Dungeon Tour Guide ch. 15 (Patreon)

“Welcome to the first room,” I said, trying to ensure my facade of calmness wasn’t breaking. “This is an introductory course to less linear combat, which few lower-level parties have had much experience with before.”

I was pretty sure my body had been changed in some way, because I definitely would’ve been sweating buckets in this position normally. As it was, I didn’t think I even sweat a single drop, which was cool but didn’t help at all with the panic coursing through me.

What was I supposed to do? She was ten times my level, and even if the skill I had could’ve easily put me on par with a level 20 healer, I was still just a healer in my human body. For offensive capabilities, I could use the dungeon, but I doubted I could use a couple of rocks to defeat anyone here.

Even if I was able to isolate and somehow kill her, there were the three others to consider. Being in a party for any extended period of time meant getting close to those that you worked with, and this party was likely to be no exception. Killing one of them was certain to result in the death of my human part and maybe also the execution of my entire body.

“Interesting,” the woman who might get me killed said. “Charles, analysis?”

The [Storm Sniper] nodded, casting a bevy of spells in an instant. [Appraisal]s and variants of that spell, mostly. “Low-level coiling venom snakes. There’s a few of them that have stronger venom or better maneuvering skills, but I think we can chalk that up to dungeon chaos. None of them are particularly bulky. Max level is 3, quantity forty-seven. Definitely suitable for a team of level 2s, I would say, but it’d be tough. Level 3 would be enough to deal with them easily. I’m not sure if a level 1 party could handle them without external help.”

“There’s precious few of those to go around here,” the [Life Cleric] noted. “But it’s good that it’s that low, at least. If only it could be lower…”

“Oh, that’s adjustable,” I said. “By specifying the power level of the party ahead of time, visitors can have their tour adjusted to fit them specifically. For instance, a level 1 party might encounter only twenty of the snakes. Furthermore, they do have external help in the form of their tour guide.”

I pointed to myself as I finished my statement, my mind working on two separate tracks at once. I had to run the conversation and the dungeon around me without failing the inspection, but I also had to figure out what this lady’s deal was.

I could ignore her, but that ran the risk of allowing the Kingsguard to run free—assuming she was actually Kingsguard and this wasn’t some elaborate prank—was pretty high. Yeah, I was confined to this one dungeon, and she wasn’t likely to try killing me while her presumably non-Kingsguard party was with her, but I did like the people I’d met from this area. There had been Kingsguard activity here recently. Who knew what she might be up to? There was a very real possibility that she would try to finish the job that the other two members of her clan had started, and I did not want the three new adventurers to die.

But how could I even stop her? Tell the adventurers that she was Kingsguard? Fat chance of that working, given that they’d only known me for the span of roughly two minutes. In fact, calling one of them a hostile soldier of the Omen was more likely to get them to treat me as an enemy dungeon mob than anything else.

“I see how it works,” the [Storm Sniper] said, snapping me out of my thoughts. “I think this is good. The dungeon can control its response.”

“It’s intelligent?” the [Sorlockadin Ranger] had seemed bored before, but that caught his attention.

“I am unsure if it is properly sapient,” Charles admitted. “However, I must admit that it looks like it might have some level of intelligence.”

“Interesting,” the min-maxer said. “Might need to revisit this one. I’ll call this a pass.”

“Pass here as well,” Charles said.

The other two assented, and though I was tempted to heave out a sigh of relief, I stopped myself.

After all, there was still the elephant in the room to deal with.

What if she was here to kill me? There was no way the Omen hadn’t caught news of two of his soldiers getting taken down—one brutally murdered—in a dungeon this far north. Had she gotten communication from him, maybe suggested to her party that this was a job worth taking? Was the [Astral Monk] going to make some bullshit excuse and tear my core apart?

Or was this a test of some kind? Something to determine if I was using extra senses—the dungeon’s senses—by engraving an inflammatory logo on the inside of a ring?

Fuck, there were too many possibilities.

“Can I try running this room alone?” the [Sorlockadin Ranger] asked, sounding for all the world like a kid in a candy shop. “With a higher difficulty?”

“You can certainly do so,” I said, only half my mind on the conversation.

I cast [Spawn Snake] absentmindedly a few dozen more times, more than doubling the presence arrayed against the adventurer.

“Kevin really does like his fights,” the [Astral Monk] sighed, sounding surprisingly human as she did so. “Sorry about this. We don’t actually need to do this to judge the room, but he loves doing it anyway.”

Well, she is human. Still, there was a disconnect between the image of the adventurer apologizing for her teammate’s quirks and the hidden insignia of the Kingsguard. It was unnerving, but I couldn’t show that feeling in front of her. If she did turn out to be hostile, I wasn’t going to be able to get out of the way fast enough to survive. At level 22, the [Astral Monk] could probably turn me into a bloody smear before I could even open a hole in the floor to drop myself down into.

The only people strong enough to take her out—whether that meant temporary incapacitation or an early grave—were her own teammates, and I highly doubted that they would turn against her if I just asked them to.

Was there some deeper meaning to the ring? I pushed my perception deeper, trying to understand anything I could about the thing, but there was something preventing me from perceiving it fully. It wasn’t shocking to see, given that these guys were such high levels, but the [Security Seal] on it was a lot more powerful than my perception ability was, so I couldn’t identify if there was any modifying effects on the thing.

The fact that it even had a [Security Seal]—which, if I remembered correctly, was a stupidly high level spell—definitely gave credence to the idea that there was something special about the ring, but not knowing what meant there was yet another layer of unknowns. For all I knew, the seal could just be to keep people from detecting the Kingsguard insignia within, but there was also a possibility that the ring itself was an offensive artifact.

Ugh, and I couldn’t even focus on it right now because Kevin the [Sorlockadin Ranger] was clearing the room. My interface lit up with notifications as he used spell after spell after spell, using a [Haste] to speed up his attacks, [Shadowy Ambush] to flit from place to place faster than the eye could track, [Divine Smite] to ensure that every slash of his blades resulted in a thoroughly disintegrated snake, and a bunch of other spells besides.

He needed some time to finish it, but “some time” in this context meant maybe thirty seconds while he absolutely demolished the room. By the time he had completely eradicated all trace of snake life within this area, the rock structures I’d painstakingly crafted looked much the worse for wear. Scorch marks marred nearly everything in the entire construct, and stone had cracked or entirely broken off in multiple areas around the room.

The guy didn’t even look winded.

“Could’ve used a few fewer spell slots,” he declared, wiping down some of his bloodied armor. For a moment, he glowed bright with a [Cleansing Smite] targeted on his own body, and then he came back into view, the blood that had coated him completely gone. “That’s maybe three percent of my slots? Suboptimal.”

Fuck.

This was the power of someone above level 20, someone who’d spent years—or perhaps months, given the proper cheat skills—refining their skills. This was the level that the [Astral Monk] would be on, albeit maybe a little lower given the fact that Kevin was definitely a min-maxer. With my current stats, I wouldn’t stand a chance.

“Is something the matter, Lucas?” the [Life Cleric] asked quietly.

I nearly jumped out of my skin. Despite the fact that I had the dungeon perception, I’d been so overwhelmed by the [Sorlockadin Ranger]’s little stunt that I hadn’t even noticed he was standing right next to me.

I can be distracted. I hadn’t really noticed before because I hadn’t been in a situation where my attention had been disrupted this hard, but it was important to know. Even though I had perception of everything that happened within me, I wasn’t always going to be omniscient if I wasn’t focusing. I was going to have to keep that in mind.

“It’s alright,” I said, forcing a smile. “I do have a question regarding your party, uh…”

“Kira,” she said, returning the smile. Hers looked a lot less forced than mine. “Our [Life Cleric] and healer. So far, I have to say that this dungeon is doing quite well. Adjustable difficulty is a godsend in an area as low-leveled as this one. I assume the dungeon is able to control it somehow?”

“It is. I can communicate to it, but it also auto-adjusts depending on the strength of the adventurers coming to clear it.” That was the not-quite-a-lie I had settled on, and I was hoping that it would pass through any lie detection spell that they might use. When planning for this situation, I had definitely not expected the inspectors to be such high level, so that incomplete truth might not actually past muster. I had nothing better, unfortunately.

“Makes sense,” Kira said, not even bothering to cast a basic truth verification spell. You’re that trusting? “Apologies for going on a tangent. You said you had a concern about a member of the party?”

“I’m a healer, but I can communicate with the dungeon and it can communicate to me,” I said. “There’s an artifact that it’s worried about.”

“Ah,” the [Life Cleric] chuckled, her laugh soft and pretty like the tinkling of wind chimes. “We have many artifacts upon us that may have caused that impression. Which was it?”

Gods, am I really doing this?

Yes. I had to. I could run through any number of scenarios in my head—escaping into the floor and trapping the [Astral Monk] somewhere while I explained the situation, killing her with a falling rock while I disappeared, anything like that—but at the end of the day, I was horrendously outclassed. There was only really one tactic I could try here.

Being honest.

“Your [Astral Monk] has a ring,” I began. Before I finished the sentence, I saw the aforementioned woman’s head snap over to me. Fuck. If I’d had any trace of a doubt that the ring was a problem before, it was gone now. “The dungeon saw insignia of a certain group printed inside it, and its effects are tripping warning signals.”

“Her ring?” Kira frowned. “That’s not an artifact. It’s a magic item, but it shouldn’t be on the rarity required to trigger an alarm.”

“It has the Kingsguard logo engraved into it on the inside,” I clarified, trying my hardest to not look at the woman I was talking about. “And—“

A flurry of mana exploded from the [Astral Monk]’s position and everything went black.