A few hours of intense cuddling with Louise actually made me a little sad for Susie, whose partner for the same time, being an NPC, would be gone when we left the floor. Granted, from what I could tell (although Susie did use a tent, so it's not like she was being too obvious about it) she had a more intense time of it than just cuddling.

I don't know how much actual emotional attachment she got from it, because when we declared ourselves ready to go and the tattooed woman whose name I never bothered to learn disappeared, Susie didn't exactly seem broken up, but there was a little bit of extra distance there. I don't think I would have handled it nearly as well if Louise had up and disappeared on me, even if I'd only met her for a couple hours. But then, I was not what anyone would call a player.

In any case, the next floor wasn't going to give us time to think on it. We had one more challenge pair, and then the boss, to get to.

As it happened, another group caught up to us as we were getting ready to go down, and waited around so we could go together. They didn't seem like my kind of people, so I didn't bother to learn their names or anything, but they were friendly enough. The only thing I really noticed was their VIP, who was (and I'm not kidding about this) literally a queen, in a full, nearly Victorian royal dress, crown, scepter, high heeled shoes, with her nose stuck in the air and a holier-than-thou attitude you could smell before you saw her coming. There was only one person in their party who was head over heels for her, so it was pretty clear who had gone into the rescue bunker that round.

Anyway, the next floor spawned us in... well, an area that could only loosely be termed a 'floor'. We came out in what was, according to Susie, probably a C-130--that's the big-ass military cargo plane they use to airlift tanks and air drop them over, well, over any damn thing they please, as long as there's nothing there to shoot the plane down.

A timer on the wall of the cargo bay we were in told us how long until the plane would get shot down--just under five minutes left. There was also a map to familiarize ourselves with the scenario. So, I guess it made perfect sense that the people following wouldn't want to come in late, even if they'd done this before.

Susie walked us through things on the map, while we all shrugged into a set of parachutes. I had no doubt I could catch myself with telekinesis, and probably everyone else, too, but uh, you know, better safe than sorry?

"Here, like I said," Susie was saying, tapping the map only briefly before retracting her arm to fit it into the backpack straps. "If we're good enough to land on the top of the building, despite the incoming fire, we'll be in good position to skip most of the grind. But, don't forget that your health pool doesn't protect the parachute. If you're going to get close to one of the guarded rooftops, pull on the control loops to turn in that direction." She put a hand on Louise's shoulder to get her attention. "Again, most of this is about you. If worst come to worst, I have no doubt we'll find you and bring you back, but this is a heck of a floor to have to search through if you go missing."

Louise nodded seriously, and again, it was clear she was under a lot of stress. Of course, I had every intention of staying by her side the whole way down.

Funny how best laid plans don't always work out.

I was watching the whole group as the timer ticked down. Nobody was going for door controls, or anything, and they weren't all clustering at the rear of the plane where it should have opened up. Everyone was nervous.

And then an explosion rocked the plane. It sounded close, and violent, but in the time it took me to start asking questions about what just happened, a tear in the hull had ripped open and the plane tipped and everyone aboard was dumped into freefall.

Now, look. We were dungeoneers. We could all take a sword strike to the face and shake it off, but there's still an active component to a situation like this where you, yourself, have to figure out just what the hell is going on. My only experience skydiving was in the Meditation Room, and that was brief; Louise didn't even have that much, and had been given some basic pointers by Susie.

All of which was to say we spent too long flailing around confused. I pushed into my Telekinesis to get some stability, but even when I had that, there was no escaping the sheer fact that I had to fight a war against air, momentum, and gravity just to stabilize.

Then I made the mistake of coming to a stop before realizing I had to stick by Louise, and dived after her. By then, although I could see her white Priestess dress, she had fallen further and accelerated to maximum speed already. Susie seemed to be chasing after her, and was close enough to reach her, but...

Well, anyway, all I could do at that point was close the distance.

Merry, for one, seemed absolutely thrilled by this new experience. She took some kind of control over my telekinetic sense and was just ...studying the forces that were at play, even though it seemed like it all should have been pretty obvious, right? Although it felt like the wind was hitting me, really, the wind was holding still (more or less) and I was barreling into it. And I had to use my telekinesis to try to accelerate myself, streamlining myself as best I could, and only after a good twenty-thirty seconds of that did I realize I wasn't paying any attention to the war-torn city we were diving into.

It was a hellscape. It was a proper modern city, bombed out and on fire, with one pristine skyscraper in the middle of it. Other nearby buildings, none more than three-quarters the height of the target building, had gun and missile emplacements on them, and they were for the moment ignoring us and shooting at other imaginary targets, probably other C-130s.

Susie got to Louise, and guided her towards the tower, but it didn't look like they'd make it, but after a moment or two, I saw two parachutes, and knew they were safe. It was, apparently, a little early--the other group had met up and organized themselves, and it was another five-ten seconds before they started pulling open their own.

I mostly used my Skill to slow me down. It was... weird to try to match speed with them like this, but it was also really, really fun. Like, when the hell was I ever going to get to use my Dungeon skills like this? Goddamn it felt good.

Soon enough I was close enough to be able to shout. Although it probably felt to them like I was holding still near them, it was actually a lot of work to willfully match their speed. "You alright?"

Louise grinned, flailed her arms excitedly at me and shouted a long, adrenaline-filled wordless shout of joy. "That was inteeeeense!" she screamed at the end of it.

I had to grin back, because yeah, that was not something I expected from the Dungeon, even after Susie had told me it was coming. Somehow... I had expected it to be more clinical. Still, after the adrenaline calmed down, and the rush started to leave, I looked around to find that we were too far out to have a good glide slope for the top of the tower.

"We can still make this," I said after a minute. "Just get close to it and I'll pull us up the rest of the way."

So they sort of steered themselves close enough to the building, and I telekinese'd their parachutes up onto the roof of the building. Following Susie's instructions, I immediately cut the leads of their 'chutes, which made sense because the roof was pretty windy, and then we all shugged out of the packs, although I went ahead and put mine, still unused, in my inventory. Not because I had a particular need for one, but well, it's not like I was going to run across a lot of them, right?

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Louise was still grinning from ear to ear, and it was good that there were no enemies here, because she took a long moment to vent by relaying her version of events to me. "I was terrified," she admitted, "when we all got separated, and I was being knocked around by the wind and then I realized, wait, I'm not panicking. I am sure I would have if I wasn't... you know, a Dungeoneer, but..." She grinned and bounced on the balls of her feet. "But I kept my head! I thought through what Susie said and got oriented and even started to look for the buildings and then she caught up and said we should pull early, and it was so loud, but I heard her! Aaaaah! It was amazing!"

I put a hand on her shoulder and then couldn't stop myself from going all the way into a hug. "I thought I'd be ready and would be there with you the whole way," I said. "I... was pretty scared there for a minute."

"I had her. I knew you'd be fine." Susie shrugged it off, although she was still grinning, too. It was hard not to enjoy a pure rush like that. "We're not qutie safe here, though. Staircase is there--if we hesitate too long, a guard group will come up. Do you two need a moment?"

I was good, but Louise took a bit to breathe and calm down. Merry caught my attention as we waited. Man, I thought we were really strong, she said, but man, if we were to try to throw around winds like that with just your skill, it'd take more than we can put out, I think. Not that we can't push and pull stuff, but we, like, do individual things. This was a whole mess of force.

I mentally nodded at her. I hadn't been thinking about trying to whip up tornado-force winds with Telekinesis, but after spending a moment at it, it was pretty clearly the wrong tool for that particular job. There has to be a magic that is better suited for it. Telekinesis was always for things, not a big volume of nothing.

Merry gave me the mental equivalent of an emphatic nod. Sometimes it feels like it can do anything, but uh, not really, yeah?

Louise finally settled down, and we started to move towards the door. Even if we could, air movement isn't just random force. You have to move a whole channel of air in a loop or something, or move all the air in the battlefield. It'd be a lot of work.

Merry considered that as Susie stopped us short of opening the door. "Remember," she said, "this group is mixed modern guns and dungeon equipment, minimal magic. They're not harmless, but their skills are still pretty poor. Jerry, just keep us free from ambushes." She swapped out her gun for the brass knuckles and took a deep breath. "Go time."

The stairs only went down one floor before they were blocked off with rubble. Susie kicked the door on that floor off its hinges and immediately punched left and right at two posted guards, grabbing the second one to use as a human shield against someone with an assault rifle. I don't know if the body actually worked as a shield; for sure, it didn't work as a hostage, because the assault rifle spat hot lead even as Susie approached, charging the guy with some kind of dash boots. Three guys poured out of a nearby doorway, but in the time it took them to draw a bead on me and Louise, Susie had delivered four quick hits to the gunman and had immediately turned to the new arrivals.

Clearly she had some practice on this floor.

One of the arrivals was a man with a big two-handed axe that charged me while the other two stayed behind to get surprise attacked by Susie. I didn't bother to try fighting without Telekinesis, and in fact flared the skill into its deeper mode just to add extra cutting power when I wrapped telekinetic force around the Executioner. The merc was tough enough that I was not going to one-shot him, and my first couple strikes were nothing like critical hits, but when I finally got my brain back in fighting gear, I managed a good uppercut to his chin that tore open the shitty office drop ceiling, and then pushed myself forward slightly so my follow up crush of his brain-pan would be nice and square. That stunned him enough that I could take another couple good full-force swings on him, and that was enough.

In the momentary quiet, a part of my brain that had been filled with companionship and how fucking awesome skydiving was went back into thinking about what I would do if I were actually in this floor alone, at my current level and with my current equipment. Because yeah, maybe I could have kept all of these guys from killing me long enough to duel each down in turn, but if they got reinforcements--and Susie had suggested there were many more--I'd be in real trouble. As it was, the Executioner was a weapon from two dungeons ago, and even final boss rare drops weren't meant for this kind of level gap. And the only real weapon I had from Armand Bayou...

Actually, I still hadn't actually absorbed the Hellfire Nega-Knuckles. I'd meant to, but the stats on it didn't measure up to the Executioner, anyway. It was a rare, yes, but an early-boss rare.

Anyway, there was a group of two swordsmen and a gunner huddled up around a corner, doing the thing where they reassure themselves before all jumping out at once. I nodded in that direction, and started moving towards it, and Susie fell in behind me really quickly. They even yelled, "THREE!" like they'd been counting down as they jumped out, and the two swordsmen went low while the gunner went high. I used telekinesis to push the guy with the gun back and down at the floor, while trying to use the Executioner to at least delay the swordsman. He was... not all that great a swordsman, though he was strong, so when he blocked my attacks, they didn't seem to bother him at all. Still, he wasn't fast or skilled, and Susie moved on to tackle the gunman quickly enough that I didn't need to keep him suppressed, and then there was no question I had this guy.

That was all for this section of the building. There was a hole in the floor we used to get down to the next lower one, which would let us back to the stairs, and then one more floor of the building. We had the pattern pretty well, or so we thought.

At some point, I got distracted, and a group of enemies that I definitely sensed but didn't pay attention to snuck up on Louise.

Thinking back on it, the worst part was hearing her voice. "JERRY!" When I turned back to look, she was holding one arm where it had been hit, and a man with a spear was standing over her. I moved, but not fast enough. We were, after all, underleveled for this area--her health was lower than it should have been.

And she took a death. Her voice haunted me after that. Something about her tone was just... pure, diluted, I-did-bad. She was expecting me to keep her safe. It was my job. I failed.

There... there was no chance that this was going to become some kind of worst-case scenario, obviously. Dungeoneers died and were brought back. But picking up her corpse item didn't just feel bad. It felt wrong. It felt like 'this never happens to someone like me' wrong. And... I guess since I'd always been a solo diver, it didn't really happen to me. I didn't have party members to lose, and that's why I wasn't quite on the ball when I should have been.

Susie just patted me on the shoulder and said, "We'll get her back. Come on."

And I knew she was right, but friends didn't die. Strangers died. It felt... weird for that not to be true. Merry, I think, was kind of interested to study the structure of the corpse item while it was in my inventory. That ...was macabre, but I knew she wouldn't do anything stupid.

Anyway, although I was a little shellshocked, there wasn't really much that could threaten me, let alone Susie, and so the rest of the floor was easy, which brought us back to the C-130 for the repeat floor. I picked up the other parachute that the level offered me but didn't even bother to put it on. When the plane ruptured, I noticed the city was laid out differently--we were further from the building, and the towers with anti-air guns on them were between us and the target building. Susie'd said as much--it was still possible to go in through the top, especially for us, but most people just hit the ground for this one and did it the long way.

I wasn't in the mood for that.

I was able to catch Susie and basically fly the two of us to the outside of the tower without parachutes, and without attracting the attention of the other rooftop baddies. From there, the pattern wasn't that different from last time, especially since Susie was eager to fight with the elites. I had a somewhat brief duel with an elite Assault Trooper with an actual pair of assault rifles each held one handed, because he really wasn't much for hand to hand. He dropped, finally, a piece of rare loot, but I wasn't interested in an assault rifle. I wasn't honestly sure how that would work with my power, anyway.

That brought us, reasonably quickly, to the exit. All that there was left was the boss floor, and then a town, where I'd get to see Louise again.

"You sure you're ready?" she asked, as though I was going to say no.

I just nodded at her, but let her be the first one into the hole. From what she'd said, this next floor would be tricky. Not impossible, but... tricky. Still, I expected we would just tear through it. She'd been through here before, so I had no doubt things would work out.