A/N: This is a rewrite of the Dungeon Hunters. In this new version, there won't be any clear characters that we'll be following. Instead, it'll be an anthology-like series of short stories and scenes that ends up painting a bigger picture.
Hope you enjoy it!
Chapter 1
The Wall
For as long as they could remember, the great walls of Orario had always been there. And they were great. Taller than everything except Babel Tower, the wall surrounding the city would be the first thing any visitor saw.
They were a symbol of Orario itself.
But nobody knew a thing about it. There were staircases leading to the top, letting one stroll along the edge and pass through crenelated watchtowers. The view was spectacular; on one side, the great forest land that stretched beyond the horizon; and on the other, a panoramic view of a bustling Orario. But there were also holes for archers to shoot arrows down from, platforms to mount cannons and ballistae on, trap doors to spill hot oil from. The only thing odd about them was that they all faced inside, towards Orario.
Nobody had used any of them in centuries. Nobody knew who had. And nobody knew who they had been used against. And in all their uncertainty, they turned to the ones who always answered their questions. Old, wise, all-knowing beings who graced the the world with their mere presences.
The Gods.
They spoke of an ancient time when Gods did not walk among mortals. When monsters roamed the land and reigned supreme. When mortals knew nothing of the Falna and were hunted as prey. They were dark, bloody, desperate times. Monsters, winged, legged, and serpentine, spilled out of the Dungeon in hordes and droves, tearing mortal civilization apart.
Dragons and drakes darkened the skies in their flocks, scorching fertile farmlands into barren glass. Grotesque beasts of all shapes and sizes stampeded villages and settlements in herds, and whole nations were erased in their wakes. Leviathans that could encircle whole islands ruled the oceans with their iron metaphorical fists, and whole fleets were reduced to sunken wrecks at the might of their maws.
The survivors banded together. They built bastions. Fortresses. The final strongholds of sentient life. And the only thing that separated them from total annihilation were the walls. Towering walls, built by the mightiest craftsmen and blessed by the Gods themselves. They stood through the onslaught of monsters, withering through one invasion after the other. And when the monster threat was finally quelled and mortalkind held ground beyond the walls once again, they sought to build one last one.
Around the Dungeon itself.
The wall was never meant to keep things out. It had been built with the sole purpose of keeping things in. To prevent such a catastrophe from ever happening again. And for that one reason alone, it could never be torn down, even if it was stifling Orario's growth and expansion.
The wall was mortalkind's literal last line of defense against monsters.
They just never expected them to come from the other direction.
First Contact
The people of Orario were not the type look up to the sky very often.
There was no reason to, not unless it was about to rain.
But that day was as sunny as it could be, and the sky was completely devoid of clouds. With such great weather, it should have been the start of a good day.
The high-pitched screech that echoed across the city quickly banished any such notion.
For the first time since it was founded, the city of Orario came to a stop. Adventurers, all ready to enter the Dungeon, halted in their tracks in front of its entrance, tilting their heads upwards while shielding their eyes. Waitresses and chefs, cleaning tables and prepping ingredients for the next wave of hungry customers, stopped what they were doing and rushed to the windows and craned their necks to peer at the sky. And even the Gods, despite their eons of existence and wealth of knowledge, shuddered as an unsettling chill washed over their bodies.
Perhaps it was good that the sky was so clear. Others might say that it was a bad thing. It gave whatever it was in the air a full view of Orario, after all. Whatever the case, the citizens of Orario watched in complete silence as the behemoth glided above their homes, at a height not even magic could have helped it to attain. But with wings as large as those, they could understand how it got there.
For the adventurers, their decisions were instinctive and instantaneous. Their jobs involved fighting monsters on a daily basis, and learning to identify them instantly was an occupational requirement.
But for many others, they had never stepped foot in the Dungeon before. Monsters were merely things they heard stories about. In their minds, they did not know where to draw the line between mere animals and monsters.
Colossal size? Blue whales were animals too, though.
Sharp fangs and deadly claws? Wouldn't that make all predators monsters?
Magical powers? There were plenty of monsters that relied on nothing but brute strength to kill.
So it was more with a sense of curiosity than fear that most people watched the never-before-seen creature soar above its head. To them, this was nothing more than an inexplicable phenomenon, something everybody could talk about at the dinner table after work or school.
They did not know where to draw the line.
So it drew the line for them.
Once more, it roared, an ear piercing shriek that was heard loud and clear by everyone in the city, despite it being even higher than Babel Tower. And then, it shook its body mid-air. Sunlight glinted off bronze scales and into their eyes as black specks seemed to detached itself from its body, descending towards the ground like giant droplets of rain. They kept falling as it flew, and a steady stream drew a marked diameter across the city of Orario.
Children laughed. Adults let out an amused grin. Adventurers let out a sigh of relief. All it had done was excrete and fly away, now a speck barely visible against the azure sky.
A young girl ran towards her mother, carrying an object that resembled a pinecone the size of her head.
"Look, Mama! Bird poop!"
The woman resisted the urge to groan. She was just about to scold her daughter and ask her to wash her hands when the unknown object began to glow bright red.
She didn't even have enough time to scream before it exploded into a giant ball of fire.
The creature had made it very clear what defined a it to be a monster that day. What a monster had that an animal lacked was simply its ability to strike fear into human hearts.
That day, mortalkind received a very grim reminder that the monster threat was still very, very, real.
A New Threat
It took eight hours to extinguish all the fires.
It took a whole day to count the casualties and relocate the homeless.
And then it took them one week to figure out what to do next.
They called it the Bomber. No one else could come up with a better name.
The Gods, together with their Captains, had held an emergency meeting with the Guild and the City Council to discuss their next course of action.
For once, the Gods' wealth of knowledge proved useless.
The Bomber was an unknown monster that came from an unknown place. Thus, the adventurers held total control of the conversation. They were the ones who had the most experience dealing with monsters.
"It has to be a Monster Rex. It's too big to be just an ordinary monster," said the blue-haired Captain of the Ganesha Familia.
"Assuming that there will only be one existing at any one time may be a costly mistake," calmly replied the Captain of the Loki Familia.
Many people nodded their heads in agreement.
Reluctantly, Ganesha's Captain took a seat, and all eyes were pointed towards the short, blond Pallum who had easily refuted her declaration.
He cleared his throat.
"Obviously, our current priority is to prevent such an incident from happening again. Ideally, we'd hunt the Bomber, but we know nothing about it, including its habitat. So the only thing we can do is to make preparations on our own end."
He looked around. Nobody objected.
"We're going to need to set up some kind of watch at the start. Capable adventurers with long-range skills need to be in the city at all times. In the meantime, we're also going to need to prepare the city itself."
"What do you mean?"somebody from the crowd asked.
"The Bomber didn't come from the Dungeon. We don't know where, but we know that much. If that's the case, then we need to prepare for the possibility that there are other monsters roaming outside as well. Perhaps a second Dungeon has appeared, and monsters are spawning and going outside. If that's the case, then us adventurers alone won't be enough to protect the city."
"So what? Re-arm the wall with ballistae and cannons?" a voice piped out.
He nodded. "That's definitely something we should look into. We need to drill the citizens on proper responses as well, and build up some kind of City Defense Force to man the fortifications. Maybe we can convert the sewers to create some kind of underground shelter for future aerial attacks."
Grunts of acknowledgements and nodding heads brought a smile to his face.
"We should adjourn here for today," he concluded. "The Guild and the City Council should look into infrastructural improvements and the human resource issues. Meanwhile, us Familias will discuss in separate regarding the watch schedule."
And thus, Orario prepared itself for war.
Fortifications
A single day was all it took for Orario to become a completely different city.
Suddenly, everyone was shooting the sky furtive looks. Fresh graves and charred buildings served as painful mementos from the Bomber Attack. The wall, once seen as an eyesore by many, became a symbol of hope.
Newly-mounted ballistae lined the top, giant crossbows that looked like they could launch a human being across Orario itself. Guards in recognizable helmets patrolled the top. They were newly trained, but they were determined. Many had lost someone dear to the Bomber, and they were united by a common sense of revenge.
A few people looked to Babel Tower with relief. Word had spread that Lady Freya herself had given up some of her living space on the top floor for adventurers to use to protect the sky. Even if the city's newfound weaponry failed, at its very core, Orario was an adventurer city, and they would not disappoint.
Orario was ready. But the rest of the world was not.
Word spread of entire merchant convoys going missing. Refugees spilled into the city that flying dragons had appeared and burned their villages into ash. Massive, grotesque, creatures were seen lumbering through the forest, some breathing fire and others crackling with electricity.
The adventurers had been right. The Bomber was not alone.
And three weeks later, they finally caught a glimpse of one of its friends.
The guard rubbed his eyes blearily. He had thought this job would have been more exciting. Sentry duty meant being the first line of defense, after all. But his first two weeks on the job, and the only interesting he'd seen so far was a cloud that looked a bit like rabbit.
He opened his mouth to yawn.
A roar thundered through the air.
And suddenly he wasn't feeling sleepy in the slightest.
He looked around. It had come from the forest, and he could hear the shrill cries of birds as a whole flock of them burst out from the canopy. The trees began to shake, and his hand instinctively reached out to touch the gigantic gong next to him.
Three gongs for a land threat. Five gongs for an aerial threat. Non-stop banging for anything else.
He gulped.
What exactly could fall under anything else?
And then a plume of fire erupted from the the trees.
"Battle stations!" He heard the commander yell.
A flurry of shouts emanated from the barracks below below him. The clankering sound of armor being donned was mixed with the clicking noise of ammunition being loaded onto the ballistae. The rolling sound of wheels and the grunts of men carrying canonballs soothed his nerves somewhat. They had enough firepower on the wall to take out a small army.
For a short while, everything was silent.
And then it burst forth from the trees.
He had never gone into the Dungeon. He had never wanted to see a monster, let alone fight one. But his younger brother had. But then the Bomber came and took his only remaining family away from him.
He had signed up for the Orario Defense Force the very day the Guild had announced its formation.
Now he was starting to question his choice.
Was this what adventurers faced everyday?
It had to be up to three or four stories tall. It stood on two legs, thicker than tree trunks, while its body leaned forwards, parallel to the ground, its tail at the same level as its fire-exuding mouth. Red and purple fur coated its muscular form, and the tail whipped itself into a tree and instantly demolished it. Its arms looked small compared to everything else, dangling somewhat uselessly in front of its legs, but he was certain that it didn't need them to kill its prey.
As if the fire it exhaled through its nostrils wasn't enough, it opened its jaw, revealing a bloody set of teeth, each as sharp and long as an adventurer's sword. And then it spread its wings.
Wings wasn't the right word, he realized. They looked more like sails; tall, thin sheets of skin that suddenly unfurled on its back. He did not what purpose they served, but they certainly did make the monster in front of him look ten times scarier.
Or maybe that was just because of all the blood.
He gasped when he noticed the wounds covering its body, blood still leaking from them. Gashes lined its long torso, the slick blood glistening in the sunlight. Puncture wounds dotted its neck, blood dripping out from them in crimson globules that painted the grass below it red. Yet, despite its injuries, the creature roared, a deafening cry of anger and dominance, setting a small cluster of trees ablaze.
For a moment, he met the monster's beady eyes. And it stared straight back.
His hand stretched out to strike the gong.
But then it turned away, and he realized it was walking away with a limp.
He lowered his arm.
He wondered if it had won the fight.
Counterattack
The first gong caused everyone to hesitate, wondering if their ears had momentarily betrayed them.
The second gong caused everyone to come to a complete stop.
The third gong caused everyone to turn around and start walking towards the nearest building, as instructed before, in a calm and orderly fashion.
And then the fourth gong caused them to start panicking and to run.
By the time the fifth gong rang, everybody already had their eyes glued to the sky as they frantically struggled to find any form of shelter.
Inside the city itself, the first two to see them were the two Adventurers perched on the top of Babel Towers.
There had to at least be a dozen of them.
The lack of any wings made them sigh in relief. The Bomber had not returned. But they had no clue as to what it could actually be. They'd never heard of any monster that kept itself suspended in the air with only giant balloons. Then again, until a few weeks ago, they hadn't known of a monster that pooped bombs.
With a single verbal command, wings made from pure magical energy erupted from the heels of one of the adventurers. She was the more senior of the two, a Level Four and Captain of the Hermes Familia. She adjusted her glasses before taking to the sky, more than ready to intercept the unidentified monsters.
The other stood back, readying his staff as he began chanting the first of many lines required for his spell. It would send a barrage of lightning bolts toward his target, and hopefully, those balloons were as fragile as they looked.
As their targets approached, the sharper-eyed adventurers realized it was not monsters they were facing. Monsters did not have balloons attached to their spines that helped them to float in the air. Monsters did not have great white cloth sails that harvested the winds to propel them through the sky. And most certainly, monsters were not made of wood, and were not supposed to have people scuttling aboard their decks.
If anything, the revelation only made them even more nervous.
Monsters, they could deal with, and had dealt with many times in the past.
An invading army, on the other hand, was completely foreign territory. As adventurers, they killed monsters. They were not used to killing their own kin. At least, most of them weren't.
Despite Orario being a landlocked country far away from any sea or ocean, both adventurers had seen, and been on, ships before. But nowhere had they ever heard of one that could fly.
Curiosity began to mix with their fear, and when the adventurers saw the white flag being waved from the bow of the lead air-ship, they heaved a sigh of relief. The last thing they wanted was another new enemy, and they quickly rushed to the Guild to announce the arrival of potential allies.
The Hunters
In times like this, the hardened warriors of Orario looked to the Guild, not their gods and goddesses, for instruction. Administrative officials, pencil-pushers, advisers... it didn't matter what people called them. They were the closest thing Orario had to a government and out of everyone else, they were the best equipped to handle hot-headed, battle-thirsty, and sometimes-stupid warriors.
But bureaucrats were defenseless by themselves, so the welcoming delegation had been joined by dozens of adventurers that had volunteered to protect them.
The head delegate swallowed a gulp as the ships touched down onto the ground. Like many others, she was born and raised in Orario. She'd never seen a ship in real life, not one with masts and sails and cannons on it. She'd gone on rowboats and canoes but they were nothing compared to the monstrosity before her. They also couldn't fly. A glint of sunlight caught her eye, and her gaze was drawn to the bow of the largest ship where golden letters that spelled out 'Argosy' were engraved.
The Argosy was huge, bigger than the Pantheon. Ballistae, loaded with arrows so large they could have been used as spears, were installed on its top deck in the dozens. The muzzles of dozens of cannons reared themselves through the many windows on its armored hull. She doubted they were the only threat the Argosy had. With so much space, the Argosy could probably fit a Dragon within.
She forced herself to calm down, wearing a confident, yet polite, mask as a ramp lowered down from the hull. The foreigners were probably friendly, she comforted herself into thinking. They could have rained cannonballs and arrows from the sky, but had instead willingly descended into an empty field surrounded by armed adventurers.
Or maybe they were just that confident of their power.
She struggled to hide her gasp. There were monsters walking down the ramp. Spikes jutted out of their shoulders and horns grew out of their heads. Sharp claws flexed as they gripped weapons almost as big as she was. She took a step back, bringing her hand to cover her mouth in horror when their leader suddenly removed his own head.
She blinked.
A charming smile. A scar-adorned face. Short white hair and sharp blue eyes. It was a human, and the object he held in his hands was nothing more than a helmet made in the cast of a grotesque monster's head. One by one, his followers took off their own helmets, revealing men and women that adorned cheerful grins.
Their armor looked terrifying, as if they had taken the skin of the beasts that lurked in the Dungeon and wore it as their own, but their disarming postures and friendly waves went far in assuring her that Orario was safe. They were fellow adventurers, no doubt about it. They looked strong and rugged. Their weapons were seemingly bigger and more unwieldy than those found in Orario, but that only spoke of their might. Were they adventurers as well?
But if that was the case, who and where was their god?
Already, she could see the adventurers around her lowering their swords. They were undeniably human. The strange group was also observing Orario's population, and she could see looks of confusion and surprise spreading across their features.
She needed to take action. She took a step forward, and in the voice she reserved for new adventurers, she said. "Welcome to Orario. I am from the Guild, can I know whose Familia you are all from?"
The leader scratched his head in bafflement. Perhaps a language barrier?
"Familia?" No, he had understood her perfectly. "What's a Familia? We're from the Guild as well, but we've never heard of such a thing before."
Now she was the one confused. There was no way these people were from the Guild. Perhaps...the theory that another Dungeon had arisen was indeed true, and with it, another Guild?
"I'm sorry. But you are adventurers, are you not?"
The man smirked as a ripple of laughter spread among his ranks. "We're not adventurers," the man clarified, "we are Hunters."
She raised her eyebrows. "Hunters?" She felt her own voice going high.
The man nodded.
"Monster Hunters."
A/N: Leave a review on your way out, please! Likes/Favs/Follows are always appreciated as well! And as always, feel free to point out any mistake you spot!