Once we had gotten that all cleared up, the two of us made our way up to the hub at the center of the Fifth Floor, and began to figure out what to do next.

We had already decided that we would continue to go through and to explore the doors that were only accessible with an Insight of five or more. Those areas were new to Praxa, which made them more interesting to her, and I think that both of us were intrigued by the thought of wandering through halls and layers that no one else had stepped foot on for at least a hundred years. There was something still and quiet about those places, and something beautiful about them, too.

The downside was that we would have to be pretty careful not to end up being too suspicious. If someone else were to see us rip open a passage through the walls of the dungeon, there would be a lot of questions, and news about my status as an Interloper would be likely to spread to the furthest corners.

So, once we made our way up to the hub at the center of the Fifth Floor, we simply waited and chatted in that circular room for a little while before the other travelers there had disappeared. Then, we made our break for it, and rushed towards the entrance to the secret parts of the dungeon. Luckily, it was pretty easy to figure out when someone new was arriving on the hub floor – there was always a large flash of light, and a long pause after that – so we didn’t have to worry about being surprised. That meant that, with a bit of care and precaution, we would be able to keep my identity a secret for as long as we needed to, and to continue to explore each of the floors of the dungeon.

Once we made our way in through the door, the two of us then began to seek out monsters to fight, as we began to experiment with how to pair our own sets of skills together most effectively.

It didn’t take us too long to discover that our fighting styles were very, very compatible.

At the most basic level, Praxa was a distance fighter (a bow wielder), while I was a close range fighter (a sword wielder). That meant that I could distract the enemy, and dodge their blows, while she could pick each of them off with precise, targeted strikes.

Not only that, but because Dexterity was the stat that she had placed most of her points into, she could even do something like shoot an arrow directly past the side of my head, and into the body of the enemy. I doubt that we would want to try that out back in the real world. But in the dungeons – where the worst that could happen would be that I might take too much damage, and have to wait a while to recover – it was an enormously effective technique, and it allowed me to fight exactly as I would have fought without her, while she skillfully and nimbly damaged our foes.

Finally, since Praxa also made heavy use of her Agility statistic, and had been very well trained in her Athletics as well, it was easy for her to position herself around the battlefield, and for the two of us to rapidly make our way through each of the floors, or to run in escape from an enemy together, whenever we needed to.

I had been clearing out the dungeons quite quickly just on my own. But with Praxa, everything seemed to be going a lot more quickly. Even apart from how good it was to be in her company, I found that fighting by her side was advantageous purely from the perspective of getting my EXP gains as high as possible, and that the two of us were a very natural pairing.

That was the advantage from my perspective, at least. From hers, however, the gains were much, much more considerable.

Apparently, in the time that we had been fighting together, Praxa had been gaining about 7-8 times as much EXP as she had ever gained before. I didn’t know why that would be, exactly. But the simplest explanation was that whatever boost was provided to the Interlopers, it was also provided to the other men and women within their party. And that was the clue that finally allowed me to discover precisely what that “boost” was, exactly.

Apparently, the system automatically determined which people were in a party based on an analysis of their actions and of their intentions. So, if two or more people were all attempting to defeat the same enemy, and if the system determined that they intended to be working together to defeat that creature, then for the purposes of that battle, that group of people would form a “party.”

Once people had joined into a party, they would then also share the EXP of the defeated monsters, and they would also share some of the benefits of their stats, like “Luck," which had been designated as a “party” stat. And while the system wouldn’t tell Praxa whether or not Insight was a party stat, it would answer that question for me – and the answer apparently was that it was. Of course, the system wouldn’t tell me exactly what benefit I was sharing with Praxa. But the likeliest explanation seemed to be that the Insight stat didn’t just provide us with clues about the deeper mysteries and secrets of the past, or open up new doors in the dungeons... but that it also gave us a considerable boost to our EXP gains. And that meant that if I could ever find a way to increase my Insight, then I might be able to significantly increase the amount of power that I could acquire.

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For now, however, the net effect of all of this was that Praxa was making the most progress that she had ever made in her life, and that goals and hopes that had seemed impossibly far away in the future now suddenly seemed as if they might be right at hand.

As you might expect, this made her rather eager to continue to go exploring with me, although she certainly wasn’t pushy about that, or demanding.

As you also might expect, I was very open to that suggestion, and I welcomed the thought of her spending time with me about as warmly as I could.

An hour or two later, we had made our way up to about the middle of the Seventh Floor, as we continued to learn how to fight together, and how to put our skills to the best and the most complementary use.

The whole time, we had been making our way through the floors very slowly, being sure to pause often to appreciate the sights that were all around us, and to take a few moments just to rest, and to talk, and to enjoy each other’s company. It was a lot like going on a long hike through the mountains with a good friend, and I found myself really enjoying sitting down on the ground with Praxa, and looking at her warm, and kind face, as the two of us laughed together, and relaxed, and just talked about whatever happened to come to mind. Then, we would make our way back up again, and continue to push forward, as we fought our way through wave after wave of enemies, and danced through their blows, and brought them crashing down towards the earth.

I think that Praxa must have been a little surprised by just how long I could fight for, and how easily I seemed to recover from the damage that I took along the way. But after I had explained about the blessing of Kalia, and about my ability to regenerate my health, she seemed to understand, and to recognize what had allowed me to make so much progress in these last few days. At the same time, she informed me of how useful that blessing might be, and how much it could help me, given the way that things worked in this world.

Apparently, there were no elixirs of health here, or rings of regeneration, or equipment that doubled or tripled your Hit Points, or anything like that. Because HP was a literal measure of your life force, the ability to restore or to enhance it was probably the single most important ability that existed, and that ability was so rare that even the adventurers who had made it through the floors of the Expert Dungeons had never managed to find all that much that could help to restore a person’s health. That meant that, in practice, the only way to restore or to preserve HP was through the use of a skill called “life magic.” But because the learning of magic was forbidden up until your 65th year, and even then, was available to only a very select few, not that many people had access to that school of magic – and even for the few who did, it simply wasn’t powerful enough to give them all that considerable of a boost in their explorations. And certainly, there weren’t any spells to provide a person with eternal health, or immortality, or anything like that.

The upshot of all of this was that it wasn’t exactly going to be possible for any sort of ordinary adventurer to do much to restore their HP when they made their way through the dungeons. Add to that the slow HP regeneration that the system provided – which slowed down even further once you had taken a bit of damage – and it was clear that most people couldn’t go through the dungeons for long, and that they would have to work together if they wanted to make it more than a floor or two at a time.

But I didn’t have any of those limitations. And that, combined with the boost to my EXP gains from my high “Insight” score, was what explained the rapid progress that I had made in each of my visits to the dungeons.

As you would expect, that allowed us to get much further into the dungeons than Praxa could have anticipated. Even at our leisurely pace, we had soon cleared the whole Seventh Floor, and we had made it through quite a bit of the Eighth Floor as well.

At first, that more relaxed, soothing pace had seemed perfect for each of us. But, by the time that we had finally made it up to the Ninth Floor, each of us were eager to push our way on ahead. Getting to a new hub floor was a very big deal in the dungeons, after all, and even though I had just made it to Floor Five the day before, I was still eager to make my way up to the next resting point, and to unlock a higher place to start from for the days ahead.

So, the moment that the two of us managed to spy one of the huge, stone towers looming out in the distance, we made our way towards it as quickly as we could, fighting our way through the residents of that floor, until we had at last managed to clear a path to the tower, and to make our way up to Floor Ten.

By that point, we had been exploring our way through the dungeons for nearly five hours. That was apparently longer than Praxa had ever spent inside of a dungeon by quite a large margin, and I think that she was starting to get pretty hungry, and pretty tired, too. The only one of my advantages that I couldn’t seem to transfer over to her was my heightened degree of stamina, which meant that, even though she was engaged in the less taxing activity of firing a bow, the endless fighting and walking of the last few hours seemed to be wearing her down by now, and making her a little eager to get back home, and to rest her body.

Still, if she was as tired as I imagined that she must be, she certainly didn’t show it. As I’d begun to realize, she was too stoic to complain. But, after I suggested that I was starting to feel tired, and that I wouldn’t want to continue on too much longer, she quite readily agreed – with an eagerness that she wasn’t all that able to hide – and so the two of us prepared to head back towards home for the day.

Finally, we at last let the system know that we were ready to return, as that same flash of light enveloped us once again, and began to take us back home.