Dungeon Tour Guide ch. 55 (Patreon)

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Edited 10/22: Slightly changed some details of the ending.

This was it. No more training, no more last minute additions.

They’re early. Hadn’t the projection been for them to attack later today? The evacuation had been scheduled for just around now to account for the attack occurring at the end of the day, but evidently something had slipped Lisa’s radar.

Maybe information had leaked? If they knew that we knew that they were planning on attacking at the end of the day, there was every reason for them to move their timetable up.

That wasn’t important. We could figure out the whys and the hows later. For now, we had to survive through the day.

I had to set aside the monster for today. [Assimilate] could take up to an hour, and it looked like the time to confrontation was going to be measured in minutes if not seconds.

People were fleeing the burning dungeon town, I saw. The town itself was maybe a quarter mile out. There were a few buildings in my immediate vicinity, but those had been unpopulated.

There were quite a few people in the horde. At least a hundred, eyeballing it, men and women and children in various states of disarray all booking it as fast as they could away from the wreckage of the town. Some of them were wearing full suits, others casual nightwear, and still others looked as if they’d just been shaken out of bed.

I frowned. Those weren’t adventurers, were they? Why were they here? Ketz was a solid few miles away, after all.

Oh, fuck. Iris had said that she was moving the citizens of Ketz into the dungeon town overnight to prepare for total evacuation, hadn’t she?

She might’ve doomed them all.

Even as I watched, someone fell, a stray magic-infused arrow striking them in the back of their legs. The people around the fallen one screamed, stumbling away from them, and nobody moved to help.

Fuck me, I was so powerless. I’d gone into this assuming that everyone would be in the dungeon already. They were still a solid four hundred feet from me and closing. There was nothing I could do that far out of the dungeon.

A figure appeared from the flaming wreckage of the town, then two, three, four, five… so many of them that it took me a few moments to process so many cloaked dots moving forward at once.

Thirty or forty of them, maybe. I frowned. That number was threatening, mind—I could feel the crushing weight of their collective mana even from here—but that didn’t feel like everything the Omen king had to offer.

“This is the first wave,” I muttered. “Fuck.”

The collection of Kingsguard were slow and deliberate in their movements, their smooth march forward contrasting the frenetic rush of bodies trying to run from their attacks.

Even so, it was going to be a bloodbath. The noncombatants were fleeing as fast as they could, but they had so few defensive spells. Fish in a barrel.

Damage had been minimal so far, but I could see multiple mages in the Kingsguards’ backline building concentrated spheres of dark energy, far enough from me that I couldn’t use my dungeon senses to detect what spell they were using.

And there was nothing I could do except watch.

The mages released, nine separate roiling black and purple balls soaring towards the massed civilians, and I closed my eyes, forcing myself to not react as the hundred-odd citizens were flattened or disintegrated or warped or whatever the spell did—

The screaming hadn’t stopped, and neither had the clomp-clomp-clomp of a hundred different people running for their lives.

I opened my eyes, and my heart soared.

Purple energy was still dissipating against a shimmering wall of energy. I’d recognize that spell anywhere, even if I’d only seen it cast once or twice.

A [Wall of Force].

And there was only one person I knew in the Ketz area who knew how to cast that spell.

Standing between the fleeing mob and the slowly advancing Kingsguard was an [Apprentice Mage] whose skills far exceeded that of any apprentice, his magically-infused red cloak billowing in the wind.

“Run like your lives depend on it!” Troy shouted, his voice reaching me even this far from the action. “They probably do!”

A moment later, a bolt of lightning flashed into existence, blitzing from Troy’s left to his side in an instant. For a second, I tensed, fearing that someone had already managed to flank the one member of Minus One I could see, and then the light faded.

Ryan’s [Flashdrive]—which was still such an odd name that I was sure that the goddess had been fucking around when designing it—ended, and he dropped the woman he’d been carrying.

“They’re early!” Rose shouted, half-turning so that I could hear her words. “That wasn’t supposed to happen!”

The mages on the Kingsguard’s side were responding now, flinging more spells at the hundred-foot-wide sprawl of pure, glittering force. Fire, lightning, poison, void, and all sorts of esoteric spells slammed into it with little to no effect, a veritable fireworks display expending itself on the the magical wall.

The first of the civilians—the adults who had classes that allowed them to move faster, I assumed—were arriving now, entering the bounds of my dungeon.

With a thought, I opened paths into the underground shelters, shallow sloping tunnels that would allow them to sprint deep into the sheltered part of the dungeon before I closed it off. With that same thought, I temporarily closed over the doors, doing my best to indicate that there was one path for them.

“Into the tunnels!” I shouted at the first pair—a man and a woman, each of them carrying hastily-locked briefcases—but I needn’t have bothered. They bolted into them, not even stopping to listen to me.

Iris had informed them well, then. That was nice. The last thing I wanted was for an uncoordinated, panicked crowd of people stumbling over each other at the cave entrance.

The shelter was only around six feet tall, with another two to three feet of stone above them, so the tallest people weren’t going to be able to walk around. As more of them filtered in, I started using [Replicate], forming food and blankets and books and seats for them to make use of while they were in the shelter.

I’d originally planned on doing that part just before they’d come in, but I’d have to make do. It was going to be a little claustrophobic in there, I had to admit. Whatever. It was better than the alternative.

I wasn’t sure how many of them were still out there on the battlefield, but—

As the last of the horde made their way into the tunnels, thankfully avoiding a full stampede, I felt human bodies enter my domain at speed.

I looked back to the scene of the fight, where Troy was opening holes in his wall to fire through before immediately closing them, and I saw Rose singing towards me.

She’d sent the wounded flying at the closest healer. Fair enough.

A few uses of [Create Water] in midair combined with a [Replicate] to create blankets hanging in the air was enough to slow their speed to be nonlethal, but it didn’t matter that much when…

There were nine of them, and six were dead.

Fuck.

Minus One’s [Wall of Force] was still up for the time being, so I had some time to start healing them. The ones who’d died had been killed recently enough that [Revivify] was able to take effect on them, and they were all intact enough for it.

I started reviving one dead teenager with one hand and healing a now-armless child with the other.

There were fewer of them than I’d expected. With how little they’d been fighting back, I’d have expected them to die by the masses.

And then I used [Triage], and I found out why.

[Subject is under the influence of a [Power Word: Pain] spell.]

They’re playing with their food.

As my first heals finished, the two barely-recovered kids looking around in wide-eyed fear before dashing into the tunnel, I glanced back to the battlefield.

The tempo had shifted.

Whereas before, there had been several lesser mages—still high-level, no doubt, given how strong the mana presence in that area was—combining their individual spells, now there was one noticeably different mage stepping in front of the rest.

Her cloak was different, I saw. The emblem of the Kingsguard was more detailed on it, more extravagant.

She spread her hands casually. From this distance, I couldn’t make out her facial features, but from her body language alone, she looked bored.

A sickening green ray shot forth with no clear origin, appearing in the air a couple feet in front of her chest, and the [Wall of Force] shattered.

I shouted out a warning, but Minus One was faster. Ryan had repositioned all three of them before the second shot—[Disintegrate], presumably—could connect.

She settled her hands back down and stepped back, presumably content to let the others do the work for her.

I kept healing the wounded and the dead, but I kept an eye on the fight. During the time it took them to reposition, I managed to get three of the remaining seven individuals back up on their feet.

Four left. My mana was going to be uncomfortably low after this, but I wasn’t going to leave them to die. I didn’t have to restore them to perfect condition, but I couldn’t let people die on my watch.

Troy didn’t put up another [Wall of Force]. He was limited on his uses, if I had to guess, and the wizard woman who’d smashed the first wall apart was probably going to be able to destroy a second one.

Six of the Kingsguard rushed forward at once, leaving bright blue trails behind them, and I had to notice that they were slower than Ryan had been. His training had paid off.

They were getting closer and closer, though, not supported by their squadmates but still threats in their own right. As the fight slowly drew closer to me, Minus One beating a tactical retreat in the face of admittedly superior firepower, I could start to feel the details of the mana coming from the fight.

And I felt it as Troy cast and Rose sang.

Troy activated [Increase Gravity], a spell with a thirty-foot radius that I’d watched him gain but hadn’t bothered to mark as significant.

Evidently, I should have.

It was enough to sink the grassy ground downwards nearly a foot, dropping the Kingsguard and stopping them in their tracks. It was only for a moment, and with their mana charging up, it wasn’t going to last longer, but a moment was all that Rose needed.

She sang a melody of pain and rage, intentionally using the vocal fry of her beautiful voice to make her [Song of Destruction] that much more intense.

The first spell had dropped a sixty-foot-wide circle nearly a foot downwards, and the second spell slammed the Kingsguard into that circle, crumpling their armor and cloaks in on themselves.

Six human bodies became six misshapen lumps of muscle and bone and blood, their skin flaying off them, and the Kingsguard died.

“Holy shit,” I muttered.

As I finished off the last of the healing, I rose to my feet, observing.

I’d known Rose’s spell was strong, but not that strong. On top of that, I hadn’t been expecting her to immediately escalate to killing them.

I wasn’t going to yell about morality or anything. There was a time and place for that, and the battlefield wasn’t it.

“Retreat!” I shouted, hoping they could hear me. “I can help you! How’d you get here?”

“We—“ Ryan dashed midway through his sentence, keeping enough of a hold on his two teammates to take them with him. “—were in the area! They’re focusing on the dungeon way more than Ketz!”

Well, shit.

That was… really bad, actually. We’d all assumed that they were going to spread their forces evenly, which meant that sheltering in the dungeon was literally the worst place that the civilians could be aside from the battlefield itself.

Was it the artifact that was drawing them? Was it me?

No time to worry about that. I needed Minus One to get closer to me so that we could survive together.

They were within a hundred feet of me now, but the Kingsguard were closing in on them. They’d used their own movement spells to match Ryan’s, and they were evidently taking things a little more seriously now. Not a second went by where there wasn’t a new spell attack from their end.

Troy was casting [Neutralize Magic] more than any other spell, and both Ryan and Rose were using their spells to dodge and weave through the multicolor bombardment. They were still doing alright for now, but I could still see that there were three mages—including the female wizard who’d [Disintegrate]d the [Wall of Force]—that hadn’t made their move yet.

And there was a presence rising right next to Minus One, manifesting behind them while they recharged. Not a single one of them noticed the [Phantom Knight] appearing from their own shadows.

“Behind—“

I didn’t get to finish my warning.

The level 12 [Phantom Knight] drew his sword, and as the blade glinted in the morning light, his head disappeared into a fine red mist.

A moment later, the sound of the gunshot reached me, and I registered the [Deadeye] that it’d been fired with.

Anderson the [Sharpshooter] jumped down from his perch atop the hill that my dungeon was buried within, appearing in my frame of vision for the first time.

“I got you!” he shouted, the slightest trace of his earlier cockiness returning to his voice. “Get back!”

Minus One took the opportunity for what it was worth, and they were inside the dungeon within moments. Anderson followed, taking a couple potshots at the Kingsguard as he did.

“This is suboptimal,” Rose admitted.

“Where’s the Guild?” I asked. “And thanks for saving those lives.”

“Not here,” Troy said. “I suspect they’re sleeping.”

“Fuck me, that’s bad,” I muttered. “We need to hold out for long enough for them to get here. I don’t know if all of us put together is enough to defeat them, but the five of us alone are certainly not going to manage that.”

“I believe in us,” Rose said, the bright determination she’d been missing the past few days showing itself again. “We can do this.”

“Start by retreating further in,” I said. “Through the doors. The dungeon’s not going to react that violently this shallowly. We need the dungeon to play a major in role.”

“Got it, boss,” Rose said, leading the way in. “You coming with?”

I nodded. “Just one moment.”

Three of them entered at the same time, and I acted, walking back as I did.

The ceiling opened above them, and six metric tons of [Devouring Ooze] fell on them.

These three were all sub-level 10. None of them reacted fast enough to avoid the gelatinous material, and in an instant, the entire entrance to the dungeon was slimey blue monster, three Kingsguard freshly trapped inside.

Three down. They weren’t dead yet, but they were out of the fight. The optimal state, in my opinion.

And then the woman who’d beaten Troy’s defenses stepped in and my heart dropped.

“Shit.”

“Something wrong?” Ryan asked from the tunnel between rooms.

“Nothing!” I replied, a little too fast. “Keep going!”

I ran, but what was the point? All I could do was close the rock behind us and hope it would be enough.

Silver hair, gray eyes, pale skin. She looked as if the color had been leached out of her, and her [Colorless Sorcerer] class provided weight to that idea.

Level twenty-fucking-seven.

The sorcerer thrust her hands out, casting a [Storm of Vengeance], and the oozes melted in front of her.

Water, void, acid, thunder, earth, air, fire, and so much more tumbled forth from her hands, making the efforts of the rest of her soldiers look like toy firecrackers in the face of a hundred tons of TNT.

The oozes disappeared, flash-boiled by the dozens of different types of magic, and the people inside them dissolved too. Around her, stone liquified and boiled.

And the scouring storm kept going.

I raised one final wall between the spell and the four adventurers in front of me.

[You have died.]

[Special skill conditions met.]

[Special skill [Divine Healer] activating.]

[Channel to divinity created.]

[Channel to divinity activated.]

[I told you not to die too soon.]

[Well, I guess it can’t be helped.]

[One more second chance. Good luck.]

[Remaining [Divine Resurrections]: 1/3]