My Charity System made me too OP

Dungeon Two: The Monolith of EchoesAn ancient vault built from obsidian memory-stone, hidden deep within the canyons of Floor 200. A place where sound shapes reality—and silence kills.

The Descent Into Silence

They arrived at dusk.

The canyon's mouth was vast and scarred, like the jawbone of some long-dead god. Echoes didn't behave properly here. Footsteps rang with a delay. Voices warped and doubled back. The deeper they ventured, the more the air seemed to listen.

At the canyon's heart stood the Monolith—a pillar of black stone reaching into the clouds, surrounded by floating shards of mirrored obsidian. Glyphs pulsed across its surface in harmonic intervals, some screaming softly in foreign tones.

Roselia winced. "It's layered with dissonant song-traps. Echo magic. If we speak without control, it could turn our words against us."

Leon's brow furrowed. "A dungeon that weaponizes sound… that's cruelly elegant."

Liliana nodded. "This place doesn't fight your body. It dismantles your voice—your self."

Millim cracked her knuckles. "Good thing I mostly punch things."

Roman smirked. "You yell while punching, remember?"

First Trial: The Hall of Reflections

As they entered the monolith, they found themselves in a long corridor lined with obsidian mirrors. Each step triggered audio illusions—fragments of their own past words, twisted and reused against them.

"I can't do this."

Leon froze. That was his voice. A recording from the early days of the Rift Wars, when he'd first lost comrades.

The mirrors flared with resonance and struck him with psychic backlash. He stumbled—only for Roman to pull him upright.

"It's using guilt. We must not react emotionally," Roman said, stepping forward calmly.

Naval unsheathed a slender dagger made of clear aethersteel and slit her palm—then pressed the blood against the mirror.

The reflection warped and shattered.

"A blood-for-truth sacrifice," she said. "This place honors pain given freely over pain remembered."

One by one, they followed suit, choosing their own truths: confessions spoken in whispers, blood-offerings drawn from scars. They passed the Hall of Reflections as shards fell like broken lies behind them.

Second Trial: The Chamber of Static Choirs

The next chamber was circular and cavernous. Choirs of invisible beings sang from above—hundreds of them, discordant, maddening. Each note struck at their sense of self, fraying memory and intent.

Liliana dropped to her knees. "It's unweaving thought… fracturing it into incoherence."

Aqua—her voice projected through Leon's linked badge from the Spiral Rift—sang a single tone in response. A lullaby.

The moment her note pierced the dissonance, a brief gap formed—a moment of unity between the voices.

Leon seized it. "Follow me. Match my pitch."

He began to hum—not with perfect tone, but with unwavering certainty. One by one, the others joined in. Their harmonized song rose like a defiant blade.

The chamber reacted violently—walls cracked, invisible choirs screamed—

And then silence.

The noise collapsed in on itself, and a spiraling staircase of obsidian formed.

"Good job, Papa," Aqua said softly through the link.

Third Trial: The Echo Lord

At the summit of the staircase lay the core arena: a perfectly spherical room. In its center floated the Echo Lord—a humanoid wraith of sound and shadow, faceless and tall, its limbs made of drifting resonance threads.

It did not speak.

Instead, it recorded the team's speech, gestures, and thoughts—then countered with exact inversions. It mirrored Leon's spells with anti-versions. Reflected Roman's strikes with perfect parries. Mimicked Roselia's formations a split-second before she commanded them.

Liliana cursed. "It's anticipating us because we're giving it the patterns. We have to fight like we've never fought before—unpredictably."

Millim grinned. "That's my specialty."

She hurled herself at the Echo Lord, not with practiced techniques but chaotic strikes—off-rhythm punches, reversed spins, feints into feints. The Echo Lord reeled, confused by the erratic tempo.

Leon followed with conjurations that broke form—summoning incomplete weapons, unstable rifts, wild spirals of void-ice and memory-light. Roselia danced with inverted formations, creating attack zones that looked like defenses.

Slowly, the Echo Lord faltered.

Finally, Naval landed a silent, well-placed thrust directly into its core—a void in the center of its chest that had never spoken.

The creature shuddered—then collapsed into pure white noise.

Dungeon Core Chamber

At the center of the room, the obsidian folded inward, revealing a crystal seed pulsating with layered harmony.

[Monolith Core Claimed]

[Artifact Gained: Echobrand Sigil]

[Effect: Grants user immunity to sonic attacks and ability to reflect one spell per combat encounter]

As the chamber stabilized, the mirrored shards along the walls flickered—then showed a glimpse of the past: the original builders of the Monolith. They were singers, not warriors—scholars of voice who tried to imprison silence itself to protect their memories from the Rift's devouring hum.

"Now it makes sense," Liliana whispered. "The dungeon wasn't meant to kill. It was a vault of identity."

Leon stood quietly, placing a hand on the Sigil. "They died trying to hold onto who they were."

Roselia met his gaze. "And now we carry it forward."

Back outside, the canyon wind sang low and peaceful.

Two dungeons cleared. Four to go.

But in the distance… something stirred beneath the sand. Watching.

Waiting.

Leon didn't look back. "Let's move."

Dungeon Three: The Forge of Midnight BladesBuried beneath a desert of black glass and obsidian winds, the third hidden dungeon was one spoken of in whispers among ascenders—a place where weapons dream, and shadows remember.

Entry into the Glass Wastes

The team stood at the edge of the Obsidian Wastes, where the very sands shimmered like broken mirror dust. Wind howled across the plain, carrying shards that could shear bone. Above, no stars gleamed—only a twilight sky locked in perpetual dusk.

"This whole area's been scorched by something ancient," Roselia said, crouching to study a fractured obsidian ridge.

"Not scorched," Liliana corrected, brushing her hand along a glass tree turned to fossil. "Melted. The records said the Forge of Midnight Blades was once the battlefield of fallen weapon-gods. Their wills bled into the sand. It created this."

At the desert's heart, a spire of forged steel rose, wrapped in chains of molten ore and held aloft by spinning black rings. This was the entrance—unlocked only by willpower and metal.

Leon approached, drawing his void-steel blade. The closer he came, the more the blade trembled.

"It remembers this place," he murmured.

A glyph flared at the spire's base: