Content warning:

  Mention of dead animals.

  Collecting crystals had been an incredibly easy and dull task. Lauren simply broke them off the Dungeon wall for several hours. She was attacked by animals twice during that time—once by a bat and once by a snake. Both had been quite small, even by regular people’s standards. This was how a lot of Explorers earned money, however, so she could at least appreciate learning about it from that perspective.

  Having left the Dungeon, everyone found something different to do with their time. Maeve and Lucia had gone to a neighbor’s house, Emma and Mist went to wander around somewhere, and Savannah went to her room to bury herself in a new book. Lauren was sitting on the couch with Heather.

  “How are you doing?” Heather asked. “You didn’t talk much in the Dungeon.”

  Lauren put her arms around her knees. “Dejected, I guess. I didn’t really know Paul. He was my neighbor, but I didn’t give much thought to him beyond that. I should’ve talked with him more.”

  Heather scooted over and put her arm around Lauren, who leaned on Heather in response. The two sat tranquilly while Lauren worked through her emotions.

  Eventually, Lauren turned her attention to the bee girl she was cuddling. Heather’s face still looked human—as did everyone’s—but her golden irises had a slightly hexagonal shape to them. Her hair was black and wavy, with two antennae sticking out of it. The yellow fluff around her neck and the black and yellow stripes on her arms felt soft against Lauren’s skin. Lauren had learned that Heather was thirty-nine years old, but like all high-level Explorers, she didn’t look her age.

  Heather gave an embarrassed giggle. “Do I look good?”

  “Yeah.” Lauren blushed. “Sorry. I’m still adjusting to seeing people again, and all the changes to Explorers makes them more interesting. I only had my own reflection to look at for a long time.”

  “It’s fine,” Heather said. “Look all you want. I like looking at you, too.”

  “I am really nice to look at.”

  Heather laughed and shook her head.

  Lauren’s gaze drifted to blankets she’d been using as a bed, currently arranged in a neat pile out of the way.

  “Heather, you’re staying here for a while, right?” Lauren asked.

  The bee girl tilted her head. “Yeah, why?”

  “Where are you going to sleep?”

  Heather pointed straight down. “On the couch. Where else?”

  Lauren blinked. “Oh, right. I’m too tall for it, but you probably fit.”

  “Were you hoping I would sleep somewhere else?” she teased.

  Lauren blushed and looked away.

  Heather shifted so she could curl up her legs to the side. As she moved, one of her wings grazed Lauren’s hand.

  “It’s not uncomfortable to sit on your wings like that?” Lauren asked.

  “Not at all,” Heather said. She leaned forward to give Lauren a better look at them.

  I don’t know much about insect wings, but they remind me of old glass windows.

  “They’re really pretty,” Lauren complimented.

  “Thanks. I like my wings, too. They only really bothered me early on, when clothes for wings didn’t exist yet, so I had to modify clothes myself. The ones available now are kinda pricey, so I still end up doing that.”

  “Making things for my ears and tail was an interesting challenge,” Lauren reminisced. “Especially when I made my helmet.”

  “I can’t imagine what it must’ve been like to go through your transformation alone…” Heather said.

  “It was pretty scary at first. I had no idea why my body was changing, and I was terrified that I’d entirely become a wolf. I remember trying to heal them away over and over again. When the changes were done, I decided I liked them.”

  “Yeah, healing magic doesn’t affect transformations. Although yours does affect plants. Are there any other differences?”

  “Nope.” Lauren shook her head. “Other than the plant thing, I have the same limitations. I can’t heal wounds older than a couple weeks, and I can’t cure diseases—I can only heal damage from the symptoms. At least transformations don’t cause any damage to people’s bodies to begin with.”

  Heather nodded. “My transformation was easy, in the sense that there were plenty of people I could talk with about it, but also difficult, because I became something rare. Not a lot of insect people walking around. But it also pushed my transition a lot farther, to the extent that I don’t even need medication anymore, so I’m really happy about that. Plus, bees are cute!”

  “Huh? Wait, you’re trans?”

  “Yeah.” Heather tilted her head. “How did you not know? The fact that I’m trans is on the internet, and I figured Savannah or someone would’ve said something about it otherwise.”

  “No one told me,” Lauren shook her head. “And I actively avoided looking you up online because I wasn’t interested in whatever the media might have to say about you.”

  “Huh, well I wasn’t trying to hide it or anything. I genuinely thought you would’ve heard already.”

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  Lauren shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter. Oh, so Lucia doesn’t need medication anymore either! That’s really cool.”

  “Mhmm! A lot of trans people have gone into Dungeons specifically for transformation. I just wish I’d done it before I spent all that money transitioning the mundane way.”

  Lauren put her arm around the bee girl. “Well, you wouldn’t be here right now if things had turned out differently.”

  Heather smiled and leaned in closer. “That’s true.”

  Three teams of Explorers—fifteen people in total—rushed across a vast desert, leaving a long trail of sand clouds behind them. Wolf Pack—who Heather was a part of again after nearly twenty years—and Wine Witches were two of the teams. The third team was Dad Joke, composed of four people, one of whom was Heather’s dad. The remaining members were other dads from his neighborhood.

  Hours ago, they had finished setting up another signal booster, and were now headed for the next Floor down. As the teams neared the exit, peacefully dealing with animals as they did so, the desert sands gave way to a verdant forest, an oasis. Heather led the group to a copse of trees, where a tunnel began.

  Lauren could smell the salt well before she could see it. As the teams descended into the tunnel, the scent grew stronger, and the sound of waves lapping at a shore echoed around them. They stepped out onto a small sunlit beach, the only patch of land on this entire Floor. Everything else was ocean.

  The signal booster from when Abyssal Seekers passed through here remained, and had a thick cable sticking out from one side and into the water.

  Lauren set the large spool of cable she’d been carrying on the ground and stretched. Everyone else carrying spools set theirs down as well—Lucia had a portable telepad instead—and sat down somewhere for a break. Lauren sat in the sand, enjoying the sunlight and gentle breeze, and Heather sat next to her.

  Lauren asked, “I didn’t think about it before, but why are we laying another cable if you already did one? Just one is enough to carry signals, right?”

  Heather shrugged. “The EA doesn’t want to rely on a single cable.”

  “Oh. Was it difficult to set that one up?”

  “Very.” Heather looked at the waves and gave a weary sigh. “But we had fewer people last time, we didn’t know where the exit to the next Floor was, and we had to map out a good place to set it up. Underwater drones could only help so much with that. Still, we eventually got it done. And that’s not even accounting for underwater fights with creatures. I’m so glad you’re here with me this time.”

  Lauren smirked. “I do have a lot of utility.”

  The bee girl rolled her eyes.

  “Are there any underwater Dungeons? Like, the entire thing is in the Pacific Ocean or something.”

  “Yeah. Unless they’re near sea level, they’re pretty much untouched though.”

  “So the Abyss might not actually be the deepest Dungeon in the world?”

  “It’s possible, yeah. Unlikely, though. They rarely go over 1,000 Floors, let alone the 2,263 that this one has. Dungeons also sometimes grow or shrink a little during Resets, so another Dungeon somewhere might one day surpass this one.”

  “That’d be cool. I kind of want to see it happen. I also want to see what a Dungeon forming looks like from the surface.”

  “Someone caught a video of it happening a few years ago. Hold on, let me find it.”

  Heather pulled it up on her phone. A large chunk of the ground fell away as if a giant sinkhole had opened up, and numerous animals came pouring out of it.

  Damn, I’m not sure if seeing it happen from the inside or the outside is scarier.

  “Any way to predict when and where one is going to open up?”

  “Theoretically we could track fluctuations in ambient mana density, but the technology isn’t there yet.”

  “Damn, I hope that gets figured out soon.”

  The two pulled out snacks to eat while they waited. As they ate, someone came up behind them.

  “Have you been deep underwater in a Dungeon before, Lauren?” Andrew—Heather’s dad—asked. He was a rabbit-kin, and had two, tall, black-furred ears standing straight out of his brown here. His amber eyes looked quite similar to Heather's.

  Lauren swallowed her bite of travel food. “I have. There’s an enormous ravine in the middle of the jungle that a lot of rivers empty into. The collected water gets quite deep, but that’s where the crystals and windows are, so I couldn’t avoid it.”

  “’Windows’? Huh?”

  “Oh, um, there’s these fish down there that have really hard eye lenses that don’t seem to decay, so I scavenged some from dead fish for my house. They work great! When I want to open or close a window, I just roll it to the side.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “Huh. So how did you explore underwater?”

  “I made a big bubble around myself and propelled it around with magic, but I had to regularly surface to exchange the air…” Lauren looked at Heather. “How did you maintain your air supply?”

  “Marama took care of it,” Heather said. “She grew a bunch of mushrooms on herself and used them to control the atmosphere. We also had air tanks for emergencies.”

  “What creatures are in the ravine?” Andrew asked excitedly.

  “Hmm… It’s mostly fish, I suppose,” Lauren said. “A lot of eels, specifically.”

  “Eels…” Andrew chuckled, nodded to himself, and wandered off back to his buddies.

  “What was that reaction?” Lauren asked Heather.

  The bee girl shrugged. “He’s probably lost in thought about some random trivia he finds interesting.”

  “So being a dork runs in the family.”

  “Hey!” Heather playfully hit Lauren’s arm.

  The three teams soon decided the break was over, so after packing up, they entered the water in a formation, with Lauren at the forefront as the main defense force. Heather took the lead in navigation, and everyone else focused either on defense or cable installation.

  The sunlight faded as they went deeper, so Lauren created several light spheres around the bubble they were in. As the darkness and pressure of the deep ocean surrounded them, so too did animals. Whales, sharks, eels, crabs, tortoises and more were all pushed away by creating currents of water. Everyone besides Lauren did the same, firing large torrents of water out of their protective bubble.

  As the hours passed, their task became easier with their spools becoming lighter, but more difficult because of having to exchange air at the surface regularly. A long distance away from the shore they started from, they reached the underwater tunnel to the next Floor.

  The tunnel curved upward into a wet cave, which then opened up onto a snowy, mountainous land. The cold wind battered hard against the group, so they opted to take another break before running straight to the exit.

  Knowing she wouldn’t be here for long, Lauren took in the gorgeous view while she still could. The mountains towered over her as she stood, gazing into the overcast sky, her heart pounding with excitement—not for the mountains, but for what lay below. Her tail twitched as it tried to wag against her control over it.

  Once everyone was ready, she couldn’t contain her excitement, so she created a sled of ice large enough to seat all fifteen of them, and rushed them forward across the snowy landscape, frequently making split-second adjustments to their trajectory so they wouldn’t accidentally run over anything.

  She reached the next tunnel only a couple hours later, having slowed her speed so as not to overwhelm the others. The tunnel narrowed and sloped downward, and the air became thick and warm. The fresh scent of abundant nature hit her nose.

  Soon, light from the next Floor could be seen, and the tunnel turned a corner, then led into a steep drop. The signal booster that Abyssal Seekers had set up was next to a small crevice in the ground.

  Lauren grinned as she stepped forward and looked into the crevice. Far below, a sprawling forest of giant trees awaited her, lit by the late afternoon sun and somewhat obfuscated by clouds

  She sighed contentedly as the tension left her body.