Dungeon Tour Guide ch. 38 (Patreon)

“The hells?” the [Swashbuckler] asked. “We cleared the room.”

He was a good-looking guy, I had to admit, and that might’ve changed the direction of this conversation with other people, but I was irritated enough to not care. I had to stop myself from actively surrounding the party with stone walls to keep them from running ahead like the idiots they were.

“You cleared the room,” I said, nodding. “Right.”

“We got gold, too!” the [Time Mage] said, somehow even more chipper now than before I’d called them together. “I got five!”

“And I got seven,” the [Arcane Archer] added. “Seems like a good haul.”

“You’ll be splitting that with us,” the [Swashbuckler] said pointedly. “Three each.”

“Less, once Iris takes her cut,” I said. “Two, three coins per person.”

“Not bad,” Arthur said, the light-skinned youth snatching a coin from his compatriot and inspecting it, turning it over in the light. “Southern currency. Less good in our parts, but not a low denomination.”

“Right,” I said. “And how much of the dungeon have you cleared, again?”

“Enough to get paid,” the [Time Mage] said, practically bouncing on the balls of her feet. “Right? This is, like, a week’s wages at the academy.”

“This is the first fucking room,” I said. “Of five, mind you, one of which has a lot more treasure than this one area can offer.”

“So?” the [Moon Cleric] asked, apparently feeling the need to add his own shit opinion into the steaming mess that his party was creating. “We killed all the monsters here, and with a moment to rest we’ll be ready for the next room.”

“I’m your tour guide, but I’m not an idiot,” I bit back. “I’d like you to answer a few questions for me. Can you lend me the courtesy of that?”

“Sure,” the [Swashbuckler] said. “You’re being kind of rude, y’know?”

“I’d like each of you to tell me how many of a certain skill or spell you still have after that fight,” I said, ignoring him. “That okay?”

Nobody said no, so I continued. “These are unique, so you should know who you are. [Moonlit Clarity]. [Minor Redo]. [Duel]. [Explosive Arrow].”

“I’m out,” the [Moon Cleric] admitted.

“I can recover mine in an hour,” the [Time Mage] said.

“I won’t disclose that,” Arthur said, folding his arms. That was as good as a confirmation that he was out, then.

“Three,” the [Arcane Archer] said. “From fifteen.”

“And this was the easiest room,” I said. “You’ve burned all of your resources. Look, you need to know that your unique spells and skills are strong. If you space them out evenly, you’ll get far more value from it than you did curbstomping the literal entrance room.”

“We needed it,” the [Time Mage] argued.

“You used your spell to avoid minor damage that you have not just one but two healers to deal with. Your [Moon Cleric] used a spell meant to support his allies on himself because he wanted a taste of action, your [Swashbuckler] wasted a powerful skill that should’ve been used on a boss instead of the first enemy, and your [Arcane Archer] used exceptional force when simple arrows would’ve sufficed to kill snakes. And notably, not a single one of you worked with another.”

“Fair,” the archer in question replied. “I was thinking in the heat of the moment.”

“And that’ll happen,” I said. “Which is why you need to prepare your mindsets outside of battle, understand me?”

“Kinda,” the [Time Mage] said, turning her eyes down.

“My honest assessment right now is that you’re going to get yourselves killed if you keep going,” I said. “I won’t stop you if you want to continue, but I would strongly advise you go home, take your coins, and think. Think on how you can conserve your power, on how you can work together. You need to be one party, not four disparate individuals fucking off to do whatever they want.”

None of them seemed to like that, but the [Arcane Archer] at least deigned to give me a nod. “Is this why we haven’t leveled up?”

“I can’t say for sure,” I said. “But potentially.”

The goddess didn’t like rewarding wasteful adventurers, after all.

“I see,” she said, turning back towards the door from which we’d come. “Thank you.”

“Jess, you can’t be serious,” Arthur said, hands going to his knives. “You think this dungeon fr—this dungeonbound is telling the truth? You know how—“

“Come on, Arthur,” the [Time Mage] said, wrapping him in an embrace from behind. “You know he’s right and I know you don’t like that but you know that I know and—“

“Fine, fine,” he groused, the anger in him dissipating like water through a sieve.

“I have got to learn how to deescalate like you,” I mock-whispered. The [Swashbuckler] could definitely hear me, but I didn’t really care. It was pretty apparent that he’d not held the highest opinion of me anyway.

“Practice, mostly,” she answered, extricating herself from Arthur’s leather armor and giving me a sad smile. “The name’s Sylva, by the by.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said. “I’m sorry it wasn’t on better terms.”

“Lots to think about,” she said. “C’mon. We’ll do better next time.”

“I’ll show you,” Arthur grumbled under his breath, probably thinking I couldn’t hear him. “I’ll fucking show you.”

Still enough gas in that tank to get mad, huh?

He stormed off, the [Time Mage]—no, Sylva—following him. The [Moon Cleric] left without so much as a nod of acknowledgment.

Well. That definitely could’ve gone better.

Hopefully they’d take the lesson to heart. The [Arcane Archer]—I hadn’t gotten her name, I realized—had seemed to actually realize that the advice I’d provided had real value. I wasn’t sure how much she’d be able to get through to the rest of her party, but I believed in her. Maybe the next time they came, the party would be less incompetent.

I checked in on them just in case something had gone awry, but the safe room was normal. I was a little surprised by how fast Iris had managed to get a pair of people to set up shop right inside it and collect tolls from the people coming by, though at this point I supposed her insane speed at handling logistics really shouldn’t have been catching me off guard anymore.

This wasn’t the party’s first rodeo. I’d known that before, but seeing it in action was a different story. Just inside the safe room, they demonstrated the minuscule amount of rewards they’d procured from the dungeon. To their credit, the tollkeepers didn’t make fun of them for the lack of return. They did, however, take around a third of it, leaving the party with two coins apiece.

All in all, the process took maybe a minute. Obviously, it’d take longer with more loot and more parties, which got me thinking about the bottlenecking issue again. For the personnel side, that could be easily resolved by having Iris bring in more tollkeepers, but the dungeon itself was still going to be bottlenecked up with only two potential runs at a time.

…maybe more levels? I could already tell that the existing dungeon was getting to be a bit hard for newbies. If I kept on improving on the difficulty, it was going to get to the point where new parties like the one I’d just encountered were going to get stomped even with the difficulty adjusted downwards.

I only had so much room to work with, though, and even as I settled down to begin the process of using an [Assimilate] to claim more space for myself, I wondered what I should do.

The underground seemed promising. I could put more challenges there, have alternate paths that led to areas more suited for adventurers of higher level. As far as my senses could tell, there was still a lot of room to expand in every direction except for the one that led directly outside, so that constraint was thankfully not an issue yet. I tilted my [Assimilate] downwards, my decision made.

What monsters could I populate it with? I still had an open [Spawn Monster] spell slot that I hadn’t quite decided on how to use yet, but I wanted to hold off on that. Before I committed to a certain monster, I wanted to first figure out what that other hidden new skill I could acquire was.

The feeling of the new skill being on the verge of materializing had been gradually intensifying over the course of the day while I’d spent intense amounts of my mana on manipulating my shape. I had a sneaking suspicion that using more mana was leading me closer to discovering what the skill actually did, and I’d hoped to use some more in the process of helping the new party clear the dungeon, but they’d proven incompetent enough for that to not be an opportunity.

My interface pinged me immediately after I finished using [Assimilate] enough to extend my domain downwards by six feet or so, a queued notification popping up once I’d finished the concentration-heavy task.

Ah. A review on the ARI by Arthur Kell. Not a favorable one.

I swiped it aside, choosing instead to start focusing on forming my new rooms. I wasn’t going to be able to complete them right now, but I could get started on hollowing out space underneath me.

I’d not gotten all that far into making my new underground path when the swirling influence of the Will of the Goddess crystallized. I could feel it happening, the step over the precipice, and for a second I felt like I was falling inside my own body.

[New spell [Combine] unlocked!]

Well, that was certainly something. I didn’t have an intuitive understanding of exactly what it did, and unlike most spells, I hadn’t read of it before—at least, not in this form. [Bladesinger]s and their like had a [Combine], but those infused weapons and magical items, and from the feel of the mana, this was probably something different.

From the intensity of the skill, it was something powerful.

Nothing to do but try it out.