The dim, red emergency lamps showered the corpses in a sinister light. Especially once they started to move, Ryan could feel himself shudder involuntarily. The air was stale and musty, but at least it didn't smell like death or rot down here. It was like when things had rotted past that point.

  Maximus ran at the first of the monsters and jumped at it, swinging Cailleach at its nose-holes. With a loud cracking that made even Ryan feel a bit bad for the skeleton, its skull was smashed in. But even so, it hadn't died yet. Though its 'face' was cracked and largely shattered, it was still moving and trying to grab at the knight. But Maximus just continued on. Once again, he swung the hammer at the same spot, breaking through into its skull cavity. A hollow, spongy mass was hidden behind it that Maximus quickly shoved the hammer into, lodging it at the edge of the hole he just created.

  He jumped off the skeleton and held onto the hammer's handle behind his head, swinging it up and over as he fell to the ground. With an almost comical popping-sound, the skull was torn off and was now hanging onto the end of the hammer, which Maximus quickly smashed into the ground. The skull shattered and the skeleton, which had been moving despite the detached skull, fell to the ground into a pile of bones and half-rotten, mummified flesh, thinly veiled in a dirty lab coat.

  [You have killed a level 12 -Skeletal Biologist-]

  Ryan frowned lightly at the message. Biologist? Why was there a biologist here at this place? Plus, the monster's name sadly didn't say anything about those symbiote-patterns carved into its bones.

  Either way... this skeleton was level 12, and it was just one of many. There were a dozen of them just here in the hallway. If it weren't for Maximus' heightened stats after the unsealing, this would be an absolute death-trap. Though, even then, it still wasn't easy.

  Maximus' hammer slowly started being enveloped in a soft, golden light as he swung it around. That was the colour of the holy energy that was being infused into his attacks by the paladin set. But Ryan really didn't have a lot of time to watch how well this was working, since before long, they would be surrounded by the skeletons. Immediately, Ryan started swinging the icy bat in his hand at the nearest skeleton. It felt like he was hitting a bowling ball right now. But even so, there was some give.

  He swung again and again. Soon, Ryan started hearing a quiet sound from the nearby ladder leading back up to the main park. Jester had jumped off his shoulder and was standing on one of the ladder's rungs, doing something that Ryan hadn't seen yet. He was playing music. He was holding his hands and head as if he were holding a fiddle or violin, miming a musician playing their instrument. And of course, it did produce real sound. It was a slow melody at first, but it was soon starting to speed up quite a bit. And the faster the song became, the more Ryan could feel himself speed up.

  [Jester has cast -Funeralist's Fiddle-]

  -[10% boost in damage dealt to any Undead creatures]

  "Dude, what? You had this sort of spell all along?" Ryan groaned loudly as he smashed in the skull of one of the undead.

  [You have killed a level 13 -Skeletal Chemist-]

  As the monster fell to the ground, he turned toward the ladder, "And don't look at me like that, I know that you just remember your spells in the moment."

  That was one of the worst parts about the spirits' memory loss to Ryan. Even though it was clear that Maximus and Jester had a vast, vast, *vast* array of techniques or spells hidden in their heads, they couldn't just actively recall them. When the situation required it or the conditions were right, they were able to recall it, but otherwise, it was all just hidden away. For example, Maximus just remembered the depths of his elemental swordsmanship techniques when he got his hands on Granfell, the elemental greatsword. Similarly, Jester seemed to best remember spells when the situation called for it. Like here, this new 'Funeralist's Fiddle' spell. Ryan had to remember to write that down later.

  Whichever the case, this was an incredible boost, and with it, it didn't take long until the skeletons immediately here in the hallway were finally gone, giving them a moment to take a breather. Ryan took a deep breath and looked around. Even these skeletons only dropped coins. So this was the dungeon's last area.

  He quickly looked around and summoned Gaia, immediately unsealing her to let her grow to two metres tall. This was big enough to install the 'Wall-Mounted Connector' to her. Ryan still felt a bit nervous when he did, but Gaia didn't even flinch when he pushed the bolts into the rocks of her body. Particularly, Ryan installed it on her chest, so that she could just help Gregor aim by looking right at the enemy. She was also still the one wearing the backpack, so there weren't a ton of other choices.

  Ryan pushed the Sniper-Cannon machine into place, and Gregor quickly got on it and began to unfold it. Surprisingly, with the connector, it took a slightly different shape, like all the blueprints were made with these sort of auxiliary tools in mind. Though, the only real difference was that things shifted slightly to allow Gregor to still use and navigate this properly. There were some small footholds that he could use to climb around the machine with. It looked like the machine had always been made to be mounted on a wall.

  Either way, now they were all set up and ready to really look around this place. Ryan helped Jester move from the ladder over onto Gaia's hunchback, where he had a good position to just keep going with whatever magic he needed.

  "If you notice anything approaching, say so immediately," Ryan said. He had to conserve his mana as much as he could, so he didn't activate his Spirit Link skill. That was why the limits of the passive link that came from the Urban Harlequin outfit only made it a bit easier to adjust to the unique lighting down here.

  Carefully, Ryan turned the horn of shapeless water into a shield to defend himself against sneak attacks. Hiding behind the shield, he turned the handle of one of the nearby doors, carefully pushing it open. It was dark in there, but even this room was dimly lit up by the emergency lights.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Inside were a few more undead. Ryan and Maximus quickly headed inside and took them out. And as their bodies fell apart on the floor, Ryan started looking around. He got out his torch and flipped it on, quickly looking around the room. It was too much of a bother to use this in the middle of a fight, so he just kept it in his pocket most of the time.

  But right now, he had to look around and see what this place was. Different to the rest of the park, this place didn't have a map, after all. He had to try and understand this part of the dungeon before moving on.

  Though, this place just looked like some kind of random laboratory. There wasn't anything special here. Test tubes, pieces of paper, outdated machinery covering the walls - nothing that really told him any details about this underground compound. He did, however, see some things that really confirmed some ideas that he had. Animal carriers. Like those for small animals and pets, as well as larger cages for bigger animals. That, combined with the fact that the monsters around here were chemists, biologists, and zoologists, his guess about the petting zoo was all but confirmed. The animals from the petting zoo were experimented on.

  "Though I don't want to know why this place is under the food court..." Ryan shuddered at the thought, and quickly stepped back outside into the hallway. And now, it was time for Ryan to just completely rely on his intuition. He had absolutely nothing to go off of right now, so he would have to randomly wander around anyway. At that point, he might as well try out this long-shot thing.

  Ryan closed his eyes for a moment and slightly turned his head. He smelled the musty air and felt subtle flows against his cheeks. His shoulder twitched just so slightly, and Ryan turned his head to the right.

  "I guess we'll head down there first," Ryan told the spirits, carefully starting to move down the hallway. He tried to be quiet, though Gaia's footsteps were echoing through the empty halls anyway.

  There were some more skeletons around, which they of course quickly took down every time. With the addition of Gregor's powerful bullets, also strengthened by Jester's fiddling, combined with Maximus and Ryan's blunt offense, they took everything down fairly easily. In the first place, this dungeon wasn't actually that 'difficult'. Considering how much mana was in here, the monsters' levels were actually pretty damn low. Of course, the Aglecards had specifically 'raised' this dungeon so that this would be the case, but even so, it was a bit eerie considering the scale and abilities of the dungeon otherwise.

  Before long, Ryan got to a larger room. It was still a lab, but there were tall vats all over the place, as if they were trying to mix things together at an industrial scale. Around here, there were still plenty of regular skeletons, but there were two in here that were different. Bigger and bulkier, but not because they were larger species. No, it was like they were two skeletons that were just shoved together a bit too hard. They were sharing a body that had twice as many ribs and three or four of sometimes five arms. The two-headed skeletons' clothes were just hanging off them, not even trying to make it look like they were actually wearing them. The bits of flesh and skin that were covering them looked like they had nearly melted off at some point. This in particular reminded Ryan of something else he saw in the petting zoo.

  "Mutation... Whatever they did here breached containment," Ryan whispered as he looked around. Just thinking about it, it seemed pretty damn gruesome. The idea of melting away like that, fusing into another person's body... It must be ridiculously gruesome. Though, in this case, it also ended up with these undead being incredibly disfigured and unbalanced. And that was on top of the already 'wrong' bodies that the monsters in this dungeon had.

  Ryan took a deep breath, and then snapped his finger. Immediately, Jester started playing the fiddle while Maximus jumped into his domain. Ryan was running forward toward the nearest skeleton and pulled back his arm. The baseball bat made of ice soon became a foothold for Maximus who jumped back out of his domain, holding both Cailleach and Granfell, so that Ryan could swing him forward. The knight shot past the first undead and toward the nearest two-headed, mutated skeleton. Meanwhile, Ryan pulled through and smashed the regular skeleton in the head. While he took care of this one, Maximus pushed Granfell in between a small gap in one of the heads' spines, basically using it as a chisel by hitting the end with Cailleach.

  The skull popped off, and by that point, the two-headed skeleton grabbed Maximus. The knight threw Cailleach into the air and grabbed Granfell tightly, stabbing down into the finger-joints. Golden flames enveloped Granfell's edge, and the finger seemed to basically crumble away as Maximus cleared his way. He climbed onto the undead's wrist and stabbed Granfell up through the bottom of the skull and destroyed one of the heads, before jumping down.

  He threw Granfell at the other two-headed skeleton and watched as it got lodged in the side of one of the skulls. In the middle of his fall, Maximus then grabbed Cailleach and used the extra momentum to smash apart the skull that had fallen onto the ground.

  By that point, Granfell had defeated the skeleton he was in charge of and approached the one with the sword lodged in it, using his bat to slam it deeper inside. The first skull hit the second, and they both cracked, as Ryan pulled the bat back and pushed it into the open mouth of the second skull. Using his weight, he pushed against the skeleton and slammed it against the ground. That was the best part of fighting skeletal undead; they barely weighed anything at all.

  With his entire weight behind it, he was able to crush the brain in the second skull. Before the bones fell apart, Ryan turned the horn of shapeless water from a bat into a whip with a large ball at its end; basically just so that the ball would get lodged in the skull. He quickly swung the ice whip at the closest other skeleton, managing to hook it around its neck. With his entire weight behind it, he pulled the skeleton toward him. Headfirst, the skeleton was pulled at him, and Maximus jumped through Ryan's body and slammed Cailleach into that skeleton face. The opposing momentums combined, the skull was completely destroyed, and the next monster was dead.

  Immediately, Ryan and Maximus continued to take care of the other monsters in the room, and by the time the last of them hit the ground, Jester's song stopped.

  "Okay, that went pretty well," Ryan stretched slightly, grinning broadly. He didn't even know why he was worried. He was able to coordinate this well with Maximus even before Silvia made him the Urban Knight outfit. And since he was passively linked to Jester, there was actually a pretty big benefit for him right now. With Jester standing back, being a support role, the spirit had a constant view of the 'battlefield'. That view, combined with Ryan's intuition, basically gave him some level of constant awareness of the everything around him. Actually, that increased the variety of special combos that him and Maximus could attempt.

  "Alright, now, what's going on here?" Ryan squatted down and lit up the corpses of the monsters that hadn't fallen apart yet with his torch. The mutated skeletons had much deeper, more intricate patterns covering them, also covering a larger area of their bodies. He pulled up his sleeve and compared the patterns with those on his arm. These root-like lines were really, really similar. Though, compared to Tiar's patterns, the ones on the monsters looked more like... briars. Like they were left behind after something latched onto them, just to be forcefully pulled away, leaving only these deep marks in their bones. Either way, it was clear that they were trying to do something with symbiotes here.

  "Were they trying to make synthetic symbiotes?" Ryan whispered. That would explain why they needed to test things on animals, at least. What if they created fake symbiotes, and then tried to make them bond with animals, leading to those mutations? And then, the symbiotes got out and destroyed this underground lab.

  "If that's the case..." Ryan quickly climbed up one of the ladders next to the large vats. He peeked inside, seeing nothing but around a foot of a dark, murky mud at the bottom, "... then I'm guessing that's supposed to be the fake symbiote?"

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