After the knights had healed their most pressing wounds—including one older knight very appreciative of having been graced by the mystic butterfly—they climbed down the cliffside. The pace was not leisurely—everyone was far too aware of the absent monsters and the danger of flooding for that—but it was more relaxed than it would have been if they were being harassed by monsters the whole way down.

  The rest of the descent down the cliff face was much less eventful than the start had been.

  Nothing came and bothered the party, to Adon’s relief. He wondered if the strixes were all dead. But even the victorious monster population did not make an appearance.

  Perhaps the griffins are giving us a bit of grace before they attack, in appreciation of our help in eliminating their rivals, he heard Rosslyn think.

  The tension had gone out of most of the rest of the group, but the Princess was still sharp. So was William. Samson also kept his eyes peeled. Adon was observing the dungeon expedition party more than he paid attention to anything else, but these were the only ones he felt significant tension from. The general mood that had settled over the group, post-healing, was one of relief. Every one of the knights here was a combat veteran of some kind or another who recognized that things could have gone much worse.

  Adon should not have been surprised, but several of them also occasionally looked in his direction with expressions of gratitude. He had assumed they would not know who was responsible for the griffin alliance based on William’s decision not to mention him—but it seemed that the young lord referring to an alliance made via Telepathy was more than enough for these resourceful, experienced warriors to put two and two together. The group as a whole was mostly aware of his contribution.

  As they neared the floor of the level, Adon noticed the goblin creatures were active on the ground, grabbing as many mushrooms as they could carry to hoard in their holes. Adon had wondered just how much the party had unbalanced the ecosystem of the level—would the griffins, without the strixes’ interference, breed more until they wiped out their own food supply? Or would the population self-regulate?

  But the goblins' own survival instincts seemed likely to preclude their extinction. They seemed to be intelligent enough to plan ahead a bit.

  As Adon watched, the goblins not only took as many mushrooms as they could carry—far more than they had been able to carry when the strixes and griffins were hunting them—but they also carried off the strix corpses that the battle had left strewn all over the ground. Some of these had been partially eaten by griffins, but there were too many strixes for that to be the majority. Most of the bodies were almost intact.

  The goblins retreated to holes that were further above the ground this time, though still small enough that the griffins could not fit into them.

  Were some of these the dens that had belonged to strixes? Adon thought so.

  The goblins seemed very aware of the power shift that had just taken place, and they were shifting their own strategy in keeping with it.

  The creatures’ choice to move to higher elevations reminded him that there would be a flood soon.

  The knights already knew about this, so there was nothing for Adon to do about it but keep his eyes open.

  Sure enough, as the group was finally close to reaching the ground, the flow of the waterfall drastically increased. Adon considered sending a warning to the party, but he telepathically sensed as everyone took into account what was happening—and kept on going at the same rate.

  By the time the knights reached the ground, the water was ankle-deep.

  The knights stepped into it without hesitation and started walking in the direction of the exit. Adon had a slightly surreal moment where he recognized just how much the entire group was trusting and banking on the reliability of his scouting expedition into the dungeon, and he felt a touch of nervousness. Would the flooding go differently this time? Did the dungeon have some real-time way of responding to how the floor’s level of danger had been reduced thanks to the monsters fighting each other?

  He flew alongside the group, keeping his baseless doubts to himself. Probably literally everyone here except for Goldie and Samson knew more about dungeons than him. It was a subject of study in this world. If there was something about unbalancing a level that would make it more dangerous, he would expect someone to have brought it up.

  The group walked through the water confidently, a few people taking time as they walked to heal their wounds more thoroughly than they had during the climb down. There were many scratches remaining on the knights’ bodies, and healing magic seemed to be the one universally common affinity that almost all people had access to in this world.

  And the water slowly rose.

  The knights simply kept moving forward, ignoring it or frowning and shaking their heads at it at most. There was nothing else to do. It was either grin and bear it, or try to climb up out of the way, and the latter was a waste of energy when there was little of it to spare. Adon did not know how many levels remained in this place, but he doubted the knights could make it through another one today. The first level had been easy enough—a bit like shooting lizards in a barrel—but the second one had required descending a cliffside after fighting a group of monsters while dangling from the cliffside, followed by this long walk through slowly rising water.

  Is this supposed to slow explorers down? Adon wondered. Was that the purpose all along? Not to kill, but simply to slow down? Why? Could it be so that the dungeon could have time to adapt?

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Despite Adon’s worries, at least the water seemed to be as predictable as ever. It rose to waist height on most of the knights—a little above that for Rosslyn and the few female knights—and then slowly began to recede, apparently cleared out by the same caves that Adon had perceived probably operated as a sort of drainage system before.

  Everything was going according to plan.

  The group had made it most of the way to the exit.

  Adon could see the opening in the cliffside now. It was not quite as high up as the entrance to the level had been—perhaps the dungeon had decided to make things easier for them?—but it was still far above the water level or even the height of a human’s head.

  Perhaps twenty feet in the air, he estimated.

  But at least none of the knights would die of a fall from that height.

  Still, nothing odd seemed to happen. The level was quiet. The water level had fallen. Adon estimated that it would not rise again before the group made it to where the exit was. The knights were not naturally slow-moving people, and since their leaders had not slacked off, they had not decelerated either.

  They were just fifty feet from the other cliff face—the one where Adon saw the exit—when the butterfly heard it.

  The beat of griffins’ wings echoed through the level. It was not just one or two, either.

  Adon knew what he would see before he turned his body, but he looked anyway.

  It appeared that every single griffin except for those heavily pregnant ones he had seen in their caves before the negotiation had come out and was flying in their direction. Their movements were relaxed, if not lazy. They glided through the air, not bothering to flap their wings more than absolutely necessary.

  The griffins would have made a majestic, beautiful, peaceful picture if not for the fact that many of them still bore claws and beaks visibly red and matted with blood and gore from their slaughter of the strixes. This was no painting come to life. It was a flock of the most predatory bird-like creatures that the dungeon could come up with.

  Adon felt tension flood his mind, and he realized that he was passively absorbing the emotions from the group as a whole. He used discipline to keep how much of their mental miasma he received under control. There was no reason for fear. Even if the griffins attacked, the knights were a superior force. Despite the fact that the knights were clearly tired, while the griffins had just fed and appeared to have been resting.

  The butterfly decided to focus on observing the griffins’ actual movements rather than letting other considerations drag him down.

  Despite the general haze of worry and suspicion that was building up around Adon, the griffins had not made any aggressive movements or even accelerated their flight speed upon being noticed by the humans. The knights, by contrast, marched double time. That was only enough to make their speed somewhat comparable to that of the airborne creatures, but they had a big head start. They made it to the cliff before the griffins could reach them.

  Rosslyn, William, and Frederick looked up at the exit, and Adon heard them loudly wondering if they should order the group to begin climbing or try to make a stand here and scare off any potential attack.

  “Scale the wall!” William yelled after a long moment of hesitation.

  The first hand touched the cliff face that held the exit, and everything suddenly changed.

  Adon could swear that the griffins’ eyes glowed—though he was too far away to be sure, that was what it looked like to him—and they instantly accelerated.

  Their wings folded against their sides, their bodies turned into airborne missiles that launched themselves at the humans. They crossed an incredible distance in a matter of seconds, and the first griffins to draw near were only repelled by arrow fire from the ranged fighters on the ground.

  The griffins hit with the arrows struck the ground, rolled, and then pulled the arrows by the fletchings out with their beaks. They launched themselves at the humans once again, at almost the same moment as the next group of griffins had thrown themselves, missile-like, at the knights climbing the cliff.

  It was as if the monsters had gone mad, and the sight was captivating to Adon.

  Despite being taken aback by the images playing out before his eyes, he maintained the presence of mind to attempt his telepathic shout attack. It did absolutely nothing that he could discern, as if the creatures’ minds were no longer their own.

  The dungeon did this, he thought gloomily, still watching the approaching group of griffins. Now we have to kill each other.

  Absurdly, he could not help thinking that this conflict would devastate the population of the creatures in the second floor, and they would likely never recover to a sustainable level.

  Even so, he charged mana, gathering power around his body so he could at least attempt to use Rosslyn’s fire magic to roast the birds. Whatever sympathies he felt for the griffins, he knew whose side he was on. And Rosslyn had warned him about this.

  As he drew out his magical power and watched the remaining group of griffins approach—and as the second wave of attacks was repelled—there was a sudden explosion of bright light from the midst of the knights. Adon had not been watching them or focused on them, but he turned slightly now.

  The butterfly saw Rosslyn, glowing with intense white light, her entire body surrounded by an intense halo of power. For a moment, it reminded him of the Goddess.

  Then the light shifted from around the Princess’s body and poured into her sword. The light grew slightly less intense, and Adon saw two knights’ bodies on the ground beside her, unmoving, a dozen dead griffins covered in blood piled up beside them.

  “Everyone, get back behind me!” Rosslyn yelled.

  Adon had the sense that this was directed primarily at him. He was the only one who had not stuck close to the group. The power that had pulsated so intensely from around Rosslyn’s body now radiated from her sword, making it glow too blindingly for him to look directly at it. He had the sense that she was preparing some sort of final attack, and he quickly pushed his charged mana into his wings and rushed, supernaturally fast, to be behind her.

  The knights were scrambling up the cliff at the same time, while the griffins, that had been suicidally charging headlong into close proximity with their new enemies, held back. Everything was held in a precarious balance, the tension in the air rising, as time seemed to wait for Rosslyn to unleash her attack.

  Then Adon zipped by Rosslyn’s head. He was the last one of the survivors to retreat behind the Princess.

  He saw her smile through gritted teeth. A tear ran down her cheek at the same moment. The strain of holding in what she had brought out of herself was actually painful, he could tell.

  Then an intense beam of light exploded upward from Rosslyn’s sword, and Adon went blind.