I came running out of Cluma's room, only to find her trying to shove Camus away as he fussed over her. "You're sure there was no damage or discomfort?" he insisted.

"Of course there was discomfort!" exclaimed Cluma. "Did you miss the bit where I said it feels like being buried alive? At least it doesn't feel like I'm on fire anymore, and no, I didn't take a single point of damage."

I picked up my left hand from where I'd left it on the table and glued it back on, leaving the two catkin to their conversation. Or rather, the one catkin and one cat-sìth.

ding

Skill [Detach] advanced to level 8

To be fair, we weren't running these tests just because Camus insisted on us proving it was safe in a controlled environment. I fully agreed with him that it was a good idea, and that I shouldn't be sending her to Synklisi on her very first teleport. From one part of the house to another was a far saner first step.

A few more teleports around the house, and we were ready for step two; to the village and back. Cluma cast a single [Darklight] to consume the mana that had built up, before I made her vanish with a touch. Through [Mana Sight] I could see that she had safely arrived in the village, or at least that she was upright and still breathing, so I teleported after her.

ding

Skill [Redistribute] advanced to level 8

As well as obtaining safe transportation—even if it was only for Cluma, because I sure as hell wasn't going to try it on anyone else—this was great for skill levels.

By the time I'd finished teleporting myself, Darren was in my bedroom. Because of course he was. Detecting Cluma popping into existence would have attracted his attention from the other side of the village.

"Hey, wait up!" came a child's voice from outside. "Why did you go running off in such a hurry!"

Oh, apparently he had come running from the other side of the village. Or at least, from outdoors.

"Any different from a short teleport?" I asked Cluma.

"Nope, it felt exactly the same to me."

"Teleport? Do me! Do me!" called Darren excitedly.

"I can't. It's too dangerous," I answered. Besides, with his quantity of mana, I doubted I'd be able to overwhelm him however much he tried to empty himself.

"Mummy, Peter's got a girl in his room," called Darren, taking revenge for my refusal, causing Cluma's eyes to open wide.

"When did my brother turn into such a tattletale?" I complained, tapping Cluma to send her back to Dawnhold just as a rather confused mum poked her head through my door.

"What girl?" She asked.

"Cluma was just here, and then Peter magicked her and she vanished with a poof!" Darren explained happily.

"I'm practising teleporting her. We're working our way up to a long-distance trip gradually," I added. "Dawnhold to the village seems to work fine. Now we'll try Synklisi."

"As long as it's safe," mum said, leaving again.

"And Darren, you need to stop running towards every single spell," I moaned. "Did you just abandon your friends outside?"

This was too much running around. Or teleporting around, anyway. I could probably store something into [Item Box] from a detached segment, but it would require my target to touch me rather than vice versa, and that would require me to cancel [Shelter].

Synklisi had the advantage of an actual teleportation chamber. It was a room in the guild headquarters specifically for spatial mages to teleport into, where they wouldn't risk crashing, and bystanders wouldn't be surprised by people snapping into sudden existence. Or slow, incremental existence, in my case. In Dawnhold, I just used the reception. It was normally quiet, but I'd still managed to freak out several delvers. I really should buy my own house in Dawnhold at some point. I could more than afford it.

...Did I need to seek Cluma's input on that, too? There was a very real chance she could end up living there, after all.

I donned my armour, since it would result in fewer questions on the way into the dungeon, thankfully finding that my new ears squished into the helmet exactly as advertised and without any discomfort. This time, I could teleport directly back to Cluma's home, since it was currently well endowed with bits of me. I collected them up while Cluma dressed herself.

"Right. Anything else we need?"

"Why are you asking me? I've never been to Synklisi before, let alone the great dungeon."

"True. Then let's get going."

I tapped Cluma for the umpteenth time, after giving her a very thorough check with [Mana Sight] that there were no visible changes resulting from the morning's teleportation safety checks, and sent her to Synklisi, before teleporting myself.

We got some odd looks stepping out of the teleport room, presumably because we were both rather young to be rank three space mages, but no-one commented as we left the building.

"Wow!" exclaimed Cluma, looking around in excitement. "What huge buildings! And that must be..."

She gasped as she slowly turned to look in the direction of the great dungeon, eyes opening wide, legs bending slightly, tail curving rigidly behind her. Her body shivered. Fear.

"What's wrong?" I asked quietly, scanning around ourselves with all of my senses. [Danger Sense] reported nothing, and even [Soul Perception] didn't pick up anything unusual in our vicinity. But Cluma had a few better detection skills than me.

Cluma blinked a few times before shaking her head, seeming to recover. "Sorry. That dungeon is just... a lot. Remember you made me sensitive to the flows of mana? The mana in that dungeon is overwhelming."

While she was recovering from her sudden species change, when she was only half awake, she had seemed to be looking at something that wasn't light, but ever since recovering, she'd given no indication that her eyesight was affected.

"Your eyesight has changed?" I asked.

"Umm... It's weird. Everything looks normal, but it's like there's something else hidden underneath. I knew it was there before I looked, and now I know I'm looking at a massive mass of mana, but I can't see it."

"Maybe with some practice you could learn to?" I suggested. "While you were recovering, you were reacting to mana very well. If anything, it was normal light you couldn't see."

"I'd... rather not. Maybe some other time."

Fair enough. I could see how it might be scary to experiment with her changes.

Learning from the last time I'd been here, I stopped off at the shop for maps, then the pair of us walked up to the dungeon. This time, the guard had no trouble at all letting us through, simply making a note of our names. Given the newbie traffic, I wasn't surprised. He probably assumed we were among them.

Placing my hand on a free crystal, I saw my available options listed as floors one to six, but two and above were unselectable.

"Cluma? Can you step outside of the white ring for a second?"

She did, and the options became available again. So I couldn't bring her straight to floor six.

...Wait, of course I could.

"Looks like I can't bring you straight to floor six using the entry crystals. I can go in alone and teleport you myself, or we can walk."

"Let's walk. I want to see inside."

"Okay. But just to warn you, you're unlikely to see many monsters."

In fact, it was even worse than last time. With maps to follow, we didn't encounter a single monster outside of the boss battles, which ended either by Cluma's assassination or by my lightning. The only point of interest was the floor five boss.

"Wow," commented Cluma, observing the sea of slimes.

"Yeah. Apparently there's some trick to it, and we aren't supposed to fight."

Cluma looked around. "You didn't pay much attention to anything but the slimes last time you were here, did you?"

"No? To be fair, they are quite eye-catching."

"Look behind you."

I looked behind me, where one of the black teleport crystals was embedded in the wall next to the door. Tapping it confirmed that yes, this boss was entirely optional.

Of course, bypassing it would mean not getting the treasure chest, and hence missing out on a bar of steel. Perhaps if a dungeon was only five floors deep, this is the sort of difficulty level we'd expect from the final boss. Then maybe that was a theme of this dungeon? Chests that contained anything other than money would have final-boss difficulty levels, but would be skippable. Could you skip once combat had started?

Of course, all that pondering was mainly to distract me from the fact that I'd missed a crystal right behind me. I knew that all the monsters were in the arena part of the chamber, and hadn't looked around after walking in. That was stupid.

"It's okay. I already know how unobservant you are," said Cluma, giving me consolation hugs.

I zapped the slimes anyway, just because I could, before we moved on to floor six.

"You aren't scared of creepy crawlies, are you?" I asked, recalling the giant centipedes that occupied this floor.

"No? Why?"

"Because this floor has creepy crawlies."

"Then I'll just step on them," said Cluma, casually flicking her tail.

Oh, you poor girl, I thought, as we walked down the first passage. Luckily for her, she never got to find out the horrors that actually clicked around the floor, because the path to the boss chamber had been cleared. Maybe I should have gone off track a bit. I could pick up a few of them in range of my [Mana Sight], despite being hampered by the dungeon's glare.

When we did reach the boss chamber, there was no queue. That may have had something to do with the sign on the door, stating that Lily was off duty.

"Who's Lily?" asked Cluma.

"The slime I told you about. She changes her name like most people change their underwear. At least now we know what it currently is, and don't have to try to politely extract it from her."

"[Inspection] doesn't work?"

"It does, but it says her name is Blobby. Call her Blobby, and you will end up with broken bones. Do not call her Blobby."

"Is she safe to hug?"

Not a question I'd previously considered, but given her reputation, it was hard to imagine that she'd object. The bigger problem would be if she decided to hug back. "Yes, but she has a reputation for being very... friendly. So watch yourself. And she's even more careless than I am, so keep an eye on [Danger Sense]. Last time I was here, she gave me a drink that was poisonous to humans."

Cluma's ears twitched. "Umm... Why did you invite me to come again?"

Good question. Partially it was because since I could teleport her now, and given the effort we'd gone through to make it possible, I was damn well going to make the most of it. But at least some of it was simply because I wanted to watch what happened when a not-Blobby and a Cluma were placed in the same room together. I expected fireworks. I also wanted to go shopping for enchanted accessories afterwards, but there was no reason I couldn't have gone back for Cluma after I was done here.

Without answering, I pushed open the boss room doors. The interior looked completely different to the last time, with three cylinders arrange in a triangular formation, one of which had six disks of varying diameters threaded onto it to form a cone. I ignored them all, headed to the side door, and knocked.

"Go away, I'm closed," came a voice from inside.

"It's me," I shouted back.

"Peter?"

Seconds later, the door slammed open. "What took you so long?! I called you yesterday! And who's this?"

"By the time you called, it was almost nighttime. I couldn't just drop everything and turn up. And this is Cluma."

"Nice to meet you, Lily!" exclaimed Cluma, throwing caution to the wind and going straight for a hug. Her arms and the front of her body sunk in by a few centimetres.

"Nice to meet you too!" exclaimed Lily, hugging back. "At least you aren't so grouchy as that one."

"Hey! I'm not grouchy!"

"Blurple," went Cluma, which I assumed was supposed to be a giggle, but with her face embedded in slime, it didn't quite work out.

"Well, come on in," said Lily, once Cluma had detached herself. Thankfully, Cluma seemed to have dented Lily's irritation at me not responding to her summons within the second.

"I assume you didn't call me just to be social?" I asked, as Cluma bounced around the room, oohing and aahing at everything, her face and armour left damp from her slime exposure.

"No, I called because of another visitor that stopped by yesterday. Remember that batch of letters mother left? There was one for a Serl... Serv? Ser-something? Some ridiculously long name that no-one would ever remember?"

"Serlvrenalliacta," came a high pitched-voice from Lily's bed. "What is it about such a simple name that you find so challenging?"

"The plushy spoke!" exclaimed Cluma from the bed, where she'd been tightly squeezing Kranakellicium, the rank five, draconic [Sovereign of Stone and Flame].