Vesa listened with his arms crossed as Reya spoke, her expression unusually serious. She had traced symbols in the air with a piece of bone, water rippling faintly in the bowl beside her.
The image she saw made her pause longer than usual. "It's not death," she finally said, voice hesitant. "But it's… change. You, or someone close to you, is turning into something else. Beasts. Not monsters—beastmen." She frowned.
"It's unstable. I can't tell when." Lenny laughed it off, Frey sighed, and Vesa muttered something about her visions always being dramatic. Eira didn't laugh. He simply stored the warning away, like he always did.
Later that day, a message arrived from Ryn. It was short, hurried, and unusually insistent. His equipment had detected faint mana fluctuations near a dungeon—too weak for standard detection, too inconsistent to classify. His guild had dismissed it as faulty gear, but Ryn didn't trust coincidences.
He mentioned a passage from a book about rare dungeons that appeared harmless, even ridiculous, yet held materials that didn't exist anywhere else. Eira didn't hesitate. He asked Lenny to come along, knowing his strange detection magic might be exactly what was needed for something so faint and odd.
The dungeon entrance itself looked like a mistake. Bright colours painted into the stone, a smiling face carved above the doorway, and music—actual music—drifting out into the forest. Inside, nothing made sense. Floors bounced. Walls lied.
Signs contradicted each other. One room forced them into pop quizzes with absurd questions, another turned into a ride that spun too fast and dropped them into foam pits. Traps weren't lethal, just humiliating. Illusions mocked them.
Lenny got stuck wearing a crown that wouldn't come off. Ryn argued with a talking statue that kept changing its answers. Eira stopped trying to understand it and simply went along.
By the time they reached the end, they were exhausted, laughing despite themselves. A final room opened into what looked like a prize shop, filled with glittering trinkets and strange tokens.
Once they stepped through, the dungeon cheerfully announced their "successful completion," pushed them out the entrance with a burst of confetti-like mana, and sealed itself—not closed, but locked—with a declaration floating in the air: No entry for the next one hundred years. Then the music stopped, as if nothing had ever been there.
Back at the guild, confusion turned into concern. Frey insisted on examining whatever lingering mana they carried. The moment she opened her magic to analyse it, something went wrong. The room flashed. Magic surged sideways instead of outward.
When the light faded, none of them were the same. Fur, ears, tails—each of them transformed into beastmen in ways that felt cruelly ironic. Personalities inverted, instincts amplified, emotions harder to hide. Silence followed. Then chaos. Somehow, within the hour, invitations arrived for a formal ball—addressed to them by name.