"Effective," Phillipe replied. "But only against some enemies, I suspect." "The spiders?" I asked. "I think they need to breathe as well." "I was thinking of a few others, actually. We'll see once we get there." And with that, Phillipe led us into a long corridor attached to the room. It was all brick and crumbled mortar, with spaces for windows on either side that were filled in by smaller bricks. I wondered what I would find behind those if I tried to bash them in. Probably either dirt, or some sort of hole in reality. The dungeons were definitely non-euclidian in nature, and I wasn't sure I wanted to really mess with them. Not from up close, anyway. Phillipe was in the lead, but he stopped a few steps in and dropped to one knee. I almost did the same, thinking he was ducking away from something, but he just pointed to the ground ahead of him. "Tyro, look." "I can't see anything," Tyro admitted after looking over his father's shoulder for a bit. I snuck around and looked, too. It took me a bit, but I caught on. "The colour's different?" I asked. "That's right," Phillipe said. "It's not a clear tell, but it's a hint." He reached down and gave one of the flagstones a hard smack. It cracked down the middle, two halves tumbling into a pit that was lined with sharpened stones. It was only a couple of feet deep, but still. "Every tell matters. What's nice about discovering a trap early in a passageway is that most of the time the rest of the passage will have similar traps within it." He stood up and tapped Tyro on the shoulder. "Take point. Eyes peeled." "Good work," Phillipe said. We continued down the corridor that way, Tyro very carefully uncovering traps as we moved along. At one point Phillipe stopped him and showed us a thin wire running across the length of the passageway and leading up to a small ledge above. We ducked under that one and kept on moving. "This one ends in the room with the stairs leading down," Phillipe said. "And the boss?" I asked. "So, you don't need to fight the boss to go down?" I asked. "Not on this floor. Most floors that have access to the lower floor before the bossroom will just allow you to go down. They also tend to be floors where the boss is always present," Phillipe explained. "Do people go to the boss at all, then?" I asked. "Ditz Dungeon floor three boss is a large goblin riding a spider," Tyro said. It sounded rote, memorised. "The bossroom has large cocoons made of woven spider silk, and long lengths of corded silk rope." "Sounds handy to someone who isn't us," I said. Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. Phillipe chuckled. "You've got that right. Next room might have a few goblins, or some spiders. We should approach it quietly, scout it out, then decide how to react from there." It took a while to reach that room. Tyro was sweating profusely by the time we were halfway there. I could tell it was using a lot of focus for him to spot the traps he did. "Are you trying to get him to unlock a skill or something?" I asked. Phillipe shook his head. "No. Though I wouldn't mind if he discovered a latent ability with trap-finding. It's some of the most dangerous work in a dungeon, but a skilled trap-finder sets their own price." "So, George back there..." "Was making nearly as much as the rest of the team combined," Phillipe said. "But he also has years of valuable experience. Any thug off the street can be given a few lessons and a sword and told to wail on goblins. It takes a lot of dedicated skills and practice to become even remotely good as a trap-finder." I nodded along. It made sense. In this world, with skills and levels and so on governing so much, it made sense that a job that required more specialised skills would both be more valuable and more difficult to train. The more skills someone spent on things related to their career, the fewer skills they'd have related to everyday things. A person with ten combat-related skills was useless to society when there wasn't something in dire need of fighting. I wondered what that made me. Nearly all of my skills with a few exceptions were tuned towards growing and maintaining mycelium and mushroom farms. On reaching the end, the three of us--four if we counted Sir Nibbles--paused by the threshold into the next room. There were goblins there. Just a trio of them around a fire, none really paying any attention to what was going on around them. "Another mushroom attack?" I asked. "Do you have many left?" Phillipe asked in return. I nodded, but the truth was I didn't have much left. "I'll need to restock." ʀᴇᴀᴅ ʟᴀᴛᴇsᴛ ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀs ᴀᴛ 𝓷𝓸𝓿𝓮𝓵※𝓯𝓲𝓻𝓮※𝓷𝓮𝓽 "We're not going to leave and come all the way back," Tyro said. I rolled my eyes. "Of course not. All I need is a space to grow new mushrooms." "How long would that take?" Phillipe asked. I wiggled my hand in a so-so gesture. "Three to six hours for a full restock." He blinked. "And how many is that?" "More than I can carry on my own," I said. "And I can make a few different sorts of magical mushrooms that might help as well... oh, hey, I can distract the goblins ahead. Make them hallucinate so that we can sneak past them." Phillipe considered it, then nodded. "Go ahead." "Masks on," I said, and I was proud to see that Tyro hurried to pull his on. I think seeing the room full of dead goblins had served as an adequate warning of what would happen to him if he didn't listen to my warnings. I fished out a mushroom from my bag. It was one of my stranger ones, all puffy and purple, and a bit squished from being in the bag. [Purple Starball] - Uncommon This magical mushroom unleashes clouds of glowing spores that, if inhaled, will cause a mammal to have vivid visual hallucinations. I tossed the mushroom way out ahead and it thumped into the ground a little ways short of the goblins. I wasn't sure if it was working at first. One of the goblins turned to inspect the sound, but that was all. It wasn't like my [Dead Man's Cough] which made it very easy to tell if they were working or not. Then one of the goblins started to scream. The others jumped up, but it was clear they were dizzy and seeing things that we weren't. In a matter of seconds one of them was crying and running to hide in a corner while another stumbled into their firepit and howled as they rolled through the flames. "I think they're distracted," I said. "Yes, I think so too," Phillipe said. We grabbed our things and darted into the room, then immediately turned to the stairs and started to run down them, our footfalls masked by the screaming and hollering of the goblins behind us. The only time I paused was to pick up the husk of my mushroom. No point in letting whomever came next know what we'd used, even if I'd left plenty of evidence behind already.