Hera barely registered that she was entering a different place, mostly because of the sheer brightness of the light that hit her eyes. The only thing that made her realize that she was, indeed, going into a hidden dungeon was a notification that appeared in front of her. That kind of system notification would show up no matter the situation. Even if she was blinded, the system could still appear to her.
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You have found the hidden dungeon Lighthouse Heart.
Locate and fix the reason for the erratic behavior of the Dark Lighthouse.
First time rewards
1 000 000 gold
The Lighthouse Heart gift.
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Despite what she had just learned, the Empress focused on the Wendigo. The creature should have entered with her, and as soon as she was able to see again, the monster was there, clear as day. As a matter of fact, the Wendigo was the only thing she could see. This hidden dungeon was the exact opposite of the one that she just come from. Instead of an area covered in darkness, she was in a place flooded by light. In fact, light was the only thing that you could see, and the Wendigo in front of her was like a dark stain on the pure white environment.
The creature also seemed to be clearly frazzled by the situation. It was looking around, trying to see if there was anything it could do to hide, as it was an ambush animal, not a brawler monster. But the Empress didn't wait to see what it was going to do. She summoned her court, noticing that after entering this dungeon, they had disappeared back into the legacy. Despite all the years she spent with them, this was the first time that she entered a dungeon without dismissing the court first, and it was good to know that if that were to happen again, those who were nearby would simply pop back into the legacy.
Seeing the sudden appearance of various threats, the Wendigo turned around and started running into the endless void of light in front of them. But Hera wasn't about to allow it to escape. She grabbed Livy by the handle of her weapon form and tossed the two-handed axe towards the beast with all of her strength. The weapon spun around and was about to hit the creature when the monster moved backwards to Hera, using two of its four hands to deflect the projectile.
But Livy wasn't about to let up. She returned to her titled form, the bipedal sea serpent appearing on top of the creature, together with a pair of chains emerging from both of her arms. Those chains were connected to Lurize and Vulcan, who were behind the Empress and pulled Livy backwards, allowing her to slam on the lower set of arms of the Wendigo with her knees, causing the creature to topple to the ground.
Before the monster could do anything else, Livy clamped the other two arms using her hands and held the monster against the glowing floor. Hera was already running towards them, and with a quick motion of the hand, Eira followed. Hera jumped and spun in the air, getting as much momentum as she could before letting the blade of her permafrost glaive sink directly into the Wendigo's head.
Even after splitting open its skull, she didn't take any chances. She told Livy to finish decapitating the monster and separated all of its limbs, all the while firing off several poison fangs at the creature over and over again.
This excess didn't come from a place of cruelty or anger, but of fear. She was worried that the Wendigo could have some sort of skill or magic that would allow it to play dead for a while. Because of that, it was better to be safe than sorry and completely obliterate its body as much as she could without damaging it too much. After all, Wendigos were still highly sought-after research materials. There was still too much that people didn't know about those creatures, and the more specimens they had, the better they develop even stronger ways of killing those beasts.
She was in the middle of that process when Atlas appeared from the same direction that she came from. The man gasped at the sudden brightness of the light, which was understandable considering they were in a pitch-black place that was surrounded by darkness, but soon he approached the Empress only to see her handiwork.
"Damn, this fight was brutal," the human gasped, and Hera chuckled before shaking her head.
"Not really." She pointed at the wendigo's head, specifically the broken skull. "Breaking the skull was the fight. The rest was post-mortem."
Atlas just nodded. "Good call. I remember hearing about a Wendigo that grew arms from its torso and a new head after people thought they had killed it."
Hera just blinked, looking at the man. "Not gonna lie, I didn't know about that one. But I figured it could happen. It wouldn't be the first monster who can do some weird shit like that," the Empress sighed. "It's just going to be really annoying to take this back with us."
Atlas waved his hand, and a piece of the armor that was around his leg formed a box big enough for all the pieces of the Wendigo to be placed inside. Together with her court, they quickly did so, and once that was over, the metal box stood up, growing a set of crab legs from its sides, and started following the man.
"This is both amazing and terrifying at the same time," Hera said while staring at the box.
Atlas just nodded at that comment. "You should see it when I'm making some weird shapes. Not too long ago, I was trying to make some metal mimics just to see if I could, and I can get pretty close."
Hera shivered to think about what a metal mimic would look like and just said, "Okay, let's just figure out a way to get out of here, then."
She took a few steps to the side and then stopped, looking around and trying to see if there was anything that could give them a hint. But there was nothing. The entire place was just an endless void of light. The only things that had any sort of color or shape were Atlas and herself. It was almost as if their entire bodies were being the focus of a flashlight. But at the same time, that caused the area behind them to be a bit darker, allowing them to see each other's outline and rough features.
"Then how do we get out of here?" Atlas looked around.
"Crimson, did you read anything about this dungeon?" Hera asked.
The spymaster shook her head. "Not really. I didn't even know this was a place that existed. At least that information wasn't in the packet that we received."
"But this is not the first time anyone enters this dungeon," Atlas spoke up. "I mean, there was no notification saying that we were going to get a level up by completing it."
"That's true. Which means that someone else did come here. Why wouldn't they share that information?"
Atlas turned to Crimson, who shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe there's some sort of resource here that they really don't want anyone else to have, or maybe they forgot. Maybe they're just not the type of people who would share that type of information."
Hera looked around. "Maybe they are still here."
"Still here?"
"But as far as we know, once someone gets the Wendigo up here, no one is going anywhere. The room is pretty much on lockdown until the reason for the missing cattle was found. That was what, one or two months ago?"
"Yeah. Which means that if someone is here, they probably died, unless they had a lot of supplies to come along."
"Oh. So you're saying that someone did find this dungeon, but they died before completing the quest for the first time?"
"Yeah. Because it just said to find a reason for the lighthouse to be weird. And maybe they couldn't find one, and that's why they got stuck here and couldn't leave."
Hera looked around once more, confirming that there was indeed nothing for her to see, before activating her Ophidianite sight to see in infrared, focusing on the temperatures of the things around them. Everything was covered in light, but at the same time, some things would absorb more light than others, making them more likely to be hot or cold..
The moment she did so, it was as if the entire place transformed. She was no longer in that white void, with nothing anywhere to be seen. They were actually walking on top of a gigantic ocean filled with sea creatures who were swimming in the light. Although calling it "on top" was not correct, as many of the creatures were also swimming in the ceiling or the sky, depending on how you looked at it. They were just in this layer between two parts of the ocean.
She looked to the side and saw a gigantic whale breaking the surface tension, looking as if it was going to be just jumping and crashing back down into the water. But halfway through the motion, it was as if gravity flipped, and the whale, instead of going down, started to fall upwards and splashed on the surface of the sky ocean above them.
"Wow, this is beautiful," she said as some of the splash of water from the whale reached her.
"It really is," Filigree smiled.
Atlas was still looking around, confused. "What is going on here?"
Hera quickly explained what she was seeing, and by then she added what she thought was the reason why no one was able to leave this place alive. "If they don't have a way to see things in this dungeon, they probably won't be able to find the source of the strangeness in the lighthouse. So we need to find it and fix it. I just don't know how or what we're looking for."
Atlas nodded, "So you are saying that because no one could see things or sense anything when they came here, they had no way of fixing the problem."
"Exactly." Hera replied.
"So okay, what do we do then? Is there anything that seems out of place or as if it was broken?" the man asked, and Hera kept looking around.
From behind, to the left, where she roughly could tell was the same location of the original lighthouse on the other dungeon, was a shape lying on the ground. It was pretty hard to tell what it was from this distance. She pointed at it, and the group started moving in that direction. Maybe it was nothing, but maybe it was something, and right now that was all they could hope for.
During the small travel, they chose to not have Nimbus carry the two of them since they weren't exactly sure about the types of dangers they could face in a place like this. That decision was only further confirmed once Livy started to get a bit too excited. As they were essentially walking on top of water, the Leviathan started jumping back and forth. Eventually, that seemed to attract some of the creatures who lived below the surface, who tried to snatch her away.
Hera and the rest of the court were quick to respond and kill the creature, which looked like a giant crab,before anything could happen. Still, that was a nice way of understanding the dangers of this room, this dungeon. And it made even more sense how no one was able to complete this dungeon quest. If one of those creatures suddenly grabbed someone who couldn't see what was going on and then pulled under the water, even if they managed to break free, they might not be able to swim towards the surface. Really trying to go in some direction without seeing things, they wouldn't be able to tell which side was up.
Now that she knew what to look out for, Hera could tell that in between the inside of the water, both in the sky and on the ground, large shapes were waiting for a chance to strike at new prey.
Once they started to get close to this different shape, Hera slowly started to see some resemblance to the whale that kept jumping from one ocean to the other. And as they actually arrived, she confirmed that it was indeed one of those whales, or at least the only other whale she had seen in this room.
She was telling Atlas everything she was seeing and the types of dangers that they might be facing, just so the man wouldn't be as frantic about it all. After all, not being able to see what's going on around someone was a very confusing situation, and Hera didn't want to add a paranoid person to their list of problems.
"So, what now? Do we kill it?" Atlas asked, looking at what was pretty much a fish out of water that was barely moving.
Killing something like this wouldn't be hard. As a matter of fact, it would be quite easy to do so. And maybe this was a way to solve this. First killing this whale and then the other one. It would make sense that this could be a way to finish the dungeon, since the whales were the only thing that seemed to be not happy where they were, and that's why they were constantly jumping from one ocean to the next. This could be whatever was broken inside the Lighthouse Heart.
Or it could be something more simple. Maybe the whale that was in front of her was the thing that was broken, and she had to fix it by healing the whale. And in her mind, that made much more sense than the alternative. Generally, dungeons were very straightforward. They didn't give any complicated requests or anything that was too troublesome. Even in situations like the previous dungeon, where you had to find the real lighthouse, they really didn't have to worry too much about finding it. The lights started to turn off one by one, and all they had to do was follow them.
But this was a hidden dungeon. Hard mode dungeons were already more complicated; they would generally ask more difficult tasks or make requests that were somehow new ones. And hidden dungeons were double, if not triple, that. They would always be much more tricky to deal with.
Hera explained all that train of thought to Atlas, who nodded in response, although he was clearly not entirely sure about the Empress's final solution to the problem.
"So you're saying that we have to heal this whale instead of killing it?"
"I'm saying that's probably one of the ways of finishing the dungeon. I think that the whales are key parts of the heart of the lighthouse, for whatever reason. And if we kill them both, we might need to also protect the baby whales that show up after them, or find something else to take their place. But if we just heal this one, all those issues are gone. We just need to make it be able to go back to the ocean, and that's it."
"Well, okay then. Are you sure? Do you have any healing skills? Because I don't have anything that could affect other people."
Hera smiled. "I don't, but..." She turned to Filigree.
"I believe this is my time to shine," the Weaver said with a smile.
Everybody gave her some space as Filigree started to cast [Balm of Life] on the whale. At first, nothing seemed to be happening, but slowly the creature began to turn dark. Its shape started to be revealed to Atlas, which made everybody stop whatever they were doing.
"Empress?" Filigree asked.
Hera stared at the whale for a moment before nodding. "Keep going."
"Wait, what?" Atlas protested, but Filigree already started working as the Empress requested.
"No, no, no, no," Atlas said. "Why are you doing this? It's clearly hurting the whale. Why are you still healing it?"
"Because I don't think that making it darker means it's hurting it. I think it's exactly the opposite."
"What? What are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about the dungeon and the place where the dungeon is located. It's completely covered in black and white. The trees and even the environment turn everything into black and white. Then we have the other dungeon, the regular one. Yes, everything is black, but there's also the white light. Two colors, two elements. Here," Hera gestured around, "there's only one. Maybe this is about yin and yang, the balance between things. The heart needs both the light and the dark, because if you think about it, the lighthouse illuminates a part of the sea. It doesn't illuminate everything. It just illuminates a single path, and the light goes back and forth, showing to others where they should go to. A lighthouse is not trying to replace the sun. It's something that needs dark to work."
"And you're banking that by making it darker we're going to be able to leave this place?"
Hera nodded and turned back to the whale, watching it as it got darker and darker, hoping that her gut feeling was right.