Adon recalled his own experiences as a monster in a previous incarnation.

  He had been concerned with survival things, too, though he’d had no young, since that was another forever alone incarnation. But he had not had any particular enmity for humans or other sentient races. He had eaten other monsters to survive—just like these griffins and even the rather crueler strixes. Whereas he had only gone and attacked that village of horned humanoids because he had received some sort of disembodied but irresistible command to do so.

  Is that how the dungeon makes things happen? he wondered. These creatures are living a perfectly ordinary, blissfully domestic life—I mean, relatively happy and peaceful for the animal kingdom, anyway—and then they’re ordered to turn into foot soldiers? They have to hurl themselves at humans until one or the other side is destroyed… But then, I guess that’s how the dungeon itself survives.

  It seemed like a set of circumstances too difficult for a simple butterfly with only a couple of months of life under his belt to fully grasp. But Adon did feel that he at least had enough information about what was happening in the second level to begin making some judgment calls.

  He fluttered closer to the griffins and took a quick read of the emotional temperature of the room. These creatures felt relatively safe, happy among themselves. Adon had the sense that they were all kin of one kind or another, which made sense since they had all spawned in this dungeon. They were all offspring of the same intelligent entity.

  Here goes…

  Adon opened up a telepathic channel to communicate with the griffin he had followed in. He was going to take a chance.

  Greetings Noble Griffin, Adon sent. I am—

  The griffin let loose a loud yowl—somewhere between a bark and an eagle’s screech. It stepped forward, getting in between its pregnant mate and the source of the sounds. Adon felt waves of surprise and confusion from both the griffin he had communicated with and the others around it—all of which had no idea what the first griffin was reacting to.

  Adon allowed them a minute to communicate among themselves. The griffin he had used Telepathy on made a series of short bark-screeches and pointed one razor sharp claw in the direction the sound had come from. To its credit, the beast’s claw was almost on target to Adon’s actual location, despite Adon having given it less than ten syllables worth of sound with which to locate his voice.

  Maybe if I actually practiced to try this, I could make the direction of my Telepathy impossible to trace, Adon thought. There was a potential disadvantage to the way it currently worked, as this situation demonstrated.

  As the first griffin continued to growl and bark-screech and point insistently in Adon’s direction, one of the other griffins—this one was brown with some white dappling across its wings, so Adon named it Speckles in his mind—rose from its position on the stone floor.

  It moved across the hollow space, walking toward where its fellow griffin pointed.

  Adon simply held tight against the wall as the other griffin sniffed around and sought him out. The butterfly was confident in his invisibility.

  Speckles quickly gave up, turned back to the first one—which Adon decided to label as Prime in his mind, because it lacked many distinguishing physical features, but it was at least the first that he had decided to observe more closely—and made a sort of groaning noise.

  Adon would have understood the meaning of the sound even without Telepathy.

  There’s nothing here. Are you certain you heard something?

  Before Prime could respond, Adon sent him a mixed sound and visual message.

  Only you can hear me, the butterfly transmitted, coupled with an image of waves moving through the air from his area of the cave to Prime and being blocked elsewhere.

  The griffin, flustered, sputtered out an answer to Speckles that sounded ambiguous and uncertain, and then thought something directed at Adon.

  There were no words in its mind, but the idea behind the thought transmitted itself clearly to the butterfly.

  How? How is it only me?

  Adon sent an image of the mana attack the strixes used, and focused very closely on the mana itself.

  Like that, magic, Adon sent, along with an image of a human hand caressing the griffin’s head and an image of a human talking directly into a visible brain.

  The griffin seemed to visibly relax a bit. It might not fully understand mana or magic, but it knew that those things existed, and they didn’t scare it.

  Then Prime thought something else, clearly intended for the butterfly’s consumption. It was an image of the human that had been caressing the griffin’s head taking a walk out of the cave and going back out through the waterfall.

  Adon sent a quick, wordless negative emotional pulse to the griffin, meant to indicate refusal.

  Prime responded with an image of a human walking near its mate, and the griffin leaping upon the human and ripping his head clean off.

  Yeah, message received, Adon thought. I get that you want to keep your family safe. We can’t just go back the way we came, though. We have to defeat the dungeon…

  He pondered how best to communicate that for a solid minute. Adon had decided that the best way that he could try to minimize loss of life for the human party was by trying to make an alliance with one of the two predator factions. Between the griffins and the strixes, the griffins, who were not obvious sadists, seemed like the obvious choice.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  The strixes were probably smarter, considering they could manipulate mana. But the griffins seemed to be one big happy family, and there were far fewer of them, so maybe it would be easier to make an alliance with these creatures.

  At last, he hit on a line of communication that he thought would be acceptable and easy to understand. He spent another minute preparing a telepathic communication to win the griffins over.

  They don’t need to know why we’re here. Just the fighting stuff…

  Adon sent Prime a long, video-style telepathic message this time. The video showed a group of armored humans descending from behind the waterfall, then being set upon by the strixes. The next part was perhaps a bit of a stretch, but Adon showed the griffins jumping in next, attacking the strixes from behind.

  Then the humans turned and, still clinging to the cliffside one-handed, drew swords and spears and clumsily fought the strixes as well.

  When the group of strixes backed down, the humans finished descending. They began crossing the valley, toward where Adon imagined the exit was located. The waterfall started to overflow behind them, causing a major outflow of goblins. At that point, the strixes descended again, and they attacked both the goblins and the humans.

  The humans basically fought defensively until the strixes were almost entirely down among them, and at that point, the griffins descended, and the knights began fighting much more aggressively, aiming to kill the strixes. Together, the humans and griffins chopped down the majority of the strixes before the rest ran away.

  Even that was not the end, though. The griffins in the video pursued the strixes and killed almost all of them, the numbers no longer lopsided. Adon depicted the griffins consuming strix flesh, since he assumed the creatures were edible.

  To conclude the video, Adon showed one of the humans shaking hands with one of the griffin’s claws and then leaving through the exit to the next level—which Adon pictured as a simple hole in the cliffside, somewhere above the water line.

  Well, what do you think of that? he thought.

  The griffin flapped its wings and suddenly sprang into the air. From its body language and general emotional aura, Adon understood that it was excited.

  So I did hit the right note with the message. An alliance might be possible, then…

  Prime turned back to its fellow griffins and began gesticulating and making excited barking noises, attempting to communicate roughly what had happened.

  The ideas were too complex for a non-language to be used to convey them, of course. Fortunately, the butterfly was there. Now that he had seen how his proposal went over with Prime, he sent the same video message to Speckles and the others—preceded by a short clip of a human talking into Prime’s brain. Adon was not human himself, but there was no reason to complicate things more than necessary. If the griffins knew he was a nonhuman himself, that might lead them to doubt whether he could actually speak for the humans or not.

  Adon was confident that the party would be happy to accept free help in navigating the dungeon. All they would have to do was fight the strixes alongside the griffins—which was less than what they would have to do with no agreement at all. The benefits were obvious.

  And the group of griffins seemed to react positively to the message.

  The general pattern of their thoughts seemed to be eagerness to participate in the purge of the strixes. Adon got the sense that this had been a long-held goal of theirs—possibly even one of the reasons the griffins were currently breeding. To have additional members of their group to better compete with the other monsters.

  This competitive dynamic was part of how this level of the dungeon functioned—the two predators driving each other to greater heights of effectiveness and pushing each other to expand their respective populations or be outcompeted.

  But it would also be the weakness of this floor.

  Adon sent a message to indicate that he was returning to his allies—another video, since that was what went over fairly clearly with the griffins—and then he left. He did not return directly to his party, however. Instead, he first went to find the other half of the griffin population, which he knew had its residence in the other cliffside.

  That could have been a difficult task, but Adon had his Impeccable Memory Skill, so he quickly sifted through his recollections, found a hole one griffin had ducked into when the violence paused, and then flew in directly. Having already seen the living arrangement of the other set of griffins, he correctly assumed these ones would be basically the same.

  Adon repeated his basic behavior—transmitted the exact same video message to these griffins—and got the same reaction. Excitement.

  Finally, he withdrew back to the entrance of the dungeon. He had not broken his invisibility or altered his Transformation for a single moment in the hour or two that he had spent in level two. Although he felt that he could hold onto his current state for longer, Adon wanted to conserve as much energy as he could. He anticipated that they would be fighting the strixes soon.

  The butterfly flew back across the valley, which seemed mostly peaceful for the moment, the only motion that his eyes detected the steady rush of the waterfall. He aimed for the gap between the waterfall and the cliff face, and he carefully angled to place himself near the largest gap possible. Even with his small and thin, transformed body, it was not easy to enter the tunnel again without getting water on his wings.

  He took a minute getting the jump lined up just right, then realized he could just use Transformation to extend his legs so that he could grasp the cliff face. Adon’s limbs were as good at clinging to sheer surfaces as they had ever been, so once he felt that he had the right angle and a good hold on the wall, he was able to fairly easily throw himself sideways into the gap between the waterfall and the tunnel opening.

  When he was behind the waterfall again, he quickly opened his wings and fluttered back into the hole.

  He let go of his invisibility and his Transformation only inches away from the waterfall.

  The young lords, the Princess, and the spiders were all sitting on the floor, apparently bored.

  “You made it back!” William exclaimed, the first to notice him.

  “We were beginning to worry,” Rosslyn added, wrinkling her nose and shaking her head. Her expression was more amused than annoyed.

  “Certainly took your time,” said Frederick, smirking.

  I was starting to teach Frederick and William a game from our old world, Samson sent.

  Adon noticed that there was a game board for a strategy game from their old world essentially etched into the stone floor of the tunnel. It was a surprisingly detailed recollection from Samson, who was not like Adon and had clear gaps in his past life memories.

  I hope you enjoyed the exploration, Goldie transmitted, allowing the message to be heard by everyone. Privately to Adon, she added: The Princess and I never doubted that you would return.

  The butterfly wondered a little about that. Had the young lords wanted to assume him dead? And why wasn’t Samson included in Goldie’s statement? Had Samson of all people thought his big brother could have randomly died in some dungeon on level two?

  But before he cleared any of that up, the priority was to share the plan. This dungeon was a time sensitive matter, after all.

  So, I’ve basically figured out how we clear this level, Adon sent, unable to keep a note of triumph out of his voice.

  He felt a sense of conviction enter his voice as he began describing the plan. That feeling that this was what he was here for. Not just in this dungeon, but in this world for.

  The butterfly had an incredible set of abilities, and he was well equipped to solve myriad problems for the world where he had been incarnated. Today was a day when he would get to experience how his reincarnation was not a waste, not a mistake, not a random selection—but a gift, to him and to this world.

  At least that was how Adon felt while he was talking in the tunnel.