The chains shattered.
The sound rang out like breaking glass, a discordant echo that rippled through the stone. A moment stretched in silence, the last fragment of rusted metal clattering to the ground.
Then—something sighed.
Not a gust of wind. Not a shift in the dungeon’s foundation. A breath. Long. Tired. As if something on the other side had been waiting far too long for this moment.
Nick tensed. Ray’s grip tightened on her broken halberd. Lexi’s ears flattened, her tail bristling.
The door moved on its own. Not fast. Not violently. It simply slid open, slow and deliberate as if welcoming them inside.
Beyond the threshold lay darkness—not the murky dimness of the dungeon, but a deep, swallowing void.
A dim ember of violent flame flickered to life in Nick’s palm. He stepped forward, the others close behind.
The moment he crossed the threshold, the darkness changed.
A soft, golden glow bloomed across the chamber.
Nick’s eyes widened.
The walls stretched high, lined with ancient, spiraling symbols, carved into smooth, polished stone. No jagged rock, no crude cave structure…
It was a temple.
At the center of the room, a statue loomed—a massive, kneeling goblin with its hands raised toward the ceiling, eyes closed in supplication.
Benches lay scattered around the room, some still intact, others rotted away. The air smelled of incense.
“What…”
Ray’s gaze swept the walls, her expression unreadable. “This is…” she hesitated, then muttered, almost to herself, “…a sanctuary.”
Then, at the far end of the room, she saw it.
A goblin hunched before the statue.
Its robes were tattered but ceremonial, draped over its frail frame in layers of deep red and gold. A wooden staff rested beside it, its tip embedded with a cracked crystal.
It did not move.
Nick narrowed his eyes. Was it dead? No.
The goblin breathed.
A single, slow inhale. Then an exhale.
Another sigh.
Then, finally, the goblin shaman opened its eyes.
Its gaze was sharp. Aged. Yet not monstrous.
It didn’t snarl. It didn’t lunge. It simply studied them.
Then, in an ancient, feminine voice, the goblin spoke.
“Dulo’kai vreshan…ku’to.”
Nick blinked. “It speaks?”
Ray stiffened.
The goblin’s gaze flickered between them before it exhaled softly, tilting its head. It knew they didn’t understand.
“…She said, ‘So you’ve come…humans’,” Ray translated.
Nick glanced at her. “You can understand it?”
Ray hesitated. Then nodded. “…Yeah, I can understand her.”
Lexi glanced between them, her ears twitching. “What else is she saying.”
Ray didn’t answer right away. Instead, her eyes remained locked on the shaman. A silent conversation passed between them.
The goblin’s lips moved gain, her voice softer this time.
“Na’shen do re’ash…?”
Ray sucked in a breath.
“She’s asking how much we know.”
Nick frowned. “About what?”
The goblin shaman spoke again.
“‘The tragedy of this place.’”
His eyes wandered to the statue, then back to the bones in the pit outside. A sanctuary beside a graveyard. A massacre.
“What happened here?” he asked.
The shaman let out another breath, the faintest glimmer of sorrow in her old eyes. Ray listened intently, her expression gradually turning dark as the goblin spoke in low, slow sentences, her voice like the echo of something buried.
Finally, Ray translated.
“She says this was once a sacred place. A place of worship. When the invaders came, her people sought refuge here. They prayed. They begged. They thought the true gods would protect them.”
Her voice hardened.
“They didn’t.”
Lexi’s expression twisted. “So they were slaughtered by humans.”
Ray nodded. “That’s right.”
The shaman continued speaking, her voice quiet. Then, for the first time, her gaze lowered.
She whispered something.
Ray’s expression froze.
Nick noticed instantly. “Ray?”
She blinked, shaking herself. Then, hesitantly, she translated.
“She says she made a bargain.”
“…With who?”
The goblin lifted her hand—
And pointed.
At the dungeon itself.
“The dungeon is alive,” Ray murmured. “And it isn’t kind.”
Nick stared at the goblin shaman warily. “What did she trade.”
The shaman smiled.
A quiet, broken smile.
Ray swallowed. “…She traded her people.”
The bones in the pit. The silent goblins. The unnatural stillness.
The dungeon had preserved the massacre. Frozen it in time. Locked these goblins in perpetual waiting, neither alive nor truly dead.
All for a single, grieving shaman who had begged for time.
“…I sorry,” the goblin shaman whispered in fractured English.
Nick inhaled sharply. “For what?”
The shaman’s smile faltered. Her voice cracked. “For the next.”
A pulse surged through the sanctuary.
The walls bled shadow.
The carvings on the wall flickered—not with magic, but with something deeper. The room itself trembled as the weight of the dungeon’s will bore down upon them.
Ray’s eyes widened. “No—!”
The goblin’s body shuddered—a deep, unnatural convulsion. Her lips moved, but no sound came, as if the words had been stolen before they could be spoken. Her fingers curled against the stone floor, nails splintering.
Then, she stilled.
And when she looked up again, her eyes were pitch black, reflecting the surrounding void being held at bay by golden light.
The sanctuary shuddered.
The dungeon was laughing.
The carvings along the wall shifted—no longer symbols, but wounds, each stroke of ancient script bleeding shadow into the golden light.
The air, once stale, now trembled with something primal and hungry.
The goblin shaman jerked as if yanked by invisible strings.
Her form straightened unnaturally, bones creaking. The golden light illuminating the sanctuary dimmed, flickering erratically as if the room itself was fighting back.
She screamed.
A voice that should have belonged to an old woman warped, layered with something deeper, something hollow, echoing like a sound from another world.
The force of it rattled the walls, and the ancient statue looming behind her fractured, a jagged crack splitting down its face.
Nick staggered back, his instincts screaming at him.
This wasn’t just a dungeon monster. This was the dungeon itself.
‘Wasn’t this dungeon supposed to be beginner-friendly?’
The shaman’s thin frame convulsed as the last traces of her own will fought against the invading force. Her arms snapped outward, fingers stretching impossibly long before curling in a claw-like grip around her staff.
The cracked crystal at its tip flared to life—not with light, but with void, sucking the golden glow form the room, swalling it like a bottomless pit.
Ray took a step forward. “She’s still in there!”
Nick grabbed her arm. “You heard what she said, Ray—she chose this! She knew this would happen!”
Ray wrenched herself free, her eyes locked onto the shaman’s trembling frame. “She didn’t choose this. She begged for more time.”
The goblin’s formed lurched forward—one step, then another, her breath coming out in ragged gasps. Her face was a warzone—one side etched with grief and age, the other stretched with a widening, inhuman grin, its teeth sharpening by the second.
The shaman’s mouth unhinged, and from the depths of her throat came a wail unlike anything human—a soundless, soul-rending cry that didn’t reach their ears but instead tore through their minds.
Nick barely had time to register the pain before his vision twisted.
—A burning village.
—Goblins screaming, clutching their children.
—A golden-robed figure standing over a pit of fire, whispering a prayer.
—Steel. Blood. Silence.
His knees buckled, the sheer force of grief, of loss, of regret pouring through him.
“It’s not real…” he muttered, trying to focus his reeling mind.
The moment he rejected it, the visions shattered, but his but still felt a ghost of the pain. His hands shook. His chest ached with a grief that wasn’t his own.
Ray was immune to mental attacks, so she was completely unaffected.
Lexi, however—Lexi was frozen.
Her pupils had blown wide, her entire body trembling. Her claws dug into her arms, her breath ragged and broken.
“Damn it…!”
Nick moved. He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her hard. “Lexi, it’s not real!”
Her head snapped toward him, pupils narrowing.
She gasped.
A real, shuddering breath.
The shaman had already moved.
She descended upon them, her staff raised high—a mass of ink-like void pooling at its tip, writhing as if alive.
Nick reacted—flames surging to life in his palm as he lunged forward.
The goblin struck first.
A single tap of her staff against the stone floor sent black tendrils racing toward them, each one curling and splitting the ground apart like veins of ink bleeding through parchment.
Nick jumped back, flames roaring as he threw a wave of fireballs into the oncoming attack. The Sinbound Flames hissed against the black magic, the two forces colliding in a cascade of writhing light. The flames eradicated the dark magic effortlessly, consuming the tendrils entirely.
Ray moved on instinct, circling left, her broken halberd shifting into a defensive stance. The shaman snapped her head toward her, locking on like a predator sighting its prey.
She whispered something.
Nick felt it before he saw it—a sudden weight on his limbs, a pulse of unnatural gravity sinking into his skin. His legs wobbled.
Ray staggered, her movements turning sluggish.
Lexi collapsed to a knee, gasping.
The goblin raised her staff again, the void curling toward the ceiling—
And then Ray moved.
With a furious snarl, she kicked off the ground, her body twisting through the air, her broken weapon cutting toward the goblin’s side like a scythe.
A pulse of black energy erupted, sending Ray crashing into the far wall.
“Ray!”
She groaned in response and held her hand out, giving him a thumbs up to show she was okay.
The shaman moved again—her staff striking the ground once more. More ink-like veins pulsed outward, carving a ring around them.
“This is a ritual site…” Lexi muttered fearfully.
Nick tensed, recalling what happened the last time he saw a ritual…
“Then we don’t let her,” he replied solemnly.
The shaman turned her eyes to him, her lips curling into a savage, knowing grin. Her staff struck the stone.
The sanctuary convulsed—the walls pulsing like a living thing. A wave of black tendrils erupted outward, spreading like veins into the cracks of the floor, slithering toward the pit of bones outside.
Though they couldn’t see it, they heard it.
A sound like a thousand whispers layered over one another, crawling up from the depth of the dungeon. The bones in the pit trembled.
Ray’s expression twisted. “Don’t let her finish the ritual!”
The tendrils reached the bones.
The pit began to glow.
Nick saw a ripple of movement as the skeletal remains began to rise.
Not just one.
All of them.
Every goblin who had died here—every forgotten soul in this mass grave—was being called back.
He clenched his teeth.
It wasn’t as if he had never considered doing something like this before. After losing so much, there was a point when he went crazy.
But he never actually went through with it.
This wasn’t resurrection.
This was consumption.
He surged forward, violent flames blooming in his palm, twisting, coiling, forming a concentrated mass of Sinbound Flames.
The goblin’s mouth opened in a silent scream.
Her staff rose—
Nick threw the fireball.
The moment it struck, the sanctuary howled. Fire didn’t just explode—it devoured. The corrupted void crackled, screaming, unraveling at the seams, burning away in an instant. The bones in the pit collapsed mid-rise, turning to ash.
The shaman let out a strangled gasp as the oppressive weight snapped like a cut string. She collapsed to her knees, the void in her eyes fading.
She was free.
The sanctuary let out a final, exhausted sigh.
Then everything went still.
The silence that followed was thick—not the eerie, watchful kind that had haunted the dungeon before, but something final.
Nick exhaled sharply, lowering his arm. His pulse was still hammering in his ears, but the weight of the dungeon’s will had lifted. The suffocating presence that had coiled around them was gone.
The goblin shaman knelt in the center of the sanctuary, her frail body trembling. The void in her eyes had vanished, replaced by dull, exhausted amber. SHe swayed slightly, barely upright, her staff cracked down the middle, the remaining shards of its crystal flickering weakly.
Nick wasn’t sure if she had any strength left to speak. But then… she moved.
She looked up at Ray.
And smiled.
Not with malice. Not with relief. Just… acceptance.
Ray took a slow step forward, her broken halberd lowered, her expression unreadable.
“She’s free,” Ray murmured.
Lexi, still breathing heavily, kept her distance. She hadn’t been able to do anything in the fight, and she still hesitated to approach, her ears twitching as she stared nervously at the pit on the other side of the doorway. But there was no movement. Whatever magic had tried to resurrect the dead was now shattered.
The goblin shaman spoke, her voice soft and tired.
“She says she’s sorry.”
Nick clenched his jaw. “Sorry?”
“She didn’t mean for it to end like this. But there was never another way.”
Nick sighed, watching as the goblin’s frail frame sank further. Even kneeling, she struggled to stay upright. Whatever force had controlled her, whatever had kept her bound to the dungeon’s will, was now gone.
And so was her time.
Ray hesitated for a moment, then did something that surprised Nick.
She knelt.
Meeting the shaman’s eyes at her level, she asked something in the goblin’s own tongue.
The shaman smiled again—this time, a small, almost fond thing. She answered softly, her voice thin, like parchment being blown apart by the wind.
Ray’s lips pressed together, her jaw tightening. She gave a small nod, then reached forward—slowly, carefully—and placed a hand on the shaman’s shoulder.
The goblin inhaled… exhaled…
Then closed her eyes.
And stilled.
The sanctuary let out a final sigh.
A ripple of light passed through the air, sweeping over the room. The corrupted shadows that had bled into the stone vanished. The flickering carvings settled, their erratic shifts softening into stillness.
A golden chest appeared at the foot of the statue.
The dungeon was… quiet.
=You have defeated (1) Dungeon Boss: Goblin Shaman=
=You gain 1 skill point=
=Current skill points: 2.04=
=Level up! Multi-Fireball is now Rank 12/-.=
-Power and speed slightly improved.-
=Level up! Sinbound Flames is now Rank 2/100.=
-Base effect is slightly improved.-
Nick didn’t realize how much tension he’d been holding until it was gone.
Ray stood slowly, her face unreadable.
“What did you ask her?”
She sighed. “Her name.”
Nick blinked. Lexi looked over in surprise.
Ray turned slightly. “Her name was Vreshka.”
Somehow, giving her a name made the moment feel a bit heavier.
He sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. “What do we do with her?”
“We let her rest.”
Nick nodded, glancing at the golden chest that appeared after they beat the dungeon boss.
For all she had done, for the horror she had become, Vreshka deserved at least that much respect.
Then, suddenly—something else changed.
The air shuddered. Not like before—not with weight or malice, but with something colder. The faint scent of charred bone and dust vanished. The lingering echoes of the battle outside—the unnatural silence of the goblins—all of it faded.
Nick’s eyes snapped to the entrance of the sanctuary.
The vones were disappearing.
Not crumbling or breaking down, but simply ceasing to exist.
Every corpse. Every weapon. Every trace of what had happened here—erased.
His stomach twisted. The massacre that had been preserved for so long, locked in time, was being stolen from reality.
Ray stepped forward, eyes widening as she stared at the pit. The remains that had rested there for gods knew how long had simply… gone. No grave. No proof. Nothing.
Lexi whimpered. “…That’s… cruel.”
Nick clenched his teeth. His fists curled. ”It’s spite.”
Ray swallowed, her jaw tight with frustration. “It’s like they were never here.”
Nick sighed. “That’s probably the point.”
The dungeon had lost. So it had taken everything with it.
Not even death was enough to let them rest.
The sanctuary remained intact, but the carvings on the walls began to shift. Slowly, subtly, the ancient symbols warped just enough to make their meaning unreadable. To make the past meaningless.
Nick looked back at the still figure of the shaman—of Vreshka.
She was gone.
A faint echo of laughter lingered—softer this time, like the dungeon’s final, mocking goodbye.
The dungeon had claimed her, and there was nothing they could do about it.
Project Knightfall 