The hallway past it slopes up slightly, and indeed the moss starts glowing gently as he passes.

"Monsters around here are stony - I can sense them, but they ambush sometimes. Pain in the butt. The stun should hopefully work well against them, though."

"All right, keep a sensor out then. My first interaction with a magical creature. Woo."

"Yeah. No one really knows why monsters attack people. Or where they even come from."

"Maybe they're just as confused as we are to be dropped into a maze," Tadashi muses.

"Yeah. Could also be, like, a history thing, if they think we're aggressive, or we think they're aggressive, or maybe they all have monster rabies - people have tried to communicate, don't get me wrong, but we can't for sure detect anything more language-y than bird calls, and even that much is rare, and they do usually attack people when the portals open."

"So...they're 'programmed', so to speak, to attack people who are dropped into this...maze?"

"They leave the portals, too, attack humans and human towns and Earth wildlife. We usually intentionally enter the mazes, to close the portals so they'll stop. If they stayed in place it'd be less urgent."

"Then we have to find where they're coming from and stop them. For good."

"Yeah. Might not be so simple, though, the dunjes are all different. Different aesthetic, different monsters, different locations."

Tadashi frowns. "Nothing's ever simple, is it?"

He tuts, then lifts his head. "We'll find a way to stop these ones then."

"Closing the portal does it, and we just need to get to the portal stone to do that."

Sara hums in alarm, then. "Monster, next intersection," she says. "It's still right now."

"Oh, oh, okay. Right. So, we should take it out quietly?"

"Might be good, yeah. I can sort of nudge aiming, but not much, so getting a good shot's the important thing."

"All right." 

Creeping quietly, Tadashi heads to the intersection Sara mentioned, looking for anything appropriately monster shaped.

That might be a boulder or a weird statue or a very still monster.

And it's stirring, slightly.

Tadashi points Sara at it, and concentrates on Honey Lemon's bright aura.

A bright flash. The monster grunts and slumps over.

"Good," Sara says. "That was one of the medium-sized ones."

"How long before it wakes up?"

"Hmmmm. Should be at least an hour I think, though these things are surprisingly tough sometimes. But we should be able to close the portal by then as long as we don't get too horribly lost."

"Then lets head straight around it, see where we end up."

Tadashi heads forward, walking carefully around the monster.

"Yeah, they tend to be denser near the center."

The corridor intersections become more frequent after that, little doors leading into little rooms off the main hallway, or small corridors branching into a tiny network of rooms.

There's a grumble, and then something is peeling away from the wall and swinging at them.

"Woah!" Tadashi stumbles back, raising Sara and thinking hard about Wasabi.

A faintly greenish flash, and the thing rocks back, not fully stunned but definitely out of it.

"Ahhh, Sara? Do I shoot again?"

It's fine, it's nothing, it's just...a wall monster? 

"Yeah that's probably best."