As the team stepped out of the first boss room, their breaths still heavy from the fight with The Whispering Shade, they consulted their dungeon map once more, to study the path from here to the next boss room.
As they studied the path ahead, it seemed pretty straightforward overall with there being minimal turns and monster fights until the next boss room.
"Let's keep our momentum going, at this pace we can reach the next boss room in under an hour, " Rocky said, taking the lead as Erin, Buhara, and Kronos followed closely, their eyes scanning the dark corridors illuminated only by Erin's staff.
The group moved cautiously, navigating the winding corridors with the confidence born of thorough preparation. However, after several minutes, as they reached a turning point where the map indicated a clear path straight ahead. Instead, they faced a solid wall, a dead end that shouldn't have been there.
"This... shouldn't be," Erin muttered, studying the map they had pre-prepared and followed up till now with a furrowed brow.
"According to this, the path continues straight ahead–" he said, sounding confused as for a moment he wondered if he was reading the map in the wrong orientation as he tried flipping it a few times.
"Maybe we missed a turn?" Kronos suggested, though his uncertainty was clear by the tone of his voice.
"No, we've followed the map exactly." Rocky said, shaking his head, as he glanced back to look at the corridor they had just come from, only to be surprised that the corridor they had just walked through had disappeared.
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"It's gone...." Rocky said, looking backwards, as his words prompted the rest of his crew to turn, only to see that the path they had just come from had vanished, and was now replaced by another solid wall, trapping them in a room with no visible exits.
"This doesn't make sense," Kronos said, his voice low but tense.
However, no matter how many they defeated, more kept appearing as the room seemed to pulse with an endless supply of enemies, each one emerging from the darkness to replace the last.
"This is pointless," Erin shouted, frustration seeping into his voice when even after 20 minutes of non-stop fighting the number of enemies did not reduce at all, however their stamina and mana reserves did.
"We can't keep this up forever!" He complained further, as he urged Rocky to find some immediate solution.
What Rocky did not know however, was that this was the phenomenon of 'Vorithra Sylithen' that was creating unexpected problems for him.
Compared to normal people, Champion's had a harder time ascending the tower by law and hence whenever a Champion's party attempted a floor test, they were bound to be thrown into scenarios where the chances of the entire team surviving were minimal.
It was not that Erin had read the map wrong or that the team had taken a careless wrong turn on their way here.
It was just that the 'Vorithra Sylithen' disruption factor plunged them into this chaos.... A chaos where death of one member was the only way the room's exit was ever programmed to open.
To make matters worse, just when Rocky desperately looked for solutions to get out of this place, scanning every nook and cranny of the room to find any traces of a release mechanism, the room suddenly started to shrink in size.
*GRRR*
Slowly but surely, the walls started to close in from all sides, making the area available to the group to fight against the monsters, smaller and smaller with each passing second.
"We need to hurry. If the room becomes too small and the monsters keep spawning then we won't be able to take so many on" Buhara said, panic now evident in his voice, as for the first time in this dungeon run, he genuinely felt the fear of losing his life.