The last of the Izhrak’s let out a whine of pain and fell to the ceiling to join its brethren.

  Eve gasped as she pressed a hand to her side, muttering a quick healing spell to seal the wound shut. It would stop the bleeding, but she needed to find a proper healer at some point if she wanted to fix her internal injuries as well as the broken arm.

  Not for the first time, she wondered about the unkillable thing that was masquerading as an adventurer at her guild.

  ‘If I had that kind of power…’ She shook her head ruefully.

  She forced herself upright and took stock. The chamber had settled into a new orientation, gravity pulling her toward what her eyes had previously insisted was a slanted surface. Her inner ear disagreed violently, and she had to pause until the dizziness passed.

  The corridor ahead twisted sharply, folding into an impossible shape that seemed to bend in all directions at once. Eve took three careful steps, and the sensation of incline vanished entirely. Her footing felt level again, solid and trustworthy, even as the world around her insisted otherwise.

  ‘Gods I hate high level dungeons.’ She frowned as she inched her way forward.

  At least this one’s rules weren’t too complicated.

  Earlier—how long ago had that been?—she’d tried to push forward aggressively, trying to find some sort of exit as fast as possible. The dungeon had answered by stretching distances until she was basically standing still despite hurtling through the air as fast as she could. Inversely, she began making actual progress when she slowed down. So moving faster resulted in moving slower, and vice versa.

  It made for some very interesting changes to her fighting style.

  The second rule was even simpler—down was whichever surface was nearest. It was the only reason these impossible tunnels were traversable at all, and the reason the Izhrak fell to the ‘ceiling’.

  ‘However…’ Eve paused and carved a shallow mark into the stone with the tip of her blade, a simple line meant to anchor her sense of direction. She took five steps forward, then turned around.

  The mark was gone.

  She frowned and looked up.

  It was there, embedded in what now served as the ceiling, the cut angled wrong. At least it hadn’t disappeared completely. Eve stared at it for a long moment before looking away.

  She continued on.

  The dungeon opened into a wider space without warning. One moment she was in a narrow passage, the next stepping into a chamber that seemed far too large to exist where it did. The walls curved away at odd angles, distances hard to judge. The mana density in the air went up another notch, thick enough in places to make her skin prickle.

  She turned around to go back, but the passage she’d entered through had already disappeared.

  Eve gritted her teeth and slowly made her way forward.

  Although at first, she thought herself alone in this giant space, something soon shifted far to her left.

  Eve stopped and pressed herself against a jutting section of rock. Her senses reached out automatically, tasting the mana currents in the air. There—a presence, slow and heavy, bending space around it the way deep water bent light. Whatever it was, it was far away enough that it either did not notice her, or did not care to come bother her.

  Which was a good thing since it was much stronger than her.

  Creatures like that weren’t threats in the conventional sense. Common dungeon delving knowledge treated the more like environmental hazards. Fighting it would be like trying to stab a landslide.

  The thing passed through the far end of the chamber without acknowledging her existence, its bulk briefly compressing the space around it before reality relaxed again with a soundless shudder. Eve waited several long breaths after it was gone before moving.

  Only then did she notice the debris she’d been hiding behind.

  At first glance it looked like rubble—shards of metal and glass fused into the floor at odd angles. On closer inspection, she raised an eyebrow.

  The construction was not local.

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  Before her lay some form of alien living space or carriage. What she had taken for shattered stone resolved into plates—smooth, curved slabs of some dark material, torn open and bent inward as if crushed by forces far greater than simple impact. Their edges were too clean in places, melted rather than broken, fused into shapes that stone did not naturally take.

  Thin, translucent fragments were scattered among the wreckage, some cracked, others warped into strange lenses that caught and distorted the ambient mana. She picked one up briefly, then let it fall. It was lighter than glass, tougher too, and threaded with hair-thin lines that served no purpose she could recognize.

  She followed the debris field with her eyes.

  Whatever this had been, it hadn’t fallen gently. Long gouges had been carved into the dungeon floor, though instead of a straight line, the strange dungeon space made them spiral around the floor. One end of the structure was simply gone, sheared off cleanly, while the other had been punched inward, ribs of metal exposed like a shattered cage.

  Eve turned to leave.

  While the wreck was certainly interesting, she did not have the time or tools to properly study it. This was not the first time other-worldly artifacts and technologies had been discovered in a dungeon, in fact this was a rather common occurrence. If the guild was to be believed, Dwarves—one of the most prominent races in the world—were not originally from here.

  Eve’s thoughts were interrupted by a loud cracking sound.

  With a powerful, tearing thwump, the space in front of her collapsed in on itself, not unlike the way it had when it brought her here.

  The air screamed as the rupture widened, reality peeling back like wet parchment. Beyond it was not darkness, but light—harsh, distant, and wrong. A sky stained in sharp, unfamiliar hues, broken by drifting shapes that might have been clouds or might have been something else entirely. There was no ground she could see. Just vastness.

  And then the pull hit.

  Mana rushed toward the tear in a violent surge, the dense, saturated air of the dungeon evacuating itself toward the sudden absence on the other side. Eve was yanked off her feet as if caught in a river current, boots scraping uselessly against stone as she was dragged bodily to the rift.

  She snarled and poured mana into flight, trying to push herself back. For a heartbeat, it worked. She hovered, trembling, every muscle screaming as she fought against the torrent.

  Then her spell faltered, torn apart by the same pressure dragging her forward. Eve didn’t even hit the floor, the pull strong enough to simply drag her through the air.

  “Damn it—”

  She abandoned flight and slammed her palms into the ground instead.

  Stone surged upward in front of her in a smooth wall, ripping itself free from the dungeon floor with a thunderous crack. Eve did her best to slow her flight down before she slammed straight into the unyielding stone. The few intact enchantments on her armour flickered slightly to dull the impact, but the breath was still knocked out of her.

  Thankfully, her last ditch effort worked.

  Mana howled past the barrier in visible streams, tearing loose fragments of rock and flinging them into the rift. The wall shuddered violently, cracks spiderwebbing across its surface, but it held. Eve pressed herself flat against it, teeth clenched, one arm braced as the pull tried to peel her away like a leaf in a storm.

  Then, suddenly, the pull greatly weakened, though it didn’t stop. Although still winded, Eve forced herself to get up and peek over the edge of the wall.

  She tilted her head in confusion.

  The rift was still very much there, if anything its edges had only grown in the few moments she’d been sheltering. However, the scenery beyond it had changed drastically. What had been a strange sky was now a…

  ‘Is that a cave?’ She tried to puzzle out what she was looking at.

  Occupying the entire rift was now some sort of deep, circular passage, its walls and floor covered wet looking mucus. As Eve squinted her eyes in consternation, the walls of the cave suddenly contracted, and the mana pouring through the rift reversed, gushing back into the dungeon at even greater speeds, tearing her shelter down and sending her flying backwards. Eve didn’t try to resist this time, instead opting to use her mana to accelerate in the direction of the flow, fleeing as far away from the spatial tear as she possibly could.

  ‘That’s not a cave.’ She looked back fearfully, just in time to see a rushing wall of black slide past the rift, before suddenly revealing a glowing green orb the size of a house. ‘That was a nostril.’

  The eye on the other side of the spatial tear seemed to momentarily focus on her form, sending tremors of terror running through her body. A visible shockwave expanded from the hole in space, quickly catching up to Eve and slamming into her with tremendous force. She let out a cry of pain as it reopened her previous injuries, blood spurting freely out of her side.

  Luckily, the rift snapped shut the next moment, cutting off the incomprehensible creature’s baleful gaze and interrupting what she belatedly realised was its roar.

  With the mana in the air no longer throwing her around at its whims, Eve crashed down to the ground, tumbling along the floor until she came to a stop on her back. As she lay there on her back, the cold sweat covering her body finally fading, she couldn’t help but laugh at the whole situation.

  ‘I, a guild master of the adventurer’s guild, a platinum ranked adventurer, almost died in some random dungeon to the roar of a monster in another world.’ Her laughter came out as a pained chuckle, the reopened injury in her side making itself known. ‘What a fucking joke.’

  Forcing herself upright, she quickly resealed her wound, though she still couldn’t do anything about her internals. Looking around, she realised that in her attempt to escape the spatial tear, she’d left the giant open space and was back in some other tunnel, this one curving upwards in both directions.

  With a start, she realised that there was a figure seated up ahead, seemingly staring further up the passage, away from her.

  Her heart jumped despite herself.

  “Hey,” Eve called out, voice rough. “Don’t move.”

  The figure shifted. Eve scrambled up, preparing to dash to the figure, only to freeze when they did the same.

  She raised her hand.

  The figure did the same.

  She turned her head slowly to the side.

  So did it.

  “Of course,” Eve muttered.

  She took a careful step to the left. The figure did the same, maintaining the illusion perfectly until the curvature of the tunnel shifted just enough that the image slid out of alignment and vanished.

  The passage ahead was empty again.