A Parashift was a wide-scale random rotation of floors between Level 20 and however deep the dungeon truly went. No one knew the exact number.
This meant levels got jumbled. Monster habitats scrambled. Going down to Level 21 expecting a Stone Turtle? You might get a black dragon instead. The kind that eats your soul and revives you, just to do it again.
So most people didn't scale the dungeon during a Parashift for those exact reasons, it was too unpredictable and dangerous.
But right now, Crosstails didn't care about danger. They were being chased.
Still.
The Chimaera Beast had followed them across sixteen floors. Its claws screeched against stone, its monstrous limbs cracked the floor with every leap, and yet, it pressed on, more relentless than any sane beast should be.
"Any idea why this is happening?" Leaf shouted, darting ahead of the group, her arms behind her back like a smug ninja. "It should've stopped chasing us I dunno like... SIXTEEN floors ago!"
"I don't know!" Julle shouted back, bouncing ungracefully as she lay slung over Horvess's shoulder like a sack of magical potatoes. "Horvess, what did you do?"
"I will throw you down, woman!" Horvess snapped, not breaking stride. "I didn't do anything!"
"There's gotta be something wrong with it." Julle turned, squinting at the monster behind them. More specifically... its tail.
But it wasn't a tail.
It was a mushroom.
A big, soft looking, lightly glowing mushroom.
Chimaeras were already rare within the first twenty floors. Not because they were physically tough—any team with two decent attackers could handle one—but because of how they were born.
Chimaeras didn't reproduce like normal monsters. For a Chimaera to be born, it needed to mate with something equally powerful. And due to their extremely picky, violent one sided mating rituals, most female Chimaeras died without ever finding a partner.
Which meant...
Whenever one did find something it liked?
It chased... forever.
Julle's face slowly contorted. "...Horvess."
"What?"
"She thinks you're her mate."
The ground rumbled beneath them.
Leaf burst out laughing mid sprint. "Oh my gods."
"No." Horvess said, dead serious.
"Yes." Julle said, just as flat.
Leaf nearly tripped from how hard she laughed.
"Wha—what part of me says yes mate me you sexy beast thing?!" Horvess barked.
"I don't know. Maybe the hammer. Maybe the beard. Maybe your primal dwarf stink." Julle said. "Just accept it, loverboy."
"I—I'm married!!"
"I don't think she gives a damn."
"Gods damn it all!!" Horvess shouted, charging faster.
The Chimaera shrieked in delight, getting closer and closer.
"Still, I can't give you our strongman," Julle said to herself, then to him. "Horvess... what exactly happened when you made it angry?"
"You mean after I bashed its skull in with my hammer?"
"Before that!"
The ground trembled as the Chimaera tore through another wall. Dust and chunks of concrete rained down like bad omens. Normally, other adventurers would be around these levels. Ready to lend a hand, or at least laugh at someone else's misery, but not today.
The Parashift had cleared them out.
"I saw a mushroom in the ground," Horvess said, puffing as he ran. "And I thought it'd taste good in a stew, so I tried plucking it. And then—" He made a loud pop sound with his mouth. "Boom. All of a sudden, a thousand pound monster is coming at me."
"So you touched its tail," Julle said, raising her staff with a groan, hand jittering as she bounced on his shoulder. It messed up her aim, but luckily.
She wasn't aiming for the beast.
"Oh Earth Spirit, Aussa," she chanted, "I beseech your otherworldly strength as your loyal vessel. Bestow upon me your element and a quarter of your power!"
Then she screamed:
"GOLEM!"
A spark of mana. A rumble of sand. And from the dungeon floor rose her summon.
Well... it tried to rise.
The golem spawned with more of a thump than a bang, the clunky thing made up of pebbles and its users stubbornness.
"Ha!" Horvess glanced back and laughed. "It's puny!"
"I'm not good with earth magic!" Julle muttered, slightly embarrassed before threading a mana string from her staff to the golem. It twitched, then moved, now a controllable puppet.
The Chimaera kept charging, its mismatched limbs pounding the ground.
But just as it was about to pounce.
The golem sidestepped, scrambled behind it, and with a tiny arm, grabbed its tail.
Instant stop.
The beast skidded, all four legs clawing at the ground, wild eyes locked behind it.
The party halted.
Leaf blinked. "What... did you do?"
"Female Chimaera beasts use their tails to attract prey," Julle explained. "When the prey touches it... that's the signal to copulate. Then kill, and if they can't copulate, they just kill."
"Oh gods," Horvess said, staring at the scene as the Chimaera began sniffing around the golem. Looking for a specific part it didn't seem to have. "That was supposed to be... me?"
"Indeed," Julle said, severing the mana tether with a flick of her staff.
The golem would dissolve back into sand in a matter of seconds.
And when it did, that beast would realize its new 'mate' was a pile of dirt.
So in order to avoid being on the receiving end of a swindled Chimaera, the party turned and walked deeper into the dungeon, ready to begin the actual job they had come to do here in the first place.
Beast treading!
It should have began with the chimaera, but that was slightly above their league. So they continued down the stretch of corridor, eyes wide, weapons at the ready.
Beast treading or Beast hunting, was the most popular type of dungeon treading.
It involved killing a monster, ripping out the core in its chest, and cashing it in for coin. Simple, effective and really profitable.
Resource treading, on the other hand, meant digging for raw materials, which meant minerals, herbs, enchanted junk, basically anything valuable hidden on the dungeon floors or locked inside unopened rooms. And while it was technically safer, it was practically pointless.
It was the same old dilemma: hunting vs. farming. Hunters might starve for days if prey was scarce, while farmers reaped steady harvests.
In this case, beast hunting was farming.
Because monsters were born daily in the dungeon.
And they were killed just as quickly.
Raw materials? They didn't regenerate or appear nearly as fast.
That's why monster treading remained the most lucrative profession in the world, a bit dangerous for the average person. But what good thing didn't take a few of your limbs!
"That reminds me, Horvess," Leaf said, strolling ahead, hands behind her head. "You've got the map, right?"
"Yeah."
"Check what floor we're on. We ran for quite a while back there."
"Alright, alright." Horvess stopped. He dropped his hammer, then his pack, rummaging around inside before pulling out a crumpled, oversized sheet of parchment.
Dungeon maps weren't geographic. That would've been impossible. Instead, they were interpretive, coded with details like monster spawns, door positions, magical pulses. Tells that helped you figure out what floor you'd landed on, or at least what floor you were closer to.
Useless during Parashifts, of course. But the first twenty floors were always stable, so for them, it still mattered.
"So?" Leaf asked, leaning back. "Where are we?"
Horvess didn't answer.
He dropped the map. Then crouched, placing his ear to the ground.
Leaf blinked. "What are you doing? Just tell me—"
"Shhh!" Horvess hissed. His eyes darted left, then right. "This is bad."
He stood up fast, snatched his gear. "We have to go. Now."
"What's happening?" Leaf demanded, stepping forward.
"We're on the twenty fifth floor!" Horvess snapped, pointing behind them. "We need to get out before the levels shuffle—"
The hallway behind them collapsed.
The entire floor descending into nothingness.
"Oh crap," Julle whispered, backing up slowly. Her fingers tightened around her staff. "This is bad... this is very bad."
"What do we do, Horvess?" Leaf asked, hands clutched around Julle's clothes.
"I don't freaking know!" he shouted, waving the map like it had betrayed him. "I'm not a dungeon expert!"
"You're a hundred years old!" Leaf snapped. "How have you never seen this before?"
"And you're seventy! Why haven't you seen it?"
"Oh, now you're bringing up a lady's age?" Leaf jabbed a finger at him. "Low blow, mister. Low blow!"
The floor beneath them trembled.
They had seconds to choose: stay and get shuffled, maybe dropped into a nest of demons or run for the next room before it flipped.
They ran.
All three of them tore down the corridor, boots pounding against stone, breath catching in their throats. The twenty-sixth floor waited just ahead, the dungeon door in sight and all they had to do was reach it, pull the lever, and slam it behind them.
If they could do that, they'd be safe. At least for a couple of minutes, until the next shuffle.
Horvess grabbed the lever.
And just as he was about to pull.
A low growl echoed behind the door. Followed by a hollow screech. Then the void-like sound of an implosion. Then the sound of flesh falling against concrete.
Too late, the floor had already shuffled.
"...Ladies first," Horvess offered, hand still on the handle.
"I am not entering that floor," Leaf said, backing up.
"Don't look at me," Julle added. "I'm not going either."
"We're going to get shuffled, you cowards! Grow some balls!" Horvess shouted.
"You already have balls—!"
The floor dropped.
For a moment, they floated, weightless, suspended in a vacuum of swirling space and infinite black.
And then with a thud, they hit solid ground.
Leaf groaned, pushing herself up. "Crap."
"We're dead," Julle muttered. "We got shuffled. We could be on the hundredth floor. Or the thousandth. Who knows how far this place goes?"
"I blame Horvess!" Leaf shouted. "If you hadn't touched a random mushroom, this wouldn't have ever happened!"
"And if you hadn't broken Ursactic's shrine, we wouldn't need to be here!"
Silence.
They both folded their arms, turning away from each other.
Then the floor shook again.
This time, the tremor came from two directions—beneath them, and from the far door on the left.
Something was trying to enter.
And that something could either be the grim reaper... or a goblin named Peter, who with their luck would probably be the grim reapers bastard son.
Which meant they had two options.
Stay and wait for a second shuffle, or wait and see what entered the room. Or gamble everything on a side door, one that stood at their far right. That led to an unknown floor.
Leaf sighed and stepped forward.
Horvess followed.
They hadn't forgiven each other just yet, but they needed to get out of this pinch before they were actually done for, and as the both of them walked up to the door, one hand on each lever. They pulled it up, and it opened.
And it was green.
Or rather, a green light emanated from a small room within the floor. Leaf walked toward it first, the others close behind.
They didn't fully understand how it worked, but they knew exactly what they were looking at.
A dead point.
A dead point was hard to explain, but the best way to think about it, was as a flaw in the dungeon's mana network, or like an error line in a piece of code.
The dungeon recycled itself over the course of a week, once every year. And during this process, small mana anomalies—dead points—would form. Inside the glowing green confines of these flawed rooms, you could witness the entire dungeon shuffling. Levels spinning, rising, falling, cycling like gears in a giant clock.
Some claimed the magician who made the dungeon created dead points deliberately as windows for observation, to make sure everything shuffled correctly. Others believed they were simply mistakes, as any error existed in life.
But none of that mattered.
As the three of them stood at the edge of the green room, only one thought occupied their minds:
FIND LEVEL 20.
If they could spot it in time and jump onto it, they could go back to safety. Level 20 didn't shift. It was one of the anchor floors, immune to the chaos of the Parashift.
They scanned the floating labyrinth in front of them, hundreds of rooms orbiting and twisting like puzzle pieces.
"There!" Horvess shouted, finger jabbing forward. A room was descending. Its floor littered with debris and fur, the fur of a beast that had chased them for over three hours.
"We've got one shot, people!" Leaf said, already grabbing Julle's hand, who grabbed Horvess's in turn.
The room dropped a little lower. Now within range.
They took a few steps back.
Then took off, their legs moved together in sync, hearts beating in tandem and in a swift move.
All three launched forward, their bodies arcing through the green lit void. Wind and shifting stone howled around them. The clash and grind of moving levels battered their ears.
They descended even more, legs wiggling in mid air. They were almost there, so close they could taste it.
But right before they could reach the floor, right before they dropped to safety, something bumped into them.
And it knocked them sideways, sending them off-course and away from Floor 20, all four of them spinning into the unknown green depths of the dead point.