"You seem angry about something," observed Cluma as I sliced off a tentacle that was trying to become an uncomfortably close acquaintance with my face.

"Do I?"

"You're drawing out your fights. You could have just stabbed the monster in the head, but you keep chopping bits off it instead."

I looked at the monster in front of me, no longer able to maintain the spatial distortion it used to mask its true position. It was missing all four of the tentacles that sprouted from its back, along with its front-right leg, the claws from its front-left leg and most of its teeth. Blood dribbled from its mouth and a dozen cuts and slashes, not to mention the stump where its missing leg used to be.

Cluma had a point. I drove my sword-staff through an eye, putting the beast out of what would have been its misery had it had any capacity to feel things.

"I'm not angry; just mildly vexed. I wanted to buy [Advanced Carpentry] to work on my next few class levels, but I don't have the soul points for it."

"Carpentry? What do you plan to do with carpentry? You'd better not have had any more weird ideas for breaking my stealth."

"Not with carpentry, no. Weren't we going to build ourselves a place out of town somewhere? With multiple bathrooms?"

"Oh. You did mention it. I thought that was way off, though. And that's no reason to get frustrated, is it?"

"Not really. Just a bit annoyed at myself for lack of foresight."

"No, that's not what I meant. If you started right now, what would you do first?"

"Find a location, make plans, source some wood? That sort of thing?"

"And which of those tasks makes use of any crafting skills?"

"Oh... Okay, I see your point."

I only needed two more soul points. By the time I was actually ready to start hammering nails into things, I may well have them.

ding

Skill [Disassembly] advanced to level 3

I paused extracting the monster core from my latest kill, but no class level followed it. Drat. Getting a soul point just as I was complaining about not having enough would have been awesome timing. Maybe I'd get another batch from [Test Subject]; the whole rank five tail thing had to count for something.

"I'm helping with those plans, by the way," declared Cluma.

"No, you aren't adding twenty bedrooms for giant sleepovers."

"Of course not. Can you imagine trying to keep them all clean? Given that it'll be surrounded by open space, when we have that many guests, they can bring tents."

I winced slightly. It wasn't 'we won't have that many guests', or even 'if', but 'when'.

"I want a bouncy room," she added, which changed my wince to pure confusion.

"A what?"

"When I stayed at Lord Reid's mansion, the benches and beds were all bouncy. It was great fun to jump around on them. We could wrap a whole room in the same sort of stuff!"

My look of confusion remained. "How old are you again?" I asked, in case I'd slipped into some sort of temporal paradox.

"Pfft. Just because I'm an adult doesn't mean I'm not allowed to have fun."

I gave that statement the consideration it deserved, my ears flicking under my helmet, and my pointless, very non-adult tail trying to sway where I'd left it detached at home.

"You're right. Bouncy room it is."

"Yay. But [Monster Perception] says there's another two of those monsters in the next room, so less chatting and more stabbing."

I flickered [Soul Perception] for long enough to get an idea of her general direction, just so that I could stare pointedly. One second she wanted to wrap a room with... springs? Dried slime? I never did find out what made Lord Reid's furniture so springy. And then the next minute she wanted to inflict grievous bodily harm on some poor unsuspecting monsters.

So, obviously, I went to inflict grievous bodily harm on some unsuspecting monsters.

Fighting two at a time was tough, even with their abilities focused towards their spatial illusions. They were, after all, level twenty-four. Thankfully, they had the usual problem with dungeon monsters; we'd already fought a bunch of them, as well as their weaker brethren above, and knew their attack patterns. They didn't know ours. It was a massive, unfair advantage.

Maybe 'thankfully' was the wrong word. Our levelling speed here really was underwhelming. Of course, Cluma's rank advancement made a difference, too. She was hitting a lot harder than she used to, particularly when she had the chance to use [Assassinate], and [Shadow Strike] had increased her already impressive mobility to ludicrous levels. I had [Far Step] myself, but it didn't let me move through monsters. I needed line of sight and a straight, clear path. Cluma didn't. Plus her skill was faster to activate.

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In exchange, she did need shadows, so it wasn't all upsides. Nevertheless, her skill was superior to mine, but that was only fair; it was rank three, while [Far Step] was only rank one.

The pair of monsters fell quickly enough, and as usual, I stripped them of their cores.

"Aren't any other monster parts valuable in this dungeon?" asked Cluma. "We've collected nothing but cores since we arrived."

"Apparently not."

"I suppose they've all been a bit... fleshy so far. No hides that look like they could be used for armour. And maybe they're all inedible?"

"I don't know, actually. It could be that they're inedible, or it could just be that demons don't eat, and transporting the stuff isn't financially viable."

I heard Cluma sniff a few times, which was a very weird sound given that she still had [Non-detection] active, and hence it seemed to come from everywhere all at once.

"Doesn't smell very appetising."

"Maybe because it's raw?"

"Meat doesn't stop smelling nice just because it hasn't been cooked."

"It doesn't?" I asked. Then again, just because beastkin noses looked no different from human ones, it didn't mean that they had the same sense of smell as us. I knew Cluma's was far better than mine, so why shouldn't different things smell pleasant to her, too?

"Nope. Apart from orc. Orc smells awful."

I smiled at that. At least some things were the same.

We worked our way slowly through the floor, continuing to kill the wolves, and eventually coming to the boss. As expected, it was simply a larger version of the floor's monsters. Standing as tall as me, the shape of a wolf, but furless and with six tentacles sprouting from its shoulders, three to a side. The tentacles waved in the air as it silently stared up at me through the hole in the ceiling.

It didn't stare at Cluma. In fact, it didn't react at all as she carefully moved behind it, unable to use [Shadow Strike] given its illusion displacing its shadow away from its real location. That didn't stop her striking from behind with both daggers and a glut of combat artes. Or at least, I assumed that's what she did; I couldn't see her, but it was the plan, and the amount of blood spraying up from the monster implied she'd followed it.

The monster didn't flinch, or even turn, but instead whipped its tentacles behind it with remarkable alacrity. There was a shlucking noise as one was cleanly sliced through. The second swung through the air without impacting anything.

The third slowed drastically, the tip whipping around as the middle impacted something with a loud crunch, followed moments later by a second crash. Globules of blood faded into visibility in mid-air before falling, not the dark colour of the monster's, but the bright red of Cluma.

I'd already been moving. The plan was for her to launch a surprise attack from behind while I launched an assault from the front the moment it was distracted, but the monster kept its red eyes fixed on me as I fell. Deciding that our original plan had failed, I threw my sword-staff at the monster, unable to accurately target any part of it through its illusion, so as expected, my attack was easily evaded.

That was fine; I didn't need it to achieve anything other than free up my left hand. Lightning struck.

The monster roared in a very un-wolf-like way, while I stared at the movements of the lightning, trying to get an accurate read on the location of its head. Really, I wanted to tear its magic apart, but without knowing Cluma's location, I didn't want to risk using raw spatial affinity.

A scan with [Soul Perception] showed her slumped against a wall, although I needn't have bothered. She started coughing, and although I couldn't locate the sound, I didn't miss the new splotches of red that faded into visibility around her.

Worried about how hard she'd been hit, I shattered the magic that hid the true location of the monster, using [Far Reach] to grab my sword-staff with my right hand while keeping up the lightning bolt, then running it through the monster's head the moment my glove ran out of power.

Of course, the monster might be dead, but it wasn't over yet. I kicked off the floor with [Far Step] just as gravity flipped, landing crumpled on the ceiling, then did my best to catch Cluma as she fell.

ding

Skill [Far Step] advanced to level 17

Skill [Soul Perception] advanced to level 18

The fact that she hadn't said anything, shouting out either that she was okay or otherwise, was alarming. I didn't want her crashing into the hard floor, even if that meant her crashing into me instead. Thankfully, I'd judged the positioning perfectly, even if I didn't quite manage to judge the catch, knocking me to the floor. In my defence, she was still invisible, and the blurred [Soul Perception] didn't make it easy, but at least she landed on top of me.

She gasped in pain, and started coughing again, splattering my armour with blood.

"Cluma!" I yelled, which wasn't the most useful. "Potion!" I added, which was more sensible, but probably not much more useful. She wasn't stupid, and if she was in a position to drink one, she would have done so. "And turn off your invisibility!"

She didn't do that either. Drinking a potion may have required a mostly functional body, but deactivating a skill only required an act of will. That she couldn't implied she was unconscious, or at least too badly stunned to react. It had only been a single hit! How much damage had it done?

Her invisibility did nothing to mask my sense of touch, and between [Soul Perception] and tactile feedback, I managed to manoeuvre her into a sitting position, feel around enough to find her mouth, and grab one of my own potions. How could I feed it to her without risking choking? Surely that should be something covered in basic delver orientation?

Dammit, I'd skipped my orientation, and Xander had quit before covering that sort of stuff.

It was a potion designed to heal. What was the worst that could happen? I tipped it into her mouth, and, thankfully, she swallowed on her own, sidestepping my lack of knowledge. I was going to need to get that sorted before we stepped foot in a dungeon again. Why had I never considered the possibility of someone being too heavily dazed to drink their own potions before?

"Mmmm," she groaned, before breaking out into another coughing fit. More blood came up. I fed her a second potion. More coughing, this time without the blood.

"Cluma? Can you hear me?" I asked.

"I... Ah! Talking... hurts..."

"Okay. Keep quiet. But can you turn your invisibility off?"

She did, revealing... nothing much wrong, really. Her armour was unbroken, with nothing more than a few scrapes and scratches. No holes or extra bends where bends shouldn't be. [Eye of Judgement] disagreed, showing her down more than fifty points of health out of her hundred-and-thirty-six, and with [Broken Bone] and [Internal Bleeding] status conditions, despite the pair of potions. She'd been hit hard, and no matter how durable her armour, it hadn't prevented the impact tearing her insides apart.

And another stupid thing. How many times had Vargalas waved insanely powerful rank four potions at me? Yet I was still carrying around standard rank two vials. I could make my own that were close to this quality. I should always keep more powerful versions in my [Item Box] in case of emergency.

There was nothing like an actual emergency to point out all the foolish gaps in our preparation.

"Come on, let's get you to hospital," I said, and she nodded weakly before dumping her mana. I didn't want to teleport her, but we didn't have a choice. Another part of our inadequate preparation; I didn't even know if the Obsidian Spires had a hospital, let alone where it was. Presumably there was one somewhere, but I felt safer with Dawnhold.

Another few uses of [Eye of Judgement] to confirm her health wasn't dropping, and she wasn't at risk of dying outside the dungeon, we teleported home.