The sound she made was not a scream, screams have a single source, this came from three places that were suddenly no longer coordinating with each other, a chord that fell apart in real time, each note dropping separately until the cave held nothing but stone and dust and the very strong smell of something that the game's atmosphere system was rendering as 'Corruption: Dissipating.'
She dissolved, the scales losing their light-absorption, the coil losing its tension. The torches, which had refused to flicker throughout the entire encounter, chose this moment to gutter wildly before they all went out.
Harley retrieved his sword from where it had fallen. The blade was fine but his hands were shaking, which the game did not register because the game did not track biological stress responses, and he was deciding whether to resent that.
⚔ BOSS COMBAT RESOLVED
Vethara, The Hollow Mother — DEFEATED
Harley Watson: +480 EXP | Level Up ×2
Namir Vox: +480 EXP | Level Up ×1
HARLEY — NOW: LV.4
HP Ceiling: 150 | STR: 18 | AGI: 16 | INT: 18 | END: 15
New Skill Unlocked: [Calculated Strike Lv.1] — Precision-based attacks deal bonus damage when target's pattern has been analyzed.
NAMIR — NOW: LV.4
HP Ceiling: 165 | [Speed Burst Lv.3 — Unlocked]
New Passive: [Combat Intuition] — Reduced reaction time for pattern-based threats.
Harley read his character sheet twice. Level four. The numbers had jumped in a way that felt proportional to the size of what they had just faced, which was the game's version of saying that counted for something. His HP ceiling sat at 150 and he was currently running at 42 of it, which meant the math was pointing urgently at the fact that he had no salves and he was in the red zone.
The cave made a sound.
Not Vethara though, she was thoroughly finished. The cave itself; a low groan from the structure. Harley had heard that sound once in a factory corridor and had moved considerably faster than his coworkers in the direction of outside, which was the correct instinct.
"The covenant," Namir was already moving, "She was the anchor. Whatever she was doing to stabilize the deep sections—"
"Gone," Harley confirmed, because the ceiling was already making its position on the matter abundantly clear.
They ran.
The exit was the eastern outcropping, the same path the prisoners had taken, and the cave corridors were accelerating in deterioration. Stones fell in chunks behind them. A support beam cracked as they passed it and Harley made a mental note that he never wanted to hear that sound again and then immediately forgot the note because the rock floor was becoming uneven.
The outcropping mouth was there, just a few more feet.
They cleared it.
Behind them, the cave completely collapsed, realization settling on Harley that it could have taken them with it if they didn't speed up just a bit.
Harley stood in the rock gap and looked at the place where the entrance had been, gasping for air.
"She was feeding," more wisdom came to him as his body retired from the adrenaline.
"Yes."
"The bandits brought her people and she gave them something in return. That was the arrangement."
"Strength, probably. Enhanced abilities. The standard terms for that type of entity." Namir rolled his shoulder, the one adjacent to the knife wound, "They weren't just criminals, they were participants in something ritualistic. The lore frames it as a beast…the reality was a covenant that had been running for far too long."
Harley thought about the prisoners in the holding rooms. About the way the bandits had built kitchens and sleeping quarters in a cave around something ancient and hungry. About Cain's face when he described the people who had gone into the forest and not come back.
"Let's find the rescues," frankly he was tired of it all and they just got started. "And then go home."
The walk back to Crestmere with eighteen freed people was nothing like the walk in. Nothing like it at all.
For one thing, they knew where they were going. For another, nobody was unconscious. And the third thing, the thing that made the walk different from anything Harley had experienced in the last twenty-four hours was the sound.
It started before they reached the village; word traveling as someone had moved faster to reach the village before, so when the main path of Crestmere came into view, there were people already at the gate.
All of them.
Harley had grown up in the part of the city where celebrations happened at designated locations on designated days and required a permit. He had never experienced the specific human event of an entire community coming out into the dark because something had been given back to them that they had stopped expecting to see again.
It was loud. It was immediate. It was the kind of thing that bypassed whatever defense mechanisms he'd built up over a lifetime of not receiving things he expected.
Holt was there; the armored man who had wanted to execute them in the first five minutes of their acquaintance. He was standing at the edge of the crowd and when Harley met his eyes there was something in the man's face that was not an apology because Holt was structurally incapable of an apology; but it was the next closest thing, acceptance.
Cain was there too, standing quietly off the central path, watching the reunions happen around him, a small smile forming on his lips.
The night was full of names being called and voices answering and small children being picked up by parents who had spent varying amounts of time wondering if they would be able to do that again.
The game, to its credit, stayed out of the way.
No notifications, no experience bars, no floating text. Just the village being loud in the dark.
Cain received them in the morning.
The room was the same; clay pitcher, wooden table, but the quality of the air was different. The weight that had been sitting in this room since they first arrived in it had shifted.
The village chief slid a pouch across the table, then a second one. Then, with the deliberate care of someone giving away something that had been kept for a long time waiting for the right moment, a small wooden box.
REWARD RECEIVED
Currency: 340 Gold Coin (x2 players)
Item: [Traveler's Compass] — Reveals hidden paths on active map. Floor 1 compatibility confirmed.
Item: [Vethara's Scale Fragment] — Rare crafting material. Unknown application.
EXP Bonus: +200 (Quest Completion)
Harley Watson — LV.4 → LV.5
Namir Vox — LV.4 (threshold not met)
Level five.
Harley looked at his character sheet and felt a warmth in the chest that was adjacent to pride but sat slightly differently. The numbers were meaningfully better now; his HP ceiling climbed to 165, new stat points distributed themselves across AGI and INT, and [Calculated Strike] leveled to Lv.2 with a bonus note that read Pattern recognition now applies passively in combat without activation.
"Don't," Namir was the alarm clock on a Monday morning for his celebration.
Harley looked up from his menu, his mouth wiggling to hide the smirk, "Don't what?"
"The feeling you're having right now." Namir accepted his portion of the gold with a calm composure, he accepted everything that way, "The level numbers went up and the fight felt significant and the village celebrated and something in your brain is now telling you that you have a handle on this."
Harley considered denying this, "...and?" slightly smug.
"You don't." Namir closed his own menu, "We're on floor one. Sub-arc one of three. The difficulty curve on the original game scaled sharply after the first major event and this version is running modified parameters, which means the scaling could be anything." He looked at Harley with a rather scolding look, he knew what overconfidence did to him, and he cared enough for Harley to not let it take his lives unnecessarily, "Feel good about what happened. You should. But don't mistake it for easy."
Harley looked at his Level 5 character sheet and at the gold in his pack and at the village outside the window where people were still finding each other, "Noted," he scoffed, "Annoyingly noted."
"Good."
They rested properly, food appearing at intervals that suggested Crestmere's hospitality had been waiting for an excuse to operate at full capacity. Harley slept for what the game's internal clock logged as nine hours, which was the longest he had slept since arriving and which his HP bar expressed its appreciation for by climbing fully to 165/165 for the first time.
He was eating something in the morning that tasted like oats but he wasn't complaining, food was food. Some man came and sat across from him.
Not Cain or Holt's men. Someone he had not seen in the village before. His left arm ended below the elbow. His left leg, visible at the hem of his trousers, had the proportions of a carved wooden replacement rather than anything biological.
He looked at them both with eyes that were similar to Namir's damage-assessment process and learned they were meant to be respected, "You cleared the cave," he announced. It was not a question.
"We did." Harley confirmed.
"The bandits."
"The bandits and the thing behind the bandits." Harley watched the man's face, "Vethara."
Something moved in the old warrior's eyes, familiarity, "The Hollow Mother." He breathed out slowly, "Then the covenant is broken."
"She's gone," Namir assured him, "The hideout with her."
The man was quiet for a long moment, "The people who said they were terrorized by a beast; they weren't wrong… But the beast they were describing was older than the bandits… Older than the covenant." He looked at them with weight in his spirit, "Vethara served something. And whatever that is, it is still in Ahmadanam."
Harley set down his food, a bit of fear settling in his stomach, "How do you know?"
"Because it took my arm," the man gestured to his condition, "And my leg. Twelve years ago. I made it further into Ahmadanam than anyone from this village had managed in a generation; I found the deep sections, the ones that even the bandits did not go into. I found what lives there." he paused, "I did not defeat it."
"What did?" Namir had his eyes cocked slightly, intrigued but not showing it.
"Time. It retreats in cycles. But it does not leave." He reached into the pack at his feet and produced something that Harley's Observation passive registered before he could consciously process; a marking above it, faint and yellow. Not a threat flag, a quest flag, "When I encountered it, I managed one thing before I lost my fight. I carried an artifact into that forest; old, from before this village's founding, pulled from the ruins at the region's edge. The artifact weakened it. Not defeated, weakened." His jaw tightened slightly, "I lost it when I lost the rest of what I was carrying. Somewhere in the deep forest. The beast retreated before I could recover it."
Namir looked at Harley.
Harley looked at Namir.
The game produced its interface with smugness.
📜 QUEST AVAILABLE
The Artifact of Ahmadanam
A veteran warrior lost a powerful artifact in the deep sections of Ahmadanam Forest twelve years ago. The artifact is believed to weaken the true beast of the lore; an entity that Vethara's covenant served. Retrieve the artifact before the beast's cycle brings it back to activity.
Objective: Locate the lost artifact in deep Ahmadanam.
Reward: Unknown | EXP | Lore Progression
[ ACCEPT ] [ DECLINE ]
Harley looked at the DECLINE button, his old nemesis had returned. He pressed it repeatedly, hoping that the result would be different but what was he really thinking?
"Fuck." The button did not respond.
It had never responded. It would never respond. He hissed at it before accepting the quest with a defeated sigh. He was hating the game more and more.
✅ QUEST ACCEPTED: The Artifact of Ahmadanam
New Objective: Return to Ahmadanam. Locate the artifact in the deep forest sections.
"Out of curiosity," Harley spoke to the veteran, who was watching them with an expression of hope that Harley already felt guilty about potentially disappointing, "the thing that took your arm and your leg… How big is it?"
The man considered this for a moment.
"Bigger than the cave you were just in," he answered plainly.
"Fuck!" Harley cursed under his breath, he was convinced the game was up to kill them. If only he knew
Namir stood and picked up his spear, "We leave at first light," he had accepted his fate, not like complaining about it will change things..
Harley accessed everything that had happened so far, and Namir's words came back to him like a haunting memory; don't mistake it for easy.
He imagined a creature bigger than the cave they had just cleared, and he shivered, what could be bigger than Vethera?? If only he knew.
He was once again pissed about the DECLINE button's continued, absolute, magnificent uselessness.
"First light." And they were going on the second journey!