Delving
The noble and occasionally ill-advised pursuit of going down when all good sense suggests going literally any other direction. Once upon a time—which in the general scale of things meant “last Tuesday”—Delving was a jolly old bloodbath between Delvers (those who go down) and Dungeon Masters (those who make sure they never come up again).
These days, after what historians call the Co-Existence Accord, it’s all been cleaned up, filed under "Entertainment," and sold by the minute to a multiversal audience with the attention span of dopamine-starved goldfish.
The Nexus? handles most of the broadcasting, sponsorships, and tasteful censorship (only the really unsightly deaths are pixelated). It's all terribly modern. Delvers sign contracts longer than most epics, and Dungeon Masters are issued quarterly mood boards and monster quotas.
Of course, not everywhere has embraced the civilised approach. In certain... unregulated sectors, the Dungeons remain as cheerfully murderous as ever. There, the System still whispers to the ambitious and the unwary. "Go deeper," it says. "The real loot’s just one floor down."
The bodies, curiously enough, are usually in the same direction.
***
Life, Annabell Smith had come to conclude, was not just unfair. It was unfair, rude, and had a tendency to kick you in the shins while pretending to offer you a hug.
She’d never possessed much in the way of worldly acclaim. But what she did have, in a not-so-distant past, she had cherished. Instant noodles, knockoff streaming passwords, and that rarest of urban miracles—WiFi (borrowed from kind neighbours, in the sense that barnacles borrow ships).
All of it, cruelly snatched away. Through no fault of her own, mind you.
She hadn’t asked for reality to rip apart or for her neighborhood to be declared a Class-3 Undead Breach Zone. She certainly hadn’t requested to become a minor footnote in the System’s latest project, filed under the title “Girl Screams, Accidentally Destroys Zombie Hivemind.”
And now, just as the dust had finally settled and she had fought her way back to the warm embrace of a fluffy bed and a pantry that was filled with an assortment of goodies—now it was being taken away again.
Litigation.
The word alone was enough to make Annabell shiver—the kind of shiver normally reserved for words like "diet", "low battery", or “we’re out of cheese.”
How many of her dearest companions hadn’t perished in the Great Snack Rapture, their noble sacrifices unremembered, their expiry dates hastily weaponised? The lawyers had come like vultures in suits, swooping in on wings of precedent and clauses, declaring that her favourite snacks—her sweet, innocent snacks—contained too many artificial sweeteners and unidentified colorants.
“Not safe for consumption,” they’d said, in tones normally reserved for nuclear waste.
“A crime against humanity,” they’d solemnly stated, as if Annabell’s beloved Marauding Jellies had personally declared war on the digestive tract of mankind.
One by one, her dear companions—Neon Nibbles, Fizzbombs, Crunchweirdz—had been declared "non-compliant with bare minimum food standards" and dragged off, never to be munched again.
And now, with the ominous rustling of metaphorical paperwork, those traitorous, briefcase-wielding readers of fine print threatened to get involved again as he—the man who had ever-so-kindly guided her to her well-earned reward for saving the world, thank you very much, and then ungratefully lingered—was now striding toward the door.
“Wait, wait, wait!” she yelped, flailing into motion. Sauce still coated her fingers in a bold and incriminating shade of pizza-sauce as she skidded around the table like a fat feline escaping the scene of the crime.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“I… I promise,” she wheezed as she caught up with him outside the apartment, hunched over and panting—rapid caloric intake, strangely, did not help your cardio, “I don’t take up a lot of space. How… how about this: you get that drowning simulator you call a shower, and I’ll take the bed. Doesn’t that sound fair?”
It was, by any reasonable measure, an excellent deal. Generous. Gracious. Logistically sound. And yet, the man didn’t respond.
He just stood there, chewing his lip as he stared out into the gray and dreary outdoors.
Now, to be clear, the outdoors were always gray and dreary. But today, they had committed to the bit. A crumbling wall here. A cracked floor there. And the sky, having apparently misplaced its thunder, crackled without a sound.
Annabell peered past him, squinting against the gloom. “What happened out here?” she asked, her voice bouncing off the stillness like a poorly thrown rubber ball.
He blinked, looked down, as if only now realizing she was there.
“Someone broke the anchor,” he said, dryly. “The one holding reality together and this place tethered to the Underfold. Now it’s being torn apart, slowly and violently—like a ship on a stormy sea it was never designed to sail.”
Annabell, having processed this information with the speed and depth of a puddle absorbing a falling star, said, “Radical.” Then, having confirmed the delightful absence of lawyers, she spun on her heel. “Well, let me know if anything interesting happens. I’m heading to bed.”
She would have gone, too—drifted off to the warm embrace of a blanket and a nap unearned but sorely needed—if he hadn’t, at that precise moment, pinched the back of her collar like she was a cat about to do something ill-advised involving curtains.
“You think this is a joke?”
“Who’s joking?” Annabell huffed, wriggling out of his grip. It was, of course, a very ladylike wriggle—if the lady in question was a pair of good shoes and stretched toes away from five feet tall, slightly feral, and hadn’t combed her hair in forever. “Snacks and naps are the foundation of a healthy lifestyle. To be without is to deny what makes us human.”
For a second, he just stared at her.
She stared back, hands on hips, having adopted a stance that might have been called ‘heroic’ if not for the sauce stains, frizzy hair, and the faint aroma of whatever garlic substitute she’d too confidently challenged.
Then, without a word, he raised his palm to the apartment door and nudged it with the solemnity of a priest revealing a particularly upsetting miracle.
It creaked. It groaned. It did that peculiar thing old hinges do where they sound like they’re asking to be put out of their misery. Flakes of paint peeled away, and while the apartment technically still stood (apart from some recent Gremlin-inspired renovations), the threshold itself—where Here became There—was flickering like an old television looking for the right channel.
“Right,” he said, voice clipped. “And how exactly do you plan to nap and snack when this entire place is turning to atmospheric seasoning? We are, in case it’s slipped your snack-addled mind, on a schedule. A tight one. Shouldn’t you have gotten a notification to delve deeper by now?”
Annabell blinked. Her eyes flickered upward.
There they were: a polite yet increasingly urgent constellation of blinking System notifications, hovering just at the edge of her peripheral vision. Things like:
- [!!] DESTABILIZATION DETECTED – Anchor Point Severed
- KINDLY proceed to the Next Layer BEFORE you are erased from existence
- [!] WARNING: Time dilation increasing.
“I can neither confirm nor deny such allegations,” she said loftily, with all the evasive dignity of someone refusing to acknowledge the eviction notice nailed to their front door.
He groaned. “Well, let me be the one to warn you, then,” he said, stepping past her with the clipped pace of a man who had absolutely had it with reality today.
“It seems the System has interpreted someone”—he jabbed a thumb vaguely in her direction—“crashing through a dungeon core as an official signal to roll out the next scenario. With haste.”
“And for some reason,” he continued, gesticulating furiously as he disappeared into the depths of the apartment, “the cursed thing has decided to assign me to this mess, as if I wasn’t the clear victim in all of this! I had plans! Spreadsheets! I had a beautiful future ahead of me!”
Annabell lingered in the doorway, still processing this turn of events as a cold realization dawned on her. She’d been duped.
He was heading for the bedroom.
“Oi! Don’t you dare pull a fast one!” she shouted. “The bed is–”
Just as she was about to scramble after him, he reappeared.
Clad in a form-fitting jacket of reinforced synth-weave, utility belts and pouches crisscrossing his legs and torso, and footwear built not for lounging but for marching, he’d transformed in an instant—from dark and troubled youth into someone who made you think, “Okay, maybe this guy isn’t such a bad person to have around if the world is ending after all.”
“You might want to change into something more practical,” he said, brushing past her again like a man with an appointment to punch destiny in the face. “Preferably whatever Delver gear you’ve got. The System’s decreed we head into the Underfold. Old-fashioned style. No shortcuts, no teleport gates, and absolutely no snack breaks.”
“No snack breaks?” Annabell gasped. “What do you mean ‘no snack breaks’?”
Above her head, blinking in cheerful malevolence, a large red System warning was busy counting down from 00:06:58. Accompanying it was a cheerful chime, like an elevator letting you know you were approaching doom with every ding.