"There's so much vegetation." the more he pushed, the more they appeared.
Harley had grown up in the city where trees existed mostly in parks between buildings, trimmed by the municipality and watered on a schedule. Nothing in his twenty-two years of life had prepared him for this amount of leaves. The canopy overhead was so thick it turned the sky into scattered puzzle pieces of pale light. Roots jutted out of the ground at petty angles, catching his feet every third step like they had a personal grudge.
He was doing terribly.
Namir, naturally, was doing fine, ducking branches at exactly the right moment, stepping over roots without looking down, hands loose at his sides. He glanced back at Harley stumbling over a root for the fourth time and said nothing. His silence was doing more damage than any comment could have.
"You could say something," Harley muttered, catching himself on a trunk.
"I was being polite."
"Don't."
Namir almost smiled, "You'll adjust. The terrain shifts every floor; you'll get used to reading it."
Harley straightened up, brushed bark dust off his palm, and tried to look like a man who had his life together. He did not succeed particularly well. His mind was still catching up to the reality of his situation and yet somewhere behind the panic, something else was stirring.
"Okay," huffing gently, keeping pace beside Namir now, watching where he stepped. "Explain this to me. All of it. From the beginning."
"This will be the third time explaining it to you." Namir remarked dryly, ducking over another branch that would have slapped the shit out of Harley if he didn't catch it in time.
"Well explain it again," he was out of breath, "please…" Now he was desperate.
He let out a soft sigh and began once again, the age old tale of their problem.
"Six floors," he took another gentle breath. "That's the whole game. Each floor runs on a lore; think of it like a story arc with objectives. You complete the objectives, you clear the floor, you move to the next. The lore isn't optional. You can't skip it, you can't work around it." a heavy silence between them, "The update changed a lot of things, but that structure stayed. The bones of the original game are still here."
Harley processed that slowly, for the third time, "Six floors. So we're on floor one right now."
"Floor one. The Demonic Beast arc… there's a village somewhere in this region being terrorized by something the lore hasn't fully described yet. We find the village, we pick up the quest, we trace the beast back to its source." Namir read it off like a grocery list, "Three sub-arcs across three floors. Clear the third floor's main event and we get lifted to the next lore."
"And the lore changes every three floors?"
"Every arc. Yes."
Harley was quiet for a moment. The forest creaked around them like something was hiding in the branches, "How many floors have you cleared before?"
"Four," his answer was very direct. "I was on floor five when the new update dropped. Whatever was ahead of me reset."
"So you know what's on floors one through four."
"I know what was on floors one through four."Emphasis on the 'was', "The update changed things Harley. I've already seen two deviations from the original content since we've been walking. The mist that hit me when I was first pulled in… that was new. The original game didn't have that. The wolf that attacked you wasn't in the first zone either." It was getting more serious as they talked, "The developers didn't just upgrade the graphics it seems."
Harley's stomach shifted, "How bad is the change?"
Namir was quiet for two steps, then three, before he finally spoke, "I don't know yet."
That was worse than any specific answer would have been.
"Has anyone ever made it to the sixth floor?" Harley asked, because he needed to keep the conversation moving; needed to stop imagining what 'I don't know yet' might mean. "Like before this update. In the original game."
"One person."
Deadass silence.
"Username was Phantom. One of the original testers, he'd been in the game since the beta. By the time floor six opened up, he'd spent more hours in Infinite Dungeon than most people spend sleeping in a year." Namir's voice stayed even, "He cleared floor five. Got the floor six notification. And then he just… wasn't online anymore."
"He logged out?"
"He was never seen again." Namir looked at him sideways, "Online or offline."
The forest chose that exact moment to let out a long, low creak, making it look like the game ate Phantom alive. Harley did not find this comforting.
"Cool," It was not cool, "Great. That's great information, thank you." he was about to burst into tears.
"You asked."
"I did. I'm regretting it."
Namir stopped walking with Harley almost walking into him, catching himself at the last second, and that was when he saw it too.
The air in front of them had shifted.
A slight shimmer at the edges of his vision spawned and then the interface materialized; crisp, floating in his line of sight. Clean block text with a soft glow at the borders.
⚠ FLOOR 1 — LORE ACTIVATED
An ancient evil has taken root in the land.Slaying the Demonic Beast, a creature of dark magic, is said to lift the curse and bring peace.But not all is as it seems…
Objective: Reach the village on Floor 1 and speak with the Village Elder.
Map Updated. Destination marked: NORTH.
Harley stared at it. He looked at Namir, who was reading the same text floating in his own field of vision and for the first time, there was something in his expression that was harder to read than calm. The tension was slowly drowning him.
"Same lore," Namir acknowledged.
"Is that good?"
"It means some things are consistent." He dismissed his menu with a gesture, "Come on. North."
Harley pulled up his own menu while he walked. He had poked at it briefly after Namir saved him from the wolf but hadn't taken a real inventory. Now he did.
CHARACTER STATUS
Name: Harley Watson Class: Unclassified Level: 1 HP: 80/100 MP: 40/40 STR: 12 | AGI: 11 | INT: 14 | END: 10
Active Skills: None Passive Skills: [Observation Lv.1] — Detects environmental hazards slightly ahead of contact Equipment: Basic Tunic, Worn Boots, Empty Slot ×3
He frowned at the empty slots. At the Unclassified where his class should be. At the fact that his HP was sitting at eighty and he hadn't even noticed being hurt. Then he remembered the wolf, the hit it attempted to land before Namir intervened. He hadn't felt it in the panic but he felt it now, a dull ache below his left shoulder blade.
The game was tracking things he wasn't.
That was unsettling.
"My class says Unclassified." He hoped his new partner would answer that.
"It assigns based on your dominant combat style. You haven't fought enough yet for the system to decide." Namir glanced at him, "It'll assign itself eventually. Don't force it."
"What's yours?" curiosity got the best of him.
"Striker. Close-range physical, speed-focus." he droned, "My skill set built around it naturally. Speed enhancement, combo chains, reflex boost."
Harley closed his menu. North meant cutting further into the forest and the map was cooperative enough to show a route; a dotted line threading between tree clusters, highlighting safe ground. The Observation passive must have been working because twice he caught himself registering a root a full second before he would have stepped on it. Small mercies.
They moved for almost an hour.
Harley had just started to settle into the rhythm of walking, of thinking, of being here rather than panicking about being here but then something was heard from both sides simultaneously.
Footsteps? Fast.
His Observation passive pinged before he fully processed it, it was a small yellow warning triangle in the corner of his vision. He barely had time to call Namir before the men emerged.
There were eight of them, stepping out from behind trees and from the undergrowth on both flanks, moving with the coordination. They were dressed in rough-spun cloth and leather armor, nothing polished, but their spears were held correctly and their eyes were steady. These were people defending something.
The one in front raised his spear level with Harley's chest and said something in a language that the game did not bother translating because it didn't need to. The message was universal.
Stop.