[Your Second Expedition Starts Now…]
The darkness before the Second Expedition felt longer this time.
Lune's consciousness lingered in the endless abyss, stretched thin in the nothingness. Just as he began to wonder if something had gone wrong, a sharp ache pulsed through his head as his senses began to slowly return.
At first, he felt a cold breeze brush against his skin, followed by a flash of bright light.
His vision was blurry at first, just a whirlwind of colours and shapes, but as a few moments passed, the world before him came into focus.
"Tskkk," he hissed, squinting his eyes almost as soon as they opened.
He lay still for a while, blinking against its radiance as he felt strength return to his body after the sudden teleportation to the Realm Beyond. The narrow treetops swayed overhead, occasionally blocking the sun's burning glare.
'I still don't get what the whole thing about this sun thing is,' he thought as he got up to his feet.
He began to look around, studying his surroundings.
There was nothing standing out in particular at first, only a scene of greenery one could find on Earth but as he turned around, his blood ran cold.
The forest was unnaturally cut short.
The grass below turned to scorched earth, the trees were gone as if erased without trace, and no further than a mile away from him was an enormous structure carved of stone.
Lune's eyes widened.
It stretched for miles from side to side, its breadth swallowing the horizon, but that wasn't what stole the breath from his lungs. It was its shape.
The stone rose in vast, sheer terraces, each one towering like a cliff face before receding into an enormous plateau so wide it could have held cities. They rose upward in a perfect, merciless order, one colossal step after another, until the structure vanished into a heavy fog.
There was no visible summit.
No end.
Only the suggestion of more stone above, implied by the way the mist that clung and broke, as if something impossibly large was still pushing into the sky beyond his sight.
The air near it felt wrong, heavy with something Lune could not quite grasp.
But he didn't need to know what felt wrong about this place, to realise what the structure before him was.
A staircase. One that looked as if it could reach the heavens.
'What kind of monsters could even climb that thing?' he wondered but didn't have to think for long as the image of the gigantic sand monster from the first expedition flashed in his head, '...I guess that thing could'
Staring at the structure before him, Lune felt a bad premonition, and that's when he remembered the most important part of every expedition, the Quest.
He opened his status window and focused on the description of his quest.
Quest: [Reach the top of Heavenly Stairs]
Lune froze.
He forced a couple of blinks, each time keeping his eyes closed for a moment longer, as if he could convince the quest to change but unlike him, the quest itself was unblinking, the text before him completely unmoving.
'I guess my luck ran out…' he mused, his eyes locked onto the massive structure.
The description of his quest couldn't be any more simple, reach the top. Yet somehow, his first quest of finding the temple of the hollow god pales in comparison to the one that's right in front of him.
Lune felt a cold dread wash over him. How was he supposed to climb this?
No gear.
No training.
He lifted his gaze, tracing the endless steps that vanished into the fog above. His stomach twisted. His throat went dry. Each terrace seemed wider beyond reason. A fall from any of them meant certain death.
But he couldn't let fear take him, not now. Not before he had a chance to strike the one who killed his grandma.
He clenched his fist so tight his knuckles ached, memories flashing through his mind. His grandma's smile, the four great leaders, the shadowy mask figure. The images burned behind his eyes, fueling his resolve.
Despair had no place here. Not yet. Not before he could kill the one responsible…
Suddenly, a loud roar cut through the air.
Lune's head snapped toward the direction of the sound and instantly saw something stir within the forest.
Branches snapped and bushes exploded as a sudden, large monster emerged from the cover of the trees. It had four horse-like legs supporting a hunched torso matted in black fur, with a goat-like head crowning its menacing frame. Two long arms ended in oversized claws, which the creature swung in a blinding rage.
But before it could get to Lune, it came to an abrupt halt, roaring at the sight of the scorched earth as if unable or unwilling to walk on it.
Lune frowned at the sight, tightening the grip on the Dark Moon Katana he summoned just a moment earlier.
'It… it refuses to get any closer?'