Basic Thaumaturgy for the Emotional Incompetent [A Magical Academy LitRPG]

"This way leads to the lower level," Severa said as they moved to another corridor where the ceiling arched higher and stalactites jutted down like fangs. Fabrisse noticed the gusts whipping along the corridor, carrying loose dust and fragments of stone in miniature tornadoes.

"What could I expect from a dungeon like this?" Tommaso asked.

Severa turned her head very slowly as she looked at him with the air of someone who had just discovered mold on fine silk.

"This is quite a common dungeon. Has someone of your caliber truly never been in a dungeon before?" she asked.

"I'm a border guard," Tom said. "I don't delve into dungeons. I tell smugglers to empty their bags and occasionally break up fights behind taverns."

Severa took a few seconds to answer, "In a Gale-class dungeon? Swarm-types, mostly. You'll see the usual airborne nuisances such as needleflies, blight-gnats, and nymphs, anything small enough to ride the air currents. They appear in numbers rather than strength." She lifted her hand to gesture at the walls. "The aether veins encourage rapid reproduction, so it becomes a test of endurance more than raw power."

The corridor narrowed intermittently, forcing them to duck or sidestep around sudden bends, while the glowing aether veins along the walls intensified, flaring with an almost feverish brilliance. Runes of every conceivable shape and size interlaced and writhed as if trying to communicate some urgent warning. Even Tommaso's crystal braces and mitts flapped against him, shoring him against the relentless wind that sought to toss them like leaves.

Tommaso nodded, taking that in. "And the mid-bosses?"

"Structural guardians," Severa replied. "Crystal-backed serpents, stone-borers, occasionally a rift-born harpy if the ceiling is tall enough. Creatures optimized for vertical mobility and pressure." She said it like she was reciting from a textbook she had personally annotated.

"And the big boss?" Tommaso asked.

Severa didn't hesitate. "A wind-aligned core beast. Usually a Greater Gale Serpent or, in rarer cases, a Cyclonic Warden. Both are loud and predictable. Both detectable from well over a hundred paces."

Fabrisse, however, could barely follow their conversation. Something weird was happening inside this dungeon.

He knew it the moment their footsteps started echoing a full second late, as in temporally misaligned. His brain tripped over it first, because it sounded exactly like Aetheric Veil: Echofold, a spell he'd practiced enough times to recognize the signature distortion.

Except he hadn't cast it.

This is wrong. An Echofold doesn't just happen.

But then he noticed Severa stopping every few steps and pressing two fingers to her temple like she was brushing away a headache. She was probably feeling something Aetheric. Some distortion, some wave-form she was attuned enough to notice.

The Eidralith's clock is lagging so much behind, and now there's some sort of temporal effect on sound. What could be an explanation for this?

"There's a misaligned surge cycle," she brought her hand out to signal for Fabrisse and Tommaso to halt.

"What's a misaligned surge cycle?" Tommaso asked.

Severa let out a sigh so elegant it could've been graded for posture. "Aetheric dungeons run on predictable cycles, as in windows in which they reset or repair themselves. A few cycles resurrect their monsters, but most patch structural damage like collapsed passages or degraded ward-lines. Each dungeon has its own cadence." She glanced over her shoulder at Tommaso, just to ensure he was listening. "Most in grade heal themselves every fifty-four minutes. But this surge cycle . . . has been accelerated. Something within the dungeon is forcing the pulse to initiate well before its natural interval."

Fabrisse should've paid attention to Severa's explanation, but he couldn't. His eyes glued themselves to the wall, trying to anchor himself in the familiar geometry. A short stretch of the corridor—a bend no longer than a few meters—kept replaying itself. The aether veins along the walls kept twisting into the same intricate patterns, then fading, only to twist again, identical, but slightly off in alignment. He could see the corridor narrow once, then widen; a fragment of stalactite seemed to jut forward and retreat. The repetition didn't seem random.

Each loop was just slightly shifted: a degree here, a shard there. Something was replaying the corridor itself, forcing Fabrisse to reconcile the movement with the space he was actually walking through. For a second, he thought they were walking in circles, so he counted his steps. The numbers added up—they were definitely moving forward. The corridor ahead changed: the narrowing bends didn't look the same, the stalactites hung differently, and the next runic panel glowed with a new pattern. Only the walls alongside them seemed to loop.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

"Does it mean the dungeon is pumping creatures faster?" Tommaso asked.

"Possibly, but that should have been accompanied by an aetheric spike where all aetheric monsters appear at once. That imprint has been severely lacking. In fact," her voice dropped half a register, "the absence of that spike is the issue. Maybe time is behaving weirdly."

So my hypothesis might be correct. I don't want to be correct. Whenever he was right about something, it meant that something catastrophic was going to happen. This is bad. He was hoping the archmagi from the outside could interfere in time so he no longer would have to spend another second in this dungeon. But if his suspicion was right . . . what should have been mere minutes could stretch into hours.

"Has this happened before?" Fabrisse asked.

"Yes," Severa paused for a while, but admitted at last. "Very rarely. And only in dungeons suffering from severe internal destabilization. There's a formal designation for them."

Tommaso raised a brow. "What are those called?"

Severa's lips flattened. It was the expression she wore when forced to touch something sticky.

"They are termed Chrono-stalled Dungeons," she said. "Which is to say, dungeons whose temporal processes become unsynchronized or cease functioning entirely. It's a side-effect of some sort of external tampering."

"That sounds corrupted," Tommaso said.

"So this dungeon is voidtouched?" Fabrisse winced.

Severa drew herself upright. "I prefer not to use that word."

"Ten minutes in here possibly equates to one minute outside," Fabrisse blurted.

Both Severa and Tom turned to him. "How do you know?"

A sudden gust of wind tore through the corridor. It whipped around corners as if the dungeon itself were exhaling.

"That was not scheduled," Severa grumbled.

The wind was strong enough to sway Fabrisse, who tumbled against the ground until a chunk of crystal burst from the floor beneath him, spreading into a solid brace around his feet and legs. The crystal dug into the stone, anchoring him in place just as a stronger gust threatened to topple him entirely. Severa's voice cut through the roar of the wind. "Hold still." She raised her hands, and similar crystalline braces erupted around her and Tommaso, forming firm platforms and walls that countered the gusts.

Through the swirling dust and howling gusts, a tall mantis‑like humanoid stepped into the corridor. Behind it, a cloud of flying insects spiraled, darting through the currents effortlessly, as if the wind didn't exist. Even the smaller flying insects weaved around the crystal braces as if ignoring the gust entirely.

Severa said, "Notice how they're not being pushed back at all. The dungeon's surge cycle is giving them a slight temporal edge. To us, the wind is violent; to them, it barely exists."

Fabrisse squinted through the swirling dust, and only now could he take in the mantis humanoid clearly. It was just slightly taller than a human, maybe two meters from floor to the top of its angular head. Its torso was lean but armored in segmented plates, and behind its shoulders sprouted a pair of translucent wings that allowed it to hover without struggling.

Severa didn't say anything at first. She just went very still, the kind of still that meant she had stopped thinking about them and started thinking about the thing in front of her instead.

"What's that . . ." He muttered, but the wind immediately drowned out his voice.

In an even voice that carried just enough tension for Fabrisse to notice, Severa said, "Even the monster profile has changed."

Fabrisse blinked. "Changed?"

"I have never seen a non-harpy humanoid in a Gale-class dungeon," Severa said. "Ardefiamme," Her voice took on a commanding tone, "Can you cast Pyrostream?"

Tommaso nodded, "I can make it strong enough to travel with the wind. With good timing, I can chain-burn them."

"Keep it focused on the swarm. You have two minutes. Crystal spells drain my reserves as I'm not optimized." Severa turned to Fabrisse. "Kestovar, angle. Angle of attack, numbers, sizes—now. It's your moment."

His pulse jumped, and the familiar tremor of uncertainty crawled up his spine. What if I mess this up? I couldn't even track five mantes coming my way.

Still, he forced himself to speak, "Uh, three—no, two . . . large—well, humanoid-sized mantises, roughly two meters each. Wings, translucent, hovering. And—ah!—a swarm of . . . maybe twenty smaller flying insects, and the corridor bends—"

"Kestovar. Keep it simple. If we haven't established a system, don't equivocate. Angle, number, sizes. That's it. Focus."

The tremor in his chest steadied as her tone anchored his thoughts. He inhaled. "Two large mantis-humanoids, roughly two meters each. Swarm of about twenty smaller flying insects, half-human size. Corridor bends twenty degrees to the left. Closing in."

The swarm surged as a single, coordinated mass, and the mantis-humanoids glided steadily behind. The swarm's formation contracted, funneling toward the corridor like a living arrow. They were closing in.

Severa answered, "Good. Clear. Maintain updates only if anything deviates from that." Then she shouted at Tom. "Now!"

"Already timed it—let's see this wind try to stop us," Tom shouted back, then he cast his spell.

The Pyrostream roared like a beast unleashed.