Nati

"Wow Nat, where is your belly?"

"Hah, your method worked," I pushed my chest out, answering Emi proudly. We no longer looked alike, but now our ribs matched. "Maybe I overdone it, turning all fat into mana, but I never felt this full. Almost as if I craved magicules and not food all this time. I feel so light too."

"Magic is cheating." She noted jealously. "But don't level this jungle."

"I will try not to." I blushed. The spell Omerta cast was devastating even for her standards, but still less gruesome than my black hole in Baran.

"You better." The orc witch giggled.

Magic seemed more powerful inside the dungeon, and I had to remind myself as we advanced slowly in the thick undergrowth to explore the area, barely seeing ahead, but the orc shaman acted like a radar. He wouldn't even open his eyes, using his nose and the magicules to map our surroundings. I still considered spirits inferior, but useful in situations like these, and Gitaut also turned out to be the most powerful among us.

"We should turn left here, there is a rift in the mana ahead." He said, and while some arguments arose about who led this party, nobody questioned his ability to navigate us.

The place looked spectacular: purple skies and a permanent sunset without an actual sun, the vivid colors in the thick vegetation drove the point home that we were in a different world, not even in the same dimension as before. The forest we traversed could have been anything from tundra to a tropical jungle and simultaneously anywhere on the equator or at the poles. The air was relatively cold but heavy and damp, and I sweated a lot on our trek.

Compared to being transported and encountering new species on the continent, that place looked ancient, but nothing strange; this was a literal fantasy setting, making my head spin. The trees were completely alien with leaves ranging from blue to red.

The flowers looked much more plain in comparison, but some grew enormous. The different smells tickling my nostrils made me think about how severe my allergies would be in a place like this if I were still in my old body. Emi's looked just like the original, but she got a new shell from the Goddess, tougher than it seemed.

"Ouch, careful with these vines." After getting entangled with some hostile-looking plant, she warned and tore it out of the ground before realizing it. She barely noticed, no sign on her skin either, but that strange vegetable looked enormous and hostile. It had spikes and long tendrils looking for victims but haven't anticipated my little sister running into it with her homunculus body.

"You all right?" I asked with my brotherly worrying, but not even a scratch on her. "Stick to the path the ogre cuts into the jungle, sis."

It was like strolling on another planet, curious luminous beings floated around us like plankton, flies and other insects were more suspicious of our group and only buzzed in the distance. I noticed some mice-like creatures with reptile skin, so our relatively normal looks stood out here. It made me feel less bad if I thought about fighting anything in the future. They seemed more like creatures from a vivid dream than actual living beings. And then, my sister stood out even more.

"I'm kind of getting hungry." She noted, the surprisingly normal-looking, yet out-of-place tomboy. I was so happy she came after me, I missed her a lot, but she didn't belong here.

Not to mention her school uniform. I saw her try to cut, burn, and most importantly, get dirt all over it, but it was like nothing happened. Her clothes looked the same as if she just come out from the tailor with it, putting it on for the first time no matter what kind of abuse it went through. It seemed completely normal, but here it was anything but that.

"Grab something from the Bag of Holding." Ember offered, nibbling on the snacks the court wizard granted us.

I would have been jealous if I hadn't gotten that awesome wyvern armor recently, but I looked the part of an adventurer at least. It had multiple runes etched into it, from Omerta's classic barrier to some kind of hybrid protection magic cooked up by Lambert. He said the blue-haired paladin had a magic-resistant armor but was a pain to deal with because it resisted both hostile and healing magic.

He came together with Omerta even before the Elder kidnapped him, and they created some sort of selective magic barrier, that let through healing, but blocked anything remotely malicious. I haven't talked to him much since the Goddess stole him back, and I admit, I was still wary of him and Gitaut, but I did my best to look at them differently.

Nothing was like it seemed in this world, like the unassuming magicians or my sister, and I had to learn the hard way how different I was from what I had thought about myself.

My body turned out to be even more sturdy than Emi's, withstanding a direct hit from my crossbows, which punched through anything else with ease, but thanks to my heightened senses, I still felt it all, even if it did not damage my body. The Goddess, and her strange priorities: she made herself indestructible first, then hyper-sensitive.

And in the end, she simply gave away her body to a stranger. I rarely thought about it, even though it seemed like one of the oddest mysteries since I was transported. But I got so used to her body that I didn't even question it anymore. And it wasn't the time for that either, advancing through this alien jungle. The noises suggested plenty of exotic critters scurrying around, but even my cat eyes couldn't catch them in the last hour. Other than the luminous plankton-like floaters, all disappeared.

"We are getting closer," Gitaut noted a bit later, so at least we knew, we were on the right track. "There seems to be a roadblock ahead, we could probably cut through it easily, but I'd rather go around it."

"Roadblock? There are no roads here, shaman." Omerta started to get annoyed with this place. Unlike my little sister, who was even smaller than her, but sturdy to the extremes, she struggled quite a lot with the thick undergrowth. "They already know we are here, might as well blast our way through them. We will have to fight sooner or later anyway."

"Hmm, I wonder if they know we're here, and if they do, who's fault is that?" Ember interjected, pulling the shortest stick among all of us.

Her oversized witch hat looked great, but she had to put it away early on since it got stuck on everything. She had brunette hair underneath and obligatory cat ears, and she was pretty like every beast girl I saw.

We tried our best to hide our tails underneath our clothes so it wouldn't get in the way, the two orcs had it relatively easy, but the huge ogre in the front row had to fight extra hard just to let us advance. He made it easier for the rest of us to follow at least.

"So are we fighting or hiding?" Emi asked. Gitaut shrugged, and the witches seemed eager for action. For the first time, I felt quite pumped up too, and even if I had to hold back a bit, I wanted to try myself out using magic again. The shaman could tell.

"It does seem like we're going to fight them. Fine by me, just don't overdo it." He said with a sigh and led us in the enemy's direction.

"Can you tell us what they are exactly?" I asked, trying to come up with the appropriate spells. I saw Omerta use that chain lightning and the crystal offered a simple solution to copy it.

But so much offensive magic was in there, it was more difficult to pick one than to cast them. Using my knowledge of the modern world put me at an advantage compared to the other magicians, once I overcame the basics to control my mana, the rest was only limited by my imagination.

"I can sense mediocre mana concentration ahead, probably something that equals a shaman or a weaker sorcerer. A dozen life forms in total, but it's hard to say what they are." The orc shaman gave a report but didn't forget to add. "We don't know how they are connected to the dungeon's core though, I'd suggest if we fight them, take them out all at once."

"We don't want them to alert the floor boss." Emi nodded, treating the whole situation as a game. I couldn't deny the similarity, but I was more reserved after spending nearly two months here.

"Whatever that meant, yes, we can't have them call for reinforcements, there are multiple settlements scattered around in this jungle," Gitaut confirmed, pulling out another parchment to sketch up a rudimentary map as we went. "The core is in that direction, with minimal detours, if we only fight the smaller outposts, we could reach it within a day or two."

"Except, the sun never sets, so we don't know when's night, or if time flows the same way," Omerta argued, pointing at the map. "We don't know if these creatures have their society here, or if their sole purpose is to fight us. We better prepare for the worst and do some recon instead of cutting right between them. If they flank us, our lives will be miserable."

"I'm only worried about the casters," Ember noted, drawing a miniature fire circle. "I can shield us with my flames from any melee formation, even archers, but magicians can shoot over, or cancel it altogether. Good thing, Gitaut can sense them ahead of time."

"Don't call me that." The shaman rolled his eyes for his obligatory protest. "I can detect mana, but what if they can teleport? Or what's more likely, they could hide their aura to some degree. I'm not a seer."

"We won't know what to expect until we meet the first roadblock." I tried to put down my argument too. "Just tell us which one is their magician, I'll take that out first, and we can examine their remains."

"Just please don't be troglodytes." Emi clasped her hands together.

"I doubt we'd met too many of them inside, the tunnels were all filled up to keep them out. My bet is on harpies." Ember noted, but it seemed like she got the chills. "Ugh, anything is fine, just no hellhounds, or things resistant to my flames. Troglodytes burn nicely."

"It's a beholder," Gitaut noted, pointing at a huge eyeball floating. It looked like part of the strange vegetation, if the shaman didn't call it out I would have never noticed it. It had tentacles feeling out his surroundings, creating sparks whenever they touched anything. "Don't let it see you."

"Ugh, I want to poke that big ugly eye out," I said, shivering, and already found my preferred method. "Let's try out the air cannon."