"Why are you so eager to get to the dungeon?" asked Cluma from her bedroom the next morning, where she was in the middle of changing.

"I'm not, in particular," I answered from their living room.

A cloud of thoughtful silence was the only response for the next minute before she left her room and stared at me.

"You're embarrassed about something," she declared with absolute confidence.

"What... What makes you think that?" I asked, panicking slightly.

"Because your embarrassed faces are stupidly cute, so I've memorised every one of them."

"You're imagining things," I lied, wishing once more that Erryn had never made her Peter-can-lie patch.

"Fine. Keep your silence. I'll figure it out eventually."

I needed to ensure mum and dad never left the village again, or found any other way to interact with anyone from Dawnhold. Maybe I could build a wall around the village?

Thankfully, Cluma dropped the subject, leaving us ready to return to our dungeon delve. A tooth turned out to be a poor medium through which to use [Mana Sight], and the snakes on floor four were tiny and hard to see, but having Cluma activate [Stealth] before her teleport would ensure her safety. I couldn't do much for myself other than activate my buff spells beforehand, but if there was anything hanging around my teleport point, Cluma would stab it before my teleport even started.

Alas, Cluma couldn't stab the mud. Or, more accurately, stabbing the mud didn't achieve anything.

"It wasn't this bad yesterday, was it?" I complained, climbing to my feet. At least the weird way [Redistribute] worked meant that I hadn't ended up with mud on the inside of my armour. Or, even worse, inside my mouth.

"You weren't lying in it yesterday. At least it's not raining."

"True. Any idea which direction we need to go?"

Cluma sniffed around and pointed. "That way. I think."

"Think?"

"Yeah. Those trees look familiar. We definitely came from over there, and were headed that way."

"Wait, so you can't smell the trail?"

"I'm sure I'll pick it back up again!"

I pondered. I agreed with the direction we arrived from, and the direction we were heading in, but was less certain about trusting her to pick the trail back up. What else could we do, though?

Then I remembered the way she had sniffed out the mana core yesterday. Did mana cores really smell, conventionally? I certainly couldn't pick up any scent from them. And she'd picked up the great dungeon, too, before looking at it. She was sensitive to the flows of mana, her trait said, but it didn't say it was only via sight. It was annoying having her take over what should be my territory, but...

"Cluma, can you smell anything by there?" I asked, pointing in a direction where I was using [Expert Mana Control] to compress the mana.

"Mud?"

Hmm. Maybe not then. I'd been hoping she could smell the flow of mana as it moved through the dungeon, and sniff out the source, but apparently that was just wishful thinking. It wasn't as if I could see it with [Mana Sight]. It was a shame Darren wasn't interested in delving; I bet he'd be able to pick up any density gradient, no matter how subtle.

We set off in our guessed direction, while I spent my time extending [Mana Sight] to the greatest range I could manage, looking for clues as to our orientation. Alas, Cluma failed to pick up a new trail, but did at least succeed in keeping us on a relatively straight path, and we hit the dungeon wall somewhere away from the exit.

"Hmm... Left or right?" she asked, snatching one of the springing snakes from mid-air as it leapt at me. She'd been utterly unbothered by the snakes, on account of still being invisible. Thankfully, the snakes on these early floors seemed to rely on vision or hearing, rather than scent, which I knew some snakes back on Earth did. When the effectiveness of [Stealth] became one of the reasons to pick this place over the demon dungeon, we weren't factoring in Cluma needing to keep her odour suppression disabled.

Hang on, weren't there some snakes on Earth that had thermal vision. Did [Stealth] mask infrared as effectively as visible light? And would a silence enchantment do anything about vibrations through solids as well as the air? Well, it's fine. I'd taught her well enough that she was never going to drop her guard just because she thought she was invisible.

"Probably right, given the angle we hit the wall at. We must have veered left at some point. Hopefully, we didn't miss it by much."

"Sorry."

"It's fine," I said, waving her concerns away. "It's not like I could have done better."

"If we'd gone to the demon dungeon, we could have just followed a map."

"And it would have had its own set of other problems. No point second guessing ourselves now. I can go drop a teleport beacon outside it at some point, anyway, and we could alternate. Preferably after getting another level or two of [Detach], because I'm out of links."

I had one outside here, one I'd left in the Emerald Nest on my way through and the one I needed to reserve for saving our progress in a dungeon. Then I had one in the village, Dawnhold, Synklisi and the Sapphire Peaks, and the finger that I'd left in the care of the sociopathic slime. That only left me with one for playing around with. If I teleported out of the dungeon, I couldn't even remove my fake ears. Or my real ones, should the mood take me.

It turned out that we had gone further off course than I'd hoped, and with the forest growth, following the wall was surprisingly hard, but another quarter hour was enough to reach floor five.

"Nothing," said Cluma, after sniffing around for a while.

"We'll just have to follow the wall, then. We should still get to floor seven today, even if we can't take the direct route."

Cluma nodded unhappily, and we started to follow the wall clockwise around the floor.

ding

Skill [Danger Sense] advanced to level 11

Responding to the skill, I spun around, hoping to see what had caused it. A blur flashed in front of me, impacting the stockade of trees to my left and showering me with splinters of wood.

Trying to show at least some professionalism in front of my junior delver, I held in the confused 'what?' that tried to escape, and focused on the impact site. It contained a tiny snake, no more than five centimetres in length, which then shrunk as I watched down to only three. It fixed its tail into the wood, then pointed at me.

[Danger Sense] flared again, but I was one step ahead of it, swinging my sword-staff directly into its path. There was a clang, and a very flat and even more dead snake rebounded off.

Bullet serpent, level 5 (Dead)

Bullet... They weren't kidding. With speed like that, it was only level five? Then again, the impact with my sword hadn't been particularly powerful. If one hit me, I doubt it would have done much, which raised the question of why [Danger Sense] had fired. Since I knew those skills were tied to our own perception of what counted as 'danger', perhaps it had just picked up on the fact that I didn't want to look stupid in front of Cluma.

"Was that a monster?" asked Cluma. "Where did it come from?"

"No idea. Given how small it was, I must have missed it with [Mana Sight]."

I spread out my [Mana Sight], this time focusing my efforts on picking up the tiny monsters.

"Oh."

"What's wrong?"

"There's dozens of the things in front of us."

I'd questioned Sara on the abilities of monsters in this dungeon, and she'd clearly said there was nothing to watch out for if we didn't let them bite or constrict us. Firing themselves like bullets should have counted. But if it impacted on my staff like that, what would happen if they impacted on my armour?

I gingerly stepped forward until I attracted the attention of a couple of more the monsters, which aimed and fired themselves at me, splattering harmlessly against my breastplate.

"Okay, so they're stupidly fast and can fire themselves from a huge distance, but can't actually do any damage, and they kill themselves on impact. I guess we can just ignore them?"

"What strange monsters. What's the point?" asked Cluma.

"My only guess is that they aren't designed for people with rank four enchanted armour." They hadn't splattered on impact with the wooden wall, so it's possible they'd survive impact with our armour if it didn't have the durability enchantment.

The impacts destroyed the cores, too, so there really was nothing for us on this floor. We could dodge the initial attacks, or try to attack at extreme range, or Cluma could scout far enough ahead to take them out before they saw me, but for mere level five cores, it didn't seem worth it. We wanted to get past floor ten, not waste time farming these upper floors.

Ignoring the barrage of ineffectual bullets, we made our way to the floor exit.

"Where's the floor boss?"

"Downstairs? Or Sara did say they were optional, so maybe we missed it?"

It turned out that the exit portal on this floor didn't immediately lead to the next, but to a separate chamber. It was decorated like a small clearing in the jungle, the room being circular and surrounded by the same impassible wall of tree trunks as the walls of the main floors. Four portals were present. The one we'd just come from, leading back to floor five, was opposite another through which I could see an equally large jungle, presumably floor six. To my right, I could see the delver's encampment. That must be the one-way portal that led out of the dungeon.

That just left the portal to the left of me, which wasn't transparent like the others. I could see light through it, but the view was distorted, and I couldn't make anything out. That must be the boss chamber, and perhaps the weird state of the portal was due to it being occupied. Another delver group was waiting outside it, consisting of six humans.

And, as ever, I immediately attracted their attention. My fake ears may not have been on display, but with Cluma as invisible as ever, I still looked alone, and wasn't fully grown.

"I assume that's the boss chamber?" I asked, figuring I might as well take advantage.

"Yes, it is. This is your first time here, but you're running the dungeon solo?"

I didn't need to resolve his misunderstanding myself, because Cluma did it for me, in her usual physical manner.

"No, I'm not on my own," I added, redundantly. "Patting her on the head is the quickest way to get her to let go."

"Oi!" complained Cluma. "They're supposed to hug back first!"

"You know, you really shouldn't do that in a dungeon. If you sneak up on people and hug them without warning, you might get mistaken for a monster. People could get hurt."

Cluma blurred into visibility, struggling with a difficult concept. "Hugs could hurt people? But surprise hugs are the best hugs!"

"Maybe. Just not in a dungeon, where people are going to be twitchy and likely to react violently to sudden, unexplained impacts. You can get away with it in Dawnhold because you're famous, or at least infamous, among the delvers, but you shouldn't do it where no-one knows you."

"What... exactly am I looking at here?" asked the human I'd struck up the conversation with.

Well, I suppose we were long past time to introduce ourselves.

"I'm Peter. This is Cluma. We're both fourteen, and we've just moved here from Dawnhold."

"Wanted to get away from civilization, huh? Well, I'm Michael, and this is my group. We're just farming steel at the moment."

Given the setup that seemed to allow leaving the boss chamber and immediately re-entering, farming boss chests here must be highly efficient.

"Can we join the queue then? We aren't farming, but we do want to take on the boss at least once."

"You can nip in ahead of us, but are you sure? It's a lot tougher than the mobs you had to face to get here."

It would be nice to have some sort of intimidation skill, or something to passively display to people our comparative strengths. Everyone in the group of six were in their low second rank. There wasn't anyone over level thirty among them. I was up to seventy-seven. Even Cluma was nearing fifty.

"I don't think we'll struggle," I said, smiling, just as a second party emerged from the portal. It flickered and turned transparent, ready to admit the next set of guests.

How hard could the boss of the fifth floor be?