When, after a while, no monsters popped up to disturb our break, we decided to play around with Diada. She took a spot in one of the broken windows of the restaurant, while I stood by the wall opposite her. Both of us formed mana balls and threw them at each other.

The one to fail to catch the others manaball lost a point. If we managed to form a new one, before the original ball, or balls reach us, we could throw extra. If we failed, we had to dissipate it and start over.

Once Tom woke up, we were juggling seven balls. I was the one to create six of them, but while I failed to catch some, Diada didn't miss once. She didn't even use her extra limbs...

The kitten opened his eyes and sat up slowly. He stretched his arms up and looked just so defenceless. The spiderling seemed to have the same idea I did, and we threw the balls at his face.

"Woke you up nicely, didn't it?" I greeted him and jumped onto his shoulder. "You ready to continue?"

The boy sneezed and nodded. "My whiskers are tingling." He said and made a funny face.

Tom stood up and I jumped back to the floor. "So... which direction do we take?"

"Why not straight ahead? The shark-toy came from there." Diada didn't wait for our agreement and skittered off on the ceiling. With a mutual shrug, we followed after her.

We didn't meet any monsters for another two crossways and arrived at an overpass. Below us, trains sped along tracks hidden in the dark. The platform between them, revealed themselves to be made out of clusters of person-sized lungs and hearts, whenever the light from the trains shined on them.

It was an eery sight, especially considering the complete lack of sound. I was tempted to think it was some sort of projection, if not for the smell of raw meat wafting from below. I massaged my throat and decided to lay off ham for a couple of weeks. The smell reminded me of a dying puppy I once saw. Its tail was bitten off, and the skin around it ripped off. Just like the flesh mounds below, it smelled like ham.

Maybe I'd ask Diada to play the violin in the evening, to take my mind off that, with a different type of horror.

"That's probably the boss room," Tom said while looking at the ceiling and flexing his hands.

"Do we jump down?" I asked and walked over to one of the broken escalators at the edge of the corridor. The stairs were missing their entire middle part, just ripped apart handrails stood on the ground.

"Uh, no..." the boy coughed, trying not to gag and continued, "there should be a more conventional entrance somewhere."

I shrugged and picked up my pace.

After leaving the stench, we took a corridor leaving away from ours and found stairs leading down.

The lower level didn't have lights, so I made two mana-light fireballs and set one to fly ahead of us and the second slightly behind. The corridor looked cleaner and better kept than the rest of the dungeon. Its floor and walls were lined with black marble, that somehow didn't reflect light.

I tried to sing, to cheer up, but some sort of enchantment blocked sound, so after opening and closing my mouth pointlessly for a while, I just settled on imagining a song.

The complete lack of sound and the dimmed light, completely messed up my perception of time, beyond the usual. When we finally saw some light and heard the noises of some people having a conversation, I couldn't tell if we walked, through the dark for just minutes or hours.

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"Seriously, why do we keep coming to this shitty dungeon?" I asked my group for the nth time. "The monsters smell like shit and are annoying to fight, the boss just scars my eyes and we have to meditate to cleanse our souls, for fucking days."

Jake grumbled and put away his bone staff. "I need to evolve into an undead race to improve my necromancy and there are no other undead dungeons in the city."

"So you will just evolve into some sort of shitty burger zombie?" I yelled exasperated. With the abundance of dragons related dungeons around the Mountain, the idiot could just evolve into a draconic race and have an advantage in any magic. But no, the moron needed to be an undead.

The mage opened his mouth to retort me, but Claire interrupted him, "Exactly, you will become a fleshy, fried zombie and we will have to continue cleansing the filth from our souls, without even building up an influence towards evolutions useful for us."

"As a warrior, you would find a lot of benefits in becoming a zombie!" Jake exclaimed and shook his staff at her.

"If you won't evolve this time, we are moving on to druidic dungeons, so start thinking on a different race to aim for." Nathaniel shut down our argument and sunk back into his book.

Seriously, without our healer, the group would have probably fell apart as soon as we finished high school.

To avoid restarting the argument I looked away from Jake and glanced into the dark corridor. Then I glanced again. Four black, spindly spider legs slowly extended into the safe space we rested in. Before I could call to my team, to prepare for an aberrant monster, the rest of the body got into the light. It was just an extremely pale girl, maybe six or seven years old.

She looked around the room and swiftly ran across the ceiling before dropping onto one of the couches closer to the boss door.

Moments later, another two figures walked in. An extremely tall catkin with the head of a kitten, wearing casual clothes, stained with blood and dust. Behind him, walked a blonde toddler, with lightly tanned olive skin. The tiny girl wore similarly casual clothes, but unlike the boy, didn't have a weapon.

The sight of small children so deep in a thirty and above dungeon surprised me so much, I almost didn't notice the tiny, black horns poking out of the girl's forehead.

"Greetings." "Hey ho!" The boy greeted us in a deep voice, while the girls sounded overly sweet. Her reptilian eyes unnerved me a little... at least until I looked over to their spider-like friend. Hers... Nope. I nodded my head to the children and put all of my attention on my nails.

"So... is there a line, or can we go fight the boss right away?" The girls sweet voice resounded. "Oh, I'm Mads by the way. Those are Tom and Diada."

The boy nodded again, while the other girl didn't seem to notice the conversation and just stared into the distance.

"We are waiting for the last group to clear the boss, you can enter after us." Our resident healer answered. "I'm Nathaniel and my companions are Jake, Claire and Kasha."

"Kasia." I corrected my friend, without looking up. We knew each other for seven years now and he still got my name wrong.

"Tom? May I call you by your name?" Jake asked, with a bit of an accusatory tone. The boy nodded. "I understand you want to show your cousins what it's like in a dungeon, but you shouldn't endanger them like this."

There was a lull in the conversation so I looked up. The catkin was looking intently at the spider-girl and scratching the back of his head.

"Don't worry old man, I could beat the shit out of you." The horned toddler sang and giggled. There were a couple of blue System screens in front of her face. "Daaamn, I heard your conversation you know... How the hell are you the only human here?"

"Your friends at least seem strong." She added and began swaying to some sort of rhythm and humming a cheery melody.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

"I just want a specific evolution!... And I'm a High Human!!" Our necromancer yelled angrily and stood up. The girl didn't pay attention and played around with three small pentagrams made out of yellow fire.

"She is kind of right, you know. You've been crippling yourself to get this undead evolution." I poked at him. Jake sat down with a huff and got back to polishing his staff. "I hate children."

"Undead are terrible at controlling the death magics. It sticks to them and doesn't like flowing out to empower their spells." The spider... Her name was Diada, said.

"And what do you know?" Jake was sulking. Claire patted him on the back and whispered something in his ear.

Silence stretched for a while and turned uncomfortable. I looked at the girl and she seemed to have forgotten about the conversation, just staring into space again.

We all stared at the creepy girl and her cat friend waved his hand. "Don't be angry at her, she just likes watching cartoons about her Mother."

I got up and leaned over the back of my sofa, but it didn't look like there was any sort of one-way screen before the girl. Right. Oh, right. These children were probably nobles. A... devil, some sort of higher catkin variant and... whatever the spider-girl was. Maybe some Arachne bloodline from another continent? If she was famous enough to have cartoons about her, I'd hear about her if she was a local.

Jake formed five skulls out of mana and had them fly erratically around him. The devil girl, what was her name again? Maddy? Maddy turned up her number to six, one large pentagram and five small ones, tracing over the lines of the big one. Our necromancer upped his number to seven and raised his nose.

Of course, he'd bloody compete with a toddler.

Maddy shrugged and reduced her pentagrams back to three, which caused Jake to raise his nose even higher. The pale girl slid eight spider legs over her shoulders and weaved a picture of a hunched undead with a very long and broken nose, out of mana-strings, between them.

Then she made it three dimensional... and added eight manaballs with eight spider legs each and made them float around the mana sculpture. The sculpture looked a little crystalline, while the manaballs were made out of ordinary mana.

"How did you form your mana like that, in the sculpture?" I asked, trying to avoid looking into the girl's eyes.

"Cheating." The devil answered in her friend's place.

What kind of cheating I wanted to ask, but the kids probably wouldn't answer. Eight separate mana constructs were still beyond Jakes ability anyway.

Nobles really had an advantage. Still, noble lines had to begin somewhere. Those children might have inherited their races from their parents, but we'd be the progenitors of our lines.

"Tom's a peasant." The spider said. How... A mind-reading race? Nobles.

We sat in silence, only disturbed by the blonde girls singing - it was a pretty song - for a couple of minutes. Finally, the boss door opened. We gathered our weapons, checked if our potions were properly secured on the belts, and other such minor things and entered after waiving to the children.

Somehow, the mound of flesh the boss was, seemed less scary today... almost mundane.

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The adults were pretty funny. Maybe we'd meet them again in a couple of months or years, and I could bully the guy with the skull staff for whatever he evolved into.

Actually, now that we were in the light... "Tom, Cate's gonna be angry you got your clothes dirty."

The kitten looked down and patted his shirt... only smearing the dirt more. I climbed onto the back of the sofa and patted his head. "I will join the training."

"Thanks." He smiled a little and nodded.

"Cheshire up!" I encouraged him and jumped down. This sofa was quite comfy. Didn't fit the mood of the dungeon though. I shrugged.

"I think I will take my backbag next time we go into a dungeon. Would be nice to have a book to read." I thought out loud and sank deeper into the softness.

Some time later, the doors opened. I formed a mana bubble and put it over my face. Hopefully, the boss wouldn't be too challenging and I would get to keep the spell for the entirety of the fight.

I waved at my friends and walked into the fleshy station on the other side. What would the boss be anyway?

I looked around and almost slipped on the wet meat. A puff of mana stopped me from falling and I continued to walk with more care.

Tom overtook me and drew his sword, while Diada stretched her legs to hang above me. I saw another group run on the walkway above. It seemed they didn't want to stay in the range of the stench too long either.

A train passed on our right and the ground opened beneath ones. We landed on a pile of wet bones. The place was lit up by lamps of various broken trains forming the walls. Before us, stood a mass of flesh, about three Toms tall and wide.

The mound of flesh trembled and rose even higher. Once it stood at its full height, it looked like a human made out of a multitude of regular-sized people. Each of its parts was made out of the corresponding parts of a person. A hundred eyes opened on its freakish face and the monster charged, throwing the bones in a splatter of gore with each step.

Tom shimmered and extended an axe blade from his sword. With a mighty swing, he cut into the creatures right ankle. A shower of smaller ankles exploded out of the wound and the giant continued running as if it didn't even notice it got hurt.

I boosted to the side and took my new knife out of the pouch, then with two more bursts flew by the back of the monster's leg. I made a shallow cut and boosted back, without waiting to see what damage I caused.

Diada was on the back of the creature, blasting mana panes into its left shoulder.

Tom run below me and slammed his sword into the spot I cut.

Even though two-thirds of the monster's ankle were gone, it's leg seemed to work just fine, as the creature pivoted on it and sent a kick towards me.

I boosted over it and flew between its legs, cutting into its inner thigh. Suddenly, something dragged me up and a large hand swept beneath me.

I looked up and two of Diada's legs held the back of my shirt. I nodded to the girl and boosted away as soon as she let go.

It seemed I got my directions wrong, as I flew away from the monsters back, rather than over to it's side like I planned. Then, with a loud crash, the mass of flesh slammed into the ground. It was missing one of its feet. Tom succeeded in cutting through.

I charged down and slammed my knife into the back of the creatures head. I kept cutting and slashing until something blocked the light on my right. I blasted off, barely avoiding a massive hand that slapped into the monsters head.

Rather than fly away, I boosted just over the massive back, making a long cut across the spine. Just before I reached the collection of tail bones I flew up, avoiding another slap.

Just as I opened my mouth to laugh at the clumsy creature, something slammed into me from the side. I looked back and saw a smashed together zombie falling down. Where did it come from?

I searched the ground, but there were no zombies swarming the place. Then, I noticed the small bodyparts, slowly sliding over the bones and forming full bodies.

Maybe it was a hydra situation? I formed an infernal fireball and threw it at the zombie that slammed into me, just as it hit the ground.

The creature screeched and fell apart. To experiment, I formed a regular fireball and threw it at the boss monster. It's skin just bronzed like a roast.

I threw another infernal ball and it too, just bronzed the monster. I furrowed by brows and formed a regular fireball, then threw it at the loose body parts. They burned properly.

I puffed mana a couple of times to avoid slamming into the ground and boosted back up.

For the final experiment, I shot a regular manaball at a new zombie that just formed. It fell apart. I didn't need to waste mana on infernal fire then.

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I slashed into the other ankle and looked up, to see how the girls were doing. I charged mana into my legs and jumped up, vaulting over a huge fist.

The monster somehow bent it's back the wrong way and sat ass up.

Another fist flew at me and I boosted down. It barely added any speed to my fall, but I managed to narrowly avoid the hit.

I slammed my sword into the monster and cut through.

The monster ROARED. Diada cut through its shoulder and a huge arm fell.

A storm of manaballs fell onto the arm, blasting it apart. Before I could see from where Mads was throwing her spells, something hit my right side.

Instead of the monsters foot, before me stood six zombies. With a yell, I reshaped the mana-axe into an extended blade and cut through the fodder.

A wind flew over my back and I turned to see the huge leg swept just swept behind me. I focused my senses to avoid more surprises, got back into a stance and run over to where the other foot should have been, to deal with the zombies that must have formed from it.

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I slapped away another piece of rotting head and continued cutting through the monster. Mother texted she'd ask Sister to let me eat some burgers today. It was a good day.

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I felt a little winded after blasting the last piece of the huge arm and landed close to Tom. He was cutting his way up the monster's legs.

I'd probably run out of fresh air in my bubble soon, so I began gathering as much mana as I could into two spells. I wondered if blasting open the monster's chest would kill it, or we had to destroy all of it.

It would be a little disappointing if only the first stage of the fight was dangerous. On the other hand, if it did die, I wouldn't have to breathe any filthy air.

The kitten seemed to have the zombie prevention under control, so nothing disturbed me and I could gather enough mana to feel the spells tremble from the strain.

I focused and threw the spells, throwing my hands forward reflexively.

The spells exploded on contact, creating a shower of tiny spines and ribs. My spells didn't quite reach the heart-mass, but Diada noticed the destruction.

The spiderling swung over from the creatures head and slammed six of her legs deep into the hearts. A screech caused the entire boss room to tremble.

The monster's body collapsed, but its head remained floating in the air.

Skin detached itself from the head, forming wings covered in hair, eyes and mouth. The new form of the monster turned around, and a skull made out of skulls looked at us with a wicked smile.

I slowly got up and... "FUCK OFF!!" Diada screamed and slammed a mass of mana into the skull. The skulls exploded.

The skin flaps fell over the broken bones and a bright doorway opened at the back of the boss arena. I titled my head. I guessed that was fine? We still had a criminal to pick up and who knew what hour it was.

I walked up to Tom, his shoulders were a little slumped. "I wanted the finishing blow..."

What a cute kitty. I boosted over onto his shoulder and patter him on the head. "You'd just get even more filthy."