The noble’s party didn’t take Kaito’s advice, and she didn’t press further. Instead, we moved on. This level was… like a jungle, but much less dense. There were trees that didn’t look like trees and some fern-like undergrowth. I wondered if the dungeon had found some pre-historic plants to match its dinosaurs. Whatever its origin, much of it had been trampled by the rush that tried to get past Ethan and his friends. We had a fairly clear path to the next level.

“Twenty-four Threat and we’re only about a third of the way down,” Kaito mused. “It was fortunate that they did not have the [Agility] to match their level.”

There were some murmurs of agreement from his companions, but they were all quite subdued.

“I’m more concerned about where the monsters were summoned from,” I said, breaking my concealment. A bit of a waste if I needed to cast it again, but I didn’t want them thinking I’d abandoned them.

“Summoning monsters off the floor they were designed for seems strange to me,” I continued.

“Is that really such a worry though? With everything else that’s going on?” Isidre asked.

“Well…” I paused, trying to articulate my concern. “There’s some kind of intelligence that controls dungeons. Not necessarily a human one, and in some dungeons it’s more of a mechanistic thing. They work off templates and rules, and it seems like Breaking changes the rules.”

I wasn’t sure, but it hadn’t seemed to me that keeping monsters to their floor was a rule that I had to follow— it was just something that dungeons did.

“When you think about it, it would be odd if Breaking only caused one rule to change,” Kaito mused. “Although, it might be the same rule.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s no need for a rule to keep monsters in the dungeon, if there’s already a rule keeping them on their floor. It could be that rule that Breaking changes, which allows for monsters to escape.”

“Huh, you could be right,” I said. But that was the end of the immediate discussion, as we’d reached the final boss chamber— or what was left of it.

The eighth level had been described to us as being not so much a cave system as a crevice system. Narrow cliff faces that had to be descended and climbed to get through. We had brought some climbing gear, despite being told that it should be unnecessary. Our enhanced physiques should see us through, as long as we had [Climbing]. The main difficulty was supposed to be fighting the giant slugs that oozed out of smaller crevices, sticking to the walls and attacking adventures without regard for gravity.

That… would not be happening today. Starting at the seventh level boss chamber, a large cylindrical tunnel had been opened up, boring deep into the dungeon. It wasn’t lit, but I could see light at the end of it, which suggested that we were looking at the ninth level.

“Did… Duke Finley do this?” Isidre asked, awed.

“I don’t think so,” I replied. I sure hope not! The power it would take to force a passage like that astounded me, though perhaps an Earth mage might be able to do it more easily.

“The edges aren’t smashed, or burned,” I pointed out. “It looks natural. I think the dungeon did this, to release the monsters lower.”

“The slugs wouldn’t have needed this, though,” Kaito countered, “And we haven’t seen any so far.”

“They move too slowly?” I speculated, “And as to where they are…” I had seen a few things in the dark tunnel that made me suspect what we were going to see next, so I cast [Light] at maximum brightness and sent it down the tube. There was… not a river of slime, but not a pool either. The tunnel sloped down, so the remains were collecting at the bottom, but so very slowly.

Chunks of glutenous flesh, pools of ichor and slime, all glistened in the light of my spell, as they slowly made their way down the passage. There were a few live slugs as well. They seemed to have been attracted by the corpses of their fellows, chowing down on the easy source of food.

Monsters eating again, I thought. I wonder what it means?

“The next level was slimes, wasn’t it?” I said aloud. “It's hard to tell, but I think a lot of the more liquid stuff is slime corpses.”

“Gross, but I suppose it doesn’t matter— we have to keep going down,” Isidre said glumly.

“They said not to use blades on the slugs, right?” I asked. “Are we going to be alright getting past them?” I wasn’t confident that my illusions would work on the giant monsters. Their eyes were too far apart, and I doubted they had a brain to fool.

“It’s fine, I’ve got this,” Fassi said confidently. She took the lead as we headed down.

It took a while for the closest slug to notice us, but when it did it abandoned its meal and lunged for us. Well, it gave a small twitch and then slowly oozed in our direction. We had plenty of time to prepare our response. Which was Fassi. She stepped forward and cast.

“[Ice Blower],” she called, and a stream of ice and snow blasted out from her outstretched hand, like a cold flamethrower. The slugs hated it. The one nearest us started to ice up, so desperate to get away that it started moving at a slow walking pace. Other slugs further down started moving as soon as the colder air reached them. It was too dispersed to actually hurt them, but they started making themselves scarce. In twenty minutes or so, they might be gone.

We weren’t going to wait for them though. Instead, we moved forward, carefully picking our way down the slope. Fassi kept the blower going. By the time we actually reached the first slug, half of it had frozen, and the other half had torn itself free. It seemed to be regretting that move, though. Ichor and bits of its insides were sliding out of it.

The smell was… not that bad, actually, but I was still glad when Fassi turned her blower on the remains, covering it all with a nice clean layer of ice.

“Look!” Nori said, pointing further down the tunnel. I moved the light over so we could get a better look.

More corpses. Piles of fuzzy, burned bodies, about the size of a dog. Some of them were covered by slime, but others had fallen to the sides, the pile of their blackened bodies hard to see at a distance.

“Bees right? It’s got to be,” I said. Those were the main threat of the tenth level. A giant swarm of creatures that could kill us on their own. We all looked silently at the remains. There were a lot of corpses.

“Sure glad we didn’t have to fight all those,” I said nervously. “I guess Finley’s got a fire mage.”

“A good one too,” Fassi agreed. “I can’t imagine they’d have a lot of mana left after doing all this.”

We pressed on. The ninth level was a swamp, designed to hide slimes. I hadn’t thought of slimes as an ambush predator, but they could be, in the right terrain. Between Nori the [Ranger] and Orino the [Druid], I got more of an education in slimes' place in the natural ecosystem than I wanted. This level was lit at least. Even if it was a gloomy green light that matched the swamp theme.

Fassi helped us here, as well. She had another ice spell that froze the ground. It was normally used to interfere with an opponent's footing, but used on stagnant water, it gave us solid, if slippery, ground to walk on. [Ice Blower] could have done the same thing, but this was more efficient.

This level was more or less intact, although a swath had been cut through the trees, vines and bushes. It led in a straight line that we were pretty sure led to the exit. We followed it. There were a few corpses along the way, but nothing like the numbers we’d seen on the top level. Not slimes, they wouldn’t have been visible, but giant birds. We couldn’t examine them easily without going off the ice path, but I guessed a wingspan of three or four metres.

There were also some slimes still alive on this level. Presumably fresh spawns. There weren’t many of them, and they were mostly put off by the ice. Some of them tried dropping down on us, but the cut path we were following meant that there weren’t any branches over us. Something to thank the Duke for, I guess.

We pressed on. The boss chamber for this level, a lake that supposedly contained a giant alligator — thirty metres long!— was missing. Just a hole to the next level.

Kaito was disappointed. “It would have been quite a sight,” she said. “And relatively easy to kill, if we were agile enough.”

Personally, I was glad there was another overpowered monster we didn’t have to fight.

“The boss chambers seem to act like airlocks,” I said. “You can’t progress until you’ve beaten the boss and sometimes, no one else can come in until your party is finished. Part of Breaking must involve getting rid of those chokepoints— and the floor rewards.”

We hadn’t seen any floor reward chests, open or closed. Irritating, but it wasn’t like we’d earned them. The party nodded, but Zichy had one question.

“What does any of that have to do with air?” The wolf-kin asked.

“It’s just an expression,” Kaito told her, “I’ll explain it later.”

We continued on.

The next level was green— mostly green. There were a lot of other colours. It featured giant plants, mostly giant climbing vines. They twisted around each other, filling the giant chamber entirely. Each vine was broad enough to walk on, if it happened to be level. Taken together, they formed a giant maze that had to be walked, climbed, and slid down to get to the other side. The combination of scents from all the different giant flowers was intoxicating.

The duke hadn’t left us an easy path to follow this time. I guess you couldn’t just cut down everything between you and the exit. If you tried, you’d end up cutting a vine that you needed to walk on… or were walking on. The floor was a long way down

“Remember that the bees were not the only danger of this level,” Kaito warned. “The flowers release pheromones and pollen that have many varied effects.”

I had been planning Phantasmal face masks, but Fassi had a better idea. “I have an [Air Bubble] spell, she said. “I can cast it on everyone, it should protect us as long as we don’t approach a flower too closely.

With our breathing secured, we all looked to Nori to find us a route.

“The duke knows this dungeon better than anyone,” Kaito pointed out, “These vines may not take footprints, but there must be some sign of his passage.”

It was true. The vines weren’t laid out in a manner convenient for foot traffic. They had little branches growing off them, and the aforementioned flowers. They ranged from about a foot across to enormous blossoms three metres wide. I couldn’t see Duke Finley slipping through all this mess without a trace.

Sure enough, after a brief scout, Nori told us that she’d found a route. That should have been it for this level, but it wasn’t that easy. Sure, the duke seemed to know a route that was fairly direct and avoided the worst of the flowers. He’d burned out a few spots, probably flowers that he couldn’t avoid. But the route itself was… strenuous.

We had found a use for the climbing gear after all. Some of us could make the jumps that the duke had managed, but the rest of us needed a rope strung across the gap so we could cross. I wondered if all of his party were just as athletic, or if he’d had to resort to similar methods.

“You’ve got Air Magic, but you don’t have a fly spell?” I’d asked Fassi after our first fraught crossing.

“Sorry, it’s not as much use in the forest as you’d think,” she said. “Just plain jumping gets you just about anywhere in a regular forest canopy.”

Despite the hardships, we managed to progress to the end of the floor. As we approached we once again heard the screeches of a large group of monsters, making me think that we’d managed to catch up with the Duke.