As Rosslyn pointed at the dungeon’s entrance, knights all around them began preparing to explore.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering that the opening to the dungeon looked like a cave entrance, the members of the expedition had brought along climbing equipment which most of them now unpacked from their saddlebags: rope, rigging, grapples, and unlit torches, among other odds and ends that were less familiar to Adon.

  A few of the Claustrian knights detached themselves from the rest of the group and approached the entrance together, then bent down and seemed to be examining it.

  Adon hardly noticed all of this. His mind had grown sharp enough to pick up on details that he was barely concerned with over his Evolution and various post-meal improvements. The brain just noted what was happening, selected any important tidbits to throw in the front of his mind if necessary, and filed the rest of the information away along with the rest of his memories.

  The butterfly was, at the moment, narrowly focused on why exactly this dungeon entrance gave him a strange sense of deja vu.

  I was a monster once. Is that it? Perhaps my past life memories will be relevant here…

  But as Adon stared at the dungeon entrance and the surrounding area, he felt almost certain that he had lived in a different dungeon than this one. For one thing, the opening led out to an extremely different ecosystem from the one he had experienced in his past life. The areas were both mountainous, but when Adon was a monster escaping the dungeon, he had emerged out into a dry, almost desert-like space, whereas Rosslyn’s land and the land nearby it were extremely verdant and fertile, with a large river running through them.

  Also, Adon seemed to recall from conversations with Rosslyn that dungeons had a life cycle, and he knew that this one had appeared relatively recently. Whereas Adon’s past life—well, it was hard to nail down a temporal space when it might have occurred. Reincarnation was still a murky subject for Adon, and for all he knew, he was actually in the past relative to that life right now. That did not seem beyond the Goddess to him.

  That was all assuming that this world was the same one in which his incarnation had lived—or would live, as the case might be. Even that assumption might be wrong. Adon was fairly certain that most of the fantastical worlds he had inhabited in the past had featured dungeons, though they did not always seem to follow the same vague model he recalled from his past life.

  There was a loud exclamation from the handful of knights who had gathered around the dungeon’s entrance, and it pulled Adon’s attention back to the present.

  “Shit!” a couple of them said.

  “Someone needs to go tell them,” muttered another.

  “Not me,” replied the last man.

  But the exclamations running through their minds were more interesting than those they spoke aloud.

  Fuck me, it already advanced this far?

  Well, we have to go in now…

  Goddess damn it!

  Thank the Goddess we showed up when we did!

  Very mixed feelings, Adon thought. All the knights were pretty disturbed by whatever they had discovered. Adon found that a single word kept recurring in their minds.

  The word was “barrier.”

  The barrier is gone.

  How did the barrier disappear so soon?

  Why did no one say anything about the barrier in the reports? Damned adventurers…

  The knights approached Rosslyn where she was, in the midst of the young lords and the arthropods, preparing her own spelunking equipment.

  She took one look at them as they walked up, and she frowned.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “The barrier is gone,” said the knight in the lead.

  Rosslyn’s eyes widened slightly.

  She cursed under her breath.

  Then she dropped the rope she had been holding and strode over to the entrance, intent on seeing for herself. Adon flapped his wings and flew overhead, looking to get an aerial view of whatever it was that was happening.

  The Princess’s thoughts gave him some cause for concern.

  It is far too soon for that. Right?

  The feeling Adon got was less from the words themselves than from Rosslyn’s tone. She had gone from cool to slightly nervous, despite the fact that she always seemed like a rather steely young woman.

  When Rosslyn reached the cave entrance, she inspected the ground briskly. Then the Princess braced her feet carefully against a few rocks embedded in the soil outside, and she dangled her entire upper body down into the hole as her slightly stunned knights rushed to follow after her.

  After a few seconds, she pulled herself up, nodding.

  “Yes, it is gone,” she confirmed to the approaching knights. “Well, that is just fine. We already knew we were on a strict timetable. Now we have a little additional incentive to hurry, if we needed it.”

  The Princess seemed to be fully in command of herself. Adon could not hear a shred of hesitancy or emotion in her words.

  He fluttered down and flew just over Rosslyn’s head, his aerial view having revealed nothing to him. It was just a cave, as far as he could see, and it descended steeply, but not enough that looking straight down from the air would really tell him much.

  The structure was just rocks as far as he could tell. Not exactly useful details.

  What is it about this barrier? Adon transmitted to Rosslyn only.

  A small thing, but an important one, she thought back. The dungeon produces it as a sort of protective measure. Think of the barrier a woman’s body creates during pregnancy, to keep her unborn baby separated from the outside world’s contaminants. When the woman is ready to give birth, her membrane ruptures, which people call “water breaking.” The dungeon makes a barrier to keep the outside world from entering. It gives wild animals that try to go in a severe headache. It can harm humans, too, which is why only those who can use mana end up exploring dungeons. The barrier also keeps most monsters from leaving the dungeon. But now it seems to have disappeared.

  Does that mean the monsters are running loose? Adon sent.

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  Well, we already know a few monsters have been seen, attacking livestock, Rosslyn thought. The problem is actually that the dungeon bringing its barrier down means that it is ready to unleash larger groups of monsters—potentially whole waves of monsters—onto the surface. There is no longer any opportunity for a small crew of adventurers to safely infiltrate the dungeon, make their way to the core, and destroy it before they could be stopped. Now, there would be every chance they would be caught up in a wave of monsters invading the surface, which would of course be immediately fatal for any force smaller than ours.

  Adon could tell, but did not bother to mention, that Rosslyn harbored quiet doubts about whether their own party was large enough to withstand one of those waves. The Princess was already onto another facet of this development.

  I wonder if the dungeon rushed toward this as a safety mechanism, because we sent adventurers in before…

  The dungeon cannot lower the barrier at any time it wants, then? Adon asked. Or in response to some, um, outside signal?

  Rosslyn looked up at Adon as he floated in the air, furrowing her brow.

  There is a theory, which I have personally tended to believe in, that the Demon Empire has some degree of authority over the dungeons, she thought after a moment. Their attacks often seem to align with dungeons spawning and breaking out all over the continent.

  Adon thought that theory fit his past life memories to some degree—mainly his recollection that when he was a monster, a mysterious, disembodied intelligence had commanded him and the other inhabitants of the dungeon he lived in to attack a specific village.

  But there were also inconsistencies.

  Specifically, he remembered that the targets of that attack had not been humans. They had been a humanoid-looking race with horns on their heads.

  Maybe demons? he wondered.

  Has there ever been any evidence about this? Adon asked.

  Rosslyn gave a short, sharp shake of her head. If there was evidence, I would have sounded more confident. We should talk about this later. We need to get moving.

  That’s right, Adon thought. She just finished saying that now we’re on a more severe time limit than before, I guess.

  “All knights, gather around me!” Rosslyn called loudly. Her whole demeanor seemed to shift from its normal state. The Princess had turned instantly military in her bearing. Her posture had suddenly stiffened, and her voice had iron in it.

  There was no longer any question in Adon’s mind as to who was in charge of this expedition.

  Every single knight, whether he wore a Claustrian butterfly or the Dessian spider, hustled to surround Rosslyn and the dungeon entrance that she stood in front of.

  “The barrier is gone!” Rosslyn said, still maintaining her volume as if she wanted to make certain that her words made an impression. “We all know what that means. But nothing changes. The mission has only become more urgent—as if we needed a reason to take the fight to the heart of this dungeon! Right now, there are other soldiers working to warn every civilian who lives within a day’s ride of this valley to evacuate their homes and travel to Wayn. Until then, those innocent families are at risk. Remember our purpose. We are the blade that stands between these beasts—” She drew her sword and pointed into the dungeon—“and innocent children. By the Goddess, we will do our duty!”

  Again, Adon was present for a minor spectacle that shifted the mood of everyone around him. Only this time, the group was smaller, a mere few dozen knights. But the spectacle was more impressive, because it was just Rosslyn, giving an off the cuff speech.

  The feeling in the knights had perceptibly changed. Adon’s Telepathy showed him that where they had felt a variety of different sentiments before—ranging from boredom to resignation to nervousness to mild excitement—they were now united in a martial zeal that bordered on the bloodthirsty.

  The sentiments expressed in verbal thought patterns were all fairly similar in tone.

  We will send those scaly beasts to the next life.

  None of them sets foot in this valley on my watch.

  I would follow her to the end of the world.

  That is our Princess. A warrior like Maud, armed and ready to fight alongside us…

  The adventure has only grown more exciting!

  Adon assumed this was the effect Rosslyn had aimed for. The Princess put away her sword, and the knights formed up into smaller squads that appeared to be split so that each group could share a common rigging system. This had apparently all been planned while Adon was not present.

  He noted that the groups did not mix Claustrians with Dessians; each country’s knights stuck with those they knew and trusted, though neither seemed hostile or surly toward the other group.

  A thought occurred to Adon, and he fluttered over to Adon, who was walking back to where the spiders were.

  What about the people in this valley? Adon sent. They live so close to the dungeon, but I think I saw people still in their homes when William stopped the group to look around earlier.

  It is up to them whether they want to evacuate or not, Rosslyn thought in response. Remember that these are the descendants of some of the Kingdom’s greatest heroes, who fought to establish our country. Most of them have trained to fight, even though they are not usually drafted to serve. They know the situation as well as any in Wayn. Both about the dungeon and about the impending invasion. The situation has become too pressing to keep secret any longer. But their position is difficult to assail, due to the surrounding mountains and the fact that Wayn and its walls directly obstruct the path of the Demon Army. If the demons wanted to send a small force to sneak through the mountains to attack the people of this valley, they could do so, but I do not know what the point would be. They would suffer unnecessary casualties and gain little that would assist them in conquering the rest of the country. The monsters do not behave so rationally, of course. Still, the people in the valley are more than capable of fending off individual monster attacks.

  And a wave of monsters? Adon could not help but ask. Should we warn them that the barrier is down?

  If we fail, everyone who lives in this valley will die, Rosslyn thought in response, a grim cast to her face. And there is a possibility that we will fail. That was always true. Against a large enough horde of particularly formidable monsters, we could be overwhelmed. That is an especial danger when fighting underground, in the environment the dungeon has shaped. That makes it all the more urgent that all of us get underground. It is my hope that the reason the barrier seems to have come down prematurely is that the dungeon rushed into this. It sensed a threat from the adventurers we sent before, and it reacted before it was ready. It could end up being a soft target, less stable than we would normally expect from a dungeon that has removed its barrier.

  Without any context, Adon felt nervous about these vague hopes and premonitions.

  But Rosslyn projected confidence in the tone of her thoughts—and somehow even in the miasma of emotions that surrounded her. It was as if she genuinely believed that she would triumph, almost to a certainty—or perhaps she believed that she must triumph, and that there was no difference between “must” and “would.”

  The Princess reached the spiders, and she quickly explained the situation to Goldie and Samson.

  “Who would you like to descend into the dungeon with?” she asked breathlessly as she finished. “Assuming that you do not want to call off entering, which is an option. We do not have harnesses small enough to fit spiders, but I feel certain that either I or any knight—”

  Frederick already volunteered to take my son and I with him, Goldie sent. Thank you for considering us, Princess.

  As if summoned by her words, Frederick began walking over toward them from where he had been huddled with a few of the Dessian knights.

  Adon felt surprised and not surprised at the same time. The younger Dessian lord seemed to be making an effort to ingratiate himself with the spiders more and more now, much as William was with Rosslyn. It was something of a rapid reversal, from Adon’s perspective.

  But first impressions were reversed all the time. It was the butterfly’s bad fortune that he had formed a bad impression of the younger brother when they first met, so now he had static clogging his perception rather than having a clear view.

  “Are you ready to descend, Adon?” Rosslyn asked.

  In her mind, she added, I know that we just had a difficult conversation, but I had never considered that you would be anywhere other than with me in this dungeon. If you feel differently, you can say so.

  No, I think the same way, Adon replied, a bit relieved. He set himself down on Rosslyn’s shoulder and became still, conserving energy for the journey ahead. It would make him look like a burden if he ended up asking for food while they were still in the early part of the climb.

  With Adon sitting and silently spectating, the Princess, Frederick, and William, plus two knights from Claustria, formed a squad together, they rigged themselves up in climbing harnesses, and they hooked their rigging onto an anchor that someone had hammered into the ground outside the dungeon for them.

  Then the entire party of knights, nobles, and arthropods descended into the underworld.