After several seconds of staring forward, Carlos closed his mouth and glanced to either side. "I suppose all the roots and moss in the tunnel walls should have been my first clue. This dungeon's theme is nature, or maybe forest, isn't it?"

"Sure looks like it to me, boss!" Trinlen piped up from a few feet behind.

Lorvan just let the sight of what lay before them speak for itself. The tunnel of dirt and roots suddenly transitioned into a vast open area. Trees and undergrowth blanketed the ground everywhere Carlos could see. There's a whole damn forest down here, underground? How far down did we go? Carlos cautiously walked out of the tunnel and looked up. The wall behind them extended up as far as he could see, but that wasn't very far with layers of leaves and branches blocking his view. He couldn't spot any sign of a ceiling, either.

The luminescent moss was ubiquitous, growing in small patches on nearly every tree trunk and some of the bushes as well, but it was no longer the only light source. Streaks of bright greenish light shone down from high above, their paths highlighted by drifting dust. And is that actual sunlight filtering down through the canopy? It certainly looks like it. Carlos hesitated for a moment, then found a tiny spot where a beam of light reached the ground, walked over to it, and tried to look toward its source. He immediately winced and looked away, blinking spots out of his vision. "Is this place open to the sky?"

Lorvan shook his head, keeping a commendably straight face. "It is not. If you fly above the dungeon from outside, you will not find the canopy of this forest there. The dungeon's magic merely imitates the appearance of the sky, including the brightness of the daytime sun."

Carlos looked around, scanning with mana sense as well. There were no visually obvious trails, and the stream of aether coming in from the tunnel just kind of… dissipated into the forest. The forest's aether was calm and orderly, as usual for in a dungeon, but its movements seemed to lack purpose. Currents of aether went in every direction. They interleaved with no clashes or disruptions, almost like the currents were threads in a woven tapestry, but they didn't seem to have any particular destination. The currents heading away from the tunnel exit were thicker and more numerous than the currents heading towards it, but that just balanced out the influx from the tunnel itself. "So… Where do we go from here?"

Lorvan shrugged. "That depends on what you want from this delve. If you want to go directly to the core, that's still below us. The fastest way would be if I clear a tunnel into the ground straight to it. If you'd rather not break the dungeon's structure, the natural path down is hidden near the far side of this forest; I brought a map that's recent enough that it's probably still accurate and can lead you to it. If you want to gain as much as possible and help maintain the dungeon's strength, you should explore and try to test yourselves against the dangers and challenges this dungeon can offer. Your protective force bubbles will interfere with at least some of that, but there may still be some suitable challenges."

Carlos exchanged a look with Amber and declared his decision. "Let's explore. How about… that direction." He pointed ahead and to the right, at a spot where the undergrowth looked slightly thinner, and started walking. The dungeon's probably already scared by how powerful our escorts are, and tunneling directly would terrify it. We need to calm it down and reassure it.

As Carlos got close to the small bushes that covered most of the ground between tree trunks, he started feeling some resistance to his forward movement. A lot of rustling, plus a few louder cracks and snaps, sounded from in front of him as the force bubble around him pushed back the leaves and branches that were in his way.

Amber laughed from behind him. "If we aim to play fair and challenge our own abilities, using an overpowered spell from Lorvan to beat the first barrier hardly seems appropriate, don't you think?"

Carlos hesitated. "Wait, does this thick undergrowth really count as a barrier and dungeon challenge?"

Haftel spoke up from the back. "Your inexperience is really showing, kid." He idly tossed a dagger, then flicked it forward into the dirt a few feet ahead and to the left of Carlos. A few leaves moved, disturbed by the impact, revealing a large scorpion hidden underneath. The dagger was so precisely in the center of one of the scorpion's open pincers, a hair's breadth short of touching the joint, that it was clearly deliberate. The scorpion jerked backwards, then turned and fled, disappearing from sight in moments. "Take a closer look at those plants."

Carlos looked intently at the branches splayed out against his force bubble. "They're certainly prickly. It'd be painful to walk through without protection. That doesn't seem serious enough for how you're acting, though?"

"Hmph. That force bubble is preventing you from getting a properly close look." Haftel shook his head. "There are thorns mixed in. Tiny ones. Hard to spot, but really sharp. And they have poison. Nothing truly dangerous, not by itself and this close to the entrance, but if you got pricked and ignored it, you'd find yourself getting weaker and more tired a lot faster than normal. Nature can be nasty like that."

"Oh." Carlos took a step back and regarded the tangle of greenery more warily. "Hmm. I think I could levitate myself over it. There's plenty of clearance between the bushes and the lowest tree branches, and I can see open areas to land in."

"Way ahead of you on that, Carlos." Amber took a few steps back, then jogged forward and jumped. She soared much higher than the apparent effort of her jump could explain, then kept drifting forward at the same height, several feet in the air. "Whee!" Just after she crossed the line of bushes, she abruptly dropped back down and landed in a crouch. She turned back to face Carlos, grinning ear to ear. "That was fun! Now your turn."

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Carlos laughed. "I'm glad you're enjoying this. Now then…" He started casting his own Levitate spell. She must have cast a prepared Levitate while I was considering the idea. I have several copies of it prepared myself, but there's no time pressure here. Might as well do it the long way, speaking the whole incantation on the spot.

Right after he cast the spell, but before he could actually start his jump, Trinlen interrupted. "That's not the version of Levitate that I wrote out for you at the academy. You modified it?" Trinlen was staring at Carlos with a raised eyebrow and cocked head.

Carlos smiled back at him. "Hmm? Oh, yeah, I made the target changeable after casting it. Switching from levitating one thing to levitating something else has been useful."

"I see, indeed." Trinlen nodded and rubbed his chin. "And you did that without anyone teaching you how? Is this part of the same house secret as for, ah, discovering new simple spells?"

Carlos hesitated. "It involved a house secret. This isn't the time to discuss more details." Without further ado, he jumped and let the Levitate spell adjust to its default of neutralizing his weight. A second later, he carefully adjusted it downward to stop ascending, then back up to not descend just yet. A spell controller could probably handle that bit of fiddling, but that's a workaround. I'd rather fix the problem at the source - the spell itself has poorly designed control mechanisms. A good design would let me specify the path I want the movement to follow, then calculate the needed force on its own. Just as he finished that thought, Carlos looked down and saw he was across the bushes and above a good landing spot. He dropped down to stand on the ground.

Trinlen called after him. "How about you demonstrate that custom feature by levitating me over? Lifting a whole person is still a bit of a strain for me."

Carlos smirked. "Sure." With only a purely mental push on the spell, he lifted Trinlen off the ground.

The young man's eyes widened and he wobbled a bit in mid-air. "Hey now! You didn't give me warning to jump!" He narrowed his eyes at Carlos. "Oooh, good one. I'll get you back for this sometime, you know." He grinned. "I'm not as helpless here as you might have thought, though. spell activate = push;" Trinlen gently accelerated forward, still drifting several feet above the ground.

Carlos waited for him to clear the bushes, then gently lowered him to the ground. That prank's played out now. Continuing it would just be mean. He turned back to the rest of the group. "Ressara, how do you want to handle this? The rest of you, I'm sure you all have your own ways."

"Oh, um." Ressara fidgeted. "You can levitate me over, but please prompt me to jump for it."

She floated over without issue, followed by Esmorana flying by her own power. Haftel did an impressively acrobatic leap to join them. Lorvan simply walked right through, his armor preventing anything dangerous from touching him.

Carlos looked around from his new vantage point. There were still bushes and vines and other vegetation all over the place, but in most places they weren't nearly so tightly clustered as in that first barrier line. "Alright, let's see what else this place has."

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They trekked through miles of trackless jungle, taking care at every step to avoid touching anything that might be poisonous, and encountered several other kinds of dangers along the way. Vines and roots crisscrossed the ground in many places, and while most of them were innocently harmless, a few were disguised snare traps. To Carlos's embarrassment, while carefully avoiding one such snare he almost stepped into a magical quicksand trap, saved from having to be extracted from the mud only by Amber calling out a warning just in time.

The real danger, though, was the vicious beasts that set upon them at several points. Most of the dungeon's monsters were various ambush predators, often lying in wait next to a trap, plus a fair amount of venomous skirmishers that harassed them with hit-and-run attacks. Ressara asked for a force bubble of her own after the first brief fight. Carlos offered one to Trinlen as well, but he declined.

A whole pack of wolves surrounded and attacked them after about an hour and a half, and most of the wolves ended up focusing on Trinlen as the only person they had a chance of actually hurting. It turned into several minutes of Trinlen frantically dodging and running while he, Carlos, and Amber struggled to throw back or drive off every wolf that got too close to him. Any one of their guards could have slaughtered the whole pack in moments, but they followed the stated plan of holding back to let the newer combatants gain some experience, just watching to intervene if needed.

The Distant Cut spell, which used to barely make a bear's snout bleed, now cut great bloody gashes in the wolves' hides, but it was clearly still nowhere near an outright kill, and it took a few hits with it on the same wolf to even get a wolf to withdraw from the fight. Carlos and Amber were both nearly out of mana when the last of the pack quit the fight and ran off, and Trinlen was breathing hard and had a few nasty wounds on his arms and legs.

They spent several minutes resting and recovering after that. Carlos winced in sympathy just looking at the dried blood on Trinlen's skin and clothes, even knowing that Lorvan had already healed the injuries that the blood came from. "Are you sure you still don't want a force bubble?"

Trinlen looked at Carlos like he'd grown an extra head. "What, just because I got a few painful scrapes? This is exactly the kind of excitement I came here for! Why would I ever want to make it boring?"

"If that's really how you feel, I suppose…" Carlos shook his head and laughed quietly. He took a deep breath and turned to Lorvan, who still wasn't showing the slightest sign of exertion or discomfort. "Think that's enough to satisfy the dungeon? Help it grow more than a typical wish costs it?"

Lorvan hesitated, then nodded slowly. "I cannot be certain, but I believe so, yes. Should I get out the map?"

"Hmm. Not just yet, I think." Carlos looked at Trinlen. "You mentioned a pathfinding spell. Could you cast it to find a path to the dungeon's core?"

"Maybe. I'd need to know the location of the destination. I might be able to divine that separately, but I don't think I have enough mana right now to cast both that and Find Path. Not with the dungeon resisting the spells and having 4 more levels than me."

Lorvan raised his right arm across his chest. "I can handle that part. Should I?" At Carlos's nod, Lorvan triggered one of the myriad enchantments in his armor, and a potent spell formed and launched into the distance faster than Carlos could examine it. "The dungeon core is located 2134.2 feet east, 788.6 feet south, and 46.9 feet down from the current location of the center of my right palm."

Trinlen stared at him and blinked a few times. "That is… a considerably more helpful way of stating it than I expected. Thank you."

Lorvan tweaked something, and the distance measurements he'd just stated appeared in writing above his arm. "It's part of standard royal guard protocol for working with mages. If a mage needs a location specification for casting a spell, give it as a coordinate triplet."

"Ah. Right. Well then." Trinlen looked at Carlos and chuckled. "Part of why you asked is that you want to hear the whole incantation yourself, right, boss?"

Carlos nodded, smiling. "Absolutely."

"Then settle in and listen. Here we go…"

spell begin; use mana = …