Chapter 223: Chapter 205: Instance

I woke up to gentle purring. Also to a painful crick in my neck. The endurance stat did nothing to protect against poor posture, and I hadn't been expecting to sleep on my sofa instead of my bed.

And sleep I had. [Clock] informed me it was morning.

I was still thoroughly restrained by Cluma. Despite obviously being asleep herself, she still had her arms wrapped tightly around me. Her legs were tangled up in mine, too, and her tail had managed to tie my ankles together. No way was I getting out of that without waking her.

I teleported instead, moving from the sofa to my bedroom.

Some dissatisfied groaning sounded from below, soon growing into noises of confusion. Apparently, teleporting hadn't been sufficient to let her sleep.

I returned downstairs to find her looking around in confusion, still only half awake.

"Good morning," I called quietly.

"Mmm. Good morning," she answered blearily.

"Not like you to wake up after me."

That comment launched her straight to full wakefulness. "I woke up ages ago! You wouldn't let go, so I went back to sleep!"

"Ah... Sorry..."

"Don't be; it was nice. Anyway, breakfast, then dungeon?"

"Yup. And institute tomorrow."

"What for?" she asked suspiciously.

"Now that you're rank three, we should get the stat enchantments on your rings redone," I answered with complete honesty. The fact that I'd also try to build a Cluma detector was a side point I didn't need to mention. "Oh, and I gave Grover some hihi'irokane last time I was there. It'll be interesting to see what he made of it."

And it was about time I surrendered to my [Xenophilia] and got that tail. From what Cluma's got up to last night, it was obvious that conscious control wasn't a requirement.

"Oh, that's true. I wouldn't say no to a stat boost. Why not now, though?"

"We could do, but we're already overqualified for the floor we're on."

"True."

We rushed our breakfast—which I spent trying to ignore the stupid, nonsensical way that [Advanced Cooking] had once again improved the taste of simple cereal—and armoured up.

Cluma dumped her mana, activated [Non-detection], and engaged in her usual hug, at which point I did not activate [Item Box].

"Wait. Something's wrong," I said, scanning around my abandoned tooth with [Mana Sight].

"Huh? What do you mean?"

"The mana is... different, somehow. It feels like my tooth isn't where I left it. I don't see the staircase."

"But it's still somewhere, and connected to you?" she asked, detaching.

"Yes."

"Something or someone took it?"

"I was using [Shelter]. I'd have felt it if something broke it."

I cut out [Shelter], slightly improving the fidelity of my [Mana Sight], but there simply wasn't anything to see. It was as if the tooth was floating in empty space. It was a pity I'd used just the tooth, and not something that offered any sort of tactile feedback. It wasn't great as a medium for [Mana Sight], either.

Still, that could be rectified.

I stripped my armour back off to pluck off a finger, and used [Item Box] to teleport it to my tooth.

Tried to teleport it to my tooth.

"Huh?" I muttered, when [Item Box] failed to eject my finger. Thank goodness I'd spotted the weirdness before teleporting Cluma.

ding
Forced entry attempted to deleted instance
Working...

"Huh?" I repeated.

"What's going on? What's happening?" asked Cluma.

ding
Instance reconstruction completed

Suddenly, my tooth was once again positioned on top of a narrow step. [Mana Sight] showed me exactly what I expected to see, and my finger popped out normally.

"I think I've figured out why we didn't see any demons yesterday. The dungeon is instanced."

"Instanced? What's that mean?"

"That if two parties enter, they end up in different places that look the same, so they can never interact."

How the heck did that work? Were they real places? If so, there must be an upper limit to the number of parties that could delve at once, but the way it talked about a deleted instance made them sound virtual. And why didn't they mention this in Synklisi? It was kinda basic information about the dungeon.

... Actually, thinking back to the conversation, perhaps this was what the guild meant about the dungeon separating parties. I'd thought she meant it would try to split up me and Cluma, not that it would keep me and Cluma away from other delvers. I'd misinterpreted the information we'd been given, because I hadn't realised instanced dungeons were a thing that could exist.

"Once we left, it deleted our instance. It's rebuilt it now, so we should be able to continue as normal."

Cluma was still invisible, so I couldn't see her expression as I retrieved my finger and redressed myself, but she didn't express any worry about returning to the dungeon. Still, that was odd. Why did it delete the instance with my tooth still in it, and since it did, how did my tooth survive? Was it the fault of [Shelter]? Where was my tooth in the period before the instance recovered?

When we stopped tonight, I'd need to leave two teeth, one in [Shelter] and one not. Hopefully, the one not using [Shelter] would prevent the instance being deleted, while the second tooth would be a backup in case it didn't, and the lack of [Shelter] resulted in it getting destroyed. The stairways were safe, so if there were no other delvers, [Shelter] was superfluous.

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"Okay, ready to go?"

The hug resumed, so I used the contact to teleport the invisible Cluma into the dungeon. I followed myself, only to find everything looking completely normal. There was no sign that the entire space had been some sort of void only minutes earlier.

"Figured out how to read the maps yet?" asked Cluma.

"Not yet, but it can't be that complicated." If it was, it did not bode well for when we reached deeper floors.

"You should have examined them last night, instead of wasting time planning out magical items to detect me."

"Nope. Dealing with you is definitely higher priority. Besides, it'll give me class levels."

Cluma remained silent and invisible, but I'd put good money on her being mid-pout.

A few of the floor's monsters were hanging around in the first room, floating balls of flesh, decorated with drooling mouths, arranged haphazardly at irregular angles. Despite the lack of any obvious sensory organs, they floated towards me, failing to detect Cluma.

One died for no visible reason, while I used [Far Reach] to stab the others.

"Their shadows are too small for me to jump to," complained Cluma, the way the balls were floating having diminished the shadows they were casting. "The monsters need to be bigger!"

"You are, quite possibly, the first delver ever to complain that the monsters aren't big enough."

"..."

"Are you poking your tongue out at me again?"

Cluma giggled while I inspected the maps. This floor didn't seem to have any portal or gravity shenanigans going on, but did lean heavily into spatial compression. Two parallel passages could lead away from a room, each coming out in different, large rooms, then the exits from those rooms would merge again into a fourth. There would be nothing obviously wrong to a delver walking down the corridor, but from an outside perspective, the second and third rooms should be overlapping, and the delver had to walk a lot further from room one to four than the distance should have required.

Whoever had made the maps had tried to adjust the scale on the fly to indicate where the compression was, with the result that some regions were shrunken into near unreadability. It would have been far more comprehensible had the map just been drawn in a disjointed way. Thankfully, all we needed to do was follow the arrows.

"Huh. That was fairly normal. We aren't even on the ceiling," commented Cluma, once we reached the staircase down.

"You think? Didn't you pick up all the spatial mana?"

"Yes, but I wasn't sure what it was doing."

"Well, how tall are you now?"

"About a hundred and seventy centimetres, but what does that have to do with anything?"

"Wrong. As best as I can tell, you're currently less than ten."

Cluma materialised in front of me, an incredulous expression on her face. "Whatever you're using to see through [Non-detection] really isn't working well."

"I wasn't using anything. If it helps, I'm currently just as short."

"Huh? No you aren't."

"This dungeon is using spatial compression. It's like we're on the inside of an item bag. For most intents and purposes, it doesn't matter, but I suspect that teleporting out right now would be a seriously bad idea."

Cluma looked down at herself, ears twitching in a comical fashion. "Really?" she exclaimed.

"Yup. The dungeon's just on the same scale, so everything looks normal."

"So if we teleported out right now, we'd end up tiny?"

"Maybe? Or we might grow during the teleportation. Or explode. I'm not risking it, however funny it would be to walk into the Dawnhold hospital and claim to Carys that I shrunk in my sleep."

Cluma burst into laughter at that thought, before staring at the staircase. "What if the rest of the dungeon is like this, and we can't teleport out?"

"Then we take the teleporter out on floor sixteen. The official teleporters must deal safely with the compression."

"Why sixteen?"

"Because the floor gimmick changes every five floors, so floor sixteen should have something different. If we don't find a safe place to teleport out from before then, chances are good we'll be stuck till floor twenty. I don't think we want to go that far in one day. That floor was already quite a lot bigger than the first few."

"Mmmk."

Continuing the theme of bosses being scaled up versions of the floor's mobs, the bottom of the staircase ended at larger ball of flesh, covered in mouths that I could fit into whole. Of course, that simply meant it cast a big enough shadow for Cluma to teleport to. It had too much health for her to [Assassinate], but [Critical Strike] did enough damage on its own, especially combined with the bleeding wounds enchantment. The liquid that spilt from the monster was far too dark to be conventional blood, not to mention the way it gently steamed, but the enchantment functioned perfectly just the same.

Thankfully, any worries about the spatial compression seemed unfounded; it had faded as we descended the staircase, and the boss chamber was back to being full-sized. We had somewhere safe to teleport out from, and hopefully the same pattern would repeat on every floor.

The gravity flipped as usual once Cluma had dispatched the boss, the chest and teleporter appearing like normal, and then it was on to floor twelve.

The theme of monsters evolving across each set of five floors continued, too, and by floor fifteen the floating spheres had doubled in size, grown a black, stone-like exoskeleton, and sprouted an array of tentacles with the same pseudo-fingers as the maggots.

Although these flesh spheres put them to far better use; they could spell-cast with them.

Monster spellcasting was oddly inconsistent. When I cast a spell, I simply invoked the relevant System skill. Even Darren was similar, moving mana around with his mind, or whatever mystery biology dealt with that sort of thing. There was no chanting involved; it wasn't as if mana had ears, so telling it what to do vocally wouldn't achieve anything.

Monsters using innate abilities were usually the same, but the goblin sages back in Dawnhold had been different. They had multi-person rituals and powerful spells with long casting times. The lengthiest ones had chants.

These flesh spheres were the same. They couldn't just think a spell into existence, but cast by gesturing with their appendages. Each spell required them to form a specific set of symbols, so we could tell what they were about to do from the first two or three. Plenty of time to counter them.

As another experiment, I chopped off the tentacles from one of the creatures. It made no further attempts to cast magic after that, spitting balls of acid at me instead. Yet, as far as I could see with [Mana Sight], the appendage-flexing served no purpose and achieved nothing. It was simply the design of these monsters that they needed to flail around to spellcast.

"I think it's your turn," said Cluma as we stared down at the fifteenth floor boss, an orb six metres in diameter. It gave the distinct impression of staring, despite still having no eyes.

In lieu of an answer, I pointed my left arm at the boss, the level twenty-two monster falling quickly to the torrent of lightning.