I looked at the chest and leaned forward, bracing one hand on the rim as I peered inside, as if that might somehow anchor me to reality.

  It was empty, though not in the sense of a box with nothing inside it. It was empty in the way a deep hole in the ground is empty, with no visible bottom at all, only darkness dropping away until my eyes could no longer follow it. It did not feel like a space meant to be looked into. It felt like a place where depth itself had stopped being measured.

  “Can someone grab my legs?” I asked after a moment. “I do not think I could actually fall in and die, but I would rather not test that theory.”

  Winnie volunteered immediately, which did not surprise me. She stepped in close, planted her feet, and wrapped both hands around my ankles with a firm, practiced grip before I could reconsider.

  “Got you,” she said.

  She lowered me into the chest.

  I cycled my vision over to my third sight as the darkness swallowed everything else, checking to see whether anything changed. I knew this was not magic in the usual sense, but I wanted to be sure. If the chest was doing something strange, this would have been the place to see it.

  It did not help. The space remained black, flat, and empty, with no flow, no structure, and no response to my attention.

  I felt around blindly, sweeping my hands through the void and along unseen surfaces. The dungeon clearly was not designed for someone my size, and before long I was fully inside the chest, my shoulders brushing against nothing at all, as if the space refused to acknowledge boundaries.

  “Winnie,” I called up, my voice echoing oddly, “can you get bigger? I cannot feel anything.”

  “All right,” she replied without hesitation.

  I felt the shift immediately as she grew, her grip tightening as her arms thickened. She lowered me farther with careful control, then grew again, muscles bulking as she strained to keep me steady.

  “This is as far as I can go,” she said at last, her breath tight with effort.

  “I still do not feel anything,” I said. “Maybe there is nothing in here for me.”

  “Well, that sucks,” Winnie said. “That seems unfair.”

  “It is what it is,” I replied. “Just pull me back up.”

  I was still using my third sight when something flickered off to my right, so faint that I almost dismissed it as an illusion.

  “Wait, Winnie,” I said quickly. “Move me to the right by about half a foot, please.”

  She paused, adjusted her stance, and shifted me sideways with surprising delicacy for someone holding a dangling child by the ankles.

  I realized then that I had not imagined it. There it was again, a wisp of the not octarine color that I had seen before.

  “I think I see something,” I said. “Stop. Do not pull me up yet. Move me to the right.”

  Winnie froze, then adjusted her grip and shifted my position again, moving me sideways instead of lifting.

  The wisp stayed in view.

  Only then did I reach for it, stretching as far as I could until my fingers brushed against something soft and fuzzy, just barely within reach.

  “All right,” I said. “You can pull me up now. I think I got it.”

  As Winnie hauled me out, the darkness collapsed away all at once and the world snapped back into light. She set me down carefully, and I straightened while blinking as my eyes adjusted, then looked at what I was holding.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  It was a furry skirt.

  I looked at them, and they looked at me. Then I looked back down at the skirt, turning it once in my hands as if that might somehow make it something else.

  “Nope,” I said.

  I tried to throw it back into the chest, but the chest melted into the ground instead, its edges dissolving like wax as the dungeon reclaimed it. The skirt hit the dirt with a soft thump.

  “Well,” Winnie said thoughtfully, “maybe it is worth something.”

  “Or maybe it is something you are going to need,” Clarice said, grinning openly.

  “Definitely not,” I said flatly. “I am not the skirt wearing kind of guy.”

  “We do not know what you are going to be in the future,” Clarice replied, laughing.

  Even Meka snorted and turned away just enough to pretend she was not picturing it.

  “Maybe I can turn it into a cape,” I muttered. “It does not matter. We do not even know what any of these do yet, aside from Meka’s book.”

  I looked around at the group. “Did we get everything?”

  Winnie nodded, finally letting go of my ankles as if she had only just realized she was still holding them.

  “Then let’s head back,” I said. “I am starving.”

  Winnie and Clarice were hungrier than I was. They were both copper cores, and while I had an appetite, they had bottomless pits that demanded to be filled.

  We had finished our quests, along with a bonus one that was probably worth more than everything else we had done all week.

  That was when I stopped walking.

  “Who got the fangs from the alpha?” I asked.

  Meka looked at me, Clarice looked at me, and Winnie looked at me. Slowly, I turned and looked back at the dissolving remains behind us.

  “Damn it,” I said. “We got distracted by the chest.”

  We sprinted back and tore into the remains before the dungeon could finish reclaiming them, taking the core first and then the fangs while working with frantic efficiency. We barely made it before the body collapsed into nothing.

  That was the problem with dungeons. If you left things too long, they reabsorbed everything, even dead adventurers, stripping them down to raw mana without a trace.

  After we gathered everything, we needed to finish our quest, we made our way back toward the guild hall. On the path out of the dungeon, we ran into Raven and her group heading back as well.

  They looked worse than we did.

  I was carrying what remained of a turtle shell shield that was still smoldering and clearly destroyed, its edges cracked and blackened. Winnie and Clarice looked disheveled from their earlier argument, with rumpled clothes and expressions that were still sharp around the edges. Meka looked more or less fine, as if she had simply gone for a walk.

  Raven’s group, on the other hand, was covered in scorch marks. Burned cloth, singed hair, and the lingering smell of smoke clung to all of them.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Oh,” Raven said with a tired smile, “we ran into a boss.”

  “On the boar hunt?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Raven replied, brightening despite the burns. “The Emberfur Boar quest.” She glanced at the others and then beamed at us. “And we got a chest.”

  I blinked at her, then nodded. “We got one too. We killed an alpha slime wolf.”

  Raven blinked. “I thought you were on the Den Mother quest.”

  “We were,” Clarice said. “It turns out the Den Mother was not the worst thing in the zone.”

  Henry, one of Raven’s teammates, grimaced. “It feels like there are more boss monsters lately. Do you think there might be a break soon? That would be horrible.”

  I shook my head. “No. This usually happens before the defenders have to make a cull. My dad says they are going to have to cull it soon.”

  Henry let out a long breath, and some of the tension left his shoulders. “So not a break, just a build.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “That’s good,” Henry replied, sighing with relief. “I was terrified we would be out here when the whole dungeon went crazy.”

  “So, what actually happened to you?” Clarice asked. “Because you all look like you fought an inferno and lost.”

  Raven took a slow breath before answering and rolled one shoulder as if she could still feel the impact.

  “We hit it hard at the start,” she said. “We did exactly what we were trained to do. All four of us stayed in formation with our shields overlapping and our spears in place, and we kept it turning so it could not line up a clean charge. We drove it back and pinned it for a moment, and that is where we made the mistake.”

  She shook her head. “We committed too hard. We pushed damage instead of control, and we did not finish it.”

  Raven nodded back toward the direction she and her team had come from. “It panicked and bolted, and it ran straight through a fallen tree as if it was not there. The damn thing exploded into a billion pieces, and the splinters caught fire almost immediately.”

  She drew in a breath before continuing. “Dry leaves, bark dust, everything on the ground went up, and the fire spread faster than we could react.”

  “It did not stop charging, even while it was burning,” Raven went on. “We were trying to keep our spacing, keep our spears between us and it, and keep each other from catching fire at the same time.”

  Her mouth tightened. “That is not something you really train for.”

  “Varen finally managed to draw it wide and force it to overextend,” she said. “He got one clean opening and took it. When it died, the flames died with it.”

  She glanced down at her scorched sleeves. “Another few seconds of that, and someone would have gone down. That’s really the reason we’re happy about how it ended, aside from the chest and the quest payout.”

  Raven looked up at us. “If it had gotten away instead of dying, we would have had to blow our whistles. None of us wanted to do that.”