"Huh?" I asked pointlessly.
"What?"
"Apparently, I've started forming a new skill. Wonder what it is? (Grenadier) or something?"
Grenades should come in under thrown weapon proficiency, though, which already existed. I was fairly sure I'd always thrown the things with unnatural accuracy. Something to do with magical weapons? It was a pain the new skills didn't tell you what they were.
"(Grenadier?) As in someone who throws grenades? Sounds more like a class than a skill."
"Magical weaponry, then?"
That didn't really make sense either, though; Grover hadn't been surprised at anything I'd put together, which implied my ideas weren't completely novel. Well, I'd find out eventually.
The pair of us moved onto floor twenty-six, now past the halfway point of the dungeon.
"What do we have on this floor?" asked Cluma, even though I knew she'd read the maps herself. She certainly wasn't showing any surprise at the heavily distorted walls, or the weird way the floor was twisting beneath us. After being beaten by the floor twenty-four boss, her diligence had stepped up a few notches. She was probably just double checking that she'd remembered correctly.
"Flesh graspers. Puddles of flesh with collections of blade-like limbs sticking out. Also, (pi) is four-ish now."
"(Pie?) What does food have to do with anything? I thought the maps said geometry was weird and things looked weirder the further away they were."
"Yeah, that's kinda right. If I was reading the description correctly, these next batch of floors are what Earth would call (non-Euclidean.) I don't remember any of the maths behind it, or which way around elliptic and hyperbolic geometries go. Just that angles don't add up right and the ratio between the radius and circumference of a circle is wrong."
I spun around on the spot, finding that it took an extra step than normal to complete a full rotation. What sort of geometry caused that? I needed to get Harry down here to explain it properly, although I'd probably need a few months of maths lessons beforehand to understand it.
"Huh? How?" asked a confused Cluma, repeating my spinning trick. "This is worse than [Weft Walk]!"
"I have no idea. Just... keep an eye on me as we're walking around. If we walk straight and side by side, we'll... crash into each other? Or diverge? I can't remember which way around any of this goes. Or maybe this is something completely different."
With space this badly messed up, how were we even conscious and walking around? I was fairly sure we wouldn't survive without the dungeon rendering the twisted geometry safe somehow. Through [Mana Sight], I could see the dense cloud of spatial affinity we were wading through.
Cluma ran a few laps of the room, adding in a few high jumps and tapping the ceiling. "Okay, I think I've got the hang of it. There's just... more 'behind me' than usual."
"[Mana Sight] doesn't have blind spots, so [Monster Perception] should be fine too."
The distortion played havoc with my spatial awareness. I was looking at a perfectly normal wall, with a perfectly normal archway in it, connected to a pair of other perpendicular walls. It was a perfectly normal side of a square room. Except that this room had five of them. We were in a pentagonal room in which every corner was a right-angle.
The maps didn't even try, and just drew the room as a regular pentagon.
"This is making my eyes water. Let's get going before I get a headache," I said, trying to match up the map with the room's exits. "This way, I think. Four flesh graspers in the next room."
"Mmm. I see them. Isn't four a few too many to start with, though? These are high level..."
"True." I looked around with [Mana Sight] to see what was down the other passages. The effects of the twisted space got worse with increasing distance, but I could see enough. "There's only one down that corridor."
We switched direction, walking away from the exit in favour of picking on a single monster. They were gross things; mounds of fat, oozing along the floor, with six chitinous limbs poking out the top. The limbs weren't used at all for movement, but only as weapons; each one had blades of chitin running along the top two of the four jointed sections. As the name of 'grasper' suggested, each also ended in a trio of 'fingers', arranged symmetrically around the tip.
[Mana Sight] showed no obvious weak spots, so I employed [Far Reach] and speared down into the centre of our prey. The white, lumpy flesh parted, but no blood was spilt and the monster simply bubbled indignantly, sliding over the stone floor with far more speed than I would have guessed it was capable of.
Two of its limbs suddenly found themselves no longer connected, severed below the first joint as the invisible Cluma made her presence felt. I made another [Far Reach] powered attack, a slice this time, again targeting the larger body rather than the spindly limbs. The attack was even less effective than the last, as my blade rebounded from the jelly-like monster. I'd made a decent cut in the process, and knocked the monster off its path, but it didn't stop and the dry wound sealed itself in seconds.
Cluma took advantage of its momentary dip in speed to remove another limb, and the monster continued to ignore her in favour of charging me. I simply used [Far Step] to dodge, aiming for the opposite side of the room.
I slammed nose-first into the wall.
"Ow," I complained, trusting in [Regeneration] to do something about my bleeding. I hadn't properly accounted for the spatial distortion and hadn't landed where I was expecting. That was also the reason I was aiming for the centre of the monster with [Far Reach]; it wouldn't matter if my aim was slightly off.
The monster didn't turn, but just shifted into reverse. Of course, that still involved slowing, stopping and accelerating, and Cluma took advantage of the brief pause to remove two more limbs. Up close, unlike me, she had no difficulty aiming. The monster swung at her with its final limb, but she dodged it with a simple back-step.
Despite the loss of its weapons, it hadn't slowed down at all. Worse, [Eye of Judgement] showed it only down by a few health points. There was no longer any sign of the two wounds I'd inflicted on it.
"I'm going to try lightning. Get back!" I warned Cluma, not trusting my aim through the floor's twisted geometry.
She stopped chasing after it, retreating away instead, and I let loose all four crystals of my weapon. That finally slowed it down as the stench of burnt flesh filled the room. The remaining limb spasmed violently, cutting into the mound of flesh with its own chitin blades, but I still had to keep the bolt up for almost a minute before the thing died.
"Resilient buggers," I complained.
"Their limbs fell off easily enough," pointed out Cluma.
"Yes, but it did hardly any damage to their health, and I wouldn't want one of them to get hold of me even without their limbs."
"Yeah... They look kinda like corpusclite, but at least our armour isn't trying to eat us."
I looked down at the pinkish material coating my armour, suddenly feeling even more disgusted by it than usual. Still, it did a damn good job of keeping me alive. I shouldn't complain.
"Given that fight, I think four is too much at once. Maybe once we get used to their attack patterns, and I can aim my attacks perfectly despite squares having five sides, but until then, we should look for ones and twos."
"Mmm. I agree. But is there another route to the exit?"
I scrutinised the map, trying to plot a route around the one room I knew we needed to avoid. That was simple enough, but chances were high we'd run into other blocked rooms, too.
"Yes, let's try this way."
A few hours later, we found ourself blocked in on every side by rooms with three or four monsters.
"Should we backtrack and try a different route?" I suggested.
"You could grenade them."
"I could, but we still have a way to go to the boss room. I don't have enough grenades to use them on mobs."
"Then perhaps we should retreat back to the floor's entrance and teleport out for the day. We don't know if they respawn, and we don't want to teleport into a room that could contain monsters."
"True, but we still have some time left, and I think we've had enough practice that we could risk a room with three of them."
Cluma didn't respond, her expression inscrutable with [Non-detection] active, but my best guess was that it was a thoughtful silence.
"They're ridiculously resistant to being stabbed, and only your lightning does any real damage," she said eventually. "None of my artes help much, even [Assassinate]. It takes two crystals of your glove to stun them, but you only have four. You could stun two and dodge the other. Or do you think you can control two gloves at once?"
Right, Grover gave Cluma a glove of her own. She'd never been able to use it in a dungeon due to her rank one [Mana Control] being insufficient to keep it under control, but I still had it safely stored in my [Inventory]. Could I use it together with mine?
It wasn't as if I needed monstrous targets to try it out.
A few minutes later, and I decided the answer was a qualified yes. I couldn't make eight separate bolts, but I could manage six, or four double-strength ones. I couldn't use an active mana scan or mana funnelling at the same time, though, which left me on something of a time limit; I didn't need active mana sight on this floor, but with the monsters' resiliency, the gloves would run out of charge long before they died without me forcibly recharging them. Three double strength bolts while using my last scraps of attention to keep them charged was our best option.
"I can deal with three like this, but not four."
"Or you can stun three and dodge the last one," pointed out Cluma.
"... Let's just start with three."
I had to store my sword-staff in [Inventory] to use both gloves at once. I didn't fancy being caught in a melee without it, so four at once was out.
On the other hand, three at once turned out to be boring. I could pin down the monsters indefinitely, so we just needed to wait for them to slowly cook. With the lightning, Cluma couldn't get close to speed up the process, so we were just reduced to waiting.
"It's like those ribbons again," she complained. "Our normal attacks don't work, but we have a counter for them that makes them easy. We're just going to keep getting deeper, and once we finally find a normal monster, we're going to get killed."
"Counterpoint; this dungeon doesn't appear to have any normal monsters."
"A monster we can't counter, then. Or what if we run into something like the bullet serpents? A version of them over level twenty-five would be deadly."
"I know you've read the maps. There's nothing like that."
"Floor twenty-nine is close."
The flesh graspers evolved floor by floor, just like the other monsters. Starting from floor twenty-nine, they could shoot projectiles from their limbs. I was looking forward to it as a chance to test [Dislocation], but perhaps a monster of that high level wasn't the best place to start. Still, there was a difference between small projectiles and the bullet serpents which fired themselves as the projectile. I'd bet the monsters on floor twenty-nine couldn't penetrate our armour.
By only ignoring the rooms with four monsters in, we made it to the boss chamber with little further trouble. Keeping my grenades in reserve, I killed it from above using all eight lightning crystals at once.
Once again, the boss died easily and without a single ding. I shared Cluma's concern; we were cheesing our way through floors without actually increasing our personal power. If we kept this up, a repeat of Cluma's tentacle incident was practically guaranteed. And that was the best case; dying in a dungeon was no longer the end. Worst case, I would be facing an Earth army, and dying to them would be. Maybe for the entire world.
As much as I'd tried to put my Law problems aside for a while, the thought that I might need to adjust my build towards fighting humans was more than enough to return a scowl to my face.
"Huh?" I asked pointlessly.
"What?"
"Apparently, I've started forming a new skill. Wonder what it is? (Grenadier) or something?"
Grenades should come in under thrown weapon proficiency, though, which already existed. I was fairly sure I'd always thrown the things with unnatural accuracy. Something to do with magical weapons? It was a pain the new skills didn't tell you what they were.
"(Grenadier?) As in someone who throws grenades? Sounds more like a class than a skill."
"Magical weaponry, then?"
That didn't really make sense either, though; Grover hadn't been surprised at anything I'd put together, which implied my ideas weren't completely novel. Well, I'd find out eventually.
The pair of us moved onto floor twenty-six, now past the halfway point of the dungeon.
"What do we have on this floor?" asked Cluma, even though I knew she'd read the maps herself. She certainly wasn't showing any surprise at the heavily distorted walls, or the weird way the floor was twisting beneath us. After being beaten by the floor twenty-four boss, her diligence had stepped up a few notches. She was probably just double checking that she'd remembered correctly.
"Flesh graspers. Puddles of flesh with collections of blade-like limbs sticking out. Also, (pi) is four-ish now."
"(Pie?) What does food have to do with anything? I thought the maps said geometry was weird and things looked weirder the further away they were."
"Yeah, that's kinda right. If I was reading the description correctly, these next batch of floors are what Earth would call (non-Euclidean.) I don't remember any of the maths behind it, or which way around elliptic and hyperbolic geometries go. Just that angles don't add up right and the ratio between the radius and circumference of a circle is wrong."
I spun around on the spot, finding that it took an extra step than normal to complete a full rotation. What sort of geometry caused that? I needed to get Harry down here to explain it properly, although I'd probably need a few months of maths lessons beforehand to understand it.
"Huh? How?" asked a confused Cluma, repeating my spinning trick. "This is worse than [Weft Walk]!"
"I have no idea. Just... keep an eye on me as we're walking around. If we walk straight and side by side, we'll... crash into each other? Or diverge? I can't remember which way around any of this goes. Or maybe this is something completely different."
With space this badly messed up, how were we even conscious and walking around? I was fairly sure we wouldn't survive without the dungeon rendering the twisted geometry safe somehow. Through [Mana Sight], I could see the dense cloud of spatial affinity we were wading through.
Cluma ran a few laps of the room, adding in a few high jumps and tapping the ceiling. "Okay, I think I've got the hang of it. There's just... more 'behind me' than usual."
"[Mana Sight] doesn't have blind spots, so [Monster Perception] should be fine too."
The distortion played havoc with my spatial awareness. I was looking at a perfectly normal wall, with a perfectly normal archway in it, connected to a pair of other perpendicular walls. It was a perfectly normal side of a square room. Except that this room had five of them. We were in a pentagonal room in which every corner was a right-angle.
The maps didn't even try, and just drew the room as a regular pentagon.
"This is making my eyes water. Let's get going before I get a headache," I said, trying to match up the map with the room's exits. "This way, I think. Four flesh graspers in the next room."
"Mmm. I see them. Isn't four a few too many to start with, though? These are high level..."
"True." I looked around with [Mana Sight] to see what was down the other passages. The effects of the twisted space got worse with increasing distance, but I could see enough. "There's only one down that corridor."
We switched direction, walking away from the exit in favour of picking on a single monster. They were gross things; mounds of fat, oozing along the floor, with six chitinous limbs poking out the top. The limbs weren't used at all for movement, but only as weapons; each one had blades of chitin running along the top two of the four jointed sections. As the name of 'grasper' suggested, each also ended in a trio of 'fingers', arranged symmetrically around the tip.
[Mana Sight] showed no obvious weak spots, so I employed [Far Reach] and speared down into the centre of our prey. The white, lumpy flesh parted, but no blood was spilt and the monster simply bubbled indignantly, sliding over the stone floor with far more speed than I would have guessed it was capable of.
Two of its limbs suddenly found themselves no longer connected, severed below the first joint as the invisible Cluma made her presence felt. I made another [Far Reach] powered attack, a slice this time, again targeting the larger body rather than the spindly limbs. The attack was even less effective than the last, as my blade rebounded from the jelly-like monster. I'd made a decent cut in the process, and knocked the monster off its path, but it didn't stop and the dry wound sealed itself in seconds.
Cluma took advantage of its momentary dip in speed to remove another limb, and the monster continued to ignore her in favour of charging me. I simply used [Far Step] to dodge, aiming for the opposite side of the room.
I slammed nose-first into the wall.
"Ow," I complained, trusting in [Regeneration] to do something about my bleeding. I hadn't properly accounted for the spatial distortion and hadn't landed where I was expecting. That was also the reason I was aiming for the centre of the monster with [Far Reach]; it wouldn't matter if my aim was slightly off.
The monster didn't turn, but just shifted into reverse. Of course, that still involved slowing, stopping and accelerating, and Cluma took advantage of the brief pause to remove two more limbs. Up close, unlike me, she had no difficulty aiming. The monster swung at her with its final limb, but she dodged it with a simple back-step.
Despite the loss of its weapons, it hadn't slowed down at all. Worse, [Eye of Judgement] showed it only down by a few health points. There was no longer any sign of the two wounds I'd inflicted on it.
"I'm going to try lightning. Get back!" I warned Cluma, not trusting my aim through the floor's twisted geometry.
She stopped chasing after it, retreating away instead, and I let loose all four crystals of my weapon. That finally slowed it down as the stench of burnt flesh filled the room. The remaining limb spasmed violently, cutting into the mound of flesh with its own chitin blades, but I still had to keep the bolt up for almost a minute before the thing died.
"Resilient buggers," I complained.
"Their limbs fell off easily enough," pointed out Cluma.
"Yes, but it did hardly any damage to their health, and I wouldn't want one of them to get hold of me even without their limbs."
"Yeah... They look kinda like corpusclite, but at least our armour isn't trying to eat us."
I looked down at the pinkish material coating my armour, suddenly feeling even more disgusted by it than usual. Still, it did a damn good job of keeping me alive. I shouldn't complain.
"Given that fight, I think four is too much at once. Maybe once we get used to their attack patterns, and I can aim my attacks perfectly despite squares having five sides, but until then, we should look for ones and twos."
"Mmm. I agree. But is there another route to the exit?"
I scrutinised the map, trying to plot a route around the one room I knew we needed to avoid. That was simple enough, but chances were high we'd run into other blocked rooms, too.
"Yes, let's try this way."
A few hours later, we found ourself blocked in on every side by rooms with three or four monsters.
"Should we backtrack and try a different route?" I suggested.
"You could grenade them."
"I could, but we still have a way to go to the boss room. I don't have enough grenades to use them on mobs."
"Then perhaps we should retreat back to the floor's entrance and teleport out for the day. We don't know if they respawn, and we don't want to teleport into a room that could contain monsters."
"True, but we still have some time left, and I think we've had enough practice that we could risk a room with three of them."
Cluma didn't respond, her expression inscrutable with [Non-detection] active, but my best guess was that it was a thoughtful silence.
"They're ridiculously resistant to being stabbed, and only your lightning does any real damage," she said eventually. "None of my artes help much, even [Assassinate]. It takes two crystals of your glove to stun them, but you only have four. You could stun two and dodge the other. Or do you think you can control two gloves at once?"
Right, Grover gave Cluma a glove of her own. She'd never been able to use it in a dungeon due to her rank one [Mana Control] being insufficient to keep it under control, but I still had it safely stored in my [Inventory]. Could I use it together with mine?
It wasn't as if I needed monstrous targets to try it out.
A few minutes later, and I decided the answer was a qualified yes. I couldn't make eight separate bolts, but I could manage six, or four double-strength ones. I couldn't use an active mana scan or mana funnelling at the same time, though, which left me on something of a time limit; I didn't need active mana sight on this floor, but with the monsters' resiliency, the gloves would run out of charge long before they died without me forcibly recharging them. Three double strength bolts while using my last scraps of attention to keep them charged was our best option.
"I can deal with three like this, but not four."
"Or you can stun three and dodge the last one," pointed out Cluma.
"... Let's just start with three."
I had to store my sword-staff in [Inventory] to use both gloves at once. I didn't fancy being caught in a melee without it, so four at once was out.
On the other hand, three at once turned out to be boring. I could pin down the monsters indefinitely, so we just needed to wait for them to slowly cook. With the lightning, Cluma couldn't get close to speed up the process, so we were just reduced to waiting.
"It's like those ribbons again," she complained. "Our normal attacks don't work, but we have a counter for them that makes them easy. We're just going to keep getting deeper, and once we finally find a normal monster, we're going to get killed."
"Counterpoint; this dungeon doesn't appear to have any normal monsters."
"A monster we can't counter, then. Or what if we run into something like the bullet serpents? A version of them over level twenty-five would be deadly."
"I know you've read the maps. There's nothing like that."
"Floor twenty-nine is close."
The flesh graspers evolved floor by floor, just like the other monsters. Starting from floor twenty-nine, they could shoot projectiles from their limbs. I was looking forward to it as a chance to test [Dislocation], but perhaps a monster of that high level wasn't the best place to start. Still, there was a difference between small projectiles and the bullet serpents which fired themselves as the projectile. I'd bet the monsters on floor twenty-nine couldn't penetrate our armour.
By only ignoring the rooms with four monsters in, we made it to the boss chamber with little further trouble. Keeping my grenades in reserve, I killed it from above using all eight lightning crystals at once.
Once again, the boss died easily and without a single ding. I shared Cluma's concern; we were cheesing our way through floors without actually increasing our personal power. If we kept this up, a repeat of Cluma's tentacle incident was practically guaranteed. And that was the best case; dying in a dungeon was no longer the end. Worst case, I would be facing an Earth army, and dying to them would be. Maybe for the entire world.
As much as I'd tried to put my Law problems aside for a while, the thought that I might need to adjust my build towards fighting humans was more than enough to return a scowl to my face.
