Level 1 Fallen

Diane let out a deep, rumbling sigh as she sent me a message, her eyes scanning the surroundings. Drake… I was gone for thirty hours at most. What happened? Why are you a ghost? Why is Bella a troll? And why are we in a monster city?!

It’s… a long story? I responded, trying my best to not give away our current identities while we walked down the wide streets, Diane in her draconic form as Bella walked next to me as a green-skinned troll.

Make it short.

Seeing the look in Diane’s eyes, I did my best to, as she said, ‘make it short’. We stumbled into a monster city, and now we’re trying to gather some information..?

Diane glared at me through the corner of her eye. Make it less short.

I let out a sigh, thinking back to what had happened after Diane logged out to start working on her dungeon. I had teleported the three of us to Oblivara, a few kilometers away from the rift, and we had gone off exploring to the west. With my True Sight, I wasn’t afraid of any ambushes, but I didn’t speak up unless I saw a monster that I thought the other two couldn’t handle.

Bella took the lead, her pistols out and ready to fire at anything that moved. Diane walked behind her, holding her staff and staring into the darkness. At first, everything was going pretty normally. We spent the day walking, occasionally stopping to fight whatever monster tried to ambush us, and then I set up a small house within a protected ward for us to rest overnight.

The strangeness began the next day. At first, it was fine, with us continuing west to explore. However, as we were walking through a patch of glowing moss, Bella suddenly vanished from the front of the group, causing Diane and I to jump in alarm. I hadn’t sensed anything when she vanished, even with True Sight. One second, she was there, and the next, gone.

I stepped forward to investigate, pressing my hand up to where she vanished. There, in the single-inch gap where the nearest two sources of light were dark enough for my hand to fall under shadow, it disappeared, as if through a dungeon gate.

Suddenly, I felt a hand grabbing my own on the other side of the gate, pulling me through. I gasped, stumbling next to Bella on the other side, and Diane soon joined me. “Is everything okay?” Diane asked, readying her staff to attack anything nearby.

The interior of the dungeon was different from Oblivara. The region was not pitch black, but dimly lit as if we were in Umbrahallow. We were also no longer in a dense forest, but standing atop a small hill in an empty grassland. Next to us was a large tree with a swirling, black gate in its truck from which we emerged.

“So… we found a dungeon?” Bella asked, clearly pleased. “Though, I don’t see any monsters around.”

“It might be a puzzle-type or resource dungeon,” I pointed out, sweeping the area with my senses and finding nothing. “Let’s explore. But, stick together. I don’t want us to get separated in a place like this.”

The duo nodded, settling back into the same marching order that we had been using before, with Bella taking the lead. It didn’t seem like there was much to see, and we walked for a solid ten minutes with nothing but grassland all around us. That was, until Bella let out a yelp, suddenly falling down through the ground.

Diane rushed forward to catch her, but only grabbed onto empty air. She pressed her hand to the ground where Bella fell, but found it solid. “What happened?” she asked, and I walked over to join her. However, as soon as I approached, Diane suddenly collapsed through the ground, vanishing without a trace.

This time, it was my turn to lunge forward, pushing against the ground. Once again, my True Sight had seen nothing. Whatever mechanism this dungeon operated under, it was not one that I could easily perceive.

I quickly fired off a message to both of them to ask if they were okay. Thankfully, we were not in a special instance that blocked communication. They responded a few moments later that they were surprised, and were just waiting for me to join them. The problem was, I didn’t know how to join them.

I looked down at my own shadow, pressing my hand against the ground, trying to find some spot where there was more give. Yet, no matter where or how I pressed, all I felt was grass and soil.

Thinking back, I tried to look for clues that would help piece this together. All that I had to go off of was the dungeon gate tucked in shadow between two glowing moss patches. As I thought about that, I looked down at the ground, at my shadow. It wasn’t my shadow that was triggering it, but maybe…

If Bella’s shadow overlapped with Diane’s to cause Bella to fall with Diane behind her, then mine overlapped with Diane’s… I just needed to create another shadow to overlap with mine?

With that thought in mind, I created a patch of darkness above and behind me, casting a shadow over my current position. Sure enough, the ground suddenly felt far less solid, and I fell through a moment later, landing next to a waiting Bella and Diane.

“Okay… noted, shadows are gateways here,” I said aloud, standing up and scanning the surroundings. This time, we were in a rocky landscape with large, jagged stones raised up like pillars. This made it even more precarious, as their shadows were somehow being cast at various unusual angles.

“Maybe this is a shadow maze, then?” Bella suggested, looking around. “We just need to find the path that doesn’t trigger any shadow gates?”

I wasn’t entirely sure about that, but there wasn’t really anything else for us to go off of, so we did our best in this ‘shadow maze’. We tried to avoid passing under shadows when we could. When we had to, we first stuck our hands forward to see if they disappeared, then pressed our foot down on the shadow to make sure the ground was solid.

This path continued in this manner for another half hour, before we found a truly unusual shadow. Unlike the others, this one wasn’t even just pointed off in an odd direction. The shadow was actively rotating around the pillar it was emanating from. In order to avoid passing through the shadow, we would all need to pick a direction and move there within a single second.

I wasn’t confident about using World Walker to bypass these shadows, or I would have simply cheated. After all, if the dungeon registered us as moving through that space, it might just send us through a shadow gate whether we wanted it to or not.

So, we waited, discussing which path to take, and then launched ourselves forward all at once. However, whoever designed this dungeon had truly too much spite in their veins. As soon as we were about to pass through the shadow’s active range, it suddenly expanded in all directions, swallowing us in an instant.

The three of us grunted as we fell to the ground, now once again in a dense forest. It was now utterly impossible to avoid standing in shadows, as the canopy of the trees overhead cast shadows across the entire forest floor. However, there was something else that caught my attention as soon as I swept my senses over the area.

In the distance through the trees, just over a hundred meters away, I spotted a monster. This was a humanoid monster with a pitch black body and large, leathery wings. Its hands and feet ended in sharp claws, and it had a pair of long horns atop its head. Just based on its appearance, I would say that it was some type of demon.

I gestured for the other two to be quiet, watching the figure from afar and activating Beyond the Veil to hide the three of us. He chanted some strange incantation, cutting the palm of his hand with one of his claws, and then smeared his blood onto the stump of a fallen tree. Immediately, a glowing red portal appeared in the air over the stump, and he stepped through it.

As soon as he was gone, I explained the situation to the three of them as we moved closer. “What should we do?” Diane asked hesitantly, looking at the still-open portal.

Thinking back, the League of Assassins had yet to properly gather information on the monster cities due to their strict secrecy. We were now in a prime position to get inside information only available to monster players. After all, whether it was myself, Diane, or Bella, we all had methods to transform into at least one type of monster.

“I think we should go for it,” I said, nodding my head. “If the worst happens, I’ll teleport us out. For now… Diane, you should turn into your dragon form, and Bella can pick a monster to turn into.”

I watched as Diane transformed, and Bella chose to turn into a troll with a tall body, elongated limbs, and rough, green skin. Then, I did my own transformation. Combining Eternal Body and Beyond the Veil, I transformed into a floating ghost that hovered a few inches off the ground, my body otherwise looking human.

Then, I focused on channeling Many Faces through Ancient Master, altering the displayed status information of the three of us to match our new forms. “Bella, you’re Karly. Diane, Darke. I’ll be Faust.”

After I said that, we approached the portal while I alerted Wisteria of our plan. Thankfully, all we had to do was touch it to enter the other side, given that Diane was currently far too large for the portal.

On the other side of the portal, I was surprised to find an open-air city, having been expecting something underground. There was a clear view of a moon overhead, surrounded by countless stars. Either we had gone to another realm, or that sky was artificial.

Either way, monsters walked the streets in all shapes and sizes, from little goblins to giants. For the most part, things looked peaceful, though I soon saw a goblin bump into a drow elf before cursing at them, only to be eaten a moment later by a giant spider lurking in the drow’s shadow.

Let’s see what we can find here, I thought to myself, leading the others away from a large platform with numerous portals surrounding it. Each portal had a label above, and the one we just came from was listed as ‘Oblivara - Fifty Layers of Shade’.

I wasn’t too worried about our identities being seen through quickly, given that we were using a grandmaster-level skill to hide our statuses. More importantly, the skills that Diane and Bella were both using were not illusions, but true transformations that should have been harder to see through.

I floated up above Diane’s back, using her height to get a good look at the city. It seemed to stretch all the way to the horizon in every direction, with monsters taller than buildings easily visible walking down other streets.

As I was looking around, Diane suddenly paused, her body going stiff. I floated around to get a better look, only to see that she herself appeared confused. Clearly, her Player had logged back on. It’s me, Diane. I messaged her quickly, waving a hand in front of her.

Diane simply stared at me for a long moment, her eyes narrowing into slits.

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