Wizard of Orario

by Xane Dragon

Harry Dresden is banished from earth thanks to a death curse. When he returns, he finds himself alone in a world that has changed in more ways than one, and few of them good. So, he goes back to his familiar job. He doesn't do parties, love potions, or magic tricks. But he can find people, even when they're lost in a dungeon.

8. Chapter 8

I got to the tower entrance first, but didn't have to wait long for the others to show up. When they did, the sun finally peaked over the high walls of the city. It wasn't as epic as television always made it seem. The bright ball of fire was giving just enough light to nearly blind me and I found myself having serious doubts about bringing the barmaids along on this little excursion when the girls did get close enough to let me see more than a silhouette.

Anya was practically skipping down the road in front of everyone with a long golden spear thrown over her shoulder that was waving every which way as she moved with each exaggerated step she took. She was dressed in a bright white outfit with a red collar that came up to cover most of her neck and a matching very short skirt that probably didn't even cover her butt with the way she was skipping around. Which meant it was a good thing she also had on a pair of shorts that went halfway down to her knees. It was her armor that had me worried. She had on a pair of leather gloves, a golden shoulder piece on her right side, and some elbow pads with matching knee pads. And that was it. If I wanted to be generous, I would have counted her boots as well.

What was even more disturbing was that the crazy catgirl who got drink orders wrong about half the time was the most well equipped member of the group!

Chloe, the cat girl with the black hair, had on a black top that matched her hair and left her midriff bare along with some pants that competed with Anya in the short shorts department. But aside from the short cloak with a hood that covered her head with little bumps at the top that made space for her ears, she had no sort of protection whatsoever.

The worst of the three was Lunoire. She had on a white top that might have just been a lighter color copy of Chloe's, but her bigger breasts meant that even more of her stomach was exposed. A red scarf covered most of the area between her chin and shoulders, while her hands had a pair of fingerless gloves and her forearms were covered in compression wraps, unless I missed my guess.

Asfi was there was well, sporting her white cape and same outfit underneath. Next to her, the two people wearing heavy cloaks and hoods with large backpacks strapped on were obviously our gods.

That only left…I looked around with a frown when the mostly female group met up with me and a few other adventurers had to go around the wall of women. "Where's Ryu?"

A girl in a green hood and mask that covered everything beneath her eyes that had been a step behind the others walked around them. "I'm right here, Mr Dresden."

I blinked. A cape and…cowl, I thought to myself as I looked at the green mask and hood with accompanying cape. Underneath it was a skintight shirt that showed off every inch of the old girl's slender frame, while a pair of boots covered nearly all of her legs and matching gloves that did the same for most of her arms. She had a belt with a pair of japanese short swords, and a wooden sword that pulsed with magic. However, there was one thing wrong…

I took her aside and gulped, unsure if I should point something out. She was wearing her cape in a way that nearly covered every part of her to make Batman proud. But, it was the decent thing to do. "Uh…Ryu…where are your pants?"

The elf gave me a little frown I could see from above the mask that covered her nose and mouth. "What're you talking about? They're right here." The instrument of clothing she pointed to was indeed a covering for her lower parts. As green as bright grass, which was a shade lighter than her cape.

"Um…" I said before looking somewhere else.

Ryu's eyes narrowed even more. "What?"

After thinking about it for a few seconds, I just decided to bite the bullet. "Ryu…I've seen underwear and swimsuits that cover more than those things."

"Damn it man! I could have gotten her out of the cape when we were in the dungeon. Why did you have to go and ruin it for me?" Hermes yelled from his place back in the main group.

The part of Ryu's face I could see slowly turned bright red, and she spun around to face her friends. "W-Why didn't any of you tell me about this?" she demanded of the other three girls decked out for a foxy feme fatale battle.

"Well…it was kind of obvious," Luniore said.

"I thought mew knew," Anya replied.

"So…you're not really a closet exabitionist?" Chloe asked.

Ryu's entire body twitched like I had seen with some people who had just had something break in their brain. Then, she took in a deep breath through her mask, and slowly let it out. "Every second counts, I'll just have to deal with this," she said before moving past me at a much brisker pace.

Since I didn't want this embarrassment to continue, I looked over to Hermes. "So, how exactly are we going to sneak you two in?" I asked before something else occurred to me. "And just why is it that you guys aren't allowed in the dungeon?"

After a few seconds, Hermes looked over to me. "As to the first, there are ways to get around the light security. The Guild doesn't try too hard to keep people out of the dungeon," the god said before he became a little hesitant. "As for the second…hmm…well, you know how when a god is injured, our divine power triggers and automatically sends us back to Heaven while healing us of any damage or purging contamination?"

"...uh…no," I replied.

"Oh, well…that's what happens when you damage our physical form in any meaningful way," Hermes told me as I noticed some of the girls looking at me in confusion. "However, the dungeon is so antithetical to our existence that it can block the transfer. There's also the possibility it may react violently to the use of arcanum inside of its boundaries. But that's still just a theory." He turned to look at the other goddess. "Which reminds me. Hestia, be sure to suppress your divinity as much as you can. One thing we know for certain is that the dungeon will send wave after wave of monsters if it detects our presence in an attempt to kill us."

The little goddess flinched before she slowly looked over to Hermes. "But…we may be down there for hours!"

Luniore gave the deities a curious expression. "Is that going to be a problem?"

Hermes let out a thoughtful sound. "Hmmm, think of it like clenching your butt cheeks while doing everything you usually do."

Behind the god, Asfi let out a tiny groan. "Sir, could you have thought of a less embarrassing metaphor?"

The mindless banter continued on as we got into the tower entrance, which Hermes waved us away from before bringing us to an area on the side of the tower without any guards. The party had split up before then, and while most of the girls went on ahead, Ryu stuck with me, Hermes and Hestia. Both of whom both took in deep breaths and…well, I could still tell they were gods, but…it was less…I don't know…godly?

"Okay, now what?" I asked.

After a little searching around, Hermes led us to what I assumed to be a manhole cover, if a litter artsy. Hestia looked at it in trepidation. "What is this?"

"We have a giant, ever expanding cavern beneath our feet, Hestia," the other god told her. "Do you honestly think some parts of the sewer system don't come very close to the dungeon? There's actually a secret entrance near here that lets certain people sneak in and out of the dungeon without having to go through the checkpoint."

I watched the goddess groan before going down the hole after Ryu. Then I followed her along with Hermes. When we got to the bottom, I turned on my amulet and let the god lead the way while Ryu took up the rear. "You know, something's been nagging me. You're not exactly all that opposed to me being here."

"Without you here, Bell Cranel is guaranteed to be dead by the time we find him, and I've decided to take an interest in that boy," Hermes told me with a smile before the smile became a little more like I expected to see from something like a fairy. "And you interest me as well, Mr Dresden. Maybe even more so than that young rookie."

Behind us, Hestia made a displeased sound. "Bell is a member of my familia, Hermes."

"How do you get to know each other?" Ryu asked from her place in the back.

Hermes turned around to walk backwards and gave a little laugh. "Why, by reputation, my dear Gale!" he said, which earned him a glare from Ryu as I found myself lost in this particular conversation. "Me by being me, of course. And Mr Dresden here, well…I'm not one to go spreading gossip."

"HA!" Hestia commented.

I frowned at the god as we got to the end of a passage and he pressed a collection of bricks deeper into the wall before I heard a loud click. Then, Ryu and I had to push back a section of a wall before moving it back in place after we got inside yet another dark passage I had to light up with my amulet.

My magic senses tingled as we moved down the hall, and I stopped to look down a passageway Hermes tried to just walk by. Something extremely powerful was not too far away in that direction. Actively powerful, not the potential energy I felt around the other gods that just walked down the street. "What's down there?"

"That's the passage to the Altar of Prayer," Hermes told me, as if that explained everything.

When I didn't reveal just how little I knew by asking what the hell that was, Hestia looked over to Hermes. "Wait. Are you telling me this is Uranus's escape route in case something goes wrong?"

I lost Herme's one word response as I tried to process what I just heard. Uranus, the first god from the Greek myths. The guy that was supposed to have been killed by his son for locking up a bunch of monsters. Because I was with at least two people who didn't know just how much information I lacked, I kept my mouth shut in regards to questions about the thing that didn't make sense.

We came out in the back of the bottom floor of Babel and Hermes guided us around until I found myself in more recognizable surroundings, the long hallway I had come out of on day one. Then, it was just a short walk to the dungeon entrance, followed by an annoying descent down the world's second biggest spiral staircase.

Anya and the other girls were waiting for us at the bottom. Chloe and Luniore took the packs from the gods while Ryu took charge. "Alright, the Takemikazuchi Familia gave us the location of where they last saw Mr Cranel. For the sake of time, I think it would be best if we start our search two floors above that one," she said before looking to Hestia. "That is, assuming he is still alive?"

"He is," the goddess confirmed before becoming confused. "But…why not start the search now?"

"From what I saw of Mr Dresden's location magic, it takes time for him to cast, and every second counts," Ryu told her.

Then, Chloe raised a hand. "Plus, with the first ten floors being as small as they are, Anya and I should be able to pick up his scent without us leaving the fastest route. If we come across a fresh scent at the stairs, we can turn around quickly and track him down. Floors eleven and below have pitfalls that can let him bypass things like that so if he fell down one of those, our noses won't help much."

"Anya take the vanguard," Ryu said before the catgirl saluted and the elf looked at her other waitresses. "You two, forward defense. I'll take the rear. Our ah…supporters will be dead center with our mage. Perseus, you'll be a rear guard backup. Anyone have any questions?"

I was going to ask why Ryu called Asfi Perseus, but someone else spoke up.

"What about me?"

I looked over to Syr and…

"Center," Ryu replied before blinking and shaking off some kind of distraction.

…

When nobody in the group of eight had any questions, we set off at a brisk walking pace that had the gods looking a little annoyed ten minutes in. Despite this being the first floor of the dungeon on an active day, I didn't see many other groups of magic stone miners as we headed down the most direct route to the second floor. Either people didn't bother with the first floor very much, or knew to split off from the main route if they wanted to get any monsters to themselves.

Unfortunately, what we did encounter along the way was monsters. Fifteen minutes from the start of the journey, the ceiling started cracking and it started raining monsters. The giant insects I saw during my first visit to the dungeon started chewing their way out of the ceiling and walls.

"Are those, red ants?" Asfi asked as she threw a trio of long pointy things to kill two of them without any problems. "Those aren't supposed to spawn for at least four more floors!"

"Hestia?" the god called out.

"My butt is clenched Hermes!" the goddess yelled back.

"Well, I'm not doing it," Syr said before everyone in the party looked at her for a moment…

I shook off the distraction and turned around to see what was going on. Despite the unexpected development, the girls were able to easily slaughter the twenty creatures that dug their way out of the rock and turn them to dust. When it was over just two minutes later, Asfi leaned over to Hermes.

"Sir, I don't like this. If these things are spawning on Newbie Road, the Guild needs to be informed. They're going to kill people," she said.

The god sighed. "It's probably just an unintended presence in the dungeon that it's reacting to," he told her. "But, we're going to have to kill all the spawns we run into. Anything we leave behind will slaughter a fresh adventurer."

-Ryu-

Despite the oddity of the powerful monster spawns, we made good time and got down to level four thanks to a steady pace. As much as I hated to think it, the lack of bodies on our way there was strangely concerning. If the dungeon had somehow become more malevolent or grown stronger, spawning monsters a difficulty higher than it should, then we should have run across several adventurers either fleeing for their lives, or found their corpses littering the ground. The fact that we didn't was an oddity I couldn't overlook.

More than one member of our party pointed out the two deities we had with us, but Hermes and Hestia swore they were suppressing their divine presence. Which, they obviously were. Neither of them had the air of majesty that surrounded a god just by being a god, despite the morality of their actions.

Then, we stopped at the entrance to level five and had our catgirls examine the downward sloping passageway with their enhanced senses to check for Mr Cranel and give us all five minutes to rest. I took out my canteen and-

"Ryu, can I have some too?"

-handed it to Syr after unscrewing the cap.

My body froze as I watched the girl that might as well have been my younger sister take a gulp from the canteen before handing it back to me. At the same time, everyone else in the group looked back at the newcomer with equal amounts of shock and disbelief.

Because, she couldn't be standing there.

It was impossible.

My mind…refused to…

"NYAAAAAAA!" Anya's voice broke into my train of thought, dispelling the daze I was in and let me fully process what I was seeing as she spoke what was on all of our minds. "What the heck is Syr doing here?!"

Goddess Hestia let out a tiny scream before jumping back from the girl standing right next to her while Hermes frowned and Dresden groaned before covering his face with his palm. Asfi just looked on in disbelief as Anya and Chloe came back at a fast jog to get a closer look at our friend. Luniore was the only one of us able to speak. "Uh, how did you get here?"

"Hm?" Syr replied with water still going down her throat. She stopped drinking and looked around. "Oh, I guess the last potion ran out."

The comment snapped Asfi out of her daze of disbelief. "Potion? What do you mean, potion?" she said between several stammers. "There's-you can…there's an invisibility potion?"

Dresden groaned again and rubbed his forehead and I put two and two together. "You gave her more of that monotone potion?"

"I haven't made any of that since-wait," he said before looking down at the girl with a scowl. "You stole the leftover potion. And what are you even doing here?"

In response to the accusation, Syr crossed her arms. "You were throwing it out anyway!" she said becoming more defensive. The girl drew in on herself and broke eye contact. "And…I was worried. Bell is hurt, and all of you were leaving me behind. People go into the dungeon and disappear every day. What would happen if…nobody came back and I was all alone?"

I felt as if someone had punched me right in the gut and all my confusion as well as the anger I had towards Syr at finding her in such a dangerous place disappeared. Working at a bar frequented by adventurers, I had seen several families endure the fallout of someone not coming back from the dungeon. We all tried to write it off as just a thing that happened, adventurers risked their lives for great riches after all, but…when you're the one it happens to, the feeling is crushing.

Syr was much more empathetic than me. It had taken me losing family to understand how a wife sitting alone at a table felt when she had been enjoying dinner with her husband the night before. For someone like Syr, she wouldn't need that.

It was no wonder she had sounded so cold when she told us to go help Bell. She must have pushed all her fears and anger down as deep as they could go. So, when all those feelings had come back while we were making preparations, she must have panicked.

"Wait," Dresden said before he looked over to Hermes and Hestia. "Are you telling me neither of you noticed her?"

Hestia blinked and took a step back from his harsh tone. "Uh…why would we?"

"Because the last time I tried to use this in front of a god, he saw through it in five seconds," Dresden said before calming down just a little and turning to Hermes. "Okay, I can believe her, but I don't trust you half as far as I can throw you!"

Hermes gave him a tired look. "What is up with all the disbelief? And what god did you try to sneak past, if I might ask."

This time, Dresden got a little unnerved before breaking eye contact. "Odin."

While Hestia's expression became interested, Hermes rubbed his chin and mumbled something only I and the cat girls had any hope of picking up. "...that makes sense. He did have an office there," he said before looking back to Dresden. "Well there you go! Hestia and I don't have anywhere near the perception of an elder god while we're down here in the mortal realm. Even in Heaven, Odin was exceptional in his ability to see through things, like Freya's charming abilities."

"...fine, whatever," he grumbled before reaching into the satchel he brought along to pull out a crystal clear bottle containing a light blue liquid and handing it to Syr. "Just drink this."

Syr took the bottle and frowned at it before looking up to Dresden. "What is it?"

"Escape potion," he said in response, getting a look of disbelief from Asfi while Syr's expression took on one of disgust. "Drink it, and you'll either end up at the stairwell, or inside Babel. I brewed six before we came here in case Bell and his friends are too hurt for us to get them out of here safely and one or more of us got too injured to drag them back."

Before Syr could voice her obvious displeasure at the idea, Asfi interjected. "I'm sorry, but what? Calling an invisibility potion a blending potion is one thing, but nobody has ever made anything like what you're describing! How does something like that even work?"

"Blending potion, the mage told her, emphasizing the name. "We still saw Syr on the way down, adjusted our formation to protect her and made sure not to accidentally put a weapon through her skull, but just didn't bother noticing that we were doing it and instantly forgot she was there."

After a few seconds of just staring at the man, Asfi finally managed a response. "That's insane!"

Dresden sighed and slumped over a bit. "Look, we don't have time for this. Syr, drink the potion."

"Isn't drinking two different kinds of your potions a day dangerous?" she asked hesitantly.

"How did-" Dresden took a deep breath. "You'll probably throw up a lot and be sick for a day, yes. But that's it! Is safer than going with us."

She gestured over to the gods. "They're going with you. And, you've all done a good job of keeping them safe."

"That's different!" he told her as his voice increased in volume. "We need Hestia to locate the boy."

And when she simply pointed to Hermes, Dresden tensed and looked away. "Would someone else tell her not to come?" he yelled at the rest of us.

The rest of the girls found something else to look at, and I sighed. This was why nobody wanted to be a party leader. "The potions you have, can they take her to safety?" I asked Dresden.

He groaned and sighed. "Probably. I haven't tested it in this environment yet, but there's nothing that says they shouldn't work."

"How?" Asfi demanded.

Once again, the man sighed. "The escape potion turns the drinker into a gust of wind for several seconds and moves them to a location they can picture in their minds. I don't know the exact time, but this batch should be enough to move at least two hundred miles. That's more than enough to get out of this place, considering all of the small ventilation shafts we've seen."

The artificer stared at the man with an open mouth for several seconds. I didn't know anything about magic item creation or potion brewing, but from Asfi was a crafter famous throughout all of Orario and beyond. The fact that she was still looking at the man in disbelief made me realize the magical effects of Dresden's crafting might be much greater than I originally thought when we went to the casino.

Which made me take another look at his staff. The innate magical senses of being an elf had told me it was more than just a carved piece of wood, but the lack of a focusing crystal that most mages used had me questioning its effectiveness. Now…I wasn't so sure.

"Look," Hestia spoke up. "Syr-whatsherface snuck into the party. Fine, we can get her out if something bad happens. Now, can we go back to finding my Bell? We're wasting time when seconds matter!"

We all shared a look before nodding, and Dresden relented. Still, he gave Hestia one of the emergency potions, and after some badgering from Asfi, Hermes as well. With the gods given a safety net, a weight I didn't know I was carrying was lifted. The last thing I wanted was to be responsible for one of them being sent back to Heaven. Even with everything I had done in my past, it was nothing compared to what I would have gone through if something happened to either one of them.

We got down to level five, and as most of us had predicted by then, rocks started falling to make way for another spawn. But, instead of the kinds of things we should have been facing, orcs pushed themselves through the walls, and I could only stand agape as a baby dragon fell from above. Even if we were having odd spawns, a monster from the eleventh floor had no business being right at the beginning of the fifth!

It crashed into the ground and made the area shake, forcing all of us to fight in order to keep our footing.

"You gotta be kitten me," Anya grumbled while Chloe drew her daggers and took a position in the vanguard next to her.

"Okay meow, I CALL BULLSHIT!" she yelled as the monster drew in air before breathing out a cone of magical fire.

The attack made me tense. Despite what some non-adventurers or people without falna at all thought, the blessing from the gods didn't make us invincible against lesser monsters. While our Status included an endurance enhancement, it had very little to do with being able to just take more damage. We could ignore the pain that came with being punched and take the extra strain that came from increased strength or speed because our muscles and bones were reinforced by the blessing, but a level one monster was still able to kill us if we let it stab us in a vital spot. Or cover us with a deluge of fire.

Normally, it would have been easy for the girls and myself to avoid such an attack by simply falling back up the stairs or maybe countering with an equal show of force that blew the fire back. However, the cone of fire had already spread to the point where that wasn't an option. So, I leaped over to snatch Syr up in a two armed bridal carry. "Get the gods back up the stairs! NOW"

"DEFENDARIUS!"

My panicked shout was overdone by Dresden, who stepped forward before throwing his left hand out. A second later, a bubble of blue defensive energy sprang up to block the incoming flames. Anya and Chloe shifted their weight and went from a pair of cats preparing to flee, to two warrior ready to pounce the second the attack was done while Asfi Al Andromeda moved forward and took out a large flask from her satchel while slotting a trio of throwing weapons in her other hand. With our escape no longer needed, Luniore put Lady Hestia down and joined the vanguard.

"Oh Ryu, am I supposed to read into how you keep saving me like this?" Syr asked me with a little giggle before she leaned her head on my shoulder and let out an overtly dreamy sigh.

I contemplated dropping the girl on her butt for a moment. But, those ideas quickly faded when the captain of the Hermes Familia took her place next to me. "Instant-cast magic?" Asfi mumbled.

The words had me sigh dejectedly. "You have no idea," I mumbled. Spells with a single word weren't unheard of. They were more rare than a dwarf-loving-elf, but they existed. The problem was, from what I had seen of Mr Dresden's actions during the night at the casino and now, every spell he had was instant-cast!

It had to be some borderline-cheat skill, or maybe something to do with that Winter-thing Syr had asked me not to look into.

"Why did I not try and corner this guy at the restaurant and make him join my familia?" Hestia whined to herself.

Hermes let out a laugh. "And here I thought you were saving your spell slots for the final boss, Wizard Dresden!" the god shouted over the roaring flames. "Letting a bunch of girls do all the fighting."

I blinked at the goading. I had thought Dresden had been using all his concentration to keep tabs on his tracking spell to make sure we didn't miss Bell. The girls were checking the trails at the stairs, but it was better safe than sorry.

And what did spell slots mean?

"Are you seriously trying to goad me into attacking a dragon?" Dresden yelled back at Hermes right before the fire died down.

As soon as it did, I set Syr down and told her to stay put before Dresden dropped his defensive magic. Anya and Chloe charged in with a beasteal glee that allowed them to take the baby dragon right in the face with the golden spear to the upper portion of the monster's mouth before Chloe leaped over her partner to slash it in the eyes and stab the beast several times in the brain once she found purchase on its head.

I went with Luniore while our ranged attackers stayed back with the gods. With the cat girls dealing with the dragon, the brawler and I spit up on its left and right flanks to slash through or bash in the heads of several orcs before they could do more than raise their weapons. Although Asfi and Dresden stayed behind to deal with strays, none made it past either of us before Anya and Chloe had dusted the dragon. Which meant they easily picked up the strays.

"Look, I'm just saying, a big powerful wizard like you, letting a bunch of girls do all the work, seems kind of…you know…wimpy," I saw Hermes tell Dresden when I killed the last orc and looked back to the rest of my party.

Dresden scowled at the god, obviously bothered by the jab, but otherwise unperturbed. "I know you're trying to play me, and if it was any other god, I might fall for it. But, I've read all your stories. So, I'm not going to do a single thing you ask me to."

"Hey! Most of that was slander! If I could, I would have sued!" Hermes told him.

"So, you didn't literally bore someone to death? Because, I know it's possible. I saw Green Lantern," Dresden replied.

The odd response made Hermes take a step back before his expression became a little darker. "...low blow, Dresden. Low blow."

"Okay, monsters are dead!" Anya called out as she spun her spear around, stopping the exchange and making us move out.

We got going again, and while we didn't have such a surprising encounter again, the oddity of the monsters attacking us, and just us in particular, continued to be an annoyance. More orcs and stronger versions of floor five monsters spawned like we were somewhere between floors eight and twelve.

With it being more than just the first few floors having this occurrence, it eventually got brought up in conversation. "Why are monsters of a higher level appearing around us so much?" Asfi asked.

"Well," Syr spoke up in an uncertain tone. "I'm no expert, but we do have Lady Hestia and Lord Hermes with us. Maybe that's why the dungeon is trying to kill us."

Hestia shot her an angry look. "We're suppressing our divinity!"

I sighed and picked up my pace enough to walk side by side with the gods. "That may be true Lady Hestia. But from the evidence I can see, we're the only party facing this hardship. If anyone else on this floor had encountered a baby dragon, we would have either seen it roaming around, or found them fleeing by now."

"So…this level of monster activity isn't normal?" Dresden asked. "Because, this is actually fewer monsters than I ran into on floor one the day I got here."

The entire party stopped dead in its tracks and even our vanguard turned around to look at Dresden. While Syr let out a little groan and slapped her forehead, I was the party leader, which meant I was the one tasked with asking the obvious question. "Say what?"

Dresden cleared his throat and began to look around nervously. "Oh uh…you see, the day I got here. I did a run through the dungeon. It was the night the guild was shut down, so nobody was there to stop me from going or leaving. But, when I first came down here, I think I might have pissed it off by trying to ah…do something I now know was pretty stupid. There was this big psychic scream and then everything from orcs to fire breathing dogs started trying to kill me."

A cold chill ran down my spine at the mention of a scream that you could only hear in your mind. For a brief instant, I was back on a much deeper floor, surrounded by ruined terrain that had been destroyed in an attempt to kill my familia. None of us had died from the trap, but…

"That's…hmmm…" Hermes said, drawing me out of the memory as he crossed his arms. "Well, more than likely, it's the fact that thre-ahem, Hestia and myself are putting out too much divinity for the dungeon to ignore because we're here together. Even with our auras suppressed as they are."

Syr perked up. "So, maybe you should drink your exit potion, Lord Hermes. If you're making it harder for us to keep going, it would be better for everyone if you left."

The expression on Lord Herme's face turned serious as he looked back at Syr. "If that's the case, you should probably head home too, Syr."

For some reason I couldn't grasp, Syr frowned and looked at the ground in front of her. "You may be right."

"Look," Luniore cut in. "We don't actually know what's causing the dungeon to react like this. If it really is something with our party, the only way to single out the problem would be splitting up and meeting at the entrance to the next floor. Whichever group runs into the most trouble is the cause."

Asfi joined the conversation a moment later. "I don't recommend doing that. We have two gods to safeguard and the dungeon is presenting us with a difficulty that is much harder than normal. Six of us guarding them to avoid any mistakes with what is going on is the bare minimum."

I thought about it for a moment. Why it would be Dresden made no sense to me, and it wasn't like there were oddities from time to time. Bell Cranel had battled two different minotaurs on floors much higher than they should have been, and I had run into my own overpowered nightmare that spawned under special conditions as well. "We aren't being slowed down by the spawns too much, so there's no reason to go out of our way and waste time dealing with it. We can't afford to get rid of Dresden or Hestia anyway, the whole quest centers around their cooperation. For now, we'll just continue on as quickly as we can."

A nod of agreement from the rest of the party was all I needed before we set off again. With time of the essence, I set a quicker pace and joined the vanguard to help deal with the monsters faster. With Dresden's defensive magic, we could afford to take risks as long as he stayed close to our non-combatants.

Taking the quickest route from stairwell to stairwell, we carved a path through twelve dragons, a hundred orcs that made Dresden roll his eyes for some reason, eight silverbacks, thirty oddly placed minotaurs on floor nine and nearly twenty hard armors. The spawn rate increased with each floor, but our more frantic pace kept anything from slowing us down.

It was when we reached floor twelve that made us pause. We were walking as fast as possible after killing off a pack of hard armors when Chloe held up her hand.

"Hey guys…" she stopped and began sniffing the air. The catgirl's body tensed, and she looked around cautiously before turning to Anya. "Please tell me-ow I'm just getting a stuffy nose."

Anya got on her hands and knees before sniffing the floor. "No…I can't smell it either," she said softly.

I looked over to Syr out of the corner of my eye as the look on her face slowly turned to one of trepidation. Beside her, the goddess in our party looked around wildly. "What is it? What's going on?"

"They lost Bell's scent," my best friend surmised with that mind of her's that was just too perfect for its own good sometimes. "Or worse…the trail ends here, doesn't it?"

-Bell-

I groaned in pain. Every bit of my body hurt. Especially my back. If what I was feeling was anywhere near what Grandpa had complained about after a long day working in the field, I truly pitied him.

"Hey Bell?" A voice that was a little on the squeaky side called out. "Are you dead?"

Dead, that was what I felt like, alright. "...yes," I moaned.

"Oh…okay," Lilly replied, although her words sounded more like a groan than anything a pallum would say. "That's nice."

"...uh…I'm here too…" Welf called out from not too far away.

"Oh! Uh…that's nice, Mr…um…" Lilly trailed off.

"Did you forget my name?" Welf asked in irritation.

"Hey! We just fell, like, fifty feet! I could have a concussion for all you know!" Lilly yelled at him. "Excuse me if I can't remember the name of a guy I just met last night and barely talked to all the way down here! I don't think we even had a single conversation until floor eleven!"

Welf groaned. "It's Welf-"

"Crozo!" Lilly suddenly yelled. "That's right, now I remember. You're a magic sword smith that refuses to make magic swords! Well maybe if you had churned one out to bring with us, Bell wouldn't be dead!"

I groaned some more. "Lilly, I'm not really dead."

"Quiet Bell! You're undermining my argument!" Lilly snapped back at me. "My point is, if you had swallowed your pride and at least carried one or two of those swords around yourself, we wouldn't be in this mess!"

I sighed to myself and waited for the feeling to come back into my legs. Lilly was just venting, like she tended to do from time to time. At the oddest times too. After I saved her, the day she became my permanent partner, she had yelled about how stupid I was for saving a girl that stole from me before she broke down crying.

As for Welf, I could understand his reluctance not to make magic swords. He hated them because years ago, his family's smithing talent was used by a nearby kingdom to outfit its army with magical weapons capable of turning every soldier into something equal to a level four or five mage for a few spells. Just a few people of that level could destroy buildings. If over a hundred of them got together, they could lay waste to entire cities. He also hated how weapons like that broke after just two or three uses, saying that they betrayed their wielder. So, he made armor instead of weapons.

Which…now that I had some time to really think about it, was probably why his familia wouldn't take him into the dungeon to level up and gain the Smithing ability he was so desperate to get. I had seen magic swords for sale in one of the Hephaestus Familia's shops, they had insane price tags. For a familia that ran on trade, it didn't make sense to have someone who could make million valis weapons only craft armor that was worth ten thousand and change.

A little rock hitting my face drew me back to the present, and I looked up above us. What I saw was…not good.

When the pass parade happened, I had thought we were going to die. Then, I had started hearing a bell ring, and my hand had started glowing brightly, signaling the activation of my Argonaut skill. But with only one shot and a choice between a large group of killer rabbits and a monster parade of an unknown size, I had decided to blast the ceiling in front of the incoming parade. The ceiling came down, blocking the tunnel like I had hoped it would.

Then…the floor had given way under the weight and caused all of us to fall.

Into a pit that had been on the floor below us.

So…we ended up falling two whole floors and landing very hard.

"Well, at least there aren't any monsters," I told myself with a tiny laugh. Then, my ribs told me that was a bad idea with a sharp stabbing pain.

"DON'T SAY THAT!" Lilly yelled. "I thought you read stores, Master Bell! Don't you know that when people do stuff like that, it's like raising a flag that says, 'come and kill us!'?"

I blinked. "Oh…uh…no," I replied after working through my confusion. "Just what kind of books do you read, Lilly?"

"No time for that!" the shortest member of our party by a good margin told me fiercely. Then, she spoke in a much calmer voice. "Uh, can either of you get up on your own?"

Welf strained against something I couldn't see, but then quickly gave up. "My leg is pinned."

I moved my legs. It hurt, but I was able to roll over and get onto my knees with a moderate amount of difficulty. "I think so…why?"

"Because I've been looking at the ceiling since we fell, and gravity is slowly winning the fight against those rocks blocking the shaft that we came through," Lilly explained in a much more serious tone than she had a moment ago. "I'd say we've got five minutes before the ceiling caves in and kills us."

"...why the hell didn't you say something about that before," Welf yelled before the sounds of his struggles picked up again.

Lilly let out a cry of frustration. "Damn it Welf, I'm a supporter, not a geologist!" the short girl yelled back at him. "It took some time to see that the formation above us was unstable."

I didn't join the argument and concentrated on moving. With a good deal of work, I forced myself back onto my feet, using every bit of leverage I could. When I did, I saw Lilly…as well as why she couldn't move.

Lilly might have been a dog girl at the moment, but her real race was that of a pallum, and the magic that let her alter her appearance didn't add any mass beyond small things like ears and a tail. Meaning that as a pallum, she was terminally short. The girl topped out at three feet seven inches in heels. Because of that, she would never be a fortline combatant and was put into the role of supporter by her familia. So Lilly developed skills to assist in that, like her Artel Assist ability. It let her carry loads several times her weight, despite the fact that the green backpack she carried was about five times her size and should have been impossible for her to pick up no matter how strong she was because of balancing issues.

It was also the reason she couldn't get up. Because when Lilly fell, she landed on her back. Which meant she was laying on top of an object that could have doubled as a tent for a pallum, leaving her legs hanging in the air and unable to touch the ground.

"Um…Lilly?" I asked.

An annoyed groan came from the little girl. "One word, and I break what's left of our healing potions," she told me. "Now help me up."

"But…can't you just undo your pack's shoulder straps?" I asked.

"..."

Ten minutes later, we were well away from where we fell down and had taken a few potions to heal the broken bones and other injuries that had occurred because of the fall. So, we did little more than wince when the ceiling did finally cave in.

Lilly laid out all of the equipment she still had in her pack, separating all the broken and useless things from what we could still use, while Welf worked to sharpen his sword that had taken a beating in the fall and from all the monsters we had killed. Once that was done, Lilly laid out the maps of several floors and frowned after studying them.

"Okay guys, we may have a problem here," she said before pointing at the map of the floor we had been on. "From what I can figure, this is where we fell."

I looked at the map and nodded as I studied the intersection. My advisor at the Guild always had me go over all the information she could find before letting me go into new territory, but memorizing a map and bringing it up in my memory was beyond me. "Right," I agreed more to show that I followed her explanation than agreed with her assessment.

Then, Lilly pointed to a stop on a different map. "And this is where the hole we kept falling down was," she said. "...I think."

"You think?" Welf asked.

Lilly looked up at the other man. "I'm not a dungeon cartographer, all I can do is make an educated guess based on our previous position and the whole two seconds we saw of the floor above us," she said before grabbing the map and putting it in Welf's face. "But by all means, if you know where we are, please tell us! Getting it wrong could only mean running around for several hours to try and get our bearings, and maybe dying because of it!"

When Lilly put the map back down, I peered over to where the pit she pointed to was and frowned. "Uh, Lilly? Wouldn't if we fell down on the western side of the first map, then wouldn't the hole we went down also be around the western side?" I asked before gesturing to the hole she indicated. It was more towards the center.

Instead of blowing up even more, she took in a deep breath and looked back down at the map. "Unfortunately, the dungeon isn't that nicely laid out. While each floor is bigger than the one beneath it, just stacking one map on top of the other and trying to calculate for the difference in size based on a simple expansion equation is a big mistake," Lilly told me before pointing to the stairs on floor eleven. "See how these are in the westermost area of the floor, well…" She brought the other map that showed floor twelve around and pointed to the middle of the map, where the stairs going back to were marked off. "It's why people don't just try to dig through each level. You start trying to dig through in the wrong place, and you may have to tunnel through two hundred feet of solid rock that regenerates before you get to another floor. But one hundred feet down, the tunnel could seal you in, trapping you there without air."

"Okay," Welf said after a moment. "I'll, uh…trust you on this one, Little Bit."

I winced at the nickname. Didn't Welf know that reminding short girls that they were short was always a bad idea? Grandpa had warned me about the wrath of the smol girl, and how much easier it was for them to attack the vital areas of men!

"Which brings us to our next problem," Lilly went on. "Even if we manage to climb back up the next two floors…that cave in is blocking the path to floor ten. We would have to wait for the dungeon to fix itself, and if something wandered into the area, we'd be trapped in a dead end."

Welf sighed before looking over to our remaining supplies. We had brought enough equipment to get as far as we did, but nearly all the recovery items we had saved to make sure we got back alive had been used to treat the injuries from our fall. "So…we wait here for a recovery team?" he asked.

I remembered back to my lectures at the Guild. That was what Ms Eina had told me. When something happens and you get lost in the dungeon, the best thing to do is hold tight and wait for rescue. There were many strong familia that made their living just pulling people out of trouble.

"No…we need to make for the eighteenth floor," Lilly said, completely tearing apart all the memories of sensible advice I had been given.

Welf stood up. "Say what?" he demanded. "Anybody knows that when you're in trouble, you fortify your position and wait for help!"

I nodded in agreement, but Lilly sighed and shook her head. "Most of our food and water was crushed or spilled by the fall. Not that we had that much to begin with, since this was just supposed to be a daily excursion. Also, we're not due back in Orario for at least eight hours. Sixteen, if they don't think we've been out all night celebrating a successful dungeon raid," she told us with a growing sadness in her voice. "Longer, if they don't even care that we're gone."

Which made me blink. I didn't know all of Lilly's story with her familia, but from what I understood, they weren't nearly as close as the name was supposed to imply. Then there was Welf, someone who his own familia wouldn't take into the dungeon. The chances of those kinds of people doing anything quickly were slim to none.

Hestia would notice me gone and do everything she could to get me back. That much I was certain of. But…I had come in late at night plenty of times to find her asleep in the little church we used as a home. She wouldn't notice I was gone until tomorrow morning.

Could we survive until then?

"Still…" I began before Lilly cut me off.

"We're two floors down from the group of monsters that nearly overwhelmed us, which means it's not going to get any easier," she said. "And most rescue parties cut off their services on the tenth floor. Corpse retrieval parties don't go past fifteen. So, it would have to be an open request from Lady Hestia, not a straight up hire. Which could take who knows how long. Bell, how much energy would you need to burn during all that time? How many calories? We might be fine at first, but we would get slower and weaker with every fight.

"If we make for floor eighteen, we might have just enough energy to get there in time," she went on. "Or, if we're really lucky, we'll come across a party on their way out of the dungeon. If that happens, we can partner up and leave together. It'll probably cost us half our stones, but it's better than dying."

I took a moment to consider her logic. It was sound, if depressing. Waiting around for help didn't seem to be the perfect option the Guild made it out to be. But then, what kind of heroic story had the main character waiting around to be saved?

Well, aside from the ones about the hero Argonaut. The ones with him always had him being saved by the princess. Honestly, he sounded more like a clown than anything else.

Floor eighteen was a safe zone, one of the few floors where monsters weren't constantly coming out of the walls. From what I understood, Adventurers used it to rest up before going into the Deeper Floors, a much more dangerous part of the dungeon where a single mistake could cost someone their life.

"So…what do you want to do, Bell?" Welf asked.

I got pulled out of my thoughts and found both Lilly, who was smarter than I was, and the older man looking at me. For a moment, I wondered why they were doing that, but then it hit me. I was the party leader, and that meant making the hard choices that could mean life or death.

After looking back down at the map to help me focus my thoughts, I considered all the risks and found something Lilly hadn't considered. "What about the monster rex on floor seventeen?"

My question got a dejected sigh from Lilly. "Last I heard, he was defeated two weeks ago," she said before sucking in a breath. "And it has a respawn time for fourteen days."

"So it's going to come back today?" Welf asked.

Lilly nodded slowly. "Factoring in average travel time, it should have been killed five to eight hours from now, two weeks ago. If we hurry and use vertical shafts like the one we just fell through to go down as fast as possible, we can beat the timer and get to floor eighteen before it comes back. But if we go, we go now. No side trips, no exploration. We can't even take the time to loot drops. If we wait, we can not pick this option even an hour down the road."

I took in a deep breath and looked at our supplies, then the map, and my party members. "Well, there's a reason it's called an adventure," I said before standing up all the way to get some feeling back in my legs. "Pack up. We make for the eighteenth floor safe zone."

-Dresden-

After the girls had said they smelled that Bell's trail came to an end, I had Bonnie take a quick peek around so I didn't have to see what the underground death trap really looked like. Not to mention the potential problems of using my Sight with a trio of gods standing around.

Once I got her assessment before I stood up from where I had crouched over the ground to act like I was looking at something. I turned back to the girls and tried not to flinch from the teary-eyed look that Hestia was giving me. "Well…it's hard to tell since we're so far away, but…I think he's still moving."

"But why is he a floor below us?" Hestia demanded. "This is already way too deep! He should be on his way back, right?"

"There's no dust."

Most of us looked back to the elf in the green cape that was examining the ground around us. "Excuse me?" Hestia asked.

After Ryu got back on her feet, she crossed her arms without looking up from the ground. "Dust. There isn't any in this area. If I had to take a guess, this floor is newly regenerated," she said before looking up at the goddess. "Lord Takemikazuchi's familia said Mr Cranel's party was surrounded, correct? Rather than fight the monsters, they might have used an explosive item, or maybe a magic sword to blow a hole on the floor in an attempt to escape from pursuit. It's a risky gamble, but it's the only thing I can think of that would explain why there isn't any dust on the floor exactly where his scent trail ends without a corpse."

After taking a few seconds, Hestia nodded. "Okay…that still doesn't explain why my Bell wouldn't be trying to come back to Orario," she said in a worried tone.

"Actually, it very well may," Asfi told her, making the goddess turn around to look at the woman. "If Bell's party thought that the way back was blocked, then it's very possible that they would make for the safe zone on the eighteenth floor. It's a lot faster than having to climb back up thirteen floors. There's also the chance they lost some of their gear in the fall. Down instead of up would be a shorter trip."

Ryu nodded in agreement. "It's what I would do," she said to the girl with blue hair before turning back to face Hestia. "From there, he could resupply, or even team up with another party on their way back to the surface for added safety."

When the goddess looked around hopefully at the two girls, I felt a little pain in my gut. There was another reason for the kid wanting to go to a closer aid station than the hospital in the tower. One of the three members of his group could be badly wounded and they just didn't have time to cover that much ground before they bled out.

I held up a hand as I thought of something. "Wait, we can just blow holes in the floor and skip all this crap before catching up to the kid?" I asked before I looked over to the brains of the group standing there with her glasses. "And you're telling me this now?"

Asfi looked at me like I was an idiot, then sighed and shook her head. "To do something like that, you would need a perfect map of the dungeon, as well as a method of determining your position in relation to each floor. That kind of precision is impossible."

I had to repress a move I nearly made on instinct. Instead of reaching for my left arm where Bonnie's jewelry was under my coat, I looked over to our dungeon expert. "Supposing one of those kids is hurt and in need of medical treatment, what are the chances of them actually making it to the safe zone to wait for rescue?"

"If they have someone slowing them down?" Ryu asked before she crossed her arms and tapped an elbow in thought. After a few seconds, she looked back up and around at the others. "Does anyone know when Goliath was last slain?"

Completely lost, I remained silent as Asfi's eyes widened, everyone else in the group had a similar reaction to the question, but she was the only one who spoke. "Oh no…if we don't catch Bell and the others before they reach the end of the seventeenth floor, they're dead."

The atmosphere became unbelievably tense, and I could only look on in clueless abandon while Hestia looked ready to collapse and Syr gasped in horror. "Uh…does anyone want to fill me in? I'm new to this, remember?"

"Every few floors, there's an area dedicated to a single supreme monster, a king among its kind," Hermes told me evenly. "It spawns right before the safe area where monsters generally don't spawn. My familia specializes in delivering things, even in the dungeon. So we keep a good track of when that thing is around, and when it's going to show up. Which is…"

Asfi sighed and slumped over a little. "Two hours. Give or take a few minutes," she said before something about me caught her eye. "Wait! Your potions! If they actually work…could you send one or two of us ahead to meet them at the entrance to floor seventeen?"

"Or, we could work our way back from there," Ryu added a moment later. "If Chloe or Anya went, they could go up with someone else as we worked our way down. If Bell is still on the move, then they could try and meet with him there to keep him and his friends safe for when the rest of us arrive."

As much as it killed me to quash the hope that I saw return in the eyes of several girls around me, I had to shake my head. "I have no idea if that has any hope of working. They're designed to take someone away from danger. If you tried to act against the nature of the magic involved and do the opposite, it might work…or it might blow you into a million pieces so when you do return to human form…you…splatter."

And then, Hestia's hope died.

Internally, I knew she was really a billion year old being, but…the way she just fell to her knees in front of me that moment and started breathing rapidly, trying not to cry in front of everyone, I couldn't not think of her as a little kid.

And…I had a very hard time saying no to crying little kids.

"Okay…Hermes," I said, drawing the god's attention. "I might have a way out of this. But if I do it, I want your oath. The big one that all the Greek myths go on about you guys never breaking. You will not use what I am about to show in any way against me or even act on it in any way without my permission. You and every one of your followers. Do it, and I will do everything I can to save that boy."

The look the god gave me wasn't his usual jovial one, it became completely serious. "So, you are keeping something up your sleeve," Hermes said before he gave a little chuckle. "Alright then…" the man stood up straight and held up his hand. "I Hermes, Herald of the Gods the Twelfth Olympan do swear upon the River Styx not to reveal any secrets associated with you and your associates that come to light during our time in the dungeon together. Nor take any action against you and yours based upon them."

Silence reigned over the group for a moment before he took a breath and I repeated the oath in my mind three times to triple check it. Everyone else just looked around confused.

With the exception of Hestia. She just gaped at the god before jumping to her feet. "Hey Hermes, WHAT HAPPENED TO THAT STUFF BEING THE STUFF WE'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO TALK ABOUT?"

"Will that suffice?" Hermes asked, completely ignoring Hestia.

"...what's the river Styx?" Asfi asked. She was likewise ignored.

"SOMETHING WE'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO TALK ABOUT!" Hestia yelled.

Hermes sighed and looked over to the little goddess. "I didn't break any rules. I was talking to Dresden, and…" Hermes's mouth clamped shut, and he frowned. Then, he looked over to me. "Wait, I can't explain. That will reveal a secret you revealed in the dungeon. Well, confirmed at least," he said before crossing his arms and nodding towards Hestia. "So, how're you going to get her to swear herself to secrecy?"

I snorted as Hestia looked over at me. "I trust her and everyone else here. You're the one I had a problem with," I told him before I took off my lion's mane coat and tossed it and my satchel of potions to Syr, who was giving me a dirty look. "...what?"

When everyone else turned to look at the goddess in disguise along with me, she put on an obviously fake smile and gave me a tiny laugh. "You shouldn't talk to gods like that, Mr Dresden."

"Trust me for what?" Hestia asked in a perturbed tone.

I looked over to the girl. "Not to make too big a deal about it, because I'm saving your kid."

For a few seconds, Hestia looked like she was going to blow her top, but then she looked away from me and slowly deflated. "Okay…you're right, this isn't the time to talk about stuff," she agreed reluctantly. Then, she threw out an arm towards me and pointed her finger right at my face. "But the second this is over, I'm getting an explanation of how you obviously know things that our children should not have any knowledge of!"

"The rest of you, please keep your mouths shut about this," I asked the girls standing on the opposite side of me.

They didn't even hesitate before nodding. Ryu was the only one who spoke. "If a god trusts you enough to give an oath, who are we to refuse such a request?" she asked.

I grit my teeth just a bit. I wanted to point out they were people with free will and opinions of their own. But, every second counted, and I couldn't get into a massive morality debate at the moment.

I reached up and flicked my armband. "If I start using geomancy to dig a way down, how long would it take us to reach floor seventeen?"

Asfi sighed. "I just said-"

The woman promptly stopped talking when the emerald jewel on my armband lit up and displayed a transparent three-dimensional map of the dungeon, starting with the floor we were on, and continuing on until what I guess was floor twenty. The map looked extremely odd, with how several of the levels were barely in an overlapping position, while other floors looked like they shouldn't be able to support the weight above them. Overall, it looked like a strange, misshapen spiral staircase with each step being larger than the first.

"Y-You have a magic item that can display an accurate map of the dungeon and project a three dimensional representation of it?" Asi practically yelled in my ear.

Then, a golden line appeared at the top floor and started to move throughout the map. "Move twenty feet down the hall and knock a hole in the ground, there's another vertical shaft right below where you're standing to get to the next level," Bonnie instructed. "Then, you'll need to dig a diagonal tunnel four hundred feet to the North East to skip to floor seventeen. That will put you in the general area of the boss spawn. If you run, you should be able to reach the seventeenth floor before Goliath respawns, assuming Asfi Al Andromeda's calculations are accurate. The chances of spawning a red-eyes black dino-skeleton due to this action is minimal."

I frowned at the odd description at the end. But, my thoughts on the subject were interrupted by the little goddess with the big boobs. "That's a spirit of intellect!" Hestia said with a frown. "Nobody outside the Fae Courts should have access to those. It violates the treaty."

Hermes cleared his throat. "Dresden belongs to Winter," he told her simply before I looked at him and frowned. "Hey, I figured that out in the bar, so it doesn't apply to my promise."

"Okay, we're on the clock here people!" I reminded everyone before I followed Bonnie's instructions and found the area she indicated on her map. "DISPERTIUS!"

Geomancy had never been an area of magic that I had bothered to learn. It was too…boring compared to the boom boom shooty stuff that fire was. And I wasn't really made for it. But, my grandfather who had taught me magic after I killed my foster father made sure I knew at least one spell dealing with the ground beneath my feet. The power to dig a hole through just about anything.

When the ground opened up beneath us, I looked down…and winced. I hadn't expected there to be such a drop between the floors. Maybe the superhumans could make it down just fine, but the gods stuck with vanilla mortal bodies might have a problem. "So uh…any ideas? I don't like the look of that drop for three of us." Or myself, for that matter.

Asfi practically ran over to the edge of the hole. "Okay, I've got this one," she said before clicking the heels of her sandals. Wings made of light sprouted from her heels, and she actually floated in the air after she stepped off the ground. Then, Asfi turned around and held out her hand. "Lord Hermes?"

I stared at the sight of the floating woman for a moment. There was zero altitude loss as Asfi simply hovered in midair. Magical flight, something I had been trying to get working for years was right in front of my face, and I didn't have the time to geek out about it or pick her brain about how it was done!

Although, as the seconds ticked by and the god didn't come running, I started to feel a little cheated of time to figure out one of the great mysteries of magic that had eluded me. So, I turned around and frowned a little as I saw Hestia very quietly arguing with Hermes, and using several gestures. When he turned around to get away from her, as he was leaving, Hestia put up an arm with a raised middle finger.

Chloe let out a gasp and practically jumped behind Lunoire. "Eeep! The sign of heavenly displeasure!" Then, both of the girls quickly jumped down the put before Asfi could start her descent.

"Really Hestia?" Hermes said before jumping into Asfi's arms. She gave a tiny grunt, but slowly descended before coming back up.

When she did, the little goddess walked up to me and shot me a glare. "You and I are going to have words when this is over."

"Words like thank you for having the resources for saving my precious child I've been crying about since the day started?" I asked.

Hestia flinched as Asfi held out her hand. "...I didn't say I'm not grateful for the help," she told me before getting on the Asfi express. "But even if we find Bell alive and well, I'm going to want an explanation."

Next came Syr since Anya and Ryu were just standing back and looking for monsters. "This is going to be a problem," she mumbled at me just before Asfi got there and took her down.

Then Ryu and the last cat girl headed down the hole before I looked down it. Butters had theorized that the Winter Mantle didn't actually stop me from getting hurt, it just negated pain as long as I didn't get an iron nail in my body to disrupt the fairy magic. That theory also worked on the idea of my increased strength and speed, since the human body has to limit itself to somewhere around thirty percent of its actual potential. Going all out would put a strain on the body that would cause it to self-destruct in a matter of days.

So, when I looked at the drop that was somewhere between twenty and thirty feet and thought of my knees, I did some quick calculations in my head before jumping down and casting a spell. "VENTO SERVITAS!"

The powerful wind surrounded me and created a powerful resistance that let me fall at about half the speed that I should have. However, it was the weeks and weeks of parkour practice I endured after gaining and playing around with the Mantle's unlocked physical abilities that let me land on my feet.

Some of the crew was already gone, but I did catch Ryu giving me a pained look. "What is it?" I asked.

"...just how many spells do you know, exactly?" she asked me after a few moments of taking calming breaths.

I raised an eyebrow at the odd question. "Oh, well…" I paused, unsure how to answer. Not because of my lack of words. I just never really bothered keeping track, or even thought to classify them. After all, a ritual was a basic spell that had a million different variations. So, is each one a different spell, or is it just one big versatile spell?

Then there were the spells that I used that could be summed up as: throw fire. But I had gained enough control to manipulate that fire into different shapes. So were fire spears and a fire net different spells that just used the same word to help me focus my Will?

And how would my classification of a spell measure up against Ryu's magic system, of which I knew next to nothing?

"...maybe a hundred?" I finally guessed, going with a conservative estimate. Which was obviously the wrong way to go, as the elf slumped over a moment later.

Syr moved out from behind Ryu and patted her on the back. "I told you not to ask," she said before moving on to the other hole where Asfi was waiting.

After she left, I looked back at the shorter elf while Anya went down the hole that was already there a second later. "Everything okay?" I asked her.

"Just my growing inferiority complex," she said before starting to move past me.

I held out my staff to try and stop her. "Hold on a second," I told her. "Are you getting hung up on the fact I know more magic than you or something?"

Ryu locked eyes with me for a moment, and I nearly looked away. She beat me to the punch before sighing. "I'm sorry. I know it's stupid-"

"No it's not," I told her. It made Ryu look back up at me, and forced me to turn my head. "After spending some time down here with you, it's pretty obvious that you're the top dog at the tavern. Then I show up, and I've not only got a magic specialization that beats yours, but Syr is trying to spend time with me and that Bell kid when it's pretty clear you're her best friend. You're feeling threatened by the new guy that can do one thing better than you and talks to Syr about stuff you didn't know existed before. If I was in your position, I wouldn't be taking it half as well and mature as you are." But, Ryu was probably somewhere around the age of two hundred.

After a few seconds, Ryu looked away. "That…well…okay, I am feeling conflicted about Syr as well," she admitted.

I shrugged. "Don't worry, she's known you for years. I'm just the shiny new toy she's found to play with. I bet a month from now, she's completely forgotten about me," I told Ryu before looking down at the elf's odd weapon. "Plus, so what if I got one thing on you? You're beating things to death with a wooden sword. I wish I had that kind of physical ability. I can't even jump down to the next floor without worrying that my knees will shatter."

Once again, Ryu looked over at me. Her eyes narrowed just a little bit, and I realized after she let out a tiny bark of a breath she was laughing. "Do you need me to carry you down?" she asked before a few more light giggles followed the first.

"Great, now I'm feeling all emasculated," I grumbled. Stupid supernatural people and their blessings that actually gave them real increased strength and durability instead of just making them feel invincible.

Ryu stopped laughing at me for a moment, but the mask she had on was still a little stretched. Was she smiling at me under there?

"I'm finding it rather hard to stay upset with you, Mr Dresden," she said before dropping through to the next floor.

"...first time I've ever heard that from a woman," I grumbled before looking down below to make sure I wasn't going to hit anything before I took a fall and broke the drop with my wind.

I got down to the next floor without breaking anything and we managed to find several discarded items that the cat girls used to pick up Bell's scent again. With confirmation that they were still alive and another check to see that the string Hestia had that led to Bell was still there, I looked back down at my armband and flicked it.

"Hey, what happens if the boy is on floor fifteen or something and we miss him?" I asked.

After a few seconds, Bonnie responded. "Doubtful. Based on the direction of the energy Hestia is expelling and our current location," she said before the map came up again to show a new bright red line from where it looked like we were, going through several floors to hit one right above a smaller area that was just one big room. "At his current rate of movement, Bell Caranel will arrive at floor seventeen in one hour and fifty five minutes."

Hestia perked up. "Wait, he's going to beat the respawn?"

"No," Bonnie told her. "The projections are based on his current traveling speed. Any encounter with monsters, whether to fight or flee will create a delay. Even factoring in just a single encounter, the odds of Bell making it through Goliath's area without encountering the monster rex are zero."

As Hestia fell to her knees, Hermes cleared his throat. "Anyone without top tier athletic ability, find someone to carry you. It's time we started running. If we go with the tunneling plan, we can hopefully avoid most of the monsters," he said before turning to his subordinate. "Well Asfi, it looks like I'll be riding you all over the dungeon tonight."

"...you just said something dirty, didn't you Lord Hermes?" she asked before kneeling down so the god could climb onto her back.

The god patted the woman on the head, which made her groan. "The fact that you can tell that just from context goes to show you how special a bond we share," Hermes said before 'sitting up' a little bit straighter on the woman's back. "Now, Hi ho Asfi, away!"

As Anya got Hestia and Lunoire did her best to carry Syr, I found myself hoping I could keep up as I had Bonnie start relaying directions of where to go to find the location we needed to start digging from to ensure the quickest trip.

While running, we had to stop twice to deal with the appearance of another baby dragon that Ryu almost instantly cut down, and three packs of minotaurs that the two girls with their arms free made short work of. Although, the speed at which they moved caused a few mistakes, and Ryu's cape got a little ruffled, while Chloe received a few scratches from a couple of near misses.

Hell, there was even a moment where I had to help out. Some kind of mix between an armadillo and a stegosaurus came rushing out of the wall right as Ryu dodged under a minotaur's axe to slide around around it and strike it where the thing's kidneys would have been. Unfortunately, this had the problem of putting her on her knees when the monster literally rolled out of the wall, trying to cut through her like some kind of living buzzsaw.

So, I threw out my staff and went to my tried and true quickdraw attack. "FUEGO!"

A hot lance of fire shot out to strike the thing dead center and burn a hole right through the creature before it dissolved into protoplasm dust midway to Ryu, with only the stone hitting the side of her cheek.

As Ryu recovered, I heard a little laugh from behind me. Hestia was just giving me a 'you can't be serious' expression, while Hermes was barely holding in his laughter. When both of them declined to comment, I frowned. "What?"

"...you're trying to save Bell, I'm keeping my mouth shut," Hestia told me from her place on the martial artist's back.

I looked over to Hermes and frowned. "The word means fire!" I told the god.

After choking down some more laughter, Hermes took a breath before speaking. "In one language, yes."

"...let's just keep going," I grumbled before we double checked the map and continued on as fast as we could.

As we ran, Hermes tried to console me. "Now Dresden, don't be ashamed, I think it's a very hot, sexy spell."

On the other side of me, Hestia groaned. "Someone remind me to kick him if this all goes well."

"Understood, Lady Hestia," Asfi replied, much to the dismay of the god she was connected to.

Half an hour after that and several more random encounters later that I am sad to say managed to slow us down quite a bit, we finally arrived at the area Bonnie had indicated. Then, I punched a five foot tunnel into the rock with my earth magic before the instructions became a little more complicated.

I looked at the holographic diagram she was displaying and frowned. "Uh, you do realize this angle is going to turn the passage into a giant slide, right?" I asked in the light of my pentangle amulet.

"You wanted the fastest route, this is it," she told me. "The real problem is going to be running out of oxygen before you hit bottom. Even with gravity doing most of the work, you still need to cast magic."

Much too short to look over my shoulder, Hestia looked around my back at the image. "Uh…isn't that a little steep? What happens when we hit the bottom?"

"The first, fourth, or eighth time?" I asked her after looking back at the goddess. When she gave me a clueless expression, I sighed. "I'm nowhere near strong enough to make a tunnel deep enough in one go. I can dig a hole for us to slide down, but we're going to hit the bottom, and then I have to make the hole deeper when we do."

"So, you go first and we follow a few minutes later?" Hestia asked.

I frowned to myself. That seemed to be the best option.

However, Bonnie killed that idea. "Negative. The dungeon prioritizes healing damage that allows people to traverse it quickly. At the most, you'll have ten minutes before it seals off the entrance and then begins to close the tunnel in an attempt to crush you to death or suffocate you."

"YOU COULDN'T HAVE MENTIONED THAT BEFORE?" Hestia screamed at my bracelet.

"I was asked to create the most efficient method of intercepting Bell Cranel before he could reach the monster rex," Bonnie told the goddess from her blinking gem. "Survivability was not a factor."

I had to reach up and rub my head. "Well, I forgot my Breathe Without Oxygen spell scroll at home," I told her. "So, how in the hell do you suggest we do this?"

"Ryu's Luminous Wind spell creates a burst of light and air when it detonates. This includes oxygen. She can cast the spell to provide both light and fresh air as you dig the tunnel," Bonnie explained, drawing Ryu's attention.

It was certainly a viable option if it worked, but something struck me as very odd how my daughter had that kind of information. She might have had my knowledge, but the cutoff point was thousands of years before this ever happened. "How in the hell do you know something like that?" I demanded. "You've never even met Ryu before today!"

"No, but some of the girls I like to talk to in Heaven while they wait for reincarnation spend about half their day watching her. I don't want the experiences of their leader, Alise Lovell to disappear. So I check on her and the others at least once every thirty seconds when I'm not absorbing information and we get to talking," Bonnie told me. "I've seen her cast the spell one hundred fifteen times. The mechanics aren't that hard to work out."

"...what?" Ryu said in a voice I could barely hear.

"And now you see why we don't let anybody know about these types of spirits!" Hestia exclaimed as she threw up her arms in exasperation. "When mortals find out about them, all they want to do is use them to talk to their dead loved ones instead of moving on. It destroys their lives!"

Ryu nearly knocked Hestia over as she got closer to me, and I tensed at the expression in the elf's eyes. It was wild and desperate, the complete opposite of what I had always seen. "You can-" she said to Bonnie's spirit stone before looking up to me. "Dresden, you can-I mean, I can…you can let me talk to Alise, one last time?"

I took a step back and broke eye contact for reasons that had nothing to do with a soul gaze before gulping. It was disturbing, but…if I had ever been allowed the chance to speak with my mother, father, Murphy or my brother one last time…or…Maggie… I'd do anything for that.

"Let's uh…let's take care of business, and then…I'll see what I can do," I told her in an uneasy tone before I looked up to Hestia. My knowledge of magic said it wasn't going to be as simple as asking Bonnie to deliver a letter, then summoning her again.

Ryu blinked, then did it again before she actually wiped away a tear. "R-Right," she said before giving me a nod. "If Alise is watching me, then…I don't want to disappoint her by failing to save someone." She took a step back and sucked in a deep breath. "In the sky of a now distant forest…"

-Ryu-

Casting spells given by a god's blessing isn't as easy as it appears to be. We don't just say a few words and stand in a circle before magical effects happen. There's a lot that goes on in our heads as we talk to activate the magic. It's more like the falna provides an outline for our minds to trace with mystical energies to activate the spell.

That's the reason people need to practice to develop the skill needed to move and chant a spell at the same time while also avoiding something that's trying to kill you, like I have. It's more than just not getting hit. It's dealing with the stress of being in a life or death battle while splitting your attention in at least three different ways if you want to survive.

Which just goes to show how distracted I was when I, a battle hardened elven warrior that could recite her spell perfectly while multiple opponents were trying to kill me, fumbled it twice as I stood in safety, surrounded by my friends.

Alise, my best friend and mentor, someone who I had tried to pattern my life after since the day I met her and joined the Astraea Familia…I had the chance to talk to her again. Not just her, but all my other friends who had died.

What was I supposed to say to them?

According to the spirit, they had been watching me!

Should I get as close to the ground as I possibly could the way the people from the east did and tell them I know what I did was wrong, but I still ask for their forgiveness and understanding?

I had killed people, dozens of them. Many had been evil, but others…I had gone after them on just hearsay and rumor. What would they say if some of those people had been completely innocent of the crimes I thought them connected to?

These were the thoughts that had gone through my mind as I fumbled with my magic the first time around. Some control exercises and breathing had gotten it to work a second time, but the fact I couldn't even do what a newly minted mage could accomplish on their first day was absolutely mortifying.

I just thanked Astraea that the spell she gave me was mostly hands off after it was cast, or I didn't know how I would have handled directing the luminous spheres with everything that was going on in my head. As it was, they hung in the air above me, providing an extra source of light.

A hand touched mine, and I looked over to see Syr before she leaned in close. "Everything okay for the moment, Ryu?"

I sucked in another deep breath and… "Syr…" I breathed as a very disturbing thought entered my mind. I didn't want to think about it. I was frightened that she was here. People without Falna didn't belong anywhere in the dungeon, and I needed to concentrate extra hard to make sure Syr was safe. I didn't need doubts clouding my judgement.

But…

"Did you know about what a spirit like Dresden has can do?" I asked as calmly as I could.

The look on the girl's face changed three different ways before she turned her head away from me. "...yes," she finally breathed so low I could barely hear it.

I…didn't know how to feel about that.

There was a sting of betrayal, but…not?

It hurt to know that Syr could have told me I could have been speaking to Alise days ago.

But at the same time, we never really talked that much about my past. Syr knew about it…somehow, but she also let me have my privacy too. Because of that, I couldn't be too angry about her not telling me there was a way to contact Alise. Maybe she was of the same opinion as the goddess, that talking to dead people just trapped you in the past.

In the end, I picked the option that didn't have me becoming angry with the girl who saved my life and might as well have been my little sister. The girl who had done nothing by trying to make my life mean something again as she kept me from sinking back into the despair that would have allowed me to bleed out in the middle of an alley.

I pulled her closer and squeezed the girl's shoulder. "You're cleaning my share of the dishes when we get back home," I told her quietly. It was a bit of a code between us. Syr hated washing dishes and did everything she could to get out of it. Telling her that was my way of saying I was upset with her, but in a way that ultimately amounted to nothing more than a minor annoyance.

"Okay everyone," Dresden called out before he pointed his stick at the ground. "Please keep your hands and arms inside the tunnel at all times until the ride comes to a complete stop. "DISPERTIUS!"

Another casual use of instant-cast magic that might as well have been an arrow fired into my prideful elf ego's gut. It wasn't fair that a human had some super rare skill that let him develop a full list of fast-cast magic.

And yes, I'll admit it, I'm a hypocritically prideful elf. I had always disliked the fact that my race looked down on others because of our long life and natural talent for magic. When I left my forest, those were the thoughts on my mind when I got to Orario. I was going to be different, I was going to be an elf that treated all races equally and didn't think of myself above any of them. So when the first non-elf laid a hand on me in a simple greeting by way of touching my shoulder…I slapped him away in disgust. Even now, the only person I let touch me with skin to skin contact without suppressing the urge to hit them was Syr.

"That's…very steep," Hestia said nervously as she looked down into the dark tunnel even my blessed eyes couldn't see the end of.

"That's how we bypass floors," Dresden said before he went in first. The tall man got a total of three steps before the incline and gravity one out. The stick he had with him let him catch himself from falling forward, but an overcorrection made him fall back before he just slid down the tunnel and into the dark.

I took a deep breath. "Okay, let's hurry up and move before this thing closes on us. Who's next?"

Hermes cleared his throat. "If I might make a suggestion? Let the gods go last. And uh…Syr too, of course."

"Why?" Hestia asked as she looked over to her fellow deity.

Syr sighed and shook her head. "He wants bodies to cushion his landing."

A little laugh came out of the god's mouth before he looked back to the captain of his familia. "So Asfi, if you could just…do the thing."

The woman with the glasses took them off before she sighed and all but jumped down the tunnel.

Then went my fellow barmaids, followed by Syr. I was last and went with the gods because I had the spell that was supposed to keep us from dying if things went wrong, and I didn't want someone to roll into one of my sphere's to detonate it prematurely.

So, we started making our way down together…and Hestia promptly let out a scream a few steps in, when the ground became unnaturally slick. I reached out and grabbed her, but my positioning was so bad that I quickly followed her down into the dark. Hermes followed not long after with my spell trailing behind.

Thanks to my magic, I got just the briefest visual of the mess that awaited me at the bottom of the tunnel before I fell into it, and everything just became a mix of limbs, clothes, and sheaths that we had thankfully remembered to bring for weapon storage. Otherwise, Anya's spear alone would have claimed at least two lives.

"Everyone…alive?" Dresden's muffled voice came out from below me.

"Who's butt is on my face?" Asfi asked in an equally distorted voice.

"Nyaaaa! That's my tail!" Anya cried out.

"Wow Luniore, your rump is really firm!" Chloe said.

"Um…thank you?"

"Don't worry everyone, I landed on something soft," the less decent male member of our party said.

"THOSE ARE MY BOOBS!" Hestia yelled.

"Okay let's get up, and…go through all of this again," I told everyone as I reached over to take Syr's hand. Which one of us I was trying to reassure, I didn't know.

Unfortunately, there was a bit of a problem. After about two minutes of twisting, struggling, kicking, poking and in one case, biting each other, we came to a very disturbing conclusion…

"I think we're stuck," Syr told everyone. "The tunnel is a bit too small for us to maneuver our way apart enough to get up. and even if they could, the people at the top would have to stand on us."

Dresden spoke again. "And on that note, let's continue," he said before casting his spell again.

The part of the tunnel we were laying on in a mess suddenly pulled away, and we became a sliding mass of people, gods and equipment. Somehow, the tunnel had us rolling around, and by the time we came to a stop the second time, I was somewhere in the middle of the jumble of people.

"I…I think I'm going to throw up, meow," Anya moaned.

"Not on me!" Hestia yelled.

"Why is there so much mud down here?" Asfi demanded.

Hermes cleared his throat, and I felt the feather in his cap tickle me as it tried to make its way to Anya. "I think its a side effect of the spell, or maybe the dungeon has natural underground waterways we're getting close to when we dig. Just because there's an underground river doesn't mean some of the water going through it isn't also seeping into the ground."

"Um…what happens if we hit a river, then?" Hestia asked.

The air was growing a little stale, so I released two of my spheres of light and wind to create some fresh oxygen right before Dresden spoke. "Well, after the first burst of water, I can probably freeze it to create a wall, then make the tunnel deeper and keep going."

Luniore coughed several times and slit something out of her mouth. "So we get to be wet, cold, cramped, and dirty," she moaned.

"Don't forget monsters, meow," Chloe chimed in. "There's always monsters in the water the deeper you go. Water usually makes the purrrrfect hiding place to ambush someone."

"..." Everyone in the group was silent for a moment as that thought made its way through all of our minds.

"Okay," Hestia spoke up. "How come nobody thought of that before we got down here?"

"Can we please just keep going?" Syr asked.

So, we did. Dresden cast his spell, and we were sent tumbling down a wet, soggy mess of a secret passage that I needed to fill with enough air to keep us all from dying again, and again, and again.

Until finally, Dresden pushed the tunnel deeper and after a few seconds of rolling, I and everyone else fell into open air for nearly ten feet before we landed in a corner of the dungeon with white walls reminiscent of limestone, illuminated by glowing moss. There was a mass of groans and complaints as well as people popping stiff joints after being compressed into a ball of flesh for a few moments.

I…took no part in it, or the complaining of the rough landing. The positioning of the weight on top of me kept me from getting up and doing any of that. Especially when I felt the weight move around to rub up against a very sensitive part of my anatomy as the owner of the body groaned and revealed himself to be a man. "M-Mr Dresden…" I squeaked out as the embarrassment kept me from saying more.

"Get your face out of her crotch already!" I heard Syr yell before I was released from my…slightly pleasurable torment.

"Ugh! Wha-oh…um…sorry," I heard him mumble as the man sat up while Syr continued to glare down at him.

I just sat myself up, my head swimming as I feared fainting from sheer embarrassment. Part of me knew it had been an accident and maybe even a necessary one to get as far as we did so quickly. But…I couldn't get past the fact someone had gotten that close to where only a husband should every touch.

Did this mean I was ruined for marriage?

"Hey!" Syr spat. "Spirit, where are we? Show the map already!"

"We are currently, one hundred two yards-"

Whatever Dresden's spirit was going to say was cut off by a loud yell that shook the entire floor and left my ears ringing.

"-from the Wall of Grief, where the monster rex spawns," the jewelry finished.

I jumped to my feet. "Girls, stay and protect the gods!" I yelled before taking off towards where the sound had come from as fast as I could without even checking to see if anyone came with me.

-Bell-

The last thing an adventurer should ever do is go on an adventure.

My dungeon advisor that had been assigned to me by the Guild told me that just about every time I saw her. At first, it confused me. After all, just going down into the depths of the dungeon was an adventure, wasn't it? The mystery, the danger, the rewards, all of these things were what made adventurers well…adventurers.

However, it wasn't until I fought my second minotaur, the one I didn't run away from, that I really understood what Ms Eina meant. That fight had been an adventure. A short one, but during that battle, I hadn't known if I was going to live or die. Even though half a dozen first-class adventurers had been not twenty feet away to watch me go toe to toe with a monster, a single mistake might have cost me my life. Challenging my limits, pushing myself further than I had gone before and risking my life to find out the answer to a question I had posed to myself, that was a real adventure.

But it was nothing compared to the one I was on now.

We had made it to floor seventeen, but the cost had been extremely high. Both Lilly and Welf had fallen unconscious not ten minutes ago because of an encounter with some hell hounds. Welf had a spell that caused magic to overload right at the moment of it being cast, so he used it to counter monsters that tried to kill us with long ranged attacks, like the fire breath of the demon dogs. Unfortunately, the last cost of his spell had put him into Mind Down, a status where the brain is so exhausted it can only work the bare minimum to keep the body alive.

Lilly had also collapsed, and I'm ashamed that I didn't even know the reason why. I had been so focused on Welf that when I looked back at her, she was just laying under her oversized backpack. So, I don't know if it was damage, or simply pushing herself too hard without any food for the past several hours. For all I knew, she could have been poisoned by a killer moth several floors ago and it was finally catching up to her.

But, I moved on, carrying Welf under the shoulder of one of my arms, and Lilly over the shoulder of another one. The only thing I had bothered to salvage from Lilly's bag was the collection of magic stones she had been carrying. If we survived, we would need to trade it for food and supplies on floor eighteen, as well as to buy passage back to Orario.

As I carried them, I came to realize something…

Adventuring really sucked!

I could risk my life all I wanted, but dragging my friends into this because of my mistake with an overcharged spell wasn't in any way fair to them at all! Not to mention that I was hungry, I was tired, my clothes were all kinds of dirty, I had lost the fire-resistant salamander cloaks that had cost us a good portion of our savings, it hurt to breathe, and we had nearly died over a dozen times since falling down that stupid hole!

And for what?

I wasn't exploring anything people hadn't already seen. I wasn't going to be a celebrated hero like in the stories for barely dragging my broken body into a safe zone when it was my mistake that nearly got my friends killed. Even if I got everyone back to Orario, healed up without any permanent damage, and had any money left over after we restocked our gear, we would just be going back into the dungeon the next day!

Where were all the things that Grandpa had said adventurers were supposed to get?

Weren't there supposed to be girls?

Well, the only girl I had been able to find in the dungeon was one I kept running away from!

Which, okay…might have been my-SHUT UP BRAIN! I told myself as I took yet another step while carrying my teammates. I'm trying to have an internal crisis due to the lack of oxygen from what's probably a crushed lung!

Which probably meant the best course of action was to drop the two people I was carrying and-I said shut up, I told myself again for even considering that option. Sure, Lilly had stolen from me, and left me to die after putting out bait to attract monsters before yoinking my supply sack and knife for a second time, but…

I looked over to the tiny girl on my shoulder as I took another step forward and came out of the dark tunnel we had been in.

Why was I carrying her again?

When I couldn't come up with an answer to that, I looked forward and…blinked when I saw a huge wall of stone so bright and disjointed in its shape that it reflected the light to create an aurora-like effect. "The Wall of Grief," I choked out through dry, cracked lips.

The big room I had just entered…it was the spawn area for Goliath.

Which meant the large cavern at the other end was the entrance to the eighteenth floor.

Despite the fact that my legs felt they were about to collapse out from under me, I felt like one of those desperate heroes in Grandpa's stories that sees victory just inches away, and managed to take another step forward with my friends still in my arms.

Then, I took another.

And another.

I dragged myself on my feet more than walked as I slowly made my way to the middle of the room.

At which point, the room started to shake, and I could only look to my left in disbelief as rocks started to fall from the wall, a lot of rocks. A dark brown creature with red eyes that had to be nearly fifty feet tall started to push its way out of the stone directly across from where I was forcing myself to pick up the pace and run to avoid being crushed to death by the rocks its birth was causing to fall.

The monster rex had spawned at the perfect moment to both lure me into the room and draw me as close to it as possible.

"Oh, come on!" I shouted as I forced my protesting body to somehow move just a bit faster while Goliath caused an avalanche that threatened to kill me before he even had the chance.

-Dresden-

The top human speed limit is around twenty seven miles an hour. I honestly don't know if that's my top speed since I have the Mantle to turn off my limits, but it doesn't seem to have much say over outside forces, like physics. Then you throw in long legs, lack of professional running trainers, and…well, you get the gist. I was a wizard that liked to play with my physical abilities from time to time, not an olympic athlete.

Ryu, on the other hand, could have probably broken every world record and taken a power lifter's lunch money if she wanted to. Which made the fact she was matching her pace to mine just a bit disturbing, since there was a chance the boy we were looking for was just ahead.

Unless of course he hadn't gotten this far and we were running off into danger for absolutely nothing. Which would have made us look really stupid.

That was all the time I had to consider in the twenty odd seconds it took us to sprint from where we fell and through the large tunnel to reach an even larger chamber than the one we landed in. Rocks were crashing onto the floor and an enormous creature was removing his back foot from an oversized hole to turn its attention to something on its left.

"Bonnie, how do I kill it?" I yelled as the creature raised a fist.

"It's a gigantic, naked humanoid monster without a penis that eats people," the spirit of intellect told me in a tone used for talking to something who was annoyingly dumb. "You aim for the nape of the neck, duh."

I didn't bother with restraint. Although the falling rocks had kicked up a good deal of dust, my eyes could just make out something moving away from the titanic monster that it had decided to focus on instead of me. So, I pointed my staff towards the area Bonnie had instructed and reached deep down inside of me before sending a roaring burst of Will powered by the fire of my soul. "FUEGO!"

The first time I had really used soulfire with my magic and the Winter Mantle to try and kill something was when a monster had burst into the neutral territory of my favorite bar. I had shot a lance of white hot fire at the creature that burned the surrounding furniture to ash in an instant simply by getting too close.

Now, the monster had tanked the blast and walked away. But it was pretty much one of the top four beings in non-existence, something that thumbed its nose at a literal angel, and from what I knew, practically unkillable.

Goliath, on the other hand, was a giant mass of ectoplasm given form by a dead goddess. From what I had seen after my party cut down dozens of other monsters, they didn't have much in the way of true intelligence or a guiding will and even if you could call what they did magic, it was all pretty basic.

I wasn't quite sure, but the ballista of fiery white hot death I sent into the giant melted right through the monster without even really touching him. At that point, the headless corpse continued to burn before my attack spell, that had curved upwards rather than continue on in a straight line after hitting the giant, impacted the ceiling above it to explode, sending a mass of molten hot lava straight down to hit the headless corpse of the monster and cover him in the deadly stuff that was basically melted stone.

So, Goliath was once again technically beaten by a rock.

As long as you don't count the whole decapitation, I mean.

With the spell done and the danger passed, I grabbed onto my staff to keep from falling onto my face while my lungs managed to suck in sweet air. "Hey…is…I think I saw…" I sucked in a deep mouthful of oxygen to keep from keeling over and stared at Ryu while she looked back at me. Her stupid mask kept me from seeing her face though. Although, I had to wonder, was her chin a little lower than it should have been?

"What?" I finally managed to ask.

"You…you just…one-shotted a floor boss," she said.

Was she talking about the giant?

Me killing the giant?

Oh wait, I know this, I told myself while trying not to get distracted by all the blinking lights at the edge of my vision. This is the part where I say something cool. "Well, if you want to be technical, it was the death that killed him."

Ryu just cocked her head to the side just a tad. "...that makes no sense."

"You make no cents!" I told her before deciding that I had better sit down. After I did that…on my back, I waved my hand at her. "Now go…do…something."

"Oh…you've hit Mind Down," she said before looking around a little. "Well, this area should be safe for two weeks. I think I saw someone jump down the entrance to floor eighteen right as you killed Goliath. I'll go check, and then head back to the party to bring them here." She looked around again. "Um…do you know if the person we saw was Bell, or…"

I didn't want to answer and just groaned in response before a little butt that was too small to take up my entire field of vision just appeared over me. Why did my not-daughter have to constantly flash me her underwear?

"Yeah, it was Argonaut, I mean…uh, Bell," Bonnie told Ryu, who took a step back at the sight of the little floating girl with wings. "Man, that's a stupid name."

Ryu blinked. "Um…okay…" she said in an uneasy tone as she looked at the fake fairy in the school uniform. "I'll…be right back."