---
Mimic Uvev: I’m awake.
Mimic: This sounds interesting.
Mimic: Let’s do it.
Mimic: Can you both send me your location?
Ashlyn: [Link]
K: [Link]
---
Mimic picked me up first, in her abomination-horse form, and we chatted a bit about where we were going as she carried me to K.
K smiled politely at us as Mimic arrived.
“Do we know where we’re going?” She asked.
“I need to find the dungeon first. I’ve told Mimic where I think an important one will be.” I said, “If it’s there, there’ll be a rift leading to another plane inside.”
“You’re certain?” K asked.
“Ninety percent.” I said, “Whatever’s on the other side might not be a problem, but it’s always best to know who our neighbors are.”
“If your eyes are anything to go by, you’ve already made nice with one of our neighbors.” K said.
“My eyes?” I asked.
“Your sclera - the whites of your eyes - are bright orange.” Mimic said, “That’s a sign of a foreign soul in the body. One of the scientists in my guardian’s labs was possessed by a ghost, and he had black sclera.”
“I’m not possessed.” I said.
“Obviously.” K scoffed, “There would be other signs if you were. But you’ve got someone else riding along, don’t you?”
“I wouldn’t say that.” I answered.
“Don’t try to deny it.” K scoffed, “You’re a terrible liar.”
“K, rule five.” Mimic said.
“What?” K demanded, outraged.
“It applies.” Mimic said, “She didn’t lie.”
“Rule five?” I asked.
“Cape etiquette for temporary alliances forms a set of rules.” Mimic said, “One, ‘Define your objectives beforehand, fully and completely’. Two, ‘Don’t lie to teammates’. Three, ‘Share all relevant information’. Four, ‘Don’t share other people’s secrets afterwards’. Five, ‘Don’t demand backstory’. There’s more, of course, but those are the first five.”
“People take it seriously?” I asked.
“We do, at least. Breaking the rules isn’t friendly.” Mimic said, “At least, not unless they’ve broken the rules first.”
As our conversation continued, we left the campus. [Blood of the Sacrificed] worked reasonably well to clear out Shadowbeasts, but having to recast it frequently made the trip take longer than it would have otherwise. Mimic and K both sped up the process, cutting down the monsters that got close and chasing down any that turned out to be exceptionally sturdy.
I could have survived this part of the trip alone, though it would’ve been much more time consuming if I had tried. The part that would be dangerous was the dungeon itself.
Mimic, K and I chatted about things as we fought. Mostly, Mimic asked questions and I answered, but K would jump in on occasion to throw in her own questions. Mostly it was questions about my hobbies, and about ‘No Savior Needed’.
I liked talking about it, even if I didn’t think I was sharing any valuable information. After the obvious stuff, like progression and strategy were covered, it diverted into obscure things. Mostly, I wound up answering ‘I don’t know’ a lot. By the time I finished explaining all of this, much less succinctly, to Mimic, we were at the conference hall I had marked on the map.
It was a Dungeon, and Mimic took us through the doors as we talked.
[You have entered a Dungeon! Some skills will not work here! Some skills’ requirements will be removed to compensate!] (1)
Both K and I dismounted, and Mimic turned back into her original form. (2) She was about sixty-two inches tall, and wearing a colorful blue dress with flowers. (3) I could see little tells for her powers in her body, but I wouldn’t recognize them if I wasn’t already looking. Her tan skin and brown hair reflected the light differently than a human without the same abilities.
While Mimic and K looked around, I took a minute to check how much Potential I’d acquired and upgrade my stats.
[You have slaughtered numerous Shadowbeasts. You gained 37,062 Potential and 3,706 Net Quanta.]
[You have spent 29,890 Potential to boost Dream Manipulation from 30 to 100! You have 7,340 Potential remaining]
[You have spent 1,035 Potential to boost Dream Durability from 30 to 40! You have 6,306 Potential remaining]
[You have spent 6,091 Potential to boost Dream Borders from 44 to 66! You have 215 Potential Remaining]
I was stopping at 100 in each stat because that was where the first soft cap kicked in. While the natural inflation of base stat prices was already fairly scary, the price abruptly increased ten times when increasing stats past a hundred, an increase that was not reflected anywhere else. (4) When you had passed that point, it was better to focus on bringing up the other stats or saving resources for gear upgrades, at least until you started reaching diminishing returns there as well.
I had focused on Dream Manipulation because I was going to be squishy no matter what I did. Dreamers didn’t get that much durability from stats, and I currently lacked any abilities to augment it. With Dream Manipulation maxed, my abilities would either hit harder or more often, which would be more useful for my survival than an increase to my still-lacking durability.
---
The first room of the dungeon was a massive rectangle, at least four-hundred feet long and two hundred feet wide, possibly more. Dungeons didn’t respect the actual dimensions of the buildings they were set inside, but the excessive size was probably because it had been a convention center. At the edges, the walls were covered in a rainbow of glass. The carpet and ceiling were both thinly ‘plated’ with red glass, except for the patches on the ceiling where lights were. At those points, clear glass was placed instead of red.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
On the other side of the room was a white door. The path through was obvious, but it was very unlikely that this room was just an empty corridor. Dungeons didn’t indulge in meaningless rooms, though there might have been something I was missing.
“This room just screams trap.” Mimic said.
“It could be safe, but I wouldn’t bet on it.” I said.
“Stay here. I’ll spring it.” K said.
She split in two, leaving one of her bodies with us. The other one tried to run across the room. When it was thirty feet from the door, a hole opened from the floor to drop her into the ground.
“It’s not lethal.” K said, and grinned. (5) A new body formed, and she kept trying to walk across the room. Every attempt was interrupted by a hole springing from the ground, catching her copies. She tried jumping across, but when her feet hit the ground she was dropped down again.
“My turn, K.” Mimic said, “Even if you could figure out how to do it alone, Ashlyn couldn’t join us that way.”
After saying this, she slid forwards slowly, leaving a thin trail of white behind herself. About three paces from where the pit trap started, she pointed her hand at the opposite wall. It slowly extended until it reached the door handle. She pushed it open, and placed her hand on the ground past the door, keeping the door from falling shut. Once that was done, she allowed her human form to collapse into a puddle of clay. Her arm stretched across the chasm to the puddle of slime on the other side. Her “arm” slowly widened as the puddle of white goo beside us thinned. Within a minute, Mimic had formed a bridge of white goo, and any resemblance to a human arm was completely gone.
“Show Ashlyn how it’s done, K.” She said, despite the absence of a visible mouth “One at a time, okay?”
K nodded, and carefully walked across. Once she’d entered the other room, I followed. (6) This room was the same as the previous room, but with green glass replacing the red glass on the floor and ceiling.
In the center of the room was a treasure chest, but the room was otherwise completely empty. Mimic reformed into her original form. K split in two again. One of her halves ran for the treasure chest, but before she reached it, eighteen balls of spikes appeared from nowhere. It was as if they had teleported in, but there were a dozen ways to achieve the effect.
Six stood between her and the chest, and twelve stood behind her. She was surrounded.
Each ball of spikes was made of clear glass, and their thin, blade-like spikes pointed in every direction. They balanced on a single spike like a top, but another spike rose from their center to the ceiling, leaving them incapable of leaning or falling. Each one spun towards K’s trapped body.
K reacted quickly. Her sword’s length tripled, and she sliced through the first one that came close, shattering its spikes and center alike. She managed it a second time, and a third. But the next one reached her from behind, and shredded through her body. If it hadn’t been for K’s ability, she would’ve died then.
I had cast [Blood of the Sacrificed] when the spikes appeared, but it hadn’t destroyed any of them before they got K's copy. I had held [Beast in the Blood], in case the other spinners had come for me.
K split again. One copy stayed with us, while the other charged forwards. Mimic leapt into the air, and smashed herself into a pile of clay when she hit the ground. The pile of clay, in a single smooth motion, hurled itself into the air, reshaping into a giant sphere of Mimic. It bounced forwards directly at the spinners. Its spikes sliced through Mimic, coming away covered in clay, but Mimic was unharmed. She slammed into its center. It shattered with a loud crash, scattering glass from the impact.
The instant she hit the ground, she leapt for another spinner.
K’s disposable body arrived a second later, and sliced through one’s core. More came, but she wasn’t surrounded anymore. She cut down one and dodged into its previous path. The others careened uselessly past. She managed to repeat this trick multiple times, but then one came from behind her. I grabbed it with [Beast in the Blood] to ‘save’ her.
That was my entire contribution to the battle, besides what little good [Blood of the Sacrificed] had done. In seconds, they had cut through seventeen monsters that could handle anything I would throw at them. Meanwhile, I had killed one. I knew I would be relying on them to carry me, but this was still embarrassing. The gap in experience and skill was far bigger than I liked to admit.
Admittedly, this was also a very good matchup for Mimic. Mimic was fairly durable no matter what she was facing, but she was virtually immune to any form of physical trauma. If you really needed to fight her, you’d want to throw either energy-based or magical attacks. She wouldn’t handle being thrown into lava better than a standard human would.
In any case, all of the glass monsters were shattered, leaving us alone with the treasure chest. K had her disposable body move forwards and open it. As she did, a popup appeared in front of me.
[You contributed to the death of 18 “Glass slicers”! +540 Potential, +54 Net Quanta]
[Your party has opened a chest! You get 1/3rd of the 6000 quanta within! +200 Net Quanta]
She frowned into the chest, and pulled out a single bronze disk. It looked almost like a plate, about six inches long and less than a centimeter thick. Various abstract markings dotted its edges, while the center held a stylized depiction of the monsters we had slain. A piece of gear.
K stared into empty air. Most likely, a tutorial popup had appeared in front of her, and she was reading it. After a moment, she turned to me.
“Is this one any good?” K asked, and handed me the disk.
{
Whirling Dancers of Death (C, Lv.1)
* 7.5% Offense Capability
}
“It’s not worthless.” I said, “I wouldn’t invest in it past level five, but it’s well suited for you.” I tried to hand it back to her.
“I don’t need it.” K said, “You need all the help you can get.”
“It’s a percentage boost! It’ll do you more good than me.” I said, “You should keep it.”
K scowled, “Fine.” She tapped at an unseen screen, and the disc vanished from her hand in a heartbeat.
I nodded, and started picking up the glass shards that were left behind from killing the monsters. Most of the monsters’ bodies had faded away, but small pieces had been left behind.
“Why’re you collecting trash?” K demanded.
“They’re useful.” I said, “I can’t craft anything with them, but I know people can. They’ll be valuable later.”
“In that case, remember to include them in the loot when we’re splitting it.” K said.
“Of course.” I said.
Mimic had been inspecting the walls, and jumped over to us in a single bound.
“This room’s a dead end.” Mimic said, “I’m guessing we’ll need to jump into the pit trap. Ashlyn, would there be another way out if we did?”
“Yes, but it’d be after the boss chamber.” I said, “No escaping after we enter, I think.”
“Can we handle it?” Mimic asked.
I nodded. They could, and I desperately hoped they wouldn’t back out. I couldn’t handle this alone, and I couldn’t keep up with them. They had years behind them, and I had hours.
“K, you ok?” Mimic asked.
“I’m fine.” K said.
“Then let’s keep going.” Mimic said.
---
(1) Inside Dungeons, you couldn’t create further pocket dimensions, so if you had an ability to create such a zone and an ability that only worked within those zones, you could use it freely.
(2) If lore from No Savior Needed remained consistent, it was actually an approximation of her body before Langwidere had given her powers. She could perfectly replicate her actual body at the time of her creation, but that had been when she was fourteen years old. As a result, all her aging was an approximation of how she would have grown. I suspected she could try to impersonate other people, but avoiding the uncanny valley effect was probably really hard for her.
(3) It was a nice enough dress that if I didn’t know it was actually part of Mimic, I would’ve worried about it getting ruined.
(4) That wasn’t the only price spike, every breakpoint of 10^X would add a new component to the formula, but the others were consistent and this one wasn’t.
(5) K didn’t get the memories of her copies when they dispelled, but both bodies could intuitively sense whether her copy was still alive. That wouldn’t keep them from making a new one and dispelling the old one, but they would know. So she didn’t know what was in the pit, but she knew it hadn’t killed her.
(6) Walking over a bridge made from another person was awkward, but if I was going to stress about Mimic’s powers, there were more awkward things to think about. Every piece of Mimic could see, taste, touch and smell, and thinking about stepping on a person’s eyeballs was obviously even more distasteful. I was trying to ignore all the implications.