The third floor was full of slimes. The two lovebird mages took the opportunity to show off, using their wands armed with firebolt spells to repeatedly kill the goey monsters.

“Tell me the floor boss isn’t an enormous version of these things,” I told the tank, who was trying to wipe slime off his massive oversized shield.

“How’d you guess. Slime cores are worth a lot to alchemists though, they are called cat... cat-tail-is-tis?”

“Catalysts,” I correct him absentmindedly. I’d used slime cores before, never thought that harvesting them was quite this messy. “We can’t waste time on this, we’re heading towards the shortcut.”

“Sure, whatever you say. We might as well head over, those rift cats have a list of higher price ingredients compared to these cat-a-lists,” the tank says with a tiny smirk.

“Did you just try to make a pun?” The female mage asks.

“What? No, never,” The tank replies with a defensive look.

“That better not have been a pun,” The female mage shakes her fist at the much larger man, “I’ve warned you about your dumb puns.”

“You’re right! It wasn’t a pun, I learned my lesson about that,” the giant man actually looked nervous as he backed away from the tiny woman a fraction his size.

I chuckled slightly at the sight, then had a thought. These two had past experience together, and the lovebird mages wouldn’t go anywhere separately, so that means these three were teammates? “Do the three of you group often?” I ask them.

“What do you mean?” The tank says with a confused look, “All seven of us are a regular team. Did you think the Guild would send you down here with a random group of people who’ve never worked together before?”

I was flabbergasted, “Even the elves are regular teammates of yours?”

The tank laughed, “Of course, they may hate official soldiers like you and your men, but they don’t hold a grudge against adventurers. We’re forbidden from getting involved in wars.”

“If your king told you to march into our homeland and burn all the elven orphanages you can find, dogs like you would do it,” one of the elves sneered. “Adventurers are different, we only kill monsters… and sometimes bandits.”

“Human bandits may as well be monsters, they’re my favorite thing to shoot at.” another elf chipped in.

“A court wizard isn’t a soldier,” is what I wanted to say, but I bit my lip. In truth I was. If the kingdom went to war, I’d be matching alongside the army, the only wizard in the nation who is both allowed and obligated to do so. Instead I say, “I feel like you don’t have many melee fighters, I thought you were assigned to us because we already had six swordsmen.”

“In a dungeon, medium armor isn’t very useful. If you get close to an enemy, you either want to be in heavy armor like me, or be unencumbered so you can dodge more easily. Our rogue and those elves are wearing wyvern leather, which is almost as strong as steel. That fancy junk your men are wearing is perfect for slowing them down, but not enough to save them if they get hit by a boss.”

“Ah,” I say, not willing to debate the merits of different armors.

“We have swords too, and we are naturally more agile than you slow humans,” one of the elves said boastfully, “we can do more than just shoot arrows. Humans like you forget that us elves have plenty of time to learn how to use many weapons and don’t need to pick just one. When the situation calls for it, we fight melee.”

“So if the seven of you are an official team, what’s the lowest you’ve ever gone?”

“How far a team has made it in a dungeon determines their rank. We’re gold rank, which means we’ve made it to the 7th floor, but not killed the 7th floor boss. But with your help, we’ll finally make it to the 8th floor and earn platinum rank!” The female mage gushed excitedly.

“So you signed up for this because you want the achievement of clearing the seventh floor boss?” I ask.

“Yes, for glory, and the higher pay that comes with a new rank, what other reason would an adventurer possibly need?” the tank asked.

“How are they doing that?!” I yell, as I throw myself to the side to avoid yet another surprise attack. An angry feline half my size, with dark grey leathery hairless skin that shimmers with purple light as it fades in and then out of existence, pounces through the space my head had occupied moments prior.

“It’s a rift cat!” The male mage says with a grunt, pausing in his fruitless attempts to hit one, “They can phase in and out, become intangible so long as they’re not breathing or attacking. Makes them a pain to deal with!”

“No shit!” I mutter, gathering my mana. Need to breathe do they? Well, that’s something I can work with. “Everyone fall back!” I yell, “Get inside the glowing circle,” a wisp of intent and I draw a wide circle of light on the hard stone floor.

The adventurers and the royal guards rushed to get back inside the now rather cramped confines of the area I’d indicated. I pushed out a surge of mana, creating a barrier from which air could no longer pass, an air ward.

“What will you do?” The female mage asked.

“Toxic Cloud,” I tell her, reaching into my belt pouch and pulling out a small vial. A spell like this is called an alchemist’s spell, in that it’s something you can’t do without alchemy. You take something really toxic, that is light enough to stay in the air, distill a potion out of it and seal it in a container. Then when you need to use it you simply use magic to disperse it to where you wanted it to go. Focusing my will, the vial first floated out of my hand, then exploded inside a bubble of force. The liquid was supended in mid air for a brief second, then under the effects of my magic it exploded outwards into thin liquid streams passing through the ward. Once outside, the liquid exploded again, dispersing into a fine mist, producing dark green clouds that billowed outwards.

Caught in the area of effect, the predatory rift cats quickly began gasping and choking, in too much pain to properly phase out.

“This is a terrible magic,” one elf observes disapprovingly, but does not hesitate to begin firing arrows at a rapid pace. The other two elves follow suit, and soon the rift cats are all dead, the few that are smart enough to try to rush into the clear air inside the air ward are quickly dispatched in the close quarters.

Once the rift cats are all dead, I gather my magic and use a prolonged gust of wind to blow away the toxic clouds. Within a few minutes the poison is scattered too thinly to pose a threat. “It’s too thin to hurt us, but wear a cloth mask for now, just in case.”

With one such mask on my face, I walk over to a rift cat and examine it closely. “That magic of theirs is fascinating,” I observe, “I wonder why we never talked about it back in the academy.”

The male mage gives a snort of amusement, “Because rift cats are only found in dungeons and wizards almost never come down here. You academic types tend to ignore anything you don’t see for yourselves, and the Adventurer’s Guild doesn’t exactly like sharing information.”

I touch the black leathery pelt and push a tiny bit of mana into it, to try to probe it. The pelt shimmers in purple glow and becomes slightly translucent for a brief moment. “The magic is bound into the skin,” I observe. “And it’s still active… I wonder.”

I use a tiny shard of my soul and press it into the dead cat’s skin. It tingles slightly and becomes stabilized. This was preservation magic, to prevent spoilage, but it was also somewhat of a grey area, as it borders necromancy. While not illegal, doing this would get some of my more conservative teachers terribly angry at me, if they ever found out. No matter, I reach out and preserve the skins of two more cats. With this, the enchantment inside their pelts would be saved, and I could study it later.

“Cut me the pelts of these three cats,” I tell Lance, he nods doubtfully.

“Bah, you can’t possibly know how to do that properly,” one elf observes in annoyance. “We will do it. These three are yours, the other four are ours, we will skin them all. These pelts are fairly valuable, nobles like the shimmer for their belts and boots.”