Lewd dungeon, p.27
Lewd Dungeon, page 27
“Master!” Lyrei calls up, as she comes over to him. “Lord Kuronoth has answered my prayer! He says that this is a sample of the alchemical fire which burns even dungeon stone! And production is locked by a System contract to only those he gives the secret to!”
Balgurg felt his breath catch in his throat, as he suddenly held the grenade a bit further from his body. “Truly? I had thought it exaggeration, even though one of the Lord’s chosen said it. While I know that the followers of the Lord do not lie, following in his example, there is such a thing as poetic license or hyperbole. But for it to be real? That is disturbing.”
“I am pleased that it made such an impression upon you.”
Suddenly, in their midst, was the figure they had been hoping to meet. As one, they took a knee, bowing before their god. “Lord Kuronoth, you honor us with your presence!”
The lord smiled at them, and reached one hand down, placing it upon Balgurg’s helmeted head. “It is you who honor me, my faithful followers. This fight was to be the wake-up call, if you were taking things lightly, because of your level and gear. But you learned what you could beforehand, and put it into practice. Yes, I know that this first floor was no true challenge to you, until the boss fight at the end, but you treated every encounter as a deadly danger, and did not let up your guard, which is far more than some might say.
“Since you have exceeded my expectations, and met my hopes for you, I decided to give you this message. From here on, the monsters grow stronger, and the fights more difficult. Some areas will be pitifully easy, if you fight well, and fight cleverly. Others will tax you far more than creatures of their level and class ought to. And, as you progress, there will be more creatures wielding modern weapons, and your success, or failure, will depend on being able to overcome them.
“Should you succeed in making it all the way to the final battle, then I shall reward you as befits loyal servants of your caliber. Each of you shall receive an item, worthy of your standing, as your level resides upon completion of the task. Until then, fight well. The second floor awaits!”
And, with that, their god disappeared into shadow, leaving them alone in the boss room. Balgurg nodded once, and looked around to his pets. “So, everyone healed up from the battle? Armor and weapons at full durability?”
Lyrei answered, the leader of his harem as always. “Yes, Master. Fortunately, damage was light, and easily taken care of with healing and repairing magic. However, the fact that we were injured at all is proof that you were correct in saying we should take this seriously. For individuals so far below our level to put up that much of a fight, after we sealed their strongest abilities? That speaks well of the rest of the dungeon.”
“Very good,” Balgurg nodded. “Now, before we go on, let us quickly go over the battle, now that we have had time to recover. How was it different from what we were told, and what should we expect, moving forward?”
“Well,” Tanila, his sharpshooter, said, “obviously the second contract allowed the bosses to display their true level, which is into Tier 2, like us. We were expecting Tier 1s, with boosts to make them competitive with low Tier 2s. No guns, but these were mages and their vanguards, so that much is to be expected. The Holy slime reported by adventurers was also replaced with a Wraith Slime, which would have been trouble, if it had targeted better.”
“Right,” the half-dragon nodded, considering her words. “If, instead of Ashera, it had targeted Ena, or Lyrei, then it would have been catastrophic, with the amount of damage the slime could have done. It may be that, when we are through with this dungeon, I will need to find an enchanter to add [Possession Resistance] to your armors, like is on mine. Though it will be expensive.”
“If we manage to achieve Ascension in this dungeon as you hope, Master,” Ena began, “our weapons and armor may well need to change, based on what our new races and classes may be, so replacing our current gear will need to be done, regardless. However, if you wish to save money, then it is possible to buy a [Skill Brand] from the System Shop.”
Balgurg frowned as he thought on that. “I dislike the idea of any mark being on your bodies other than my [Slave Brand]. Marking you as mine, and mine alone. I won’t let your bodies bear any other mark, save perhaps the mark of our Lord, to use your flesh as a holy symbol in His name.”
“There is another option, Master,” Ratha said. The Dreadnought Bulwark was quiet, as a rule, only speaking when she had something to say, so Balgurg made sure to pay attention. After all, as the Tome of Kuronoth said, it was a poor Master who ignored the warnings of his slaves, to slake his own pride.
At his encouragement, she continued, “So far, you’ve used the [Possession Resistance] skill, implanted on your armor. However, the skill can be bought from the System Shop. And you possess the skill through your Slave Master profession to teach skills to your slaves by paying mana instead of making them spend skill points. If you were to purchase the skill for yourself, then you would only need to spend the mana to bestow it upon the rest of us, as well as any future slaves you wished to protect from possession. That would be the cheapest course, in the long run.”
The Assault Mage nodded. “I like your plan, Ratha. We will do that, when we return to a place with a System Shop. For now, Lyrei, I want you to stay wary, so that you can exorcise one of us, should we be possessed.”
“Of course, Master.”
Chapter 314 – Lessons
I had to admit that I was impressed as I watched the team make their way to the third floor. Balgurg and the rest were not quite breathing heavily but they were definitely not taking things easy. With no trees or vegetation to block their view, they’d switched to their guns for the second floor. Of course, the thick mist should have made targeting beyond a few feet impossible. And, indeed, that is how it worked for the parties that had taken it on before.
However, the high-tech look of their armor was not just for show. Oh, it offered superior protection, that much was certain. Not just against incoming attacks, either. The sealed nature of the armor meant that the Enflaming Gas was useless, and though they could still be grabbed by Captain Hentai and his fellows, the paralytic slime had no effect, since it didn’t touch their skin, and the slimes died before they could penetrate the armor, and start violating the people inside.
But the biggest benefit to the armor was the fact that it had integrated magitech sensors. From what I could tell without a sample to analyze, it looked like they had infrared and radar capabilities, at the very least. The infrared wasn’t too big a deal, since there were spells that gave creatures darkvision, but the radar did not care about the mist. Well, not entirely.
Either way, it meant that their target acquisition went from ‘a few feet away’ to ‘thirty to fifty yards’. Sure, picking up on a target when it is merely half a football field away doesn’t sound terribly impressive when dealing with modern weapons, but when the monsters are all melee focused, that gives people plenty of time to bring them down. Sure, I’d compensated for the increased lethality of guns by drastically increasing the number of monsters on the floor, but that just meant Balgurg and his girls engaged in a running firefight as they made their way to the other end of the floor.
The only bright spot, from my stance as a dungeon, was that they did not have time to stick around and loot the bodies. It was a one-sided slaughter, sure, but they had to keep moving to keep from getting hemmed in and pinned down, which would have allowed the monsters to potentially take the advantage. So, they expended resources to get through the floor, without any of the loot that normally would have compensated for their expenses.
The challenge rooms were the first time where the team was truly tested. Without the ability to work together, their individual challenges had pushed them all. Still, I wasn’t surprised when they made it through. The challenges were intended to ensure that Tier 1s who went through them were the best that they could be in their specialty. Anyone on the cusp of Tier 3 was going to be fine, even if they still had to work for things.
The boss fight against MAGA and his minions was anticlimactic to the extreme. The Hellfire Sorceress just bathed the entire room in hellfire, while the rest of the group formed a cordon around her, keeping the enemies at bay. It was an impressive display, but not one that could be easily replicated by someone of a more reasonable level. The low Tier 2s didn’t have the mana reserves for something like that, to say nothing of the Tier 1s that made up most of my adventurers.
Naturally, I had been taking notes the entire time I was watching them. There were plenty of areas of the first couple levels that I could, and probably should, change. I didn’t want to make things too hard, though. I still wanted my dungeon to be tough, but fair.
First thing I intended to do was find a way to add magic to the mist on the second floor. Make it so that you couldn’t use radar or other such things to see beyond the limits of normal sight. That would increase the difficulty, without making it unfair, or disallowing certain things altogether. With the contact ranges reduced, there would be much more pressure on the adventurers, even if the monsters weren’t actually capable of harming them.
Which brought up the second big thing. Too many of my traps and monsters relied on a few things that were easily guarded against once you got past medieval-level (or even modern-level) technology that magic and the System had made relevant. The scifi armor that these adventurers were wearing had definitive defenses against the main threats on the low levels. I needed a way to adjust.
The problem was finding a way around that kind of armor without making something that would overpower people who weren’t on that level. Gatekeeping my dungeon so that you HAD to have the best, most expensive armor to survive was a recipe for failure. No, I needed something that could threaten, but not overwhelm.
The Wraith Slime had been reasonably effective during the first-floor boss fight. While the Tier 2 slime was not really something I could use against lower-level adventurers, the Ghost Slime, which it evolved from, was available. It lacked the [Possession] skill, but its incorporeal nature, and the way it could drain someone’s attributes, weakening them, made them an obvious tool I could use in the future.
When considering the future direction of my first few floors, two options immediately presented themselves. I could find slimes and plants that had attacks which did not need to deal with armor, like psychic attacks that weren’t dependent on pheromones or the like. Alternatively, I could find creatures capable of piercing the armor, and opening up gaps that could be exploited by my existing creatures. Perhaps even find creatures that attacked the armor directly, consuming it, while leaving the adventurer within unharmed?
I decided to start with mental attacks, since those were easier to scale. Now, slimes with mental powers were rare, obviously, because slimes were largely mindless. Same with plants. So, it was only natural that I didn’t have anything like that available to me. However, ‘rare’ did not mean ‘nonexistent’. And if there was a plant or slimes out there with those kinds of powers, I knew exactly where to find them: the marketplace on the Galactic DEN.
Filtering through the available patterns, I found an interesting little gem from a dungeon on Xovilia. They had a species of tree with a name that translated to Dark Bargainer. Of course, the tree wasn’t actually sapient, and couldn’t make bargains. The name came from the fact that the tree produced a psychic call that affected living creatures around it, luring them in close. Touching the tree was dangerous, since vines would try to wrap around any living being that got too close, pressing them against the trunk, which seeped sap that would not only act like a powerful adhesive, but it was also was a digestive.
Yes, the tree was carnivorous, and lured people in, only to bind them and digest them alive. All while the victim was blissfully unaware, their minds lost in a delusion of peace and happiness. Their deaths fed the tree, which allowed it to produce fruit.
The fruit was the other reason it was called the Dark Bargainer. The tree bore two types of fruit. One in twenty was a silver color, and was a universal panacea. Literally, a bite of the silver fruit would cure magical super-cancer, work as an antitoxin for a poison that would kill a Tier 4, or restore sanity to someone driven mad by being too long in the physical presence of eldritch deities that were too far from the ‘reality’ that mortal minds could comprehend.
The other nineteen fruits were a blood red color. Eaten raw, they were universal maladies. Someone foolish enough to do that would find themselves poisoned, wracked by an incurable disease, cursed, and much more, to the point where the lucky ones died soon after. Even gods could be slain by this fruit, in its raw form, though it took longer. However, when properly prepared, this fruit was the basis of a drink that granted a person a full level’s worth of experience, and double the normal attribute and skill points for that level!
The catch, and there obviously was a catch, was that the tree only produced a fruit after it had been fed. When a living creature died and had their corpse absorbed by the tree, the psychic lure stopped, and it produced a fruit. One minute after the fruit was plucked, or fell, the lure began again.
As for taking it down? Well, it was a TREE, so trying to hack it with a sword or shoot it with an arrow was going to do fuck all to it. Chopping it with an axe or chainsaw was possible, if you could keep the lure from taking you over or the vines from pulling you into the sap. As for magic? Well, the damn tree regenerated when you used fire on it. The only way to kill it was to freeze it completely and then shatter it with blunt force, or an explosive.
I would have to be careful about where I placed the trees, and how many of them I used. The psychic lure’s range was relatively small, but the fact that the things were so hard to kill meant that people would likely end up dead the first few times they met one, until they learned to be wary. Had to be careful not to overcorrect, and make the dungeon too hard.
There was also the problem of ‘friendly fire’. On their own, the Dark Bargainers wouldn’t distinguish friend from foe. They weren’t intelligent enough for that. While the slimes and plant monsters would be fine, my Hunter and Earl could possibly be affected. That was a ‘suboptimal situation’, to say the least.
Fortunately, the dungeon also had a solution to that problem, in a second listing on the marketplace. Cheeky, but I would do the same thing. While the Dark Bargainers were not even sentient, much less sapient, they could be trained, because magic was a thing. You just needed a magical talisman of some sort, and the thing could be trained to not lure those individuals.
That would take more time, but it was more effective, in my mind, than introducing elements that just made certain individuals immune to the lure. Especially since the talisman could be a tattoo, or something embedded in the creature’s body. That way, it was hard to lose (or get stolen), meaning there was less chance of people replicating them. If I made it so that the brand or item didn’t drop when a creature was killed, they could even be made to believe that it was just a part of the magic that made up the dungeon.
Now, that still left me with finding a way to compromise that scifi armor. Thankfully, the Galactic DEN knew all about that armor, and had plenty of tips and tricks for sale on the marketplace. A Needler from the planet Uiter would do nicely, and I could also grab the Constructbane Slime from Thirenia.
The Needler was another plant monster. It didn’t move, and didn’t have a lure like the Dark Bargainer, but it was relatively cheap, and had a bunch of needles that could be shot at targets. Even better, the needles had a magic field that allowed them to pierce armor. They barely did any damage, even on unarmored individuals, but it would wreck the armor’s seals, and injected whatever venom or toxin the Needler was imbued with into the target. If I imbued the Needlers with Passionslime Juice, then that would be a monumental success.
As for the Constructbane Slime, it was a slime that exclusively ate nonliving material, such as the metal and the composites that made up most high-end armor and constructs. They didn’t eat living flesh, but an encounter with one would often leave a careless adventurer naked and unarmed. Not exactly the best situation to be in while you were in a dungeon.
With those decisions made, I turned to check in on the party, and how they were progressing through the third floor.
Chapter 315 – Tested
“Remember, this shrine, while not a safe zone, houses nonhostile creatures. There may be a chance to pick up new skills and techniques, that we don’t have, if we prove ourselves. The information we have says one of the creatures here will teach a technique called ‘Lightning Palm’.”
His pets nodded to Balgurg’s words. However, Ena looked at him, and said, “Depending on what the technique is, I don’t know whether any of us will actually be able to use it as intended, Master.” When he nodded at her to continue, she just shook her head. “While all of us have [Unarmed Combat] as a skill, we do not know the root of the ability, or the mechanics of it. For instance, if it is a technique that coats the skin in electricity, then it would do nothing for us, except perhaps shocking us and disrupting the functions of our armor. Just as one example.”
Her sister, Tanila, nodded. “And even if it is a more versatile technique, our information on how useful it is against the boss for this floor is was all based on fights from those under the lesser contract, at lower levels. Just as the first-floor bosses revealed new forms, we will probably have to deal with the same, here. This setup is designed to aid weaker groups, getting them further into the dungeon.”
