/A/N Start/

Heyo!

I know it's weird for me to be doing this whole… "author's note" thing, but I figured you guys would dig it, so here we are.

Oh , I also wanted to say this: please review! Whenever I get a review, it's such a great well of inspiration to write the next chapter, and it's also cool to see if you guys might have any suggestions for the story or my writing in general.

So ya know, I'd appreciate it.

Here's the next chapter, hope you enjoy it!

/A/N End/

Chapter 2 - Depths Beyond

Something tickles at the edge of his perception. A slight feeling that starts in his lungs and creeps in, spreading through a warm tide. Where it passes, he can feel again. Lungs shallowly take in air and exhale, bringing each wave of heat. Up his throat like coals and against his face like a midsummer shower.

He sighs in a slight tremor of comfort, but all that comes is a wracking cough, bringing with it heat and stoking the coals.

He breathes again and the coals jump into tongues of flame.

A boiler within roars, a torrent of scalding sea replacing pleasant air.

Lungs wrack even louder this time, so loud he can finally hear it. At the edges of his perception, as if his own lungs were a mile away.

For a moment, the flood stops. Time to think, to perceive his body on cold stone, like jagged ice. Time to feel faint sparks in his hands and feet, juttering and twitching. He can begin to feel light pass through his eyes, a dim blue-

Eruption.

Searing pain, like hellfire.

Droplets fly from his mouth, sticking to his body.

He can feel the heat on his legs now, sparks clinging to his skin.

Sticky, red embers.

Oh gods, he's dying.

Everything slams back in full force at that moment, amnesia wiped away by a cleansing flame. He remembers how things led to this, what 'this' was, and where 'this' happened. A simple job, he remembers. Adventurers, notorious for their foolhardy nature, were likely to have riches ripe for the picking. Having caught a caravan down, they set out from the Under Resort on the 18th floor, trailing their victims. One small slip up was all it took and they would be rich, they would be free fro-

The flame surges to life again, bringing hacking and groans.

Right, 'would'.

They hadn't expected to be the ones to slip up. Made too much noise, he thinks. Perhaps they weren't religiously in the shadows instead. It didn't matter anyway, the result was the same: discovery, and soon after, destruction.

It was so pitifully easy, to slay them like insects. Even though everyone but him were blessed, they didn't have the power to stand up to those Level Twos. They wielded weapons too impossibly large for any mortal man.

One such weapon that, being reminded by an uncomfortable cold in his stomach, could easily pierce stone and flesh like paper.

The moments before this one, he imagines, were that crumbling of stone on the edge of that impossibly dark hole. The weapon now pierced in his gut saw it fit to bring him down into it, the final will of the adventurer who wielded it. He descended into blackness for so long and…

And….

He was here.

At the bottom of the dungeon, with a slab of cold iron in his gut and bleeding out in a cave within a cave. He would die here, meet his end in a failed attempt at fortune as a fool. Bled out and-

~Ch-Ch-Chssst~

His thoughts freeze as he hears it, a strange, juttery call that grows closer. He's never been this far in the dungeon, but his heart sinks as it realizes what it is. What that bone-chilling, utterly inhuman noise means. What will happen to him when the noise gets closer. He asks his own panicked thoughts this, but he knows. He knows.

There's no escape, not in the condition he is, not with how much damage his body has suffered. Weak from blood loss and hunger, he can barely stand, let alone run.

~Chhsstch~

There's no way out.

And yet, he feels within him that same conflagration. Gouging, scalding fire that burns like his soul is set aflame. Licks of blazing heat that pain his insides like a feral beast. That is proof enough.

His mind brought in by a line of fire, his eyes scan the cramped cave for something, anything. He searches in what he once thought would be his tomb, black dots scanning mausoleum walls. Yet, when they settle on the cross of iron jutting through his chest, he knows that was never the case. Not a tomb, not yet, not until those ever-louder hisses get so close they bite and pierce his ears, tear at his heart.

~CHHHHSK!~

It's an arena.