The Forbidden Dungeon had changed and it was all my fault. At least that was what the accusing glares of the Guild officials said each time someone came in with a new story. No one had actually died from the changes, so mildly annoyed glares were all I had to put up with.

Now, finally, I would get to see the changes for myself. It wasn’t easy making time for a delve, but like a morning exercise routine, you just had to do it. Delving every week wasn’t ideal for grinding, but with all the new delvers from the Tribes, once a week was all we could get.

Constantly working as a group had improved our teamwork and now our group was a finely tuned monster-killing machine. Standard procedure now was for Kyle to be the only visible combatant. It was Felicia’s job to stay three paces behind him, while my position was behind and to the right of her.

Cloridan, of course, was right out in front, behind the monsters. Arranged like that, the invisible combatants could stay out of each other's way. Kyle didn’t have to worry about where any of us was and just concentrated on holding his line.

As the one who could see us all, I was responsible for directing the battle. Doing so with [Unseen Sound] was a little awkward, but the simple formation didn’t need much in the way of direction, just warnings when things went wrong. Since I was also the one in charge of contingencies - blinding opponents, casting temporary shields, doing… miscellaneous things with water… it worked out well.

Integrating Cutter into the formation was proving more challenging. He just didn’t have the stats to go against a lot of the monsters down here, so he couldn’t back Kyle up. Invisibility would help him, but then he’d either be getting in the way of Kyle or Cloridan. For now, he was back with me, visible and charged with attacking anything that got past Kyle. That only tended to happen with groups of smaller monsters, so it was generally safe. Not that safety was a huge priority for Cutter.

“Oh come on! I can get in there!” he protested to the empty air beside him. I tightened my grip. Ostensibly, I was holding on to him so he knew where I was. I didn’t need my hands to cast spells, and I still had one hand for my dagger if I needed it. The other reason was that even if I wanted to waste five mana repeating myself, he wasn’t in a mood to listen.

“Just stay back, I’ve got this,” Kyle called back. Cutter danced with frustration, not in a mood to enjoy his free XP.

He had made great strides in the last few weeks though. Through dint of much effort, Cloridan had finally convinced him that a more martial profession would suit him than Rogue. It was the lure of bigger weapons mostly, but the fact was that we didn’t need two rogues. I had been sure he’d go for [Fencer], but right now he was leaning towards [Ranger] due to his recent wilderness experience. He wouldn’t meet the requisites for either until he got some more Ability points at his next level though. Or he aged a bit, which was apparently not an option.

In preparation for his new [Profession], we had upgraded his equipment. His old partial plate and dagger were gone, replaced by Silversteel chainmail, dagger, and a longsword (enchanted by me, of course).

“Cutter, if you can’t delve safely, you’ll have to stay overground and hunt in the forest,” I projected. He scowled, but stayed put. Hunting had gotten scarce around the town since the Tribes had redirected the monsters.

In front of us, the Felibull slumped to the ground, Cloridan’s daggers in his back.

Your party has killed a Felibull - your experience share is 234 XP

At the notification, Felicia skipped forward, circling around her boyfriend, and descended on the fresh corpses. Now that we had a spatial bag, we were harvesting a lot more of our killed monsters, and Felibull was at least partially beef, so it should be in demand. Kyle and Cloridan moved to the two exits, making sure they were still closed, and listening for the rats.

Cutter and I got to work searching for the key. They were one of the things that had changed. To progress to the next level you needed three keys, which were to be found in three of the twelve rooms on this level. To date, no patterns had been found in where the keys were placed. It appeared to be random for each group, but the Guild was recording details of where each team found their keys, hoping to find a pattern.

Instead of three straight routes, this level now arranged its rooms in a four-by-three grid with four straight passages running along the length of the arrangement. Each room had a door to the passage on each side of it, so there were multiple ways to progress. If you knew which rooms you needed, you could get through with just three fights. Without that knowledge, it averaged about ten.

Cloridan waved to attract my attention, so I lowered the output from my [Light] spell. Everyone looked over at Kyle. When they saw him looking around as well, they re-oriented on Cloridan’s door. They couldn’t see him, but the light was a sign that the rats were passing by.

The rats were another random factor, so I noted the room we were in, and which corridor the rats had wandered down. The rats — a whole swarm of double-sized nasty critters — wandered the corridors at random intervals. If they heard anything they’d come into a room and either attack the party or join in an existing fight.

Swarms were actually a weakness for our party — I missed having Janie’s [Firestorms] to clear a corridor of weak enemies — so we stayed quiet and careful. A few moments later, Cloridan waved the all-clear, and I returned the light to its normal level.

Having signals and procedures for this sort of thing meant that I could keep up my spells instead of re-casting them for each fight. It killed the banter that we’d normally have indulged in, but it was much more mana-efficient.

“I found it!” Cutter called excitedly. He managed to keep his voice low as he brandished our second key.

“Good job,” Kyle said. He was the only other one who could talk without a spell. “Go help Felicia with the harvesting.”

I abandoned rummaging through the broken glassware and joined them, waiting until Cutter had picked a corpse to work on before picking my own. It must have made a disturbing sight for the others. I, at least, could see an outline of Felicia and myself, but the others would see two corpses apparently dismembering themselves.

There wasn’t another rat patrol while we’d finished harvesting, so we waited until they came again. Once they’d gone, we moved on.

The second floor was also changed, but not as drastically. The twisting tunnels that made up the maze had gotten narrower and even more twisting. The chambers where monsters had been found were now more… habitable. If you were a rat, that is. Filled with straw, rags and food waste, they made perfect dens for the Graxis Rats that filled this level. They lived in the chambers, but they weren’t limited to them. The dog-sized creatures crawled through the tunnels looking for intruders.

They were attracted to light, so I extinguished my spell, and we broke out the Darkvision potions. If we’d wanted to kill the maximum number of rats, we could have barricaded a chamber and fought them as they came, but we had other plans. For one thing, previous reports had suggested that there was no limit to the number of rats, or at least not a reasonable one.

Tunnels had been found, too small for a human, but large enough for a rat. The theory at the Guild was that part of the dungeon wasn’t meant to be delved, but was set aside for rat breeding. Having your monsters breed more of themselves saved on mana costs. Rhis had talked about this. At length.

There hadn’t been enough reports to be sure, but it seemed like the maze shifted with each visitor. However, there was a way through with minimal killing. Six of the chambers were unoccupied, and if you passed through them you’d get to the final boss without any encounters, bar the first room.

Of course, you had to find those rooms. Most people had to choose a tunnel, and see if it led to a fight. If it did, then backtrack and try again. It got a little trickier if you were following another party and the chambers hadn’t been repopulated, but we were the first for today.

We also had an invisible scout to find the way without getting into any fights, so we passed through this level without difficulty. The rest of the Dungeon was unchanged, as of yet.

“So what do we think?” I asked the group. We’d reached the bottom, and had collected our random treasure again. This time it was one of the less appreciated spatial boxes — a masonry workshop. A box the size of a brick, it could be opened and unfolded a ridiculous number of times into a small room set up for a mason to use. It wasn’t great.

I mean, sure if you wanted to trek into the wilderness and set yourself up as a [Mason] it was pretty great. But who did that? Generally, you wanted to set yourself up surrounded by civilisation, where workshops and tools were easily found. Aside from the contents, the only thing the box would store was stone — and not a lot of it. There had been some speculation about using such boxes for the upcoming quarry opening, but no one had been very enthusiastic.

“Well, it’s just as we’d heard, wasn’t it? Nothing new since yesterday.” Felicia said.”

“The second-level boss was new,” I pointed out. “It was a Chimera before. I’d say the fact that a Greater Graxis has been swapped in means that it's finished the second floor and is going to start on the third floor.”

“I get that rats are more efficient than Chimeras,” Kyle said, “But just about anything is, so why rats? Should it be mutant rabbits?”

“Maybe the new Controller finds rats more threatening than rabbits,” I mused. “Or… it’s weird, but rats are associated heavily with laboratories where I’m from.”

“They are? Wait— you know what a laboratory is?” Felicia asked.

“You don’t?” I asked, surprised.

“Well, I know the word,” Felicia emphasised. “In stories, it’s a room where the evil [Master Arcanist] fights the hero sometimes. It’s got something to do with magic? But I thought your world didn’t have magic?”

“In my world, it’s a room, or a building of rooms, that are set up to study something,” I explained. “You have different laboratories for different fields of study. I had thought that the name of this place was supposed to suggest that this Dungeon was a place where somebody had been studying the way to make Chimeras… did none of you get that?”

There were shrugs all around.

“No one really pays attention to Dungeon names,” Kyle said sheepishly. “I never gave it much thought.”

“Okay…” I said slowly. “So, I was also thinking that the new levels — at least the first one — were a lot more like how labs are set up in my world. The interiors of the room as well, at least if it wasn’t so wrecked.”

“That is odd,” Felicia agreed, “But where do the rats fit in?”

“Well a lot of labs are set up to study living things,” I explained. “For a lot of experiments, one living thing is as good as another, and rats are really cheap, so they get used a lot.”

“So…” Felicia trailed off, trying to make sense of it. “Do you think the Dungeon got that from you? Or was there some previous civilisation that had a similar arrangement?”

“I don’t know.” I paused to think about it. “Actually, where do Dungeons get their names from? The two out here are named something appropriate for what they are, but Oakway was named after the town… or was the town named after the Dungeon?”

Kyle and Felicia shrugged. “I don’t know,” Kyle said. “Both of them were there when my family arrived.”

I made a note to remind myself that Rhis must be much older than he seemed to be. “The latter would make more sense,” I speculated. “I don’t think Rhis, or whatever is behind Dungeons, would know or care about the town.”

Rhis wasn’t there to ask, of course. He was back in town, or at least his Core was. Rather than being left on boring guard duty, he’d asked to be unpowered for the duration of our expedition. Despite my misgivings, he assured me that he experienced no time when he wasn’t powered, and hence no discomfort.

“Anyway,” I said, putting all the speculation aside. “We came here to do our own experiment. I removed another cage from my backpack, and we did the Phantasmal cage again. This time it was a squirrel that we dumped in the pen.

“Any reason it’s a squirrel this time?” Felicia asked.

“Not really,” I replied. “I did want a different animal, in case it needs to be different to replace the existing controller.”

We all watched as the squirrel explored its new pen. It looked nervously at us, and then dashed around, looking for a way to escape. It wasn’t long before it touched the orb.

“Nothing happened,” Cloridan said.

“Yeah,” I said slowly. “Just what we predicted. So it should be safe for one of us to touch it.”