With This Treasure, I Summon Primordial Weapons
Chapter 12: Dungeon Gate

Chapter 12: Dungeon Gate

Godric frowned as he realised he’d just been swallowed by a dungeon gate that had opened directly beneath his feet.

"You have to be kidding me..."

Calling it bad luck would’ve been an understatement. Red Alerts weren’t exactly rare, but the odds of a gate manifesting right on top of someone were astronomically low. So much so that in the entire recorded history, there was only one instance of the gate opening right on top of someone.

Looking at Raven, who stood barely a meter away, Godric didn’t need to read her thoughts to know she was just as stunned. Their eyes met for only a moment before both instinctively surveyed their surroundings.

A desert stretched to every horizon.

Not the golden dunes he’d seen in textbooks, but a sea of crimson sand, as though every grain of it had been soaked in blood or something far worse.

A dry, hissing wind swept across the wasteland, carrying scarlet grains into the air before scattering them into the endless distance.

Above it all, hung the sun.

As much as it had resembled the sun back home, it felt nothing like it. Its weight pressed down on them with oppressive heat. Its light shone so intensely even with his eyes squinted and his hand above his face, Godric could only look at it for a split second before he had to lower his gaze from the stinging pain in his eyes.

"So much for an easy day," Raven muttered.

Godric couldn’t disagree.

Every dungeon gate contained its own isolated world, shaped by mana into anything from abandoned buildings and underground caverns to sprawling forests, mountain ranges, or, in their case, an entire desert.

The size and complexity of the dungeon gate usually reflected its danger. Blue and Green gates were relatively small, often cleared by a group of experienced summoners within an hour.

This place, however, didn’t look anything like that.

The crimson dunes rolled on without end, swallowing the horizon in every direction.

"At least there aren’t any monsters nearby," Raven said, though she sounded anything but reassured.

"Any guess what gate it might be?" Godric asked, his eyes still scanning their surroundings.

Raven took a slow turn, her expression growing more uneasy with every passing second.

"Yellow...? Maybe even Orange."

As bad as it was, Godric wasn’t surprised by her answer.

Raven took a deep breath, calming her racing heart and mind before turning toward Godric with her usual calm demeanour.

"Any preference on which way we should go?"

Godric shook his head.

She nodded. "Okay... Let’s go this way then."

The first stretch of the walk was completely uneventful.

Exhaustion set in far sooner than either of them expected. The relentless heat drew the moisture from their bodies with alarming speed, each step through the deep crimson sand growing heavier than the last.

Godric’s eyes continued scanning the surroundings, looking for anything that could help them in this dire situation.

"This is not how I pictured today to go..." Raven muttered under her breath, pushing her heels through the sand.

"Not fancy enough for you?"

Raven shot him a sideways look. "I was hoping for an easy day and some private lessons with my mentee."

"You don’t have a mentee."

"Oh, he’s just playing hard to get. He will come around."

"He won’t."

Raven chuckled at his dry response, her voice sounding a little raspy from the dehydration which grew stronger with each step in this immense heat.

Noticing that change in her voice, Godric spoke. "If we don’t get out of this heat soon, we’ll die of dehydration before we ever reach the core."

There were only two ways of getting out of a dungeon.

The first was to destroy its core. Most dungeons were shaped in a way that instinctively guided those inside toward it, though reaching it was another matter entirely.

The second way was to complete the dungeon’s hidden objective, which was a lot harder than it sounded. The problem was that no one ever knew what that objective was. There were no clues or instructions, only the dungeon itself, which always offered little information about what the objective might be.

"The sun will set soon," Raven said, taking a quick glance at the sky above where the sun had already begun its descent. "It should cool down when it does."

Time seemed to slow as exhaustion and dehydration weighed down on them. Godric’s feet were barely dragging now, the crimson sand clinging to his boots with every step. Every inch forward was a battle in itself.

Godric’s thoughts grew sluggish beneath the relentless heat. His legs moved purely on instinct as his mind drifted back to the rainy streets of Elyune’s outskirts.

He never thought he’d miss that damp place this much.

Before he could reminisce about his rainy days in the outskirts any longer, Raven suddenly stopped beside him.

"What is it?" he asked, snapping out of his hazy thoughts.

"I... I think I felt something." Raven said, her brows furrowed as though she wasn’t sure if it was her mind playing tricks on her or if she had truly felt something.

The two of them stood in silence for a moment, listening for any sounds.

Well, it was about time one of them started to hallucinate.

Just as the thought entered Godric’s mind, something beneath his boots trembled.

It felt almost as if the ground somewhere deep beneath him vibrated at a steady rhythm, the movement so faint it was almost indistinguishable from the small breeze carrying the grains of crimson sand across the horizon.

Raven turned toward him, silently asking a question he didn’t have an answer for.

What he did have, however, was a bad premonition that whatever it was, it wasn’t anything good.

A second later, the faint vibration underneath the sand stopped.

For the shortest moment, there was nothing but silence.

Then, the sand around them stirred, and the world convulsed.

Godric went down hard, dunes twisting and collapsing around him, and before he could get the chance to try and get up, the sand surged into the sky as if shot from a catapult.

But instead of falling back down, the sand began to coalesce, forming a massive figure, taller than any building or mountain Godric had ever seen.

He kept stumbling backwards as the ground itself heaved, his vision swallowed by a storm of grit that left tiny, stinging cuts across his face and arms.

Then, somewhere between that sand, he saw it.

The sand formed into four limbs and a head.

This place had never been a desert. They spent the day walking across one gigantic monster.