They caught up quickly, with Torwin’s trip through many different areas taking longer to relate than Velik’s slug fest. Torwin was grateful he hadn’t been thrown into that. The sheer number of monsters would have burned through ammunition faster than his bracer could generate it, though he suspected he’d have had an easier time with the champion. Piercing high-armor targets was something he was well equipped to do, though no one ever really fought an elite of that caliber solo.

The dungeon was supposed to produce monsters around level 30 at most. Level 68 was way too high, and shouldn’t even have been possible. Something strange was definitely going on, probably related to the corruption that they suspected had infested the place.

“How many tries did it take for you to find me?” Torwin asked once they’d reached the end of their stories.

“Just the one. I got lucky.”

“I kind of doubt that.”

Did the dungeon want us together? That doesn’t make sense. For dimensional dungeons, it always tries to split the team up. Something Velik did must have cut through the spot with the most resistance since it was trying to keep us apart. Or maybe the dungeon is only maintaining these two spots, so there were no other places to go. That’s probably not it…

Maybe he really did just get lucky. I’ll have to ask Aria if she can explain it once we get back.

“Whatever the reason, I’m glad it worked out for us,” he told Velik. “But you’re going to need to do something about that new skill if you want to be effective moving forward.”

“I’m open to advice.”

Torwin was almost hesitant to even suggest something after finding out that Velik had managed to merge two skills he’d expected it would be impossible to combine. Unique class bullshit breaking all the rules. I guess as long as I don’t tell him something is impossible to do, it won’t stop him from trying to do it.

Decision made, he said, “Well, the good news is that it’s quite common for increasing the skill’s rank to allow for some fine tuning about how overpowering it can be to whatever sense it’s tied to. The bad news is that until you get that far, there’s not really much you can do about it. Just trying to control that should go a long way toward boosting the skill’s rank, though.”

“How high a rank are we talking?” Velik asked.

Torwin shrugged. “For me, it was around rank 4, but I didn’t really fully gain control until I folded [Mana Sense] into [Ranger’s Lore]. Obviously, that’s not going to be possible in the next hour, so we’re going to need to figure something else out. I’d say you should stay back, fight defensively, and let me handle any threats.”

“I was thinking something a bit more immediately useful,” Velik said. “Tell me how you increased your skill’s rank.”

“There’s no real trick to it. You just need to understand what you’re seeing. I didn’t take [Mana Sight], so for me it was more learning to identify specific mana streams at farther and farther ranges.”

“Range isn’t a problem,” Velik said as he peered around. “I can see mana everywhere I can see. But it overlaps everything. That’s because of the dungeon?”

“Exactly. Taking that skill now was… not a great choice. You couldn’t have picked a worse spot to handicap yourself with this. Every dungeon is flooded with mana. It’s how the core connects to its territory and controls things. A dimensional dungeon like this one is even worse, because it’s actively warping the shape of the dungeon around us.”

“Theoretically, I could follow the flow of mana to the dungeon core,” Velik mused out loud.

“In theory, sure. In reality, not today, tomorrow, or even next week. You’ll need at least a month or two of practice to get a few ranks before you could even attempt that.”

“How many more could I need? It’s already advanced twice.”

Torwin froze in place, then slowly looked back at Velik. “I’m sorry. I think my mind must have blanked out a second there. Did you just tell me that you have a brand new skill, not even a class skill, but a general skill that you have no idea how to use, and that you’ve already pushed it up to rank 3 in less than half an hour?”

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“I’ve had a lot of incentive to practice,” Velik said dryly, “especially since I can’t turn it off. The mana here is overwhelming and it’s everywhere. There’s no getting away from it.”

Which should make it harder to master the skill! This is ridiculous.

Torwin didn’t say that, though. If Velik was somehow figuring this out, then his plan of tracking the mana back to the core might actually work. He’d already done the impossible once by cutting through those ‘knots’ in the mana or whatever and manually shifting himself out of one piece of twisted space to another.

Maybe he’s some sort of savant with mana. If his life had been different, if he’d been given a choice at his class, he might have been a powerful mage instead. I guess we’ll never know. Torwin took a moment to consider what he knew of Velik, then revised his opinion. Or maybe it’s just the fact that his mental and mystic are higher than any mage has a right to. That unique class of his gives way more stats per level than normal.

Whatever the reason, if it meant finding the core to this dungeon in an hour or two instead of wasting weeks slowly bleeding it dry of its mana until it couldn’t defend himself, Torwin was grateful. What he’d thought was going to be a massive handicap was turning out to be a blessing in disguise.

“Do you think you can trace the mana flows back?” he asked, half-dreading the answer.

“All the way to the core? I don’t know. Maybe. I know this hallway we’re in has that same spot in the mana where it all jumbles together. It’s right there.”

Once Velik pointed it out, Torwin could feel something strange there. He was used to using this skill more to feel monsters about to trigger magic attacks or to spot heavy concentrations of mana nearby that almost invariably led to something magical. Here in this dungeon, trying to read the mana was all quite overwhelming.

And this kid who’s barely a third my age did it no problem. How embarrassing to be shown up like this.

“Okay, show me how you break it open. I’ve got plenty of skills that use magic myself, so I should be able to do the next one while you recover. We’ll trade off until we reach the core.”

* * *

The dungeon core didn’t really understand what was going on, but its instinctive reaction to the intruders breaking through its spatial barriers was to send out the guardian. Unfortunately for it, the thing growing on it had replaced the guardian as a means of gaining a measure of control over the core.

That had seemed like a good idea at the time. It no longer did, now. The dungeon was too weak to defend itself from humans this powerful, and what should have been its primary means of stopping them from getting closer had been soundly defeated.

This dungeon was doomed. The thing started retracting its vine-like tendrils slowly, each one retreating back into the seed. The core pillar almost seemed to shudder as the thing clinging to it extracted itself from their almost-symbiotic union. Without that consciousness helping it to optimize its reactive impulses, it defaulted to its original behavior and did what any dungeon would do.

It started trying to churn out monsters, and lots of them. They were all weak things, with far too little mana to grow them right. Certainly, they were nothing like the flesh beasts the thing had crafted using the dungeon core. Fortunately, those existed outside of core control, and the thing could use them as a vehicle to escape.

It just needed to finish detaching itself from the doomed core first.

* * *

“Something’s changed,” Velik said. “The mana flow is falling apart. It’s clashing against itself.”

“What does that mean for us?”

The young hunter considered that question for a moment, then shrugged. “I don’t really know. I guess we just keep going and hope for the best.”

“Wait, do you hear that?” Torwin asked, cocking his head. “Monsters.”

They hadn’t seen any in a while, but all of a sudden, the world shifted around them. Instead of being on a flight of stairs circling the interior of a tower, they were now in a courtyard covered in dead, yellow grass. The predicted monsters poured out of a portcullis at the far end, a veritable flood of hundreds of bodies.

Why so weak, though?

[Identify] couldn’t find a single one over level 20, and Torwin’s arrows killed them three or four at a time as they punched through the leading edge to kill monsters farther back in the ranks. Despite his partial blindness, Velik also easily moved through the crowd. His spear lashed out, its shape changed once again into something with a cutting edge, and he whipped it through the monsters like a farmer scything his field.

The wave ended as abruptly as it began, with a few hundred monsters dead. The bodies started to break down immediately, which was weird, but it had been a weird dungeon all the way around. “It’s recycling the bodies,” Velik announced. “Trying to reclaim the mana. It did this before when I was in that arena.”

“We’d better prepare for something big, then.”

“Maybe, but I didn’t get a notification that we’d entered a champion’s domain.”

Torwin paused. That was true, so maybe the dungeon wasn’t trying to build up another monstrosity. Maybe it was just weak. Maybe it was desperate.

“I think I can follow the mana stream from these monsters directly to the core, assuming that’s where it’s all going,” Velik said. He walked twenty feet across the courtyard, dead grass crunching under his feet, and let loose that blindingly bright skill of his.

Torwin followed him, and the two stepped through the hole in space together. He pulled up short the second he stepped through. They’d made it to the core room, but…

“What the fuck is that thing?”