Dungeon Tour Guide ch. 164 (Patreon)

Lucas

Crisis after crisis after crisis came to me, and so the grind never ended. Just under nineteen days left to go, and we were still no closer to saving the otherworlders.

They numbered nearly a hundred thousand, now. 95,191, to be exact. It was only thanks to the isolation of the dungeon rooms that they weren’t all together. If all of them came together at once, I wasn’t sure even I could take them on.

Okay, I probably could, but their power was my power, so that was an unfair matchup.

I’d been exchanging messages with all of my adventurers. The picture it painted of the outside was growing increasingly dire, and as it did, so too did my frustration with the goddess.

[ARI - new message received!]

#

This is Thorn, speaking for the Pallbearers and Starfall.

Tuyu Laurel is dead. I wish to believe that in her final moments, she found peace. She seemed to have lost the light of the goddess. I can only hope that meant she found herself.

Anderson and Inquisition. I believe you stated that Nora, the [Alchemist] from your party, had gone missing. We have located her. She recently escaped from one of the king’s production facilities.

I visited the reported location of the tower, but it’s gone now. It appears that it relocated itself once it realized killing the [Alchemist] was no longer possible.

Starfall is returning to aid Alder Corp and the otherworlder contingent they have acquired. The Pallbearers and Nora will return to the dungeon by nightfall.

May fortune bless you.

#

I winced at the content of the message. Killing was necessary sometimes, I understood that—it was why I had executed the true fanatics amongst the Kingsguard, and it was why I had killed the Omen.

It felt different when it was someone I’d worked with and liked. The necessity of it was clear. It would have served them better to interrogate her for the kings’ plans, at least, but it was possible that he simply hadn’t bothered to add that part to the message.

This was a shitty situation all around, but Tuyu had directly contributed to the deaths of… I didn’t even want to think of the number right now. Even if I didn’t agree with their decision, I could understand it.

And wasn’t that a horrifying thing to be okay with?

It said a lot about the situation that I had to just wave off the execution of a comrade because there were more urgent deaths on the horizon.

There was still so much I had to do. It was starting to overwhelm me.

Of course, it could always get worse, which the universe (or, more likely, the goddess) decided to prove to me about ten minutes after I received the message.

A woman entered the dungeon, which was nothing notable on its own. The demographic split of the otherworlders in Centerpoint actually slightly favored them—just over 52%.

No, what was notable was:

1) She was not an otherworlder, and—

2) She was not one of my adventurers.

With the number of people taking up processing power, it took me a moment to even realize she was here, but when an absurdly powerful middle-aged woman started walking straight through walls without the stone even resisting her, I noticed.

Carly Iru. Level 29. [Omniscient Librarian].

Twenty-NINE? That was higher than the most powerful being I’d seen, though I knew I probably eclipsed that when I had my power of friendship [Intertwine] going.

How was she still allowed on this plane? I was pretty sure that common literature said anyone above level 25 or so could barely fight for fear of being forced to ascend by the goddess.

When I started focusing on her, she paused, then looked to the sky.

“Centerpoint Dungeon,” she said. “Or should I call you Lucas?”

“You have my attention,” my [Guide] spoke into her ear. “Who are you, why are you here, and what do you want?”

“My, that’s a lot of questions,” she replied. “My name is Carly Iru, but you know that. Your good friend Iris called upon me for my services, oh… a month ago? Time has been odd these past few weeks. As to why I’m here—not only does it appear that I have failed in my attempt to stop the king, this dungeon is the largest remaining bastion of humanity remaining.”

“Why don’t you step on in,” I told her. “You’re going to have to catch me up on what you’ve been doing.”

“I’d love to,” she said. “I don’t suppose you have tea?”

#

I did, in fact, have tea. Iris had provided me with a bunch of proprietary Alder brand fodstuffs, which had included a couple truckloads of tea leaves.

[Reshape] took Carly through the layers of the dungeon without her having to break them herself, and soon enough, she was sitting in the same room that I’d met with Anton in.

She inhaled deeply over her cup, sipped it, and sighed in pleasure. “I do love the taste of a good red tea. It’s been too long.”

“Tell me your story,” I said. “From the beginning, if you could.”

I’d put a few crises on the backburner to talk with her. Anyone that wasn’t on the verge of immediate death got a quick fall into a shallow pit of [Stabilizing Ooze]s, and I would not be bothered with dealing with them until this was done.

“From the beginning, you say,” she repeated, arching an eyebrow. “Well, forty-seven years ago, I was born, and—”

I cracked a smile at that. If I wasn’t so pressed for time, I might’ve genuinely found it funny. “Not that far. Tell me. How does a level 29 stay on this plane? And why haven’t you changed anything? Where have you been?”

“I am not a conventional fighter,” Carly said. “I am a librarian. Always have been. When I was thirty-eight years old, I happened to read a few books that were not meant for the eyes of mortals, and I gained the [Omniscient Librarian] class.”

She paused there to take another sip of tea.

“What does your class do, and why haven’t you been using it?”

“Relax, kid,” she said with a grin. “World’s not ending.”

“It literally is.”

“We’re not all about to die, are we?”

“The people here are. In nineteen days, actually.” I decided not to tell her about the fact that the clear condition was destroying me. I didn’t know what her capabilities were, so there was every chance that she could just kill me here and now.

I greatly preferred being alive.

“So they are.” She didn’t seem terribly surprised by that. Had she already known. “I’ll pick up the pace, then. When I was forty—young and dumb, like we all are then—”

“You’re not that much past forty.”

“Like I said, young and dumb. I learned that [Omniscient Librarian] has a very peculiar skill. Even when the class isn’t active, I can remember everything I have ever read. When it is active, I can read anything, and from those books, I can [Learn] anything.”

“Anything?”

“Any book that exists, has existed, or will exist.”

I frowned. “Will exist?”

“With some rules, of course. No power can truly model the future. My class models what the future will be like should the status quo continue on, then shows me the books that may exist in this simulated reality. For instance, the books I saw in prison last year are very different from the books I see now. There are much fewer of them now.”

“Hold on, in prison?”

“Let a lady finish her stories will you?” She drained the rest of her tea before continuing. “I was young and dumb, and I found a future book regarding experimentation with Dungeon Cores. I was already level 24 then—turns out, it’s really easy to level up in a class about reading books if the only hobby you have is reading books.

“I thought it would be interesting, trying to take scientific research from decades into the future and plant it into our world,” she continued. “Forty-five years down the line, there were supposed to be a group of scientists that discovered how to advance to the next level of being by infusing nature into themselves. They chose the powerful Dungeon Cores to bind to humans.”

“I—”

“Shhh. Let me finish. I used my [Learn] skill to bypass the limitations holding me back. I [Learn]ed how to break past guards, how to commit research safely, and how to control free, raw magic.”

“I did three trials. The first one, some unnamed dungeon in the middle of nowhere, was a dud. The second one was a little better known, and it exploded in my face. It took me days to heal that, and the law was chasing me for months afterward.

“The third one almost worked. By almost, I mean I accidentally bound an overloaded Dungeon Core to a test subject who then immediately went mad with power.”

“Oh.”

“One thousand, seven hundred and forty-one,” she said. “That’s how many people I killed. That’s why I was in prison. I deserved it.”

Your numbers have been beaten, I thought but didn’t say. That was too insensitive.

“I know what you wanted to ask me,” Carly said. “I will not pretend I’m a normal, doddering lady who somehow bumbled her way into near-ascension. My eyes can [See] far more than any of you can see. I know this dungeon is yours, the same way you know who I am.

“And no, the dungeon that you bonded with is not any of the same ones I experimented on.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. This conversation was already weird enough. I was glad that I didn’t need to learn that the random lady who’d just waltzed into my dungeon was also the mother of the dungeon part of me.

“So, why are you here?” I prompted as the silence grew long. “And why didn’t you stop the king?”

“I couldn’t,” she said simply. “As I said, I’m not a direct fighter. I will tell you that I witnessed a level 30 and a 31 otherworlder target the king directly. Their bodies were ultimately used as fuel for the ritual depositing transmigrations everywhere into this world, I believe.”

“Oh, shit,” I said. I hadn’t known that. Not knowing what happened outside the dungeon was really hurting me. I couldn’t verify if what she said was true, but I could buy it. If two extremely powerful otherworlders had been sacrificed… I could totally see how that would be the trigger to bring in a ton of new ones.

“As to why I’m here,” she said. “You may be the only city left in this kingdom that still has tea.”

I stared at her, dumbfounded.

“Also, I do still want to save the world,” she said. A corner of her mouth quirked up. “What, do you think I walked all this way to not help? Come on. You have help coming, and now you have me.

“Let’s break down how you’re going to defeat the king.”

#

Anderson

This was starting to wear on him.

If it had just been him, Alice, and Alex, it was possible that they could’ve gone a lot faster, though not by that much because Alex still hadn’t regained his focus.

But he had almost a thousand people following him now, and most of them weren’t even level 5. It took them an hour to set up camp at night, and then another hour to break in the morning.

A year ago, he wouldn’t have even considered stopping to help them.

Damn it, Lucas, he groused internally. Why’d you have to go and make me a good person?

As it was, they were less than a week out from Centerpoint now. He hoped that they could make good time, though with the way that the otherworlder party following him kept expanding every day, he wasn’t sure if that time estimate was going to be accurate.

There were an increasing number of otherworlders just trying to survive as they got closer to Centerpoint. Though some of them would’ve been able to stick it out alone, there was safety in numbers—and more importantly, everyone was willing to get behind Anderson when they realized the [Gunslinger] was level 18.

He couldn’t deny that it felt good to help so many people, though. Given the number of monsters he’d fended off alone or with Alice, he knew he’d already saved quite a few lives, and he was going to save more.

Of course, that was assuming he got them all to Centerpoint in one piece. Although Anderson was strong, he still wasn’t strong enough. Nearly half a hundred people had perished on the march so far, most of them from freak ambush attacks.

They were more vigilant now, though. Alex had proved himself to still have use in some way when he’d set up a system of watch, scouts, and early warnings, for the entire thousand otherworlders, and so they hadn’t been properly ambushed in a while.

Their watch system worked well enough that the otherworlder scouts spotted the spire before he did.

One issue with the system, unfortunately, was that it was comprised almost exclusively of otherworlders, since the native survivors they found were few and far between. That meant that when they described what lay ahead as “a building like the Washington Monument,” Anderson had no idea what they were talking about.

He ventured forward to find it himself, leaving the [Nightmar]e behind to defend his group.

With nobody to defend, it only took him five minutes to travel what would’ve taken the group half an hour.

He spotted the spire soon enough. It was a tall, white, gleaming obelisk, and it stood in a divot just beyond a hill. Anderson kept himself from venturing too close to it, because any structure that had survived the Cataclysm and the king’s monster horde was extremely suspect.

As it turned out, he was right to do that. Anderson got himself situated on a neighboring hill about half a mile away, and he used his [Eagle’s Eye] to get a better view of the full spire.

It had to be at least a thousand feet tall. The smooth surface had runes carved into it, which Anderson definitely couldn’t read, and the divot it was in was the same. From higher up, it was plain to see that the bottom of the tower was shimmering with magic, and the same flat white substance had replaced the soil there. More runes were carved in a circle pattern around the base, and the lines glowed golden.

It looks like a ritual, he thought to himself. Was it?

Then he saw why the runic lines were golden as a small door at the base of the spiral opened, and a golden sphere whose size he couldn’t determine from such a distance rolled out, neatly entering the runic circle.

Hm.

This definitely wasn’t Lucas’, was it?

Anderson had a very bad feeling about this.

#

Anderson here.

I think we found part of what the king is planning. If it’s not the king, then it’s another interested 3rd party, but either way, I doubt it’s friendly.

There’s a big narrow white tower with a runic circle under it that looks like it’s being fed by golden spheres.

Going to send my otherworlders around it, but I think I’m going to try attacking it and running away. See what happens.

If anyone else sees a spire, let me now.

Wish me luck.