Chapter 221: Chapter 203: Maze

"And that was [Assassinate]," said Cluma, having demonstrated her new arte.

I poked the giant maggot gingerly with my foot. [Analysis] confirmed its death. I just didn't understand how. Cluma had used [Shadow Strike] to teleport behind it, then swung her dagger. It had lightly grazed the maggot, and then it had... well, died. There was a small amount of blood, grey and slimy, oozing from the shallow cut, but the damage wasn't even close to being fatal. There wasn't even a hint of mana. Nevertheless, its health had immediately jumped from full to zero, with just that tiny wound.

It was a single target arte, unlike the wide scale attacks I'd seen other people use at rank three, but a hit seemed to mean instant death. But just like with [Non-detection], I assumed there would be a weakness. There was no way she had a skill that let her kill everything with a single touch.

"Hmm... That attempt cost me three times the stamina of the last one. The skill description says that the cost scales with the injury. I guess it makes sense that killing something by stabbing its heart out is cheaper than killing by scratching their skin."

"Do stronger enemies require more stamina, too?" I asked.

"Maybe? The skill description doesn't say so, but it would be strange if I could do that to the hydra."

If stronger monsters took more stamina, the size of her pool would provide a hard limit on what the skill could do. Something dependent on the amount of health the target had left after the strike? If it took a thousand points to slay the hydra, the skill would be rendered useless against it.

For now. Her endurance would continue to increase, or she could take skills to enlarge her stamina pool.

"What about [Shroud]?" I asked, and Cluma vanished. That wasn't anything she couldn't already do, though. "Isn't that just [Non-detection]?"

"Maybe?" came her slightly ethereal voice. "The skill description said it would let me hide myself even when stealth effects were suppressed, but so far I haven't noticed anything different from just activating [Non-detection] on its own."

A counter-counter for a counter we hadn't even encountered. Fun. But of course she took it regardless of current usefulness, because it claimed to make her stealth better. No wonder she'd prioritised it over [Weapon Mastery: Dagger].

I flicked out the monster core from the dead maggot, my new [Disassembly] skill letting me know its exact position and guiding my knife in with an ease that must have been artificial. The dead flesh seemed to slide out of the way, practically ejecting the core from the body at the slightest touch. Alas, it still didn't come out clean, and I was once again glad that [Item Box] kept my various stored items apart.

"According to the maps, the right turn ahead will take us back to the entrance," I commented, double-checking our position.

Cluma tilted her head, presumably considering the fact that the corridors were all straight, the turnings were right angles, and that the number of rights and lefts we'd taken so far had been equal.

"This dungeon is weird," she commented.

"Yeah. Would not want to be in here without maps," I agreed. I'd actually worked out the trick to this floor in the first corridor, but knowing how it worked wouldn't have helped me navigate.

We took the turning, followed the passageway and, sure enough, came out in the original entrance chamber. In the middle of the floor, a staircase provided the route down. An upside-down archway at the top of a wall held another staircase which looked like it went in the same direction as this one, but that nevertheless led outside the dungeon.

"How are we on the ceiling?!" complained Cluma. "All the passages were flat! This makes no sense!"

"It's quite simple, actually. Look over there," I said, pointing.

"Huh? The corridor we just came from? It's flat and straight. You can see the passage we turned in from."

"Yes. Now close your eyes and look properly."

"Huh? Look with my eyes closed? What do you... oh! It's just a portal!"

Yup—portals positioned in the centre of corridors. What looked like a straight passage was actually completely disjointed, but the portal was so clean that someone without a good mana sense could step through it without noticing. Or even someone with a good mana sense, if they weren't paying attention. Throw in the exit portal having a different orientation to the entrance, and it was simple enough to explain how we'd ended up on the ceiling.

The gravity control was interesting, though. I could see whiffs of space and earth affinity wrapped around the room, which made some sense from the perspective of Earth logic, but there was also a hint of water mixed in, which didn't. Was gravity an obtainable complex affinity, or was the dungeon cheating?

Regardless, we continued our trek into the dungeon, descending the staircase to the second floor. Or maybe ascending it; I was utterly clueless as to which way we were pointing. A compass skill would have been useful in Serpent Isle, but for this, I'd need more. Yaw, pitch and roll; I needed a full cockpit worth of instruments.

The ceiling was stepped in the same way as the staircase, in a perfect mirror of the floor, with lighting panels halfway up the wall. The effect left the staircase with an oddly symmetric feeling, which did nothing to assuage my suspicion that I was still upside down.

The staircase came out into a cubic chamber, but it ended at the ceiling, rather than coming out at floor level. Cluma peered through the hole in front of us, where two metres of maggot waited below. I was secretly glad it was just a larger maggot; a giant fly would have been appropriate, given the maggot mobs, and I wasn't sure I wanted to see a scaled-up fly.

"Are we supposed to just drop down? Or will the ceiling turn out to be the floor? I don't see any other exits."

I took out a level one monster core from [Item Box] and dropped it into the hole, where it fell straight down without veering off in any odd directions, accelerating more than expected, or randomly transforming into a bunch of flowers.

"Looks like we can just drop. Maybe the exit opens after the boss dies?"

Cluma nodded and vanished once more, which I took as my signal to jump. Not that she waited for me; the maggot boss was dead before I even landed. I hadn't even had the chance to appraise it.

My complaint about her rushing died in my throat as suddenly I was falling upwards. I squeaked unprofessionally as my ascent slowed and reversed, flinging me back toward the staircase I'd just dropped from. Thankfully, my jump had given me a little forward momentum, and I didn't fall straight into the hole in the new floor, crashing down in front of it instead.

Right on top of where the treasure chest had appeared...

"Gah!" I exclaimed as I bashed a leg into the chest and my ankle twisted.

"Huh. That was odd," came the voice of Cluma, who was still invisible.

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She was right about there being no other exits, but given the reversal of gravity and the stepped ceiling of the staircase, I could only guess we were supposed to leave the same way we came in. Yup; [Mana Sight] showed a new portal had been laid across it a few stairs up. Or down. Or sideways. Whichever direction it pointed, it now led somewhere different to where we'd come from. In addition, a teleporter appeared behind the chest, providing a way out of the dungeon for anyone who didn't want to go further.

"Next boss, wait for me to land before killing it, maybe?" I asked.

"I didn't know it was going to do that!"

"Nor me. At least it answers how we get out of here."

Cluma looked down the stairs, easily picking up on the new portal now that she knew what to look for.

"I suppose that comes out on the next floor?"

"One way to find out. But give me a minute for [Regeneration] to fix my ankle."

"Sorry," she said quietly.

"Like you said, you didn't know it was going to do that."

Thankfully, my recovery boosts meant I didn't need to wait long at all. My only disappointment was that I'd left my artificial limbs at home, and I couldn't simply summon them; I knew cutting my skin cut the artificial limbs, but what would a sprain do? They didn't have soft flesh inside to twist around.

The theme of soft and squishy enemies continued for the next few floors, as did the static portals turning the dungeon into a geometrically impossible maze. The enemies grew progressively more bizarre, however. Metre-long maggots may be unnatural, but they were still just a scaled-up version of something I was familiar with. Floor two had things that had the same shape, but the head was occupied by a giant eye, while a mouth ran three-quarters the length of their undersides. On floor three, they grew tentacles from their backs. On floor four, the tentacles had finger-like appendages at the end, and chitin fragments coating parts of the body made them less squishy. Floor five added wings and a full chitin exoskeleton.

Perhaps the reason the floor one boss hadn't been a fly was that these creatures were not larval flies at all, and we were seeing their life cycle playing out as we descended. Not that a monster had a life cycle. Their backstory, then?

Each boss chamber was the same, too, with the staircase ending at the ceiling, and the gravity flip once the boss was defeated. The boss—always an even larger version of the floor's mobs, with a few extra levels—became aggressive the moment we touched the floor, which raised the possibility of an interesting exploit for flyers, but wasn't something we could take advantage of.

"Okay, even I think this one is kinda gross," commented Cluma, peering through the hole in the ceiling at the monstrosity below.

It was hovering above the floor, wings buzzing into a blur, with its cylindrical body held nearly vertical. The eye at the end was pointed straight at us, the mouth held slightly open. A pale yellow tongue protruded and licked a circle around its exoskeleton as the tentacles wriggled. It gave every impression of looking forward to eating us.

"Agreed," I muttered, activating [Far Reach] and driving my sword-staff through the eye without even entering the room. I may not have had [Assassinate], but for a level eight monster, I didn't need it.

The pair of us gracefully spun around as gravity reversed, landing on what had previously been the stepped ceiling, before I nipped out to loot the steel ingot from the chest.

"At least each floor is short," commented Cluma as we returned the way we'd come.

"They get bigger the further down we go, and we've only been quick because we have the maps. Imagine trying to find our way in this place without them..."

"It wouldn't be too bad. It's not like each floor is massive, so as long as we marked where we'd been, we'd be able to explore the entire floor until we found the way out."

"So far. Lower floors are massive. And how would you mark where we've been? The dungeon would eat anything we dropped, and all the passages look identical."

"Scent? [Tracking]?"

Huh... That was true; the first few floors of Serpent Isle, Cluma tracked previous parties by scent. It wasn't as if there was another party right in front of us, or we'd have caught them up. Why weren't their trails cleaned up? Did the dungeon only deal with things that touched a surface? Or perhaps there was a lower limit to the size of targets it would absorb? But that limit would need to be borderline molecular.

"Yeah, I suppose that would work," I nodded. "For the first five floors, anyway," I added as I exchanged the fifth floor maps for those of the sixth. It had an interesting set of symbols labelling intersections, with quite a lengthy glossary.

"Why? What's up with this floor?"

"This floor has junctions between corridors where the exits are relative to the entrance, rather than absolute."

"What the heck does that mean?"

"Like, if you reach the junction and turn left, you'll always end up in the same room, regardless of where you came from. Even if you came from that room."

Cluma pulled in alongside me, not missing the opportunity for a quick hug while staring at the map.

"I feel there should be a skill just for reading that," she muttered.

A minimap skill might be useful. Was that something a higher ranked scout could get? It was unlikely it would inform the user of the quickest route through the dungeon, though, so these detailed maps put together by the previous delvers were anyone's best hope of quickly reaching an appropriate floor.

The staircase ended at an archway on the sixth floor, the decor subtly altered compared to the previous five floors. The walls were the same colour, but were made of larger blocks. The light was a slightly warmer colour. In the place of mutated maggots, a black amalgam of limbs and eyes, clutching to a wall with five ape-like hands, blinked slowly at us.

"This dungeon is weird," I repeated for the umpteenth time.

"A perfect match for you, then," responded Cluma, with an entirely innocent smile.

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