The Aby Survival Guide: Chapter 3 (Patreon)

Hi! This chapter, or any chapter really, are certainly a long time coming and for that, I am sorry. I think this is the first time I've really suffered from proper writer's block, mostly thanks to school and work, and I only really was able to sit down and write more than a single paragraph at a time in the past three days, and even then with effort where Mapper chapters are normally completely effortless. Still, now that I have I am hoping that I can work past this block and get back to slightly faster uploads this holiday season. Of course, I will keep pledges paused into December, after how I was this month. Once again, I apologize, and more importantly, I hope you enjoy! 

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Chapter 3, When Things Change 

For all the times I mentioned in the previous two chapters just how abrupt, jarring, and seemingly unprovoked the Reef Dungeon’s layout and underlying theme-or lack thereof- changes after the seventh floor, I must once again stress that any expectations and preparations you’ve made to survive the floors up to this point should be thoroughly tempered or even outright discarded following this. The changes come fast and only grow more pronounced as you descend deeper, and any theme you can find on one floor can be completely contradicted on the next, with the dangers residing within getting shaken up just as thoroughly.

Let us begin with the eight floor; a vast, wide open arena that resembles the fourth at a glance but must be approached in a wholly different manner to it. It is the last floor that faithfully mimics the Grand Reef in which the Dungeon resides- mostly, anyway- which means that every single centimeter is alive with mana coral. This, in turn, leaves the landscape vibrant and rich with mana, to the point where it can feel stifling to those more sensitive, and thus rife with nooks and crannies for things to hide.

The majority of which will be sharks, and a great deal of them at that. Before this floor, sharks are underrepresented to the point of seeming neglect on the Dungeon’s behalf, and I had wondered if the little one simply forgot it had their kind, somehow. Instead, it seems that they all simply congregate on the eighth, and almost never venture outside of their selachian haven. The shark’s reputation as a terrifically effective predator is not an empty boast, either, which leaves the floor almost devoid of anything else.

Of course, that reputation also spells out much of what you must keep in mind to remain safe on the floor, and while there is a tremendous diversity among the residents of the floor, none have yet strayed from what it means to be a shark. So while you must be extraordinarily cautious, prepared to fight or flee as you explore the floor or simply speed through to the next exit, you can rest assured that this is perhaps one of the most straightforward of all the wonderful rooms within this Dungeon.

However, do not take this to mean that it is safe, firstly because there is nowhere in any Dungeon that merits such a word, but more importantly because even in its simplicity, the eighth floor holds a few potentially nasty surprises. Ambushes are common here, with every coral potentially hiding an excitingly toxic serpent or an unexpectedly magical moray, and there are even a few formless terrors nestled away in the poorly defined shape of the octopus. In simpler words, be wary of the canvas of color beneath you, because when you reach for a tantalizingly valuable crystal, something hidden could well come reaching back.

Of course, I would be a poor guide if I didn’t lay out in greater detail the sharks I mentioned previously, because despite the ground’s very real danger, you would do well to stay very close to it and look upwards. It is difficult to ignore how unsettling it must be to see dozens of sharks swimming around you, and it is likely that you will find more than one will peel away from the group to strike out at you, often in concert and with an intelligent overseer optimizing their strategy in real-time.

That, perhaps, is one of the greatest dangers to an inexperienced Diver and with a generous half of you having never encountered a Dungeon before, I am sure you might face the same issue. You will find it uncanny, how the creatures can behave so naturally one moment then suddenly seem almost programmed the next, how instinct will so seamlessly become intellect and how a general, unfocused desire to see you dead or consumed turns into a razor-sharp will to see you both.

It is a commonly shared fact that a Dungeon can, at no apparent cost, supersede the will of their spawn and control them as puppets. This is true, but very rarely does a core go so far, for reasons unknown to even me. Instead, what they would rather do is probably even more dangerous for you. Using the functional omnipresence granted to them within their domain, and combined with a constantly growing bank of knowledge on the habits and means of invaders sapient or otherwise, a Dungeon will be nearly prescient about what actions you might take and will relay this to every creature capable of thought that it deems relevant to allow them to hunt you as they see fit. Even if you can surprise the core, a task that only gets harder as they age, you will not stop them from telling everything around you about how best they could kill you.

So, there will come a moment on the inside when you feel that all of Vol has been turned against you, that you are being conspired against by the whimsy of some hateful overseer, and it is crucial that you realize that for all intents and purposes, this is true. Your life will be measured in terms of resource expenditure and your value only found in how much knowledge can be reaped from your corpse.

However, there will be plenty more time to really drive home just how hostile the interior of the Dungeon is, and I have yet again strayed from the purpose of this guide’s introductory chapters. Before I move on to describing the ninth floor, however, I would like to make a point of one rather outstanding individual amongst the toothy residents, a shark that manages to stand out simply by taking their species to a logical extreme.

I could not divine her species in the research I conducted after my excursion, but it seems apparent that her evolution is some form of sabertoothed tiger shark. The unnamed creature is a fair bit larger than most of her floormates, and is singularly dazzling in comparison. Most sharks tend to be colored so as to blend in with the open seas or rocky ocean floor, to be hard to see when looking at them from above or below or through the lens of sandy, clouded water. This one is instead designed to blend in with the dazzling reds of her coral beds and, more dangerously, the clouds of blood that the sharks are sure to revel in.

She’s also much closer to an ambush predator than most of her kin, and it seems she doesn’t have the same reliance on motion to keep her breathing, so it is very likely that she might just sit and wait until the time is right to appear next to you and leave the floor just a bit more crimson than before.

With that warning out of the way, let us move onto the ninth floor. This is where the Dungeon begins to truly branch out, and you will notice immediately that the floor- another arena- is truly massive compared to any before, and much more glaringly, almost empty in comparison. It seems like a slightly misinformed attempt to replicate the open seas that the floor’s inhabitants would call home. Swordfish and stray sharks, pods of ravenous razortooth dolphins and a few various oddities from floors above and beneath populate the area, but the space is just so large that it still manages to feel almost empty if you aren’t being harangued by everything.

Granted, that’s a very likely scenario, but if there were a floor to rest and regroup before Diving deeper, or one to count your gains and losses before deciding if you even should, this would be that. The threats are direct and the experimental nature of the floor serves to make it feel rather unrealized when compared to the other levels. I must stress that this is not me calling the floor easy, and a single lapse in judgement could still easily spell your end, but you needn’t be concerned about whether or not you’ll be incinerated or frozen, envenomated or simply shot by some noisy crustacean.

But, in return for the less chaotic nature of the floor, the rewards are also lesser, if you could consider the ninth as having any at all. Without throngs of mana corals, few crystals grow, and even those that do are sustained by the comparatively measly mana wafting in from both sides. With the mana being much more homogenized by the time it reaches the scattered grains, the crystals are unable to grow from a single element, meaning that the floor is speckled with the murky whites and greys of unaspected mana crystals rather than the lightshow of elements you will find elsewhere.

From here, there are two paths to follow, another departure from the norm of a Dungeon so young. Split paths normally show up after dozens, not a handful, but this is just another entry on the list of wondrous peculiarities on display. Most of my floor numbering from here on out will be guesswork and assumptions, and in the end, floor numbers matter little once paths begin to diverge. It is helpful that opposing passages lead to such remarkably different environs, so you will be able to tell exactly where you are even if you can’t tell how many floors you’ve passed.

To begin, I will detail the icy reef you enter if you follow the tunnel near the center of the ninth floor’s arena. I would make a guess that this is the tenth, it seems like a nearly-traditional boss arena, but considering the nature of both the last and the next boss the tenth floor could just as easily be the one swamped with darkness and swarming with snakes. No matter, even if the gentleman guarding this floor isn’t the official second boss, he and his companion are undeniably powerful and easily on the list of the Dungeon’s most dangerous.

And he is most assuredly a man, though gentle might be stretching the meaning of that word somewhat. It is no secret that Dungeons oftentimes start building up colonies, communities, and even cultures of native-born creatures that have grown into true sapience, especially common amongst whatever creatures the core began their life with. In the case of the Reef Dungeon, I believe that to have been almost certainly kobolds, since explaining their presence otherwise is just about impossible. More to the point, every single individual has undergone some sort of evolution, with most having understandably become highly adapted to living in water, and a few becoming almost exclusively aquatic.

Still more have taken the leap from kobolds into things more traditionally recognized as superior, a task much easier with Dungeon-aided evolution. Most spectacularly is the dragonkin that dominates this icy floor, likely created with a strong affinity towards magic that was nurtured as he grew into what he is now, possibly even aided by being granted the mantle of a boss. Of course, this is speculation, and the reality is that no matter how he has attained his power, he is able to wield it spectacularly.

Fighting by his side is another shining example of Dungeon evolution, a moray eel gifted with magical talent rivalling or even exceeding her dragonkin partner’s own. The pair fight in tandem, both able to conjure up a maelstrom of ice and water and both well adapted to working in tandem, their gifts becoming all the more impressive as they do. They will almost certainly have the advantage of range, and they are prepared to abuse it as much as they can, though I’ve no doubt the dragonkin would be just as great a menace to fight in close quarters.

I would strongly advise that you treat the duo like the siren and many more outstanding individuals; if you are not absolutely prepared to face him down then do not linger overlong on his floor, not that he would likely allow you to. Move through the floor swiftly and defensively, and with any luck he might be focused elsewhere, allowing you to gather a few of the rarer, more ice-focused crystals that the Dungeon has to offer. Otherwise, hunker down and move to the next floor, the entrance of which is nearly directly beneath the exit of the ninth.

Should you intend on staying and fighting- an admirable desire but not one that I can fully support- then you should first temper your hopes of actually claiming the bounty on the pair’s heads. As with most Boss Bounties, the creatures in question will be very difficult to kill, able to retreat with the Dungeon’s aid when things turn sour and there are plenty of distractions to ensure your pursuit is cut short, if you can even attempt it.

If you thought the Dungeon was rid of the Mustard-Scaled Snapper that plague the earlier floors then I am terribly sorry to disappoint, and to inform you that they manage to take on an even more frightful form here. The only good news is that their clouds of razored scales have been blunted. The bad news is that the icy blue clouds these variants produce are, in most any way, worse. They swirl with a not-insignificant amount of mana and, upon contact with just about anything- including other scales- will freeze solid in an instant, and then keep getting colder.

I saw a truly disheartening amount of icy rubble, interiors hollowed out in the unmistakable forms of fallen Divers. Many of these frigid monoliths seemed to be all that was left behind by entire parties; I shudder to imagine their final moments, trapped in a swiftly growing tomb of impossibly chilled ice, their view obscured by the opaque scales, their teams suffering the same fate nearby and completely isolated from them.

Worse still, even though they seem only to release their scales when agitated, and sometimes will even be consumed in their own blizzards, the dragonkin and his companion should be perfectly capable of wielding this cloud as though it were any other ice. Whether or not they have realized this, I do not know, but the possibility exists, and you should be incredibly wary of it.

Regardless of whether you stick around and fight before you descend or simply rush to the next floor, should you make it to the exit and decide to continue you will need to be prepared for what you will encounter because, as I’m sure I’ve stated an exhausting number of times, you will need an entirely different approach to what follows compared to what got you to this point, and it is especially divergent here. So much so, in fact, that I will need to devote the entire fourth chapter solely to the next two floors, since it is teeming with life and with danger so unlike what came before and what will follow that I simply can’t treat it like a logical inclusion here. 

Of course, I recommend you consult the bestiary for a much more thorough explanation of the creatures on all of these floors. After all, knowledge is only a danger to yourself if you have less of it than you should.