Dungeon Crawl

Dungeon Crawl, or simply DC, was one of the sketchier titles on GameIn.

To be honest, Sawyer had been **** to try it for a while. It was a darker title in which players spent hours and hours in a literal cave-like dungeon among monsters and traps. And on top of that, it had a reputation for housing some of the most depraved, blood-thirsty players on the platform. PvP was a constant threat in the dungeon, and there were rumors that many of its players joined the game just to vent their darkest and most violent fantasies on unsuspecting noobs.

As a life-long coward, Sawyer simply didn't vibe with DC. But... something about it drew him in that night. He loved adventuring and combat and new worlds, and there was some very cool lore in DC - if you could live long enough to discover it. In the end, he decided to jump into the game portal just to try it out. If he didn't like it, he would just spawn-out.

When Sawyer appeared in the game, he found himself in a dark open area inside a cave. A few torches burned low on the walls, casting long flickering shadows behind him. His avatar was his own body - the default for most games - and he was wearing simple tattered cloth pants and a blue shirt. He didn't even get shoes to start with.

He walked forward and found a sign by the exit. It read: "Warning - Beyond this room are several exits leading into the dungeon. A safe area extends for one hundred meters in every direction, but beyond that PvP is enabled. Proceed with caution. The goal of every floor is to locate the golden staircase which will lead you to deeper floors. If you die, you will lose everything except one chosen item and start over from floor 1. "

Wow, not even a 'Good luck!' Sawyer thought. Harsh.

He grabbed a torch from the wall and started down the narrow cave into the dungeon. After a while, the cave opened up again, and split into ten paths, each going a different way.

"How am I supposed to know where to go?" he mused out loud. There was probably a trick to it, but he couldn't figure it out and ended up just leaving through one of the middle tunnels.

At the end of his chosen tunnel, Sawyer found himself in a more man-made structure. It was still cave-like, but now the floor was at least flat tiles, the walls were carved into flat surfaces and pillars, and the ceiling was a little higher.

It was quiet. So quiet it was scary. Sawyer could hear his own footsteps as he walked slowly through the darkness, his torch only lighting up a small circle around him. In the distance he occasionally heard strange sounds like metal grinding on metal, or something clattering against stone. He even heard something eerily similar to human voices from time to time.

When he turned a corner, he nearly dropped his torch. He was face to face with a sword-wielding skeleton! It's hollow eyes snapped to him with a crack as soon as he was visible, and it started sprinting at him with its sword held high.

Sawyer bolted in the opposite direction since he was 1) terrified, and 2) completely defenseless.

He ran blindly with the creature right behind him until something caught his foot and he tripped. He yelped shrilly, loud enough to echo through the tunnels, and hit the ground with a thump.

In an instant, two huge scythes swung out from invisible recesses in the walls and sliced through the skeleton like it was made of paper. Bones clattered to the floor and the scythes disappeared back into the trap. Sawyer looked back and saw the nearly-invisible trip wire on the ground rise back up and pull taut, resetting itself for the next victim. He gulped and stood up, shaken.