Flora and Amara left the old water mage after he couldn't provide more answers to Flora. She would love to know more about the composition of the potion Tim Bluthe used for his trashbin composter.

Back at the brick building, she donned her mech-suit and connected to a second octopus.

5 mana-reg Messenger Mech-Suit

15 mana-reg Octopussy Aito

15 mana-reg Octopussy Aidan

5 mana-reg Bliz

1 mana-reg Multitool

1 mana-reg Wavering Ring

1 mana-reg OnyxLightning Plasma Sword

2 mana-reg free (but two nocks connected to deactivated turret-traps in her quick-access belt)

Most of the villagers had gone home, but the mayor sent her off with some stiff encouraging words.

"We are rooting for you, Auntie Flow." She felt Ralf's short sentence came from his heart.

Inside the building, a staircase let upward. On top of it, a trashy approached.

Bliz and the octopussies joined her.

The trashy fell when Flora's second bolt hit. It left a small pile of glowing loot.

Name: Corrupted Goo

Type: Crafting Material

Tier: 1

"Aidan, it's your job to pocket the loot. I won't touch this stuff." Flora was glad she integrated access to her inventory to the octopussy.

On the top level of the building, a door let to the next room, which contained pools with an overhead crossing.

Two more trashies blocked the way. After the team killed them, Flora analyzed the fluids in the pools with Measure and Identify. The basins nearest to the entry of the brick building were clear, but the closer they walked to the other side, the more rose the toxicity levels.

Using Zoom, Flora discovered filters connecting the pools. She recorded the rune-schemes.

A tattered lattice blocked the path. Before the trashies had corroded a jagged hole, it gated a circular tunnel opening. Flora swiped her badge across a panel, and the mesh went up.

A damp trail with drains on both sides led into the darkness. The acrid stink, which was barely noticeable on the outside, now assaulted Flora's nostrils.

Bliz illuminated the immediate surroundings, but Flora fetched a headlight for Octo-Aidan and herself.

As soon as they activated the lights, they spotted the next trashy only a few meters away. Flora yelped in surprise and had to fight to keep her balance on the slippery floor.

Her pets pelted the elemental. Even with Bliz's cold-effect, it still advanced close enough to swipe Aidan and Bliz in the murky water with its mop.

!

The trashy flew back, and Flora followed up with a Lightning Bolt while Aito activated Rapid-Fire.

It picked itself up and came at them again.

"Why won't this garbage die?" Flora exclaimed.

"The Recommended Group Size of two is higher than the others', Milady," Aidan answered while he used six tentacles to crawl out of the channel and two together with his eyes for shooting.

This time the trashy swung its mop at Flora.

The narrow path offered no room to dodge, so Flora activated Plasma Sword-Dance and countered.

The mop bounced off her mech-suit, and she lost only a sliver of hit-points, but her plasma sword left smoking gashes in the piled garbage.

Before it could swing again, the elemental crumbled and then dissolved.

"Aidan, keep track of their type, rating, RGS, and level. Notify me if anything changes."

This time no loot-pile appeared with its distracting glow, so a yellow patch on the floor stood out.

Name: Corrupted Patch

Type: Trap

Description: The death of a corrupted elemental spread toxicity.

Effect: Chance to poison, Chance to corrupt.

"What does corruption mean in this context?" Flora was sure that nobody of her team would accept bribes from trashies.

"It has a similar effect like Disturb Connection but targets animals and elementals. The owner loses control over their pets. Additionally, corruption affects behavior negatively."

"Bliz can go evil because of it?" Flora stared at the icicle, worried. "Sweetie, I better banish you. Thank you for escorting me, but this environment isn't safe for elementals."

Bliz zapped around Flora and swung from left to right.

"You want to stay?"

Now, she swayed forward and backward, which Flora interpreted as a nod.

"Alright, but don't walk into the traps."

"She can't see them, Milady."

"Bliz, listen to the Aidan, he will warn you about the corrupted patches."

The elemental nodded again and bounced around the patch after Octo-Aidan had circled it with its tentacle.

As Flora sighed, because of the antics of the reckless elemental, the next trashy appeared from behind the corner.

This time, Flora electrified it twice before she had to melee.

After it dissolved, Flora rounded the corner and discovered it was a crossing.

"We need a map. Aidan, please create one... nevermind, I'm sure the mayor has one. We are going back."

The mayor still stood at the barricade when they arrived.

He stared at them wide-eyed.

"Nothing to worry about, Mayor. I just came for a chart of the sewage-system."

Visibly relieved, he sent the data to Flora.

"Aidan, remind me in advance to ask for a map when we get similar quests."

Flora retraced her path to the crossing and measured the toxicity levels along the way. The most distinct differences she received at the intersection. The values doubled in the tunnel to the dungeon.

Now and then, another trashy attacked them. Flora used them as test-subject for which type of spell hurt them the most.

Smite, as her highest leveled skill, was the clear winner. Fire did a lot of damage as well but canceled out Bliz's cold-effect. Next came water; the secondary effect of acid burns affected the elementals while Metal's bleeding and Wood's poisoning didn't. Kinetic, Ice, and Lightning shone because they hindered the advancement of the enemies.

At the next crossing, Flora tested the different directions again. The pattern stayed true, the path to the dungeon had the highest toxicity.

Toxic Aura: - 10 HP per minute.

Flora wondered why she didn't receive a debuff, and Aidan told her she was resisting the aura.

Two trashies awaited them. Flora welcomed the added challenge because she wanted to test her crowd control.

The left elemental got stuck in it, while the team shot at the right elemental.

Aito and Aidan activated Rapid Fire, and the trashy dissolved before it reached the group.

The trap still shackled the second elemental, and the team used the opportunity to kill it unimpeded.

"Don't activate Rapid Fire at the same time, dears. I want to have one of them ready for eventualities."

"Beep, beep." Aito objected and showed Flora a forum thread about focusing firepower.

"I'm sorry, sweetie. I have no patience for it at the moment, but we do it your way until I have read the article."

Flora learned a lot from the continual fighting. Her experience was slowly catching up to her skill levels. Standing in the distance and methodically casting spells on the slow-moving piles of garbage was no challenge, but Flora was far from bored. She tried to kill them before they reached her team, and her casting grew sharper with each elemental they defeated.

The next trashy stood alone, but a few meters behind him, another one approached.

They fired at the first, and when the second caught up, Flora switched targets and transformed it into a sheep.

Then she cast a lightning bolt at the first trashy, but the lightning jumped over to the sheep, and it transformed back in an angry elemental.

Both of her foci featured an effect for spells to perpetuate, although the Onyx Lightning only for lightning spells and the Wavering Wave-Ring only for secondary effects.

Flora reminded herself not to forget it.

The next lightning bolt killed the first target, and Flora pushed back the second one just as it arrived. When Rapid Fire came off cooldown, the octopussies shredded the trashy.

Finally, the team reached the entry to the dungeon.

Crudely etched runes surrounded the familiar shimmering screen. A skull glowed on the portal.

"The runes don't look like the work of a professional. I would expect something more sophisticated from the Halls of Magic. Additionally, I haven't noticed visible runes around the other portals I have seen. However, this is my first dungeon..." Flora scratched her head. "Aito, find some pictures of other dungeon entrances."

"The skull symbolizes it's a heroic dungeon, Milady." Aidan highlighted a console on the wall.

Dungeon: Garbage Disposal

Description: Trash elementals have overrun the village Tsoville. Rescue the villagers from the peril.

Heroic Mode:

Difficulty: A

RGS: 3

Normal Mode (Disabled):

Difficulty: C

RGS: 3

Three filled leaderboards for the normal dungeon followed (1 Player, 2 Players, 3 Players). The leaderboards for the heroic mode were empty.

"Nobody said anything about heroic, right? I reckon it's one of the changes."

Aito displayed pictures of dungeon entrances to Flora. No runes were visible on the doorframes.

"Someone messed with this instance. Okay, we assumed this before, but now we are sure of at least one method they have used."

Flora recorded several hundred runes. She recognized only a few of them. But even if she would know all of them, the scheme's complexity exceeded her understanding.

"I don't want to mess with it, but I even less want to enter the instance with it active. Recommendations?"

"I can overlay the runes with their translations. We have records of even some of the sub-rune-schemes, Milady."

Aito displayed an explosion.

"We explode if we mess with it, or should I destroy the scheme?"

She held up two tentacles, then paused, took one down, and waved the other.

"Oh, well. Do you have a suggestion, Bliz?"

The icicle froze and then hid behind the octopussies at high speed.

"Let's go with Aidan's option first."

Text appeared over single runes, and Aidan circled some areas and wrote the name of the whole sub-rune-scheme.

"So what do we have here? A containment rune-scheme, nice, we are starting with the hot issue. But the connection to the next sub-diagram is inverted, isn't it? Those runes are hard to read, but it would be logical, the elementals do escape out of it. Then we have dimensional stuff... increasing more dimensional stuff, relating to entry stuff - seems like the entry to a dimension." Flora rambled.

She had a flashback to long-forgotten Latin lessons and figuring out whether the Romans defeated the Gauls or the other way around. While in school, she had always betted on the Romans to win because they had written the books, here she had a hard time deciding what the rune-scheme wanted to contain and what to allow entry.

Flora sat for over an hour in front of the portal and puzzled. Occasionally, a trashy appeared, but it never survived long.

"The more I look at it, the more I believe the scheme is faulty. Maybe the spillage of the elementals is incidental, merely a side-effect." Flora tried to stare the diagram into submission. "Let's destroy it. Take cover."

The runes were etched with acid. Only transforming or destroying the stone would remove them. Because enough rune-schemes had exploded in Flora's face when she produced the slightest mistakes, she took no chance.

From 20 meters away, she fired rockets at the portal. The wall stayed immaculate.

"In the Cetviwos, many areas are protected against collateral damage, Milady."

"System and Craidla, I want to destroy the rune-schemes on the portal. The etched ones, not the original ones."

The wall wasn't impressed.

Flora walked into spell range.

The stone melted. When the first rune vanished, the frame started to pulse.

Flora dove away as the shockwave hit her and threw her into the murky channel.

"Ugh!"

"At least, transforming them worked."

Flora inspected the scheme, and it was inactive. After refreshing her shield, she smoothened the rest of the door frame.

"Milady, your quest updated. You completed the objectives: 'Prevent the Spillage.' and 'Find out what caused the Spillage'. You can hand it in or finish the bonus objectives: 'Clear the Sewage.', 'Clear the Instance.' and 'Catch the Culprit.'"

"Let's go for the bonus."