The world flipped end over end for what felt like forever till it came to an abrupt skid and a stop. I stared at the ceiling for a bit, before swearing as the paint caught up with my shock.

  "Alta? You good?" I heard Myth's voice drift from somewhere above me.

  "Yes, Mythramanda, I'm perfectly peachy." I drawled while the roof finally decided to stop swirling.

  "Cool Cool. I'll be right down." I heard her footsteps shuffle down the stairway.

  I pulled myself up, grumbling a bit at my now-damp outfit. A shake of my head cleared the last bit of fogginess from my brain. I looked up and the wall was still there at the top of the stairs.

  "An illusory wall? The map didn't say anything about illusory walls. What the hell is this?" I double-checked the map and confirmed my suspicions. Absolutely nothing. No margin notes, markings, or anything. I was going to have words for the map maker, most of them four letters and unfit for polite company.

  "Yeah, looks like. After you fell through, I poked my head in and its just not even there. Kind of cool, but super weird too huh?" Myth cast a small healing spell to fix some injuries I hadn't noticed.

  "Yeah, weird. Where are we, though? If the map didn't show the illusion walls, we don't know what else might be wrong." I didn't like this. I don't like surprises in general, but dungeon surprises never went well, especially on a time crunch.

  Dungeon mapping was a critical part of a Dungeoneer's job, and many of them staked their reputations on the accuracy of them. Mismarked areas, incorrect layouts, and even loose assessments of monsters could be the difference between life and death for adventurers doing a delve. Excuses could be made for new dungeons, but the Tower of Ash and Blood had been explored and mapped before I was born. Before my parents had been born for that matter.

  Which left two options. Someone gave us a bad map on purpose, or something was wrong with the dungeon, and I was leaning towards the first. A time crunch and bad info? Our professor was an arse and I was totally going to let him have it when we got back.

  I don't have to put up with this! I'm a beautiful noblewoman! Was! Whatever!

  No time for that now.

  "Let's get going. Weirdness aside, we don't have enough time to worry about it." I held up my hand and conjured a light orb, and Myth did the same with her small swarm of lights.

  As we made our way down the corridors, stopping every so often to disarm a trap, and pocketing the more interesting bits and bobs from the mechanism. Some artificers and others find the mechanical parts, poisonous liquids, and other such things very valuable. Since the dungeon regrows all its parts and can reset the traps, probably through the same method as it creates monsters, it can afford to lose a few parts, and I had expenses to pay.

  Being in exile was not lucrative at all, and I'd prefer not to work hard for my money if I could avoid it. Sadly, I couldn't avoid it nearly as much as I liked. I had my pride, but pride doesn't feed a gal.

  We made our way through the floor, and aside from stray goblins from the earlier swarm, there wasn't much in the way of monsters. Any chests we found had some fairly useful stuff, like potions and the like which both Myth and I were glad of.

  Healing magic could do a lot, but it drained mana from a magic user, which would need to be replaced by drawing in the mana from outside the body. The problem with this is that there was only so much a person could absorb. If you did it too much, you got a kind of sickness. Muscle pain, nausea, dizziness, blurred vision. A lot of magic training was less about using spells and more about stretching how long you could last before getting sick, or at worst, fighting through said sickness.

  Mana potions helped with this, holding off the sickness and making drawing in power easier, with the downside of causing the magic user to crash into a deep sleep when the mana potion wore off. You didn't want to take too many of them, as it hadn't been unheard of for a magic user to pass out for days afterwards. Another part of magic training was learning your limit for potions.

  For Dungeoneer's though, these potions were essential. Drawing in mana was fine, but the deeper you got, the mana got, I guess for lack of a better term, grosser. You could use Dungeon Mana, but it felt rotten somehow. Wrong. You could use it but it made your body feel off. Mana potions had the added effect of staving this feeling off. Useful little bottles of liquid.

  And a good thing we found them. Only on the second floor, and the Dungeon, mana felt thick. So this was a real dungeon, huh? Simulated practice could never prepare you for the feeling. What confidence I had felt when we started, as slight as it was, was drying up.

  "How's our time looking?" I broke the silence. For some reason, even whispering down here felt like asking for trouble, but it had to be done.

  "We've been making ok time. We got a little over an hour or so, and there's the next set of stairs." She pointed ahead of us. I envied her eyes sometimes. Wood Elves had the best eyes of elf kind, and even with light spells active, I could barely make it out.

  "Good. The next floor doesn't have much to it, according to the map, though let's be honest, we haven't exactly been able to fully trust it yet." I tightened my grip on my sword, and I saw Myth ready herself as well.

  We approached the stairs carefully, keeping my eyes peeled for any tell-tale signs of traps, but felt relief as I didn't see any. I had no idea what criteria dungeons used to decide where to place things, and I didn't need another tumble today, thank you very much.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  As we descended, I noticed the soft orange of torchlight, but it lacked the characteristic oily smoke smell. As we made it to the bottom we discovered a singular room. The source of the light was, in fact torches, but they looked strange, like their flames were made out of some kind of glass bubble. Something to steal later for the artificers, I mused.

  The only other thing in the room was a singular treasure chest.

  Myth and I both looked at it for a moment, looked at each other, nodded and said in unison. "Mimic."

  Mimics were a staple of dungeon ecologies, and of all things that could dwell within them, every dungeon had one, and every mimic worked the same. They even used the same pattern of chest down the wood grain. Since they had become such common knowledge, even outside the Adventuring field, the only things that fell for mimics were stray monsters and idiots.

  Since we were neither, it was time to figure out our approach.

  Mimics though well known, were not pushovers or safe. They were strong, fast, and durable with sharp teeth, claws, and a venomous barbed tongue. This I was ready for!

  The first trick to fighting a mimic was to get it to stop hiding as a chest. Their chest form was a kind of chitinous shell, which was incredibly tough stuff, and you needed it to open up so you could strike at the more meaty bits.

  My first instinct was to shoot a little bolt of magic at it, but I didn't want to waste magic this deep in the dungeon. I motioned for Myth to get back. She was a good healer and mage, but I was the front line and I needed room for what was about to go down. She knew what to do. I hoped. Goblins were scary enough, I had no idea how she'd react to a mimic.

  I searched around my belt pouch till I found what I was looking for. A smooth, perfectly round steel ball, about the size of a man's eye. Good and heavy.

  I wound up and pitched it across the chamber straight and true. My eldest brother, one summer, during one of the many times I had escaped by sister's monster slaying lessons, had taught me about stone tossing on lakes to get them to skip across. I never could get the skipping right, but the tossing, I was plenty skilled at.

  The metal ball struck with a solid metallic thud and a small crack. I had hit it harder than I thought, as it stuck in the mimic's false wooden shell. The creature reared up, its long, lanky limbs unfolding, muscles taut, drawing to its full height, much taller than any human, elf, or other of the Mortal species. The lid lifted to show rows of sharp dripping teeth and a long disgusting snaking tongue with a spear-like tip at the end, dripping with a paralytic venom.

  It stumbled for a moment, as if it had trouble getting its bearings, before turning to me and focusing its eyeless gaze upon me and letting out a roar of hungry rage. This was it!

  It began a slow circle of me, its tongue snaking this way and that, and I kept my eyes on the stinger. That was the greatest threat of a mimic. They didn't defeat their prey with strength or speed, but by impeding their movement and then devouring them. I kept tapping my sword on the ground to keep its attention on me. I didn't want it deciding Myth was a better target.

  It tensed, and the tongue shot out, just like I had expected. I ducked to the side and swiped my blade down, severing the offending tendril, and it gushed a thick purple-ish blood and screamed in pain. I had one shot at this. I rushed forward as fast as I could, my leg muscles burning as I pushed, and drove my sword directly into the open lid-mouth. It leapt backwards and thrashed about, its hands trying to pull the blade free, as blood gushed and ran onto the floor. With a gurgle, it collapsed, and after more twitching, it sat still.

  As tempting as it was to retrieve my blade, you had to be careful with mimics. They weren't above feigning death to try some other attack.

  I saw it twitch with movement, but before I reacted, a bolt of light struck it. I turned and saw Myth, her hands held out. I couldn't say I blamed her. Probably wanted to get some hits on something while we were down here.

  The place where the bolt hit smoked softly, and the body of the mimic began to liquify, the stone floor drawing in the blood and body of the creature. After the corpse had vanished, I noticed something twinkling in its place.

  We both approached and looked it. It was a tiny crystal, pale green in color. It was a crypt-stone.

  Crypt-stones are a byproduct of dungeons that occur on occasion. Sometimes the dungeon absorbs something extra when reclaiming monster parts, rocks, treasure, other bits of trash, and when it makes a new monster, that bit gets stuck in the monster's body and it turns into a crypt-stone.

  There was a whole slew of superstitions about them, such as curing diseases, bringing good luck, and stuff like that, but as far as any Dungeon researchers could tell, it was just a shiny rock. A shiny rock that would fetch a nice price to superstitious suckers.

  Myth and I couldn't help but grin at our good fortune. Since we got to keep anything we found during this assignment, it meant that we could get a real meal tonight instead of just broth and bread again.

  As if to punctuate our joy, the back wall slid open between the strange torches to reveal a room bathed in a soft light. We both knew that light. It was the dungeon core.

  And looking at my timepiece we didn't have much time to spare.

  We entered the room and marveled a bit at actually seeing a dungeon core in person for the first time. It was like a sphere of rippling shimmering greenish light, but not so bright that we couldn't look at it. A core when it is at its ideal state, is perfectly round, but this one had started to form little offshoots, like roots off a vegetable. Unlike the core, they were opaque and black, almost like glass.

  This was our duty as future Dungeoneers. These little shoots had to be trimmed. If they gained the same glow as the rest of the core, the shape and size of the physical dungeon would chang,e and the strange mana would spread into the surrounding area. This needed to be prevented at all costs.

  We both got to work. We opened our pouches and took out our tools. Looking at them, the term pruning was apt. They looked very similar to gardening implements. Shears, little knives, and the like were laid out, but unlike their more pedestrian cousins, the metal was engraved in all kinds of runic markings to make this task possible.

  We both set to work, clipping here, shaving a bit there, even snapping off more stubborn branches. Eventually, it was done, and the core looked somewhat brighter. I wasn't sure if the core appreciated what we did, but I liked to think so. We gathered up all the severed pieces into a bag, to show as proof of the completion of our task.

  As we put our tools away, a circle of runes on the floor in a back corner began to glow. This was a quirk of dungeons no one had quite figured out. When one defeated the dungeon and finished pruning the core to some sort of standard, a teleportation spell circle would form in the core room.

  "We gotta move, Alta! Clock says we've got 30 minutes!" Myth had a panicked look as she held up her timepiece.

  We both swore and ran for the circle. Upon entering it, we felt surrounded by light, and in mere moments, we found ourselves outside the dungeon's entrance, ankle-deep in swamp muck once again.

  I breathed in the air, foetid as it may be, it was better than the stale wrongness of the depths. As I looked, Myth was already tearing down the path back to town quicker than I had ever seen her. I followed behind and caught up quickly. No way I was letting her beat me!