Perched on a thick branch near the crown of a massive jungle tree, 30 kilometers away from the platform he was teleported atop of, Deacon had one leg casually draped over the side and let it swing aimlessly as if he weren't seventy meters above the forest floor and potentially attracting the attention of any tree dwelling creature.
Above him, leaves the size of shields rustled gently, casting streaks of golden light across his leather armor. In his lap, propped against one bent knee, a sleek mana phone hummed softly.
A video played across its rune-lit screen, some Tier 2 craftsman with a cocky grin and a machete made of enchanted bone was building a jungle treehouse on some jungle island somewhere on Floor 14's World Map.
The camera panned over arcing beams of flexed wood, vine-braided support ropes, and platforms built into the canopy with clever use of natural branch bends. The guy even had a pulley system for lifting supplies.
"So that's how you get the boards to stick together without any nails," Deacon muttered, watching the final clip of the build cycle as the treehouse came together under an hour. "Knew downloading this guy's whole series would pay off eventually."
With a flick of his thumb, he both paused the video on his manaphone and switched it off he then pulled his left foot up atop the tree branch he was on and leaned his back against the trunk while sliding his phone back into his pouch.
He stared out across the endless canopy of jungle all around him. Birds cried in the distance, one of them let out a cry that sounded suspiciously like a hawk's cry, and another, like some pig... donkey crossbreed.
Deacon adjusted himself against the massive branch, letting his eyes trace the wildlife below him.
For once, he wasn't in any rush to complete this floor.
Not because the challenge was too hard, quite the opposite. Gathering a hundred thousand gold in a place known for its abundance of wealth was bound to be easy, especially with the partial map he received from the Hidden Quest reward. But gathering just a hundred thousand gold wasn't the real game here, not on a Treasure Hunt Floor.
The Floor didn't care if you brought enchanted daggers, rare artifacts, ancient coins, gear, or even chipped pots that somehow added up to five hundred thousand gold. It only needed a hundred thousand worth sacrificed at the altar to lift the seal. The rest? Yours to keep.
And Deacon had every intention of bleeding this place dry before moving on.
It made sense, too, why no one else has any plans for speedrunning this Floor.
The Isles of the Damned wasn't a trial to anyone on the Floor; they were a goldmine. Albeit not to say the Floor wasn't dangerous, he'd seen a plethora of cadet corpses and platforms like the one he was teleported atop of.
Floor Three is still plenty difficult, Level 10 Elites and Bosses all roamed the jungle; he'd seen quite a few of them on his tree-hopping adventure.
Pushing himself up into a standing position and pulling down a long, coiled vine from a higher branch, testing its strength. It held. Between the vines, the branches, and a few tricks he'd just picked up from his manaphone, he could probably get a decent outpost set up by nightfall.
Still, if he was being honest, he'd much rather build his base on a remote island – far from the central Isle where every cadet from Floor Two seemed to spawn.
***
The descent from the treetops took longer than expected, unsurprisingly, in hindsight, given the sheer height of the trees and the effort he made to stay out of sight. Fighting while climbing down wasn't exactly a skill in his repertoire.
Leaping from off the last ten meters of the tree, the jungle floor greeted him with a wet, squelching sound as his boots sank slightly into the moss-covered mud... Of course, everything is muddy, he remarked to himself.
Compared to the air at the top of the trees, the air on the jungle floor was muggy and filled with the buzzing of insects, with the occasional shriek of some random monkey off in the distance. Deacon unsheathed his short swords and started walking.
Ah crap, Deacon thought to himself as a thought came to mind. Are there giant mosquitoes here?
He wasn't heading in any particular direction, not at first. Just letting instinct carry him to where ever since, he couldn't really get an aerial view on account of the massive trees and leaves in his way.
Ten minutes into his aimless walking around, he saw something unusual.
A tree, massive even by the jungle's obscene standards, rose ahead like a lightless lighthouse in the middle of an island. Aerial roots could be seen above ground, creating a web of roots that both stood taller than himself as well as covering everything around its base within a twelve meter radius, even above ground.
Nestled within that tangle, heavily covered in moss, was stone… bricks, he muttered to himself as his eyes narrowed. It looked old, weathered, and definitely not the kind used in a hidden base by some Earth Affinity cadet.
He slowed his pace.
The vines hung thick around the roots, but didn't quite hide the doorway tucked beneath them. The stone was aged, pitted from time and laced with green veins of creeping plantlife. But the lines were straight, too precise for it to be naturally made.
A ruin. Maybe a vault. Hell, maybe it's some sort of hidden dungeon the Aztecs made.
Deacon exhaled slowly, then chuckled to himself as he walked toward the massive growth of aerial roots beneath the massive tree.
"I know I said I'd take my time," he muttered, brushing vines aside with a sweep of his arm and twisting his body through the many roots. "But, this has to be like… divine intervention. I mean it must be considering how not 8 hours ago, I was talking to like three gods – albeit they probably wanted to kill me... and, to be fair, I did participate in binding them and I did throw a punch at one of them."
Slicing through the last few roots blocking his path with his short swords, he pressed both hands against the stone door and gave it a slow, steady shove. It moved without protest, just producing a faint creak and a drift of dust spilling from the frame onto his boots.
"But that's the thing, isn't it?" he said while snapping his fingers as he cast Ignis to create a small flame that flickered to life just above his head as he headed down the stairway just behind the door he pushed open, not phased in the slightest that the door beneath a massive tree led downwards.
"Even when I'm trying to be patient, the second I see something interesting, I just gotta poke my head in and see what's going on," he muttered to himself as he trailed his hand across the moss-covered stone walls beside him.
At the bottom, the stairwell opened into a wide chamber.
Deacon walked into the room cautiously, eyes roaming over the chaotic mess before him. The room was far larger than how it looked like through the narrow stairwell, and in the dim light cast by his floating headlight, the messiness of the room was especially apparent.
What the hell happened here? Deacon wondered to himself as his boots echoed softly in the surprisingly acoustical room - he could even hear the distant echo of dripping water.
Tables all around the room were knocked over, broken, or both, and bamboo sheets were scattered all across the floor. Shelves had been pulled off the walls, their contents spilled out over the stone floor.
In conclusion, it looked as if a cluster of air bombs had been dropped in the room; he would know - he was the one who did the exact same thing in the Teacher's Lounge in his second year at the academy.
He approached the heavy metal door at the far end of the stone-brick room and reached for its curved handle, and gave it a firm pull. When it didn't budge, he tried again with both hands. The cold metal stayed stubbornly shut. Frustrated, he tried levering the door open by trying to slide the tip of a dagger into the thin gap between the door's pin and the knuckles that covered it, but it remained closed.
"If only Bonehead were here," Deacon said, while glancing at the door's lock. "He would have picked this open no problem."
Turning back towards the staircase, his eyes began to roam over the mess, searching for the key he needed to open the door, or even a lockpick... yeah, never mind that. I'd just end up breaking the pick inside the lock and fucking myself over because of it.
Worst case, if he couldn't find any, he would have to use his newly acquired axe and crack the door open. This, of course, was risky as he could potentially cause a cave-in from the reverberations from his strikes.
But then again, I could just slowly heat up the door until it becomes like tofu and cut through it easily, Deacon mused. As he kneeled beside a large desk and began rifling through it. Yeah, that actually sounds a lot better than what I'm doing right now.
"If I don't find the key in here, then I'll just go and do that," Deacon muttered under his breath as he tossed aside pieces of paper, broken quills, dog tags, and mold-covered cups – until his fingers brushed something cold and hard.
A small metal key, the dull gleam of iron catching the flickering light of his hovering flame. "Jackpot," he said before moving toward the locked metal door at the end of the room.
As the door creaked open on rusted hinges, a thick, warm, and putrid scent slammed into Deacon like a sledgehammer to the face.
"Gah – shit!" he hissed, jerking his head to the side and clamping his nose shut with the crook of his wrist. "What the fuck died in there?"
The stench was starting to sting his eyes, leaving them bloodshot, and burned the back of his throat with every breath. It was a rancid blend of being beside a bloater zombie, shit, and stagnant sewage - thick enough to taste.
He blinked rapidly and pinched away the tears that pricked his eyes, then took a cautious step back, letting the door hang open, and began to fill the room he was in with the same smell. "Nope. I'm not going to risk blowing up with this with open flame on my head," he muttered, sliding out a slim, pencil-sized tube from one of his side pouches.
He bent the tube until it produced a soft crack, and a moment later, the translucent fluid inside it began glowing neon green, spreading like veins through the length of the cylinder until it bathed the room in a soft neon glow.
And if he was being honest, every time he cracked one of the glow sticks open, especially the purple ones, it reminded him of that time Jass caught a slime and stuffed it into a glass jar, planning to use it as a nightlight as her old slime in a jar nightlight died because she forgot to feed it for a week and a half.
He gave the cylinder a small shake, then held it out in front of him, his other hand raising the still-hovering flame of Ignis.
Snapping his fingers again to snuff the spell out. The darkness folded in, leaving only the neon green glow of the glowstick to paint the room around him.
"Last thing I need is for the whole underground to collapse on me because of some random ass trapped gas pocket," he muttered as he stepped carefully into the hall beyond the door, lowering his posture and keeping to the balls of his feet. The smell only worsened, clinging to the walls like rot in a wound.
Deacon swallowed and kept moving, a glowstick held out ahead with a string of mana. "System, if this turns out to be some sort of elaborate underground sewer system leading me to a large pile of shit. I swear–" he paused, eyes narrowing as the light brushed over something glinting further down the hall.