Colt took care of the dinosaurs. They were snuffed out like wicks on a candle—a cut or so was enough to handle any of the little rascals that got close. The one thing in their favor was how impressively they scampered around with those tiny legs; compared to his dexterity, though, they fell.

  He didn’t hog the experience.

  Nate, Sarah, Nick, and Julia helped with the extermination. Unlike the comet that crashed into the earth and annihilated these things ages ago, this time, it was a bit more bloody.

  Julia tore them apart with water; a high-pressure stream of water on the monster’s flesh brought ugly results. Nate cracked skulls with his hammer, morphing the metal to have spikes. Sarah snapped a dino-neck. And Nick shot them from a distance, protecting their scout.

  All said and done, they euthanized twenty of them.

  ———

  You have leveled up!

  You have 6 Stat points to spend. You have gained 1 point of Dexterity and 1 point of Soul

  ———

  About time.

  Colt gifted the unspent points to Soul. More there meant more room to play with his Edicts and wield the power. Going into a D- ranked dungeon again required strong weapons, and he was this group’s strongest weapon. Might as well polish his knife and prepare for whatever they might face.

  Julia wiped the overabundance of blood off her face; she looked like she’d walked off the set of a horror film. Her high-pressure streams of water required physical closeness. A new use of her water magic that she’d tested out on their recent expeditions. It had the unsightly result in a horror fest of blood from their enemies. Even Nate, who smashed stuff into a paste, didn’t get the same type of gore.

  Colt shook his head.

  “Should be clear, please find us the entrance and do your scan,” Colt asked the horrified scout.

  The girl shivered and then got to her work, pacing past the disfigured dinosaur corpses and around the exterior of the Adventure Science Center.

  Sarah sighed as she watched, “Last time I was here was as a kid. Now it’s swarming with these things like a movie. What has the world become?”

  “We’ll, not too sure, are we? At some point, we’ll get info from outta our little town, and then we’ll get a better idea. Til then, all we know is what we got.” Nick said.

  “And what we have is Greek-themed hell tournaments, a childhood playground turned into Jurassic Park, and a city with officials bent on tyranny,” Sarah replied, her language a bit more brazen since the scout was far enough not to eavesdrop.

  Colt rolled his shoulders, feeling forcing the muscles to relax. This part wasn’t tense, even though the fighting and pulling at his Edicts got his heart running. No. It was coming soon. The scout prowled the outside of the building and settled on the main doors—she focused and then looked at them. Go figure. The dungeon entrance was the entrance.

  “We do with what we got.”

  The pink-haired scout gave an urgent wave, so they made their way the rest of the way over.

  “It’s D- like you said. Name is ‘Primeval Park,’ and… The scale is confusing. The layout here is beyond the ability of my skill to grasp.” She said, concluding her report. Aside from the confirmation of the rank, it wasn't much, which is about all Colt needed.

  Frankly, it was hard to trust the scouts. The last time they delivered information about a dungeon, they were exceptionally wrong; granted, a goddess using Edict to alter and conceal the real difficulty level in an attempt to lure in lower-level participants for drama in her gladiatorial games was unlikely to happen again… But, her report didn’t inspire confidence.

  In a lot of ways, it was akin to checking on a box on a form. “Will you be able to get back to New Nashville safely?” he asked.

  “Of course. Are you guys really going into another one of these? After the last time?”

  Ah, so the word got around with the scouts; well, it was probably their worst fear to mislead dungeon divers. In their eyes, they all worked together to benefit the city, and the last thing one of these arbiters of information wanted was to incorrectly provide information that brought about death to the people relying on them.

  “We cleared one. Which means we’ll deal with this one.”

  She gave them a hesitant look—her head turning left and right while she spied their background; no more dinos were coming. For a second, she looked as if she might say more but decided against it. Turning around and scampering off.

  Colt took one last look at the extinction event outside of the dungeon and then moved on from it. He strolled to the Adventure Science Center, grasped the door handle, then moved inside. As tossed the big glass door open, he was once more greeted by a swirling vortex. Lights twinkled inside an inky black pit, their presence shining and encapsulating. Little mote of life and death.

  He stopped as he was mesmerized by the sight.

  The way they shifted, like countless cosmos—out of all the portals he’d witnessed since the end of the world, this one had a particular beauty to it.

  Once he shook himself back awake, he finally entered.

  ———

  Welcome To Primeval Park

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Dungeon Rank: D-

  Clear Conditions:

  Defeat Tyrannous X

  Defeat Csaba The Great

  Note: Exit cannot be discovered until all bosses are defeated.

  ———

  The first thing that was apparent about this dungeon was the darkness—all around was darkness, trees thicker and wider than houses spiraled up nearby, the canopy stretching so high into the sky that the leaves grasped it and blotted it out completely, stealing light for below. Barely any of it got through, providing a near-dark room

  The ground beneath his feet was a scattering of black-ish plants and thin, starved vines that clambered up the trees as they fought for their lives for an ounce of light.

  Next was immediate caution.

  A snake the size of a normal tree was coiled nearby on the tree—and Colt had caught its attention with his appearance.

  Snap decision.

  Colt’s knife appeared in his hand and then left it in the same instant, darting through the air at the snake wrapped around the tree above. The snake didn’t have time to react as the weapon went point first into its black eye, spouting blood as he let out a mighty hiss that reverberated in his chest.

  Nate appeared.

  “Forge your skin, now!” Colt said, his knife vanishing from the Snake’s eye and already in his hand again—the guy did as Colt said, a second before the head of the Snake snapped downward, jaw unhinged as it made to bite Nate whole.

  Colt hastily wrapped a cut around his knife, then sliced—tearing right into the side of the Snake’s neck; the creature’s scales glowed as it fought against the superior Edict, but the blow was too powerful for such a sloppy defense to fight.

  First, the cut went a foot into the fleshy monster. Then another foot. Then, like a tree, it lopped the entirety of the head off; the body on the nearby tree collapsed with a heavy THUMP.

  ———

  You have defeated Tree Snake - Level 50

  ———

  Colt ran over to the decapitated skull of the monster, still wrapped around the place Nate had been, coating his knife with his Edict and cutting through the monster’s flesh—Sarah appeared, and he ordered her to help. Then Nick, and lastly Julia.

  All of them, he noticed, appeared in slightly different spots. Whatever teleportation mechanism the system used, it had a random chance.

  Colt cut through the thick, meaty jaw—revealing Nate beneath.

  The guy was panting heavily, the sharp-dagger points of the snake poking into his skin all around, but none of them got very deep. Forging his skin strengthened it, preventing the attack from going through. That and the rapid beheading of the monster prevented it from clamping down and turning Nate into snake food, thank god.

  “I hate this place already,” Nate said, wiping off saliva and blood.

  Colt let out a sigh of relief and scouted outward. The scale was wild; vines and trees in every direction as far as one might look, a veritable natural park of gigantic trees. Given the theme, he predicted it would be full of more oversized monsters.

  A lot of stuff to cut through, which would be good practice.

  “Yeah, I think I hate it too. I don’t know how we’re going to find the missing people. It might be better to focus on the objectives since they haven’t cleared either boss. At the very least, if we finish the dungeon and never encounter them, they’ll have a chance to get out. So that leaves us with two jobs: we have to kill Tyrannus X… And Csaba the Great.”

  “Is Csaba a type of animal?” Nick asked, summoning his light bow; its glow was heaven-sent, making it much easier to look at their immediate surroundings. Eerily, the fauna beneath their feet shuffled and shivered in the light’s radiance. Creepy.

  “Maybe?” Sarah offered.

  Colt inspected one of the plants and then kicked it. Just to make sure it wasn’t one big monster itself. Thankfully, no. Nothing was more terrifying an idea than an entire dungeon where every single plant was alive and watching them. He inspected the plants again to be sure and got nothing substantial. Primeval Dark-Lead Undergrowth Fauna—how the system picked its names was too utilitarian sometimes.

  The whole of the forest appeared to be on a slope, with a steep enough angle to tell which direction was ‘up.’

  “Well. We have two general ways to go.” Colt said, eying either direction. It was a grand forest either way. Descend or ascend. Go down to hell, or go up to meet god, if one wanted to be a bit dramatic about it.

  “Uphill?” Nate said, still wiping snake spit off him. “If it breaks the canopy and can give us a view of smoke or fire. Worst case, this is a dungeon. The boss is somewhere. The top of wherever this is seems as likely a place for a boss as any.”

  Colt twirled the knife in his hand. If Nate thought that best, then he did too.

  With a short agreement by group vote, they set out in that direction.

  They found another giant snake, even larger than the last, by the horrifying grace of this majestic forest, but it, too, was murdered. This time, Nate collected some meat and made a fire. Unlike the Endless Alleys, scarcity of food didn’t initially appear to be an issue—not when there were giant tree snakes to slaughter.

  After that, they got moving again.

  Another giant tree snake; this time, they found it in the midst of fighting what looked to be a Pterodactyl—the giant dinosaur under the canopy and in a life-or-death struggle on the forest floor with the snake. They killed both of them, getting engaged in the scuffle on their way through their dungeon. Experience was a must. Given that everything they faced was about level fifty, it added up very nicely for their lower-level members.

  Colt thought it felt a vast sea. Even though these creatures were a higher level, stretching for that next one was taking longer and longer.

  The brief skirmishes didn’t go to waste, though.

  ———

  Olympic Mandate (Basic) has gained a level!

  *Soul And Mind Fortitude* (Basic) has gained a level!

  ———

  He didn’t feel torn up about using the Olympic Mandate on cool-down. Practice with it in live combat was valuable. Leveling it up was even more valuable. Eventually, it would get stronger, but to get there, it had to be used often and as much as possible. It was an odd paradox.

  The nature of it having an hour-long wait tempted him to keep it in his pocket and break it out in fights that demanded an edge. But if you did that, it’d go nowhere.

  Instead, he just viewed it as a button to press at every opportunity, not taking its use into his calculation of him at his strongest. There was no other mental framework he might use for now which would maximize its training. Think too hard about it, and it was wasted. Nike would probably say that ‘champions must always give one-hundred-and-ten percent,’ or that kind of bullshit.

  Colt kept it practical.

  Mile by mile, they trudged upward, beholden to the almighty slope. Its steepness only continued to grow. At times it was all they could do to climb up roots from the giant trees to make progress.

  Gradually, more and more light broke through the top—it became less a dense wall of green ceiling, to a light green and maybe spots of light above.

  Hours in, Colt offered to climb a tree and see above the canopy… With it not quite as dense, it made seeing any danger above easier.

  “Sure. We’ll set up camp below.” Nate agreed.

  “Thank god the rogue is finally scouting. Sheesh.” Julia complained while rubbing her stomach.

  “Appreciate wishing me luck, Julia,” Colt shook his head and walked over to a massive tree—staring up. Offering was one thing. Climbing was mostly about dexterity, right? Not that he’d put in much practice but… Near a hundred points of dexterity had to have a point, didn’t it?