“That’s a creepy sign,” Jaclyn commented as she stepped up to the start of the muddy pool with a narrow metal walkway in its middle and two mesh fences on either end that acted as the next challenge.

“BEWARE THE TATZELWYRM’S LEGACY!”

It was like something straight out of a movie, or maybe one of those stupid lawn ornaments people with average incomes but a complete lack of taste put in their garden as a joke. Wooden planks, black paint that had run after being applied, holes in the wood as though someone had shot it with a gun, and something had taken a bite out of the corner.

And what did it mean? When had the Dungeon gotten its hands on one of those creatures? They weren’t jungle dwellers, based on what Gula had said, they were supposed to live in the mountains. So whe- … the blood. Gula’s projections might not have been physical creations, but the blood of the Tatzelwyrm was its main weapon, so that had been real. And when she’d used it in the Dungeon, it had grabbed a hold of the pattern.

Jaclyn really didn’t want to think about one of those things being in the water. If it died in a way that shed blood in any way at all, then the water would be filled with a virulent toxin that would cripple or kill anyone who got wet. And cleaning an entire tank of water, especially one with so much other filth that would get caught up in the spell and cleaned as well, massively driving up the mana cost.

Not to mention that she didn’t even know what was in there. Clumps of moss, algae, and wood drifted along the surface, giving everything an even swampier appearance.

But trying to clean the water so that she could see was beyond even their combined mana pools, even if Harper and Granger had learned the cleansing spell. They doubtlessly would, later, and on the off-chance they decided they didn’t need it, she’d set them straight.

Nothing left to do but either retreat, or try something else. Jaclyn chose the latter option, cautiously dipping the tip of her toes into the water, realizing that was extremely shallow there. She proceeded onwards with the same caution, carefully testing her footing before putting any weight down, until she’d reached the beginning of the walkway, where mesh fencing ensured that one could only proceed onwards via the walkway, while also ensuring that anything inside the water underneath stayed put.

Clearly, the area before only served as a way to ensure everyone got their feet wet.

And that, in turn, convinced her that her initial assumption had been correct. The challenge wasn’t just getting past a pool full of God only knew what, it was doing so without spilling their toxic blood. Blood which, she assumed, wouldn’t go away when the body dissolved back into magic. However, she should be immune, and the others weren’t in the pool yet, so she was willing to risk it.

Jaclyn stuck out her arm first, holding it through the gap in the fence, and waved it above the walkway, but nothing happened.

So she held it above the water itself, garnering an immediate and vicious response as a crocodile a little shorter than she was tall leaped out of the water and snapped at her fingers. Or rather, where her fingers had been. She’d yanked her arm back the instant the monster had breached the surface, and was now making a grab for the creature.

Her fingers closed around its torso, allowing her to get a solid grip on it, but this left her in an awkward position, holding onto a wildly flailing and snapping beast whose jaws she could not hold closed with her free hand without getting bitten. But she had the strength to just hold it far enough away from herself that it couldn’t actually reach her, which made the situation bearable if strange.

She pulled it back through the gap in the fence, turned around, and held her captive out to Gula.

“Can you analyze this thing?” she asked. Instant identification required an insanely high Inspect Skill, which even Gula didn’t have, but with a captive, it should be doable.

“Unranked Dwarf Crocodile,” Gula said. “I believe it is a fully grown specimen.”

Was the sign premature, then? Was the toxic blood only going to be added later? Was there something else in the water? Or were there both unranked crocodiles and F-Rank Tatzelwyrm crocs in there?

“I’ll go over first,” Jaclyn said. “If I fall in, use the Tatzelwyrm projection to poison the water. Stay out of the water after I’ve killed all the crocodiles until we know it isn’t toxic.”

Poisoning the water would bar their advancement deeper into this section, but also kill all the little crocs in there. And accidentally killing something with toxic blood would do the same. But it seemed they’d be fine if all the crocs were the same.

Jaclyn let go of the crocodile with one hand and manifested the badger claws on it, then put them clean through her captive’s skull. It disappeared after a heartbeat, leaving her clutching a bale of crocodile leather.

Oh, maybe she could have something nice made for herself out of that? Her share, at least?

She tossed the loot back onto dry land, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath.

Then, she opened her eyes, manifested a spectral badger paw on each hand, and stepped out onto the walkway.

In an instant, the water began to boil, half a dozen critters becoming visible in an instant. Some merely differentiated themselves from the driftwood by moving, others launched themselves up from underwater, jaws already open and ready to clamp onto her.

She stepped backwards, causing the first attackers to miss, while lashing out with her claws. These were the claws of a Honey Badger, specialized for digging rather than combat and not really optimal for cutting enemies flying by to ribbons, but with her power, it didn’t make much of a difference. At this point, the only problem was how hard it was going to be to get all that leather out of the water.

Most people would not have been able to fight like that without losing their balance, but she was both a trained martial artist and even had Ballance as a Skil in her alternate loadout, where it had already hit Level 13. Meaning she was sufficiently good at it that she could do it professionally. Become a trapeze artist or something.

Jaclyn even wound up catching the last two crocs and carried them out to the others and let Granger blow them up with a fireball for the sake of Levels.

Ok, that had been “easy”, but she was yet to figure out what the sign had been about. Pure psychological warfare?

But the way was clear, so they all walked across the walkway while Gula’s bird projections picked up the leather packets floating in the water.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

That’s when Jaclyn saw the giant grey head lazily rise above the surface, beady little eyes staring at her. A hippopotamus. Likely the creature with the Tatzelwyrm’s blood.

So that was the game. Kill or escape the crocodiles without so much as scratching that thing. Beating the small critters was easy when she was at E-Rank and they were just normal animals. But like the brochure had already said, this place was incomplete. Once these things gained a little power, the difficulty would skyrocket.

Granger came up to her holding a pet token he’d found somewhere. For a crocodile, based on the design.

“You missed this,” he said, offering it to her.

“You don’t want this?” she raised an eyebrow. Normally, he practically squeed with excitement every time he found one of these things.

“No space, no money for food,” Granger repeated his earlier statement. “A temporary summon would be cool, though. For fighting, or just to have a tiger to cuddle with on the couch for an hour or two. Something without a lifetime commitment.”

***

Oh, that was a cool idea, Thomas had to admit. But could he actually do that?

“You don’t want them to summon a bunch of meatshields in a Dungeon,” Elias advised as though he’d read Thomas’ mind. “But you can add a condition to them that makes them not work in here, and that prevents summons from coming in.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that befo- …” Thomas began before cutting himself off. They’d had this argument already, and Elias had won it. Resoundingly.

The fairy had simply rattled off every piece of trivia he knew in an hours-long speech of which Thomas had retained very little. He just had to hope that Elias showed initiative and provided the necessary information. Or, if he felt that there was information he hadn’t been provided, he could just ask.

Creating a new token was easy, he just created a duplicate of each existing token pattern and one by one, manipulated the copy as needed. Temporary summoning, with the summoner being able to cut it short at will. If they didn’t, the monsters would vanish after three hours.

He also figured out how to adjust the creatures based on the mentality of the summoner, as much as the token could sense at any rate. Someone who wanted a meatshield would get a merciless fighting machine, while someone who just wanted to have a cute big cat to cuddle for a bit would get a creature actually receptive to the snuggles.

And then, just for the hell of it, he created a few of what he called “swarm tokens” in his head. They would only work for a few minutes at most, being very much a weapon of last resort or something to be whipped out right at the beginning of combat, but they would be powerful, especially when he got some high-Level rats. Until now, whoever got their hands on these tokens would be able to throw out half a dozen rock hyraxes, a trio of wolverines, or even a fivesome of Fer-de-lances.

“Should I create summoner creatures?” Thomas wondered. It seemed like a great way to somewhat sidestep his command limit.

Elias vigorously shook his head. “Won’t do you any good. Your creature’s creatures also count against your limit in here.”

He laughed. “You’re a Dungeon, for celestials’ sake. The embodiment of challenge! You can’t just infinitely chain together summons until the only limit on your creatures is space.”

Yeah, that actually made sense. Lots of it. But Elias wasn’t done.

“But that only applies to the inside of your Dungeon. Jan could use tokens, but he’ll still have the usual limit on bonded creatures, even if they’re just temporary. So two full creatures, or one swarm.”

After that, Elias explained that you could get your first bonded creature at F-Rank, the second at D-Rank, the third at A-Rank and the last at S-Rank, while summoner Classes or people who just had the relevant powers would obviously have a higher limit.

And, Elias being Elias, that then turned into a long story about just what summoners were capable of. Thomas made sure to memorize the important or useful stuff and just ignored the rest.

That, and messing with the tokens was a nice distraction from watching the delvers breeze through the new section. He really wished he’d been able to upgrade the crocodiles, but creating Jan had taken priority for a very good reason.

Just how would they handle the next area, though? The Boomslangs matched Inspector Abrams’ E-Rank, and the Fer-de-lance pattern had finally hit F-Rank and gotten the same armorbreaking bite the other snake had already gotten.

***

Another forest of vines, but one without monkeys. Jaclyn had a really bad feeling about this one.

Gula threw a lightning bolt into the foliage before they did anything else, though, checking if they could use fire and lightning without causing a huge wildfire. At least that was what she thought, until she saw something dissolve at the point of impact, leaving behind a small vial.

“Snake,” the orc deadpanned as Jaclyn carefully approached and grabbed the loot.

It was, well, a sturdy glass vial vaguely reminiscent of one of those things that doctors drew drugs from to inject someone with. Pulling on the label let her unwrap a long-ish paper roll covered in Daedalus’ awful handwriting. It was slightly better than last time, possibly due to the larger spider monkeys being better able to use human-sized writing utensils, but it was still plenty ugly.

The note was long, reading like one of those instruction leaflets found in medicine packages, informing her of the fact that this was, in fact, an antidote to the snake’s bite, but not guaranteed to work. It had never been tested on a human, Daedalus didn’t know if the concentration was sufficient or potentially even high enough to cause issues, however, he’d be very grateful to someone who took this vial to be checked out and returned with the results. Whoever was the first to take up this offer for a specific antidote would receive ten vials adjusted based on the information for optimal efficacy.

Cool. And when she shared that information, Harper explained that he even had a few needles he could use to inject someone in an emergency, if Gula’s Caladrius projection was on cooldown.

But did they have enough to deal with the Dungeon?

***

Thomas grinned as he watched the delvers struggle through the snake section, alternatively cursing a blue streak or jumping in fright at every small noise.

He really was proud of this place. It was nasty and had great loot.

Making the antidote had been easy, he’d just had one of each snake bite a zebra, the closest thing to a horse he had, and inject a tiny amount of venom, which then caused the production of antivenin. Then, he used another creature to spill the zebras’ blood, which he then absorbed and only summoned the needed component to provide the vials he’d distributed.

Though most snakes only dropped leather or vials of their venom, the latter of which was very obviously marked to avoid any fuckups. He wasn’t entirely sure what someone would do with that liquid, but he’d once heard that various venoms were extremely expensive and even if no one would buy that stuff, some researchers would doubtlessly be very happy if they got to play with it.

The Boomslangs vine growth power was messing with everyone’s footing while the flesh-rotting bite of the Fer-de-lances always required immediate treatment, until the Caladrius was on the verge of disappearing, likely only a single use away from becoming unavailable.

And that’s when Granger decided to just yell at everyone else to stay back, summoned a fireball in each hand, and hurled them into the jungle ahead, annihilating quite a lot of snakes. It was a cool move, but how much mana could he have left after that?

***

Jaclyn couldn’t really blame Granger for trying to burn a path through the jungle, though the smoke was annoying. The blaze had died down quickly due to this place being almost completely fresh growth and utterly lacking leaf litter, but it was still irritating. The smog was only at a “kitchen disaster” level, thankfully, but not exactly great.

Her stomach grumbled as she caught a whiff of roast snake, earning herself a few curious glances. She just shrugged, figuring that trying to explain the issue would only wind up making her look even more ridiculous.

She might not have been some were-beast completely divorced from her humanity, devouring her fellow man to satiate a primal hunger, but her power was subtly affecting her. Specifically, her appetites. However, the whole “snakes are good eating” advice was the worst of it.

Sure, there were certain tea snobs who’d call her using half a glass of honey for every pot of tea heresy and demand punishments normally reserved for high treason or regicide, but generally, having a sweet tooth wasn’t a problem.

That being said, if any of her colleagues ever saw her do that, they’d tease her as a matter of course.

Then, Jaclyn chortled at the mental image that now invaded her thoughts, of someone walking in on her while she had half a snake dangling from her mouth.

She caught herself after a short while, sighed, and began to advance again. The venom might not do any damage to her, but she’d already been bitten nearly a dozen times and it wasn’t fun.