeon smelled like wet stone and something older than that, something that had been rotting quietly for long enough that it had stopped bothering to announce itself.
Aris found it tolerable, mostly because he had to.
He moved through the lower corridor at an unhurried pace, armoured hands loose at his sides, the soft crunch of gravel beneath his boots the only sound that hadn't been there before he arrived. The mana crystals embedded in the cavern walls threw pale blue light across everything—across the bodies of the iron-shell golems he'd passed two corridors back, across the cracks spiderwebbing outward from where each of them had simply... stopped working. Across the dungeon's general insistence on being dramatic about its own architecture.
He'd been inside for eleven minutes.
He knew because he'd checked his phone before entering and made a private bet with himself. Twelve minutes, he'd thought. Generous, given the tier, and the contents inside. The guild assessment had clocked this as a B-rank dungeon, elevated hazard, recommended party size of six with the minimum of an A rank leading.
He was going to lose the bet by one minute, which was mildly irritating.
The core chamber announced itself ahead—a widening of the corridor, the temperature dropping a few degrees, the mana pressure thickening into something that would have made a lesser awakened's ears ring, settling against his skin with a humming intensity. Aris rolled his shoulder once, more out of habit than necessity, and stepped through.
The dungeon boss registered his presence immediately.
It was a reasonable specimen. Twelve feet of crystallised mana and something that had probably been a bear at some point before the dungeon got to it. Four arms. Two of them ended in claws that could have opened a car like a tin can. The other two were fused into a single battering mass of hardened shell that it was already swinging toward him with the kind of confidence that came from never having met anything it couldn't kill, or even pose a challenge.
Aris looked at it, his detached eyes sparkling with mild curiosity.
It looked back at him, well it tried its best for something with no discernible eyes that could look.
He exhaled once, slow and controlled, and with it he let the smallest thread of himself unspool.
Barely a breath of entropy, the kind he kept wound so tightly against his ribs that releasing even this much was like unclenching a fist he'd forgotten was closed. He felt it, immediately, the way he always did; a bright searing line behind his sternum, discipline biting back against disorder.
Somewhat worth it, in the grand scheme of things. At least he wanted to convince himself that it was.
The crystalline lattice running through the boss's shell developed a fracture. Then several. Then the fracture spread to the joints of its limbs, to the compressed mana cycling through its core, to the fundamental structural integrity of something that had been constructed by dungeon logic to be indestructible.
The boss took one more step toward him.
Then it stopped, in the way that things stop when they've been informed, at a molecular level, that stopping is the only available option.
The silence afterwards was complete, slightly eerie in its fullness.
Aris looked at the collapsed remains for a moment, then looked at his phone.
Eleven minutes, forty seconds.
He'd lost by twenty seconds. He was choosing to blame the corridor layout, it would hopefully be a sufficient excuse, the damned thing was too labyrinthine to navigate without a mage.
He pocketed his phone, turned around, and headed for the exit.
The gate back to the surface opened in the standard way—a shiver of spatial mana, a pressure change, the particular quality of outside light, the kind that dungeon interiors never quite managed to replicate regardless of how many crystals they threw at the problem, shining through. Aris stepped through with his hands already moving to fix his hair, which the dungeon's musky ambient mana had done something unfortunate to, and looked up.
He stopped.
The crowd had formed a loose semicircle around the gate. He estimated somewhere between forty and sixty people, which was higher than last week but lower than the week before the incident with the C-rank dungeon in Harlow District, so statistically, things were improving. Two of them had professional cameras. One had a sign. The sign said, in letters that someone had clearly spent time on, ARIS MARRY ME, with a small drawing of what he generously interpreted as a heart.
A woman in a blazer was already moving toward him with a microphone and the expression of someone who had rehearsed this approach.
He had eleven seconds, he estimated, before she reached him. Long enough to make a decision.
He smiled.
It was a good smile—he'd been told this many times and had privately confirmed it in enough mirrors to accept it as fact rather than vanity. Symmetrical. Slightly self-deprecating at the corners, which people found disarming. The kind of smile that belonged on a billboard, which was unfortunately not a metaphor. Humans were just too weird as a species.
"Aris!" The reporter arrived. She had good energy. He didn't hold it against her, considering the woman had probably never stepped inside a dungeon. "Can you confirm this was a solo clear?"
"Mm." He tilted his head just slightly, which the cameras tended to like. "The guild assigned it as a team mission, but the team had a scheduling conflict, so I offered to handle it. Nothing dramatic."
"A B-rank dungeon. Solo."
"The assessment was slightly elevated." He hummed in thought, just in the way that the reporters liked. "It was manageable."
From somewhere in the crowd, someone made a noise that a human being produced when they were experiencing an emotion with no available outlet. He'd heard this noise before. He was, at this point, fairly fluent in it.
"You've been inside for just under twelve minutes," the reporter continued, consulting something on her tablet. "Our cameras tracked you entering at—"
"I took a wrong turn." He hadn't. "The lower corridors in this tier can be disorienting."
"Right." She didn't look like she believed this. That was fine. She didn't push it either, because whatever she believed, the footage of him exiting alone and uninjured from an elevated B-rank after twelve minutes was going to perform extremely well regardless of the explanation. They both understood this. The interview could proceed from that shared understanding.
"We've been hearing a lot about your upcoming partnership with Celesté. Any comment on the rumours about a summer collection?"
Twelve minutes in a dungeon with a mana-crystallised apex predator that could wipe out a city, Aris thought, and this is the follow-up question.
"I can't confirm specifics," he said pleasantly. "But I'm really happy with the direction things are going."
"Can I ask—" A different voice from the crowd, younger, slightly too loud. "—what moisturizer do you use? Like, you just came out of a dungeon and your skin is—!"
"Hydration," Aris said, turning to smile at the crowd, "and good genetics."
This produced a response from the crowd that he could only describe as a collective small death.
He excused himself from the reporter with a smile and a practised apology about a following meeting, signed two things that were thrust in front of him. A phone case and, memorably, someone's forearm—and made it to the car that Lyra, his manager, had positioned forty meters from the gate with the efficiency of someone who had learned, through experience, to have an exit route ready.
The door closed behind him.
The crowd noise dropped to a murmur.
He sat back against the seat and let the smile go, finally letting his weariness appear on his face.
In the quiet of the car he was aware, dimly, of the chaos still coiled against his ribs, patient and pressurised and waiting for the kind of release that twelve minutes and one dungeon boss had not come close to satisfying. He drew it back, layer by layer, the familiar ache of compression settling behind his sternum like a bruise he'd gotten used to.
"Forearm?" Lyra said from the driver's seat, without turning around.
"She seemed committed."
"Gareth called," Lyra continued, merging into traffic with the calm of someone who had decided to simply not engage with the topic of the forearm. "The team wants to do a debrief since you technically completed their contract, this was your last mission for them."
"I'll send a report."
"They want to do it in person. I think Gareth feels responsible."
"He shouldn't."
"He's going to anyway." A pause. "He also said, and I'm quoting directly, that you should have waited in the room with the crystals because it wasn't deemed safe enough by the diviners."
Aris looked out the window at the city moving past them—the guild flags on the buildings, the dungeon hazard signs on the street corners that everyone had gotten so used to that nobody looked at them anymore, the ordinary skyline of an ordinary city that had learned to build itself around the fact of monsters.
"Noted," he said.
Lyra, who knew him well enough to know that noted meant something between understood and I have filed this information in a place where it will never affect my behaviour, said nothing further.
He watched the city.
Outside, someone had put up a new billboard. It was an ad for Aurum Energy Supplements, and the centrepiece of it was a photograph of him from two weeks ago, looking pleasantly energetic in his training gear, holding a small silver can.
He had never tried Aurum Energy Supplements.
He looked away from the billboard and closed his eyes, and thought about what he wanted for lunch, the back of his mind lamenting the events that had led up to this mess of a life.
And mostly, mourning the lack of quite had been suffering from since the last month.