An Unbound Soul

The lacuna wolves proved simple enough to fight. I'd step into a room to attract their attention, and they'd charge, both with their real selves and the displaced fakes. The rapid movement made the disturbances in the room's mana more obvious, giving the invisible Cluma an opportunity to attack. If there was more than one, I could join in myself, too, either with lightning or simply holding out my sword-staff and letting the dumb beasts impale themselves.

Alternatively, I could just bathe the room in raw spatial mana and shatter their displacement trick to pieces.

"Cheater," complained Cluma.

"It's not my fault if I happen to counter the monsters in this dungeon. It's not as much of a cheat as I expected, though."

"Huh? How so?"

"Back in the institute, raw spatial affinity looked really scary. Raw time affinity killed a patch of grass, even. Certainly not the sort of stuff I'd want to be hit by. Yet these monsters seem fine. I've tried blasting them with both types of affinity, and [Eye of Judgement] didn't show their health drop by a single point."

In my never-ending search for new, magical weapons, weaponising raw affinity mana seemed like a no-brainer. I'd already weaponised soul affinity, albeit not without considerable side effects, so after we'd put in the effort at the institute to prove I could create spatial and time affinity without accidentally killing myself, hitting monsters with it was an obvious next step. Alas, it simply didn't do anything.

Monsters had vastly different biology than 'real' creatures. Yes, many of them had mouths and digestive systems, and would even eat stuff if the opportunity presented, but they didn't need to. They lived off mana. Maybe that was what protected them, or maybe it was the System, but I simply couldn't get any affinity mana inside of them, which meant no having different parts of their hearts running at different speed, or other such biologically disruptive fun.

What my affinity mana could do was smash their carefully laid out constructs. At least for now. As the mana grew denser, their magic grew more sturdy. Exploding the ribbons on floor seventeen had felt like tearing up paper, but now I was tearing cardboard. How many more floors until I was trying to tear adamantite?

"But it's no challenge," she said. "I've barely had any skill levels since we started this dungeon, despite us already being so deep. If you keep cheating like that, we're going to end up hitting a floor where you can't cheat, and we'll suddenly find ourselves way over our heads."

"That's true," I admitted. I'd one-shotted the previous five bosses because fighting them conventionally would have been problematic with our skillset. Given the floor we were on, fighting anything conventionally wouldn't be completely straightforward. If I leaned on mana manipulation to cheese my way deeper and came across a monster I couldn't deal with, we'd be in trouble. "Okay, I won't disrupt their... illusions? Displacements? I'm not actually sure what I should call it."

For being so interesting, the dungeon soon became samey. Each floor had its gimmick, but once we'd figured it out and learnt the patterns of the monsters, it just became a trudge to make it to the exit. It didn't help that we were taking far longer over each floor than we had at the start, due both to the tougher monsters and the growing complexity of the mazes. Despite restricting my use of [Expert Mana Control], [Mana Sight] was enough of a cheat on its own.

"If you think mana manipulation is cheating, what are your thoughts on mana senses?" I asked. "There's no way we'd be able to work our way through this maze so easily without being able to locate the portals."

"But plenty of people have mana sense skills."

"Plenty of people have mana manipulation skills these days, too."

"Oh... Uh... But we don't get skills for getting lost in a maze, so it doesn't matter?"

"We can still trivially pick up the monsters on this floor. And if we were relying on skills like [Tracking], or maybe some third rank equivalent, then we would. Heck, I'd be levelling [Mana Sight] if it wasn't already maxed, and you are levelling [Mana Perception]."

"Hmm... You're right, but it just feels like blowing up monsters is cheating more than keeping an eye on where we're going."

The ethics and philosophy of cheating in dungeons left undetermined, we continued our trek through the floor. The monsters weren't particularly tough; I still hadn't visited a wide variety of dungeons, but from what I'd seen, a monster's level granted them some size of budget of their own, which could be spent on stats or abilities. These monsters had spent a chunk of theirs on spatial illusion abilities, and so had lower stats as a result. [Eye of Judgement] pegged them as having considerably lower physical stats than the anaconda emperors.

I doubted that would remain true in a few more floors' time.

The boss was a level twenty-seven version, standing as tall as I was. It stared up from where I was looking down at it through the hole in the ceiling, emitting a low growl.

"This isn't quite the same as the last floor," opined Cluma nonchalantly. "The distortions there didn't affect sound, but that growl is coming from the exact same place as its image."

I focused, concentrating on listening. I wouldn't have wanted to hazard a guess where the sound was coming from; echoing off all the walls, it could have originated from anywhere. Yet Cluma could pick it out confidently. At the rate of soul growth, it would take another two days for my catkin ears to be fully occupied. Would my hearing improve to the point I could make it out, too?

Of course, the fact that the location she could hear it in was wrong was a definite downside in this particular case.

"Stat-wise, this is the second toughest thing we've fought after the hydra," I pointed out.

"We've fought enough of them today to know how they act. Just because this one is a little bigger, I don't think it'll be a problem."

"Then let's go," I replied, dropping into the room.

The illusion raked at me with its claws, so I stepped into it, evading the real swipe which came from behind. Amusingly, that resulted in a chunk of my torso appearing behind me.

Cluma followed me from above and stabbed my illusionary torso a few times as she fell, resulting in a spurt of black blood that was certainly not mine.

The monster roared, unable to see Cluma, so coming at me instead in a whirl of fangs and claws. I answered by impaling it through the face with my sword-staff. I'd been aiming for an eye, but attacking almost blind caused me to miss my target. Thankfully, my heavily enchanted weapon pierced through the monster's skull, stunning the monster, but not bringing it down. Just as it started moving again, Cluma added a few more head wounds, and the thing collapsed into a puddle of its own blood, the illusion shimmering and vanishing as the real monster appeared.

Then, of course, gravity abruptly reversed, leaving me standing upside-down on the ceiling. I didn't remain there for long.

"You stabbed your staff right through its head and it kept on going!" exclaimed Cluma, spinning professionally in mid-air.

"Not for long, but..." I started, before being rudely and unprofessionally interrupted by the new floor. "The monsters are getting tougher. It's getting harder to one-shot them even if we strike them in a vital area," I finished.

It went back to my previous point about them being biologically fake. Just like they didn't need to eat, I'd be prepared to bet a small amount of money that they didn't really need their hearts, and they were only weak points because the System said so. Besides, plenty of monsters didn't have hearts. Or brains. Or any sort of internal organs at all. Slimes certainly seemed pretty homogenous.

Even smashing a monster core wouldn't immediately kill a monster, although given their usual positioning, the act of getting to one in order to break it was generally damaging enough.

"How do these monsters evolve, then? Think we can finish the next batch of five floors?"

"Next floor can make multiple copies of themselves. The floor after has an ability very similar to my [Distortion]. Twenty-four adds some tentacles, and twenty-five can teleport."

"Those first two won't make a difference, but tentacles will be annoying. What is it with this dungeon and tentacles?"

"I've no idea. Some of the monsters have been weird to start with, but even these, that look perfectly sensible, end up mutilated by the end of their section."

"Sensible? You know there's no natural animal that looks anything like these, right?"

"Huh? They're wolves."

"Lacuna wolves, yes. But what natural animal are you comparing them to?"

I paused, realising I was comparing them to Earth wolves. So, this world's alien wildlife had struck again. At least they had snakes.

"Okay, it's an Earth animal. But they're kinda like saliazos, aren't they?"

Cluma squinted as she mentally compared the sleek, killer wolves with the big dog-like things with the bunny ears and lolling, slobbery tongues. "No. No, they really are not," she concluded.

"Okay. Fair enough, but it does raise an interesting point. Why do dungeons have so many monsters based on Earth animals?"

"Don't ask me."

"I was being rhetorical. I don't think there's anyone I could ask." Not without Erryn...

"Well don't phrase it like a question if you don't expect me to answer! Anyway, shall we go home?"

"Sure."

So we did, and with our hihi'irokane production over, we could spend the full following day in the dungeon, completing a further two floors and leaving the tentacle wolves to face on our next trip.

I woke up the next day, sitting up in bed and waiting for the vertigo I'd had the previous two days to pass. Hopefully, this would be the final time; [Soul Perception] now showed my soul having completely filled my new ears, and it had stopped its growth. My hearing was crisper than ever. I could hear Cluma moving around downstairs. Each individual chirp of a bird outside. Children playing.

... The beastkin a few doors down the street. Dammit. Why couldn't this have happened after mating season?!

I touched one gently, causing it to flick. I could feel it perfectly. Even weirder, it was warm. It was a proper part of me. Yet it was made of fabric and a small amount of orichalcum thread. The System was weird. Cool, when it wasn't locking me in rooms and ripping my every thought from my head, but still weird.

And in a few days more, I'd get my finished tail, too. I wasn't even sure why I wanted it. 'Better cuddles' didn't seem like much of a better excuse than 'because I can'. Then again, sometimes, 'because I can' was all I needed.

It was unlikely to get me class levels though, and neither would dungeon delving. I needed something to get my final five levels. My continuing enchanted food escapades would probably get me there eventually, but 'eventually' wasn't good enough.

Oh, there was something else I was planning to do once I'd taken the [Artisan] class, wasn't there. Cluma coming upstairs and shutting herself in the bathroom while I was desperate for a wee but was still too disorientated to stand up was the reminder. I was going to build a new house! Admittedly I wasn't expecting it to happen so quickly, but surely a house would be good for levels? It checked the difficult, novel and meaningful checkboxes.

And I didn't have the soul points for [Advanced Carpentry], because I'd spent them on [Advanced Tailoring] to adjust my clothes for my stupid tail. Dammit past me! Using up soul points just because you wanted to be fluffy.