Saturday arrived with a quiet sky and cool air.

It was late afternoon when Noah and Damien met outside the academy gates. The city was still active around them, people moving through the streets, shops open, the usual hum of Novaris going about its business.

But their destination was east. Outside all of that.

They had taken transport bus and then get off eastern area, where this forest was near.

Noah looked at himself for a moment as they walked.

He was wearing plain clothes. Dark trousers, a simple long-sleeve shirt. Nothing remarkable. But over it, he wore a breastplate and a few pieces of light armor strapped at his forearms and shoulders.

He looked really handsome. At least he thought so.

About light armor, he hadn’t bought them. That wasn’t something he could afford right now. He had already spend money on other things.

It was Damien who had handed them to him that morning without much ceremony. He said he had spares and they were just sitting unused. Noah had accepted without asking too many questions.

But as they walked through the path leading toward the eastern outskirts, Noah found himself thinking about that.

That pare armor he got from Damien.

He glanced sideways at him.

’Where did a he get spare armor from?’ As much as Noah knew about Damien, he was not from some noble family or rich background.

So the answer came to him after a moment.

Morgana.

He remembered now. The thing Damien had told him before. It was Instructor Morgana who had found him. Not in some grand city, not in some prestigious family estate.

In a forest near a small farming village. She had been passing through the area, noticed something in the boy who was fighting a boar type monster, and taken him as her disciple

It was simple and typical.

His parents were farmers. Ordinary people living ordinary lives in a village that probably didn’t even appear on most maps of the region.

Noah stared forward at the path ahead.

’So he’s not an orphan.’ At first Noah had considered Damien as orphan.

But when he got closer to Damien he understood that he was not Orphan.

Why he assumed that? Because the way these stories usually worked, the protagonist always had some loss at the center of them. Parents gone. Village destroyed. Someone taken too early. That wound which never fully closed, driving everything forward.

But Damien had none of that. His mother and father were alive. Healthy, probably. Tending their crops somewhere, proud of their son and whatever he was becoming.

It was strange. Almost disorienting.

Noah thought about it more as they walked in silence through the treeline.

If the game this world was built from was truly a dark one, then that detail didn’t sit right. A protagonist with no tragedy? With a full family still intact?

That could only mean one thing.

Something was going to happen to them later.

Not now. But somewhere down the line, in whatever arc was still ahead, the story would reach out and take something from Damien to push him forward.

Noah felt a quiet pity.

He almost laughed at himself for it. Feeling sorry for the main character. The one with the talent and the strong mentor and the good looks and the natural charisma that made everyone around him want to follow him.

He got that heroic charisma.

’Sorry, man. Now I am feeling bad for you.’

"Hey."

Noah came back to the present.

Damien was looking at him with a sideways glance, still walking. "You’ve been quiet this whole time. What are you thinking about so deeply?"

Noah blinked.

Then he smiled and shook his head. "Nothing. Just excited. Afterall this is my first dungeon. You know how it is."

Damien looked at him for a moment like he didn’t entirely believe that. Then a smirk crossed his face.

"Sure," he said simply. "For what it’s worth, I’ve explored a few before. Nothing like an unsurveyed one, but I know how they work. So don’t worry too much."

"Oh, great," Noah said. "Then I’ll leave the front to you."

"You’ll be right beside me," Damien replied.

"Beside you. Right."

They kept walking.

---

The forest thickened as they moved away from the city. The sounds of Novaris faded behind them, replaced by the steady rustling of branches and the soft crunch of dead leaves underfoot.

It didn’t take long to find the site.

They heard it before they saw it. Voices, the low sounds of organized activity, a presence in the trees that didn’t belong to nature.

Then the path opened slightly and the entrance came into view.

It wasn’t dramatic in the way Noah had half-imagined. No glowing crack in the air. No swirling energy.

Just a wide stone mouth set into a slope of earth and rock, old and weathered, surrounded by trampled ground where people had been walking in and out over the past few days.

Temporary structures had been set up around it. A small station with a canopy overhead, a row of equipment cases, two portable lights mounted on poles that hummed faintly.

Several staff members from the Crimson Vale Guild were on duty. Two guards stood at either side of the entrance itself, and at the station, a staff member sat behind a folding desk with a tablet in hand.

A few other adventurers were nearby, gearing up or speaking quietly among themselves.

Noah and Damien walked over.

They placed their cards on the desk without being asked. The staff member picked them up one at a time, checked the display, and looked back up.

"Both confirmed," she said. "You’re cleared for entry." She set the cards back down. "A few other groups are already inside. The dungeon interior is large and branches in multiple directions. The guild advises you choose a different path if you encounter them. There’s no reason for conflict."

"Understood," Damien said.

Noah nodded, running a hand through his white hair as he picked up his card and slipped it back into his pocket.

She gave a short, practiced summary. Watch your mana readings. Mark any passages you take if you have the equipment for it. Exit the same way you enter if possible. Don’t go deeper than your core level can support.

Standard words. Said the same way to everyone.

Then they were waved through.

Noah and Damien walked toward the entrance.

The stone arch was wide enough for three people side by side. Old carved lines ran along its edges, worn almost smooth by time, whatever they had once depicted no longer readable.

A faint coolness came out from the darkness beyond it, carrying a smell of deep earth and something older beneath that.

Noah’s hand moved without thinking. A sword materialized in his grip, summoned cleanly, the weight familiar in his palm.

Beside him, Damien did the same.

His blade appeared with a quiet shimmer, held low and easy in his hand, the grip relaxed in the way of someone who had done this before.

They stepped inside.

The light from outside followed them for only a short distance before the stone walls swallowed it.

The passage descended in a long, gradual slope, wide enough that the walls didn’t crowd in on either side. Torches had been mounted at intervals by the guild team during initial survey, but they only stretched so far.

Beyond their light, the dungeon continued into uncharted dark.

Noah’s eyes adjusted slowly. His mana sense was quiet but present, reaching outward the way it had been trained to do over weeks of circulation practice.

He couldn’t feel anything ahead yet.

’Doesn’t mean there’s nothing there,’ he thought.

Damien moved at an easy pace beside him. His expression was calm. Focused but not tense. The kind of calm that came from genuine confidence rather than ignorance.

Noah watched the walls as they walked.

Old stone. Not natural cave formations. Shaped. Built by someone, once, for purposes that no one alive still remembered.

Whatever this place had been, it had been here a long time.

And now they were walking into it.

The slope leveled out after a while.

The passage opened into a wider chamber.

Not large enough to be called a room, but enough space that the walls no longer felt close. The guild torches ended here. Beyond this point, whoever had done the initial survey hadn’t gone further.

The air was still. Cool and dry with that same deep earth smell that had greeted them at the entrance.

Noah looked ahead.

Three paths were present there.

Each one cut directly into the stone, roughly the same width, disappearing into separate directions. The left passage angled slightly downward. The middle went straight ahead, flat. The right curved out of sight almost immediately.

No markings or sounds coming from any of them. Nothing to go on.

Damien stood at the center and looked at all three for a moment.

Then he tilted his head toward the left.

"That one," he said.

"Okay," Noah replied.

He didn’t ask why. Damien had more dungeon experience than him. And honestly, one passage looked the same as another right now. Noah had no strong feeling either way.

He followed.