Dungeon Tour Guide ch. 39 (Patreon)

First things first. I didn’t want to accidentally use a strong new skill in a place where it could lay waste to me and my best-laid plans, so I opened up some space in a wall, giving me about a ten by ten by ten cube of room to work with.

I sealed it off, ensuring that I had at least six feet of solid stone between me and the room. Since this new spell was a dungeon spell, it meant that I could use it anywhere as long as it was inside my domain. As such, there was really no point in going there with my body. After all, I could still use my dungeon senses to see and manipulate the inside of that room—what was the point of risking my human life?

Just to be extra-extra-safe, I walked away from the room, placing myself on the opposite side of the dungeon from the testing room. That put me in the boss room, which might’ve been a concern, but I’d learned that the monsters I made wouldn’t attack me if I was alone. It was the safest place to be right now.

Granted, I doubted this spell would be anything explosive, but it was always better safe to be sorry.

With that sorted, I could start testing.

[Combine]

Proficiency: F

Effect: Combine two entities’ attributes to create a new entity.

From the name, description, and the feel of the mana, [Combine] was supposed to be used on two different objects—well, duh. It didn’t say what that actually entailed beyond ‘combine,’ so I started small, utilizing [Reshape] to pump out two cubes of stone, a foot to each side.

I went to activate [Combine], drawing out its mana to use on those two targets, and I found that I couldn’t. The spell wasn’t activating properly—it got less than halfway through its activation sequence before simply fizzling out, the mana dispersing into thin air.

Well, shit. Was it because they were too similar? Rock combined with rock wouldn’t make anything new, so maybe if I put something else there?

This time, I hollowed one of the rocks out and used a [Create Water] inside it.

Attempt two. This time, I pulled on the mana of the new skill, and with just the right twist…

Nope. The spell dissipated once again, breaking its structure and dissolving away.

Okay. That kind of made sense. I couldn’t be one hundred percent sure on anything, but the way it was worded lent itself to the interpretation that the mentioned ‘entities’ were quite different from each other. It was possible that I was just using the spell wrong, but it wasn’t like a rock and a wet rock had that many differences.

In that case… I didn’t really have many materials to work with, but I did have wood. I made a door inside the room and detached it from the wall.

This time, I targeted the freshly freestanding door and a cube of rock, and this time I felt the spell take hold.

A flash of light and mana blinded even my dungeon senses for a moment. When it faded, the two objects had become one. The door’s texture was the same, but it’d lost much of its color, and my senses told me that it was completely and totally made of rock.

That was promising. Having stone doors and… stone water? Was that possible? Well, stone combined with some other element, anyway—that was neat. It didn’t actually change much about the functionality of the dungeon, but it opened up some options like hidden trapdoors and such.

Still, it wasn’t that much of a gamechanger, and I got the sense that I hadn’t unlocked the full potential of [Combine] yet.

…could I use it on living things? If, for instance, I gave a snake skin that was more or less the same color and toughness as the wall rock, that would be a gargantuan upgrade to a mob that currently barely threatened level 1 parties.

I activated a [Spawn Snake] inside the same testing room, then targeted it and the remaining stone cube with [Combine].

[Error: [Combine] is on cooldown! You may use it again in 09:21]

Huh. Okay. This spell had a ten minute cooldown or so? It was a little more limiting than my spawns, but I supposed that made sense if it was able to affect living creatures. It’d be a little busted to be able to constantly buff monsters on the fly—well, at least, it would be if it turned out [Combine] could actually buff my mobs. For now, I would have to wait.

[Error: [Combine] is on cooldown! You may use it again in 06:10]

And wait.

[Error: [Combine] is on cooldown! You may use it again in 03:37]

And wait.

[Error: [Combine] is on cooldown! You may use it again in 00:59]

After what seemed like an eternity and was actually exactly nine minutes and twenty-one seconds, [Combine] was off cooldown.

I cast it immediately, selecting the snake and cube like I’d done before.

The same flash of light and mana came, and I silently breathed a sigh of relief that they were actually valid targets.

[New sub-species [Rock Snake] discovered! Sub-species added to [Spawn Monster] pool.]

The notification from the interface came so unexpectedly that I almost jumped.

Sure enough, there in the room was a snake with mottled grey and brown skin, hard enough to… well, if experience had taught me anything, it wouldn’t stand up to that much, but it was stone nonetheless. That was a pretty significant durability boost, and from the looks of it, it wasn’t affecting its movement.

The sub-species thing was also new. A quick check of my interface showed that it was indeed listed under [Spawn Snake], but it was greyed out. Upon trying to select it anyway, a message popped up informing me that the [User has not reached a sufficient level to activate this spell.]

That was a touch disappointing—it’d mean that I would have to make these monsters manually, waiting ten minutes between each, which would severely cap my ability to actually deploy them.

Nothing I could do about that, unfortunately. Unlike the Alder Corporation, I didn’t have a way to break the interface, so I would just have to focus on leveling up my dungeon side.

That did bring to mind a question—why hadn’t the [Fake Hydra] counted as a new species? Was it just similar enough to being a snake that it didn’t count?

I sighed. Man, I wish I had a few researchers on hand.

Maybe I could enlist Iris to help me find a few people that could give me some answers. The questions I held weren’t critical, but it’d be nice to know how and why the interface operated the way it did, which wasn’t something I had the capacity to find out on my own.

For the time being, I could experiment more with [Combine]. I was still keeping an eye on the safe room, and though the two low-leveled tollkeepers remained at the door the whole time, it didn’t appear that anyone new was entering, which meant I could fully focus on the task at hand.

It was time to summon a [Displacer].

Theoretically, I was pretty sure that spawning one wasn’t going to result in a monster on the loose. Even I couldn’t escape the boundaries of the dungeon, and I doubted a living being I created would be able to. Just to be safe, though, I moved the room a little further away, preventing even the luckiest of marks from the [Displacer] to allow it to teleport out.

If it came down to it, I reminded myself, I could just preemptively absorb it back into the dungeon . That was always viable.

I was still more than a little wary activating [Spawn Displacer] for the first time, but it looked like my measures held. It did take a lot more mana than any of my other summoning spells did, but I still had a plethora of it from the aborted fight the last party had just had.

The twenty-foot-long horror sprung into existence inside the testing room, still smaller than the real thing—the consequences of absorbing a lesser [Displacer] included a weaker spell, I assumed—and it did not move.

Five seconds passed, then ten. Twenty.

After a full thirty count, I let out a deep exhale. Even though I knew that I had the tools and skills necessary to deal with the situation if it went awry, I’d still harbored some fear that something critical would suddenly go wrong. No need to worry about that, apparently.

I used a [Spawn Snake] again, forming a little one no longer than a foot, and then I moved to use my new skill.

[Error: [Combine] is on cooldown! You may use it again in 04:27]

…right. I kept forgetting that was a thing. That was annoying.

As I waited, I watched with my dungeon senses as the snake started approaching the lesser [Displacer] that it would eventually be forcibly merged with.

The monster struck faster than a human eye could see, one of its tentacles flickering out of position and grasping at the snake.

The snake never stood a chance. Within moments, it was inside the [Displacer]’s maw, which meant that its corpse was probably already scattered across realities.

“Oops,” I muttered. I hadn’t expected that.

Dungeon monsters can, in fact, target each other. I felt like I’d read that at some point, but the idea hadn’t really clicked until now.

While I waited for [Combine] to come off cooldown, I considered things.

What was the hybrid of the snake and [Displacer] going to look like? If the end result was just, like, a [Displacer] venomous tentacles, I’d have to scrap it. The monster was clearly too powerful for this dungeon as it stood, and I wasn’t going to even think about using a deadlier version of it as a boss. If the [Combine] ended up making a snake with special powers, though, then we’d be talking.

On top of that, I wondered if I could use [Combine] to spice some other parts of the dungeon up. The last dungeon tour had shown that my newest iteration of dungeon design was remarkable at forcing powerful adventurers to burn their resources and take a hard fight, and that had largely been because of the puzzle room. And what had been unique about that room?

It was the constructs, I thought. In other rooms, constructs could be easily outsped and outmaneuevered, which never let them bring their full power to bear. If I was able to use [Combine] on the earth constructs and make them faster, they could prove to be truly fearsome foes in their own right—maybe even enough to make a separate boss room just made of constructs.

That could come after I finished figuring out what [Combine] actually did with these two beings. Its cooldown was finally over, so here went nothing.

[Combine] had been surprisingly mana-efficient so far, I realized—maybe because I was ending up with less material than I’d started with?

This time, though, it was a little more noticeable. It was still startlingly efficient, but there was some more mana investment needed.

When I pushed some more mana in, it took a form, and in that form was a question.

Hmm. I supposed that answered my question about which monster the [Combine] was going to affect more. If I had to guess by the feel of the mana, urgently pulling in one direction or the other, my decision would affect which monster would dissipate into mana and which one would gain its traits.

Alright. That simplified things.

Pushing the mana in the direction of the snake also cost a fair amount, which was a touch irritating, but I’d deal.

Once again, light and mana flashed, and once again, I created a new monster.

[New sub-species [Displacer Snake] discovered! Sub-species added to [Spawn Monster] pool.]

It looked… like a snake. A regular snake.

Had the spell not worked? The [Displacer] was gone, so—

The snake vanished, taking a chunk of the ground along with it. A moment later, it reappeared on the opposite corner of the room.

Fuck yes.

This was a welcome addition to my dungeon. So long as it didn’t break out of the room it was assigned to, a [Displacer Snake] could cause so many new problems for a party that a regular snake flying out of an air vent simply couldn’t. I wasn’t sure if it could swap positions with people yet, but if it could, that would add a huge element of complexity and teamwork to a fight.

I could work on the constructs later. For now, since I couldn’t use [Spawn Monster] to create either [Rock Snake]s or [Displacer Snake]s, I would focus on creating a few of those to populate the snake room at the entrance.

Before I could really get started, though, three people walked into the safe room.

I raised an eyebrow, making my way to them as fast as I reasonably could.

Iris was waiting for me, flanked by two level 10 adventurers.

“You called for security?”