Mage Tank-Chapter 245: Dungeons and…

My first move was to get more information about the space I’d somehow gotten stuck in. I hadn’t been teleported, since my Extradimensional Entity subrace would have tried to stop it. I should have at least gotten a notification. Given that this was a Dimensional Dungeon, it was possible that we’d walked into it. Everyone else had probably been teleported away from me, rather than the opposite.

Dungeons were something new in System phase two, but we hadn’t run into one yet. They didn’t have any Delver Level requirements, and didn’t grant any stat points, but instead granted a massive buff to the progression speed of their relevant intrinsic skill. The Littans had said they could earn as much in a single day as they normally earned in a month outside of one. I was more than happy to further that research here in the Hall of the Recondite Ruler.

I used Coordinated Thinker to study the space. The distances kept changing, but Coordinated Thinker didn’t only help me teleport. It also helped me gain an intuitive grasp of spatial and planar phenomena. The fluctuations in distance weren’t completely random. There was an organic pattern, imperfect but regular, like someone’s rate of breathing. The inhale stretched everything out, the exhale compressed it inward. Except that there were about six hundred pairs of lungs doing that all at once.

The point is that it wasn’t a completely predictable formula, nor was it chaos. I could time my movements to slip between the micro-portals and spatial whorls, but it would take a lot of instinct and reflexes. I liked to think I was pretty in touch with my primal side, but that wasn’t really my thing.

Aside from understanding the hall’s hazards, I was reaching out to see if I could find its boundaries. So long as it wasn’t a self-repeating pocket dimension where one wall adjoined to a wall on the opposite side–like the Closet–I could probably pop my way through the edge and out of danger.

What I felt outside the tunnel was not friendly. The space was a storm of violent motion, with ragged portals tearing open reality thousands of times per second. That wasn’t anywhere I wanted to be. The amount of power swinging around could tear its way through the tunnel’s wall in an instant. I couldn’t even detect any mana weaves in the stone. The walls were a formality, marking the line between challenge and death.

The hallway ahead looked like it extended on for eternity. It wanted me to think that it was endless, but I’d stared down infinity more than a few times. This wasn’t like gazing in the Dominion Ivy’s dimension, and it sure as hells wasn’t like taking a peek at the Dread Star.

I sent my mental hands through it, extending them forward to search more intentionally with Coordinated Thinker. After only a few seconds I chuckled. The motion almost made me brush up against a spatial tear by my shoulder.

When I sent my perception ‘forward’, it travelled in several directions at once. Keeping my real hand where it was, I popped a small bit of stone debris from my inventory and into my palm. We had lots of excess rubble these days. I tucked my thumb behind the rock and gave it a flick.

The stone shot forward much faster than I’d expected, but I was a relative expert at throwing blunt objects very very hard. Either way, the stone got shredded by the dimensional hazards, but more importantly, it didn’t follow a straight path.

A spatial tear cut it in two, and the two halves immediately took 90 degree turns in different directions. They each zigzagged through the air, making pivots so clean and fast it looked like cuts in an action film. Finally, one half collided with the ceiling behind me. The other half didn’t make it, swallowed up by a portal.

It was a bog-standard non-Euclidean space.

Okay, it wasn’t bog-standard. We weren’t dealing with something as simple as space acting like the surface of a sphere, where the shortest distance between two points was an arc, rather than a straight line. This was more like space had become as wrinkly as old Nax back out front, and the shortest distance between me and the end of the hall was ???.

Fortunately, this wasn’t a major issue. I had a trick for situations like these. If three-dimensional space was acting up, I’d just step outside of it for a second, walk a few steps, and come back.

I reached out strangeward, happy to jump past all this nonsense.

It was even worse out there. My brain did a soft reboot and my consciousness slipped for an instant. Strangeward was always a mental strain, but whatever was going on out there, my human mind hit eject before I had a chance to even consider processing it.

That got me wondering what sort of maniac was responsible for making this place. Beyond that, how much power did something need to create this?

I shook off the question as I realized that several parts of my ass were gone.

When my consciousness had slipped, I’d swayed back just a touch. I was well-equipped on the posterior end, so my cheeks were the unfortunate victim of this blunder. It hadn’t cost me too much HP, but having my booty cratered like the surface of the moon scuffed my ego. It’d grow back, but it was the principle of the thing.

“Okay, this was fun,” I said to whoever might be listening. “But now that the patty cakes have been threatened, I’m taking things seriously.”

I used Coordinated Thinker to track the spatial relationships floating around me, and my mental view of the hall shattered. The chunky pieces tumbled across one another until they reassembled into a mosaic perspective of the hall. The walls were jagged and irregular, fit together like someone took a jigsaw and hammered the pieces in all willy-nilly, rather than solving the thing. However, I could now see a ‘straight’ path to the end of the hallway. It was a few hundred feet away.

I focused on Dreadful Shortcut. There was a pressure pushing against the ability. Apparently the hall even had anti-teleportation measures. I smiled and cast the spell anyway.

The deific teleport laughed its way past the hall’s protections. To say that it tore through them like a bull through a spider’s web wouldn’t be fair. A spider’s web was something that had mass, and could thus apply force to the bull. In this situation, the counter-teleport had the same effect on Shortcut as a thing that had never existed in the first place. I could tell it was there the same way I could see a distant ray of sunshine. It was obvious, but it wouldn’t stop me from walking forward.

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Your Dimensional Magic skill has increased to Level 46!

That was nice, but I was feeling a little let down since it looked like I’d found the exit. It was a quick skill level, but I’d been hoping for more than that. Maybe other Dungeons would be longer. Or maybe I wasn’t quite done.

At the end of the hall was a lovely door. It was sized for a normal human, which felt out of place. It was also fairly modern-looking, with three rectangular panes of smooth, semi-opaque glass down the center, set into dark wood.

I reached for the handle, but the door pulled away from me. I stepped forward, and it pulled back again. I dashed and flew, instantly moving into a sprint from a full stop with my Bolt evolution, but the door matched my pace. I teleported, moving at the speed of thought and managed to snag the handle. The door flew down the hall as I held on.

Rather than being annoyed, I was happy that the inanimate object wanted to play a game of tag. That meant more Dungeon.

We were absolutely flying down this tunnel, the walls whipping past in a complete blur. Despite the speed, there was very little wind, and holding onto the handle wasn’t terribly hard. We were accelerating, though the g-forces I was experiencing didn’t reflect how much we were accelerating. There were some spatial shenanigans happening. Some kind of Alcubierre effect, maybe?

I still had Therianthropy active, but there were only two minutes left on its timer, which was up to thirty-two minutes per use. I tried my wings, which brought me forward with ease as I moved into an upright position. We were definitely travelling faster than my maximum flight speed, but the warped space near the door served as its own relative frame of reference.

I turned the knob and opened the door. It opened inward to reveal a large, circular chamber filled with about a dozen people. Many were people in the same sense that Nax was a person. Still people, just with unexpected anatomical structures. A few skewed closer to a bestial appearance than Nax had, while others looked mostly human.

There were five separate thrones around the room, ranging in size from something that’d be a tight fit for my backside–assuming no more chunks had been taken out–to something designed for a person of architectural proportions. Two of the thrones were occupied.

On the first was a man about the size of an elephant, with a crown of swooping feathered horns growing from his skull. He squatted in his seat on a pair of thick, feathered haunches. On either side of his chair was a horse-sized being that looked like a cross between a hellhound and a beaver, each with large hands and opposable thumbs. I couldn’t tell whether they were pets of some kind or something sapient.

In the next throne over–directly opposite my door–was a woman with blue crystalline skin who had a literal halo floating behind her head. Not a gold-ring-style halo hovering over her head–like the kind one sees on Christmas cards–but a tangible wreath of light emanating from behind her. Three men were giving her some personal attention, swabbing her with oil and attending to her various claws. They each wore hats with short veils that covered the tops of their faces. Fangs poked out from between their lips.

Directly in front of me was another woman, this one with alabaster skin and hair a shade of black so deep that it looked closer to a liquid. Her features were a bit unusual, but it was a very good sort of unusual. She had the type of features that would start wars on the internet, with half of everyone thinking they were the most gorgeous creature to walk creation, while the other half had no idea why everyone was obsessed, and were maybe even a little put off.

I fell into the former category. She was so attractive that my brain immediately locked up. My mind switched into mental fuckery mode and I scanned for any sense of mana, checking all my various abilities to see if this was some kind of magical effect. But it wasn’t. I was just having a moment.

She looked at me like I was a very interesting bug.

There were other people in the room, but I didn’t have time to take them in. Only a fraction of a second had passed before the woman swallowed my attention.

A fraction of a second after that, she Spartan kicked me back out of the door.

It was a strong kick, but I snapped out with my tentacles toward the door frame before I flew off into the eternal hall of dimensional nonsense. The frame was flush with the wall that was still speeding past, making an absolute fool of the concept of friction, but the frame wasn’t made of some kind of super material. It was plain wood. Very nice wood–probably something exotic–but it wasn’t reinforced. I dug in with the ends of my tentacles and hooked them downward, giving me a good hold.

I looked into the woman’s eyes, deep blue like the bottom of an ocean, while I hung onto the door frame. I gave her my best smile, the one I kept in reserve for moments exactly like this one. It was my ‘yeah, you just kicked me, but I forgive you and also look how charming I am’ smile.

“Hello there,” I said.

She smiled back with slightly raised eyebrows. Hers was more of an ‘are you really looking at me like that right now?’ kind of smile.

I was doing a lot of nonverbal translation today.

“Having fun?” she asked.

“Oh yeah,” I said.

“Hmm. I’ll allow you to go and have some more then.”

She didn’t move an inch, but the doorframe disintegrated. My direction of travel reversed, and suddenly I was moving backward down the hall at a thousand miles per hour. It was a completely smooth transition, one that I hadn’t even felt. All of my momentum was just going the other way all of a sudden.

It was so weird, I loved it. Therianthropy ended and my wings faded into sparkling dust. Even so, my smile grew wider as I cast Shortcut. I felt a nudge as someone tried to Dispel me, but I appeared back at the door frame without issue.

I stood just inside of the room, only far enough in to keep my balance. I didn’t want to be rude and invade these people’s personal space, but this door was also the only exit as far as I knew.

Someone chuckled, and I noticed for the first time that an older woman stood a dozen or so feet back from the one who’d just tried to Leonidas my ass away. She had the same skin tone, hair, and eyes. She could have been her grandmother. Maybe she was.

The younger woman rubbed at her forehead.

“How are you doing that?” she asked.

I smoothed down and straightened my boa. “Doing what?” I asked.

The horned man let out a barking laugh and the younger woman’s eyebrow twitched. She snapped her fingers, and I felt her trying to portal me away.

You have resisted a non-consensual Dimensional effect!

She looked at her hand like it had grown an extra thumb.

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“It’s hard to answer your question if you teleport me somewhere else,” I said.

The woman went from staring at her hand to slowly looking over to me. The smile was completely gone, and now she was plain irritated. The older woman behind her strode forward and placed an arm around the younger woman’s shoulders. She looked at me with barely hidden amusement in her eyes.

“You have earned the audience of this hatchling,” she said, patting the young woman’s arm. “But you have not earned mine. Return to your trial, and we will see how you fare when an adult administers the test.”

This time, no one tried to teleport me away. The entire room teleported instead, leaving me hurtling down the hallway with no wings to support me.

“Oh fuck,” I said, trying to use Gracorvus to keep myself in the air, but I fumbled the angle.

I hit the ground going north of Mach one.