“Maybe with gravy? Or with sun tomatoes?” Niff asked the centaur.

“Maybe,” the cleric groaned.

“Or maybe if you roast it right it might taste like beef?” Niff pondered.

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never engaged in cannibalism.”

“Oh come on! They have whole restaurants dedicated to your kind! I mean, it must taste good for them to be that popular right? At least for the zombies. I’d never eat any sentient being! No way!”

“What if it was a very smart cow?” Darvind proposed.

“Never! I’d name it, and then I’d take it with me and make it my friend!”

I smiled.

This conversation had been going on for about ten minutes now. Niff had started right before we’d reached the dungeon entrance and she hadn’t stopped. I looked around. There was barely anything here. The whole dungeon was sparse, only having trees and ruins.

And even then, the tree looked dead and twisted. From what I understood it was a special type of tree, biomancied exactly for this dungeon. They had a problem when this place had first opened up. Adventurers would get swarmed by undead and be unable to flee or hide. The dungeon was too open, too flat.

So someone had biomancied trees that fed off of death mana. The trees had no leaves and twisted and turned in weird configurations. They had no nutritional value, at all and they existed mainly as coverage for adventurers, something to hide behind or burn for firewood.

They towered over us as we walked through the place. The ground was uneven in some spots, with roots and fallen trees blocking the path occasionally. We were currently making our way to the bronze rank area. Velin and I were on the lookout for now. We were still too close to the entrance for any real dangers to be present.

This area saw all types of adventurers, from copper to gold to even mithril or even divine rank if the deeper parts of the dungeon called for it. So any monsters that wandered by or spawned here would have a tough time sticking around.

“Well, I’d never eat a dwarven steak. It’d taste like mushrooms or pebbles or something.” Darvind grunted.

“How would you know what dwarves taste like?”

“I’m a dwarf lass, and I’ve bitten my tongue and nails before, and other dwarfs on occasion.”

“Well, what have you got against mushrooms?”

“Nothin', I just wouldn’t want to eat them by themselves.”

“I think a good dryad salad wouldn’t be too bad, though I hope to never try one,” Velin added.

“You’d be an undead zombie who needs sentient flesh to survive and ya still manage to eat plants?” Darvind asked.

“Meat appalls me.”

“Flavor appalls you, donkey.”

“Not as much as you do you fat boulder.”

“Smartass.”

“Footstool.”

“Horse.”

“Earthworm.”

“Drunk.”

“Prune.”

“Dullard.”

“Am not!”

“Why do you two hate each other?” Niff asked, quickly getting between the two.

“I don’t hate ‘em.”

“He’s not important enough to despise.

Niff watched with a small frown as the two men glared at each other.

“They're fine Niff,” I said as the mouse quickly walked up beside me.

“Why do they fight so much?” Niff asked me.

“They’re not fighting. It’s just banter.”

“But Velin said Darvind is a footstool and Darvind called Velin an ass!”

I looked at the little mouse. Her frown had deepened and her ears had flattened out a little. Even her tail seemed to wave with animosity.

“Did someone… was someone mean to you because you’re a critter-kin?”

Niff nodded.

“It took me a whole year to get my adventurer’s license. A whole year. I was qualified from the very beginning but that damn secretary did the most she could to try and talk me out of it. And the man in charge of the classes wouldn’t let me take the test because he felt I wasn’t strong enough yet! I had to take that damn course twice!”

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

Niff stomped the ground and kicked up some wet mud onto her shoes.

“All because I’m small. Even when I got my license they tried to talk me out of going to this dungeon. That and my parents and everyone around me saying I can’t be a good adventurer because of what? My size? My race? It’s unfair.”

I nodded at her. Species-based discrimination was common enough but I hadn’t thought of what Niff might have been through herself. Back on the train she’d gotten livid at being called a rat. And she had sided with me regardless of my race. Well maybe because of my race now that I thought about it.

She might have felt sympathy for me, even comradery in some regard. I was deemed dangerous for being a half-demon and she was deemed weak for being mouse-kin. It was judgment for traits we couldn’t control.

She really was like a kid.

“I get it Niff, but those two don’t think less of each other because of their species. In fact, they respect each other regardless of it.”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

“It’s like having a sibling and bantering with them all the time. You say some mean stuff but you each care for each other at the end of the day right?”

“I guess.”

“And besides, they don’t talk to either of us that way because they know where our boundaries lay, right?”

The small mouse nodded.

“They’re just messing with each other, nothing more-”

Both Niff and I stiffened, our heads turned towards the sky. The other two did the same as well and Velin moved to stand beneath a tree. With practice ease, he pulled his bow and arrow and struck.

The arrow flew through the air, slint and enchanted. It approached the bird from below and struck it right in the stomach.

I raised my hands and cast.

Wind.

It was another cantrip. It was mostly useless and caused a nice breeze to come towards you. At best it could be used to camouflage scent but if you elevated it to the third tier it would increase in power from a small breeze to a gust.

I guided the bird’s corpse as it fell down, the wind pushing it in our direction. Eventually, it landed a hundred feet away from us, its frail bones crushing itself.

We walked over to it, Niff constantly smelling the air to see if she could get anything.

“Smells dead to me.”

“That’s because it is dead. And it was dead before we took it out as well. This dungeon has no natural life aside from the trees.”

I lifted the corpse with telekinesis, raising it closer for Velin and me to look at.

“I’ve never heard of a naturally undead bird?” The centaur spoke. “The body is in good condition, aside from where I shot it that is. Bird bones are frail too, it’s a wonder they killed it without breaking any.”

“They’re rare,” I said while turning the bird in the air. “But this isn’t one of them. This is a raised undead. There’s no rot and the feathers are all there. It was probably killed with an instant death spell too.”

Velin and I nodded at the same time and we looked at each other in thought.

“Is that a lover’s gaze or would you two lads like to explain what you’re thinkin’?”

“Ah, well you see, this is a created undead, made by a necromancer,” Velin stated.

“Right,” Darvind nodded.

“Undead here have to be specially identifiable. Zombies, pets, servants, whatever they are, if they’re in here they have to wear an identifiable badge. That’s one of the rules for this dungeon,” I added.

“And this crow has no badge?” Darvind asked.

“Exactly.”

“What if they forgot to put it on?” Niff asked. “They could have made a mistake, no?”

“Maybe,” I commented.

“Well, what are the alternatives?” Darvind asked.

“That something in here raised the crow.”

Velin reached into his robes and pulled out a notebook. He flipped through the pages until he seemed to have found something.

“Yes, one of the missing bronze rankers was registered with a crow as a scouting undead. As well as three zombies, and according to the necromancer’s guild, he came in here with a refined corpse, hoping to make it into a death knight.”

“So there’s an evil necromancer in here, eh?” Darvind grunted. “Well hate to break it to you lads, but there are a shit ton of those in this place.”

“Yup! Lots of liches in here!” Niff yipped.

“Yes, but those are all permitted beings,” Velin spoke. “A lot of the subspace dungeons act like borders between the Asrin Realm and whatever other realms they connect to. This one acts like the border between our realm and the realm of the dead. But that doesn’t mean there are no laws here. Any lich permitted to exist here wouldn’t dare to kill adventurers. That would put a gold rank bounty on their head.”

“That’s what happened to the last lich, and he was an undead that came from the Land of the Dead,” I added.

“I heard about that. Bastard killed forty-five adventurers unprovoked and hid it for weeks. Then the goldies hit ‘em hard, turned his phylactery to dust,” Darvind said.

I nodded.

“So it’s an evil lich then?” Niff asked.

“No,” Velin replied. “We’ve seen things like this before. It might be an evil lich or one of the native citizens. There’s too much going on to say, it is merely a piece of the puzzle.”

Velin was right. This was weird but without any corroborating clues, this was nothing. It could be an unmarked undead, or it could be an undead made by one of the native liches. Hells, it could even have been abandoned here and risen on its own. There was no definitive way to know.

“Niff, can you smell the crow for us?” I asked. “See if you can smell anything living on it.”

The mouse-kin nodded, cheerily stepping over to the crow's corpse and putting her nose close to it.

“Hm. Yeah! I can smell something on it! Don’t know what though, can’t pick up anything else!”

“Is it a lion-kin? That’s was the species of the person the crow belonged to,” Velin added.

Niff sniffed again, her snout almost touching the horse.

“No. I don’t know what it is but it smells like a lion-kin… but it isn’t one, ya know?”

Velin turned his head and Darvind scratched his beard.

“What do you mean Niff?”

“Ah… it’s-” she frowned. “It’s always weird with you no-scent folk. I don’t know how you live like that, not smelling anything.”

Niff scratched her head for a moment, sniffing the corpse a bit more and thinking.

“It’s- it’s like seeing a statue in the distance and thinking it’s a person but then realizing it’s not, ya know? It looks like a person, it stands like a person but it’s just… not.”

“Interesting,” Velin said writing something down furiously in a notepad. “What part of him doesn’t smell right? His fur? His eyes? Or is it his organs?”

“No no, it’s not any of that! He smells like a lion-kin with his body… it’s just something else that smells off, like…like… oh I don’t know how to explain it.”

“His mind?” I asked. “Or his soul? Does it smell like his soul doesn’t fit with his body?”

“YES!” Niff yelled with wide eyes. “Yes! That’s exactly it! He smells like a lion-kin with his body but not with his mind!”

“What?” Velin muttered.

“Ya can smell soul?” Darvind added. “Bet his smells like horse dung.”

“What do you mean his soul smells different?” Velin asked looking from me to the mouse-kin and ignoring the dwarf.

“Niff said she could smell I wasn’t evil back on the train. That’s her whole reason for partying up with me, right?” I said to Niff.

The small mouse-kin nodded proudly.

“She wasn’t kidding. She can literally smell the nature of things, beyond the physical realm.”

“But how? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“A racial gift, or more likely a racial blessing gifted to them by their patron god.”

“Vaymir, the Lord of Small, blessed be her name,” Niff said with her hands clasped together for prayer. “She was the reason my people were able to survive and trade in the wild lands instead of being captured and enslaved.”

“Amazing,” Velin mutters.

“Yeah, but that narrows down how these people are going missing,” I replied.

“Yes,” Velin said with a nod. “Possession.”