My first move was to get more information about the space I’d sohow gotten stuck in. I hadn’t been teleported, since my Extradinsional Entity subrace would have tried to stop it. I should have at least gotten a notification. Given that this was a Dinsional Dungeon, it was possible that we’d walked into it. Everyone else had probably been teleported away from , rather than the opposite.
Dungeons were sothing new in System phase two, but we hadn’t run into one yet. They didn’t have any Delver Level requirents, 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 teleport. It also helped gain an intuitive grasp of spatial and planar phenona. The fluctuations in distance weren’t completely random. There was an organic pattern, imperfect but regular, like soone’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 ti my movents 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 dinsion 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 tis 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 to think that it was endless, but I’d stared down infinity more than a few tis. This wasn’t like gazing in the Dominion Ivy’s dinsion, and it sure as hells wasn’t like taking a peek at the Dread Star.
I sent my ntal hands through it, extending them forward to search more intentionally with Coordinated Thinker. After only a few seconds I chuckled. The motion almost made 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 dinsional hazards, but more importantly, it didn’t follow a straight path.
A spatial tear cut it in two, and the two halves imdiately 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 . 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 sothing 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 beco as wrinkly as old Nax back out front, and the shortest distance between and the end of the hall was ???.
Fortunately, this wasn’t a major issue. I had a trick for situations like these. If three-dinsional space was acting up, I’d just step outside of it for a second, walk a few steps, and co 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 ntal 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 wondering what sort of maniac was responsible for making this place. Beyond that, how much power did sothing 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 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 , and my ntal 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 soone took a jigsaw and hamred 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 asures. 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 sothing that had mass, and could thus apply force to the bull. In this situation, the counter-teleport had the sa effect on Shortcut as a thing that had never existed in the first place. I could tell it was there the sa way I could see a distant ray of sunshine. It was obvious, but it wouldn’t stop from walking forward.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringent.
Your Dinsional 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 . 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 ga of tag. That ant 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 so spatial shenanigans happening. So kind of Alcubierre effect, maybe?
I still had Therianthropy active, but there were only two minutes left on its tir, which was up to thirty-two minutes per use. I tried my wings, which brought 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 fra 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 sa 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 sothing that’d be a tight fit for my backside–assuming no more chunks had been taken out–to sothing 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 so kind or sothing 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 n were giving her so 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 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 forr category. She was so attractive that my brain imdiately locked up. My mind switched into ntal fuckery mode and I scanned for any sense of mana, checking all my various abilities to see if this was so kind of magical effect. But it wasn’t. I was just having a mont.
She looked at like I was a very interesting bug.
There were other people in the room, but I didn’t have ti 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 back out of the door.
It was a strong kick, but I snapped out with my tentacles toward the door fra before I flew off into the eternal hall of dinsional nonsense. The fra was flush with the wall that was still speeding past, making an absolute fool of the concept of friction, but the fra wasn’t made of so kind of super material. It was plain wood. Very nice wood–probably sothing exotic–but it wasn’t reinforced. I dug in with the ends of my tentacles and hooked them downward, giving a good hold.
I looked into the woman’s eyes, deep blue like the bottom of an ocean, while I hung onto the door fra. I gave her my best smile, the one I kept in reserve for monts exactly like this one. It was my ‘yeah, you just kicked , 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 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 so more then.”
She didn’t move an inch, but the doorfra 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 montum 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 soone tried to Dispel , but I appeared back at the door fra 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.
Soone chuckled, and I noticed for the first ti 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 sa 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 away.
You have resisted a non-consensual Dinsional effect!
She looked at her hand like it had grown an extra thumb.
“It’s hard to answer your question if you teleport sowhere else,” I said.
The woman went from staring at her hand to slowly looking over to . 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 with barely hidden amusent 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 ti, no one tried to teleport away. The entire room teleported instead, leaving hurtling down the hallway with no wings to support .
“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.
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