Chapter 143: Descent (1/2)
Stairs popped out after the entrance, plunging into the dark depth of the cave. The perpetual darkness of the Blackvault Mines seemed bright compared to that descending trait.
Enatsu could not hold back his trembling legs. Yoichi followed Shioko step by step, with Kenji was clinging to his leather pouch.
”These stairs lead into a large circular room, located more than twenty meters deep. Once we kill the boss inside, we can finally get out of the dungeon,” Shioko explained. Without getting lost in pointless chatter, the archer descended the first step of the long staircase.
As soon as the plan of her boot impacted the step, the same noise as the sticky mud that had characterized all the sound of the dungeon rumbled louder than usual.
The large circular door leading to the boss's room masked the cramped space the tamers had to travel to move to the last area of the dungeon. The staircase was located inside a descending tunnel just over a meter and a half wide.
The sludge accumulated at that point was much more abundant than all the other rooms in the mine. However, a strange physical phenomenon was taking place on those stairs: the dense mud, despite being subjected to the natural slope of the rock, climbed the stairs with an upward trajectory.
Black mud particles flowed from bottom to top, carrying debris of various kinds and small shrubs or remnants of insects and climbing vertically upstairs. They flowed out of the tunnel leading to the boss's room.
Splitting on the sides of Shioko's boot, the flow of mud overcame her foot, continuing undisturbed its path outwards of the large circular door.
”What the hell am I looking at?” Enatsu gulped, spying over the step. The merchant rubbed his eyes, believing that that vision was a hallucination due to tiredness.
”Is the mud really going up the stairs?” he continued, pale as a corpse.
”Apparently, Yoichi was right,” Shioko stated in a low voice. Her second foot also dropped to the first step. ”It just seems that the source of the black mud is down here,” she remarked, rolling her eyes towards Yoichi.
Yoichi turned his gaze back. Half of his face was illuminated by the light of Nobu. Due to that tunnel narrower than the initial one, the bulky butterfly demon could not fly inside.
”This substance came out of the Blackvault Mines and extended to Blackborough. If we can't find a way to stop its advance, it could go north and... well, I don't even want to imagine what might happen if it reaches the capital area,” Yoichi thought out loud.
The sickening smell of that dark substance had now soaked the nostrils of the three travellers, who had become immune to its stench. The mission of Hyobe's necklace, the object that had driven them to enter that dungeon, had taken second place, losing importance.
Something was using that dungeon boss's room as some factory to produce that black mud.