I'm a little disappointed by my showing in battle back there, but then I wasn't trying to be a valiant warrior. I was just trying to protect my sister, and she wound up protecting me instead. I really need to step up my game. I don't want to define myself by combat, but know this is a violent world where I can't really avoid it. And the terrible twins are itching for a fight and I want to support them.

"I want to try some things on the next run," I say. "Can you guys hold off on attacking right away? None of the monsters we've seen so far start off as hostile."

I need a new staff, but this time I select a branch for another purpose. I also tuck some goat cheese into my bag of holding before we return to the dungeon.

As we make our way through the ground floor, shadowy monsters shadow us from the shadows. I think this dungeon may have overdone it a little on the shadowiness. The deep, dark music that had stopped playing after we killed the first floor boss is back again. My soul quakes and trembles under the fear effect but I firmly tell it to calm down. It's just music, dangit. My soul is just being excessively melodramatic.

When we reach the big black wolf, the party hangs back and lets me take the initiative, watching me curiously to see what I do.

I give my new staff a good throw and say, "Fetch!"

The Subwoofer's tail wags so hard it sounds like a super-amped drum solo. He chases after it, picks it up carefully in his shadowy maw, and brings it over to me. The party tenses and puts out their weapons, but I telepathically tell them to hold. The big shadowy dog drops the stick and plops back on his haunches, lolling his tail cheerfully.

Rowan's aura ripples with disbelief. "What in the Void was that?"

"He's just a big doggy who wants to play and he's not fussed about how," I say. "He'll still tear your leg off if he can. But he starts off as Wary, not Hostile. And despite the fear music magic, he's actually happy. He's having fun. Also, Lily told us that the monsters on the first few floors won't attack unless you start a fight."

I toss the stick for the good boy a few more times before he lays down and lets me scritch him behind the big perky ears.

The music permeating the entire floor has shifted as well. Although it's still metal, it's brighter, more heroic metal. The sort of music that plays right as the action hero is about to do something awesome. It went from a debuff to a buff. The song bolsters the spirit rather than tries to cause it terror.

Skills increased: Persuasion (Animal Handling), Clairvoyance (Empathy), Discipline (Fear Resistance)

"Good job on finding another path," Aunt Rosemary says. "As you can see, some bosses have different things you can do to pass them. Each path you find gives you more experience, making it good to try other things when you run the same dungeon again. Doing the same thing over and over gets you less and less experience."

I'm sure I can't be the first person in centuries to think of throwing a stick to a doggy. Aunt Rosemary gave the hint herself in suggesting that he might be a reincarnated dog. I still feel a little cheated of a clever moment. Oh well, at least I got the skill levels.

"Diminishing returns," I say. "Alternate win conditions grant additional experience."

"Yes, but I'm speaking to seven-year-olds," Aunt Rosemary says with a smile.

"I know what he said," Willow says.

"Aunt Rosemary, these kids have higher Intelligence than my mom," I say. "And higher language skills than me, but that's just because I decided not to bother learning Common because I can do the same thing with psychic powers anyway. My auto-translator seems to do a good job of translating English into both 'precocious child' and 'Elder Teacher'. You may not have even heard the same words."

"Ah. True. Thank you for telling me. Once we get home, we will put you on a lesson plan to turn off your auto-translator and learn Common properly."

I sigh. "Yes, Teacher." I don't bother complaining that I don't even think it's necessary. I'm pretty sure the auto-translator is a reincarnator thing because we're psychic. I haven't heard of any non-reincarnators who have it.

The Subwoofer takes a nap and happily lets us claim the chest without trying to stop us. After letting Aunt Rosemary gather up the coins, we climb the stairs to the cat-and-mouse floor.

"I wish we could come out here without Aunt Rosemary," Griffin grumbles. "She ruins all the fun and makes it boring."

Aunt Rosemary sighs. "Would you prefer your Uncle Falcon to chaperone instead? You think he would make things more exciting for you?"

"Yes!" Griffin claps his hands together. "That would be so awesome! Uncle Falcon is lots of fun! He tells stories and stuff."

I watch the mice on the second floor running around for a moment. Monsters don't need to eat but they do enjoy it when they can. What they're really consuming is the essence in the object, so even though they don't need it for the calories, they can still benefit from it. I pull out the cheese from my bag and crumble it in my hands before scattering it around the room.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

The mice surge on every bit of cheese, completely heedless of whether a cat will eat them because they stopped running for a moment. The ones that are fast enough manage to absorb a few bits of essence before a cat pounces on them. Once all the cats have caught a mouse, they all go off to nap in front of a window happily, letting us pass through the area without stopping us.

There are no sunbeams streaming in through the windows. There is no sun out there. But it still feels like there should be. At the very least, the yellow August sky from the Great Orb should be visible, but the windows are too foggy to let in any light.

"Well, I want to fight," Griffin says. "That's boring."

"We can always run it again," I say. "We're sneaking past sleeping monsters now. I'm sure you'll get a fight if your [Sneaking] is too low, [Sneaky Child]."

Griffin frowns. "But… oh, alright. You get to pick stuff on this run but I get the next!"

"Fair enough," I say with a grin.

"I hardly ever get to fight monsters," Griffin says. "I can sneak whenever I want to."

"You've never snuck past monster cats before, though," I say. "Remember that you get more experience from doing different things."

"I guess," Griffin says reluctantly.

We quietly make our way past the sleeping cats, though I have to wonder if they'd bother getting up even if we were loud. The panther boss is still laying on top of the chest, having not budged from its perch for such meager treats.

"I don't suppose we brought any milk or cream or anything?" I ask. "Otherwise, I'm out of ideas. And dairy products."

"Bah, let's just kill it and take the chest," Griffin says.

After defeating the oversized kittycat the second time, Griffin eagerly goes to loot the chest. Willow stops him and checks for a trap first, and they disarm it before opening the chest. Griffin lets out a whoop upon seeing the contents.

Griffin holds aloft a black fountain pen. "Look! It's the pen Aunt Lily wanted!"

"Now try not to break this one immediately," Aunt Rosemary says with a small grin. "Perhaps I should hold onto it to give it to her when we get home?"

We head upstairs to the room with the spiders and the moths.

"So what do we do here?" Rowan asks.

"Climb up to the ceiling and light the braziers without getting caught in the webs," I say.

"I take back my complaint," Griffin says. "This is gonna be fun."

Decorative pillars and beams provide places to climb, though avoiding the cobwebs is the tricky part. The moths, for their part, are content to rest on the furniture slowly making fog with their wings unless bothered.

I climb up and to hold the brazier steady while Griffin tries to get the brazier lit. He actually has Survival (Fire Making). Anise is never patient enough to wait until I can unlock it. But before he can reach the brazier, he slips and almost falls, snagging his leg on a web. The closest spider lunges at Griffin.

Anise cuts him free with a swipe of a bright yellow sword that's only a little on fire. The rest of the party dogpiles on the now-hostile spider.

I cling to the spinning brazier, trying to avoid falling or getting caught in the remaining webs. So long as I'm up here, I might as well try to light this fire myself. Griffin dropped flint and steel, but I still have my own in my bag of holding, since it's light enough that I didn't have a good excuse not to carry it. That's when I notice there's no fuel in the brazier. I hadn't thought to collect firewood before coming in here.

"How's it looking up there?" Anise calls up once the spider is dead.

"There's no fuel up here," I say. "Any ideas?"

"I have some," Anise says. She pulls something out of her pack and tosses it up at me.

I catch a book with an incredibly raunchy title. "Uh… mom?"

"It's perfectly flammable," Anise says.

"But it's a book. I mean, it's complete smut, but it's a book. That's totally wrong. I'm not going to start burning books."

"Suit yourself," Anise says with a shrug.

Flames burst in my hand as the trashy romance novel spontaneously combusts. With a startled yell, I drop it in the brazier and throw myself backward through the gap in the web.

Skills increased: Search (Inspection), Athletics (Climbing), Enhanced Feet (Soft Landing)

The moths all lift into the air and fly toward the pile of smoking hot erotica. Before it smolders out, most of them get caught in the spiderwebs around the brazier, and the spiders quickly wrap them up.

"Let's… just bring some firewood on the next run," I say.

Our reward is a chest that hadn't appeared during our chaotic last attempt at this floor. After letting the twins deal with a minor trap on it, I open it up to take a look at our reward.

A powder blue plastic lighter lays amid the pile of dungeon coins. The sort I might have seen back on Earth in the hands of someone lighting up a cigarette on a smoke break. It seems even more incongruous here than the fountain pen on the last floor.

I hold it up and flick it a few times to produce a tiny flame.

"Now you can be a pyromaniac too!" Anise says brightly.

"Still not going to burn any books," I say, tucking the lighter into my bag of holding.

Aunt Rosemary still won't let us try the fourth floor, so we head back downstairs and out to our camp.

The lighting in the area has distinctly improved. Without the insectoid fog makers upstairs, the air is clearing up. Slowly growing yellow rays shine in from the windows, turning the mysterious shadow cats into merely indistinct sleeping tabbies.

"How long will this effect last?" Basalt wonders.

"Until the next reset at dark," Aunt Rosemary says.

"You keep saying 'dark' when the sky is yellow," Basalt complains.

"'Dark' refers to the period in which Tiganna, the local skymote, is dark," Aunt Rosemary says. "The Great Orb and the distant skymotes are but dim lights compared to the glow of our own skymote's aether core. But it's just below the horizon, so you can only tell it's there by the fact that the northwest horizon is bright and the southeast horizon is dim."

"So what class are you aiming for, Burdock?" Basalt asks once we settle back in to camp.

"Something magical," Burdock says. "I've been working on hand magic. Thauma… I can't say it. I wanted to learn speech magic but I'm not good enough at speech for it. I'm getting pretty good at hand magic though."

Burdock snaps his fingers and embers flare in the small fire pit. It seems like everyone here is better at making fire than me and the dungeon just took pity on me by giving me a lighter.

"That's pretty cool," Basalt says. "Wish I could do things like that. My dwarfy skills are nice, though."

"You just need to get to Elite rank," Burdock says. "I'm sure you'll get it. You're good with that axe and dwarves live a long time."

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