Amid the shadows, the fighting, and all the noise literally in my family’s compound at the moment, the sound of my cousin’s voice cut through all of it like a knife through butter.

  “I can’t hold the shadows up for long. There’s too many of them. For right now, where the hell is everybody else, and why the hell are we not moving towards them right now?”

  There were only two goals for this little mission of ours: buy the book and wait around for my cousin to show up however long that would take. Both of those seemed to be accomplished, so now we needed to get back to the dungeon as soon as possible.

  So I yelled back at my cousin.

  “They’re not here. They’re inside the snake dungeon. There’s a safe space or something or another in it. More system fuckery!”

  After that, I found him standing next to me, even though I could barely see, but I knew it was him when he placed a hand on my shoulder.

  “Look, I can’t really run around the shadows like you can, but my dad and a few of our Uncles are here running around. Grab them and start moving towards the snake dungeon. The second you dispel the shadows, I’m gonna leave them a little surprise to give us a bit of room to run. Get to the dungeon and don’t look back.”

  He definitely had way more questions and things he wanted to say, but he simply grunted an acknowledgment, and his hand left my shoulder as he went off to do what I asked. We needed to run.

  We had the book, and now hopefully it meant that everyone had the chance to gain some immediate strength in the fight ahead. Staying here and fighting to the death simply wasn’t it.

  Even with my cousin who was here now, with his increased strength, it simply wasn’t a good idea. The next time we left the dungeon, it needed to be with a proper plan and more than just myself and him, even though I was confident just the two of us alone would be able to cause significant damage to these lava wielding bastards.

  A few moments later, I heard the sound of my cousin’s voice cutting through the darkness, letting me know it was about to disperse, and with it I activated a skill they hadn’t yet seen.

  “OCEANS MAW!”

  As the darkness left the area, the roar of a leviathan made out of water rose up behind it and slammed into the few lava people who were in front of me.

  I didn’t wait for the result of the attack to reach my senses. I turned around to run as fast as I could to catch up with the members of my family.

  Before long, lava was once again being thrown towards me, but none of it was enough to stop me, my cousin, my dad, or my uncles from reaching the entrance of the dungeon. Thankfully, they waited for me, and we all entered it together, appearing on the first floor, where we all took a second to catch our breaths.

  But sadly, we were doing more than just catching our breaths.

  As those first few snakes slithered out from the two rooms down the hallway in front of us, my dad wore an expression of seriousness unlike any I had ever seen. Even when he had to tell me that my grandma passed, he never looked this dreadful, this filled with pain and sorrow, but he made a choice…seemingly before we even reached this point.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Of course, I had other uncles here, and one of them would have done the same, but it was my father who stepped up.

  I’m not sure if I agree with why he chose now to do what he was about to do when we still had more floors of the dungeon to work through, but I suppose he wanted my cousin to get ahead of the news he was about to learn and to be prepared to see the state that his mother was in, and his younger brother.

  There would obviously be no good moment to tell him that his father died. No perfect moment. No time where the pain would be lessened.

  Either way, nothing about this should be easy, so when Uncle Robert motioned for me to follow him and the others towards the snakes and eventually down the hallway to allow my dad and my cousin a bit of solitude, I simply did it.

  A few moments later, and it wasn’t the sound of our steps against the strange floor of the dungeon. It wasn’t the sound of our weapons swinging through the air. It wasn’t the sound of blade meeting flesh, blood spiraling through the air as the snakes lost their lives to our weapons.

  Nor was it the sound of the hissing that filled the dungeon floor.

  No, at this point in time, the only sound that myself and the other members of my family, save my cousin, could hear was the wailing and screaming of the latter.

  I have heard Rakeon cry before.

  Many times in fact.

  There were times when his tears were because of me.

  Whether it was because we got into a fight of some kind or I hit him too hard and he cried about it, or watching him get hurt doing something we definitely weren’t supposed to be doing…

  This happened a lot more when we were little, of course. More so as toddlers. And it happened to me as well. He would hit me too hard or push me too hard, and I would ‘cry’.

  When our grandma died, we definitely shed tears then. When his favorite football team got smacked in the biggest game of the year, yeah he shed some tears then too…

  And recently, after a night of claiming lives and listening to the death cries of others, I heard him cry that following morning, unable to deal with the guilt that plagued him in the short term.

  But what I was hearing now wasn’t the cries of a young man. It was a broken soul. One that didn’t see a way forward. One whose only path now was to remain broken forever. These cries, these sounds, the screams. They came from the depths of everything my cousin was.

  He yearned for his father. He cried out for his father. He yelled for his father. He raged at his killers.

  This was not a sound that I was fond of, and even as I mowed down the snakes, who never stopped coming, tears began to fall down my own cheeks.

  There was silence between my uncles and I as we listened to the sounds of my cousin.

  And I could feel it.

  No, I could hear it.

  The fact that my uncles were crying too.

  It seems rain found its way onto floor one of the Snakebite dungeon and it came with the backdrop of music formed by the sorrowful cries of a young man who has lost his father.

  All of us… a nephew lost an uncle. Multiple men lost a brother. And obviously a young man lost his father. And that was only in reference to Uncle Terrence. Uncle Grant was also no longer with us, and even now my cousin has no idea about the state of our grandfather.

  I won’t swear it again because I’ve already done so, but while I’ve never considered myself a killer, for some time in the near future, that will change.

  I promise it will.

  Before long, my dad came walking down the hall and so too did my cousin. Dried tears were on his face, and his eyes were red from those very tears.

  By no means had he gotten over the news he had heard, and I could see it in his eyes. He did not want to be moving right now. He wanted to be sitting still, crying and begging that what he heard wasn’t true. But we couldn’t stay here forever, and his mother needed him.

  There were no words said, and it was mostly a silent trek down as we mowed through the floors that stood before us before eventually entering that space once more and reuniting with the other members of the family, all of whom were glad to see we made it back safely, and this time with our cousin in tow.