Dungeon Tour Guide ch. 46 (Patreon)

I had to swap up how I did things around here. That much was immediately obvious.

So far, I’d been fair. I’d explained traps to people, told them what monsters did, and generally just handheld them through the entire dungeon. Yes, I’d given them lessons, but it had all been done with some level of kid gloves.

The Kingsguard weren’t ever going to do that. The first ones who’d invaded me, their low leveled scouts? Yeah, those might play fair, but that was just because they literally didn’t have spells or attacks other than “bash person with sword”. The second attack had occurred through the mind control of a level 20, the third through a dungeon break unleashed miles away, and the most recent one had involved someone who abused spell combinations to blitz his enemies.

The last one hadn’t actually been that tough compared to the [Astral Monk]’s incursion even accounting for the five-level gap, which I guess spoke to the power of picking good classes and skills. Still, his combo had been devastating enough to kill or nearly kill both of the similarly underperforming level tens with me.

Anyway, the point was that the Kingsguard used underhanded, one-off tactics that worked incredibly well the first time and significantly less well after I figured them out.

I had no reason to believe they were going to exhaust their bag of tricks, so I was going to need to teach my adventurers to deal with that kind of shit.

If I wanted to train adventurers to fight against the Kingsguard, my dungeon would have to fight like the Kingsguard. What did that mean in practice?

Well, I couldn’t think of every eventuality, but I could think of some of the methods that the Omen king had deployed or might deploy in an effort to attack me—sending soldiers with powerful spell combos, mind-controlling allies, breaking dungeons, maybe using monsters that the Kingsguard had captured and controlled—and implement similar things in my dungeon.

I was probably going to have to get in touch with Lisa again after I did this. There was no way my dungeon was going to still be suitable for level 1s if I continued down this path.

Well, maybe if I disabled the new measures. That could work.

Also, I had to reconsider the method of guiding that I’d been doing. Even I could acknowledge that I’d been helping people a little too much. Explaining the goal of the puzzle without letting M-1 have a shot at figuring out the entire room themselves, telling people where air vents were hidden and what monsters did… sure, a traditional tour guide might tell people what things were and where they were, but clearing a dungeon was no traditional tour.

I’d have to ease it in—after all, Minus One was pretty used to my dungeon by now, and it would be a bit weird to just completely change the tone of it on them—but I did need to start thinking about the dungeon with consideration towards how I could use it as a training facility in addition to a fun, rewarding experience.

My mindset approaching this wasn’t to create a scenario for literally every edge case that the Kingsguard could throw at us—even leaving aside the fact that I didn’t know what they could do, I wouldn’t be able to implement all of them.

The point of this was to build a mindset. My adventurers had known what to expect, and that was the polar opposite of what they’d be going into with the Kingsguard. I’d taught them well on things like teamwork, protecting each other during fights, communication, and better usage of those skills, but I’d yet to train them on how to fight against enemies that didn’t play fair. I had to make sure that they could be prepared for sudden developments in practically any situation. They had to learn to be adaptive.

What tricks could I use to facilitate with that?

Well, for one, I’d been putting off one of my [Combine] experiments, and this seemed like a perfect time to apply it.

I separated the testing room from the main dungeon again. I didn’t bother putting the [Displacer Snake]s back in there—they’d proved their use already.

Six feet of solid stone was probably enough for my purposes. I’d done enough experimentation with [Combine] to be used to it at this point, so the process was simple enough.

A lesser [Spawn Earth Construct] came first. I had to make this monster before creating the [Displacer], since doing it in the other order practically guaranteed that the construct would get destroyed before it could be fully created. Other than that, though, there wasn’t much to it.

One more use of [Spawn Monster] later and my [Displacer] was in place. I activated [Combine] as quickly as I could—couldn’t have the [Displacer] deciding it didn’t like the construct’s existence before I consumed it for its skills.

This [Combine] was noticeably harder than the last few had been, but I’d regenerated enough mana to manage it. It was still going to be a bit tight on my reserves, but that was perfectly acceptable if this worked out the way I wanted it to. Besides, I had a bunch of snakes still in the dungeon—if I really ran short, I could just absorb some of them.

I set the [Combine] to land on the earth construct. Theoretically, I could’ve made a [Displacer] that had increased strength and durability, but that was less ‘sometimes the enemy will have an unfair advantage’ and more ‘fuck you, you are going to die in this dungeon’ kind of stuff.

The process was over in an instant, and…

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

Wow, that was a wordy name.

To test it, I spawned a handful of snakes inside the isolated room, pumping more of my limited mana into them to make them larger.

I was pretty sure I could tell the difference between what would create a new sub-species and what wouldn’t at this point. At a guess, if I just manipulated the [Spawn Monster] skill itself, it could create something that had a different species name, but it wouldn’t give me a new unlockable subspecies. [Combine], on the other hand, probably did it every time since I was going beyond the boundaries of [Spawn Monster]. In this case, creating human-ish sized snakes was enough to get them to be considered [Greater Snake]s under the interface but wasn’t enough to get that subspecies unlocked in [Spawn Monster].

The—ugh, [Earth Construct - Displacer Variant] was such a long name and so was Displacer Earth Construct. Maybe I could refer to it with an acronym?

I sent an instruction to the new monster to attack, and the ECDV got moving instantly, lumbering forward.

I frowned. That wasn’t what I’d hoped for, but I had to keep observing it. There were some very obvious physical differences—normal earth constructs weren’t nearly as metallic as the ECDV was—but was that the extent of it? Hopefully not.

My worries were assuaged as it stepped forward to strike a snake. As the ECDV’s target slithered out of the way, the construct blurred.

Half a second later, it appeared directly in front of its target, and it completed its attack, already halfway through its swing.

The snake didn’t stand a chance. It exploded into gore and free mana, the ECDV’s fist slamming through it like it was wet paper.

Good. I might need to tone down its attacks some—an attack that fierce killing an adventurer might take them past the limits I could [Revivify] them from—but this was very different from the slow-moving constructs that my dungeon had made use of so far. It was sure to catch someone off guard, and it’d be a good segue into narration by me about how lots of enemies out there in the world would surprise you like this.

Interestingly enough, the [Displace] it used wasn’t quite the same as the one that a [Displacer] could utilize. [Displacer]s arguably had a more effective one, because they could teleport and swap spaces with an ally, making combat flow significantly harder. I wondered why the [Displacer Snake] and ECDV didn’t do that. Restrictions, maybe? Lower intelligence?

Whatever the case, this worked really well. I didn’t have enough mana to make another one and still have enough to [Revivify] someone after, and I wanted to keep that safety net, so I would be satisfied with the one construct for the time being.

I gave it an instruction to stay passive until ordered into action just like the rest of the constructs, then reconnected the testing room with the main dungeon.

“You can go in the… parkour room,” I muttered. “That’ll throw people for a loop.”

Since I could only make one of them, I could only put it in one side of the dungeon. For the time being, it could go in the guided side, since it was pretty likely to just straight up kill someone.

Alright. What else could I do?

I still had a [Spawn Monster] slot open. Could I take a look at that?

I needed something that could throw people off. So many of my options were too simple—stuff like goblins, bats, skeletons, any decent adventurer already had a plan to deal with. All I could really create right now were fodder enemies, and I didn’t want that.

One particular monster caught my eye. The option [Spawn Mephit] could be interesting if I remembered what those monsters did correctly…

Fuck it. It wasn’t like I had much else I could do with this, right? At this level, there weren’t actually that many good options.

Alright. I selected it.

Something clicked into place as the interface confirmed my decision, the Will of the Goddess pressing down on me. That was my last level-up upgrade, I was pretty sure, since that constant feeling of incompleteness was gone now.

I was still running low on mana, but the [Spawn Mephit] spell was pretty unintensive in terms of resources. It only started consuming more when it got to consuming more mana to make variations like [Ice Mephit]s or [Acid Mephit]s and the like.

The result was a small winged imp-like creature with long clawed fingers, maybe the size of my head. At base, they didn’t really do anything other than be a nuisance and try to fly and attack you, but…

I ordered it to stay still, allowing it to fly a bit into the air, and then I dropped a rock onto it from the roof.

With how weak it was, a single fast-falling rock was enough to take it out, but it didn’t fade immediately.

I stepped backwards, counting in my head. One… two… thr—

The body exploded into a shower of viscera and flame, incinerating the rock that had killed it and eliminating its corpse.

I’d remembered right. Mephits self-destructed on death, even the base forms, though those only really did heat and blood while the more advanced forms used other types of damage—ice shards, acid bursts, and the like.

I wasn’t quite sure where I’d put them yet, but there were decent odds I ended up just using them as fodder enemies. See how adventurers dealt with them.

The thing was, their explosions were pretty powerful, but you could pretty easily get rid of them by just double-tapping the kill. They were functionally going down to 1 HP and then exploding, and finishing the kill would make stop that.

It would be a good lesson in showing adventurers that you could never really be sure that something was dead until it was dissolving away. There were a number of monsters with that trait I could think of that the Kingsguard might use.

With that finished, all I had to do was wait and regenerate mana and think about how I was going to guide people from here on out.

I went to grab pen and paper, silently thanking Rose for having the forethought to get me some.

This is going to work out.

_________________________

Minus One returned at sunrise. I had no idea why they were here again, but they were pretty heavily worn.

For some reason, they were carrying a sofa chair?

I met them in the safe room as per usual, closing both doors to the dungeon.

“Hey,” Rose said, obviously tired but still chipper somehow. Her armor was torn up, and I could see new scars on her arms where magic had healed wounds imperfectly. “I told you I’d get you one of these.”

“Okay, you’re going to need to back it up a little, here,” I said. “Explain? I don’t even want to ask about the chair.”

“I picked that up,” Ryan offered. “There was an open store on the way here.”

He was similarly hit, sporting another fresh set of scars and dents in his plate armor.

Troy had taken the least damage, but he still looked weary as hell. “Hi Lucas. Good to see you.”

“You were injured,” I said, a vague anger that might’ve been protectiveness burning within me. “What happened?”

“Oh boy,” Rose said, practically bouncing on her feet, “have I got a story to tell you.”