"Ten percent!" Tom exclaimed. His head shot over to look at Mike who was standing in the kitchen smiling at them. "Are all your meals that great?"

  Mike laughed, adjusting the net that held back his plentiful brown hair. "Just the special ones."

  "Thanks Mike!" Zoe called out. "I appreciate you."

  Mike smiled.

  "Hey," Jeff said, leaning over his bowl of stew. "I know we just got back from the dungeon Tom, but what do you say we go find another one?"

  "I was going to suggest the same thing. Be a shame to waste this meal." Tom agreed.

  Both the men turned and looked at Zoe, a hint of guilt creeping through their excitement.

  "You mind if I tag along?" Zoe asked. "I can handle my own and I've got a few buffs I can give you two."

  Jeff and Tom looked at each other and shrugged. "It's fine with us but you sure you'll be alright with it? Even for a looper you're a little under where we'll be going."

  "What'd you have in mind?" Zoe asked.

  "Well, may as well challenge ourselves with this buff right? Try something a little higher level? I was thinking The Madness Tunnels?" Tom suggested.

  Jeff hemmed and hawed for a moment, his head tilting back and forth. "We could, but nobody has anything nice to say about the whole madness part."

  "True," Tom agreed, leaning back in his chair. "We could buy one of those anti madness bracelets but they're not cheap, and there's no guarantee we clear the dungeon anyway."

  "Mhm. You don't happen to have a bunch of anti madness bracelets laying around, do you?" Jeff turned to Zoe.

  She did, back home in her enchanted box of failed experiments. A few hundred years ago she'd tried to make an enchantment that would help her stay focused, and it worked a little bit but as it turns out enchantments aren't that great at manipulating a person's thoughts. At least not without gathering some skills she didn't want to have.

  They gave a small boost, if she wanted them to. Though that might have been just placebo. The bigger benefit was that it counteracted some magical effects that dungeons occasionally had and gave Zoe even more work to do as she opened more gates to dungeons for Foizo.

  "Don't happen to have any on me." Zoe laughed. It was always fun finding ways to answer that weren't quite a lie but didn't truly answer people's questions. Often times she could just tell the truth as she laughed and people would write it off as a joke. "I could pay for some though."

  "No, no." Tom shook his head. "We couldn't do that, you've already done more than enough for us. How 'bout the grotto?"

  "Which one?" Jeff asked.

  "The level eighty grotto of the wolf, what do you think?" Tom lifted an eyebrow as he turned to Jeff.

  "Okay, okay!" Jeff lifted his hands in mock surrender. "Just checking, maybe you wanted to pet some dogs."

  "No obviously I mean the grotto of the hawk." Tom said. "It's a decent bit over our level but we should be well suited to it. I can take the birds down with my arrows and you can lock them to the ground with your earth manipulation."

  "Sinkhole magic," Jeff corrected. "Flying monsters don't tend to like sinkhole magic but they're also pretty well suited to avoiding it, unfortunately. It's not the worst choice, but how about the labyrinth?"

  "Do you have any skills to keep us from getting lost?" Tom looked to Zoe.

  "Hmm?" Zoe turned back to the two men. "Sorry, yes. I have a good tracking skill. We won't get lost."

  "Everything alright?" Jeff asked.

  "Yeah. I'm fine. Just the mind wandering is all. I'm fine with the labyrinth." Zoe said.

  "Awesome," Tom slurped up the rest of his stew, scraping up the remnants of the broth with a piece of brul. "Then lets not waste too much time. We've only got ten hours with this buff so lets put it to work."

  Zoe and Jeff both finished up their meals and then the trio walked towards the central portal room. It was a work of art, in Zoe's eyes.

  The gates themselves were stable even without any assistance, which was great when they only had the one gate to the moon. But as they got more and more — and as they recognized the need for defending their city, closing the gates at a moments notice became something of a priority.

  The enchanted stone surrounding each gate pulsed with mana, eager to smash through the gate's foundation and rip it apart at a moment's notice. The ensuing wild mana would be ripped away through an enchantment in the floor beneath the gate and sent to a dedicated room a few dozen meters below. It didn't cause much a problem to begin with, but the last thing anybody wanted in the middle of an emergency was to have to deal with the remnants of an imploding gate.

  Tom led the trio through the portal house to the gate that connected to the Laughing Labyrinth — a level five hundred dungeon with some rather unique magical effects, at least for what Zoe had seen from dungeons personally.

  Zoe took her role as support on the backline, providing some healing and speed buffs, along with keeping track of their progress through the labyrinth as the mana ripped through the walls and built up new ones.

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  The real killer in the labyrinth however were the subtle uses of space magic that would occur. You could be walking down a pathway and without even noticing it, be warped away to somewhere else in the labyrinth that looked identical. It was masterful, though simple. Space was just squished and as you walked past the condensed space, it was stretched back out.

  No, Zoe thought to herself. The real killer were what she'd dubbed the clowns. Dark, furry humanoid beasts in bright, colourful garb prowled through the labyrinth. Their hyena-like laughter a constant companion as she wandered through.

  She'd never had much of a fear of clowns — a healthy respect for the irony of scary clowns was one thing, but fear outright? That was reserved for the truly terrifying things. Like spiders, and cockroaches.

  But these things were just downright creepy. They had lanky arms that stretched around the corners as she approached, their disgusting black claws dripping with tar as they scraped against the labyrinth walls.

  And for just a moment as their bright green eyes peered around the edge, the laughter would stop. Silence the only accompaniment as their gaping maw drooped, staring deep into her soul. It gave her shivers every time.

  Tom and Jeff never wasted a moment, spikes of earth impaling each of the beasts as they appeared with a flurry of arrows following soon after. The only times Zoe's healing was necessary was when they stumbled on a group of the beasts or when the dungeon's magic spat them out right in the middle of a horde.

  Jeff's sinkhole magic proved quite effective, the spikes were competent weapons when used to pierce through the beasts and quite useful for defence when he formed the spike around the group. Zoe tended to prefer something a bit more form fitting that let her still manoeuvre, but the hollow spikes were very quick to create and did a well enough job at stopping the beasts in their tracks.

  And Tom's arrows were far from lacking. Each one he pulled seemed to have a new effect. Twisting through the labyrinth tunnels as it pursued the beasts, exploding with violent, twisting mana that rent apart the beasts' flesh.

  "How many different arrows do you have?" Zoe asked in a quiet moment. "I don't think I've seen the same one twice yet."

  Tom shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine. The skill's really powerful but the arrow effects are random. It's a right pain in the ass sometimes."

  "You ever get bad ones?" Zoe asked.

  Jeff scoffed. "We once had a boss on the ropes, just about to die. One more sinkhole would've taken it out." Jeff points his thumb at Tom. "This idiot fires off an arrow, and the damn thing healed it right back up."

  "Your arrows can heal?" Zoe asked, her eyebrow raised.

  "Yeah, but like I said, I can't control it. And I'm not going to shoot my arrows at friendlies in the hopes that it heals them instead of rips their head off." Tom shook his head, the annoyance clear to Zoe even without her empathy.

  "But if you could control it, that would be very powerful. You thought about a class evolution maybe?" Zoe suggested.

  "I'm trying everything I can to get a good healing class for my next one, but you know how it goes. Even if I get one, I've never used the arrows to actually heal somebody I wanted to heal. I probably won't get healing arrows." Tom sighed.

  Getting to the boss room didn't take the group very long with Zoe leading them down the right path with only a few distractions. And the boss room was no less eerie than the rest of the dungeon.

  A lone head sat on a stone pedestal in the middle of a large circular room. Its black hair snaked along the floor and up the walls, with a subtle green light radiating from its large eyes.

  When they entered, the head turned to them and laughed, lifting off the pedestal with its hair as it drifted impossibly far away with the help of some space magic. Hair twisted along the floors beneath them, grabbing at their feet and scraping against their legs.

  "SINKHOOOOOOOOOLE," Jeff shouted, stretching his hands out in a strange motion as a spike of earth rose from beneath the pedestal, ripping through some of the hair to little effect as more seemed to grow from the torn strands.

  Tom let loose an arrow that seemed to freeze in the middle of the room before it could reach the very distant laughing head. He shot another a moment later, which met a similar end.

  "Hmm," Tom hummed, slicing away some of the hair grabbing at his feet with a dagger he pulled from his waist. "It doesn't seem very strong at least."

  "No," Jeff agreed. Small spikes of earth shooting out from around his and Zoe's feet, ripping apart the hair before it could grab hold of either of them. "Is it a puzzle, then?"

  "It might be. What do you think happens if we get grabbed?" Tom asked, not stopping his efforts to cut away the hair before it could.

  "We might get pulled somewhere else, I guess." Jeff suggested. "Closer to it, maybe? Though maybe it just tries to strangle us. I don't think we should try that till we try some other things. Doubt we could just walk over to it with all that space magic its doing."

  "We could try running. Can you run fast?" Tom asked Zoe.

  Zoe nodded.

  Tom shot off, with Jeff and Zoe following close behind. Neither Jeff nor Tom looked behind them as they ran for a few minutes but to Zoe's vision, it was clear they were almost running in place, the pedestal in the center of the room just a few feet behind them the entire time.

  "No good, huh?" Tom asked. He turned around and chuckled, noticing how little distance they'd made.

  "Maybe it's something to do with this pedestal?" Jeff turned and walked up to the pedestal.

  Zoe struggled to hide a smile as she also turned towards the pedestal. The laughing grew louder as soon as she did, along with the sounds of hair scratching against hair and rock.

  Both Tom and Jeff's heads shot up to look back at the head which had almost got right on top of them in the time they weren't looking. As soon as they looked at it, the head drifted back off into the distance out of reach.

  "Ah shoot, it's one of these." Tom whined. "Jeff, you think you can handle it?"

  "Mmm, it might take a few tries but maybe. You think it's smart enough to try and trick us?" Jeff asked.

  Tom nodded. "It might be, you want a minute to prepare?"

  Jeff nodded then pulled the two back to near the entrance. Zoe watched as a trickle of additional mana seeped out of him, forming a tiny almost invisible web of earthen strings across the room.

  "Can't get them very far with whatever that things doing so this will have to be enough." Jeff pulled Tom and Zoe into a hug. "Close your eyes you two."

  Zoe nodded and closed her eyes. A few deep breaths from Jeff later, the laughter grew louder as the head approached them. As it smashed through the earthen webs, Jeff let out a scream of sinkhole pride and an earthen spike shot up from the ground, smashing into the head. The head shot off, bouncing against the ceiling as the laughter quieted for a moment and then drifted back into the distance when Jeff opened his eyes a moment later.

  "Okay, I think it's working." Jeff said.

  Tom opened his eyes and looked at the head in the distance. "It looks closer." He said.

  Jeff nodded. "A few more goes and I think we'll have it."

  The process repeated a few more times, the earthen wires formed along the room and the spike smashing the head against a wall as it ran them down. Each time, the head a little closer after it drifted away through the space anomaly.

  When the head couldn't drift past the barrier of the room, Jeff and Tom bared down on it with every ounce of magic they had. Arrow after arrow chasing it down with various magical effects. Dozens of spikes pulled from the walls and the ceiling, smashing into the head as it bounced around the room like a ping pong ball.

  After several minutes, the head lay motionless on the floor. Its hair ripped and torn apart, no longer connected to the strands that crept along the walls. Dark tar like blood seeped from the many wounds covering the head, soaking into the mass of hair beneath it.

  Tom and Jeff both stared at the head.

  "Tom," Jeff's voice was wary, with the hint of a nervous wobble.

  "I know, Jeff." Tom spat.

  "Where's the reward message?" Jeff asked.

  You should watch Hamilton if you haven't. Good musical.

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