Have you ever had an inclination that something was going to happen, like the fact that the pudding you'd left in the icebox would be gone when you got home, but still been surprised when it happened? Yeah, that happened to me.
The friggin dead Human, was not friggin dead. Surprise, surprise!
Nope, the Human was not dead, and the first thing I thought of when I saw it's eyes open, was that it's soul was up for grabs. Then, I scolded myself for spending too long in the company of Daimons.
"...D-don't go....g-go....thir-thirteenth..." The Human rasped, mouth dry as bone, and one eye crusted shut by blood.
"You got to the Thirteenth Floor? What's there?" The poor thing, apparently I was thinking of Humans as pets now, swallowed thick around the lump in its throat.
"...D-demon...g-od..s-s-is...un-unbeatable." The Human went back to being dead, and I shrugged. Sure, that sounded ominous, and impossibly more dangerous than being wolf chow, but I was already dead.
Unlike that weakling Human, I could still move if I lost a few limbs. Unlike that little thing, I did not feel like going back down ten whole Floors just because there was a Demon or a God or whatever on the last Floor. That kinda came with Dungeon territory.
I was rudely surprised again when the Human's body was crunched under the weight of a ginormous foot.
"Huh, isn't that grand?" There, above me, was, you can guess, the Floor Boss. He, yes I know it's rude to assume gender pronouns but I didn't think a female could ever be that ugly, was standing at an impressive ten foot eleven or so.
He had long dreads that fell and tangled behind the leftovers of a breastplate, reaching his knees. His skin was the gross kind of tan you only ever see on naked mole rats, and he wielded a dented Scimitar. Also, I'm fairly certain his face used to be the same color as his body, but now it was a sticky black-red color from eating...well that wasn't important.
What was important, was that he had just squished my new friend's body like an ant bully. He'd gotten Human guts to cover the entire front half of me, and it didn't feel great. And now, he was leaning down to scrub the scraps of bone and skull from his foot, an inch away from flicking me with his nail.
Man, I really hated Daimons.
I rolled quickly to the side while my form was hidden by his thick ass finger, and tried to figure a way out of this. I'll simplify the fight in six easy steps.
How to kill a Daimon Lord, Step One:
Check that you have everything important, a weapon, some kind of Magic, debatable immortality, feet.
Totally got that covered.
Step Two:
Find an opening, and attempt to wound the giant, while avoiding the completely inconspicuous couch-sized mouth.
Problem, his mouth was the only opening.
Step Three:
Get swallowed whole by the Daimon. It's much better going down alive, or you know, dead. Whatever the heck I am.
Step Four:
Risk using every last drop of Magic you have built up to explode the thing from inside. Preferably do this before getting covered in whatever gross other things the Daimon Lord has ate.
Step Five:
Escape from the Daimon's innards mostly unharmed, and not at-all exhausted because the only way to survive that would be to be a Lich.
Step Six:
Burn that sucker with the fire spreading from its guts. Also, include celebrating in this step, because your time is limited.
While I was still getting used to gore and the smell of burning flesh, I used something, will not waste time debating on what it was, to craft myself stillt-feet and moved on to the Eleventh Floor. Don't worry, I remembered to recover my Magic first.
I will purposely use a time skip to make sure nobody can cheat their way passed the next two floors. I promise it wasn't because anything embarrassing happened. It was because they were boring.
They were terrible, one covered in adorable Spiders, not more adorable than Zombats, and the other a nest of some type of Crane Spawns I'll try to remember to ask Suzui about.
It was fun to snap their unusually long stick necks though. After another rest stop and wondering how other Adventurers ever made it through this Dungeon at Beginner level, I moved on at last to the finale.
Nobody knew why, but all Dungeons had thirteen floors. People speculated that there were thirteen gods, or maybe they represented the thirteen zodiacs, or possibly even the thirteen rings of Hell. I personally believed that the number twelve just wasn't cool enough.
Twelve is too easy to say and overused, so Dungeons always have thirteen floors. Bakers dozen and all that.
Well anyway, the path onto the last floor, opened up to let me through. There to greet me was a granite-gray cave, small and dry, much like a normal room.
Apparently the floor was not an entire ecosystem like all the others, but just one room, the Boss Room.
Lighting shone from some unknown source, breaking over the tallest stave I've ever seen in my life and death.
Holding that stave, dressed in blood-red and white accented robes and a ridiculously large hat was someone I thought to be dead.
I recognized the midnight Black Crown secured to the tip of the stave.
It was the Hierophant.
"I was expecting you." He boomed. I laughed, hiding the burning ache of rage beneath a nervous smile.
"Really, because I wasn't."