“That was very disappointing,” Mel said. “I was expecting something more when you gave it a special name, but all you did was have them run straight at the intruders!”

  “They can’t all be winners,” Kelsey admitted. “There’s not much Tier Two skeletons can do to these guys unless I give them special equipment, and this is not the arena for that.”

  They were watching Cas take apart the Skeleton King. Mel was pretty sure they could have used a spell to turn him into dust, but Cas had said he wanted to test his swordfighting.

  “Aris uses guns at close range,” Mel said sulkily.

  “Yeah, but I don’t want to give guns to these guys, which is what will happen if I let them near my Shooting Squads.”

  Mel pouted. Kelsey always had a reason. She looked over at the fight.

  “Cas is stronger, but he’s not that good. The Lazybones would have cut him to pieces.”

  Maris looked over at them, but Kelsey ignored her.

  “Eh,” she replied to Mel. “He’s got a spell on him that keeps away steel, and another spell on him that keeps away undead. Not much that any skeleton can do to him.”

  Kelsey glanced over to make sure Maris was listening. “At least up close,” she added with a sly grin.

  Maris grimaced. “Stop playing around, Cassian,” she said. “Finish it, and we’ll continue.”

  Cas didn’t respond, but the next strike was at full strength, bashing through the Skeleton King's defence and shattering his chest. He wasn’t dead from that, but he was on the ground, twitching helplessly. A few stomps from Cas finished him off.

  Not even bothering with the loot, Cas moved straight to the floor exit. “The next level is supposed to be spiders, yes?”

  “She said she switched it to rats,” Maris replied, casting a suspicious look Kelsey’s way.

  “Hardly matters,” the man grunted. Sword still ready, he lifted the stone covering the passage down with a spell.

  “She didn’t lie, it is rats,” Maris said, reporting the results of her spell. “And wait… this can’t be right.”

  “Rats of this tier don’t get that big, not like spiders,” Kelsey said loftily. “So I made the tunnels smaller, so they’d be more comfortable.”

  “How small?” Cas demanded. Maris grimaced as she answered.

  “Large enough for us to get through, but we’d have to crawl most of the way.”

  “Serves you right for being so big!” Mel taunted. She didn’t really understand how human sizes worked. Kelsey had tried to explain it to her, but it didn’t make sense. But she knew enough for a taunt. “Should have gone on a diet!”

  That one might need more work, it didn’t seem to faze them. They gathered at the entrance and muttered to themselves about how to proceed.

  “How come she didn’t cast her spell until after the door opened?” Mel asked.

  “It’s harder for them to get past the floor barrier,” Kelsey told her. “But with the door open, the escaping mana is just shredding that barrier.”

  She glared at the hesitating wizards. “So move it! Shake a leg!”

  “I’m not crawling through pitch-black passageways,” Cas retorted. He conjured a mage-light and jumped down into the open area below. Five waist-high tunnels led off in different directions.

  “It’s not mana-saturated like the floors,” Maris said. “The exit is that way.”

  She pointed in the right direction, ignoring the obfuscating flows of mana as it weaved through the tunnels. You couldn’t lose someone in a dungeon maze. There always had to be a path to the core, and the mana would always flow away from it. Kelsey had confused matters with multiple mana streams going in different directions, but you could always find your way to the end with enough patience.

  Or you could use a spell to look through the rock and see where the exit was.

  “Right. Down we go,” Cas said and placed his hands on the rock. Magic flowed out of him, and under its influence, the rock shifted.

  “Tch. Cheaters,” Kelsey grumbled, but the wizards ignored her.

  It took a while. Mel wasn’t sure if it took longer than it would for someone properly sized to find their way through the maze. She wasn’t great with the passage of time. Kelsey had a clock in her mind-space, but not out here.

  However long it took, eventually, the wizards looked proudly at the long, tall passageway that spiralled down to the next level.

  “Where are the rats?” Mel asked.

  “On the edges,” Kelsey said. “At least they had the survival instincts to avoid getting trapped in that goopy rock.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “It matters not,” Maris said. “With all the passageways closed, they can’t get to us. We can proceed to the next floor unchallanged.”

  “Guess so,” Kelsey said.

  Maris looked at her suspiciously and then strode off down the passageway with the others following. She looked at the wall, staring through the rock.

  “That’s odd,” she said. “Why are they clustering around us?”

  “They had programmed territories and patrol routes, but you disrupted all that by shifting the whole place around,” Kelsey explained. “Now they’re falling back to the basic order: get as close to the intruders as you can.”

  “They can see us through the rock?”

  “They’re blind. Detect life is short-range, but it works through just about anything,” Kelsey said idly.

  Maris stared a moment longer, then looked away, shuddering. “Creepy. But it doesn’t matter if they can’t get to us.”

  “True,” Kelsey said. “Of course, my radio still works.”

  “What?”

  Mel didn’t hear the explosion, as every single one of Kelsey’s kamikaze rats exploded. Trapped in the confines of the caves, it was too big for ears. If she’d been physical, she would surely have been pulped by the pressure wave as it shattered the rock walls around them. Instead, the wave, and the rocks it carried passed right through her and smashed into the wizards.

  Mel’s ears, which told her what she would have heard if she had ears, just sent her an impression of something vast moving through her. A hand of the gods had moved through the floor, smashing everything in its path.

  Then she heard the crashing sound of rocks falling and of Kelsey cackling.

  “Magnifique! Plastique!”

  It wasn’t cramped, exactly, in the middle of the rockpile. Not for them at least. Mel imagined that it must be fairly uncomfortable to be buried under rocks if you had a body. Not that she cared.

  Mel and Kelsey were floating on either side of Maris. The mage was unconscious, trapped under the rockfall that her colleague had created. The two of them were “in” the small gap between the wizard's body and the rocks. Mel imagined it would look pretty strange to someone who could see in pitch darkness, through rock and see their invisible forms.

  “Is she going to die?” Mel asked.

  “No,” Kelsey said sourly. “Not until her wards run out at least.”

  “Can’t we do something?”

  “No. All my rats are dead, and she’s protected against them anyway. I can’t do anything to this floor until she leaves. I thought that burying her might accomplish something, but she’s even got a talisman giving her air.”

  They briefly flitted around to check on the others. They were all in a similar situation, but they returned to Maris, as Kelsey judged that she would be the first to wake up.

  “Look, she’s starting to come around,” Kelsey said.

  Maris spent a long time groggily twitching, but Mel knew the wizard was awake when she started screaming.

  “Why is she doing that?” Mel asked.

  “She woke up in darkness, unable to move,” Kelsey replied. “She’s panicking. It looks like her perception spells ended when she fell unconscious.”

  “So we can’t even tell her how annoying she’s being?”

  “Nope, but she’ll figure it out eventually.”

  It took a long time for Maris to try casting a spell, but Mel took some comfort from the fact that the wizard was having a much worse time than she was. Tears, sobs and desperate struggling against the rocks pinning her down were all a part of the process.

  Eventually, she thought to cast a spell—a simple light spell, revealing (to her) the rocks all around her. Her next spell must have been the one that let her see Mel, because she jerked in surprise at the two faces pressed close against hers.

  “Agggh!” was her first response. Mel didn’t see any need to reply.

  “You’ve been watching this entire time?” Maris asked.

  “You’ve been very entertaining,” Kelsey said. “Unfortunately, we’re on a timer, so if you could move along, please.”

  “What timer?”

  “This pathetically ineffective rockfall is blocking the mana flow. If you know anything about dungeons, you know that isn’t a situation I can tolerate for long. I need you out of here so I can clean up.”

  “Also, we can’t kill you until you get to the next floor,” Mel pointed out helpfully.

  “So sorry to have been an inconvenience,” Maris spat. She cast another spell and then twisted around, looking for her friends.

  “Everyone’s… alive?” she exclaimed.

  “Yeah, those wards are pretty tough,” Kelsey conceded. “Still, there’s always next time.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, part of the blame goes to Cas for not paying attention to architectural principles when he was making that tunnel, but a bigger part goes to me for blowing you up with high explosives.”

  “But… there was no mana.”

  “If you say so,” Kelsey said smugly. “Don’t expect me to give away all my tricks. Now get moving! Last call!”

  Maris groaned, but started turning rocks into sand. It turned out that she wasn’t very good at it, but Lucian was only a yard away. She wasn’t able to wake him, but dug through his pockets and pulled out Aubey’s core. Mel watched with interest, as she’d never seen a wizard switch cores like that before.

  Maris set her own core aside, wrapping it in cloth and putting it in an inner pocket. Only then did she draw out Aubey’s core, placing her hand on it and wincing at the sensation.

  “Problems?” Kelsey asked.

  “No.” Maris did something to bring Lucian around. Then, with the new core, she was able to destroy the stone around her much faster. That caused the rocks above them to fall, but the wards took care of that. It wasn’t long before the three wizards were stumbling into the gloomy light of the next floor.

  “It’s… bigger than I expected,” Cas said.

  “It’s bigger than it used to be,” Kelsey explained, although only Maris and Mel could hear her. “You’re looking at the new and improved Forest of Gloom, now with spatial manipulation.”

  Maris tore her gaze away from the vista in front of her and shot a look at Kelsey. “You’re not supposed to have that, according to the records.”

  “Records are out of date,” Kelsey said smugly. “Got a level.”

  “She put off getting it for the longest time,” Mel complained. “She could have been doing stuff like this the whole time!”

  “I had my reasons,” Kelsey said. “I needed to mine out that much rock, and it was an interesting challenge having a cavern that big and making it seem like it was a single open span. But now I’ve got more space to work with.”

  “Is that why the forest is so… patchy?” Maris asked.

  “Even for me, it takes a while to grow a whole tree,” Kelsey confirmed.

  “We need some protection before we go out there,” Cas said. “Otherwise, we’d just be asking to be picked off at range.”

  Maris nodded. “Mist should do it,” she said. She’d switched back to her original core, and now used it to draw water out of the air to hang in tiny droplets around them. Mel could see fine for a few yards, but the mist extended first thirty, then sixty yards until all sight of the forest was lost. The group started walking, guided by the mana to the exit on the other side of the forest.

  “Matches the theme, at least,” Kelsey said. “But I’m disappointed that you’d think I would use the same trick twice.”

  “What’s your trick for this floor, then?” Maris asked.

  “Oh, no tricks,” Kelsey said.

  A terrifying screech sounded from the air above them.

  “It’s just that, since I’ve got all this extra room to play with, I thought I’d get some flyers,” Kelsey said. “And I happened to pick up a whole bunch of different drake corpses recently.”

  More screeches sounded, coming closer. Quickly.