Chapter 1

Fey wasn’t one to panic, but she was starting to get a little worried.

The adventuring band she was a member of had descended into the dungeon assuming it was like any other, and it had appeared that way at first, simple slimes, a few dim-witted goblins, nothing they couldn’t handle.

But then the monsters had started to get tricky. Living armours. A suit of armour that could move of its own volition wasn’t an unheard of monster, but the strange craftsmanship of the armour was unlike anything any of them had ever seen, all angular spikes and cruel edges, strange runes dotted the armour’s surface and they carried black bladed swords.

The leader of their band, a strong willed red-headed elf named Ellaria, wasn’t one to back down and she blasted the armours apart with her typically explosive style of pyromancy. Mostly that worked out, however sometimes the armour was strong enough to hold itself together under the barrage and they were forced to close combat. That meant Vivi, a five foot tall white-furred fox biped, and Flora, a three and a half foot tall pink-haired shortstack gnome. Not exactly typical species for dangerous fighting but they had soon proven that it was a mistake to judge them by their stature.

A living armour approached the band. Vivi’s longsword whistled through the air glowing bright and sliced open the armour’s cuirass revealing the empty interior. The Armour hissed and stumbled backwards in time for the dozen metal weapons telekinetically orbiting the gnome’s body to zip forward and smash into it, hammers, daggers, and spikes, to crush, slice, and pierce.

The living armour was looking quite ragged by this point and each step it took had a stuttering tremble. The band relaxed slightly seeing it was close to going down, but suddenly the armour lunged forward in a last desperate surge. Its sword came up and Vivi only had a moment to cry out before the blade slashed up her side spraying blood over her white fur.

“No!” screamed Ellaria as Vivi slowly slumped to the ground, a paw clutched to her side.

Ellaria thrust her palm forward and a cone of fire obliterated the living armour sending chunks of flaming metal careening down the stone corridor.

“Fey! Heal her!”

Fey trotted forward and lowered herself down beside the fallen vulpine fox girl, not so easily done being a centaur, but still she managed. She held out her hands over the wound and after a moment it began to heal over, the wound sealing and leaving clean snow-white fur behind.

Vivi breathed a sigh of relief and climbed to her feet. She held out her paw and Fey grasped it, grateful for the help to get her hooves under her. She was small for a centaur, her horse body more pony like than horse like, meaning that the top of her head only came up to a little under 6 foot 8 inches.

“Thanks for that, I should have seen that attack coming, my fault.”

“No problem, I’m just glad you’re okay.”

The fox girl smiled shyly up at Fey.

“I was wrong about you, you are good at what you do, I guess I was being kinda speciest expecting you to fight. I really should know better, it’s not like I don’t get flak for being a front liner with my height and build.”

“O-oh, it’s fine, just got to keep in mind not to judge a book by its cover, aha.”

“Hey hey hey, enough with the feelings and stupid shit, we’re in a dungeon, save that crap for later,” said the gnome. She was levitating herself in a reclined position as though relaxing on an invisible couch. Various sharp metal instruments lazily orbited around her.

“I wouldn’t put it quite that way but we do need to focus, this dungeon is unusually dangerous. Speaking of which,” said Ellaria as she turned to look down the gloomy heavy stone blockwork corridor.

A clanking and scraping sound filled the air and around the corner dozens of living armours stomped, each holding up a black long sword in a pair of armoured fists.

“That’s a bit more than just unusually dangerous Ella! If we fight that we’re gonna die!” yelped Vivi staring at the oncoming wall of metal.

“Er, right. Run!”

Ellaria double palmed the air and a pair of massive fireballs shot down the corridor to explode and fill it with light and fire. She turned on her heel and legged it in the opposite direction, quickly catching up to the rest of the band who were already making haste. Behind them the wave of living metal charged through the fire, their metal bodies wreathed in flames.

The group dashed down the gloomy stone corridors, Fey’s hooves clacking against ancient stone while Flora whizzed through the air.

They rushed into the chamber that contained stairs back up to previous floors and the exit. Problem was that there was no stair.

Fey looked around in disbelief. Where there had once been a rectangular hole in the wall with a broad set of stairs there was now flat heavy stonework with no indication there had ever been an exit there.

“What the fuck?! What is this!” cried Flora. She hurled an orbiting hammer at the wall and it pinged off without even marking it.

Ellaria eyed the blank stone warily.

“This isn’t a normal dungeon. Somethings wrong here.”

“Blow a fucking hole in this piece of shit wall!” yelled Flora jabbing a finger at it.

Ellaria set her jaw and brought up her hands. She hurried as the sound of clanking metal became distantly audible.

A huge azure fireball swiftly coalesced out of the air and then compressed in her palms to about the size of a fist.

“Get back.”

The others rushed to do so as she hurled it at the stone. The fireball rocketed forward and struck the wall with an ear splitting roar. Blue fire washed out and away from the impact point until half the room was ablaze.

The group squinted and peered through the fire but as the flames died out they could only look on in dismay at the completely undamaged stonework.

The sound of metal boots entering the room broke the silence.

Fey didn’t hesitate. She grabbed Vivi and Ellaria and tossed them on to her back and galloped full tilt away from the armour with Flora floating in her wake. She picked one of the many corridors leading out of the chamber and fled down it leaving the armour in her dust.

“We’ve no choice! There’s gotta be another way out!”

Ellaria hooked an arm around the centaur’s waist and leant forward.

“No, I don’t think there is another way out. This dungeon, it’s telling us we need to kill the boss before it will let us leave.”

“That’s insane! Dungeons aren’t alive!” cried Vivi.

“This one is it seems, or at least being controlled somehow.”

“Fuck that plan! That’s just a shit way to die! You saw how nasty those armour fucks are, their boss is gonna fuck us up waayy more!”

“Got any better ideas?”

The gnome scowled at her.

“Exactly. Buck up or button up, we’re going down.”

Ellaria jabbed a finger ahead and Fey followed it to see a stair through one of the many side passages ahead. She slowed and stepped inside. She paused to let Ellaria and Vivi off her back and the band made their way down the steps, Fey awkwardly, centaurs were not made for stairs.

This stair seemed larger and longer than the one they had descended originally, and grander, revealing itself as their meagre light descended into the blackness. It took them nearly half an hour to travel to the bottom of the huge shadowed stair. They even had to break a few times to rest. Vivi mentioned several times how strangely gigantic the stair was, none of the band had come across anything like it in a dungeon before.

It felt like it took forever but eventually they reached the bottom. A massive door over twenty foot tall greeted them. Bronze and verdigris with age and wear it featured strange strutted helix-like designs in relief and what looked like eggs framed in leafy laurels. Large angular runes were engraved at the top of the door but none of them had any clue what it said, the language was completely unknown to them.

“This is probably the important bit, you don’t put nothing behind a door like this,” said Vivi in a hushed tone.

“Why are you whispering, The doors closed,” said Flora drifting past, a finger twisting in her ear mining for wax.

“I- hey! stop criticising, this place is spooky!” said Vivi defensively.

“Whatever you say foxy. Look, I’ll handle this.”

The gnome sat up and stretched on her invisible floating couch, she cracked her knuckles, and then waved her hands vaguely at the door. The door trembled and vibrated on its hinges, dust and dirt and patches of degraded metal breaking away as it shook. With a terrible screeching grinding sound the door began to swing slowly open, leaving a mess of debris in its wake.

The band cautiously peeked inside as it widened. There wasn’t much to be excited about, just darkness. As the doors fully opened they stepped inside, nervously looking around.

Darkness swelled around them, the small island of light from a yellow flame that hovered over Ellaria’s head a lonely pool in the oppressive pitch-black.

Fey’s hooves echoed noisily against the flagstone as the band made their way forward.

“Hello! Anybody out there! ... Come and get some!” yelled Flora.

Vivi shot her an angry glare.

“Stop that! Gods, can’t you take anything seriously for once in your life!”

Flora blew a raspberry at the white furred fox.

A small red light suddenly flicked on. Fey wasn’t sure if it was small or just really far away. In any case, it was only a dot in the sheer black wall of lightlessness.

The band stared at it, frozen and ready to bolt.

A metal sounding clunk and an echoing bang made them flinch.

Suddenly a voice echoed out of the darkness. It sounded mechanical and metal, an incredibly artificial voice.

[Welcome to the collection facility. Facility currently in er--ERR--error.]

“What was that language? What did it say?”

“Dunno, never heard anything like it.”

[Facility has been operating for ten, thous- thousa- hundred- year, years, years. M.I Magical Intelligence tasked with magically syphoning Virility from all life forms planet wide and storing for reseeding after collapse of creator’s civilization ten- thousan- hundred- thousand years ago.]

“How do we shut it up? Where’s the boss?”

[Creators failed to preserve any number of their kind for rebuilding before collapse. Facility without target. Facility operating on original command. Facility currently failing to contain collected Virility. Exceeding maximum containment despite cannibalising material from unused lower cities to build additional bays, despite extreme unprecedented levels of Virility compression, despite use of emergency overflow tanks. Facility is currently seven hundred trillion units past original specification of Virility containment.]

A clunk caused a very distant flood light to turn on, then another, then another, the lights clunked on one by one getting nearer as they came to life. Once they reached the hundreds Fey realized she was looking down a stupendously vast hall that had to be at least ten miles long and a mile tall. The walls and floor were slanted inward and vast cylindrical glass tanks filled every free spot each containing a large lakes worth of white fluid. Rows and rows of the things, an unimaginable amount of fluid.

The band stared open-mouthed at the insane space, mind-bogglingly vast. Then to their side the next floodlights started clunking to life. Their eyes swivelled to see another hall the same size as the first, endless seas of massive glass containers. They gulped as the next row of lights began to flick on, then the next. In total there were seven of these stupendous halls that all converged on a massive stone platform that the band had emerged out onto.