Cluma scrambled up a smooth, vertical tree trunk as easily as if it was a ladder, vanishing into the canopy above. There was some rustling, followed by a brief rain of snakes.
Large Grass Snake, level 1 (Dead)
Despite the 'large' label, they were half a metre long at most, slow moving, and didn't look at all threatening. The 'grass' didn't make much sense either, given that they appeared to live in the trees.
"How can snakes climb trees?" complained Cluma from far up above. "They have no hands!"
"Magic?" I tried, not actually having any idea how they managed it. Magic was likely the wrong answer though, because I was pretty sure they could do it on Earth, too. Or maybe they just spawned up there. Fortunately, I could pick them out trivially with [Mana Sight], so I wasn't going to have any of them dropping on my head unannounced. I occupied myself with extracting their cores, while Cluma attempted a spot of high altitude navigation.
"I can't get a good view. The top branches are too thin to stand on, and there's not good enough footing to leap above the leaves."
"Pity. We should just follow the wall then. It's not as if we're in a rush, and we can always resume where we left off."
Cluma dropped out of the canopy, landing lightly on her feet and looking around uncertainly.
"Or do you have another idea?" I asked.
"If [Tracking] works to follow previous groups, I might be able to do it without the skill by following their scent trail," admitted Cluma. "But..."
She broke off her sentence, but from her slight blush, I could guess what she was thinking. If she deactivated her odour suppression enchantment, she'd once more suffer from whatever problem I had that prevented her from hugging me for a sizeable chunk of a year.
"Would it help if I kept my distance?"
"Yes. Sorry. I suppose I owe you an explanation," she sighed. "It's not that you stink or anything, you're just very pheromoney. You smell very... available. It's a side effect of your [Xenophilia] trait."
I blinked. Available? What was that supposed to mean? "But you didn't have any problems with my dad?" I pointed out.
"He's not available," answered Cluma with a shrug. "He's very much claimed by your mum. And he's waaay out of my age range."
"Wait, so it's not just you," I realised with a rising sense of horror. "All beastkin can smell that I have the [Xenophilia] trait?" Admittedly, most of them were more respectful of personal space than Cluma, but still...
"Yup," she said happily, as if this revelation wasn't the most embarrassing thing in the world.
No, wait. The most embarrassing thing in the world was dressing in women's black lace underwear in front of Dad. Second most embarrassing thing, then.
"I suddenly feel like staying down here forever," I muttered.
"You're hardly the only one with that trait," Cluma remarked with another shrug. "It's pretty common. Ran across them all the time in the delvers bar. And I'm more sensitive than average, on top of being young. No-one else would be as badly affected. The biggest problem is that beastkin only give off strong pheromones when they're in heat, whereas you smell all the time."
"I wasn't worried about how badly affected they were, just that I'm advertising my embarrassing trait to everyone."
"You're embarrassed that you're attracted to me?" asked Cluma, ears drooping. Oops.
"No, just that the System feels the need to advertise it," I answered, having employed [Minor Speed] and all three mental stat boosting spells to smoothly come up with an acceptable answer.
Yes, I knew I wasn't supposed to be using my soul affinity spells outside of emergencies, but that was an emergency!
She perked back up, then [Mana Sight] picked up a flash from her earring. She looked at me in utter surprise, completely stunned for a few seconds, before taking a few more steps away and sniffing around.
"Found the trail. This way," she said, pointing.
"Hey, wait. Back up. What was that look you just gave me?"
"Nothing," she said, blushing and turning away from me.
"What the heck? Now you're embarrassed? I'm the one who supposedly smells 'available' here."
"Not anymore," she said quietly, and I could see the edges of her massive grin as she turned to follow the scent trail. Guess I'd been claimed too, then. Hopefully that meant other beastkin couldn't smell me.
On the other hand, did other races have sex signals of their own I'd been giving off? No-one had ever said anything, so I had to assume not. My sanity would be at risk if I started thinking otherwise.
We jogged on through the jungle, and thankfully the lack of low branches on the trees and the small amount of undergrowth made traversal easy, despite the thin layer of mud coating the ground. Being on the first floor, we didn't stop to hunt the resident grass snakes, and sped on until we reached a portal in the opposite wall, passing through it into another equally large room filled with exactly the same trees as the previous one.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
This time the monsters were giant grass snakes, a full metre long, but no faster or more threatening than the first floor. Once again, we were able to race through the floor. Floor three contained humongous grass snakes, at two metres, and they proved to be slightly more problematic. They still weren't dangerous, they were just bulky, and when one dropped from a tree, they tended to make an impact.
"Eww," exclaimed Cluma, spitting out the mouthful of mud the falling snake had just splashed her with, and giving herself a shake to throw it off her armour. "Right, that does it."
She drew her bow, launching arrows at any snakes above us on our path, causing them to fall before they got into splashing range of us. Unfortunately, her quiver could only fit a limited number of arrows, and before long we were reduced to dodging between drop sites, trying to remain out of splashing range.
"When we revisit the shops, I should pack a bunch of spares in my [Item Box]. You don't normally use your bow in a dungeon, so I didn't consider it before."
"Yeah, that would be helpful," said Cluma. "Or we could wear cloaks over our armour."
"Or that," I agreed, taking out more of the snakes with [Far Reach].
"It's a shame I don't have [Mana Arrow]. With your mana recharging trick, that would give me unlimited ammunition."
"Yeah. It's a pity [Darkness Mage] doesn't have any offensive spells."
I'd only ever seen Cluma use a single spell from the [Darkness Mage] repertoire; [Darken Senses], the spell she used to blind my [Mana Sight]. From the library, I knew her class also offered a more powerful version of the rank one [Darklight], [Orb of Darkness], as well as [Extinguish Light], but I agreed they weren't of any great use. Even [Darken Senses] would have no use in this dungeon. It might have been handy in Dawnhold, were it not for her mana veil enchanted armour, but with that, the whole class seemed pointless. It really was only a stepping stone for her to get the rank three class she wanted.
Aside from the spells, which were free between [Magical Beast] and [Jack of All Trades], she hadn't bought any rank two magic skills. The rest of her soul points, she was saving for rank three. [Magical Beast] had rendered the rank one skills free, though, so she'd picked up [Mana Control] and [Mana Finesse].
Being careful to avoid any more splashes, we made it to floor four. It contained a type of monster called fanged spring serpents, and at ten centimetres each, they were tiny. They were also fast.
While I might have had complaints about the names of the grass snakes, these were named with a hundred percent accuracy. A snake having fangs was no great surprise, but I hadn't expected the 'spring' part to be literal. The grass snakes dropped out of the trees above, but these things launched themselves. Coiling up like a spring, they propelled themselves from the branches far faster than gravity would allow. The trick also permitted them to cover some horizontal distance, so avoiding walking beneath them wasn't sufficient.
At least they were small and light enough to not cause splashes.
Cluma took a step to the side and held a dagger up in front of her, watching as a miniature monstrous snake cleanly bisected itself lengthways as it passed by. Fast they may be, but they had zero ability to manoeuvre in mid-air.
"Drat. I broke the core," said Cluma.
"I think it's going to be hard not to. They're so small that the core fills a big chunk of their body."
In fact, their cores were smaller than normal. A regular sized one wouldn't have fitted at all. I hadn't realised they came in varying sizes. Did the smaller cores have additional uses? They hadn't been mentioned when we were asking about material prices, so they couldn't be more valuable than regular sized versions.
Not that I could think of many uses for raw cores. There were portals, but beyond that, I'd only heard of them being used as reagents. The magic crystals I'd made had always been smaller than the cores I'd used as components, so it was likely that the size of the core didn't impact the size of the crystal.
We continued following the path to the next floor, and I found myself wishing I had a shield. Batting the things out of the air with my staff proved surprisingly difficult, and dodging just resulted in them springing back up off the floor. They still posed no threat; Cluma snatched one out of the air, and it whipped around and bit her on the wrist, but its fangs simply broke against her armour.
"Why do they even bother to keep attacking?" she complained. "They can't hurt us. They're just annoying."
"I suppose it's what they're designed to do."
"Designed?"
"They aren't real animals; they're artificial things made by the dungeon. They have no soul."
"A soul? That's the bit of you that came from Earth?"
Oh? That's interesting; she didn't get memory wiped. "Yeah. It's the bit of someone that makes them a person."
Cluma continued leading our way, now with a rather more thoughtful expression on her face.
Halfway through the floor, the rain started. Not just drizzle, but hammering droplets the size of coins, which burst through the leaves unhindered. The faux sky flashed with lightning, and that wasn't fake; I could pick up far stronger mana than that produced by my glove. Thankfully, it only seemed to be flashing across the ceiling, and none of it grounded itself through the trees.
"Yuck, my armour is getting all muddy again," complained Cluma.
"It's about time to quit for the day anyway," I replied. "They weren't joking when they said how big this dungeon was."
"Sara said two hours per floor, which is slower than what we've been doing, but the monsters are easy up here."
"Yeah. Following the scent trails doesn't seem any slower than [Tracking]."
Cluma frowned a bit. "For now," she said. "But this rain is going to mess them all up."
A valid point. I'd expect it to spoil [Tracking] too, if it relied on footprints and such, but it was a System skill, so it probably cheated somehow. I certainly hadn't seen any footprints along the trail we'd been following. Which, now that I thought about it, there should have been, given the mud. Did the dungeon reset itself as we moved?
"We do still have a bit of the day left. Do you want to eat in Synklisi?"
"First the beach, and now taking me to a meal in the big city. You're really going all out."
I saw the flash of mana that indicated her re-enabling her odour suppression, before she dived at me. I stood unmoving, completely nonplussed. Going all out? How so? I went to the beach because Cluma was drunk, and drunk delving wasn't something I had on my to-do list. I was suggesting Synklisi because I was hungry and wanted to eat somewhere interesting.
Was I being accidentally romantic? Was that a thing that could even happen?
Without dwelling too deeply on it, I sent her to Synklisi, teleporting myself afterwards, leaving a tooth behind as my new beacon. My usual lump of toe would have either required me to strip in the middle of the dungeon, which would be a bad idea even on floor four, or otherwise would leave me unable to remove my armour without activating the second stage of [Detach], which in turn would leave my armour with a hole in.
ding
Skill [Detach] advanced to level 9
Skill [Shelter] advanced to level 6
Apparently, using my skills to pause a dungeon delve came with its own great rewards.